[jdk]

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. :)

[sveiss]

My marriage and a good chunk of my career trajectory can both be traced directly back to having "grown up" playing AC and writing/coding for Crossroads of Dereth. It's a little scary to think how different my life would be if I hadn't picked up that box--possibly the only copy the EB Games in my small English town would get--and gone "huh, looks cool".

I think growing up during those years of transition, right before the Internet became mainstream and ubiquitous, was a huge boon. Sure, the early MMOs were far from the first international social forum enabled by the Internet, but they were right at the technological frontier at the time. There was something special about inhabiting this massive, 3D virtual space alongside people from across the world, and having that experience be just as novel to everyone else as it was to me.

You couldn't replicate that today, and growing up with the world at your fingertips on a pane of glass as a taken-for-granted fact of life must be a very different experience.

[jdk]

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. :)

[yvdriess]

Another "grew up playing AC" here and fondly remember interacting with Bael'Zharon on the Harvestgain server during the life events. Did you also blow up Arwic? :D

I still use AC and to some extent AC2 as an example of how wild, weird, dynamic and interesting MMOs were before the EQ formula won through WoW's success.

[jdk]

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

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

[wykillin]

I also wonder how many hours and points I wasted into jump to jump across the roof tops, haha. I absolutely loved the server based physics, even though I had the crappiest dial up connection at the time. I was 14 when I started playing that game. So many amazing memories, Atlan stones, spell system, cheesing death items, being afraid of losing everything because there's no bank, haha.

Lately, I've been getting more and more into esoteric topics and I keep thinking about this games lore... There is so much occult knowledge/history baked into the entire thing and I honestly still use the game as a reference point for some many things.

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

Thank you!

[jdk]

> 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.

[stefan_]

Ironically I think WoW had a bunch of these bugs too, with mechanics prioritizing "oldest account id" first..

[shostack]

Are there any games since then you think captured the feel of the unique discovery-based magic system?

[jdk]

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.