Gameplay

’tis a bloomin’ economy

Asheron’s Call 2 is the closest that MMORPGs have come to a completely free market. The only time the game interferes with the economy is by including a way to turn items into gold. Loot and created artifacts all have a gold value, for which they can be traded in the inventory screen. We suspect that these values low-ball the true value of an item in an increasing fashion. As more gold is created, inflation rises and the trade value of items rises. More importantly, loot picked up off monsters also has resource scores.


Almost every piece of loot has a resource score. While you could mine a crystal mine for ore worth 10 crystals, items that are dropped by monsters are often worth quite a bit more. A staff used for magic skills will have a crystal resource value, which grows in proportion to the level of the monster it was taken off. There is a fair amount of randomness to the resource values, but nothing blatantly ridiculous. In our explorations we found that some distant, out of the way locations offered up low level monsters who would sometimes drop a specific loot item with a high resource value. This is a great incentive for players to scour the game world early on, before everything is mapped out on fansites.

Look at him get bloody

They die so melodramatically

So dark

A mining we will go

So what are resources used for? Crafting. The crafting skills are completely separate from combat abilities. A player opens his skills menu, goes to the crafting submenu and then sees a list of further submenus like Tumerok Weaponsmithing or Toolmaking. These open up and give the player an option of picking a set of items, like Tumerok spears. Here we encounter the crafting hierarchy. Primitive spears need only a 15 wood resource item to attempt crafting. The next level spears need 27 wood and 27 stone. The cost keeps increasing and gold is eventually factored into the equations. Additionally, not just anybody can attempt to craft any spear. To create the second level spears, players must first successfully create 5 level one spears. To create third level spears, they need to make 5 level two spears, and so on. Overspecialization doesn’t work too well either, since success is based off the general crafting skill (ie, Tumerok Weaponsmithing or Toolmaking.) To have a high skill level, the character needs to diversify his abilities. Alternatively, he can go to a forge to increase his skill.

Quests

Quests are as basic as they get. Almost all of them fall into the “go here kill/get this” theme, and those that don’t tend to be potion quests. Potion quests? That’s right, some monsters drop potions which give you a quest. Don’t ask… we don’t get it either. A potion quest is a time-limited quest which has a player hunt down X number of Y creatures, with a small reward at the end.

OK this is WAY too dark

Where's my damn infravision?

Creepy

Additionally, there are vaults that are unlocked with glyphs. These vaults reveal part of the story when completed. All dungeons, including vaults have a level recommendation on them, which is occasionally way, WAY off the mark. Someone at Turbine should review dungeon difficulties.