Features

Turbine has released a teaser image for Asheron's Call's April Event, titled "Upping the Ante".

The event is tentatively scheduled for April 15.

Asheron's Call was one of the three games that helped kick start the graphical online RPG genre and now as it hits its 8th anniversary, we talk to Turbine's Community Manager for the game, Andy Cataldo. He updates us on the game's status and future.

WarCry: Some of the often-requested to be added features include things like a quest panel, land control, and pets. Since some of these work fairly well in other Turbine games, are there any plans to incorporate this type of functionality? Or is the technology AC is founded on just too old?

Andy Cataldo: We absolutely have some ideas around all of these things. Pets, while still in their early stages, still have some great potential. A quest panel is a bit tougher. To make something like that work we have to go through every line of every quest ever put in to the game over the past 8 years...no small task. As far as Land Control goes, all I will say is we have some ideas.

Read more after the jump.

Johnathan Steinhauer's bi-weekly look at the MMO scene takes him to the concept of "Player vs. Player" (PvP) combat. This is a hot issue with stalwart defenders on both sides. Johnathan draws on his MMO experience and asks for your feedback.

It was in Darktide that I first began my online game experience. I was drawn to the server because I wanted a realistic game. It didn't make much sense to be able to battle monsters, but not other humans. Nor was there any recourse on PvE servers against moochers, griefers, or their ilk. I've never been much of a PKer myself, preferring cooperative play, but I did enjoy the camaraderie of defending a town from a raid as well as the general realism it allowed.

The problem I had was getting cut down in a shop or on the street simply on the whim of some punk. The story at the beginning of this column is not an exaggeration, it happened to me. I can only take solace in the fact that I did a bit of vigilantism. I hunted the guy down and sent him back to the Lifestone, recovering the gear he'd stolen from me in the process.

Read more after the jump.

I recently had the chance to visit Turbine's Headquarters and meet with all three development teams (Asheron's Call, Dungeons & Dragons Online, and Lord of the Rings Online). today, I discuss the time I spent with the Asheron's Call team:

Though the primary focus in the Turbine offices was preparing Lord of the Rings Online for open beta, I had a chance to sit down with the Asheron's Call developers. As Asheron's Call continues to grow in its seventh year - yes, seven! Frelorn and company gave me a sneak peek at some of the cool things coming and a bit behind the scenes on some the new tech getting added to the game.

One of the first topics we discussed was the ability for non-player characters (NPCs) to access players' inventories. Now I know this was mentioned at the recent dev chat we hosted, but what I found really cool about this is no more of the days of dropping tokens onto the Town Crier and having someone come up in front of you and you dropping the token onto another player's head and starting a secure trade window. This feature will be a very welcome improvement, especially for quests like Olthoi's Pincers. What will happen is the NPC will check your inventory and you will get a dialog box asking if you want to turn in the item for the quest, and this will repeat for each item you have the NPC is looking for.