Turbine Entertainment has announced that Asheron’s Call will be heading free to play as of March 4th, although the game will be heading into maintenance mode at the same time. While there are no plans to shut down Asheron’s Call at any point in the near future, there will also no longer be any updates apart from maintenance, bug fixes, and a few tweaks here and there. There are also plans to allow players to run their own servers, as mentioned in the announcement:
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 Asheron’s Call servers. We intend to put the call out to tech savvy enthusiasts that love Asheron’s Call to create a community for players who want to run their own Asheron’s Call servers.
Both Asheron’s Call and Asheron’s Call 2 will be made available to play for free. Given the emphasis on player-operated servers and that the move will shut off what cash flow Asheron’s Call has left, all signs seem to point toward the sunsetting of b0th games in the next year or so, the official servers at the very least. At the very least, Turbine clearly recognizes the passion of their community and is one of an extremely small number of developers willing to hand their game over to the community when it is no longer financially viable for them to keep going.
We will have more details as they approach. Turbine has not commented on whether or not private servers will be possible for Asheron’s Call 2.
(Source: Asheron’s Call)
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