Asheron's Call is a 3D fantasy online RPG. Thats right, its got all the right genres all baked into one game. I will start by saying the world of Asheron's Call is immense. It takes me on average from 10 to 15 minutes to run from town to town. There are portals around towns to make traveling easier, but there is usually only one, so choices are limited. But I would rather travel on foot anyway because I can kill any monsters I see as I travel along the road.

Asheron's Call is in Beta phase 2. The game plays great, I can only wonder that if the game plays this well now, how will it play after they take out a lot of the bugs? They are about to release a Beta phase 3, it promises to have more quests, less bugs, and more 3D acceleration support. You won't need 3D acceleration to play AC, but it sure helps. There isn't a whole lot of lag, and there are usually 1,800 players in the same world at one time. When AC is released, there will be multiple worlds (servers).

You can create your own character from limitless possibilities. You get to pick from three different races. There is really no difference between the races. They can all do the same things. The only difference is the color of skin. My first character was a Blade Master. I chose to take one of the preset classes but you can create your own character from scratch. I haven't counted, but I think there are over 20 skills for your player. I haven't been able to use even a quarter of them yet.

Unlike some RPGs, your character doesn't have to gain experience until he levels up and then spend experience points on his character to make him better. In AC, you can do this at anytime. The only think that happens when you level up, is that you get 1 skill credit. A skill credit is used to train skills. When you start the game, you have Specialized Skills (bonus of +10 to skill, goes up faster with use, usable), Trained (Bonus of +5 to skill, usable), and untrained skills (no bonus, unusable). You can spend skill credits on raising a untrained skill to a trained skill, or raise a trained skill to a specialized skill. Your skills can go up when you manualy raise them (from experience that you get when you kill monsters) and they raise by themselves. My sword skill was at 65 when I started. I only manualy raised it 5 times. It is now at 78, that means 5 points were from me using EXP on them and 8 points were from physical use. My Melee defense as also risen 4 points from physical use.

There are a lot of unique features in AC. Here are a few;

Allegience - You can swear allegience to someone and they will get experience points when you kill a monster. You don't lose any experience points from this, but whomever you pledged alliegence too, can be getting experience even when they are not playing. You become there vassal. But what do you get out of it? Whomever you pledge allegience to can give you information, items, and money. I don't suggest pledging allegience to someone unless you now them well, because they could just take off and not help you out. You will get experience takin away from you if you cancel the allegience within a short period of time. So you don't want to do that. Some vassals get a lump sum of money for pleging allegience, some just get some weapons and armor. Others may get a certain amount of money for every week that they are a vassal.

Fealty - This is a real nice feature that allows a group of players to become group and share exeperience points equaly. All players will get a certain amount of experience points, depending on their level. A higher level player will get more experience points then a lower level player because he needs more to level up.

Universal Mana Pool - This is a unique feature. The more people who know a spell, the weaker it is. So if you are the only person to know a level 5 fire spell, then it is really powerful. But if you give the spell out to other people it gets weaker. This seems like a great feature in theory, but most players complain that it is bad because it is too easy to get a spell so all the spells are weak and they die to easily to monsters. I will have to wait until Beta Phase 3 comes out to see if this is improved.

The graphics are great. AC can bring you into the game with its in-depth atmosphere. There are ambient sounds, birds flying over head, and even little butter flys fluttering around. There is time in AC and day/night seguences. I have also played in the rain once. That was cool. AC looks to be a very promising game and will be released before the Holiday Season. Some speculate that it will come out in November.