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.

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Updated Aion Beta Review & Abyss

• Third Closed Beta Weekend Impressions
• Aion Enchanting Guide
• Aion Beta Weekend Review
• Aion Gathering Guide
• Flying FAQ

The author is already planning to make a third part the next beta weekend (Abyss, PvP, Stigmas etc.), so stay tuned and be the first to watch it!

edit: watch the “Super Serious” third vid here!

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Completely Unbiased Review of Aion – Part II

• Completely Unbiased Review of Aion (Beta)
• Third Closed Beta Weekend Impressions
• CBW5 Screenshots, Combat Video & CryEngine
• Killerguides Aion Guide Review
• Aion Beta Weekend Review

Thanks to @longasc for finding it! And remember if you have anything interesting I could post here, be sure to send it my way either via the contact form here or via twitter.

Be sure to check out part two of this vid also!

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Completely Unbiased Review of Aion (Beta)

• Completely Unbiased Review of Aion – Part II
• CBW5 Screenshots, Combat Video & CryEngine
• Aion Beta Weekend Review
• Killerguides Aion Guide Review
• Third Closed Beta Weekend Impressions

There’s plenty of info on various subjects, and while it may not be extremely useful for those who have been participating in the beta for months, those who are rather new to the game will surely find something for their taste. It might be especially useful if you preordered Aion and want to participate in the upcoming beta weekends. Here’s a short list of just some of the content:

• class and factions info
• divine power
• equipment (weapons & armor)
• leveling
• professions
• stigmas (stones, quests, shards, skills)
• quests and quest types
• selling items
• kinah strategies
• legions
• titles
• leveling guide 10-20 for both factions (will be updated soon!)
• Abyss
• user interface
• macros
• enhancements

This unofficial Aion guide is constantly updated, usually after each beta weekend. A few parts are still work in progress, but I’m sure it will be finished by the time Aion is released. It’s great to see such info gathered in one nicely written guide, but there is one downside: it comes at a price. If you ask me it’s worth it, but it’s your call.

The price of the guide is $29,99, which in my opinion is more than fair. Once you order here you’re also eligible for free updates so whether you get it now or in few months makes no difference. However, the guide has a discount price right now and you can get it for $19,99 — the offer lasts only for the next two days though so hurry up if you want your copy.

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Oh, and I almost forgot: the first five people who post a comment on this post get a free copy of this Aion guide, courtesy of Killerguides. You get the real deal with all the goodies and free updates of course! Just be sure to use a working email and your name so I can forward it!

Giveaway over, thanks for participating!

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Killerguides Aion Guide Review

• Free 1-10 Leveling Guide – Asmodian & Elyos
• Abyss Guide
• Beginner’s Guide to Skills and Chains
• How to Earn Kinah Guide
• Closed Beta Event 6 Info

First, Tobolds review. Overall it seems his experiences with Aion were mostly positive, but since he’s not too keen on PvP it might of turned him away from the game a bit.

The only major disappointment of my Aion weekend was the severe lack of replayability. There being only two races means there are only two newbie zones from level 1 to 10. And the two newbie zones are very similar to each other, starting you in the wilderness, getting you to a first village with all the trainers, then a lake area, a forest, another wilderness area, a big camp full of enemies, and a cave. Several quests in the two zones are downright identical, for example the final quest in the cave where you need to activate three colored colums before destroying an abyss gate. As I mentioned, even the big cutscenes for the destiny quest line are the same for the two races, and for every class. So while Aion can compete with World of Warcraft in terms of quality and polish, in terms of amount of content WoW is far ahead, even if you compare 2004 WoW with 2009 Aion.

You can read the full post on his blog here.

The second review is by Serennia on WoM.

Although there’s much more to talk about, I think the point I’m trying to get across here is that although Aion quite obviously tried to mimic a lot of WoW’s best aspects and funnest selling points, NCsoft still has a long way to go if they really want to make any sort of dent in the WoW playerbase.

It seems to me Serennia wouldn’t be impressed with any game regardless of its quality, but that’s just my opinion. Just because people are bored with World of Warcraft does not mean they’ll all suddenly switch to Aion, and most importantly it certainly doesn’t mean they won’t like the game. Personally, I haven’t played WoW in over a year and have no desire to, but I like Aion so far because it seems like an interesting and fun game, unlike many others.

If you ask me, WoW is definitely the best MMO game out there. When you take into account the number of subscribers, the amount of content and the time you can spend playing it without getting bored, that’s a hard nut to crack. But if you’re looking for a WoW-clone and expect it to be perfect and even better in pretty much every aspect, I doubt you will find one, not now and probably not in the next ten years.

Why everyone expects literally every new MMO game coming out to be the so-called WoW killer is beyond me, and frankly it annoys me. It doesn’t have to be polished right from the start (note: Aion is still in beta and everyone generally agrees it’s quite polished), it doesn’t need thousands of quests and hundreds of different areas. What it needs and in Aion’s case it might already be present, is its own “soul” and NCSoft should stick with it.

Aion may be similar to WoW, Warhammer or any other game, but they all are similar – that’s why we call them MMORPG games. It obviously needs to offer something different to be successful, and Aion might have exactly what it takes.

Aion won’t appeal to everyone, just like WoW doesn’t. It will however have it’s own fanbase and thousands of players who will appreciate and enjoy it for what it is, and not because they’re bored with other games. It might not have eleven million subscribers and generate billions of dollars of revenue, but we’ll play it anyway because we like it. It’s hard to say where Aion will be in six months or a year, but if you ask me if it keeps me entertained for that long, I’d call that a success.

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Third Closed Beta Weekend Impressions

• Aion Beta Weekend Review
• Aion First Look Preview
• Completely Unbiased Review of Aion – Part II
• Updated Aion Beta Review & Abyss
• Killerguides Aion Guide Review

If you take away one thing from this first look at Aion, I hope it’s this: Do not do what I did, and switch between Free Realms and Aion in the same playing session. Your brain will explode. But I’ll get to that in a minute.

Aion is big in the Far East. Really big. A localized, Westernized version is coming to North America this year. The development team behind the game is so confident they’ve got a hit on their hands that they allowed people to post screenshots from the beta event two weeks ago, and the NDA officially lifted on June 16th.

So what’s it like?

There is an unholy degree of character customization. For my female warrior, I had 44 hairstyles, 20 faces, and six bodies. There were 23 “premade” face/hair combinations. There were tattoo options. And there were 25 face sliders to customize everything from eyebrows to nose tilt. And there will apparently be voice options as well, although they were not functional while I was testing. There are also body sliders. Some people pushed those sliders aaaaaaaaall the way to the right, predictably.

When you’ve finished creating your character, and you choose the avatar to be played from the character group on the beach, your little simulacrum is extremely excited to be chosen.

It is fantastically gorgeous, with thousands of little details to gorge on. The landscapes are sweeping and epic. The animations look like they were done with motion capture, and within a few feet of the opening spawn point, you’re sure to find people testing their new emotes.

There’s much more variance in terms of the differences between male animations and female animations. Even at level one, combat animations are flashy and dramatic.

On top of all this, the spawn rate during the beta event was jacked to eleven, with millions of two legged rat things and thousands of armadillo things waiting to die. I logged in for the first time within an hour of the floodgates opening. Should have been a slideshow, right?

My machine is a dual core Dell (1.86 Ghz), ,,P, with two GB of RAM and an NVIDIA GeForce 8600 GTS. As I’ve said elsewhere, it’s two years old, and loaded up with every MMO in existence, half a dozen RPGs, and a crapload of my secret vice, puzzle adventures. While I was playing Aion, I had my email and IM running, as well as an image editing program open to crop screenshots on the fly. I did not attempt to play Aion on the road, so I only experienced the game on a Fios connection.

If it hadn’t been for all the people, I might have thought I was playing a single player game. I never had the slightest delay at any point, doing anything, over the course of several days. I cannot name a single MMO in my experience where that was true at launch, let alone beta!

The sound was phenomenal. It was gorgeous, lush, and did a lot to create mood. It never sounded repetitive at all.

While I did not get to experience either flight or fighting other people in my three day journey of discovery, I found plenty of evidence that neither is an afterthought. Anyone following this title for any length of time already knew that, but if you’re just now catching on to Aion: Koreans do not do PvP as an afterthought. The Asian market expects it to be an integral part of the game. The game is therefore not balanced by testing the PvE, and then tested for PvP at the last minute.

When you first log in, you’re invulnerable. After you finish a fight, you remain in combat mode for several of the longest seconds of your life. These are the most basic anti-exploit mechanisms possible, and you would be stunned at how many PvP betas I’ve encountered without them. Or maybe you wouldn’t be. Anyway, it’s not just that:

The interface has elements you can mouseover to see if someone’s in range, even flying people. The layout and location demonstrate that aerial combat is something the game was built around, as opposed to added into the game to sell a few extra copies.

Questing was both a disappointment and a wonder. Here is where I warn future Aion players to not even look at Free Realms. I was finishing up my FR review when the Aion event started, so I played both titles in the same hour. I swear that FR made me stupid. I kept looking for the green dots to lead me to each objective, I couldn’t find simple objects because they weren’t sparkling like a rapper’s front teeth, and I felt vaguely let down that killing a rat wasn’t a cause for fanfare, celebration, and text messages assuring me of my greatness. Instead, NPCs were openly insulting me, accusing me of sleeping on the job, of having no honor, of not caring about anyone but myself.

I got over it, mind you, but the disorientation persisted for a few minutes. The insult routine is a little odd, from a Western point of view, but it’s stemming from a cultural ideal where newcomers must prove themselves. Respect is earned, not granted. Just relax and level up; the peasants will respect you by level five.

It’s definitely not a Western MMO, even with all the cultural localization they’ve been doing. (That localization is not complete, or was not as of mid-June. Some of it is just funny – “We will not let you wretches to take the goal!” – and some of it’s annoying, such as when the Korean word for a particular object could be either of several English words, and the NPC uses both in a single line of dialogue.) It’s hard to put a finger on what makes it foreign, beyond the obvious stuff like the heckling. And the obvious stuff like the talking ferret. What is it with Asian games and talking furballs?

Anyway. Quests. The interface is marvelous. They don’t load up your quest journal with tons of data you may not need, but all the nouns can be clicked to feed you more information:

There’s a great waypoint system as well, where your destination of choice appears as a purple X, and as an arrow on the minimap.

The first few levels of quests, sadly, were mediocre at best. The standard “save the farm, kill the rats” material. When you’re done, you are solemnly thanked for solving a problem that clearly still exists. I should have taken a screenshot of the farmer thanking me for solving his armadillo infestation as one respawned directly under his pitchfork.

There’s no attempt at even hinting at the backstory (big apocalyptic event, sundered the world, erased your memory – got that from Google!), except that a few NPCs mention that you’ve lost your memory. The early quests don’t do anything to set up the situation, or to even create a vague sense of curiosity over what’s happened to you and your world. If you have played as many MMOs as I have, you are going to spend the first hour or two with a sense of “oh, god, not this again,” and you will be strongly tempted to go back to the world where you already did these levels.

Do not make this mistake.

I finally completed this one quest, you see, as an ordinary earthbound warrior. The talking tree snapped me to a cutscene. It was a “recovered” memory, and it was wonderfully done. The environment, the music, the dialogue, it all worked together to create a sense of mood and expectation. Before I could over think it too much, my character suddenly ran to the edge of a cliff and jumped. The sense of falling was rendered so well that my physical stomach lurched a little.

And then my angel wings snapped open, and I could fly. And kill.

I haven’t wanted to play an MMO until dawn in years, but I almost did that night. That quest marked a real turning point in the game. Many of the quests I got after that were better written, and the ones that weren’t, well, I didn’t mind so much. There was a new feeling to the game, like there was something I was working toward.

My first look was over much too soon. I’m looking forward to more.

Come feed your Aion addiction on AionFly.com

Aion First Look Preview

• Third Closed Beta Weekend Impressions
• Aion Beta Weekend Review
• Killerguides Aion Guide Review
• Updated Aion Beta Review & Abyss
• Completely Unbiased Review of Aion – Part II

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.

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Source: Paragus on mmorpg.com

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