Asheron's Call 2

» see ac2.turbinegames.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

i missed asheron's call 2. by 2002 i was a university student in ankara on a slow connection, and the original asheron's call had already not reached me in any meaningful way. the western mmo of that era ran on monthly subscriptions paid in dollars to a us-billed credit card. turkish students did not really have that pipeline in 2002, and the latency from ankara to a us east coast server was punishing even when you could pay.

the game launched on november 22, 2002, published by microsoft game studios. turbine had built the original asheron's call as a third pillar of the late-90s mmo wave, next to ultima online and everquest. ac2 was supposed to be the modern successor: prettier engine, fewer dice rolls, a redesigned skill system. instead it confused the existing fanbase by stripping out the systems they actually liked, and never built a new fanbase to replace them.

by 2003 microsoft had handed the publishing back to turbine. by 2005 the subscriber count had bled out enough that turbine pulled the plug. the servers shut down on december 30, 2005, after 37 months of operation. that should have been the end of the story.

~ the record ~

~ the resurrection ~

in december 2012 turbine quietly brought ac2 back online. not for new players, not for sale. it ran as a free perk bundled with an active asheron's call 1 subscription. warner bros. interactive owned turbine by then and the calculus was different: a few hundred loyalists asking nicely could be served by one rack of servers that nobody was billing back to a balance sheet. so the game came back from the dead with the same engine, the same maps, the same population that had played it before 2005, minus most of them.

the resurrection lasted four years. it was caretaker mode the whole time. no new content. no marketing. you logged in and the world was the world from 2005, frozen.

~ the day they both went dark ~

in august 2016 turbine announced that ac1 and ac2 would both shut down on january 31, 2017. the shutdown was tied to the closure of turbine's live operations team as the studio pivoted away from mmos toward mobile lord of the rings games. ac1 had been live since 1999. ac2 had been live, on and off, since 2002.

on the final day, players gathered in the capital cities to watch the servers go down. there was a tradition by then of mmo shutdowns becoming wakes. the matrix online had done it in 2009. tabula rasa had done it in 2009. ac2 got its turn on january 31, 2017, alongside its older sibling. the asheron's call player council had been pushing for a community-run emulator and turbine offered to release some server files, but the legal arc on that took years.

~ the long tail ~

the asheron's call private server scene eventually rebuilt working emulators of ac1. ac2 got less attention since it had a smaller and more bitter community to draw on. the ac1 emulators were the ones that mattered to the diehards.

what ac2 left behind was a cautionary template for mmo sequels: do not rebuild from scratch when your audience is happy with the original. the same lesson would get re-taught by everquest 2, by lineage 2, by the matrix online's successor that never shipped. ac2's particular tragedy was getting to teach the lesson twice, since its 2012 resurrection proved that even given a second chance and zero cost of entry, the audience for a forgotten mmo sequel does not come back.

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