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Asheron's Call is an old and beloved game. Many current MMO's including WoW still have not been able to reproduce many of the systems created by Asheron's Call and many players haven't even seen them yet. It really deserves a place up with all the other Good Old Games.
"The allegiance system, where players swear fealty to each other, gave high levels a reason to seek new players. New players gave the person they swore allegiance to experience without losing any themselves, and this in turn would be passed up from the bottom of the pyramid to the top."
Seamless gigantic *handcrafted* world where you can run around without zoning. No randomly created monotone landscape. No instancing to separate you from your friends in dungeons.
Unfortunately, Turbine, Inc. has set a date for closing the Asheron's Call I and II servers. In the past they had mentioned releasing the server code so players could run their own servers, but that is apparently no longer an option. It is currently getting requests for remastering on Good Old Games.
(Score: 2) by Magic Oddball on Tuesday December 27 2016, @01:56AM
Rather than pushing for it to remain payware by handing it over to another company to profit from, it'd be a lot better if either
A) Technically adept fans reverse–engineer & host the server software (as fans of some other games have done), or
B) Fans crowdfund the purchase or lease of the server rights
Either option would open the game up to 'fresh blood' in terms of curious players & modders — sticking it up on GOG so only retrogamers driven enough to spend money on it, on the other hand, will not.
(To be clear, I'm strongly in favor of paying creators for their work if they wish to be, however old it is; I'm only against paying third parties who didn't do any of the work. That especially applies to cases where the creators had looked the other way regarding 'sharing' of their old work, but the new rightsholder DMCAs all other copies off the Web, which has been the pattern with GOG thus far.)
(Score: 2) by romlok on Tuesday December 27 2016, @01:19PM
Interestingly, Dungeons and Dragons Online and Lord of the Rings Online, Turbine's other two old-but-still-active MMOs have been spun off/bought out by Standing Stone Games [standingstonegames.com], a company set up specifically for this purpose by Turbine's MMO development team.
Since the new company didn't take on Asheron's Call as well, I assume it wasn't as profitable as the two licensed games.