Ten Years of Asheron's Call

This week marks the tenth anniversary of Turbine's classic MMO Asheron's Call. One of the earliest games to popularize the genre in the late 1990s, Asheron's Call is also one of the longest-running games in the MMO catalog. To find out more about the early days of the game and its relevance to the current state of the genre, we talked with designer Toby Ragaini and got his candid thoughts about what went right and wrong with the early game design.

In addition to talking about Asheron's Call, Toby was also excited to reveal his latest project, a more mainstream, browser-based MMO called Faunashpere.

IGNPC: If you want to make an MMO today, there's no shortage of titles you can look to for inspiration. Developers of the early MMOs didn't have that luxury. How did you handle the freedom and frustration of developing a game that couldn't build directly on the proven successes of others?

Toby Ragaini: Text based MUDs were the predecessors to the MMOs we know today. Most people probably aren't familiar with these games, but imagine playing an MMO based solely on the text output of a combat log:

"You hit the goblin for 4 damage!"


"You missed the goblin!"

As silly as that sounds, the basic level of emotional investment was still present in the games. You made a character, leveled him up, collected loot, and perhaps made some online friends along the way. The formula worked, and it wasn't too hard for creative types to image this experience in a graphical environment. Thus was born Ultima Online, EverQuest, and Asheron's Call.

IGNPC: Asheron's Call went against the grain in a number of ways, not only by avoiding some of the traditional fantasy races but also by including a more flexible skill-based character system. What was the motivation behind that decision? Given the continued popularity of elves and wizards in the MMO world, do you feel it was a risk that paid off?

Toby Ragaini: In some ways, I do think we paid a steep price for being "different". It came down to an incomplete understanding of the new player experience. Classes work because they are an easy but interesting decision for starting players to make. The skill-based model of Asheron's Call front loaded a number of decisions and was overwhelming for many users.

Similarly, I think having quasi-realistic human tribes replacing fantasy races was a mistake. It really cut down on the amount of visual difference available to player characters. Having short, burly dwarves and tall, elegant elves provides for instant recognition.

However, in other ways, our willingness to buck the trend paid off. I'm still very proud of the unique backstory and fiction that we developed in Asheron's Call. It provided us with a degree of flexibility that allowed us to surprise users, and introduce monsters and villains that people would experience for the first time. And of course, we also stood out in that our environments offered vast seamless vistas. This was an enormous technical achievement at the time, and represented an incredible engineering accomplishment.

IGNPC: Other early MMOs, like Ultima or EverQuest, gave players the chance to explore a world they were already familiar with, at least in broad terms. How did you try to ensure that AC's more original and unknown setting would give players a sense of exploration and discovery without making them feel lost or alienated?

Toby Ragaini: In part, this was achieved by mixing the old and the new. That green-skinned brute bearing down on you wasn't an ogre; it was a banderling. Was there a functional difference? No, not really, but it made something familiar seem new again. But honestly, I think exploring the unfamiliar was one of the reasons Asheron's Call stands out in people's minds. Never knowing what lies over the next hill is very exciting, and Asheron's Call's original setting made this possible.

IGNPC: Even with the original feel of the game, there seem to have been some familiar influences. What were some of your main influences when creating the content for the game?

Toby Ragaini: All of us on the design team grew up with Dungeons & Dragons, Tolkien, Conan, etc. We were all products of these influences. Personally, I was always inspired by how Tolkien was able to create such a fully actualized world, and while I would like to imagine that we were trying to break from that mold, its almost impossible to do that completely when you're creating a fantasy world.