Asheron's Call 2: Status Report Q&A #2
Wouter "Hyrrix" Ryckbosch, 2003-11-24

Seems like it's our Status Report Q&A time of the season again. This time we try to get a closer look at the current status of Turbine's Asheron's Call 2, by putting a few questions to the executive producer of the AC franchise: Jessica Mulligan.

Jessica Mulligan: The consolidation went almost flawlessly, which is a tribute to our server guru, Gator. Out of hundreds of thousands of characters moved between servers, we had only 11 total problems, all of which were fixed in less than 24 hours. The benefits are that players now have more opportunity to group with other players for the tougher quests and dungeons.

Jessica Mulligan: While we had a number of issues we wanted to address, the main issue was to add the ability to rise above level 50 in character growth. Everything else grew out of that: If you have higher level characters, you need higher-level content for them to play. We knew it would be a big task, which is why we started planning it back in April.

MMORPGDot: One of the most important aspects of the September Episode was the introduction of the Hero System. Can you tell us a little bit about it, and why you felt that something like this needed to be added to the game? How do you feel it's been received, now that players have been using it for about a month or so?

Jessica Mulligan: We needed an advancement system for the high-level players; most of the regular players in AC2 were above level 40 and we had a cap at level 50. If we wanted them to keep playing, we needed to provide a way for them to advance.

The Hero class skill system and game play has been received well and the player comments about it have helped us in our fine-tuning of it. We'll be adding another tier of Hero skills after the first of the year and much of what you see there will be based on player comments.

Jessica Mulligan: In fact, we just publicly published a 5 month development, November 2003 to March 2004, to get comments back from the players. Some of the items in that plan include player-owned housing, lore books, Tier 3 Hero skills, a total rewrite of crafting and a rewrite of the Player-versus-Player elements. It is an ambitious schedule.