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posted by on Monday December 26 2016, @05:36PM   Printer-friendly
from the all-good-things-come-to-an-end dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 2) by Celestial on Tuesday December 27 2016, @04:21AM

    by Celestial (4891) on Tuesday December 27 2016, @04:21AM (#446243) Journal

    GOG won't help with Asheron's Call. Asheron's Call, like any MMOG, requires a server to run. Almost everything is done backend, on the server. The client just puts up the pretty graphics (well, for 1999), and relays your inputs. And from what I understand, the servers for Asheron's Call are the problem. Rumor is that the server software was written specifically for Windows NT 4, and won't run on anything past Windows Server 2003. They decided that it wasn't worth re-writing the server software to run on any newer server operating system. Now, how true this rumor is, I have no idea. But considering that the Asheron's Call developers were in bed with Microsoft in the late '90s and early '00s, it wouldn't surprise me.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 27 2016, @11:14AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 27 2016, @11:14AM (#446303)
    Many virtual machine solutions support Windows Server 2003. So I'd agree it's not worth rewriting.

    However that's a different thing from keeping the game going or shutting it down.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 27 2016, @04:51PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 27 2016, @04:51PM (#446377)

      You really want to run Windows Server 2003 on a computer, even a VM, connected to the Internet?

      The time it takes to get pwned will be measured in milliseconds.

      • (Score: 1) by toddestan on Tuesday December 27 2016, @05:26PM

        by toddestan (4982) on Tuesday December 27 2016, @05:26PM (#446386)

        Presumably the servers are still running right now, and will continue to run for another month or so. I don't know anything about the technical side of the game, but I would assume there's no reason that the servers would have to expose IIS or ASP anything like that to the internet, so lock it down tight with a good firewall and it would probably be okay - at least for a while.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 27 2016, @05:00PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 27 2016, @05:00PM (#446381)

      Many virtual machine solutions support Windows Server 2003. So I'd agree it's not worth rewriting.

      What problem does a virtual machine solve? A virtual machine on the network is no more secure than a physical machine. If it's hardware compatibility... well, they still have their old physical machines, and they can probably buy more on the used market.

      I'll also note that virtual machines are less performant than physical ones, so you'll need more hardware to do this (assuming you even can).