Asheron's Call

Set in a heroic fantasy world, Asheron's Call allowed players to create a character, or avatar, from one of three in-game races. The players could allocate a limited number of attribute points to attributes such as "Strength", "Coordination", and "Quickness" and select skills such as "Unarmed Combat", "War Magic", and "Melee Defense" for their character, with those base skills starting at a level determined by the character's attributes. Unlike many other games of the genre characters were not locked into a specific class, and could even reallocate previously selected skills to acquire other skills later in the game. Gameplay involved earning experience points ("XP") through a variety of activities, including engaging and defeating monsters in combat, fulfilling quests, and interacting with NPCs.

Those earned experience points could be then invested to improve the character's abilities by spending them on attributes or skills. Additional skill points were awarded after the character reached certain levels, and these skill points could be used to acquire or train new skills. In addition to earning experience, questing and combat often yielded recoverable loot such as armor, weapons, health potions, and spell scrolls. Many types of loot could be improved or imbued with special spells and effects via Asheron's Call's "tinkering" crafting system.

The story of Asheron's Call spans across several worlds and thousands of years. The primary worlds in the story are Ispar, the world where the human characters in the game originated, and Auberean, the gigantic world where Dereth, a small island continent and the game's setting, is located. The game's monthly updates composed a story. The history of Auberean spans back 35,000 to 40,000 years.

A race of beings known as the Empyreans dominated the world for most of its history. They were tall slender humanoids with lifespans of 1,000 years and were divided into several cultures including Falatacot, Dericost, Haebrous, and Yalaini. These cultures had many conflicts over the years, but eventually, in a world of many oceans and seas, the "Seaborne Empire" of the Yalaini became the dominant society. A Yalaini and member of the royal family, Asheron Realaidain, was born approximately 2,500 years prior to the time when the story starts for players, when they "arrive" in Dereth.

Asheron's Call was developed by Turbine Entertainment Software and published by Microsoft. It had a multimillion-dollar development budget of $4 million. It was designed by Toby Ragaini (lead designer), Chris Foster, Eri Izawa, and Chris Pierson. The development team consisted of 30+ full-time developers, including 6 artists, 4 game designers, 15 software engineers and 5 QA testers.

Asheron's Call was technically innovative for its time. It did not use zoning, a technique of partitioning the game world into zones that ran on different computers on a cluster. This caused delay when moving between zones. Instead Asheron's Call had a single seamless world.

Michael Wolf for Next Generation gave the game three stars out of five, and called it a deep, complex game, but not as easy or fun as EverQuest.

Asheron's Call received generally positive reviews from critics. On the review aggregator GameRankings, the game received an average score of 81% based on 26 reviews. On Metacritic, the game received an average score of 81 out of 100 based on 15 reviews.