Due to moving old accounts from Microsoft's billing system to Turbine's for a brief period last week I had live subscriptions to Asheron's Call, Asheron's Call 2, City of Heroes and World of Warcraft. Now only the WoW one is still extant.

Signing up again to the AC and AC2 accounts and dropping them almost immediately does give a month's playtime (even in AC2 now Turbine have rescinded Microsoft's Mafia-like “you done wanna pay? you done gotta play!” immediate account cutoff anyway), so I thought I'd pop in and see how the old games are doing.

Patching AC up to the latest took a while, even on DSL and even from the Dark Majesty expansion installer. It's safe to say that AC hates my current two-monitor-with-one-showing-X-windows setup. Starting up AC would minimise the X-session, or, on occasion kill it dead. Once in though, I could set the AC screen size to 1280 by 1024 and only the character select screen would play resize with the other monitor.

Loging in on my highest character - a level 40 sword/item/life character as I recall - at the Arwic lifestone, I found it over-run by some level 50ish fire elementals. I could barely remember how to fight or even equip a weapon, so took the better part of valour and did a runner towards Arwic itself, now a walled city. There I managed to use the in-town lifestone and bind.

The place was very quiet - not a soul around. I remember how the PKs bitched when Turbine put in the ambient sounds in towns of people laughing and figured this was the kind of incongruity that produced. Notices in the chat pane said I'd got a free award for the fifth anniversary - it turned out to be a Bael'zaron doll. I was also due to be awarded a rainment and a banner if I talked to two NPCs in Al-Arqas. I couldn't remember how to get to Al-Arqas.

I found a nearby portal to the local apartments. Inside, I wondered if any were available and, dredging my memory, tried the @house available command. At the end of the massive list of available cottages, which filled the chat pane's scrollback and more, it said some were. There were no villas available though, and only a couple of mansions - so some people must still be around.

I wondered where they were - and where my lifestone tie was located. So I cast the recall spell and found myself in Ayan Baqur where there were indeed people. Though they were in the middle of a PK-lite battle. I wandered through the town, clicking on NPCs I didn't recognise and found a couple who were willing to give me quest suggestions - go fight Golems. Not sure whether the suggested golems had increased or decreased in power since I was last around I demurred and recalled back to Arwic.

In my day, busy town was a dungeon just to the north of Arwic called the Abandoned Mines. Its popularity was due mainly to the presence in it's depths of a number of portals to many of the towns in Dereth. As such, it was known universally (apart from by the Heretics on Thistledown) as “the Subway”. It too was devoid of life, though the portals were still there. Then I remembered that just after I'd left they'd introduced the marketplace as proper meeting place for selling things. There was a command to get there: @marketplace. Inside I found about 20 people, one of whom was attempting to sell salvage. One person asked if I needed a patron, proving one thing about AC will never change

Other long standing issues remain too. The interface has had few to no improvements made over the years; you're still limited to a mere 9 hotkeys and there's no mouse-look (which I'm so used to now I kept trying anyway). Yet, as the only game I've played to have landscape housing, it remains tempting enough that I'm going to look at how much Codemasters are charging for the expansion. On the other hand, the lack of players could make getting back in a decent monarchy an issue - and I don't think they've made the game any more solo-friendly for the over 40s than when I left.