Asheron's Call

                       by Dave Booth

Asheron's Call (AC) is Microsoft's product in the online RPG
genre.  Although, to coin a phrase, 'comparisons are odious', it
is normally bracketed together with Ultima Online and Everquest.
As such the game is inevitably compared with the other two.  My
own experience prior to AC was with Ultima Online.

The AC box comes with CD, game guidebook - a deceptively slim
oeuvre - and a quick-reference card.  The q-ref card opens out
into sections.  It consists of a map of the world of Dereth,
commonly used keyboard shortcuts, and a list of the skills you
will use in game.  More on that later.

Installation consists of loading the software from CD, then
registering your product with the Zone, who host the servers
that AC runs on.  The same as if you've ever registered software
on the web.  Registration also starts the clock ticking on your
first month's subscription to the game.  So dive in and get
playing.

You first select a 'world' in which to play.  Similar to UO, in
that each world is a server implementation of AC.  There are
plenty of them for the user population, in fact it was a surprise
over time to notice that rarely does a server host over 2500
gamers, when you consider that a UO server commonly hosts 20 to
30000.  Bigger boxes with stronger elastic bands I guess.

The servers are co-located somewhere on the US Eastern seaboard so
your choice of server doesn't affect the dreaded lag.  What is
worth noticing is that all servers bar one are designated
'non-player killer'.  This means that characters created on those
servers are initially non-PK.  It *is* possible to subsequently
turn PK on such a server, however PKs cannot attack non-PKs ever
for any reason.  To freely PK and be PK'd from day one, choose the
Darktide server.

Chosen your world?  The next phase is character creation.

This is the most hotly debated subject in AC.  The choices you
make in character creation determine by and large what your guy
will be like for the rest of his game life.  In UO, you can learn
and unlearn skills and so change your character.  Merchant in
March, swordsman in September.  Not so in AC; skills cannot be
unlearned, and the cost of learning new skills increases
exponentially.

You initially choose your character's race.  Sho - Asian, Aluvian
- European, and Gharu'ndim - North African/Middle Eastern.  Each
comes with innate abilities, such as the Aluvian dexterity in
using the dagger.  Race also plays a part in your ability to use
some magically enhanced items, though this restriction is
comparatively rare.  Sho characters for example are marginally
more likely to be able to use magic bows.

You then choose your character's sex and appearance (like skin
tone and hair style).  Thankfully neither sex nor follic density
has an impact on the game.

The next phase is to define the basic physical attributes of your
character. They include Quickness (which among other things,
affects how fast you can run) and Focus (which affects how well
you can heal wounds). The most points that can be given to an
attribute is 100, and of course there aren't enough points to go
round so it's decision time.  A mage character will want high
Focus and Self - Self equals mana in AC.  For a successful
swordswinger, choose high Co-ordination, as this increases the
chances that you'll land a critical hit.  And so on.

Now you design your character's set of skills.  Skills and
attributes should go hand in hand, so to be able to run fast from
day 1 you need to have both a high Quickness attribute and Run
skill.

There are plenty of skills to choose from, again with a limit to
the number of points to spend on raising them.  The critical
choice however is whether to Specialise, Train, Untrain, or Unuse
a given skill.  To raise a skill from Unused to Specialised means
spending LOTS of points, compared to making an Untrained skill
into a Trained one.  Why?  Because whereas Unused skills will not
be available to you, Untrained ones will be usable but not
improve, Trained ones will improve, and Specialised ones will
improve rapidly.

I'd recommend that the new AC player start out by creating a
character purely for learning the game. Learning the game
mechanics and exploring Dereth are very absorbing activities in
their own right.  Also your first character could well be later
used to good purpose in a support role, having skills that your
'main' character doesn't have.  It is impossible to build a
character with every conceivable combat and merchant skill.  So
think longer term, when you'll need several characters with their
own specific skills and roles.  Alternatively you might prefer to
read up on character creation and gameplay strategies first.  In
which case I can thoroughly recommend the alt.games.asherons-call
newsgroup, and the Crossroads of Dereth (cod.xrgaming.net) and AC
Stratics (ac.stratics.com) websites.

There are several published 'templates' which purport to permit
you to design characters like the Uber-Mage.  Such templates do
work provided (a) you're already well familiar with the game and
(b) you have a support structure, as in other well-developed
characters, whether on your account or friends who will help out.

My characters now (after 2 months) consist of : Harry, an archer
who also dabbles in magic; Spondiferous, my mage-in-training; and
Khoni, the alchemist.  The latter two are mule characters, whose
role is to provide Harry's supply of magic arrows and identify any
weird magical objects that he finds.

Next choose the town you wish to start in, and your character is
created and portalled there.

Once you are in Dereth the first thing that strikes is the visual
beauty of the game.  The landscape varies from snow-topped
mountains, to bleak deserts, bubbling swamps and rolling pasture.
Day and night, snow and rain, are all beautifully rendered.  Just
watching dawn come up from the peak of a mountain is a stunning
experience.  AC uses the rotating-camera view method, you can pan,
tilt, and zoom into and out of your character.  A top-down
mini-radar shows where other players, NPCs, and monsters are in
relation to you, for that all important fight-or-flight decision.
In one corner of the screen is a section which can be toggled to
show your character's inventory or a map of the world.

Watch your mini-radar; as you walk around admiring the scenes
(catch the waterfall near Holtburg for instance) you might not
notice the Gnawer Shreth coming at you out of the distance.
Gnawer what?  Ah, there are no Orcs, Dragons, or other
Tolkienesque denizens in AC. Instead AC has a host of monsters
which are unique. Such as the Shreths and Drudges that are dotted
across the land.  These fellas are the starting character's
sparring partners.  Good for the much-needed beginning experience
points.  They congregate near the starting towns, conveniently
enough.

As you gain experience points you can distribute them into your
attributes and skills. So two 35th level Axe fighters may have
quite different abilities depending on the direction each player
chooses to take their character.  New skills can be added to your
character as he progresses, though it's very slow.  Skill points
are needed to make a skill trainable, and these are only gained as
you rise in levels.

Whilst fighting monsters learn the monster's innate behaviour
patterns. Some will attack en masse if you stick an arrow in or
lob a spell at one of them. Others - Wasps are classic for this -
can be picked off one by one.  Of course if you're a melee user,
you'll have to wade into the pack to attack, so they will all
start to beat you up anyway.  Just make sure you trained your Run
or Melee Defence skills!

Magery is a highly specialised art in AC.  You first must learn
the spells you want to use.  This is achieved by combining
'components' together and doing a trial casting.  Components
include magical potions and powdered gems.  Easy enough to hold
of, but there are so many spells in AC and six levels of power,
that spell research is very involved. The idea is that Mages are
cloistered academics, spending as much time poring over magical
reagents as firing off war spells in the field.

If all that sounds too dull, and firing off war spells in the
field is more appealing, there is a program called Split Pea which
will greatly help in the task of learning spells.  It won't give
you the high level spells on a platter, but will greatly reduce
the researching time, and the associated spend on wasted
components.

Archers can procure bows with increased attack bonuses and magical
properties.  They can also procure arrows with more oomph, like
fire arrows and the popular greater blunt.  Which you use at a
given time depends on the monster under attack.  Fire works great
against the hairy ape-like Tusker, whilst greater blunts are the
arrow du jour for smashing the carapaces of Olthoi beetles.

Melee folks are certainly not left behind.  Swords, axes, and
clubs can be had which do more damage per swing and which, like
arrows, are imbued with elemental attacks.  It's a common sight to
see a Lugian - a rock-chucking behemoth - under attack from a
meleer armed with a Lightning sword.

The flip side to this is that monsters have resistances as well as
vulnerabilities. Try your axe of Acid against an Ivory Grommie and
he'll eat you alive - Ivories breathe acid as their primary
attack, so they aren't particularly hurt by a bit of the old
H2SO4.Let's say that you did just that, and the grommie burped
more acid onto you than you could take. What now?  Firstly, you
materialise at a Life Stone.  These are plentiful in Dereth, and
you can choose which one to resurrect at.

The penalty for death in Dereth, is that you lose between one and
a half-dozen of your most valuable items, and you also acquire a
5% penalty to all of your attributes and skills ("vitae").  Ouch.

Your corpse will stay in the world for a while, giving you time to
race back from the Life Stone.  Watch that you don't die while
retrieving your items though, as the 5% penalties are cumulative.
Living with a 25% vitae penalty is NOT fun.

If your most valuable item is that nice piece of armour and you'd
*really* rather not lose it, then get yourself one or two magical
orbs and mana stones.  Weigh very little, but cost a bomb.  But if
you lose a mana stone in death, the chances of retrieving it are
better than losing your best weapon or armour piece.

Vitae can be worked off by acquiring experience.  Rather than wade
in and try to best the monsters that gave you vitae in the first
place, find a lot of Shreths and Drudges and take out your vitae
on them.  Lots of them.  Then when the vitae is used up, go back
and exact your revenge.

With superior weapons and tactics. A number of enhanced weapons
and ammunition pieces can be obtained in the town shops.  Weapons
and armour with added bonuses are common enough. Enhanced arrows
are much rarer.  Most people I know either have a mule
alchemist/fletcher, or a guild mate who makes them.  Guilds in AC
are known as allegiances, or Monarchies. An allegiance or Monarchy
is a group of people who swear fealty as a Vassal to a Patron. The
Patron helps the Vassal with what ever he may need to progress
through the game and in return the Patron gets an experience point
bonus from the Vassal. The bonus does NOT come from the Vassal's
experience point pool.  It's free. Vassals can enlist their own
Vassals in turn.

The player at the apex of this is the Monarch. Monarchs with a
network of vassals and sub-vassals can generate lots of free
experience, and in return provide armour and weapons, and help
with training. Think of a benevolent version of a pyramid
marketing scheme.

Sadly you won't see a Castle with your Monarch's flag flying over
it. Housing has not been implemented in AC.  Also unlike UO, there
is no bank to store your loot in.  You carry your worldly
belongings around with you, all the time.  Unless you have
offloaded them to a mule that is.

Surprisingly enough this is liveable.  You are forced to decide
what to keep, sell, or give away.  It works very well in
conjunction with the allegiance system.  Higher level Patrons are
all too pleased to pass on the 86%-bonus bows they have to archer
vassals (like me, hehe). It also mitigates that well-known
UO/Everquest phenomenon, the spawn camp.  Where people sit near a
high-level monster spawn, kill the spawned monster, loot it, ad in
finitum.  Not much point accumulating lots of loot if you haven't
enough Strength to carry it all.

There are two groups of ingame helpers, Advocates and Sentinels.
Both are regular players who join their respective groups to help
players in game. Advocates help new players learn the game. They
are nice and want to truly help players but they are hampered in
their powers. If you die because of a bug and lose some valuable
items because of it, they basically say they are sorry you died
and they will report the bug but tough luck on the lost items.

Sentinels are the AC version of Game Masters. if someone violates
the Code Of Conduct they come out and punish the offending player.
A violation usually means someone is harassing other players or
doing something to hinder the normal playing of the game. They can
ban a player from the game for a fixed amount of time but this
rarely happens.  Just like UO in that respect.

One aspect where UO has the gain over AC is socially.  In UO, the
speech your character utters appears in text over their head.  AC
however has a separate scrolling text window for system messages,
events (like 'An Ivory Grommie sears you for 25 points of acid
damage'), and chat messages.  That is the only ingame
communication tool. It doesn't aid in the suspension of disbelief,
or the fostering of community. As one contributor to
alt.games.asherons-call put it : "As I go tooling into Mayoi it's
more like :"Heya Doko", "Hail Rubi", "Street, haven't seen you for
a while"....  So there's no home feeling, but there's a homie
feeling."  With no housing or banking, players looking to trade
usually stand around town spamming the text window with requests.
So while you try to explain to a new player how such-and-such a
monster fights, you have to contend with lines and lines of
'BUYING PYREAL BARS!  MSG ME!' from Joe Blow in the corner.
Thankfully the game has a 'squelch' button to silence these
miscreants.

AC however outstrips UO in the exploration aspect.  The graphics
alone make it worthwhile travelling to the four corners of the
earth (and under it).  Discovering the denizens of a new place,
and how to avoid being killed by them.  Turbine (the programmers
of AC) foster this by introducing monthly game updates with new
episodes of the ongoing AC storyline.  Each update introduces a
quest, which might reward you with a super-duper weapon, or
present new monsters to meet and greet, or even add a whole new
region to explore.

In EQ, players are segregated into zones along with players and
monsters of similar levels. Rather like a network of playpens.  In
AC you can take your level 1 character to the Direlands and try to
defeat a level 120 Golem. That is a silly thing to do alone.  But
with a Life Magic mage companion, you *can* beat monsters way
above your level.  The plan is for your companion to cast spells
on you that improve ("buff") your armour, weapons, and abilities.
So while you are nominally level 15, you fight like a level 35
character.  Meaning that you can kill level 50 monsters, and so
reap oodles of experience quickly.  This is known as
'powerlevelling'.

The process of character growth appeals to the achiever.  Gaining
experience, levelling, improving and adding to skills.  AC is very
much a skill and level based game.  The number of exp points
between levels rises exponentially, so that progress to level 10
is quick, to level 20 much slower... and only a handful of
hardcore players have reached level 100 since the game went
retail.  The exponential progress curve acts as a spur to go hunt
bigger, badder monsters with fatter experience and more valuable
loot.  This is how AC keeps players moving throughout the world.
That, plus a very high respawn rate, means you can always find a
clutch of monsties to blunt your axe on.

Well that's about it for the review, I must go now. There's a
group of Tuskers waiting for me to ignite them with my Greater
Fire arrows. Provided they don't pound me into the ground that is.

                              - o -