Aion’s Issues
Aion’s Issues
This will probably be my last write up regarding Aion. If you have been following my previous articles, I have detailed my play experience with the game by focusing on the 1-10 experience, 10-25 early Abyss, and the 25 and beyond. This will be my last word on Aion for the time being because some of the game’s issues have forced most of my guild to step back from the game.
Now I am not one to make “I quit” posts typically, but all thing considered, I believe my assessment of the game in previous articles has be pretty fair and objective. So what I would like to do here today is talk about some of the aspects of Aion that ultimately ended up turning us sour in a constructive and informative way.
The Grind
It seems you can’t read anywhere about Aion without reading about the grind, and this blog has been no exception to that. That being said, it has to be mentioned because this is probably the first of several pitfalls that is going to be cause people to throw in the towel.
This is a graph that fairly accurately plots the experience points curve in Aion at each level that was made by a member of the community here. As you can see by the graph, right around level 35 the amount of exp needed literally makes the graph look literally like a wall. Often times when you read on various forums about people saying the grind is fine, make sure you put it into the context of what level they have made it to. Now to be fair, the amount of exp needed by itself is not necessarily the problem as you start to enter your 40’s, but the way in which questing starts to play far less of a role.
When I hit level 42, I quickly completed all of the new quests and looked down at my 60 million exp bar to see only about 10-15% of it had been filled, leaving the remaining 50 million to be obtained by pure mob grind. Now I am well aware of an upcoming patch slated to increase the quest exp and mob exp, but I think the problem goes a bit deeper than that. There is a real lack of quest content that becomes painfully obvious at the higher levels. Quest content is very good at masking grind in other games, so the lack of it in Aion at this level range really only adds to the pain and tedium.
The best comparison I can make is for those who played Age of Conan at release and hit the wall around level 50 where the quest content dried up almost instantly forcing people into grinding cannibal caves for levels to get through the gap. This problem only gets compounded more however as the exp needed to level continues to grow exponentially, but the amount of content does not. This only helps feed the bot epidemic and will undoubted crush the will of non-hardcore players as they reach the higher levels.
One final note on the grind that really bothers me is that Aion seems to punish grouping. As a ranger, I found in most cases I was able to solo grind far more efficiently than in a group killing elites a few levels higher than me. I would highly recommend adjusting the experience modifier for grouping to make it more appealing to group. So with all the above factored in, players struggling with the progression in the game are going to start to ask if it’s worth enduring for the sake of PvP. Let’s take a look…
PvP
I like to break the PvP elements in Aion into pretty much 3 different categories. First you have your rift PvP into enemy territory, then the fortress fights, and finally your small scale encounters that occur in the Abyss.
1) Rift PvP
A week or so ago, my guild got a group together to through a rift into the Asmodian level 30+ area to go cause some trouble. I think it was a real telling moment to me personally when it became glaringly clear that at least half of the people we were killing in this zone were bots. When attacked, bots would simply stand there or continue to attack their mob, and when killed they would run the same exact route back to the same spot literally upwards of 10 times. Each time they would take the same exact route, to the same exact spot, and not even stopping or deviating when getting attacked. Granted killing the bots was a good source of Abyss points, but the fun of the PvP leaves something to be desired when a PvE mob offers more resistance. Again in all fairness, there were probably 50% real people mixed in who had guilds, who would react to being attacked, and change tactics after being killed or spotting us.
In this regard, I really have to say that NCSoft’s bot detection team or tools, or whatever they are spinning as is either completely worthless, or they think their customers are stupid. Who the hell is in charge of the bot spotting team, Stevie Wonder? Anyone with a working pair of eyes can see dozens of bots infesting the level 30+ area on both sides. They are so blatantly operating out in the open that there is no way possible anyone could NOT see them. Frankly when I read NCSoft press releases about how they have tools in place, it’s insulting to my intelligence.
2) Fortress Battles
I think most people can agree that the fortress fights make up one of the key elements of the PvP aspect of Aion. In my last article, I touched on the fact that crashing seemed to be somewhat of an issue during some of the sieges. Since then, I have had the chance to participate in many more sieges to see how much of an issue the crashing really is. I can say with all honesty in almost every siege I have been in since then, the game crashed at some point during the sieges, except for one where the Asmos never showed up to defend and I had all of the character models turned off (Shift + F12).
This is a major problem for me on so many levels. First of all my PC is pretty serious, and judging by all the posts on forums and conversations with most of my guild, people having this issue are a pretty sizable portion of the playerbase. This is pretty much game-breaking because the fortress battles are the only way to get medals, and medals are needed to get the top PvP reward gear, so crashing during sieges pretty much makes is close to impossible for you to get the medals needed to pursue the endgame gear. With the game being out so long overseas, and 4-5 rounds of betas in NA, I am somewhat confused how the game went live without anyone knowing about this being picked up, let alone not being hotfixed. It’s even sillier when someone in the community posts a fix on the forums before your professional coders can do it.
Another issue is a flaw in the overall fortress system in general that also Warhammer Online suffered from, a lack of incentive to defend a fortress. Medals are not given for a successful defense, and enemy fortress guards are actually a better source of Abyss points than most other mobs and players. Killing a handful of guards seems to net more AP than running the instance you get access to for holding the fort. So when you think about it, you are somewhat better off not defending because you will be granted a better source of AP, and a chance to earn medals when you go after it again later (assuming you don’t crash).
3) Small Scale PvP
Small scale PvP overall remains one of the game stronger suits to me personally. The only zerging that really goes from what I have seen so far is during the fortress fights, which is completely understandable. The rest of the time people tend to roam around solo or in small groups making for some pretty fun encounters. A smaller group of players who play smart is capable of beating a larger group if the right tactics are used along with the right crowd control.
I think if there is anything I would change, I would make other players worth more experience points. Although it wasn’t in the game originally, the amount of exp given for killing a player is so small that they pretty much may as well not give you any at all. One other aspect is the fact that low level players give virtually no AP, but at the same time your enemy’s level is hidden. This can be annoying when you opt to chase someone for quite a long distance only to be rewarded with 1 AP. Had you known the person’s level you may have been inclined to not even bother chasing them extensively. I also understand the benefit though of hiding levels, so it’s a double-edged sword I suppose.
Summary
The way I see it is that players will need to start asking themselves this question: Is worth enduring a steep and tedious grind that becomes exceedingly light in content for PvP that has 2 of out 3 aspects not meeting expectations?
The prospect of increasing exp sounds good in theory, but there is no mention of any much needed quest content. NCsoft’s word is becoming losing a tremendous amount of value to players due to their inability to find the bots that every player with a pair of working eyes can see on a daily basis. I can understand that many players may be willing to hang in there a bit longer given the game’s polish and small scale PvP, but at this point I have to say the answer to that question is “no” from me personally, but to each their own.
Paragus
Co-Leader of Inquisition
www.inqguild.com
Aion’s Issues
Aion’s Issues
This will probably be my last write up regarding Aion. If you have been following my previous articles, I have detailed my play experience with the game by focusing on the 1-10 experience, 10-25 early Abyss, and the 25 and beyond. This will be my last word on Aion for the time being because some of the game’s issues have forced most of my guild to step back from the game.
Now I am not one to make “I quit” posts typically, but all thing considered, I believe my assessment of the game in previous articles has be pretty fair and objective. So what I would like to do here today is talk about some of the aspects of Aion that ultimately ended up turning us sour in a constructive and informative way.
The Grind
It seems you can’t read anywhere about Aion without reading about the grind, and this blog has been no exception to that. That being said, it has to be mentioned because this is probably the first of several pitfalls that is going to be cause people to throw in the towel.
This is a graph that fairly accurately plots the experience points curve in Aion at each level that was made by a member of the community here. As you can see by the graph, right around level 35 the amount of exp needed literally makes the graph look literally like a wall. Often times when you read on various forums about people saying the grind is fine, make sure you put it into the context of what level they have made it to. Now to be fair, the amount of exp needed by itself is not necessarily the problem as you start to enter your 40’s, but the way in which questing starts to play far less of a role.
When I hit level 42, I quickly completed all of the new quests and looked down at my 60 million exp bar to see only about 10-15% of it had been filled, leaving the remaining 50 million to be obtained by pure mob grind. Now I am well aware of an upcoming patch slated to increase the quest exp and mob exp, but I think the problem goes a bit deeper than that. There is a real lack of quest content that becomes painfully obvious at the higher levels. Quest content is very good at masking grind in other games, so the lack of it in Aion at this level range really only adds to the pain and tedium.
The best comparison I can make is for those who played Age of Conan at release and hit the wall around level 50 where the quest content dried up almost instantly forcing people into grinding cannibal caves for levels to get through the gap. This problem only gets compounded more however as the exp needed to level continues to grow exponentially, but the amount of content does not. This only helps feed the bot epidemic and will undoubted crush the will of non-hardcore players as they reach the higher levels.
One final note on the grind that really bothers me is that Aion seems to punish grouping. As a ranger, I found in most cases I was able to solo grind far more efficiently than in a group killing elites a few levels higher than me. I would highly recommend adjusting the experience modifier for grouping to make it more appealing to group. So with all the above factored in, players struggling with the progression in the game are going to start to ask if it’s worth enduring for the sake of PvP. Let’s take a look…
PvP
I like to break the PvP elements in Aion into pretty much 3 different categories. First you have your rift PvP into enemy territory, then the fortress fights, and finally your small scale encounters that occur in the Abyss.
1) Rift PvP
A week or so ago, my guild got a group together to through a rift into the Asmodian level 30+ area to go cause some trouble. I think it was a real telling moment to me personally when it became glaringly clear that at least half of the people we were killing in this zone were bots. When attacked, bots would simply stand there or continue to attack their mob, and when killed they would run the same exact route back to the same spot literally upwards of 10 times. Each time they would take the same exact route, to the same exact spot, and not even stopping or deviating when getting attacked. Granted killing the bots was a good source of Abyss points, but the fun of the PvP leaves something to be desired when a PvE mob offers more resistance. Again in all fairness, there were probably 50% real people mixed in who had guilds, who would react to being attacked, and change tactics after being killed or spotting us.
In this regard, I really have to say that NCSoft’s bot detection team or tools, or whatever they are spinning as is either completely worthless, or they think their customers are stupid. Who the hell is in charge of the bot spotting team, Stevie Wonder? Anyone with a working pair of eyes can see dozens of bots infesting the level 30+ area on both sides. They are so blatantly operating out in the open that there is no way possible anyone could NOT see them. Frankly when I read NCSoft press releases about how they have tools in place, it’s insulting to my intelligence.
2) Fortress Battles
I think most people can agree that the fortress fights make up one of the key elements of the PvP aspect of Aion. In my last article, I touched on the fact that crashing seemed to be somewhat of an issue during some of the sieges. Since then, I have had the chance to participate in many more sieges to see how much of an issue the crashing really is. I can say with all honesty in almost every siege I have been in since then, the game crashed at some point during the sieges, except for one where the Asmos never showed up to defend and I had all of the character models turned off (Shift + F12).
This is a major problem for me on so many levels. First of all my PC is pretty serious, and judging by all the posts on forums and conversations with most of my guild, people having this issue are a pretty sizable portion of the playerbase. This is pretty much game-breaking because the fortress battles are the only way to get medals, and medals are needed to get the top PvP reward gear, so crashing during sieges pretty much makes is close to impossible for you to get the medals needed to pursue the endgame gear. With the game being out so long overseas, and 4-5 rounds of betas in NA, I am somewhat confused how the game went live without anyone knowing about this being picked up, let alone not being hotfixed. It’s even sillier when someone in the community posts a fix on the forums before your professional coders can do it.
Another issue is a flaw in the overall fortress system in general that also Warhammer Online suffered from, a lack of incentive to defend a fortress. Medals are not given for a successful defense, and enemy fortress guards are actually a better source of Abyss points than most other mobs and players. Killing a handful of guards seems to net more AP than running the instance you get access to for holding the fort. So when you think about it, you are somewhat better off not defending because you will be granted a better source of AP, and a chance to earn medals when you go after it again later (assuming you don’t crash).
3) Small Scale PvP
Small scale PvP overall remains one of the game stronger suits to me personally. The only zerging that really goes from what I have seen so far is during the fortress fights, which is completely understandable. The rest of the time people tend to roam around solo or in small groups making for some pretty fun encounters. A smaller group of players who play smart is capable of beating a larger group if the right tactics are used along with the right crowd control.
I think if there is anything I would change, I would make other players worth more experience points. Although it wasn’t in the game originally, the amount of exp given for killing a player is so small that they pretty much may as well not give you any at all. One other aspect is the fact that low level players give virtually no AP, but at the same time your enemy’s level is hidden. This can be annoying when you opt to chase someone for quite a long distance only to be rewarded with 1 AP. Had you known the person’s level you may have been inclined to not even bother chasing them extensively. I also understand the benefit though of hiding levels, so it’s a double-edged sword I suppose.
Summary
The way I see it is that players will need to start asking themselves this question: Is worth enduring a steep and tedious grind that becomes exceedingly light in content for PvP that has 2 of out 3 aspects not meeting expectations?
The prospect of increasing exp sounds good in theory, but there is no mention of any much needed quest content. NCsoft’s word is becoming losing a tremendous amount of value to players due to their inability to find the bots that every player with a pair of working eyes can see on a daily basis. I can understand that many players may be willing to hang in there a bit longer given the game’s polish and small scale PvP, but at this point I have to say the answer to that question is “no” from me personally, but to each their own.
Paragus
Co-Leader of Inquisition
www.inqguild.com
Aion: Post Launch Impressions
Aion: Post Launch Impressions
It has been about a few weeks since the NA launch of Aion, so I wanted to take some time to give my Aion review. In these first few weeks I have been exposed to a variety of gameplay experiences in the game, so I am going to talk about a few aspects of the game that have struck me as either being well done, or needing improvement.
Looking for Gold Channel
I used to to think LFG was about finding groups, but in Aion is seems to be more about finding gold. There is a serious gold spammer epidemic that has rendered this channel pretty much unusable. On any given day, this chat channel is literally flooded and spammed by gold sellers, that you can’t even read anything.
I find it very hard to believe, despite the rhetoric from NCSoft, that there is a serious ongoing effort to target and ban the accounts of gold spammers. In fact it’s downright absurd. You might think that given the number of servers they have running, that they could afford to have one GM on each one who can spot and ban these people. The money generated from the banning of these accounts and spammers rebuying them should easily justify the price of paying someone to monitor it.
Aside from the rampant gold spamming, the LFG channel needs to be broken down into level ranges. It makes no sense that people in their late 30s and 40s have to sift through level 25’s trying to find a group. This could also work to the advantage of forcing a gold spammer to level up as a deterrent if they want to spam mid and higher level players.
The Abyss
Now that the game has released in North America, I have had a chance to spend a lot of time in the Abyss experiencing PvP and some of the various mechanics surrounding it. There has been a lot of discussion over whether or not the wings are just a gimmick or if they really add anything to the table. I have to say that after spending quite a bit of time in the Abyss since release and doing some PvP, I am starting to lean more towards this feature adding an element to PvP combat that is not found in the competition.
There is the obvious element of flying and fighting in the air, but I think that doesn’t fully explain it. It’s not so much the fact that you can fly to me, as much as it is the environment that is possible because of the flight element. In games like WAR and even DAOC, the standard battlefield was typically a flat plain or maybe a mountainous area where battles would unfold. In Aion with the element of flight, battles are able to take place is the very surreal looking environment of the Abyss with its floating islands, comets, upside-down ruins, and other interesting locales.
I have had some interesting fight situations that just would not be possible in some of the other traditional RvR MMOs out there. Me and a friend had a chase underneath a floating continent weaving and bobbing through stalactites. I have had fights where me and my opponent were hopping from island to island blasting each other, and recently a large fight with one side holding the ground against an aerial force. Of course I have to mention one incident where a bunch of people, including some of my guildmates, were completely obliterated when a stray comet plowed through a crowd of people fighting near an artifact.
Speaking of artifacts, Inquisition decided to have a small guild event to go test the waters on taking an artifact on the bottom floor of the Abyss where thing were lower level. Taking the artifact was a pretty simple task overall, and reminded us as being on par with some of the smaller battle objectives in WAR in terms of difficulty. The artifact was protected by a group of NPC’s of the opposing faction with an elite boss. While we brought 2 groups being uncertain on how hard it would be, one solid group of players would have been an adequate force. Once the boss goes down, a broadcast message told everyone we had taken it, and our guilds emblem was stamped on the site and displayed on the map. There is however no message to let you know when your artifact is under attack by the enemy faction.
Finally, I had the chance to get involved in my first fortress siege in the lower Abyss. The amount of people involved was pretty massive and I have to say it even made my high end PC start to lose some frames. One issue I experienced along with many others was crashing during the attack. This is one area where I think some improvement is needed, but to be fair I have to say the game handled itself better than WAR at this stage in terms of performance.
The door to the keep took quite some time to bring down, but I did not see anyone there really utilizing the siege weaponry which would have undoubted sped the process up. The keep guardian in Aion makes the Warhammer and DAOC keep lords look like a wimp in terms of appearance and difficulty to kill. In Warhammer the keep lords usually seem to buckle within a minute of the room being breached, in Aion it takes far longer and actually gives the other team a chance to turn the battle in the final room since the fight is so long.
That chance to turn the battle is exactly what the Asmos in this fight successfully did. The layout of this particular keep had a large opening in the courtyard that dropped you literally on top of the boss inside. While we were busy trying to bring the big guy to his knees, the enemy capitalized on us not defending the courtyard and turned the boss room into a bloodbath. Death from above was an ocean of Asmos pouring into the room from above like a faucet of red names. The fight was pretty impressive with people flying all over the place killing each other, while an angry Balaur boss went on a rampage. All in all it was pretty fun with the exception of the crashing. Hopefully they will improve that aspect for the large fights, but thankfully most of the abyss fighting outside the keeps has been small scale and very reminiscent of DAOC.
The Grind
This has been one of the hot topics regarding Aion, and I have read a ton of threads from people making various claims about grinding as it relates to Aion. Before we go any further and people jump down my throat, apparently everyone interprets what grinding is differently. Just so we are all on the same page, my definition of grinding is having to kill mobs repeatedly without any related quest in order to gain experience points.
Aion has a grind. Yes, yes, I know the classic “All MMOs are and have grinds!” line, but it is my opinion that the grind in Aion can legitimately be perceived by some as steep once you start to level into your 30’s. Of course this statement is subjective, and depending on your prior MMO experiences your opinion may vary. Someone from Lineage 2 might not find it bad, but someone who is used to WoW and some more modern traditional style MMOs might be in for a bit of discomfort in this area. I survived old school EQ1 and FFXI in terms of grind just to give a little perspective on where I am coming from. A lot of players are probably going to have to come to terms with the fact that most people won’t be reaching max level in Aion as quickly as they did in some other MMOs.
Up until level 25, I think the grind was not particularly rough until maybe level 24. After 25, the Abyss opens up as a new area for quests, campaigns, a dungeon instance, and exposure to increased mob exp. In the 30’s, the amount of quests and the experience they yield starts to fall a bit short in terms of being able to quest your way through levels. Combine this with the fact that the amount of exp needed to reach the next level starts to increase dramatically in the level 35+ range. As an example, leveling from 36-37 required just under 20 Million EXP, the next level going from 37-38 jumps up to 26 Million EXP. At 37, killing a 39 Abyss non-elite mob solo (which yields more exp than non-abyss mobs) nets in roughly 23,000-25,000 exp a kill. As a ranger I can kill probably 2 per minute, equally around 500k exp in 10 mins, or roughly just under 3 Million per hour, or 8-9 hours to get 26 Million Exp to level via pure mob grinding.
All of this is based on the premise of course that not a single quest is completed, and you are soloing and not grouping for elites (which has the potential to be faster depending on the group and location). Whether or not questing is faster than grinding all depends on what is available to you at a given level. Some of the juicy campagin quests give upwards of 2+ Million Exp, while your average quest can net you anywhere between 400-800k. Regardless of which is faster, you will not have enough quests to level purely from questing as other MMOs, and you will be forced to grind at some point to clear the remaining exp needed. The fact is some of the quests just flat out don’t give enough exp to satisfy a lot of players, but upcoming changes look to change that. Depending on your prior MMO experiences this could be perceived as normal or a major turn-off, but there is definitely something to be said for grouping and doing elites in an instance or hard area. Just to give an idea of how it ends up looking later, rumor has it that you will need 86 Million exp to go from level 49-50.
Instances
I have also had the chance to do a variety of PvE instances in the first few weeks. All of them seem to have quests to kill the final boss for a blue item of some sort. Some of them require you to get keys to enter them, some can be entered if you control castles in the Abyss. Most of them provide a decent source of exp and come with some degree of lockout timer. In terms of loot, you might be in for an unpleasant surprise when it comes to taking down some of the bosses.
This brings me to one pretty annoying point regarding boss mobs. In all of the instances ran and bosses killed, probably more than half the time the bosses dropped nothing of any real value with a few blues being seen rarely. This is something I think a lot of players might find somewhat annoying, myself included. Killing the final boss of a dungeon and finding nothing but a small amount of gold is going to be received like a slap in the face for many players. Hell at least give us a random green or something, but only finding 500 gold or a common crafting mat off of a level 37 boss is complete ass.
Final Thoughts
Aion remains to be a solid and polished product, but not without it issues. Depending on your MMO tastes, some people may be turned off by the fact that max level is difficult to achieve, while others may enjoy that. As players start hitting the mid 30’s and hitting the leveling quicksand, I can see some people being turned off to the game. The issue of bots and gold spammers is something NC Soft really needs to crack down on in a big way. Despite all of the flowery language by the devs, I have yet to see any reduction at all in these activities.
On the other hand, if you can get past the brutal leveling curve, there is a very interesting RvR experience. Aside from the occasional crash in the fortress fights, Abyss RvR so far seems to be small scale and reminiscent of DAOC in many ways with roaming groups outside of the big sieges. The PvP I have seen at this stage does not seem to be ruined with excessive crowd control like the competition, and the rewards seem viable. Whether the end game actually works is something we probably won’t know until a large portion of the population reaches higher level, and that seems like it may take more time than some may have anticipated.
Paragus
Co-Leader of Inquisition
www.inqguild.com
(Zikel Server - Elyos)
Aion: Post Launch Impressions
Aion: Post Launch Impressions
It has been about a few weeks since the NA launch of Aion, so I wanted to take some time to give my Aion review. In these first few weeks I have been exposed to a variety of gameplay experiences in the game, so I am going to talk about a few aspects of the game that have struck me as either being well done, or needing improvement.
Looking for Gold Channel
I used to to think LFG was about finding groups, but in Aion is seems to be more about finding gold. There is a serious gold spammer epidemic that has rendered this channel pretty much unusable. On any given day, this chat channel is literally flooded and spammed by gold sellers, that you can’t even read anything.
I find it very hard to believe, despite the rhetoric from NCSoft, that there is a serious ongoing effort to target and ban the accounts of gold spammers. In fact it’s downright absurd. You might think that given the number of servers they have running, that they could afford to have one GM on each one who can spot and ban these people. The money generated from the banning of these accounts and spammers rebuying them should easily justify the price of paying someone to monitor it.
Aside from the rampant gold spamming, the LFG channel needs to be broken down into level ranges. It makes no sense that people in their late 30s and 40s have to sift through level 25’s trying to find a group. This could also work to the advantage of forcing a gold spammer to level up as a deterrent if they want to spam mid and higher level players.
The Abyss
Now that the game has released in North America, I have had a chance to spend a lot of time in the Abyss experiencing PvP and some of the various mechanics surrounding it. There has been a lot of discussion over whether or not the wings are just a gimmick or if they really add anything to the table. I have to say that after spending quite a bit of time in the Abyss since release and doing some PvP, I am starting to lean more towards this feature adding an element to PvP combat that is not found in the competition.
There is the obvious element of flying and fighting in the air, but I think that doesn’t fully explain it. It’s not so much the fact that you can fly to me, as much as it is the environment that is possible because of the flight element. In games like WAR and even DAOC, the standard battlefield was typically a flat plain or maybe a mountainous area where battles would unfold. In Aion with the element of flight, battles are able to take place is the very surreal looking environment of the Abyss with its floating islands, comets, upside-down ruins, and other interesting locales.
I have had some interesting fight situations that just would not be possible in some of the other traditional RvR MMOs out there. Me and a friend had a chase underneath a floating continent weaving and bobbing through stalactites. I have had fights where me and my opponent were hopping from island to island blasting each other, and recently a large fight with one side holding the ground against an aerial force. Of course I have to mention one incident where a bunch of people, including some of my guildmates, were completely obliterated when a stray comet plowed through a crowd of people fighting near an artifact.
Speaking of artifacts, Inquisition decided to have a small guild event to go test the waters on taking an artifact on the bottom floor of the Abyss where thing were lower level. Taking the artifact was a pretty simple task overall, and reminded us as being on par with some of the smaller battle objectives in WAR in terms of difficulty. The artifact was protected by a group of NPC’s of the opposing faction with an elite boss. While we brought 2 groups being uncertain on how hard it would be, one solid group of players would have been an adequate force. Once the boss goes down, a broadcast message told everyone we had taken it, and our guilds emblem was stamped on the site and displayed on the map. There is however no message to let you know when your artifact is under attack by the enemy faction.
Finally, I had the chance to get involved in my first fortress siege in the lower Abyss. The amount of people involved was pretty massive and I have to say it even made my high end PC start to lose some frames. One issue I experienced along with many others was crashing during the attack. This is one area where I think some improvement is needed, but to be fair I have to say the game handled itself better than WAR at this stage in terms of performance.
The door to the keep took quite some time to bring down, but I did not see anyone there really utilizing the siege weaponry which would have undoubted sped the process up. The keep guardian in Aion makes the Warhammer and DAOC keep lords look like a wimp in terms of appearance and difficulty to kill. In Warhammer the keep lords usually seem to buckle within a minute of the room being breached, in Aion it takes far longer and actually gives the other team a chance to turn the battle in the final room since the fight is so long.
That chance to turn the battle is exactly what the Asmos in this fight successfully did. The layout of this particular keep had a large opening in the courtyard that dropped you literally on top of the boss inside. While we were busy trying to bring the big guy to his knees, the enemy capitalized on us not defending the courtyard and turned the boss room into a bloodbath. Death from above was an ocean of Asmos pouring into the room from above like a faucet of red names. The fight was pretty impressive with people flying all over the place killing each other, while an angry Balaur boss went on a rampage. All in all it was pretty fun with the exception of the crashing. Hopefully they will improve that aspect for the large fights, but thankfully most of the abyss fighting outside the keeps has been small scale and very reminiscent of DAOC.
The Grind
This has been one of the hot topics regarding Aion, and I have read a ton of threads from people making various claims about grinding as it relates to Aion. Before we go any further and people jump down my throat, apparently everyone interprets what grinding is differently. Just so we are all on the same page, my definition of grinding is having to kill mobs repeatedly without any related quest in order to gain experience points.
Aion has a grind. Yes, yes, I know the classic “All MMOs are and have grinds!” line, but it is my opinion that the grind in Aion can legitimately be perceived by some as steep once you start to level into your 30’s. Of course this statement is subjective, and depending on your prior MMO experiences your opinion may vary. Someone from Lineage 2 might not find it bad, but someone who is used to WoW and some more modern traditional style MMOs might be in for a bit of discomfort in this area. I survived old school EQ1 and FFXI in terms of grind just to give a little perspective on where I am coming from. A lot of players are probably going to have to come to terms with the fact that most people won’t be reaching max level in Aion as quickly as they did in some other MMOs.
Up until level 25, I think the grind was not particularly rough until maybe level 24. After 25, the Abyss opens up as a new area for quests, campaigns, a dungeon instance, and exposure to increased mob exp. In the 30’s, the amount of quests and the experience they yield starts to fall a bit short in terms of being able to quest your way through levels. Combine this with the fact that the amount of exp needed to reach the next level starts to increase dramatically in the level 35+ range. As an example, leveling from 36-37 required just under 20 Million EXP, the next level going from 37-38 jumps up to 26 Million EXP. At 37, killing a 39 Abyss non-elite mob solo (which yields more exp than non-abyss mobs) nets in roughly 23,000-25,000 exp a kill. As a ranger I can kill probably 2 per minute, equally around 500k exp in 10 mins, or roughly just under 3 Million per hour, or 8-9 hours to get 26 Million Exp to level via pure mob grinding.
All of this is based on the premise of course that not a single quest is completed, and you are soloing and not grouping for elites (which has the potential to be faster depending on the group and location). Whether or not questing is faster than grinding all depends on what is available to you at a given level. Some of the juicy campagin quests give upwards of 2+ Million Exp, while your average quest can net you anywhere between 400-800k. Regardless of which is faster, you will not have enough quests to level purely from questing as other MMOs, and you will be forced to grind at some point to clear the remaining exp needed. The fact is some of the quests just flat out don’t give enough exp to satisfy a lot of players, but upcoming changes look to change that. Depending on your prior MMO experiences this could be perceived as normal or a major turn-off, but there is definitely something to be said for grouping and doing elites in an instance or hard area. Just to give an idea of how it ends up looking later, rumor has it that you will need 86 Million exp to go from level 49-50.
Instances
I have also had the chance to do a variety of PvE instances in the first few weeks. All of them seem to have quests to kill the final boss for a blue item of some sort. Some of them require you to get keys to enter them, some can be entered if you control castles in the Abyss. Most of them provide a decent source of exp and come with some degree of lockout timer. In terms of loot, you might be in for an unpleasant surprise when it comes to taking down some of the bosses.
This brings me to one pretty annoying point regarding boss mobs. In all of the instances ran and bosses killed, probably more than half the time the bosses dropped nothing of any real value with a few blues being seen rarely. This is something I think a lot of players might find somewhat annoying, myself included. Killing the final boss of a dungeon and finding nothing but a small amount of gold is going to be received like a slap in the face for many players. Hell at least give us a random green or something, but only finding 500 gold or a common crafting mat off of a level 37 boss is complete ass.
Final Thoughts
Aion remains to be a solid and polished product, but not without it issues. Depending on your MMO tastes, some people may be turned off by the fact that max level is difficult to achieve, while others may enjoy that. As players start hitting the mid 30’s and hitting the leveling quicksand, I can see some people being turned off to the game. The issue of bots and gold spammers is something NC Soft really needs to crack down on in a big way. Despite all of the flowery language by the devs, I have yet to see any reduction at all in these activities.
On the other hand, if you can get past the brutal leveling curve, there is a very interesting RvR experience. Aside from the occasional crash in the fortress fights, Abyss RvR so far seems to be small scale and reminiscent of DAOC in many ways with roaming groups outside of the big sieges. The PvP I have seen at this stage does not seem to be ruined with excessive crowd control like the competition, and the rewards seem viable. Whether the end game actually works is something we probably won’t know until a large portion of the population reaches higher level, and that seems like it may take more time than some may have anticipated.
Paragus
Co-Leader of Inquisition
www.inqguild.com
(Zikel Server - Elyos)
Aion: Updated Impression and the Abyss
Aion: Updated Impression and the Abyss
Since my last article covering some of the basics of Aion at low level, I have had a chance to invest a bit more time in the Chinese version of the game. Having progressed far enough to see the Abyss finally, I wanted to take some time and give some updated impressions on my play experiences since I am a bit farther into the game.
The Grind
The first thing I want to touch on are my experiences with the grind in the game so far. From levels 1-20, I can say that I was pretty much able to quest through most of my levels. The campaign quests give a substantial amount of EXP over the standard quests, and there are some repeatable quests to help you through some of those areas where you do find yourself grinding to reach the next level after your quests are all completed.
Between the levels of 20-24, the grind starts to pick up more and more each level. The percentage of your levels EXP you are able to get through quests starts to gradually go down in this range for a few reasons. The first is that the amount of exp to reach the next levels ramps up pretty quickly, and secondly, some of the quest EXP rewards don’t seem to be enough. The repeatable quests really don’t reward to well either, as one requiring you to kill X amount of mobs, rewards you at turn in with amount of exp equal to killing 2 of those mobs. In the time it takes you to go turn them in, you could have kept killing and came out better off. As a result, I spent a lot of my time grinding in the jungle and desert in Eltnen. Once reaching 25 however, things seem to pick up a lot (I’ll touch on this later).
Legions (Guilds)
During my time playing, I had a chance to delve into the Legion functionality with some of my guys on the NA and Chinese versions. My first beef is that Aion only allows 3 different ranks for your legion members, and these rank titles can’t seem to be changed. While you can set permissions for each of the 3 ranks, you can’t have 2 people be the highest rank. In MMO guilds like mine where there are 2 leaders, this is somewhat disappointing and inconvenient. The current version I played during the NA weekend and Chinese also only allow 10 characters for your legion name, which I find unnecessarily restrictive. Since my guild’s name is 11 letters long, I can only fit “Inquisitio”. This forces us to abbreviate ourselves to INQ, and I am sure other MMO guilds will have to do the same unless the newer version updates we haven’t played yet increase the character limit.
Aion legions also have levels like some other MMOs like EQ2 and WAR. Unlike its predecessors, Aion only has three levels for legions. Upgrading your legion to level 2 requires having 10 people on your roster, and a payment of around 120,000 gold. Once you upgrade, you will have roster limit increased from 30 to 60 maximum members, although in my opinion the fact that there is one at all strikes me as silly. Once you upgrade, you can also customize a guild emblem for your cloak. There are only a dozen emblems, but you can pick any background color you can imagine. You can also change your guild emblem at any time if you so chose for a small fee.
The one really good aspect of Aion’s legion system is if you are able to upgrade to level 3. Level 3 requires a higher roster count and around 1.2 million gold, which is not as bad as it sounds on paper given how much money I was making. Any decent size guild should have no trouble getting this cash together if everyone kicks in a bit of cash. At level 3, the limitations of the emblem system redeem itself by letting you put your own design. This means you can literally use any graphic or logo you want to represent your guild. During my playing I managed to see some pretty interesting logos as seen in the above screenshot. Overall I think there is room for improvement in the legion functionality, but specialized level 3 emblems make for an awesome feature.
Rifts
Once you reach level 20 and start to move into the third tier of zones, you will start to get your first taste of PvP. It seems like every so often, there are rifts or portals that appear somewhat randomly that connect to the other faction’s area. These rifts seem to have a chance to appear in one of many predetermined locations across the zones, which are quite large, and have a set number of uses before they become unusable. From my own experiences, it seems that at almost any given time there is a rift up that either leads to the enemy area or has the enemy coming into yours.
There are no PvP restrictions in terms of where you can go and who you can attack. Enemies can even go inside the perimeter of your main fortress if they are careful to avoid guards, which is not difficult. While you are able to attack anyone of any level, you will not know what level the people on the other faction are. This makes for some interesting encounters where people misjudge the strength of their opponent. In one personal experience, a bunch of us ganged up on a single enemy only to have him obliterate all of us by dropping a meteor on us! In addition to the PvP points awarded, there are special “infiltration” quests that require you to go to the enemy zone and complete tasks there. In this regard the rift aspect of the game makes the PvP not consentual, which is fine by me but may turn off others.
The Abyss
Once your reach level 25 the game starts to open up and you are allowed to start delving into the Abyss, which is the games central area for RvR.
As soon as you hit level 25, you will receive a new campaign quest series to complete in order to be able to access the Abyss. The campaign consists of 3 mini trials you have to go through in order to prove your worth, but also double as a minor tutorial. The first test consists of proving your worth by completing 1 task from 3 available choices. I chose a challenge to kill some monster under the arena in a certain time limit that was laughably easy. The second trial tests your knowledge, and has you answering a series of multiple choice questions that serve to educate you a little about the Abyss and some of the game’s lore. It’s impossible to fail it seems as picking the wrong answer prompts you to try again among the remaining choices.
The final trial is a test of flight in which you have to fly through a series of rings in a short time. This serves to educate the player about the use of these rings which are present in the Abyss. Flying through the rings replenishes a portion of your flight timer and gives a small speed boost during the trial. Like the previous trials, it was not difficult at all and I was able to complete it on my first run through. Once all trials are complete, you are shown to the Abyss portal (as seen above) and are free to go through whenever you want.
Once you arrive in the Abyss, you will find yourself in a fully functional fortress area with pretty much everything you will ever need. The fortress was complete with various vendors, banks, auction house, bind point, and even teleporters to take you to many of the games PvE zones. You will also notice that there are new standard quests for the Abyss that helps alleviate the strain from leveling, as well as campaign. The first campaign mission presents the player with a simply amazing tutorial about RvR in the Abyss through the use of various cutscenes.
Abyss Tutorial
Here is a quick summary:
The first thing they explain is that the Abyss has a total of 9 keeps that you can fight over, and they are spread across 3 different layers: bottom, core, and top. The Balaur are a monster faction that participates in the Abyss wars, and they often take over these keeps.
Each keep has some sort of damage shield that protects it from air assaults. Trying to attack a keep from the air while the shield is up is supposed to be difficult and damaging. Inside each of the keeps is some sort shield generator that powers the shield. If this generator is destroyed, then the shield goes away and people are free to assault from the air without any kind of penalty or negatives.
Each of the keeps has doors to protect it from ground assaults that will need to be broken down in order to gain access. The doors are also especially vulnerable to siege weapons that can be deployed by the attackers. In addition, there are also portable bind points that can be dropped in the field so that people can respawn close to the fight. These bindpoints are supposed to easily destroyed and only be able to be used a certain amount of times before being rendered useless.
Finally they explain about artifacts that can be used to sway the battles. They are supposed to be activated to provide various effects from mass healing, mass damage, and other assorted abilities. They also tell you to kill the boss to take the keep, and elaborate on the benefits of taking on for your legion. Benefits range from Abyss points, items (including Abyss medals), cash, and other bonuses in the newer versions of the game we haven’t received yet. They also give you a final warning about some sort of Balaur flying battleship that can drop monsters into areas to mess with people.
The Abyss environment itself look very nice and seems to vary as you go from island to island. The entire area is flight enabled, and the rings can be used to guide you over some of the longer stretches between islands. There are teleports that take you from the bottom level to the top level, but if you look up at the sky on the bottom level you can see the upper level far above.
The core of the Abyss can be seen in the center and resembles a large sun-like ball of fire. In case you were curious, flying into this ball of fire will result in being insta-gibbed. PvE in the Abyss was getting me around 13 AP (Abyss Points) per kill at level 25. The fact that you can gain points through PvE can be a good thing or a bad thing depending on how you look at things. On one hand some people might not like the fact people can PvE grind their way up the ranks to abyss abilities and gear. On the other hand, people opting to take this route do so in an area where they can be ganked at any moment, so it will help drive traffic to this area making people somewhat easier to find.
Rewards
Abyss rewards come in the form of abyss abilities for reaching certain ranks, and item rewards for cashing in your points.
Over on Aion Source, I spotted this thread that shows an example of some of the high ranking Abyss abilities. One of the more notable abilities this high ranking person has is the ability to effectively turn themselves into a raid boss once every 2 hours for 10 minutes. This is definitely an interesting dynamic that should be interesting to see in action.
Items are the other major reward you get from PvP. There are stores in which you spend your Abyss points in order to purchase high end gear. There are various degrees of gear for each level range that have varying prices. Most of the green items can be bought purely with points, but some of the high level gold (epic) items also require medals which are earned during fortress sieges.
The Abyss gear actually looks to be itemized well, a problem that WAR had at launch with a lot of its PvP reward gear. The above picture shows 2 Abyss bows that are both level 30. The green one costs much less AP then the gold one, but the gold one features more damage, stats, and socketing slots for manastones. It is up to the player to decide if they want to hold out for the higher end item, or hold out for higher level gear. Since players lose AP for PvP loss, some may want to cash out sooner depending on their luck. One final point, spending points you have earned subtracts them from your total, thus reduces your rank. This means as people purchase items, there will be a constant moving up and down the RvR ranks, and high rank players will have to decide if they want to give up their rank abilities to cash out their points for weapons.
Conclusion
I really am looking forward to seeing how this all pans out when the game releases in North America. The game has solid PvP rewards, risk, and keeps / artifacts for people to fight over. For all the comparisons you hear about this game with WoW because of the playstyle, I’m starting to think it might be in many ways like an asian DAOC. If everything works out, I think this game could offer a lot to people who were fans of DAOC and disgruntled Warhammer fans. I look forward to continuing my journey on the Chinese version a while longer, and I am curious to see how the patches NA will have at release alleviate some of the issues with the game. If they can reduce the grind as they claimed in a recent interview, then I think this will be a game a lot of people will probably be jumping into if the end game ends up being solid.
Paragus
Co-Leader of Inquisition
www.inqguild.com
Aion: Updated Impression and the Abyss
Aion: Updated Impression and the Abyss
Since my last article covering some of the basics of Aion at low level, I have had a chance to invest a bit more time in the Chinese version of the game. Having progressed far enough to see the Abyss finally, I wanted to take some time and give some updated impressions on my play experiences since I am a bit farther into the game.
The Grind
The first thing I want to touch on are my experiences with the grind in the game so far. From levels 1-20, I can say that I was pretty much able to quest through most of my levels. The campaign quests give a substantial amount of EXP over the standard quests, and there are some repeatable quests to help you through some of those areas where you do find yourself grinding to reach the next level after your quests are all completed.
Between the levels of 20-24, the grind starts to pick up more and more each level. The percentage of your levels EXP you are able to get through quests starts to gradually go down in this range for a few reasons. The first is that the amount of exp to reach the next levels ramps up pretty quickly, and secondly, some of the quest EXP rewards don’t seem to be enough. The repeatable quests really don’t reward to well either, as one requiring you to kill X amount of mobs, rewards you at turn in with amount of exp equal to killing 2 of those mobs. In the time it takes you to go turn them in, you could have kept killing and came out better off. As a result, I spent a lot of my time grinding in the jungle and desert in Eltnen. Once reaching 25 however, things seem to pick up a lot (I’ll touch on this later).
Legions (Guilds)
During my time playing, I had a chance to delve into the Legion functionality with some of my guys on the NA and Chinese versions. My first beef is that Aion only allows 3 different ranks for your legion members, and these rank titles can’t seem to be changed. While you can set permissions for each of the 3 ranks, you can’t have 2 people be the highest rank. In MMO guilds like mine where there are 2 leaders, this is somewhat disappointing and inconvenient. The current version I played during the NA weekend and Chinese also only allow 10 characters for your legion name, which I find unnecessarily restrictive. Since my guild’s name is 11 letters long, I can only fit “Inquisitio”. This forces us to abbreviate ourselves to INQ, and I am sure other MMO guilds will have to do the same unless the newer version updates we haven’t played yet increase the character limit.
Aion legions also have levels like some other MMOs like EQ2 and WAR. Unlike its predecessors, Aion only has three levels for legions. Upgrading your legion to level 2 requires having 10 people on your roster, and a payment of around 120,000 gold. Once you upgrade, you will have roster limit increased from 30 to 60 maximum members, although in my opinion the fact that there is one at all strikes me as silly. Once you upgrade, you can also customize a guild emblem for your cloak. There are only a dozen emblems, but you can pick any background color you can imagine. You can also change your guild emblem at any time if you so chose for a small fee.
The one really good aspect of Aion’s legion system is if you are able to upgrade to level 3. Level 3 requires a higher roster count and around 1.2 million gold, which is not as bad as it sounds on paper given how much money I was making. Any decent size guild should have no trouble getting this cash together if everyone kicks in a bit of cash. At level 3, the limitations of the emblem system redeem itself by letting you put your own design. This means you can literally use any graphic or logo you want to represent your guild. During my playing I managed to see some pretty interesting logos as seen in the above screenshot. Overall I think there is room for improvement in the legion functionality, but specialized level 3 emblems make for an awesome feature.
Rifts
Once you reach level 20 and start to move into the third tier of zones, you will start to get your first taste of PvP. It seems like every so often, there are rifts or portals that appear somewhat randomly that connect to the other faction’s area. These rifts seem to have a chance to appear in one of many predetermined locations across the zones, which are quite large, and have a set number of uses before they become unusable. From my own experiences, it seems that at almost any given time there is a rift up that either leads to the enemy area or has the enemy coming into yours.
There are no PvP restrictions in terms of where you can go and who you can attack. Enemies can even go inside the perimeter of your main fortress if they are careful to avoid guards, which is not difficult. While you are able to attack anyone of any level, you will not know what level the people on the other faction are. This makes for some interesting encounters where people misjudge the strength of their opponent. In one personal experience, a bunch of us ganged up on a single enemy only to have him obliterate all of us by dropping a meteor on us! In addition to the PvP points awarded, there are special “infiltration” quests that require you to go to the enemy zone and complete tasks there. In this regard the rift aspect of the game makes the PvP not consentual, which is fine by me but may turn off others.
The Abyss
Once your reach level 25 the game starts to open up and you are allowed to start delving into the Abyss, which is the games central area for RvR.
As soon as you hit level 25, you will receive a new campaign quest series to complete in order to be able to access the Abyss. The campaign consists of 3 mini trials you have to go through in order to prove your worth, but also double as a minor tutorial. The first test consists of proving your worth by completing 1 task from 3 available choices. I chose a challenge to kill some monster under the arena in a certain time limit that was laughably easy. The second trial tests your knowledge, and has you answering a series of multiple choice questions that serve to educate you a little about the Abyss and some of the game’s lore. It’s impossible to fail it seems as picking the wrong answer prompts you to try again among the remaining choices.
The final trial is a test of flight in which you have to fly through a series of rings in a short time. This serves to educate the player about the use of these rings which are present in the Abyss. Flying through the rings replenishes a portion of your flight timer and gives a small speed boost during the trial. Like the previous trials, it was not difficult at all and I was able to complete it on my first run through. Once all trials are complete, you are shown to the Abyss portal (as seen above) and are free to go through whenever you want.
Once you arrive in the Abyss, you will find yourself in a fully functional fortress area with pretty much everything you will ever need. The fortress was complete with various vendors, banks, auction house, bind point, and even teleporters to take you to many of the games PvE zones. You will also notice that there are new standard quests for the Abyss that helps alleviate the strain from leveling, as well as campaign. The first campaign mission presents the player with a simply amazing tutorial about RvR in the Abyss through the use of various cutscenes.
Abyss Tutorial
Here is a quick summary:
The first thing they explain is that the Abyss has a total of 9 keeps that you can fight over, and they are spread across 3 different layers: bottom, core, and top. The Balaur are a monster faction that participates in the Abyss wars, and they often take over these keeps.
Each keep has some sort of damage shield that protects it from air assaults. Trying to attack a keep from the air while the shield is up is supposed to be difficult and damaging. Inside each of the keeps is some sort shield generator that powers the shield. If this generator is destroyed, then the shield goes away and people are free to assault from the air without any kind of penalty or negatives.
Each of the keeps has doors to protect it from ground assaults that will need to be broken down in order to gain access. The doors are also especially vulnerable to siege weapons that can be deployed by the attackers. In addition, there are also portable bind points that can be dropped in the field so that people can respawn close to the fight. These bindpoints are supposed to easily destroyed and only be able to be used a certain amount of times before being rendered useless.
Finally they explain about artifacts that can be used to sway the battles. They are supposed to be activated to provide various effects from mass healing, mass damage, and other assorted abilities. They also tell you to kill the boss to take the keep, and elaborate on the benefits of taking on for your legion. Benefits range from Abyss points, items (including Abyss medals), cash, and other bonuses in the newer versions of the game we haven’t received yet. They also give you a final warning about some sort of Balaur flying battleship that can drop monsters into areas to mess with people.
The Abyss environment itself look very nice and seems to vary as you go from island to island. The entire area is flight enabled, and the rings can be used to guide you over some of the longer stretches between islands. There are teleports that take you from the bottom level to the top level, but if you look up at the sky on the bottom level you can see the upper level far above.
The core of the Abyss can be seen in the center and resembles a large sun-like ball of fire. In case you were curious, flying into this ball of fire will result in being insta-gibbed. PvE in the Abyss was getting me around 13 AP (Abyss Points) per kill at level 25. The fact that you can gain points through PvE can be a good thing or a bad thing depending on how you look at things. On one hand some people might not like the fact people can PvE grind their way up the ranks to abyss abilities and gear. On the other hand, people opting to take this route do so in an area where they can be ganked at any moment, so it will help drive traffic to this area making people somewhat easier to find.
Rewards
Abyss rewards come in the form of abyss abilities for reaching certain ranks, and item rewards for cashing in your points.
Over on Aion Source, I spotted this thread that shows an example of some of the high ranking Abyss abilities. One of the more notable abilities this high ranking person has is the ability to effectively turn themselves into a raid boss once every 2 hours for 10 minutes. This is definitely an interesting dynamic that should be interesting to see in action.
Items are the other major reward you get from PvP. There are stores in which you spend your Abyss points in order to purchase high end gear. There are various degrees of gear for each level range that have varying prices. Most of the green items can be bought purely with points, but some of the high level gold (epic) items also require medals which are earned during fortress sieges.
The Abyss gear actually looks to be itemized well, a problem that WAR had at launch with a lot of its PvP reward gear. The above picture shows 2 Abyss bows that are both level 30. The green one costs much less AP then the gold one, but the gold one features more damage, stats, and socketing slots for manastones. It is up to the player to decide if they want to hold out for the higher end item, or hold out for higher level gear. Since players lose AP for PvP loss, some may want to cash out sooner depending on their luck. One final point, spending points you have earned subtracts them from your total, thus reduces your rank. This means as people purchase items, there will be a constant moving up and down the RvR ranks, and high rank players will have to decide if they want to give up their rank abilities to cash out their points for weapons.
Conclusion
I really am looking forward to seeing how this all pans out when the game releases in North America. The game has solid PvP rewards, risk, and keeps / artifacts for people to fight over. For all the comparisons you hear about this game with WoW because of the playstyle, I’m starting to think it might be in many ways like an asian DAOC. If everything works out, I think this game could offer a lot to people who were fans of DAOC and disgruntled Warhammer fans. I look forward to continuing my journey on the Chinese version a while longer, and I am curious to see how the patches NA will have at release alleviate some of the issues with the game. If they can reduce the grind as they claimed in a recent interview, then I think this will be a game a lot of people will probably be jumping into if the end game ends up being solid.
Paragus
Co-Leader of Inquisition
www.inqguild.com
Review: Aion Beta Weekend
After my last entry about some of the upcoming MMOs, luck would have it that I was able to get a chance to play Aion during one of their recent beta preview weekend type events. Today I am going to try to give you my impressions from playing during the recent weekend event that had a level limit of 10, but did allow players to make characters from both of the game’s factions. While I will be the first to admit that 10 levels is hardly enough to review much of anything, but I think I got a chance to sample the game and take a look at various aspects that were present.
Just to recap quickly here before I get started, I went into this with a few preconceptions about the game in terms of graphics, polish, and whether or not the game would be bringing anything new to table. I have seen some pretty remarkable screenshots of the game, so graphically I set the bar pretty high. The game has also been out in a foreign market for a while, so I expected a fair amount of polish. In terms of innovations I approached Aion with fairly low expectations. As soon as the log-in screen popped up as seen above, I felt somewhat reaffirmed that graphically I would not be disappointed. So with all that being said, let’s get started!
Character Creation
Before we can do anything, we have to create a character. The game is based around 2 main factions that are to be pitted against each other akin to what we have seen in Warhammer and World of Warcraft. One of the main differences with Aion is that the game only features 2 races to chose from, the Elyos (Angels) and the Asmodian (Demons). If your used to some of the other RvR MMOs out there where each team has several races to chose from, this might concern you as it did me.
As soon as I saw the actual character creator, my concerns about character customization for my appearance pretty much vanished. I have to say in all honesty that Aion sports one of the most customizable character creators I have seen. Aion gives you infinitely more options than many of its competitors, and rivals and possibly exceeds Age of Conan. For starters, the creator has a color palettes that enable you to make almost any part of your character into any color you can imagine. This opens the door for some very creative and also very silly looking toons. Hair, skin, and lip color can be anything from standard colors to wild shades of green and purple.
Sliders and more sliders. This creator has sliders for everything you mind can think of, as well as stuff probably wouldn’t have considered. When you make your character, the 2 main aspects are designing your face and your body. The body creator has 12 sliders alone, one of which includes a height slider that can make your character as small as a child or a tall as an ogre. As if that wasn’t quite enough, the face customizer has another 25 sliders! It’s very easy to lose yourself at this point, and if it wasn’t a beta, I might have been there for quite some time trying to sculpt my guys face. In conclusion here, there are enough options to make your character look unique despite the fact there are only 2 races to chose from.
The other decision you have to make is what archetype do you want your character to be, as well as the gender of your character (this is actually done before the customizing step). This probably where my first beef comes into play. I am the type of person who would rather pick a class right out of the gate, rather than an archetype. My concern with this route is that you do not actually get to play the class you want until you have put in 9 levels into your guy. While this is not really a large time investment by any means (took me 90 minutes my first time), I’d like to find out sooner rather than later if the class I am going to be is to my liking without having to invest the time to find out. I don’t want to put in the time and finally get to my class only to find out it’s not a good fit for me, then have to reroll and repeat the early content again just to try again.
User Interface
The Aion User Interface is pretty much the cookie-cutter UI we have seen from most of the traditional style MMOs in recent memory. If you spent any time at all playing WoW, EQ2, AoC, or WAR, you will pretty much feel right at home instantly.
You will find most of the standard UI elements here along with the ability to customize it a bit. Aion gives you 3 rows of hotbars to be stacked on top of one another, but they remain completely invisible if there are no abilities dropped into them. Aion also uses the same exact keyboard buttons assigned to some of the basic functions from previous MMOs as well. Again if you have played a recent traditional MMO, you will find yourself open your inventory, character window, map, etc. without even having to look up the predefined assigned key.
The character window itself is broken into several different tabs of information. The main screen features the standard equipment paperdoll which is accompanied by all of your characters primary stats, defensive skills, and resistances. Below that you will find your backpack contents and gold totals. One confusing things for me was the fact that instead of using the term backpack, Aion calls it the “Cube”. The cube initially only has a limited number of slots, but there is an NPC who will expand your cube for a fee.
Another interesting aspect is that much like Warhammer Online, Aion also features an unlockable title system. It seems that by completing certain quest or quest chains you can unlock new titles to be displayed next to your name. What makes this system a bit different than WAR’s title system is that the Aion titles actually have different bonuses associated to them. I was able to unlock Tree-Hugger by completing one of the early quest chains that gave me an accuracy boost. The list seems to have 50 hidden titles in total, so most likely there will be certain titles that end up being favored by certain classes in the game because of the bonuses they give.
Combat
Aion’s combat style follows the traditional MMO style combat from games like WoW, EQ2, and WAR. The game features the standard tab targeting system, and activated abilities that are on various different cooldowns. The game’s mini-map color codes aggressive monsters as red, and when you target them you even see their aggro radius as if it were a tiny radar.
The combat sounds and animations struck me as being pretty well done. While the combat seems to be in many ways the same recycled form of combat we have seen in the last few MMOs, it does feel responsive and look well. The game’s combat does feature positional attacks and a combo type system for chaining weapon attacks together.
They really seem to go out of their way to make the skill chains easy to learn compared to some other MMOs. As an example, the character I picked was under scout archetype. One of my stun attacks can only be performed directly after my character evades an incoming enemy attack. In some previous games, it would be up to the player to watch the combat very closely for the evade message or animation. In Aion, when my character evades I get a visual flashing effect on the ability that pretty much screams “press me!”, that get accompanied by another visual in plain view near the center of my screen. This makes it fairly user-friendly for even new and inexperienced players to know when to seize the opportunity to use a situational skill.
One final quick note here. This game also seems to feature items that can be socketed with other stat boosting items to give very specific effects much like the Warhammer talisman system. The stones can be popped into both weapons and armor and seem to drop fairly regularly off of mobs I fought. They effects I saw ranged from adding HP and MP, all the way to boosting crit chances and evade percentages. This gives a little bit of room for the player to mess around with various set ups, and the stones can be removed from a special NPC in case you want to try a different stone.
Quests
Questing in Aion is pretty lame to be honest, there just isn’t really any other way to say it. You can tell as soon as you talk to your first NPC that your questing career in Aion will pretty much consist of the same drab recycled kill and collection quests that we have seen in WoW, EQ2, AoC, WAR etc. Quest NPCs can be spotted by the usual floating icons over their heads to indicate quest offerings or turn-ins.
This is yet another game where the work of a hero is to collect flowers, kill animals, collect dingleberries, and do some part time work for Fed-Ex. I won’t harp on this too long as I have already ranted on this countless times in the past, but there really isn’t much anyone can write at this point in a quest box to make collecting sacks of grain into something heroic. I didn’t really care for it in Warhammer, but at least Warhammer mixed things up with their public quest system, there just isn’t anything along those lines here to help break up what will be a long chain of tedium.
The one thing Aion seems to do a little different in the quest department is their campaign quest system. The quest journal is divided into normal quests and the campaign quests. Each of Aion’s major zones seems to feature a campaign series of quests. These are pretty much a long series of quests that chain together that help walk you through the area and give you a little story at the same time. The initial level 1-10 noobie area campaign seems to revolve around the fact that you have lost your memory and need to try to recall it. The bad news is these quests pretty much are the same exact kill and collection quests you will find in the other part of your journal. When the campaign starts, you will see all of the quests listed with the recommended character level for it, although at the start you can’t see the specifics of the quests. As you start to progress through the campaign, you will unlock the ability to see quests further down the list as well as their reward.
The one saving grace about the campaign system is that they do seem to go a little out of their way to help drive home the story element that comes along with some of them. A lot of these quests will reward you with cutscenes at various stages to help give you an idea of what is going on. Not all cutscenes seem to be created equally though. In the quest to recover your lost memory, the final stages have some pretty impressive and entertaining ones (as seen above), but at the same time there are some that tell you a farm has been pillaged that seem unnecessary. I’ll take anything that helps break up the tedium though I guess.
The World
I wanted to devote a section here about some observations I made about the world and some features it has.
The first thing I want to touch on are the graphics and the games performance. This game probably has the best graphics of all the traditional MMOs on the market with the exception of Age of Conan which I think has a completely different art style. Performance wise, the game runs great on a wide variety of systems. I also have to say the sound and music seemed pretty well done as well. A lot of the musical scores I heard in some of the various areas seemed to be professionally composed and helped add to the immersion factor.
There are a lot of familiar features to Aion that seems to have been copied from other games. I noticed right out of the gate that they have flight masters for flying you across a zone the same as found in WoW, EQ2, and Warhammer. The only difference here is that instead of riding a flying animal, your character uses a special pair if wings to fly himself over to wherever he is going. Aion also seems to have a working mail system and auction house system in place much like its competition. One good feature that I think is new to this game is a fast way of selling vendor trash type loot at the merchants with a single button. One thing that I did find somewhat annoying was the fact that binding to a new location costs money.
One of my biggest concerns regarding the world is the layout of it. The world is divided into 3 parts, one of the Elyos, one for the Asmodians, and the Abyss PvP area in the center. Each of the race’s section of the world map seem to be divided into 5 main zones and a city. After leveling from 1-10, I had completely exhausted the first zone, leaving 4 more to be explored. Given the amount of areas remaining, and the number of levels I have yet to climb, I suspect that the game is extremely linear in terms of how you progress through the content and the map. In a lot of other games, you are given choices on which zone you want to spend your time adventuring in at any given level. Since other games have multiple races and multiple areas to go with them, in WoW for example if you tire of the human areas, you can head over to the elves for a change of scenery and content. I fear that Aion will send you down a very narrow set of rails in order to reach the max level with little room for deviation. This can be worse if you decide to level up an alt because you will be forced to do all of the exact same content you did the firs time around in all of the same places, including the campaign quests.
This leads to me another concern regarding how someone will experience PvP during the leveling process. In Warhammer Online, each area you level up is connected to an area controlled by the enemy. This means that if someone really wants to experience the games PvP at any stage, they only need to wander over towards the local hotspot. While I haven’t seen this during the preview weekend, I have heard there are portals that can open up randomly that send you to the enemy area for PvP. Depending on how rare these occur, your exposure to the PvP side of the game could be very limited initially. I like to have an opportunity to test my character in PvP even at the early stages so I can see how well the class I picked handles itself in a variety of situations.
Flight
No doubt one of the main selling points and innovations of Aion is the flight mechanic. Initially you can’t fly right out of the gate when you start, but once you reach level 9 and complete the campaign to get your class you will be able to glide and fly after a ceremony.
The flight system seems to work very well and I found the controls very easy to get a handle on. In the bottom right part of user interface, there is a little flight indicator that tells you if you can fly in a certain area, and how much flight time you have left. If you are in a flight-enabled area, you simply press the “Page Up” button for your character to sprout their wings and take off. Once you are in the air, you can press “R” and “F” to fly up and down respectively, or you can hold your right mouse button down to tilt your altitude. The meter will start to tick down and when its out your wings will vanish sending you plummeting. You can manually land or turn off your wings by pressing the “Page Down” button. Sometimes I found the fastest way to get back to the ground safely from high up was do turn off my wings to fall, then turn them back on right before I hit the ground (use this method at your own risk).
Having a third dimension to the game is definitely a very interesting feature, and flying was genuinely a fun experience. Having that third dimension made finding some quest locations tougher though, as on several occasions I reach the quest waypoint only to realize my real destination was actually high above me on some floating island. My only beef is that the PvE areas I explored have certain parts you can fly, and others you can’t, so you will find yourself hitting invisible walls that force you to land when transitioning to a no-fly area. I would love to see more areas be flight enabled.
PvP
Unfortunately the limitations of the weekend didn’t give me a chance to really be able to check out the PvP. This is what will inevitably make or break the long term playability of this game. While I was unable to participate in any PvP, I did notice a few features related to it.
For starters there seems to be a tab on your main character window dedicated to your PvP stats from the Abyss. The window seems to keep track of your PvP rank, as well as your kills and points earned broken down into various time frames so you can monitor your progress. Everyone seems to start out as a rank 9 Soldier, and by earning points you can advance through the ranks. There is also a rank window that breaks down the point totals needed to reach certain ranks, as well as which players on each side are at the top of their game. Points are earned by killing players in the Abyss, and unlike other MMOs, they are lost when you are killed. This is one aspect that makes Aion stick out from its competition. Warhammer and WoW were both notorious for treating people with kid gloves by rewarding them with points even for a loss, while Aion seems to have some sort of consequence for a loss. This will undoubted stop competitive players from just rushing into fights without any fear of death, which is a good thing in my opinion.
The abyss seems to be the focal point of the Aion endgame and its PvP. By looking at the map, we can see that it has 3 different layers, and assorted keeps to fight over in it. I am not really sure how this endgame will stack up against what we saw in WAR, but this is going to be what makes or breaks this game. The area looks to be a decent size by looking at the maps, and I hope that is the case. If all of the endgame PvP is going to be in this area, it will need to be very large to stop it from getting old. Despite its flaws, Warhammer had a variety of areas and fronts for people to fight on to add a little variety to the PvP endgame, hopefully this area will offer enough to keep people entertained for a long time.
Conclusion
Aion is a graphically stunning game and has tons of polish. The game has been out overseas for a little while now, and I think that ultimately that fact will be a large benefit to the North American fans. Since the game has been out and patched for a while in other markets, NA players will be getting a game that is polished and feels complete. There are not that many MMOs that have come out in the last few years that players have been able to say that about. The game has a real focus on endgame PvP, and the patching the game has gone through already has no doubt made class balance less of an issue. I am glad to see that there is a loss for death in PvP, as bind and zerg rushing seems to plague a lot of other traditional style MMOs that have tried for the same goal.
On the flip side, Aion strikes me as very linear game. The way the overworld is layed out has me worried that in addition to being constricted, players will be forced to stomach through the same content over and over again every time they level up another character. Aion also is not a game that is oozing with innovation. Outside of the flight mechanic, I think a lot of people will legitimately be able to criticize this game for being somewhat of a clone in some aspects of some of the more recent traditional games. The endgame PvP is going to be the real test of whether or not this game breaks through to people and distinguishes itself from the rest, or if it gets written off as another MMO using an already exhausted formula. I think despite that, this game will appeal to a lot of people who might be current WoW and WAR subscribers. The game already has a huge following overseas, so it should be interesting to see how it fairs in a completely different market.
Paragus
Co-Leader of Inquisition
www.inqguild.com
Review: Aion Beta Weekend
After my last entry about some of the upcoming MMOs, luck would have it that I was able to get a chance to play Aion during one of their recent beta preview weekend type events. Today I am going to try to give you my impressions from playing during the recent weekend event that had a level limit of 10, but did allow players to make characters from both of the game’s factions. While I will be the first to admit that 10 levels is hardly enough to review much of anything, but I think I got a chance to sample the game and take a look at various aspects that were present.
Just to recap quickly here before I get started, I went into this with a few preconceptions about the game in terms of graphics, polish, and whether or not the game would be bringing anything new to table. I have seen some pretty remarkable screenshots of the game, so graphically I set the bar pretty high. The game has also been out in a foreign market for a while, so I expected a fair amount of polish. In terms of innovations I approached Aion with fairly low expectations. As soon as the log-in screen popped up as seen above, I felt somewhat reaffirmed that graphically I would not be disappointed. So with all that being said, let’s get started!
Character Creation
Before we can do anything, we have to create a character. The game is based around 2 main factions that are to be pitted against each other akin to what we have seen in Warhammer and World of Warcraft. One of the main differences with Aion is that the game only features 2 races to chose from, the Elyos (Angels) and the Asmodian (Demons). If your used to some of the other RvR MMOs out there where each team has several races to chose from, this might concern you as it did me.
As soon as I saw the actual character creator, my concerns about character customization for my appearance pretty much vanished. I have to say in all honesty that Aion sports one of the most customizable character creators I have seen. Aion gives you infinitely more options than many of its competitors, and rivals and possibly exceeds Age of Conan. For starters, the creator has a color palettes that enable you to make almost any part of your character into any color you can imagine. This opens the door for some very creative and also very silly looking toons. Hair, skin, and lip color can be anything from standard colors to wild shades of green and purple.
Sliders and more sliders. This creator has sliders for everything you mind can think of, as well as stuff probably wouldn’t have considered. When you make your character, the 2 main aspects are designing your face and your body. The body creator has 12 sliders alone, one of which includes a height slider that can make your character as small as a child or a tall as an ogre. As if that wasn’t quite enough, the face customizer has another 25 sliders! It’s very easy to lose yourself at this point, and if it wasn’t a beta, I might have been there for quite some time trying to sculpt my guys face. In conclusion here, there are enough options to make your character look unique despite the fact there are only 2 races to chose from.
The other decision you have to make is what archetype do you want your character to be, as well as the gender of your character (this is actually done before the customizing step). This probably where my first beef comes into play. I am the type of person who would rather pick a class right out of the gate, rather than an archetype. My concern with this route is that you do not actually get to play the class you want until you have put in 9 levels into your guy. While this is not really a large time investment by any means (took me 90 minutes my first time), I’d like to find out sooner rather than later if the class I am going to be is to my liking without having to invest the time to find out. I don’t want to put in the time and finally get to my class only to find out it’s not a good fit for me, then have to reroll and repeat the early content again just to try again.
User Interface
The Aion User Interface is pretty much the cookie-cutter UI we have seen from most of the traditional style MMOs in recent memory. If you spent any time at all playing WoW, EQ2, AoC, or WAR, you will pretty much feel right at home instantly.
You will find most of the standard UI elements here along with the ability to customize it a bit. Aion gives you 3 rows of hotbars to be stacked on top of one another, but they remain completely invisible if there are no abilities dropped into them. Aion also uses the same exact keyboard buttons assigned to some of the basic functions from previous MMOs as well. Again if you have played a recent traditional MMO, you will find yourself open your inventory, character window, map, etc. without even having to look up the predefined assigned key.
The character window itself is broken into several different tabs of information. The main screen features the standard equipment paperdoll which is accompanied by all of your characters primary stats, defensive skills, and resistances. Below that you will find your backpack contents and gold totals. One confusing things for me was the fact that instead of using the term backpack, Aion calls it the “Cube”. The cube initially only has a limited number of slots, but there is an NPC who will expand your cube for a fee.
Another interesting aspect is that much like Warhammer Online, Aion also features an unlockable title system. It seems that by completing certain quest or quest chains you can unlock new titles to be displayed next to your name. What makes this system a bit different than WAR’s title system is that the Aion titles actually have different bonuses associated to them. I was able to unlock Tree-Hugger by completing one of the early quest chains that gave me an accuracy boost. The list seems to have 50 hidden titles in total, so most likely there will be certain titles that end up being favored by certain classes in the game because of the bonuses they give.
Combat
Aion’s combat style follows the traditional MMO style combat from games like WoW, EQ2, and WAR. The game features the standard tab targeting system, and activated abilities that are on various different cooldowns. The game’s mini-map color codes aggressive monsters as red, and when you target them you even see their aggro radius as if it were a tiny radar.
The combat sounds and animations struck me as being pretty well done. While the combat seems to be in many ways the same recycled form of combat we have seen in the last few MMOs, it does feel responsive and look well. The game’s combat does feature positional attacks and a combo type system for chaining weapon attacks together.
They really seem to go out of their way to make the skill chains easy to learn compared to some other MMOs. As an example, the character I picked was under scout archetype. One of my stun attacks can only be performed directly after my character evades an incoming enemy attack. In some previous games, it would be up to the player to watch the combat very closely for the evade message or animation. In Aion, when my character evades I get a visual flashing effect on the ability that pretty much screams “press me!”, that get accompanied by another visual in plain view near the center of my screen. This makes it fairly user-friendly for even new and inexperienced players to know when to seize the opportunity to use a situational skill.
One final quick note here. This game also seems to feature items that can be socketed with other stat boosting items to give very specific effects much like the Warhammer talisman system. The stones can be popped into both weapons and armor and seem to drop fairly regularly off of mobs I fought. They effects I saw ranged from adding HP and MP, all the way to boosting crit chances and evade percentages. This gives a little bit of room for the player to mess around with various set ups, and the stones can be removed from a special NPC in case you want to try a different stone.
Quests
Questing in Aion is pretty lame to be honest, there just isn’t really any other way to say it. You can tell as soon as you talk to your first NPC that your questing career in Aion will pretty much consist of the same drab recycled kill and collection quests that we have seen in WoW, EQ2, AoC, WAR etc. Quest NPCs can be spotted by the usual floating icons over their heads to indicate quest offerings or turn-ins.
This is yet another game where the work of a hero is to collect flowers, kill animals, collect dingleberries, and do some part time work for Fed-Ex. I won’t harp on this too long as I have already ranted on this countless times in the past, but there really isn’t much anyone can write at this point in a quest box to make collecting sacks of grain into something heroic. I didn’t really care for it in Warhammer, but at least Warhammer mixed things up with their public quest system, there just isn’t anything along those lines here to help break up what will be a long chain of tedium.
The one thing Aion seems to do a little different in the quest department is their campaign quest system. The quest journal is divided into normal quests and the campaign quests. Each of Aion’s major zones seems to feature a campaign series of quests. These are pretty much a long series of quests that chain together that help walk you through the area and give you a little story at the same time. The initial level 1-10 noobie area campaign seems to revolve around the fact that you have lost your memory and need to try to recall it. The bad news is these quests pretty much are the same exact kill and collection quests you will find in the other part of your journal. When the campaign starts, you will see all of the quests listed with the recommended character level for it, although at the start you can’t see the specifics of the quests. As you start to progress through the campaign, you will unlock the ability to see quests further down the list as well as their reward.
The one saving grace about the campaign system is that they do seem to go a little out of their way to help drive home the story element that comes along with some of them. A lot of these quests will reward you with cutscenes at various stages to help give you an idea of what is going on. Not all cutscenes seem to be created equally though. In the quest to recover your lost memory, the final stages have some pretty impressive and entertaining ones (as seen above), but at the same time there are some that tell you a farm has been pillaged that seem unnecessary. I’ll take anything that helps break up the tedium though I guess.
The World
I wanted to devote a section here about some observations I made about the world and some features it has.
The first thing I want to touch on are the graphics and the games performance. This game probably has the best graphics of all the traditional MMOs on the market with the exception of Age of Conan which I think has a completely different art style. Performance wise, the game runs great on a wide variety of systems. I also have to say the sound and music seemed pretty well done as well. A lot of the musical scores I heard in some of the various areas seemed to be professionally composed and helped add to the immersion factor.
There are a lot of familiar features to Aion that seems to have been copied from other games. I noticed right out of the gate that they have flight masters for flying you across a zone the same as found in WoW, EQ2, and Warhammer. The only difference here is that instead of riding a flying animal, your character uses a special pair if wings to fly himself over to wherever he is going. Aion also seems to have a working mail system and auction house system in place much like its competition. One good feature that I think is new to this game is a fast way of selling vendor trash type loot at the merchants with a single button. One thing that I did find somewhat annoying was the fact that binding to a new location costs money.
One of my biggest concerns regarding the world is the layout of it. The world is divided into 3 parts, one of the Elyos, one for the Asmodians, and the Abyss PvP area in the center. Each of the race’s section of the world map seem to be divided into 5 main zones and a city. After leveling from 1-10, I had completely exhausted the first zone, leaving 4 more to be explored. Given the amount of areas remaining, and the number of levels I have yet to climb, I suspect that the game is extremely linear in terms of how you progress through the content and the map. In a lot of other games, you are given choices on which zone you want to spend your time adventuring in at any given level. Since other games have multiple races and multiple areas to go with them, in WoW for example if you tire of the human areas, you can head over to the elves for a change of scenery and content. I fear that Aion will send you down a very narrow set of rails in order to reach the max level with little room for deviation. This can be worse if you decide to level up an alt because you will be forced to do all of the exact same content you did the firs time around in all of the same places, including the campaign quests.
This leads to me another concern regarding how someone will experience PvP during the leveling process. In Warhammer Online, each area you level up is connected to an area controlled by the enemy. This means that if someone really wants to experience the games PvP at any stage, they only need to wander over towards the local hotspot. While I haven’t seen this during the preview weekend, I have heard there are portals that can open up randomly that send you to the enemy area for PvP. Depending on how rare these occur, your exposure to the PvP side of the game could be very limited initially. I like to have an opportunity to test my character in PvP even at the early stages so I can see how well the class I picked handles itself in a variety of situations.
Flight
No doubt one of the main selling points and innovations of Aion is the flight mechanic. Initially you can’t fly right out of the gate when you start, but once you reach level 9 and complete the campaign to get your class you will be able to glide and fly after a ceremony.
The flight system seems to work very well and I found the controls very easy to get a handle on. In the bottom right part of user interface, there is a little flight indicator that tells you if you can fly in a certain area, and how much flight time you have left. If you are in a flight-enabled area, you simply press the “Page Up” button for your character to sprout their wings and take off. Once you are in the air, you can press “R” and “F” to fly up and down respectively, or you can hold your right mouse button down to tilt your altitude. The meter will start to tick down and when its out your wings will vanish sending you plummeting. You can manually land or turn off your wings by pressing the “Page Down” button. Sometimes I found the fastest way to get back to the ground safely from high up was do turn off my wings to fall, then turn them back on right before I hit the ground (use this method at your own risk).
Having a third dimension to the game is definitely a very interesting feature, and flying was genuinely a fun experience. Having that third dimension made finding some quest locations tougher though, as on several occasions I reach the quest waypoint only to realize my real destination was actually high above me on some floating island. My only beef is that the PvE areas I explored have certain parts you can fly, and others you can’t, so you will find yourself hitting invisible walls that force you to land when transitioning to a no-fly area. I would love to see more areas be flight enabled.
PvP
Unfortunately the limitations of the weekend didn’t give me a chance to really be able to check out the PvP. This is what will inevitably make or break the long term playability of this game. While I was unable to participate in any PvP, I did notice a few features related to it.
For starters there seems to be a tab on your main character window dedicated to your PvP stats from the Abyss. The window seems to keep track of your PvP rank, as well as your kills and points earned broken down into various time frames so you can monitor your progress. Everyone seems to start out as a rank 9 Soldier, and by earning points you can advance through the ranks. There is also a rank window that breaks down the point totals needed to reach certain ranks, as well as which players on each side are at the top of their game. Points are earned by killing players in the Abyss, and unlike other MMOs, they are lost when you are killed. This is one aspect that makes Aion stick out from its competition. Warhammer and WoW were both notorious for treating people with kid gloves by rewarding them with points even for a loss, while Aion seems to have some sort of consequence for a loss. This will undoubted stop competitive players from just rushing into fights without any fear of death, which is a good thing in my opinion.
The abyss seems to be the focal point of the Aion endgame and its PvP. By looking at the map, we can see that it has 3 different layers, and assorted keeps to fight over in it. I am not really sure how this endgame will stack up against what we saw in WAR, but this is going to be what makes or breaks this game. The area looks to be a decent size by looking at the maps, and I hope that is the case. If all of the endgame PvP is going to be in this area, it will need to be very large to stop it from getting old. Despite its flaws, Warhammer had a variety of areas and fronts for people to fight on to add a little variety to the PvP endgame, hopefully this area will offer enough to keep people entertained for a long time.
Conclusion
Aion is a graphically stunning game and has tons of polish. The game has been out overseas for a little while now, and I think that ultimately that fact will be a large benefit to the North American fans. Since the game has been out and patched for a while in other markets, NA players will be getting a game that is polished and feels complete. There are not that many MMOs that have come out in the last few years that players have been able to say that about. The game has a real focus on endgame PvP, and the patching the game has gone through already has no doubt made class balance less of an issue. I am glad to see that there is a loss for death in PvP, as bind and zerg rushing seems to plague a lot of other traditional style MMOs that have tried for the same goal.
On the flip side, Aion strikes me as very linear game. The way the overworld is layed out has me worried that in addition to being constricted, players will be forced to stomach through the same content over and over again every time they level up another character. Aion also is not a game that is oozing with innovation. Outside of the flight mechanic, I think a lot of people will legitimately be able to criticize this game for being somewhat of a clone in some aspects of some of the more recent traditional games. The endgame PvP is going to be the real test of whether or not this game breaks through to people and distinguishes itself from the rest, or if it gets written off as another MMO using an already exhausted formula. I think despite that, this game will appeal to a lot of people who might be current WoW and WAR subscribers. The game already has a huge following overseas, so it should be interesting to see how it fairs in a completely different market.
Paragus
Co-Leader of Inquisition
www.inqguild.com
Darkfall: Alliances and War
Since the writing of my last entry, massive battles have broken out across Agon, and with these battles, the formation of alliances are starting to shape the political landscape. In a previous entry, I mentioned the web of guild relations and the possibility of a political map to help everyone understand it. Apparently the Darkfall community has decided to take matters into their own hands and we are starting to see the community try to understand where the lines are drawn.
When you look at the larger map, you can see the workings of what appears to be geopolitical relationships in some areas of the world. Specifically, the 4 sub-continents seems to have certain guilds who are working together in alliance to either fully control certain land masses, or who are bent on conquering them by driving off other guilds.
This very situation manifested itself over the weekend when one of the guilds on Nilfheim (Ice Island) became the target of a massive assault that brought hundreds of players to their city looking to retaliate against them for previous attacks. While the attackers inflicted massive damage to all of the structures, without a formal challenge, the city’s ownership remained intact. The next day a formal challenge was issued, but this time the defenders were able to rally a coalition of their own and managed to hold off onto their city. Needless to say, the server was pushed to the limits and in some cases beyond leading to some people in the 300 man battle to suffer random disconnects.
The Challenge
In order for a city or hamlet to change ownership, and challenge must be issued by one guild to another. When the challenge is issues, it lasts for a period of 6 hours that is divided into 2 stages. During the first stage (4 Hours), the guild that issued the challenge will have its own city or hamlet vulnerable and up for grabs. This adds what can be a substantial risk to picking a fight with another guild as you can rest assured that that they will try to rally their allies to derail the attack at the issuer’s city. Once that stage expires, the challengers will then be able to commence their assault on their target (2 Hours). If at any time during this entire challenge the guild leader who issues the challenge is killed or goes offline, it is considered a loss and the challenge ends. There is also a monetary price that I will touch more on later, but guilds issuing challenges who do not own land will need to pony up a large amount of gold to compensate for the risk factor. If they win they keep the gold, if they lose the enemy keeps it.
My Siege Story
I’ll try to put some of this into context from my first siege experience which happened over the weekend. One of our allies decided they wanted to target a specific enemy city on a nearby remote island because one of its resources was a harbor, and they belonged to another alliance of guilds that they have an unfavorable view towards. The challenge was issued by our ally, and our first order of business was to assist in the defense of their city and protection of the guild leader until we could progress to the attack stage.
We all decided to saddle up and put on our Sunday’s finest gear because after all, this is the type of situation we play for. As a hamlet owner, we found the city to be awe striking in both size and complexity. Upon arrival we saw the walls were lined with people on every side, and this particular city has large cannon towers on each side. I was able to take control of the cannon for a short period of time just to see what it was like, and it reminded me much like sitting in a turret seat in an FPS game. The guild leader who issued the challenge was held up in a very large keep, and the entrance leading into it was blocked by rows of people in the event someone breached the outer wall.
Since we showed up to the city in the tail end of the defense stage, we didn’t really see any action as the enemy was making their own preparations for the likely assault we were getting ready to mount. There were probably upwards of around 200 people on our side inside making preparations, and my PC handled it better than I thought, although there were many in my guild who experienced some crashes and had to turn down settings. I found that I only had to turn down the number of sounds in the audio options, and I was surprised how well the client handled this number of people in such a small geographical area.
As the defense stage came to end, the challenge issuing guild began to hand out siege hammers at their bank to all who could take one. This was one aspect of the monetary costs I mentioned earlier, as these are the main tool for destroying structures at this stage in the game’s life. Buildings in Darkfall can’t be destroyed with normal weapons and magic, only by siege related equipment, so these hammers are the main tool being used since nobody is far enough along to roll out war hulks and large boats.
We soon traveled to the coast nearby and started making our way from island to island. I have to say it was definitely a sight to remember seeing so many people at once moving together as a large mass and some people even brought rafts along to make the trip easier. Unfortunately during this leg of the journey, some of the minor random disconnects that hit us earlier become a bit more frequent. Some of the people who ended up being dropped while in the water logged back in to find themselves back at their bindstone miles away from the battle.
It was at this point that tragedy struck. Among the large group of people who experienced a disconnect, was the challenge issuer. The current rules state that if that person goes offline at any time during the challenge, it counts at a loss. Needless to say there was a lot of anger and frustration on the part of the challenger. The previous 4 hours defending, the organization getting the army together, and the extremely high monetary cost all were wasted. A source from Aventurine tells me they are aware of the issue and looking at ways to make this aspect easier, so we can only hope that some changes to this part of the mechanic are considered to prevent future unintended forfeits.
Despite the upsetting setback, the remainder of us decided to keep going just to see what happens. As I was marveling at the sheer number of people we had, I wondered if it was really going to be necessary. When I finally arrived at the enemy city, I was in amazement at how many people were there waiting for us in a defensive position as the city was located atop a cliff (reports are upwards of 200). We were greeted by the largest volley of magic that I had ever seen, it reminded me of a scene from Star Wars with all the energy flying through the air, no screenshot or words I can say will ever really do it justice.
The enemy alliance had one of its guilds try to attack from behind, but the accidentally tipped their hand too soon and were discovered. With our numbers diminished from the disconnects and all the plasma flying at us from the well defended city, we decided to make the most of the situation and turn our focus to the guild trying to flank us. This led to an initial melee that quickly had them retreating into a chase that went into the ocean and nearby islands. The result was widespread fighting and chaos that left many of them dead, and quickly stripped naked of their belongings.
Apparently hell bent on getting every last one of these guys, someone on my side dropped a raft into the water where literally a dozen guys packed onto it, effectively chasing down and shooting at anyone who was still left alive. After we finished them off, most of the force decided to recall home and reflect on the evenings events. I have to say that despite how much it sucked to lose the challenge, many of us still had an experience that we will remember for a long time to come. Hopefully Aventurine will continue to evaluate and make changes to help streamline the siege process to prevent future incidents from occurring.
Paragus
Co-Leader of Inquisition
www.inqguild.com
Darkfall: Alliances and War
Since the writing of my last entry, massive battles have broken out across Agon, and with these battles, the formation of alliances are starting to shape the political landscape. In a previous entry, I mentioned the web of guild relations and the possibility of a political map to help everyone understand it. Apparently the Darkfall community has decided to take matters into their own hands and we are starting to see the community try to understand where the lines are drawn.
When you look at the larger map, you can see the workings of what appears to be geopolitical relationships in some areas of the world. Specifically, the 4 sub-continents seems to have certain guilds who are working together in alliance to either fully control certain land masses, or who are bent on conquering them by driving off other guilds.
This very situation manifested itself over the weekend when one of the guilds on Nilfheim (Ice Island) became the target of a massive assault that brought hundreds of players to their city looking to retaliate against them for previous attacks. While the attackers inflicted massive damage to all of the structures, without a formal challenge, the city’s ownership remained intact. The next day a formal challenge was issued, but this time the defenders were able to rally a coalition of their own and managed to hold off onto their city. Needless to say, the server was pushed to the limits and in some cases beyond leading to some people in the 300 man battle to suffer random disconnects.
The Challenge
In order for a city or hamlet to change ownership, and challenge must be issued by one guild to another. When the challenge is issues, it lasts for a period of 6 hours that is divided into 2 stages. During the first stage (4 Hours), the guild that issued the challenge will have its own city or hamlet vulnerable and up for grabs. This adds what can be a substantial risk to picking a fight with another guild as you can rest assured that that they will try to rally their allies to derail the attack at the issuer’s city. Once that stage expires, the challengers will then be able to commence their assault on their target (2 Hours). If at any time during this entire challenge the guild leader who issues the challenge is killed or goes offline, it is considered a loss and the challenge ends. There is also a monetary price that I will touch more on later, but guilds issuing challenges who do not own land will need to pony up a large amount of gold to compensate for the risk factor. If they win they keep the gold, if they lose the enemy keeps it.
My Siege Story
I’ll try to put some of this into context from my first siege experience which happened over the weekend. One of our allies decided they wanted to target a specific enemy city on a nearby remote island because one of its resources was a harbor, and they belonged to another alliance of guilds that they have an unfavorable view towards. The challenge was issued by our ally, and our first order of business was to assist in the defense of their city and protection of the guild leader until we could progress to the attack stage.
We all decided to saddle up and put on our Sunday’s finest gear because after all, this is the type of situation we play for. As a hamlet owner, we found the city to be awe striking in both size and complexity. Upon arrival we saw the walls were lined with people on every side, and this particular city has large cannon towers on each side. I was able to take control of the cannon for a short period of time just to see what it was like, and it reminded me much like sitting in a turret seat in an FPS game. The guild leader who issued the challenge was held up in a very large keep, and the entrance leading into it was blocked by rows of people in the event someone breached the outer wall.
Since we showed up to the city in the tail end of the defense stage, we didn’t really see any action as the enemy was making their own preparations for the likely assault we were getting ready to mount. There were probably upwards of around 200 people on our side inside making preparations, and my PC handled it better than I thought, although there were many in my guild who experienced some crashes and had to turn down settings. I found that I only had to turn down the number of sounds in the audio options, and I was surprised how well the client handled this number of people in such a small geographical area.
As the defense stage came to end, the challenge issuing guild began to hand out siege hammers at their bank to all who could take one. This was one aspect of the monetary costs I mentioned earlier, as these are the main tool for destroying structures at this stage in the game’s life. Buildings in Darkfall can’t be destroyed with normal weapons and magic, only by siege related equipment, so these hammers are the main tool being used since nobody is far enough along to roll out war hulks and large boats.
We soon traveled to the coast nearby and started making our way from island to island. I have to say it was definitely a sight to remember seeing so many people at once moving together as a large mass and some people even brought rafts along to make the trip easier. Unfortunately during this leg of the journey, some of the minor random disconnects that hit us earlier become a bit more frequent. Some of the people who ended up being dropped while in the water logged back in to find themselves back at their bindstone miles away from the battle.
It was at this point that tragedy struck. Among the large group of people who experienced a disconnect, was the challenge issuer. The current rules state that if that person goes offline at any time during the challenge, it counts at a loss. Needless to say there was a lot of anger and frustration on the part of the challenger. The previous 4 hours defending, the organization getting the army together, and the extremely high monetary cost all were wasted. A source from Aventurine tells me they are aware of the issue and looking at ways to make this aspect easier, so we can only hope that some changes to this part of the mechanic are considered to prevent future unintended forfeits.
Despite the upsetting setback, the remainder of us decided to keep going just to see what happens. As I was marveling at the sheer number of people we had, I wondered if it was really going to be necessary. When I finally arrived at the enemy city, I was in amazement at how many people were there waiting for us in a defensive position as the city was located atop a cliff (reports are upwards of 200). We were greeted by the largest volley of magic that I had ever seen, it reminded me of a scene from Star Wars with all the energy flying through the air, no screenshot or words I can say will ever really do it justice.
The enemy alliance had one of its guilds try to attack from behind, but the accidentally tipped their hand too soon and were discovered. With our numbers diminished from the disconnects and all the plasma flying at us from the well defended city, we decided to make the most of the situation and turn our focus to the guild trying to flank us. This led to an initial melee that quickly had them retreating into a chase that went into the ocean and nearby islands. The result was widespread fighting and chaos that left many of them dead, and quickly stripped naked of their belongings.
Apparently hell bent on getting every last one of these guys, someone on my side dropped a raft into the water where literally a dozen guys packed onto it, effectively chasing down and shooting at anyone who was still left alive. After we finished them off, most of the force decided to recall home and reflect on the evenings events. I have to say that despite how much it sucked to lose the challenge, many of us still had an experience that we will remember for a long time to come. Hopefully Aventurine will continue to evaluate and make changes to help streamline the siege process to prevent future incidents from occurring.
Paragus
Co-Leader of Inquisition
www.inqguild.com
