I've been visiting Blues for YEARS, and this is the like the 2nd time that I've been moved to post something.

I played AC2 on and off over a 2 year period. My longest stint was probably 6 months, maybe more.

What killed this game, and there were many things, was the fact that the game was released before it was ready (hooray! - that never happens). There was a period were chat would be down for weeks, and an MMOG with no chat is pretty interesting to play. They were constantly nerfing and redoing classes to the point where I bought the player guide back at launch, if you go back and match that guide to the player class talent trees today not a single one is the same as it is now.

Not populating towns with NPCs was another major mistake - the premise was that the players were supposed to watch Dereth rebuild, well there was hardly an economy and no real "hang-outs". Every possible design decision made back-fired, being able to transmute loot into coin right on the spot was so nice, but it reduced the need to visit towns and bump into other players.

I bought the exp pack, hoping for a miracle, but it was not meant to be.

The AC2 engine is its best feature, with a good machine you can crank up the detail and it looks amazing - at the time the water affects beat anything on the market (and possibly still today).

Another killer for me was the rubber-banding - it was so frustrating to be running and pop back 10-20 feet, to run some more and get thrown back again, every new patch that was supposed to fix it never did or brought horrendous lag.

When Turbine bought the game everyone thought that that M$ was the problem, after a while I started to miss M$ and their money.

Bottomline - you can't bork a game like they did and expect people to stick around, it may have worked back in 1999 when there was maybe what? 3 MMOGs, but not today - there are way too many choices and with the emergence of consoles people have too many options.

I could go on and on but I won't. I'm sad to see this happen because believe it or not there was a good game in there buried under the mess. The engine will live on in some future Turbine game, DDO and LOTR look pretty good.

This comment was edited on Aug 25, 20:52.