A colossal game like developer Turbine’s Asheron’s Call is difficult to write a true traditional review on. Most games are straightforward, and can be looked at completely and as a finished package, but a game like Asheron’s Call is forever expanding and growing into an entirely different experience. There is one thing I can say confidently about Asheron’s Call, though; it’s addiction in a box, plain and simple, and if the government ever realizes just how much it leaves one needing another fix just after logging off, it’s sure to quickly become a regulated substance. I wouldn’t be the least surprised to see on the news five years from now a feature about an underground Asheron’s Call ring being busted up by the FBI. Feed the dog and water the plants a little extra before popping in that CD, because once it’s spinning, Sparky and your collection of Chia Pets will have to learn to fend for themselves.

The world of Asheron’s Call is known as Dereth, and it is huge. According to the company line (which my travels have lead me to actually believe), the ever-expanding island is 22 miles. Indeed, one can run 5 minutes in one direction and barely move a speck on the in-game minimap, while still seeing variant scenery, although a bit too much snow right now (more on this later). Fortunately, there are portals to navigate the gigantic setting, and load times are fairly fast, so moving around Dereth is simple.

Asheron’s Call, being ever-changing in nature, has a storyline that truly is forever evolving, but in addition to the epics of the present, the past is also rich with a substantial bit of history and lore that can be discovered if one reads the manual and examines the pages on Microsoft’s Gaming Zone. The background story reads something like this: A long time ago there was a race of powerful peaceful beings living on a world called Dereth (yes, you’ve heard this one before, but it gets a little better). One of the most powerful sorcerers, a wizard named Asheron, was bored one day, and messed around with all sorts of magic. After card tricks and pulling quarters out of ears became tiring, he decided he needed a new little demonstration to receive attention from the ladies. So he accidentally opened up a portal to another world. Unfortunately for the peaceful race, the Empyreans, and fortunately for Microsoft’s wallet (because an RPG of a bunch of peaceful wizards sitting around talking wouldn’t have made the money) beyond the portal was a deadly insect race known as Olthoi.

The Olthoi rushed through the portal *coughWarcraftcough* *ahem* and Asheron said, "Oops." To remedy the situation, good old Asheron blasted the entire Empyrean race into a world between dimensions. Tinkering with time and space isn’t the safest practice in the world, and Asheron’s transporting of the Empyreans caused a few more portals to pop open in other worlds, routing tons of other races, including the three playable human races, into Dereth. Other things happen from there, like the Olthoi enslaving the humans, and a rebellion lead by two famous heroes freeing them, one of which died, and the other is still alive somewhere. At first look into the game, I thought the story had little relevance at all and that, to most players, it may as well have been a game of Nethack or simply any other dungeon crawler; a true fantasy feeling is admittedly somewhat disrupted by some anxious powerleveler saying, "u ready to go 2 dungeon? follow me." I later discovered though that there are guilds committed to role-playing, if very few, and lots of lore to be learned about Dereth. The game even attempts to explain death, saving, and level ups in quirky little speculation narratives.

I wouldn’t have lost sleep over a lack of an explanation behind the "mysterious colored aura" seen in level-ups, but I still commend Microsoft and Turbine on effort to add just a little more immersion to an already consuming experience. The overall epic feel of the game is somewhat lacking, and does not quite achieve the build-and-climax formula of the better single player RPGs, but it comes closer than most online role-playing games thanks to Microsoft’s dedicated staff of developers who continue to modify and change the game world through sudden events. One such event was beginning as I made my first foray into Dereth.

To keep with the winter holidays, the lands of Dereth have become blanketed with a perpetual falling snow, and the grasslands and deserts alike have become hidden by a coat of white. New monsters and items have also been added in the "Sudden Season" event, backing up Microsoft’s claim that Asheron’s Call is truly an ever-growing world. Quests involving a discovery of the source of the perpetual snow are rumored to not be far off, and NPCs occasionally speak of a lost adventuring party somehow connected to the recent happenings. Although the snow effect has a last-minute feel to it, the cosmetic changes are still drastic, and the gameplay changes, while few as of yet, are an exciting prospect. I found it sort of annoying though, because there’s something strange about universal snow, especially within the desert lands of the Gharu’ndim, where cacti sporadically penetrate the white surface. During the beta test, another event of this scale was seen, as the sky turned red and new monsters fell from the heavens, forcing adventurers to unite to fight off the horde. A city was destroyed in the process by a comet, and has since been rebuilt. It is easy to see that the replay value of Asheron’s Call is nothing less than infinite, if Microsoft’s teams keep busy on adding new happenings and updates. While online gaming worlds such as Ultima Online and Everquest boast phenomenal replay ability, they lack the monthly facelifts promised by Asheron’s Call. Though while in the game you’ll find yourself caring more about running away from an approaching Drudge Skulker than finding out the truth behind the Sleeping Sentinels, I am still curious to find out just who and where Asheron is and what exactly will happen next to Dereth.

It’s fairly easy to sign up and get started in the world of Dereth. Installation is straightforward, as is the registration. You’ll need an account on Microsoft’s Internet Gaming Zone, but it’s free, and the required Zone downloads are small and surprisingly system-friendly for a Microsoft product. Unfortunately, AC does have a monthly fee, but after my experiences, I would say $10 is easily worth a month of that much game play. The game also comes with one month free, which is a nice little bonus. I did have one odd technical conflict that nearly kept me from being able to get into Asheron’s Call, but an obscure bit of documentation I found online pointed out that it was conflicting with my WinGroove synthesizer, and a removal of the WinGroove driver had Asheron’s Call up and running perfectly.

Once in the game, after the slew of Microsoft logos and cinematic, a drab movie is played. The movie would have made no sense whatsoever if I hadn’t read the backstory, but even with it, there wasn’t much to it. But this is Asheron’s Call — you didn’t buy this and pay $10 a month to watch cheesy mpegs, and the movies can, and should, be disabled. Character creation is a fun process, and reaches the perfect balance between simplicity and complexity. While there is always the quick cookie-cutter character option, most adventurers, whether newbie or battle-hardened veteran, will want to customize their creation. Visual options include choosing the hair, eyes, nose, mouth, skin color, and starting clothing of the adventurer, and while you can’t quite distinguish someone on the field by appearance alone, you can successfully make a unique appearing adventurer.

The first gameplay choice given is to pick from one of three races, the old English style Aluvians, the occidental Sho or the Arabic Gharu’ndim. While the races hold little true difference, each does have their own culture, though it’s often forgotten in the heat of the game, and each does lean towards a certain area of expertise. The Aluvians are the standard fantasy justice-lovers, protectors of the weak, keepers of the oral hygiene, watchers of the Judge Judy, and they begin with Assess Person and Dagger. The Sho represent a disciplined Eastern culture and excel at unarmed combat. Gharu’ndim are desert dwellers, and have some obsession with a poet whose name cannot be pronounced, though I’ve never seen this role-played by anyone (and who can blame them?), and they focus more on the mind than on brute force. The races are more so personal preference, and have bearing on specialized geographic region more than anything. After races, character class is chosen. The available choices are Blademaster, Warrior, Archer, Vagabond, Sorcerer, Life Mage and Enchanter, but it is not even necessary to choose a strict class, as there is a fully open-ended character called Adventurer, and every class can be fully customized. Classes in Asheron’s Call are essentially just a way of picking a group of skills most suited for one type of profession and creating well-balanced characters, and a warrior can easily learn the skills of a Vagabond, while a Vagabond can pick up the spells of a War Mage, if not as adroitly.

Once your character is finished, a click instantly transports you to the city you chose to begin in via portal. Right in front of your starting location is a tutorial center, which explains combat and spells adequately, but is somewhat basic and doesn’t tell much about the world itself. It is no substitute for the 80-page manual that does a good job of explaining the systems and intricacies of the game, and the manual in turn is no substitute for the teachings of a more experienced player. When my first character graced the world of Asheron’s Call, I ran through the tutorial, walked around the small town a bit, and then was hit with a feeling of, "What now?" I was infected with a strong case of newbie syndrome, and for the first few levels had no remedy, enjoying combat when I could, but usually meeting a quick death if I strayed too far in exploration. But Asheron’s Call has an excellent system to make sure one doesn’t stay a lost newbie for long. By appealing to the greed of veteran players, battle hardened armor-clad warriors normally too busy to give a second thought to a half-naked dope newbie meandering around helplessly are inspired to help the new players and take them under their proverbial wings. Asheron’s Call’s allegiance system is a clever idea that encourages a symbiosis between the strong and the weak, satisfying both parties with rewards for uniting. Any player can swear fealty to another player, who becomes their patron. The new player, a vassal of the patron they swore to, (who may also have sworn to another patron, and so on and so on), is offered rewards by the patron in return for their loyalty, and may be given rare equipment, money, spell secrets, or simple game knowledge depending on the instructor. In return for their assistance, the patron receives a small fraction of bonus experience points for every bit of exp the vassal picks up, and since a patron can have any number of vassals, and those vassals can also have more vassals, it results in a complex but benign fantasy pyramid scheme. This also makes for interesting guild type groups, as the highest patron in a chain becomes the monarch, and monarchs and patrons compete to best serve their vassals. Being a newbie in the game and having vassals compete for your fealty is like walking into a new school only to find yourself the most popular kid in the class. For my own part, after being killed in excess of ten times as a newbie, being suddenly handed an Ivory Flaming Longsword (oooh….it glows) for no tangible cost was quite a thrill.

The control and interface are more of the game’s many strong points. With so many menus and sub-menus, Asheron’s Call actually manages its windows very well, almost like, well, Windows. Shortcut bars, simple item usage, and easy to use tabs within menus add to the ease of navigating the different screens in the game. The control in Asheron’s Call worked out fine, and I have no real complaints about it aside from a slightly annoying transition from chat commands to normal keyboard usage, for more than once I’d be walking along, Mr. Cool Level 5 Blademaster with the Flaming Sword, about to recruit some other adventurers to join my group, when I’d accidentally forget to engage the chat mode and turn on something like AutoRun, sending me running into the distance as if I had just stumbled into an Olthoi Queen with PMS. I seemed to have real trouble with this in the beginning, sleeping, standing, doing chat poses and autorunning in the midst of every conversation like a true schizophrenic, but I’ve become more used to the control and couldn’t imagine a much better way of mapping so many functions and controlling so many actions. The only action that seemed a little out of place was the jump function. It’s a trainable skill, and the assigned button can be held down to jump a little higher at the cost of much stamina, but WHY? As of this review, there’s a bug associated with the useless jump as well — jump onto a steep slope, and you may be stuck beyond hope, or dead (leaving your corpse stuck beyond hope). And speaking of death…

Death is somewhat mild in the earlier levels of Asheron Call, but it can be very frustrating later on when good EQ is taken away because you did not know when to flee. When you die, you start back at the last "lifestone" you made contact with. Lifestones are located outside most major cities, and are vital to remember if you’ve traveled a long distance. The penalty for death is a reduction in vitae, or life energies, in addition to a loss of one piece of equipment and a little money. The vitae penalty is a mild temporary loss in skill and maximum HP, and can be worked off through small amounts of experience points, and I would consider it too light a punishment for death if not for the loss of one item of equipment, which can be very crippling if the item is a rare weapon or piece of armor. The lost equipment can still be retrieved from your corpse however, should you be lucky enough to find it again in such a big world. Having a big party definitely helps though, as someone can stay behind to guard it and direct you to it.

Combat in Asheron’s Call is so-so — and that’s very unfortunate since you’ll be spending more time in or around combat than anywhere else if you’re the average player. Non-magical melee combat is half-decent, allowing for some tactics in battle by including three different attack heights and a slider bar that can be set to choose a personal balance between speed and power, but overall, simple fights really are little more than rush in, press the attack button of the height of your choice, and watch your health and stamina so you can escape when needed. Some further depth is present in the fact that monsters have elemental resistance and weaknesses, as well as areas that are more susceptible to attacks of certain height, but overall, the monsters seem to differ little outside of appearance and basic stats.

I would have liked to see a little more responsiveness to the environment on the part of the AI, and quite simply, some actual AI to begin with. Monsters are able to cast spells, but you’ll see nothing particularly devious, and many creatures behave exactly alike, despite Asheron’s Lore and the manual mentioning different traits among the races. One example of the lack of creature programming is how Drudges are said to fear sunlight, but will pursue you into daylight without blinking a single over-sized eye. The monster variety is also slightly lacking, although Microsoft promises to add more creatures as time goes on, and the fact that most creatures come in many different classes and sizes does some to fill the void of bestiary diversity.

A somewhat annoying bug is the tendency of collision detection on monsters to be poorly done; a Drudge will often poke its head and limbs through a closed door as it tries to attack you through it (and if that Drudge has throwing weapons, it actually is able to). The combat animation is fairly simplistic and minimal, but it gets the job done acceptably. I don’t mind the hand-to-hand combat, and I’d be hard pressed to find ways to improve it much, but it just has a lackluster quality that does little to distinguish it from every other online role-playing game. Missile combat isn’t much different; the system of high, middle, low applies the same, and the only difference is the need to flee if the monster gets too close. Yet, to balance out the mediocrity of combat on Asheron’s Call, an excellent magic system has been implemented with a few interesting innovations.

Magic spells in Asheron’s Call are divided into four schools (Life Magic, War Magic, Creature Enchantment and Item Enchantment) and have to be discovered and researched, and Microsoft has claimed there are more than 1,000 combinations of spell components to form new spells — though they also claimed that they didn’t have a monopoly and that Windows is user-friendly, and the thousand-spell thing sounds a little like empty ambition. Spells are stumbled upon by mixing one item of each of the following categories: a scarab, a plant, a powder, an element, a talisman and, for higher-level spells, tapers. Most ingredients can be purchased, though the higher level varieties must be discovered elsewhere.

So what keeps one player from discovering a powerful spell, spreading it around, and allowing every newbie to use it regularly? It’s as simple a motivation as this: basic human greed. The more a spell is used over a period time in the world of Asheron’s Call, the weaker it becomes. Your new Fire Bolt IV can be fizzled down to 50 percent strength if its casting becomes commonplace, or can be boosted to 200 percent if its global uses are few. There is a logical system to formulating and discovering spells, but I’m not about to reveal it here other than to say it’s not too tough and that the manual offers decent hints. Overall, I am very pleased with the magic system and its innovations. Couple that great magic system with a Blademaster or Archer or something else, and you can have a very interesting character on your hands.

The graphics and sound in Asheron’s Call are among its few disappointments. The sound, or what little of it there actually is, is meaningless, poor and occasionally annoying. The portal sound is the most frequently heard, and it is long, repetitive, and blatantly cheesy. Other sound effects are sparse and uninspired. At least the music is somewhat better than the sound, because of one simple fact: There is none. With console and some PC RPGs, music has grown to be one of the most important parts of atmosphere, but because of the non-linear nature of Asheron’s Call, every theme would be generic, bland, and horribly repetitive, since there would be no appropriate time for a sad theme, a happy theme or a theme for an individual character. Though it won’t work for all systems, I was able to play MP3s while playing Asheron’s Call to cover up the nasty sound effects and lack of music, and I found it a good remedy.

Graphically, the game stinks of mediocrity and an overuse of bland polygons. The only saving grace of the game’s visual dissplendor is the architecture of the various buildings, and the far vision and feeling of immensity the game conveys. Overall, pop-up is less apparent then I would have expected in a game that actually streams the world data to your computer as you play. The textures are simplistic and small, and there were noticeable glitches on my Voodoo3 3000 card in the form of rare but noticeable seams between walls and an odd occasional hovering polygon or two, though this was sparse and not enough to really hinder the gameplay or overall enjoyment. Character models are sufficient, and unremarkable. Spell and item effects are dull and basic as well, setting the middle-ground theme for the graphic category. While I would have liked to see a better graphic presentation, Asheron’s Call is an online world, and if I had to make a choice between better visuals or the immensity and lack of loading times as the world has now, I would confidently choose the latter.

Microsoft’s six Zone servers have so far seemed capable of handling the traffic of the game, as lag on my 56k modem was rare and even then, not long-lasting. I’ve been in towns where thirteen or fourteen other plays were in my current view without the game showing the slightest sign of lag. Some slowdown can be seen in the form of the occasional awkward "warping" of other players and NPCs, where they are walking in one direction and are suddenly where they were four seconds ago, but considering the load on the server, I would say the small amounts of lag are a relief.

Of the six servers, five are mirrors of the same basic world, while one, Darktide, is a Pkill-only server. Having a Pkill-only server is a perfect solution, as lovers of deathmatches and guild wars have a place to enjoy, while newbies do not need to fear being cut down by a level thirty player as they are about to kill their first rabbit. There is a way to become a Pkiller on a standard server, but even if a player undergoes the ritual required, they can only harm other Pkillers. I have a feeling that I wouldn’t have been able to survive long enough to write this review if the Pkill situation were handled any other way.

Asheron’s Call, like any game, has its flaws, but chances are, you’ll forget about them after a few hours of playing. Beneath the bugs, under the audio and visual shortcomings, is a wealth of gameplay and engaging fantasy fun. Though a little rough around the edges, once you become immersed in the world of Dereth, you’ll never want to leave. Microsoft and Turbine have truly formulated the perfect drug, in the form of a $10 a month fix called Asheron’s Call.

The greatest hesitance in purchasing AC should not be over the graphics, or the flaws — instead, take some time to consider if you’re ready to give up every shred of your social life in exchange for hordes of drudges waiting for the cold kiss of your steel. Keep in mind, Asheron’s Call is for the persistent and courageous: You’ll need to be willing to fight off a seemingly unending flow of monsters, to be willing to brave the most maze-like and treacherous dungeons, and most frightening of all, to trust Microsoft with your credit card number — but in the end, the experience is rewarding and immersive beyond words.