Asheron's Call: Status Report Q&A #2
Wouter "Hyrrix" Ryckbosch, 2003-11-14

In our second Status Report Q&A about Asheron's Call, we interviewed Jessica Mulligan, executive producer of the Asheron's Call franchise at Turbine. Want to know more about the current status of the game, the recent additions and future plans? Well... then you'd better read on.

Jessica Mulligan: Sorry, no comment.

Jessica Mulligan: When the September event, "Groundswell" went live, PK Lite proved to be even more popular than we had expected. So popular, in fact, that the corpses of players littering the countryside were starting to cause framerate problems! In our October event, "Reign of Terror", we reduced the decay timer on these corpses to help prevent this from happening.

Other than that one issue, PK Lite is working out pretty much as we'd planned. One thing that helped was that we asked our fans for feedback while PKL was still on the drawing board. This helped us make sure that the design we implemented was something that our players wanted and would enjoy.

Basically, PK Lite is a quick way for players to try out PvP combat without a lot of the risk involved with our traditional PK system. Players can enter PKL mode with a simple command, and after a short delay they're free to fight with any other PKL players. PKL players can't interfere with or harm non-PKs, or traditional PKs.

When a PKL player is killed by another PKL, they don't drop any items and they don't have any vitae loss. The winner doesn't gain any experience points. It's basically no-consequences combat, and allows for things like allegiance battles and player tournaments without having to get into the sticky details of players looting each other or having to recover from vitae loss.

At almost any time of the day, you can find PKL duels and battles happening at major player gathering spots. For those players who wanted the excitement of PvP but didn't want to risk losing their hard-won items, it's really proven to be a great new form of play.

Jessica Mulligan: When the Olthoi story arc was drawn up, it just worked out that the climax of the story would take place in late October. With the amount of story and content that we wanted to work in, it would have been anti-climactic to have it end any sooner.

I can't tell you too much about the October event as much of it has yet to be discovered by our players, but I can tell you that the fate of Dereth hangs in the balance. In a pre-event teaser story, the players saw an assassination attempt on High Queen Elysa Strathelar, possibly coordinated by the powerful magess and Council member Nuhmudira. Now the players have to face the Ancient Olthoi Queen without the leadership of their Queen. Unlike our previous teaser stories, this one was presented in the form of a short comic book, drawn by our lead artist.

When the event launched, the Olthoi had staged an invasion of Dereth, much as they did in September. However this month the players were able to quickly find a way to drive them off. Now the Undead have come forward and are offering to assist, in exchange for the recovery of various alloy machine parts from across Dereth. Can the players trust the Undead? Can they trust Nuhmudira, who is leading the counterattack on the Olthoi? At the moment there are a lot of unanswered questions.

In addition to this storyline-based content, we managed to work in upgrades to twenty of our older dungeons, as well as new Virindi and heritage masks and new features for fellowships.

Jessica Mulligan: When we did our across-the-board monster rebalancing, it created a lot of opportunities for players to experience older content in new ways. Many of our players like to stick to the hunting grounds, dungeons, and quests that they are most familiar and comfortable with, not knowing how big a world Dereth really is. There are many out-of-the-way dungeons and locations in Dereth that may have been upgraded since the last time a player visited them. Really, there's never been a better time to start over with a new character and try something you haven't tried before.