Asheron's Call, one of the original “big three” 3D MMORPGs, is closing
asheronscall.comI ran technical operations for Turbine for several years, from just before Asheron's Call returned from Microsoft to the LOTRO launch. Asheron's Call was the first MMO I played, as well. It had an amazing run: I think the very small team model they adopted for the last few years before updates ceased was really smart.
It was also kind of technically cool. In AC, you could literally dodge projectiles if your twitch skills were good enough, which made PvP way more interesting and tricky than most games could muster. The no-zone model beat the crap out of Everquest even if they did have to teleport people out of population centers now and again. The cost of that was hardware, though... we needed a lot of servers for each world, relatively speaking.
Man. So many memories.
Yeah, such a great game running for 17 years now I think. So many memories indeed. The team has been working on releasing the server to the fanbase but sadly they hit some hurdle and could not release it even though it was supposedly almost done. The only thing left was packaging and documentation according to the guy doing it. We all wonder what happened to stop this...