-
Announcement
-
Simtropolis Returns! 05/26/2026
See here for details about our site recovery efforts. -
Wanted! Missing or... Recovered! 07/26/2026
Casting a wide net here for file recoveries.
-
Search the Community
Showing results for tags 'mmorpg'.
Found 1 result
-
The massively multiplayer online role-playing game "Asheron's Call" shut down yesterday after over 17 years of service. First released in 1999 on Microsoft's Internet Gaming Zone, "Asheron's Call" stood alongside ""Everquest" and "Ultima Online" as the early big mmorpg's in the age of dial-up. It's persistently online fantasy world of Dereth offered adventurous players 500 sq. miles (1,296 sq. km) of open exploration space and a set of then-novel game mechanics that have now become standard in the genre. All good things must come to an end, and after AC's developer Turbine was finally acquired and gutted by Warner Bros., the old game with its long diminished player base was sadly permanently shutdown. The successor game "Asheron's Call 2" was also similarly shut down at the same time. What's fascinating is the final moments of the world online, as the remaining players gathered to share their goodbyes and await their scheduled end in Dereth's many towns, meeting halls, and gathering places. At 12:00 p.m. EST, January 31, 2017, all player characters were automatically logged out en masse as the official servers were disconnected, leaving players' desktop game clients briefly hanging without server information packets until they too closed. It was standard program behavior for unexpected disconnections, including the pinkish light animation, but within the time between the server disconnects and the desktop clients crashing, those logged in witnessed an inadvertent virtual Rapture followed by a suddenly empty world. "Night of the Comet," "The Langoliers," or even "Sword Art Online" came to mind as dropped items and weapons people were holding were left in limbo without hands to carry them or pick them up again in a deserted world. Maybe it is the romantic fondness of this long-time player, but there was something eerily beautiful in this Ending. A lot of people devoted a sizeable portion of their entertainment lives into their virtual characters over the past 17 years, and the touching video "My Grandpa and his Asheron's Call" released last month after WB's closure announcement went viral as it revealed an unexpected real face behind some of the fantasy avatars and the alternate lives they were now fated to lose. Incidentally, "Odainsaker" is a legendary place name from a Viking saga recounted in the hauntingly Romantic illustration book Castles (1984) by Alan Lee and which I specifically chose as a long swordsman's character name for "Asheron's Call," and the familiarity of this online identification among my real-life friends got me using the name as an avatar everywhere else, including here on Simtropolis. I'm actually often called "Odain" as a nickname in real life! Imagine my surprise when another of my Viking-inspired characters ran into a dungeon occupied by a questing fellowship of Norwegian players, and they all thought I was one of them and started speaking to me in Norsk. Thorkill says: "Help, I'm trapped in a dungeon full of Norwegians, and they're all trying to talk to me!"
- 3 Replies
-
- 3
-
-
- mmorpg
- asherons call
- (and 1 more)
