It's the End of a World as We Know It

This is depressing. :(

Poor NPC's :(

Never played AC2, didn't like AC1 much. But it would be nice for Turbine to give a free copy of AC1 and expansions, a midlevel character, and 1 month of free game time to it's AC2 playerbase.

I never played this game, but it's kinda depressing when an entire world dies like that.

It's weird to think you can buy a game now and in X years' time you might not be able to play it because the servers and other players might not be there. There's no way around it I guess, when other people are such a part of the game, but it's weird all the same.

So when do the big ones start going under? UO next year anyone?

Too bad they can't flip the switch on all the MMORPGs, they're huge time-sinks that rarely provide fun equal to the $$ and or time a gamer spends on them.

Any game where you have to work hard to earn the right to have fun is not a good game in my book. :(

Still it is sad to see an entire project thrown away like so much discarded trash. Too bad really. I guess these types of games that are cancelled go to the Island of Misfit MMORPGS, so they're not really alone. :P

The premise that MMORPGs aren't for niche players is ludicrous. Whoever wrote that needs to do just maybe a little research? EVE, World War II Online, Anarchy Online. What do these games have in common? They're small, they make money, and they have enough of a core base of fans to keep their business engine running. EVE expands its content every six months or so. Anarchy Online has been doing OK with only a couple of servers and now they're working on Age of Conan.

AC2 is a bad game. Let's not make over-generalizations based on one bad apple.

AC2 was really cool, and WoW seems to have taken a lot of it's UI/combat ideas from it. unless of course those were done pre-AC2, i never played EQ1 much. it's main problem was lack of content, and lack of vendors. if you picked up crap you didn't want, you could simply change it into cash. and if you wanted to upgrade your gear, it had to drop from something. i remember playing for hours doing little but exploring. but it was just so sparse that it got old quickly. it was a disappointing game that could have been so much more, but this was probably inevitable.

cute writeup.

AC2 is what happens when a a big publisher like Microsoft influences the game designers choices too much. They killed any chance of making the game appealing to the large MMOG audience that wanted to play it. Instead it leaned towards non-MMOG players who want the game to be much easier to learn and such. Although there is nothing wrong with that, they just didn't focus enough on making the standard AC fans happy. AC2 basically didn't get any fans from the first to pick it up and play it really. So the AC fans either moved onto a better MMORPG, or they just kept playing AC1 and never moved to AC2.

The problem with so many MMO is that a lot of them will fail for a few to succeed. I just hope that studios won't close as a result of less than expected success, but hey ... look at Westwood. They probably didn't die just because of Earth & Beyond's failure but it was definitely a deciding factor.

AC2 was the first MMORPG I played (like, for longer than a week). I played strong and hard for 2 months -and gave up. I couldnt take the bugs and the lag. It drove me insane rubberbanding all over the place.

But I will never forget my first REAL exposure to a persistant on-line world.

I was in my first week playing and I was standing in this beautiful snowy valley admiring the frosted mountains (the GFX were fantastic back then). I showed my, then, girlfriend the moving clouds, the sun setting behind them. The mobs walking around, and suddenly anothre player comes running by. I pointed out to the GF that that was a real person somewhere in the world playing Ac2 as well. It was cool. I logged out and we went to dinner.

The next day I logged in, DL some stuff, and began to play. But wait, my character was now in the middle of a lake....PLoP! WTF was going on here?! It took me a second and then I realized it. The season had changed and the snow had melted from those moutains to form a lake in the valley I was standing in.

I know it sounds cheesy, but it was a defining moment in gaming for me. It was incredible.

When AC2 was announced I thought this would be the MMORPG that was going to do what later WoW did - make it accessible and popular among the the general population. After all AC was quite fun in its day. I was incredibly disappointed and bored by the beta though.

AC2 was my first MMO...

I got into it in the 1st month of release. It was pretty bad. Grinding was a pretty big part of the game. I grouped a fair amount, but since I was in school I had very little time to play. The world was big, but it felt very rushed and empty (SWG reminds me of that game, but it has more mobs). They had made these large cities witch a ton of instanced buildings that served no purpose at all. When you needed to talk to another guy in the city you had to run a long way to get to him, but he could be found standing in front of the same type of building you just left.

After about 2 months of play there were still HUGE bugs. Every other day there was a new patch that supposedly fixed bugs/enhanced gameplay. The craziest thing was that after almost every patch there was some part of the CHAT system that would be broken! So they introduce a patch to fix some random problems and BAM! the global chat no longer works. For an entire day or two a chat tree would be down or partially working.

AC2 had some cool stuff though. One ability allowed you to build small walls and turret type things in the world. You could then put your party inside and they would be safe until the wall was destroyed or the enemy killed. It had a limited amount of crafting, though they kept saying they were planning on removing it. They also did some world events that changed the landscape to some small degree.

the beta for ac1 was fun as hell. never played retail because I'm not an mmorpg guy and I knew they'd nerf all the beta fun because mmorpg's are for self punishment whores. :p

Sad, sad, sad. If I ever cared to pay for an MMORPG it would have been AC2. It was the only one I ever had any fun in.