Asheron's Call 2: Fallen Kings

I've been playing AC2 now for about 2 months. I have 2 characters, one a level 20 Lugian Berzerker (think big bad dude with two huge swords) and one a level 31 Human Ranger (think tall slim Asian Zen archer who has a big gnashing teeth friend).

I've found this game quite enthralling, captivating and fun to play.

You start out by choosing your race, physique, hair style, clothes and such and then go out to learn about the world.

The three races are Lugian (big lumbering half-giants), Tumerok (man sized lizards) and Humans (fleshy two legged...well you know the rest). Each race has their different skills, specialty types, attack ranges and so on.

For instance, if you are a missile attack character, the Humans have the longest range, then Tumerok and then lastly the Lugians. But the Lugian ranged attacks are a bit more powerful than Tumeroks which are again more powerful than Humans. So the game has some balance to it for each race.

You go through some training dungeons which put you out into the real world at about level 3.

You choose what you want to be by investing skill points (SP) into specific skills and make yourself better in your chosen field by pumping experience (Exp) into your skills. Skill points you accrue only when you gain a level, but you are constantly gaining Exp as you kill monsters and do quests and that Exp can be spent as soon as you have enough to raise one of your skills.

The whole point of any Online RPG is to meet and adventure with people, and AC2 is no different, although sometimes finding people to play with can be a little tough as the number of people playing on each of the servers is usually only about 200. I do however, usually find other people to adventure with, which definitely is what keeps me coming back.

The crafting system is pretty simple and elegant, but gets to be a bit expensive as you progress. You can make weapons, armor, tools and other items. As you succeed in making a specific item, you gain skill in making that item. Eventually, make enough of an item and you will be able to make the next level of the item. You make items by opening up the recipe for the item, equipping any tools you have to increase your skill at making the item, dropping in items of the proper materials levels (all items in the game are made up of two materials such as Iron and Stone with a specific rating from between 10-90) and clicking craft. Your character does an animation depending on what you are crafting and then you get a result, either you succeeded or you failed. The first 3 levels of items are relatively easy and inexpensive to build, but once you get to level 4, you have to use some of the more unique materials in the world and also throw in some gold. So crafting becomes quite time consuming and expensive at the top. But it's still an interesting and cheap way to upgrade your character until about level 15.

As I said before, you gain experience and levels by killing monsters and doing quests. The monsters are pretty varied for a 3d game and they get much harder as you progress through the lands.

Once you get to level 15, you can move from the island you begin on, Osteth to the 2nd island, Omishan. At level 30 you can move up to the 3rd island, Linvak Massif. There is a lot to see and do in each island and plenty of quests, vaults and incursions. To read more about these, I'd suggest going to http://www.ac2hq.com.

So basically, like any other RPG, you kill monsters and gain experience, but AC2 is a bit different in that you choose what skills you want and aren't locked into choosing skills in one specialty, although you can't choose skills from a different race.

I find the game to be a lot of fun and pretty challenging as a Ranger especially with a group. I do attacks and watch the health of the others in the group and heal them as I can.

The game really favors people to get into groups, as if you get a good enough group, there's not a lot you can't kill and you gain Exp pretty quickly.

Another interesting social aspect of the game are Allegiances. These are basically like Guilds in UO or Clans in other games. One big difference, however, is that you gain experience when any of your vassals or underlings gains a level or hits a certain amount of total experience. So it can be a pretty cool way to get higher level people to help new players.

The one place where the game is currently lacking is in the chat system. Chat channels are frequently down and it is very difficult to have multiple one to one conversations at one time with multiple people.

There are also some minor bugs and downtime happens about once or twice every two weeks, but things are getting better with each new monthly release.

Also, shortly most of the servers will be merged down to just 4 or 5 servers from the current level of 15 or so to better increase the amount of people on a given server at any one time and to make the experience more lively.

One other thing that I should mention about the game at least as I have found it so far. You do not have anywhere near the level of grief players as there were in Ultima Online and other games. Also there are far fewer camp opportunities compared to games like EQ so that isn't near as big of an issue either.