jdk

Oh yeah we definitely used the CoD databases in many cases over internal tools, so well done. I remember Ophelea too. Hope y'all are doing well!

The smallest world stays small. :)

I think a few (persistent) games touched on things like that, but I can't think of any that really went hard on it for long-term characters (instead you mostly see it in roguelikes/lites where if you got a bad roll, it didn't matter since you were making a new character soon anyway). At a very broad level, this is sort of what the taper system did but that was cracked after 6 months or whatever and it didn't really offer any meaningful differentiation beyond brute-forcing permutations.

> I'm curious, do you know how the games lore was developed and were there ancient texts that were inspirations for the events?

I was very not-involved with the lore/story (to the point, where I think I wrote a handful of notes and stuff before it being decided that I should just focus on gameplay, and someone else would cover the lore for me!), but there were 3-4 people primarily responsible for it and they were all very much fantasy literate, so it wouldn't surprise me at all if some of the inspiration were from those sources.

You're welcome!

I think I mentioned this in another comment and certainly a ton over the years - but a lot of the magic of AC was that it was made by a bunch of people who had never made a game before, much less an MMO, and there were very few ingrained lessons, so we were foolhardy enough to just do things the way it felt we should, player behavior or other consequences be damned. It was built on hopes and dreams and naivete and that made it beautiful and flawed.

But also yeah, once something ships to players, it's now "theirs" and not "ours". We stood in pretty stark contrast to EQ's "you're in our world now" philosophy, again, for better or worse.

You're welcome! Haha, mattekar farming will always hold a special place for me. And, of course, TD's herald defense is probably top 3 gaming memories for me. So much lifting done across the community for what's now basically oral history.

But also thank YOU for participating in some of my very formative experiences of my life as well. The players really made it a joy to work on.

In terms of discovery and wonder, I think Valheim did a good job of it in the general atmosphere and loop, but in terms of magic systems, not really. You have the Magika (or even Path of Exile) where spells have component parts and build into something larger, but there's not much mystery there.

A theme of a bunch of the comments is that the internet / audience makes this sort of thing impossible these days. One of my white whales for game design is figuring out if mystery, especially in multiplayer games, is still possible in a meaningful way.

Oh man... Now I'm trying to remember which of the CoD folks were from England. Thanks for all / any of the work you put into that site. It was really the nexus of AC for a number of years. I'm glad it's been lost to the ages because I definitely had a number of real spicy comments on it. I'm happy AC at least indirectly helped your career/marriage in some small way. :)

Nope, it was before my time. I joined the team in beta.

I had been gone from Turbine for 8 or 10 years by the time they decided to shut AC down, so I can only speculate. I assume it had something to do with WB not wanting to "give away" the IP but instead just lock it away in a vault.

The biggest problem was the degeneracy once it was "solved", instead of organizing around social circles. It led to people feeling like cogs in the machine and skewed play patterns and motivations.

I haven't really given it any serious thought but I'd likely start with trying to more strongly codify the good parts (incentivizing smaller circles inside of the larger structure, making systems for patrons/vassals to play together in more meaningful ways, etc) while highlighting the positive actions that players could do / benefit from. I don't want to say AC was TOO opaque but a lot of it definitely suffered from being over designed for a very hardcore market.

Yay! The first time an MMO lands for someone, it definitely makes an outsized impression. The combination of social outlet with a huge amount of free time is a recipe for something great.

It's funny you mention Valheim - one of my groups in had a core of people who I met back in the AC days and their friends. We got to some real old man gaming that probably annoyed their friends with all of the "back in our day..." stories while we were running around the landscape, running from trolls, etc.

Yeah, I was also involved in blowing up Arwic. It just felt right!

Definitely miss the "weird" MMOs of the early 00s...

For the last 15 years or so, coworkers ask when I'm going to make a new allegiance system but "less broken". So many good social behaviors came from its structure that it really deserves another attempt.

And yeah, Ash Gromnies were the bane of so so so many players.

Thanks! Always nice to hear people who "grew up" play it. AC having server-side physics and actually making use of them led to lots of ridiculous and emergent gameplay. I don't know how many hours I just spend idling in towns jumping from rooftop to rooftop or seeing how high I could climb up massive structures. Everytime I try to play again though, the old "you can't go home again" hits too hard and I just quietly close it back up and go back to the nostalgia.

I was on the design team, so was directly responsible for a lot of the shadow invasion stuff (if you ever saw the big bad Bael'Zharon running around in the live events, that was me!) and other patches for the first 2 years of its lifespan.

Weirdly, I work on WoW now with my career having come full circle after having not worked on MMOs since the mid 2000s. :)

Haha "Og mage" ... yeah. The combat of AC still holds up in its janky for being fun in the context of an MMO. I spent most of my playtime on Darktide and dear lord, it made me so sweaty.

It's amazing to me how many people are still friends with their patrons/vassals from 25 years ago.