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Comment by jdk | Hacker News Reader

Really didn't expect to see AC at the top of HN. Asheron's Call was the first game I worked on and I remember all the times we'd joke with Wi about it and watch monsters beeline for him. It seemed like one of those "Haha sure, player perception" problems and not something that was actually real. IIRC someone did a very cursory look at the code at one point but it never bubbled up as important enough to assign someone to to actually investigate.

Wi came to one of the player gatherings with little printed out cards and would hand them to people and say, "You've been Wi flagged!"

The fondest of memories.

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I loved Asheron's Call, played it a lot back in the day. My friends and I were in high school at the time so we had absolutely no idea what we were doing, but that didn't stop us from running around the world goofing off. My hobby was making characters with totally insane Run and Jump skills. Once you leveled up enough you could literally leap from one end of a town to the other like Superman, it was extremely funny. The character was awful in all other regards, but I didn't care. I made another character whose sole purpose was to climb to the top of the highest cliff or building I could find, and jump off it. And there were some HIGH places in AC. I miss being able to play MMO's innocently like that rather than trying to min-max every last bit of efficiency out of everything, as embodied by WoW (another game I loved, but for different reasons).

I also really enjoyed the periodic story events that had really dramatic impacts on the world, like the shadow invasion. It was a great game, especially for its time. So thanks for whatever part you played in its creation.

Thanks! Always nice to hear people who "grew up" play it. AC having server-side physics and actually making use of them led to lots of ridiculous and emergent gameplay. I don't know how many hours I just spend idling in towns jumping from rooftop to rooftop or seeing how high I could climb up massive structures. Everytime I try to play again though, the old "you can't go home again" hits too hard and I just quietly close it back up and go back to the nostalgia.

I was on the design team, so was directly responsible for a lot of the shadow invasion stuff (if you ever saw the big bad Bael'Zharon running around in the live events, that was me!) and other patches for the first 2 years of its lifespan.

Weirdly, I work on WoW now with my career having come full circle after having not worked on MMOs since the mid 2000s. :)

Another "grew up playing AC" here and fondly remember interacting with Bael'Zharon on the Harvestgain server during the life events. Did you also blow up Arwic? :D

I still use AC and to some extent AC2 as an example of how wild, weird, dynamic and interesting MMOs were before the EQ formula won through WoW's success.

Yeah, I was also involved in blowing up Arwic. It just felt right!

Definitely miss the "weird" MMOs of the early 00s...

Ironically I think WoW had a bunch of these bugs too, with mechanics prioritizing "oldest account id" first..

Are there any games since then you think captured the feel of the unique discovery-based magic system?

In terms of discovery and wonder, I think Valheim did a good job of it in the general atmosphere and loop, but in terms of magic systems, not really. You have the Magika (or even Path of Exile) where spells have component parts and build into something larger, but there's not much mystery there.

A theme of a bunch of the comments is that the internet / audience makes this sort of thing impossible these days. One of my white whales for game design is figuring out if mystery, especially in multiplayer games, is still possible in a meaningful way.

Literal showerthought while ruminating on this idea: are you aware of any multiplayer systems where individual characters have intentional Wi flags (good and bad) at a very granular level? for example, every spell or skill includes a fixed modifier generated for the player so that two identically built characters have different capabilities. Every aspect determining success or power has one. You are just slightly slower at lockpicking in the rain and your fireball casts a little faster than average, and the decrease in damage for casting while moving is a bit more significant.

You remove the “meta” from the game because every character has a different meta that is just a little too cumbersome to figure out in any way other than “feel” it.

I think a few (persistent) games touched on things like that, but I can't think of any that really went hard on it for long-term characters (instead you mostly see it in roguelikes/lites where if you got a bad roll, it didn't matter since you were making a new character soon anyway). At a very broad level, this is sort of what the taper system did but that was cracked after 6 months or whatever and it didn't really offer any meaningful differentiation beyond brute-forcing permutations.

My marriage and a good chunk of my career trajectory can both be traced directly back to having "grown up" playing AC and writing/coding for Crossroads of Dereth. It's a little scary to think how different my life would be if I hadn't picked up that box--possibly the only copy the EB Games in my small English town would get--and gone "huh, looks cool".

I think growing up during those years of transition, right before the Internet became mainstream and ubiquitous, was a huge boon. Sure, the early MMOs were far from the first international social forum enabled by the Internet, but they were right at the technological frontier at the time. There was something special about inhabiting this massive, 3D virtual space alongside people from across the world, and having that experience be just as novel to everyone else as it was to me.

You couldn't replicate that today, and growing up with the world at your fingertips on a pane of glass as a taken-for-granted fact of life must be a very different experience.

Oh man... Now I'm trying to remember which of the CoD folks were from England. Thanks for all / any of the work you put into that site. It was really the nexus of AC for a number of years. I'm glad it's been lost to the ages because I definitely had a number of real spicy comments on it. I'm happy AC at least indirectly helped your career/marriage in some small way. :)

I was Dotcher on CoD and ingame, but I don’t think we ever spoke. I didn’t post on the forums much at all, and as a teenager on the wrong side of the world the fan gatherings and the like were a tad inaccessible.

I did a bunch of writing, news posting, collecting information for the monthly patch summaries, and then they figured out I could code and I ended up building tools and maintaining various bits of the site. I think I ended up owning the item database code for a while? I remember hearing that one got used at Turbine, because it was superior to what you had internally!

I’m now married to Kelly Heckman (Ophelea), who was site manager on CoD for a while, and my first real job was at a social gaming startup, getting in the door with the help of her network. That set my career on the path it is now, so you can draw a direct line from picking up that game box to where I am now. So yeah, thank you and the rest of the team :).

Oh yeah we definitely used the CoD databases in many cases over internal tools, so well done. I remember Ophelea too. Hope y'all are doing well!

The smallest world stays small. :)

I also wonder how many hours and points I wasted into jump to jump across the roof tops, haha. I absolutely loved the server based physics, even though I had the crappiest dial up connection at the time. I was 14 when I started playing that game. So many amazing memories, Atlan stones, spell system, cheesing death items, being afraid of losing everything because there's no bank, haha.

Lately, I've been getting more and more into esoteric topics and I keep thinking about this games lore... There is so much occult knowledge/history baked into the entire thing and I honestly still use the game as a reference point for some many things.

I'm curious, do you know how the games lore was developed and were there ancient texts that were inspirations for the events?

Thank you!

> I'm curious, do you know how the games lore was developed and were there ancient texts that were inspirations for the events?

I was very not-involved with the lore/story (to the point, where I think I wrote a handful of notes and stuff before it being decided that I should just focus on gameplay, and someone else would cover the lore for me!), but there were 3-4 people primarily responsible for it and they were all very much fantasy literate, so it wouldn't surprise me at all if some of the inspiration were from those sources.

Devilmouse!

AC is one of my favorite games of all time (neck and neck with Ultima II (I'm old)). I still play on the emulators from time to time - endlessly searching for more Hoary Mattekars.

I played on Thistledown and ran a little portal bot named Stip Dickens an Ayan Baqur that helped ferry people into the Shard of the Herald event. That was a lot of fun.

The loot system was also one-of-a-kind. I don't see that level of randomness in many other games.

The game felt like the writers and staff were highly literate and well read. I now know so many real life herbs and plants due to their use in spellcasting. And AC taught me words like "Mnemosyne".

And each month we would get several pages of amazing lore. (Side note, there's an ongoing web serial called "The Wandering Inn" that reminds me quite a bit of AC. People dropped into a video game like world, insect people, references to a "Zeikhal"(similar to a town name)....

So, I just want to thank you for your work on AC. It's had a profoundly positive impact on my life.

You're welcome! Haha, mattekar farming will always hold a special place for me. And, of course, TD's herald defense is probably top 3 gaming memories for me. So much lifting done across the community for what's now basically oral history.

But also thank YOU for participating in some of my very formative experiences of my life as well. The players really made it a joy to work on.

I was in from beta until about 2004. Lots of fond memories! Closest I've come to feeling the same way I felt playing AC in recent memory is actually Valheim. Can't quite put a finger on why, but there are very few games that hold such an important place in my heart. I was a high schooler when it came out. Some days I regret not going into game design, especially with the current wave of VR games. Some days I'm tempted to quit my major tech company job and try to create that magic myself in a VR MMO.

But that would be something only a crazy person would do.

Yay! The first time an MMO lands for someone, it definitely makes an outsized impression. The combination of social outlet with a huge amount of free time is a recipe for something great.

It's funny you mention Valheim - one of my groups in had a core of people who I met back in the AC days and their friends. We got to some real old man gaming that probably annoyed their friends with all of the "back in our day..." stories while we were running around the landscape, running from trolls, etc.

Add me as another with fond memories. I was introduced to AC by my coworkers at my first full time job after college. Pretty much all the software devs I worked with at the time played it, including both my manager and the head of the site. Our office had our own little monarchy on Leafcull at first, though we later joined up with a bigger group.

On patch day, the office banter usually centered around the things we were seeing popping up as we'd reload Maggie the Jackcat's community-sourced patch notes throughout the day [0].

Sometimes we'd even download the patch and log in for a few minutes, just to poke around. (Always being careful not to do anything _real_ due to the risks the infamous patch day server rollbacks.) Then there'd the be waiting for the Decal updates.

I still remember that my main was a tank archer build, which was pretty much untouchable going toe to toe with the mobs in PvE as long as the stamina held out. I went through a _lot_ of stam potions, though!

I remember also finding somewhere about how to extract the terrain data from the game. I scraped the coordinates for various destinations from some place and wrote a little OpenGL viewer that would let me do flyovers with the various locations marked with labelled bullets.

Good times!

P.S.: Anyone remember the Drudge Dance [1]?

[0] http://www.thejackcat.com/AC/Culture/Dereth/Dereth.htm

[1] https://www.angelfire.com/rpg2/dragons/Drudge_Dance.wav (direct link doesn't work; copy and paste URL instead)

I still hum the drudge dance sometimes. It melds together with YTV "short circuitz" reels as well (this one in particular https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ScvIbcNV38k)

AC was my first MMORPG, fond memories indeed. I remember the sheer adrenaline I got when "going red" and watching PK drama and battles unfold at the subway, dominated by a build called the "OG mage," slidecasting all over the place casting drain health until finishing with a missile spell. I would cast Blooddrinker 6 on monster weapons and giddily laugh as they sliced through new players starting out. I remember staying up the entire night during a school day when housing was released and being one of the first people on my server to claim one. I even remember being a vassal to a very generous asian guy in his mid twenties living in LA named Kyoto and my countless interactions with him and his brother under a specific tree.

Countless memories I could keep going on and on, but what an experience!

Some of my favorite memories as a kid were playing Asheron's Call. Incredible game.

Haha "Og mage" ... yeah. The combat of AC still holds up in its janky for being fun in the context of an MMO. I spent most of my playtime on Darktide and dear lord, it made me so sweaty.

It's amazing to me how many people are still friends with their patrons/vassals from 25 years ago.

A fellow comp sci major in college introduced me to AC. Bought it on a whim after seeing him play it in his dorm. I still remember the physical box with some special bonus map and swag.

Lost so much sleep power levelling on a rock with those ape like creatures and just spamming magic to discover new combinations. The discovery and wonder does not match up with the graphics I see now when I search for screenshots and videos. Beta and early WoW almost had the same effect but your first is always special.

Min-max:ed dagger warrior for the win! Also, fear the ash gromnie! AC was never really trumped for me (AC2 was... different?). I just wanted a world to roam, and the vassal system is probably the only pyramid scheme that incentivised making social connections. :) My patron did a lot corpse runs for me.

For the last 15 years or so, coworkers ask when I'm going to make a new allegiance system but "less broken". So many good social behaviors came from its structure that it really deserves another attempt.

And yeah, Ash Gromnies were the bane of so so so many players.

What do you see as the major flaws and what do you think you would do differently?

The biggest problem was the degeneracy once it was "solved", instead of organizing around social circles. It led to people feeling like cogs in the machine and skewed play patterns and motivations.

I haven't really given it any serious thought but I'd likely start with trying to more strongly codify the good parts (incentivizing smaller circles inside of the larger structure, making systems for patrons/vassals to play together in more meaningful ways, etc) while highlighting the positive actions that players could do / benefit from. I don't want to say AC was TOO opaque but a lot of it definitely suffered from being over designed for a very hardcore market.

It eventually ended up being a straight line where you could add yourself lower and higher in the line with two different characters, and turbo feed the xp upwards (there were loyalty stats to push up and receive more xp). It peaked with a prevalence of bots that would be parked at the bottom feeding the line 24/7.

Loved AC. Bots kind of killed it IMO (something I feel bad about contributing to), but also new MMOs (WoW decimated the competition when it came out). I remember a portal / recall trick with two vendors, where one would sell a specific thing cheaper than the other would buy it. This was before eBay cracked down on virtual goods. Interesting times.

As with many concepts designed to do good in this world I think it's (unfortunately? not sure) human nature to attempt to "solve" a system, whether the consequences greatly diverges from - or is even the opposite to - the intended path or not. (E.g. optimizing for time is not always a good thing, but we often act as if it were - the right amount of "grind" may mean I'm spending more time doing other things than just gaining power, since it takes too long anyway. Also, in real life, cooking is quality time to me, so I'd rather not optimize that away etc.) "The opposite" is the forbidden fruit that drives some people in the first place, so "just the right" amount of freedom seems almost impossible to design. In games, where the only loss is time spent, I assume we take things a lot further than in real life. There may be dire social consequences of course, hence the need to police us unruly players, or make the world explicitly harsh and design the game play around this as in EVE Online.

Similar with the min-max:ing of the class-less system. :) IIRC, the aforementioned "dagger warrior" was designed around two things: double attacks at max attack power, and mobs not being able to land a hit. The perfect glass cannon that made it possible to survive AC's harsh lands even when under-leveled - or die instantly. :)

The size of the world was another thing that drew me in - another kind of "grind", if you will. Seeing other players whoosh:ing by - literally running by, in a mount-less world - was pretty hilarious, but the fact that it took time to get around was only a good thing IMO. I want a game world where the only option is to carefully navigate a large, dangerous desert to find the missing ingredient. The current theme-park MMO juggernaut seems to lock most things behind some "boss" and be done with it, which makes the game world pretty void of other players in most places. You just move on to the next quest hub and leave old content behind for ever. This also makes the world, regardless of its actual size, only feel as big as the current "zone" (I don't like "zones").

But in the end, the developer needs the game to be profitable and the players want the most out of their money spent. If my wants belong with a minority group the game probably won't cater to me.

Not really sure what my point is (old man yelling at clouds with contempt for "instant gratification" perhaps), but thank you for AC and the time you spent developing it! :)

You're welcome!

I think I mentioned this in another comment and certainly a ton over the years - but a lot of the magic of AC was that it was made by a bunch of people who had never made a game before, much less an MMO, and there were very few ingrained lessons, so we were foolhardy enough to just do things the way it felt we should, player behavior or other consequences be damned. It was built on hopes and dreams and naivete and that made it beautiful and flawed.

But also yeah, once something ships to players, it's now "theirs" and not "ours". We stood in pretty stark contrast to EQ's "you're in our world now" philosophy, again, for better or worse.

Sorry, who is Wi?

"Wi" was An early player of the game that was the a victim of the bug. His character's name was Wi, and the bug was named after him.

I remember people theorizing it was due to a short name (only 2 characters), and so would create longer usernames to try and avoid the "curse"

AC was such a fantastic game and community - props to all you at Turbine that worked on it. So many great memories for me!

Thanks! Glad it holds a special place for you :)

In retrospect, I give a lot of credit to the fact that we were young and dumb and didn't know any better. I've been revisiting a lot of the stories from back then and so many of them end up with us saying, "I dunno, let's see what happens!" and not being dissuaded by "best practices" or even common sense.

Also lots of credit goes to the early internet era when people were a LOT more forgiving of, well, everything.

> IIRC someone did a very cursory look at the code at one point

Any idea how the targeting algorithm was chosen? It does not behave the way this letter says that it should.

Nope, it was before my time. I joined the team in beta.

Any insight you could share on why the server didn’t end up being provided to the community for self-hosting?

I had been gone from Turbine for 8 or 10 years by the time they decided to shut AC down, so I can only speculate. I assume it had something to do with WB not wanting to "give away" the IP but instead just lock it away in a vault.

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