Aion (Zikel chosen as PT community server)

[Xole]

So I promised a bunch of people I would eventually get around to making this post, and so here I am, proving yet again I am a man of my word, even if that word is oddly given, generally insane, and spouted off in rather large drunken rants on occasion. Note, I suck at talking about things as I can't figure out how to tie it all together, so I'll mainly cover this as a review. ( Also mods, I'm writing this FOR PEOPLE FROM PT, thus please leave it here D: )

So what is Aion? Many here have probably heard tidbits but really don't know to much about the game itself, how it plays, or even what the game is centered around, so lets talk about this first.

According to wiki Aion: The Tower of Eternity (Korean: 아이온: 영원의 탑) is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) released in Korea with new localized versions in development. The game developer is NCsoft's own Aion Team Development Dept, a major Korean game developer. Aion combines PvP and PvE in a fantasy dream setting. A major feature of the game is flying, both to reach new areas of the game and for aerial combat.

In other words, blah blah blah Korean made, and has PvP. Let me help by paraphrasing this a bit, Aion is a fantasy game developed by the Korean company NCSoft, best known for games like Lineage 1/2, Guild Wars, and I have no clue what else because I could care less. Aion is built to be a PvPvE game, which means a PvP game ( like DAOC or Guild Wars ) with PvE elements ( like WoW, or uh...WoW? )

Gameplaywise this plays like any normal MMO, you go kill the enemy mens in their base, and this makes you a steroid popping superhero with flashlight eyes, who saves the damsel in distress while doing your daily dose of manly things like grunting or lifting weights. So nothing new here, however, I would like to point out just how well this is all melded together, the quests are interesting, the story is well written, and really pulls you in, unlike various other games, and the leveling is fairly intuitive and easy, unlike most other MMOs, you buy your skills as "books" ahead of time, and use those when you level to get your skills, so you can theoretically go into the field with all the books needed for the next few levels, and thus skip transits back to town.

Combat is good, fun and well made, unlike WAR with it "I SPAM RAVAGE AND WIN" you have to plan out your attacks in complex skill chains, and plan each move to succeed, which adds a bit of skill and depth to the game which I enjoy. Basically, when you use one of your base attacks, you are given the option to use two or more new attacks, which are generally more powerful, either in terms of damage done, or they are a CC of some sort. Yes thats right Bright Wizards, to use all seven of your CC, you'd have to cast a damage spell of varying power first, or in some cases even two spells before hand, which really helps filter down the amount of CC in the game.

And now to the meat of this, the PvP. I've already talked a bit about this in the Praag forums here but I'll go over the basics once more. Now Aion, at its heart is a PvP game, yes it has dungeons at the end, and yes you can't PvP from 1-50, but the entire point of the game is to try and conquer the Abyss.

For those of you who played DAOC, remember Emain, or the Old Frontiers? The Abyss is basically like that, you are given nine Forts, all of varying difficulty to capture, and several forms of relics with varying power, and then told to go conquer this realm with your buddies, but to watch for the other sides.

Yes thats right, sides. Unlike WAR, Aion has three factions, the Elyos, the Asmodians, and the Balaur, all of whom are locked in a constant struggle to try and capture all the forts of the Abyss. ( A bit anticlimatic, but whatever, its fun enough. ) However, I must point out one of these sides is in fact a PvE faction.

A PvE faction you say? How does this work?! Well you see, as the Elyos and Asmodians conquer the Abyss, the Balaur get stronger, and will turn that strength towards the side that happens to be winning the most battles, and pop up when the Forts open up in an attempt to KILL EVERYONE IN PAINFUL WAYS.

Now at this point, you must be thinking "Nals, you handsome, charismatic, hunk of man you haven't given any negatives! This isn't a good review, this is just you hyping Aion up!"

Maybe! But thats why I am adding in this last section, to appease you mean people who always like to see the negatives, and to prove my good intentions!

First off, gear means alot in this game, if you run around at 50 in unsocketed greens, its going to hurt a bit when you try to PvP, however this tends to be fixed by the fact that ALL THE BEST GEAR IN THE GAME COMES FROM KILLING PLAYERS IN PVP.

Also, some have an issue with Forts, unlike WAR, you can't just walk up to a Keep and say hello and claim it, you need to wait for it to be rebuilt, and for the defenders to get ready, what this means is after a Fort is taken, for the next hour or so, its unclaimable. Now, I don't see this as a negative, but I know many do, so I decided to add it just in case, but I want to add a positive to this as well. When Forts open up, EVERYONE is there, you think WARs Fort fights where huge battles, your've yet to see some of the Aion battles, when everyone heads to the Fort to fight over it, and yo uhave anywhere from 100-300 people all fighting over a chunk of rock, and unlike WAR, the game can support it WONDERFULLY.

If you have any questions just ask, and I'll try to answer them, and yes, I realize this is a really long post, but eh, what can you do. Also, I'd like to compile something of a list of Phoenix Throne players who will be planning on playing this, so if so, might as well say so, lulz.

[Kahoona]

I'm in the US closed beta and it looks sexy.

[Atpost]

Eh, having trouble finding any reliable information on Aion at all. Every single 'preview' I've found is basically a reading of the back of the box features list. Stuff like 'this game has flight in it supposedly, which sounds fun, I wonder how it works!', and I'm annoyed there aren't any solid reviews of this game so far since it's out in another country. Surely at least one reviewer out there speaks the language and can do a review? No?

Ah well, gonna file it under 'sounds nice, but could be complete garbage, no way to tell yet', and see what the reviews are like six months after release.

[makani]

Originally Posted by Kahoona

I'm in the US closed beta and it looks sexy.

:O

US closed beta is up?

Where did/does one apply for such things?

[WarMachine]

No sign up for Beta. Those that preorder the game get to beta test it. Though, all your testing is the Korea to US translations, as the game has been live for about a year now in the asian markets, and is extreamly polished.

[Omaani]

Originally Posted by Xole

First off, gear means alot in this game, if you run around at 50 in unsocketed greens, its going to hurt a bit when you try to PvP, however this tends to be fixed by the fact that ALL THE BEST GEAR IN THE GAME COMES FROM KILLING PLAYERS IN PVP.

This would be my only concern with the game. Maybe this can be offset a bit with a third faction but this was always my major gripe of WoW. If one faction gains the upper hand in gear, they will become harder to kill. Thus you begin a problem of the haves/have nots. You cant kill the opposing faction with the better gear thus denying you getting the ability to get better gear yourself. As this happens, the margin of disparity grows till the point where one faction has all the gear they need and the opposing faction has a horrible time gearing up because they cant kill the geared faction.

Again this is based on WoW which has only two factions. With the introduction of a third faction, it might help mitigating the issue somewhat as two weaker factions could combine forces to do battle against the stronger one.

[Tirayn]

Originally Posted by WarMachine

No sign up for Beta. Those that preorder the game get to beta test it. Though, all your testing is the Korea to US translations, as the game has been live for about a year now in the asian markets, and is extreamly polished.

Beta codes are also being periodically allocated to certain forums and whatnot to giveaway as they see fit, and some have been given away on twitter as well by the NA reps.

Also, for those of you playing beta should like, post your name so we know it's you. You know, if you want.

[Rimarlk]

Xole, question time!!!!



1. How difficult is leveling from 1-50. Is leveling from 1-50 fun? Or could it be fun like in WAR where if the place was populated at every tier, it would be fun, but since it's not, leveling is a grind. You know what I mean I believe.

2. Is there a talisman-like system where I can get certain "additions" to put in my weapons/armor? How in-depth is customization?

3. Any word on crafting? You know, something that's actually meaningful and in-depth unlike WAR. (WAR has an awful crafting system.)

4. Combat. When you fight another player, does skill win the fight, or gear? Or if you're out-geared but better skilled than your opponent, can you put up a good fight?



Thanks.

[Coventry]

Just wanted to add my two cents. I'm taking part in the NA beta weekend now. I'm a very causal player here on PT and my Main is named Elixir. I'm putting together a little list below of things I've noticed in Aion (for the very limited time I've spent in it). It's just some mental (and now forum) notes I've made about the differences that stood out to me.

1. Aion is very very pretty. This may not mean much to some but it even had my husband commenting on how pretty the graphics were. I'd say that between Aion and WAR Aion is the winner here, even if you don't go for the amine stuff it's still prettier.

2. No pvp till higher levels (I've heard this is lvl 12+ but most people say you'd get eaten up and spit out at low levels and to wait till 20+). This makes me very sad. WAR wins here hands down. Also, I'd like to point out Aion has no scenarios or battleground type areas that I've seen yet. I've heard of a few places where people can go have free for alls and duel but those types of activites are not for me. I'd prefer personally a scenario or battleground type area for some quick pvp action. WAR wins this for me.

3. Grouping is far easier here in WAR than in Aion. Aion has a pretty standard LFG flag system with notes. Now I'm not the type of player to spam 'LFG XXX area for XXX item' Aion is better than WoW for this, but not as good as WAR in my opinion.

4. Leveling so far is easy and the quests flow pretty well in Aion. I've not noticed any 'grinding' issues problems with leveling. I played for about 3 hours last night (Friday) and even with all the people competing for items and mobs and me not knowing a thing about the game I made it to level 8. *Please note* I LOVED the Aion character creation process and spent ... well... too much time playing with that.

5. There isn't a first shot mob tagging system in Aion. This annoys me slightly since I'm playing a healer and I've had some mobs that others have stolen since others were able to do damage faster. In the crowded environs on the start of the beta it was really noticeable. This will most likely get better as the heard of new people thins out, but it's worth mentioning since it also can be an issue with greifers. A first hit mob tagging system works much better in my opinion.

6. I like the gathering skills in Aion. Pretty much on par with WoW. I kinda miss gathering in WAR. OH! Also, I really like the private merchant thing you can do in Aion. Basicly you can put things that you'd like to sell up and your character then sits down by a little pole (that's created wherever you are) that flags you as a merchant. You can write your own selling spiel about the items you've got. It's pretty neat. I haven't played with it fully, but I thought it was pretty neat!

That's all I've got for now. I'm going to go playtest some more and see how it goes as my character progresses. I'm not sure that Aion is going to be the next game I play, but it's really flashy. Not everything that glitters is gold tho... So I'd better test it some more.

[Seldoran]

Originally Posted by Omaani

This would be my only concern with the game. Maybe this can be offset a bit with a third faction but this was always my major gripe of WoW. If one faction gains the upper hand in gear, they will become harder to kill. Thus you begin a problem of the haves/have nots. You cant kill the opposing faction with the better gear thus denying you getting the ability to get better gear yourself. As this happens, the margin of disparity grows till the point where one faction has all the gear they need and the opposing faction has a horrible time gearing up because they cant kill the geared faction.

Again this is based on WoW which has only two factions. With the introduction of a third faction, it might help mitigating the issue somewhat as two weaker factions could combine forces to do battle against the stronger one.

The difference is it wasn't difficult to get gear in the later parts of the Burning Crusade, and now in the Lich King. In Vanilla WoW, yes, that was definitely a concern, but the Grand Marshals and T3 could wear that badge with a little pride.

Between the Arena, Dailies, Reputations, Raids, Heroics, Crafting, etc etc, Warcraft became a game where the Purple was the new Blue, greens were the new Grey, and Orange is the new Purple. It is definitely much easier to get gear than it was before, so it wasn't like a select group of people dominates the entire server simply because they lock up Ysmari or something and prevents other players from getting Nature resistance to progress in Naxx.

Gear doesn't seem to come easy in Aion, but then again I'm only level 11. The aesthetics alone appealed to me, and let me say that ~FLYING IN COMBAT~ is ten kinds of kick @$$.

Flight works like this: It's bound to keyboard keys to activate, for one minute duration (I assume as you advance in it as you raise level), and a ten second cooldown between activation. Once your wings are activated you have a full 360 degree control of movement, and you are safely out of harm of anything that can't fly/shoot.

But Beware! Stay aloft too long and you will tumble to the ground and die a horrible death that resulted from your legs ending up in your chest after trying to land on your feet.

Aerial PVP is something I am looking forward to.

[Xole]

Originally Posted by Atpost

Eh, having trouble finding any reliable information on Aion at all. Every single 'preview' I've found is basically a reading of the back of the box features list. Stuff like 'this game has flight in it supposedly, which sounds fun, I wonder how it works!', and I'm annoyed there aren't any solid reviews of this game so far since it's out in another country. Surely at least one reviewer out there speaks the language and can do a review? No?

Ah well, gonna file it under 'sounds nice, but could be complete garbage, no way to tell yet', and see what the reviews are like six months after release.

Did you read my post? It was an opinionated review of Aion, pointing out the good, AND the bad, if you go to the link I provided in the PvP section I even go over a few more faults the game has. I'm not sure what you want in a review, and I'm sure I messed up a bit, but damn man, I tried, at least read it! :P

Originally Posted by Rimarlk

1. How difficult is leveling from 1-50. Is leveling from 1-50 fun? Or could it be fun like in WAR where if the place was populated at every tier, it would be fun, but since it's not, leveling is a grind. You know what I mean I believe.

Not difficult at all, and it is indeed fun, someone posted a general guide saying with the 1.2 patch, a hardcore player can get from 1-50 in roughly a month, maybe a bit longer, while the casual player will take a month and a half to two months. With very little grind involved, due to the sheer amount of quests they keep adding.

One thing to note, unlike WAR, this game does have certain areas that you will need a group to do, so I expect to see some slowing down as the game gets older, and it gets harder to find a group for these group quest zones, however you can still level without them, just won't get the rewards for it.

2. Is there a talisman-like system where I can get certain "additions" to put in my weapons/armor? How in-depth is customization?

This is how the entire gear system works, basically you are given an item with no stats, and armor based on what quality of item it is, and then 1-4 "slots" to put in the manastones you get from pretty much everywhere.

Manastones are like talismans, except permanent, and it adds a whole new level of customization to your character, you can go all Physical Crit for example, and hit really hard, or go all HP stones to be tougher, you basically set up your own gear, unlike WAR with its giving Willpower to tanks.

3. Any word on crafting? You know, something that's actually meaningful and in-depth unlike WAR. (WAR has an awful crafting system.)

The crafting is, well, I wouldn't call it fun, but I hate crafting with a passion. Basically, you pick a proffession, then to level it up and get more recipies/designs/whatever you go and do "Work Orders" or quests given by the trainer, where they give you the materials to make stuff, then off you go to get free skill points.

The crafting once you get to the higher levels is pretty normal, you go get the mats, come back, open the screen and select craft all, and two littles bars representing pass and fail come up, depending on your skill level, the bars will move towards the end, and if you pass, you get a new item. Also sometimes you will get criticals and get much better stuff, did a few tests and its around 10-20% chance of a crit.

Its nothing amazing, but it works, and tbh, its more akin to WoWs crafting then anything, it doesn't bring in anything new, but its solid, and at least better then WAR in this regard.

4. Combat. When you fight another player, does skill win the fight, or gear? Or if you're out-geared but better skilled than your opponent, can you put up a good fight?

Mix of both really, the game follows to good ol' RPS equation, where if you go up against your classes mortal enemy, you will most likely get stomped unless you are some crazy awesome power player. However, gear really just makes this more evident, a well geared Assassin facing a Cleric will kill them far faster then normal, wheras a well geared Cleric might actually get away or survive.

The main thing is though, and I really want to push this point, is that unlike WAR, you get the best gear through PvP, by killing other players you earn Abyss points, which you spend on the best gear in the game. And its really not hard to get this stuff, if we had all been playing Aion as long as we've been playing WAR, we'd prolly already have full sets, so it really evens out near the end.

Thanks.

Answers in Pink

[Atpost]

Originally Posted by Xole

Did you read my post? It was an opinionated review of Aion, pointing out the good, AND the bad, if you go to the link I provided in the PvP section I even go over a few more faults the game has. I'm not sure what you want in a review, and I'm sure I messed up a bit, but damn man, I tried, at least read it! :P



Answers in Pink

Well, thing is, all the stuff that was the equivalent in WAR works just fine. Great, in fact. The details is where stuff starts breaking down, and you don't seem to cover things like class mechanics compared to each other, end game objectives and what it means down the line, ect ect. WAR looked great on paper too, and even messing around with it for a few months didn't show any glaring flaws outside of the obviously unintentional bugs. Saying stuff like 'you get the gear through pvp' reminds me of the 'you can level up from start to max in pvp'. Both are true, both are good ideas, yet there are obviously problems with both a few months down the line.

I'm not saying you're trying to sugarcoat anything, but fact is it takes months for things to start showing their wear even after the full game is available. That's why I was hoping someone reviewed the foreign version, as there aren't any artificial controls in place there to keep the problems out for a test group. And, since NCsoft disappoints me on a regular basis with the games they choose to bring over, I think the wise thing to do is wait 6 months then see if problems have cropped up, which they inevitably will.

[Dusky Beauty]

This is the review I made and posted on my guild forums. War Seekers is planning to make a prominent presence in Aion when it launches. I, and many other guildies have been playing the chinese live version intermittently for approx 2 months.


Character Customization
One of the things that Aion promises is that you will have a character that does not look like everyone else. I have to say that Aion delivers on this claim. The Character creation feature blew me away with it's myriad of options. Based heavily on City of Heroes customization, the Aion team put in sliders for every feature imaginable for thickness/thinness and length/shortness for body type, and many of the major facial features. A full video of the process (credit goes to my guildy Warmachine) can be seen here. http://www.gametrailers.com/user-mov...reation/316786

Even a choice in character voice has not been over looked In the chinese release. My only complaint, is that at first glance it appears you can't customize eye color, but once the player becomes familiar with the customization options you learn that the "face" options are more to place the eyes over your facial build than anything. Leveling armor is generic for a long while, but there are player made dyes (and dye removers) you can use in basic colors to look a little more unique, and post 30 there are gear reskinning options you can take advantage of to keep the stats on your best armor set, but to give it the look of your best looking armor set. From what I can tell, the major use of armor and weapon crafting is for the unique skins if you outgrow the stats in end game.
Final word on character customization, 9/10. Best in the mmo industry to date. Could be improved with easier to understand tags in localization.


Impressions of the Game World
When I first entered the world on my Asmodian Warrior (an hour after I started creating her..) I wasn't too impressed with the landscape at first. It was very asian fantasy typ-ey and reminded me a lot of a more generic Final Fantasy rpg title. After playing a bit longer and questing further into the world I started to see a lot more of the gameart. The art for Aion is reportedly all hand drawn, and is very aesthetically appealing. Once I got into the groove of playing my character and working away at the starting quests, the landscape really started to grow on me, and by the third quest hub I was captured by the quaint forest I found myself in and it's animal residents.

The trend of well designed unique environments has continued throughout my gameplay, and my first few trips through the starting zones for each faction have been enjoyable, and well planned. Thus far, I haven't seen mobs spawned for the sake of filling a zone with fawna. All creatures apart from gray conn 'critters' are mobs for at least one quest per zone.
At first many people I spoke with assumed the world of Aion would be much smaller scale than western MMO titles like Warcraft of Warhammer, but thus far this has not been the case. The maps I have played through and looked at are enormous. As large, if not larger than Warcraft.
My only complaint is that the skylines often look a bit like a flat oil painting.
Final word on world design 8/10. Art 7/10. Appealing, approachable, massive. Wish the skyline looked like a sky with stuff in it rather than a painted ceiling. Up close though, everything looks great with no sharp polygons.

Quests, Leveling, and the G-word
Grinding. Western MMO players loathe it. We hate low droprate quests, and we need more mental stimulation than farming mobs over and over, efficiency be damned. The single greatest fear of any new MMO is how bad the grind is.
Levels (up into the mid 20s, as far as I've played) actually come pretty easily. Most of your XP comes from quests and I've often suprised myself while I'm just working my way through finishing all quests in a hub to find I am a lot closer to a level than I expected to be.

It seems like the levelling is very closely related to WoW levelling in that the world is so lovely, and the quests are so much fun and rewarding that you don't even notice that you are grinding at all. I have yet to find a quest with an atrocious drop rate, or an impossible escort quest. The most irritating quests I've done were actually timed quests when I had difficulty finding the specific mob, but I was pleasantly suprised to discover that the Mosbear tusks I had collected that were *not quite* enough to finish in the time alotted were not destroyed, and that the quest items counted again when I retook the quest. A simple thing, which dissapated all anxiety I had. Seems like better droprates, and better planning than WoW.

One of downsides are presence of group quests, which may or may not be bad depending on your playstyle. There are a few quests I've run into that are all formulated to force people to go into a specific elite area that they cannot possibly do without a group.
While there are a few of the more difficult quests you probably shouldn't do solo, but can bluff your way through if you're a durable class, or a particularly good player, the group quests come with a big fat GROUP heading, and it's impossible to do with anything less than a tank, a healer, and a heavy dps who are all elite players that you can assume will never accidentally pull more than one mob and are high on the level range for those quests.
I found these difficult to accomplish playing on a foreign language server (pugging was out of the question) but when I finally got my guild group together it went smoothly.
I think this will be difficult for soloers to approach, but if you have a guild to rely on, or a friendly personality and patience for a pickup group, it's not going to be a problem come stateside release.

The other issue gamers should be reminded of is the fact that Aion is a two race game, with one race for each faction. If you've gotten used to WoW and Warhammer you're probably going to miss the option of flying out to a new racial pairing to do different quests for either difficulty or variety. The beginning of both sides is very linear in your choice of questing grounds, with little wiggle room (Do I finish the quests from the town on the left of the fork in the road? or the hub down the road on the right?)
Anecdotally, I've heard that more quests are being added to all region releases so that people will have the option of skipping some of the current quests and still level up to cap without running out of quests to do on the way.

It seems like a large % of quest XP is earned from killing the quest mobs. At this time on the chinese release, it's not really viable to group quest your way through the content designed to be solo. This formula may have been used in the eastern market to discourage AoE grind groups, I wouldn't be suprised to see group XP bonuses implimented later on.
Final word on quests and grind 6/10. I'm spoiled by Warhammer's 100% drop rate on quest items, and I would like to see less focus on killing npcs to progress your character overall. However levelling through questing is the tried and true formula of most of the successful MMOs out there. At least since the devs felt like it had to be implimented, they implimented it well.


Classes and Balance
If you're following Aion at all, you're familiar with the class/subclass specialization NCsoft has gone with. So far in my testing I have been pleasantly suprised at how well put together the classes actually are. The mage and it's specializations for example are the very defenition of a glass cannon. Immensly powerful, but propotionally squishy. In my (limited) experience all the classes are an exemplar of class balance, and the popularity of the classes are generally all in proportion to each other
(See pie chart here:http://www.aionsource.com/forum/gene...ion-china.html )

When taking into account the probability that a large percentage of bots on the chinese servers these numbers are taken from are gladiators, the numbers are shockingly, pretty even. Especially compared to the numbers you would expect to find of warriorpriests and bright wizards in Warhammer, or deathknights and paladins in WoW, so this gives us a good view of balance.
So far most people I have spoken with who have tesed the game are not dissapointed with the class they selected to play. I'll bring up balance more in PvP discussion.
Final word on classes 9.5/10 I don't think they could have designed them much better, but once you select your specialization, it's final, and there is no respec feature I have seen or heard of if you change your mind deeper into the game other than rerolling from scratch.

Performance
I upgraded my rig to perform in Warhammer's massive RvR, so I don't really have excuse to lag, yet I was still getting bad client side lag from Mythic when loading, accessing my mailbox, or many other activities. Lag in Aion is nonexistent for me, which is strange considering I'm playing on a server in China, often during it's late night weekend peak. I am fairly certain that any computer that is currently capable of playing Warcraft will have no problems with Aion. Anyone with a computer capable of playing WAR, will be disillusioned with Mythic as a result of playing Aion. Final rating on performance, 10/10. My experience leads me to think nothing else on the market is going to have as much graphical bang for the buck as Aion.

[makani]

A couple more questions if you all don't mind:

-Anyone here have a Chanter? This is the class I was looking at pursuing.. but I had heard it was totally inferior to Cleric before though.

-I *did* play a couple hours in Aion during the Chinese Beta, and while overall I was loving it (made it to lvl 7 before my couple free hours ran out lol), I didn't like the fact that the quests don't have any kind of built in direction indicator on the map. Did they add in any kind of map help for quests, like the green star in Guild Wars or the semi-opaque Red Blob in Warhammer? Or is someone working on a QuestHelper for Aion as we speak?

[Kahoona]

Originally Posted by Tirayn

Beta codes are also being periodically allocated to certain forums and whatnot to giveaway as they see fit, and some have been given away on twitter as well by the NA reps.

Also, for those of you playing beta should like, post your name so we know it's you. You know, if you want.

My name is Kahoona in the game.