Asherons Call: Postmortem: Turbine Entertainment's Asheron's Call

Gamasutra, the gaming site which focuses on game development, published an article back almost three years ago on what went into the development of the game we all know and love.

[I]Many weaknesses of Asheron's Call at launch stemmed from the methodology we followed for feature completion. Features were scheduled by milestone and were expected to be completed in their entirety before other features were worked on. While this approach may work for more typical software applications, PC games rely on a host of interrelating systems that cannot be implemented in a vacuum.

An example of this involved our melee combat system. This game feature was completely spec'd and implemented long before magic spells worked within the game, under the misguided assumption that it saves developer and test resources not to have to revisit completed features. Clearly, these two game systems needed to be tested and balanced in stages alongside each other, not independently.[/i]

Quite an interesting read and even has some interesting screenshots of VERY early AC as well as some of the tools used in the creation. Head on over and read the whole article on Gamasutra.

Thanks to Ellen Ripley of Solclaim for letting us know about this.