Turbine posted an update on the development and upcoming changes to Asherons Call this week that lays out the content for the February update, which funny enough is expected to release March 4th, so technically a March update. A few of the features in development include reworked rewards for the Viridian Rise, a new coliseum, enhancements to the three societies, new Paragon weapons, and an Enlightenment system, which allows players that have reached level cap to sacrifice all levels, experience, Luminance, and Luminance augmentations to start fresh. Enlightened characters will have the benefit of starting over with an extra point in all trained and specialized skills, two extra for Vitality, and a new title.
Enjoy the update because after that, things will slow down as Turbine shifts its focus more to maintenance, balance tweaks, bug fixes, and "maybe" the occasional small content update. Part of the intended changes that Turbine will be implementing is the eventual ability for players to play both Asherons Call and Asherons Call 2 for free and even operate private servers.
Although this change of focus is necessary for our company, we love the Asherons Call games and we want them to live forever. We understand that players who have been enjoying our monthly updates will be disappointed at the change to Asherons Call. Our long term plan is to make the game free to all active accounts. We are working on a date in the not-to-distant future where all active accounts will be able to play the game for free. Asherons Call and Asherons Call 2 will be a gift to our loyal players."
"In addition, we have been working within the company to start an initiative sometime near the end of the year to allow players to run their own Asherons Call servers. We intend to put the call out to tech savvy enthusiasts that love Asherons Call to create a community for players who want to run their own Asherons Call servers.
While getting a server up and running is not exactly a user-friendly experience, Turbine wants to establish and build a community of tech-savvy people interested in running their own Asherons Call server before releasing the tools.
"Unfortunately, setting up and running an AC server is not a user friendly experience. Enthusiasts would need some knowledge of running an SQL server, setting up the network, using our tools to configure the SQL server, installing the Asherons Call server with our complicated tools, and distributing the client. Our intent is to help these players build a community so these processes can be created and distributed to people interested in running an Asherons Call game. If that works out we can look into releasing tools and data files that would allow players to modify game data and create alternate content for their own Asherons Call games."
via Massively
Source: Asherons Call Announcement
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