Turbine Relaunch MMO Sequel Purely To Please Fans
Turbine Entertainment recently made a post on the Asheron’s Call forum announcing that all current subscribers will get chance to dive back into the previously closed MMORPG, Asheron’s Call 2. The MMORPG sequel was originally released in November of 2002 but failed to impress fans of the original and was later cancelled after a new expansion failed to attract more subscribers.
“We have opened up a new server for anyone who has an active Asheron’s Call subscription to play Asheron’s Call 2 for free!” the company said. “Although we would have loved to revisit some of our old characters with you, we were not able to bring over any of your old characters. We do, however, present this new Asheron’s Call 2 server, Dawnsong, to all active Asheron’s Call players with a paid subscription or who purchase an ACTD retail key and subscribe.”
“We spent a lot of time trying to come up with various ways to keep the game running at the subscriber level we were at, but in the end none of them worked in the long run,” he said during an interview. “Once we exhausted all of our options, we made the final decision. Nobody at Turbine was happy about that, but it had to be done.”
“There are many factors that contributed to AC2’s ultimate fate, and it’s really hard to single one factor out above the others,” he added. “There are a lot of things that Turbine has learned from AC2, and we’re constantly applying those lessons to Dungeons & Dragons Online and Lord of the Rings Online. One of the key lessons that we learned is the customer perception of sequels in the MMO space. They end up splitting your community more so than growing it. So they are counterproductive, unlike sequels in other game genres where they can be really successful.”
Sadly Asheron’s Call 2 is only currently available on one server for current subscribers of Asheron’s Call, but it’s still great to see such an established company going that extra mile to please their customers. If you’re that interested in playing again you could quite easily sign up for the original and gain access.
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