Aion
I make a point of never allowing myself to get swept up in the hype surrounding forthcoming MMO's. I've seen so many of them come and go during World of Warcraft's lifespan that it's only setting yourself up for disappointment. The majority of them are architects of their own downfall as publishers rush them out before their time with no clear vision, sating themselves for a sliver of WoW's gargantuan market share instead. WoW might be dreadfully stale right now but MMO's are cyclical so whether something actually needs to come along and beat it is a matter of debate. I can't deny that any company worth their salt thrives on competition and pushes themselves to edge ahead when they're forced to though. Anyone with an interest in wrestling need only look at the embarrassing state of it now when compared to the great Monday night wars of 1995-2001 for a perfect example of this.
Aion just evoked the "oh look, another MMO, cool" reaction from me whenever I saw it. I had no interest in reading about it until it collapsed at which point I'd be curious to find out why. Penelo spoke about it a lot and seemed to enjoy the weekends of beta they had on offer. Lunitun the same. Then Chris started talking about it's virtues, though I suspect more out of a desire to have anything other than WoW in his gaming life. I knew there was an open beta in the near future and downloaded the client on the Friday it was released. When we were raiding, I saw someone mention needing a beta key in a conversation I wasn't really paying attention to. Penelo confirmed this which irked me. An open beta that needs a beta key is a bizarre choice of wording. It was ridiculous to me that the only guaranteed way to get in it was to buy the game in the first place for a key. So I'd have to buy the game to discover if I wanted to buy the game? Yeah... Saturday morning, Shovel came on and announced that he'd managed to get three beta keys and asked if anyone would like one, an invitation I lept upon.
Sunday, I went to my future niece-in-law's (?) third birthday party and got pretty drunk. It ended a lot earlier than I anticipated so I was able to get back in time to raid which, in hindsight, would've been a hilariously bad idea, but it was canceled due to lack of people. I logged out, made myself an Aion account and got going. It didn't take long at all for me to feel like the game had some pretty good potential so I grabbed a sheet of paper, drew a fantastically wonky line down the center and put a Thaddius charge on either side. This entry will be an attempt to take the bones from either side of the line and adhere some flesh to them.
For clarity sake, I played as an Elyos Templar on Spatalos.
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- Really great information is made available for people new to the game. I'm a seasoned MMO player and even I was thoroughly impressed by the little videos you get at the beginning to show you how everything works as the world and your abilities open up. This is the sort of thing that prevents new players feeling overwhelmed and encourages them to stick with the game. FFXI had absolutely none of this and, though I have no doubt it's going to change in Cataclysm, even WoW doesn't touch this degree of accessibility.
- Aion has a really good sense of empowerment. My abilities felt strong, they looked cool and I could see the mob dying as a result of my actions. It's sort of hard to explain and requires first hand experience.
- The character customization is mind blowing. As I tend to do these days, I tried to create an androgynous, camp male but what I felt like I ended up with was an Elvan from FFXI. I really don't want that! I joked that I was going to create my live character tiny with a giant head just to annoy everyone who was bitching about them but then I actually saw one in Sanctum and realized how stupid they look. Not even stupid in a funny way, just stupid.
- The game looks great and seems to be really well optimized. A PC game can always look better but I was impressed with what I was getting without tweaking while maintaining a very smooth frame rate. It dropped a little when I stuck it in windowed mode and entered insanely crowded areas, but that's to be expected.
- The music is great. This is an aspect of any MMO that's crucial to me. I still to this day listen to FFXI's soundtrack and WoW has some beautiful music in places. Phantasy Star Online's score is still with me. So yeah, it's crucial this is right, and it is. Akarios Village reminded me of a mix between The Sims' "Building Mode 4" and a piece from Final Fantasy X that I'd have to break the bet that I can write this whole entry with The Beatles' "Something" on to find out the name of.
- Little things I noticed of no major importance; zooming in and out is fast, items needed for quests respawn fast, using an ability on a mob autoruns you to where it is.
- The level curve and progression through zones is excellent. There were a few times where I'd go to one place, run back, then have to go back for the follow up but it wasn't particularly grating. Having a built in quest tracker is standard these days I guess and Aion's works well. It wouldn't have hurt having an option to automatically track any quest you get instead of having to manually tick every box as you pick them up but that's a minor nit pick. The only time where I felt like I'd run out of quests to do was around 17 in Miraju and that went away when I sucked it up and did the Krall quests with Yuna, Luni and two pugs.
- The short cutscenes you occasionally get around quests are nice and help break up the action. Sure, some are hilariously bad - the romance scene in Dukaki Mines was particularly cringe inducing - but they give quests flavor even for people like me that rapidly click through everything.
- I thought the combat system was primitive when I first begun. That quickly changed as new abilities opened up and you get the chain system. Then you have to make decisions on what to use, how to use it, etc. It would've been nice to see how combat unfolds at later levels but there's not much you can expect from a week beta. I was mighty impressed with what I saw though and it took more skill than a 969 rotation.
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- My absolute, biggest problem with Aion is the front end. If you get disconnected or AFK out too long, the game boots you out and completely closes. If you fail to log in the game boots you and completely closes. There was a day where I couldn't connect to the authentication servers until about four or five attempts had been made and, let me tell you, having to open the game every single time was infuriating.
- If you so much as twitch while talking to an NPC, it cancels talking to them. I really don't understand this. Technical limitation? I just... I don't know, it perplexes me, though you get used to it and it doesn't annoy nearly as much later on when you're over it.
- There's a button to put on your bars you have to push to loot everything on a mob. Couldn't there just be a box to tick in the options that looted everything when you right click?
- "Tax". There's a cost for everything in Aion. Want to set home point? Kinah. Want to teleport from one end of the ridiculously large Sanctum to the other? Kinah. Want your exp back after dying? Kinah. Every game needs it's method of getting gold out the economy so it's sorta like WoW's repairing spread out but it still seems a weird way of doing it.
- You have to press escape to clear your target.
- Crafting in general goes both ways for me. This is something I only briefly touched on beta but the two bars for the success and fail system take ages to go up. It is cool you get exp but it doesn't seem like a well thought out system when I can go to an anvil, press "create all" and have nothing to do but tab out for ten minutes. Gathering takes it's sweet time too. I also had someone run up and spam click a plant I was hoovering and took the second extract as soon as I was done.
- The beautiful oil paintings they use for loading screens are ruined by the copyright text at the bottom.
- The airship in Sanctum took a disgracefully long time. It was a hark back to FFXI days, which is not a good thing.
- The beta community was dumb as rocks for the most part. I swear, if I saw anyone ask where Tutty or that fucking fossil was one more time... I'm just ranting really. The advent of quest helper on WoW lowered the patience of the lowest common denominator further and it transferred here. Aion pretty much tells you where to go and what to do and when it doesn't, general gets flooded.
- As a Templar (tank), I found it hard at times to gage threat. It's probably because we were spoiled with Omen in WoW but, really, there's no way. A few times I lost threat to people and was only able to tell with target of target, which updates REALLY slow.
- Fuck that fucking crab outside Veteron Citadel.
In summary, the game is fun as fuck and does a lot right. If I was asked whether it was closer to WoW or FFXI I'd say neither and that it felt like PSO if it was done properly as an MMO. I'm already sold on the merits of playing the game to the end game in itself and if it sucks there, I've had fun. The real test is obviously going to be at that point but there's cause to be optimistic. I've read a lot of high profile WoW players post on EJ about the admiration they had for Guild Wars end game which was heavily PvP orientated as Aion will be. I played Guild Wars for a week or so and enjoyed it at least.