AC - 2007 Producer's Letter : AC News

Hello from Turbine! It's been a good year for Asheron's Call™, and we're looking forward to more good things in the upcoming year.

Before I discuss our plans for the future, I'd like to review our accomplishments in the last year.

One of the first things we did last year was to fulfill a promise to the PvP community. We rebalanced the damage and mechanics of PvP combat to make fights faster, more lethal, and more exciting. We based our changes on feedback and discussion with PvP players on our boards, and we are pleased with the way things turned out. Now that we feel good about the way PvP combat works, it's time to focus on another way to improve PvP: giving people something to fight over. I'll get back to this issue when I discuss future plans.

In addition to the PvP rebalance, we added a lot of new in-game features over the year, including cast-on-strike weapons, equipment sets, the title panel and expanded powers for monarchs to appoint officers and manage their allegiances. And of course, we completed the massive Throne of Destiny story arc, which started with the Viamontian invasion of Dereth and culminated in the unified efforts of two monarchs, King Varicci II and Queen Elysa, to defeat the threat of the ancient demon Grael. We recently completed a "mini-arc" that sent players to the world of Bur to investigate Asheron's mysterious disappearance from Dereth.

With all the great things that went into the game in the last year, perhaps the most important development happened outside the game. Near the beginning of last year, we made the Asheron's Call client available for download online, through the Turbine store and through arrangements with online file hosts. Now, people who are interested in the game but unable to find copies at their local game store can buy a digital version of the game online. In 2007 we plan to even further expand our digital distribution partnerships for Asheron's Call™.

We followed the online distribution of the client with new marketing and advertising initiatives over the course of the year, capping with the launch of a free trial program in the late summer and fall that has infused the game's population with new and returning players. In addition, we recently announced bulk subscription plans, where players can contact Turbine customer service to pre-pay their monthly subscriptions in convenient three-month, six-month, and one-year packages. Watch for our continued marketing initiatives, featuring impressive new artwork, in print and online media.

Obviously it's not just the AC Live team that's been responsible for all of these great initiatives. The marketing, billing, and customer service folks at Turbine have gone above and beyond the call of duty to support Asheron's Call.

So with all that great stuff under our collective belt in the last year, what is the AC team planning to do with the next year? We will, of course, continue to put out compelling content updates and an evolving storyline, but there are three major initiatives we'd like to focus on this year. Please keep in mind that these are our goals, and we cannot make guarantees or set timelines about when you can expect to see them in the game:


Quest Experience
One of the issues nearest and dearest to the hearts of many in our community is frustration with grinding in high-level dungeons or hunting grounds for character advancement. After a lot of impassioned internal discussion and with copious feedback from players, we've decided to increase the amount of experience that players achieve through quest completion. This should allow players to advance at a healthy rate through questing, so that you won't feel like you need to grind Olthoi just to keep competitive. Starting with this year's first content updates, we've increased the amount of experience each quest grants as a reward. For now, this increase affects new content only. As time permits, we will start retrofitting old content to be commensurate with our new standards.

Quest Tracker
A key feature of current MMO's is the quest panel, which allows you to keep track of quest objectives and locations with a single UI panel. We'd like to bring this functionality to Asheron's Call. However, we have over seven years of quests, major and minor, to be updated. Much like the new quest experience guidelines, the quest tracker will only apply to new content at first, and then will gradually be retrofitted onto older content over time.

Elder Game
This is the biggest and potentially the most challenging of our initiatives for the year, but I wanted to announce our intention to start development on an alternate "elder game" mechanic. I may be doing it a disservice by calling it an "elder game" because we do not intend it to be solely for high-level players. Our goal is simply to provide an alternate method for players to compete and have fun, beyond the well-loved traditional activities of questing and hunting. The starting point for our design will be the land control system we had in the works as part of Throne of Destiny, but it will likely change a lot as we develop and refine the system. We don't intend for it to be solely PvP-based, but there will certainly be a PvP component to it. We intend to have a great amount of discussion with you, our players, so that we can tailor our work with community input.

That sounds like a pretty ambitious list, right? We're looking forward to the challenge and we think there's still a lot of great work ahead of us.

So in closing, I'd like to thank all our players, whether you've been with us for seven years or you're in your first month. We cherish the opportunity we have to work on this game and keep providing content for you to enjoy.

Cheers,

Dave "Crowley" Javier
Producer, Asheron's Call