General Discussion

I never had the chance to play AC2 and I am currently playing Lord of the ring online and was just wondering how turbine could mess up a game enough for it to be shut down! I played two turbine games, LOTRO and DDO, and I have yet to be really dissapointed with any of their games. That and also Asherons Call is still up and running! how could they mess up the sequal so horribly?

What was the game like? How was the combat / crafting / PVP and all of that and why did it fail? how were the patches? I wanna know all about AC2 >: D

Pretty much the same things as any mmo.  Just less effective.  Shaky startup, minimal content, no npc traders, very poor chat system ( the chat server was defective for the first year), small small world, linear content

AC2 was nothing like AC1.  The only thing in common was the background history (not story) and races and species in the game.

I was more interested in UO2.  Have always lamented it being canned before even being released.

Originally posted by grunty

Pretty much the same things as any mmo.  Just less effective.  Shaky startup, minimal content, no npc traders, very poor chat system ( the chat server was defective for the first year), small small world, linear content

AC2 was nothing like AC1.  The only thing in common was the background history (not story) and races and species in the game.

 

Didnt AC2 try to be a bit more EQish? Never got the chance to play it, though I did get accepted into the beta (which I didnt notice till AFTER release because it was sent to an old obscure hotmail account...)

Originally posted by rejad

I was more interested in UO2.  Have always lamented it being canned before even being released.

I don't ever see UO2 coming as long as they can still crank out expansions that people still buy... I'm amazed every time I see a new expansion for UO... I played the game through 5 expansions too but seriously enough is enough. Make it free to play and focus efforts on a UO for the new millennium.

Originally posted by Bronks

 

Originally posted by rejad

I was more interested in UO2.  Have always lamented it being canned before even being released.

 

I don't ever see UO2 coming as long as they can still crank out expansions that people still buy... I'm amazed every time I see a new expansion for UO... I played the game through 5 expansions too but seriously enough is enough. Make it free to play and focus efforts on a UO for the new millennium.

 

 

UO2 (later named Ultima Worlds Online: Origin) looked good for its time. We were waiting for that game to come out and then it just suddenly got canned. Instead they decided just focusing on UO was more worth it in the long run.

I live in Las Vegas, NV and had the pleasure of meeting a Turbine empolyee that worked on AC2 DDO UO and now he is on LoTRO.  I did make it a point to ask him about AC2 and why it went poof after being out for a short while.  He did not tell me alot, but there where some statements that there was some internal problems with the dev teams due to the company not being very big.  He told me that b/c Turbine did not have alot of employes they had to cut the teams that where on AC2 and put them to better use on a game they thought would do better in the market, that being DDO.

I myslef liked the game b/c of the different skills it let you choose from for your class and this time around in AC2 there was no need for spell componets :).

I loved AC2 just the mass lag experience wasn't too great.

I was in AC2 beta and after vowing I'd not buy it when it launched I ended up doing just that. AC2 was one of the biggest disappointments in game history in my eyes. Up there with Daikatana...and well Age of Conan.

For AC2 Turbine pretty much abandoned much of the mechanics and diferences that had made AC1 stand out in the MMO comunity. AC1 had a skills based character generation and advancement system. making each character highly unique and very flexible. AC2 went with a more traditional EQ'ish 3 races, 18 classes.

On the positive side, AC2 was gorgeous. Perhaps one of the most stunning looking worlds ever. The characters were distinctive, but lacked alot of visual variety. The games engine was also a tad to much for most of the systems at the time, leading to performance issues.

Also on the positive side for the game was the classes themselves. Each race had 2 each of melee, caster and missile type classes. And each was really really distinctive. Some cool stuff. I still miss the game play of my Feral Attendant and Lugian Sage.

But then we come to the bad stuff. The game was pushed out way too early. Lots of terrain bugs, and nowhere near enough content. The original idiotic plan was to have no NPC's. Towns would develop and populate out as various progression goals were reached in the worlds. Possibly a neat idea, but poorly executed, and any world changes had to be done manually by the devs. Buildings were basically big rocks. You could not enter. The 1-20 island was wonderfully fleshed out, with lots of content and was a fun game. The 20-40 island was a mixed bag with not enough content and some bugs. The 40-60 island was an abomination mired in massive terrain bugs, poorly placed mob spawns, no content whatsoever and a bleak and unappealing terrain motiff. (oh look more snow!)

It wasn't a bad game however, and probably would have survived, except for one truly tragic error on the part of the devs and publisher. Turbine was the developer, but at the time Microsoft was the publisher/producer. MS insisted that they use MS's new experimental Windows 2k based chat server as the primary in game chat platform. Well about 30-40 days after release the MS global chat server gave up the ghost. (and it wasn't a world by world thing, all servers used the same common global chat, ideally so you could chat between servers. In this case it meant you couldn't.) The MS chat failed miserably, killing all in game chat except the immediate local channel. No guild chat, no friends chat, no friends lists or who is online, no directed