Asheron’s Call fans are in for a treat today! Readers will recall that the original and beloved Asheron’s Call launched 22 years ago this month, but it was maintenance-moded for years under Turbine and then sunsetted outright back in 2016 when Standing Stone split off from Turbine and joined Team Daybreak. So players have been left to muck around in multiple rogue servers and dodge barrages of Warner Bros cease-and-desist letters.
But this week, the community has leveled up with the release of a new public beta for the 20-year-old Decal. What’s Decal? Asheron DB, which broke the news first, explained to us that it’s the third-party plugin framework for the game that allows developers and modders and rogue server runners to “drastically extend functionality beyond what’s possible in the game client,” and this is its first update in over eight years. Some of these mods add much-needed functionality to the ancient MMO – everything from map HUDs and trading to allegiance management and player tracking.
“Decal being updated after all this time is a signal of the activity going on within a small but dedicated group of plugin developers who are continually pushing the boundaries of what’s possible within the Asheron’s Call client, which is helping keep the game alive in its post-shutdown era,” Asheron DB’s Jesse Overton says.
Of course, this is a beta, so you might not want to rush out and grab the latest version right off the bat, and even if you do, you’ll need a rogue server to actually use it with, and for that, you’ll need the emulator itself. There are apparently several servers to choose from.
And over the last year, several players have been focused on what they’re calling the Asheron’s Call Community Preservation Project, or ACCPP, a group focused on finding and preserving old applications, plugins, articles, screenshots, and artwork from the game – digital ephemera, not just the game files itself, although that’s certainly part of it. If you’ve got anything AC-related lying around on an old hard drive, maybe consider kicking it their way.
Happy birthday once again, Asheron’s Call.
For the first time in 8 years, the essential #AsheronsCall plugin framework Decal has been updated with a new beta version. Read more: https://t.co/TWOIQ5t3BW pic.twitter.com/FTK6R2YCoG
— AsheronDB (@AsheronDB) November 29, 2021
Further reading plus one of our old streams:
