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Online RPG 'Asheron's Call' to shut down after 17 years
Well-done online role-playing games tend to have a long shelf life, but the Asheron's Call series has lasted longer than most. It got started way back in 1999, and has lasted through three publisher changes, a shift to a buy-once model and even a full-on resurrection, among other tribulations. However, even classics have to call it quits at some point. Turbine has announced that it's ending support for both the original Asheron's Call and Asheron's Call 2 on January 31st, 2017. The series will be completely free to play for any account holder until then, but you won't get to create a new account to see what the fuss is about.
Lord of the Rings Online gets a Mac client
Lord of the Rings Online is a massively multiplayer game run by Turbine Entertainment based on JRR Tolkien's popular fantasy fiction series. The game first went live back in 2007, but a few years ago transitioned over to a free-to-play model, aiming to bring in a large audience of free players supported by a smaller group of people paying for microtransaction items. Now, after "planning and discussing and working on this for quite some time," Turbine's VP of Product Development Craig Alexander told TUAW in an exclusive interview that Turbine is releasing a Mac client for Lord of the Rings Online this week, bringing the free-to-play game to Apple's platform and the Mac audience. The client is now live, and can be downloaded directly from this link. The Mac platform has been making leaps and bounds forward in options for gamers lately. Steam famously brought its platform over to Apple's personal computers recently, as have several other developers. Turbine first considered bringing Lord of the Rings Online to Mac back when the game went free-to-play, said Alexander, but the reason it took so long was because the company decided to build a native port for the game rather than depend on emulation or other similar methods. "Trying to outsource the task just didn't make sense," said Alexander. Kate Paiz is the executive producer of the game, and she said that because the Mac client is native, it'll be the exact same game on the Mac as it is on the PC. "It'll all just work natively," she told TUAW. "The Mac stuff will work through the same patcher." The Mac game itself won't have any extra features or experiences exclusive to the Mac, but Paiz said the team always tries to figure out how to best welcome new players, and was thinking about the Mac client even while developing the game's latest expansion, Riders of Rohan, released a few weeks ago. The current launch of the game will be as a beta client, downloadable directly from Turbine that will simply sign into the game's live servers. A closed beta has been active for a few months, so this is essentially an open beta period starting now. Turbine expects to maintain and update that client over time, fixing any problems that users have. Alexander said that as the client moves out of beta, the company will consider making it available on Steam or other downloadable platforms. The Mac App Store probably isn't a possibility just yet, because Turbine depends on the game's microtransactions for profit, and running those through Apple's marketplace would just cost too much at this point. But Turbine is expecting both to see current players excited to run the game natively on their favorite computers, and new players interested in a free-to-play experience on OS X. "There haven't been a lot of MMOs or free-to-play games on the Mac yet, which we think is an opportunity, " said Alexander. "We're hopeful we're going to get lots of new players." And Paiz said that Turbine is happy to have Mac users on board. "We're very excited to welcome the Mac community firsthand ... We'd like to see what this IP and this game means to them personally."
Turbine won't deny possibility of console Lord of the Rings MMO
Ever since people got word of the stealth-action MMO The Agency, a lingering question in the back of everyone's mind has been "will other MMO's get console attention now?" The answer is complicated. Blizzard probably won't bring World of Warcrap to consoles, but other developers are more open to the possibilities of console gamers who don't feel like getting a new computer every six months. Turbine Entertainment, creative minds behind The Lord of The Rings Online, are open to the idea. "I actually think Lord of the Rings is a platform we can build from," said executive producer Jeffrey Steefel. Even though the PS3 supports keyboards and mice, they've still got to think of a way to translate the game from PC to consoles. Steefel vaguely explained, " ... you've got to do everything in a thoughtful way and know why you're doing it, for who you're doing it, and then, what is an MMO on a console? What is that really? It has to be different." However different it may be, we'd be honored to start getting some MMO's on the PlayStation 3. Whether or not the game would feature cross-platform play is not known, but we'd like to see it exist someday.
