Asheron's Call finally shutting down.

Not a bad run for a game released in 1999. Here's hoping they bring back some of the old major villains and destroy the world of Dereth one last time.

https://www.engadget.com/2016/12/21/...

My first MMO. There's things that they did to this day is still unique to the MMO genre.

Sad to see them finally making it go dark. Hopefully they sell off the code or someone has scrapped enough to create private servers.

My first as well. I'll drink a swig for AC tonight.

Well, the servers just turned off.

No final event, no ingame announcement or acknowledgement, nothing. In the town of Arwic, everyone's avatar disappeared except for their equipped weapons/shields and orbs/wands, which just floated there in the breathing animation until the disconnect screen popped up.

RIP AC.

Yup. I had to work, or I would have been on for the end. I logged in the last couple nights, caught up with some old friends, and signed up for a Morningthaw Facebook group to reconnect with others. It's sad to see it go, but not unexpected. I'm actually a bit surprised there's been a little media coverage of it, and I think Warner Brothers is getting a little bit of bad press over how things ended...

As 'Asheron's Call' Nears Death, One Designer Looks Back - Waypoint (I'm actually in this screenshot and video... I'm all the way to the right, if you see a guy in bright blue armor, I'm the guy standing to his left in a grey/black robe. I'm in the video too, but I don't walk up until about a minute in.).

The Final Moments Of Asheron's Call - Kotaku

Yea the lack of private servers for this is sad.

It's sad they ended with no fanfare, considering the send-off for the beta had what amounted to The Disco at the End of the World.

Yeah. Lots of people streamed the moment that everyone's characters just mass logged off, but the consensus is that anyone in development that knew how to do world events either split with the DDO/LOTRO teams, or left long before that. The team running it to the end couldn't even update the launcher, it still advertised them working on releasing the code so private servers could be set up.

There are already a couple emulators being worked on. It'll be interesting to see just how much of the game they can restore, and how long before WB releases the legal hounds.

PurEvil wrote:

There are already a couple emulators being worked on. It'll be interesting to see just how much of the game they can restore, and how long before WB releases the legal hounds.

How? The official word was no code was released.

They had hundreds of players data mining the game before it got cut. I think the last reported amount was roughly about 60-65% of the map and dungeons was mined. Now they're reverse engineering it from the data. The two big ones are ACEmulator and PhatAC.

PurEvil wrote:

They had hundreds of players data mining the game before it got cut. I think the last reported amount was roughly about 60-65% of the map and dungeons was mined. Now they're reverse engineering it from the data. The two big ones are ACEmulator and PhatAC.

Data and code are two separate things. It was my understanding the code still had proprietary MS code from way back when and they weren't giving it up.

After an online game has been completely shut down why do they still care who uses the code or runs their own copy? They're unable to make money off it anymore so why does it matter if someone "steals" a copy?

ranalin wrote:
PurEvil wrote:

They had hundreds of players data mining the game before it got cut. I think the last reported amount was roughly about 60-65% of the map and dungeons was mined. Now they're reverse engineering it from the data. The two big ones are ACEmulator and PhatAC.

Data and code are two separate things. It was my understanding the code still had proprietary MS code from way back when and they weren't giving it up.

Yeah, they didn't get any code, the data logged was mostly item positions, spawn data, terrain elevation, portal locations, and such, and they've got developers coding up new servers using that information.

Kehama wrote:

After an online game has been completely shut down why do they still care who uses the code or runs their own copy? They're unable to make money off it anymore so why does it matter if someone "steals" a copy?

That's how I feel about it. The current rumors are either there is some proprietary code or hardware that WB doesn't actually own, and the licensing would be too difficult to be worth it for them. Still seems silly to me. My opinion is they sold the IP, haven't made it official yet, because turning away a community that banded together and made an offer on something you're about to toss out seems really illogical.

PurEvil wrote:
ranalin wrote:
PurEvil wrote:

They had hundreds of players data mining the game before it got cut. I think the last reported amount was roughly about 60-65% of the map and dungeons was mined. Now they're reverse engineering it from the data. The two big ones are ACEmulator and PhatAC.

Data and code are two separate things. It was my understanding the code still had proprietary MS code from way back when and they weren't giving it up.

Yeah, they didn't get any code, the data logged was mostly item positions, spawn data, terrain elevation, portal locations, and such, and they've got developers coding up new servers using that information.

Kehama wrote:

After an online game has been completely shut down why do they still care who uses the code or runs their own copy? They're unable to make money off it anymore so why does it matter if someone "steals" a copy?

That's how I feel about it. The current rumors are either there is some proprietary code or hardware that WB doesn't actually own, and the licensing would be too difficult to be worth it for them. Still seems silly to me. My opinion is they sold the IP, haven't made it official yet, because turning away a community that banded together and made an offer on something you're about to toss out seems really illogical.

Right the original Turbine developers had help from and the game was produced by Microsoft. They're not going to hand that over unless they get paid handsomely and if the IP had been sold it would make the news. As much as i'd like to see the game live on, although i still thought that losing the taper discovery mini-game made it watered down, is not going to happen. At least not anytime soon.

There is still AC life, for now at least.

There was indeed never any server code released, but back in the early 2000's someone had written a functioning emulator. When the closing was announced, he resurfaced, and offered up that old code and a project formed around it (I was watching from a distance, so I'm unclear on whether the original author ended up leading that project or if it was someone else). They eventually got something up and running, but went suddenly dark one day. The project leader said he was threatened with legal action so shut everything down. Others forked the project, and its alive and relatively well. There are at least two projects using that fork, one aimed at having servers from the Dark Majesty era, while the other (seemingly more populated) aims at emulating the final status of the world. They can be logged into using the same launcher, and both provide really detailed setup steps. I've played around a bit on the end-game PvE server, and it felt a lot like the late days of the game. I think I might want to play around with the DM servers more though.

There is also a separate emulation project being written from the ground up; I think they occasionally post status updates, but haven't gotten past private testing.