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My mini review of Aion.
VABeachDave
Member Posts: 228
I just wanted to throw out my own mini review of the Chinese beta version of Aion. Just so you know I have several years experience playing World of Warcraft (Given up due to Blizzard’s extremely piss poor customer service). I have also played Age of Conan, Ever Quest II, Dungeons and Dragons on-line, Ultima On-line and Lord of the Rings online. Today is April 20th 2009.
I am currently playing on the Chinese open beta (Yes the Beta servers are still up and running even though the Chinese version is now live). Not sure why the beta servers were left up but I will continue to play until the boot me. I am also using the unofficial beta English patch which is far from complete. I’m sad to say I don’t know what version of Aion this actually is as a lot of the game is still in Chinese so I can’t read the version numbers…
Lastly take into account I still have not hit the higher levels yet so this will obviously not be a complete review; just first impressions.
My system is Windows Vista Ultimate x64. 6 gigs ram. 2 duel core Xeon processors (3.2 Ghz each) and a NVIDIA 9800 GTX+ graphics card. 24” Dell monitor running at 1920 x 1200. I have high speed SCSI hard drives. Contrary to the graphics card and specs, this is not a gaming system. It’s a computer workstation and thus normally is not very good at graphics in 3d. It’s built to handle lots of information very reliably and only with 2D stuff.
Not once has the game lagged out or crashed or given any hint of a hiccup and this is while connected to a the Chinese beta server half way across the world. Stability does not appear to be an issue.
To start of with, the game loaded fine even though I had to down load and patch everything in Chinese (Then add the English patch file). Nice that it was simple enough to do so even without being able to read any instructions. The game does take a long time to load. Unusually long but I suspect it is due to the hard core graphics it uses.
The character creation screen is really nice. There are 23 pre selectable head designs and you can modify any one of the 30+ facial attributes and 13+ body attributes to customize the looks of your character completely. From the number of videos floating around on Youtube with people designing toons that look like famous people (President Obama for example) you can pretty much design any look you want here. You can even select one of several voices for your character but that functionality is not working yet apparently. You can also view what your character will look like nearly nekkid, with average and heavily armored. There is also a random generator for the looks of your character which will randomly choose settings for you. Keep clicking it and eventually you will find one you like. About the only thing I found missing on this screen was a random character name generator. I suspect once the servers start to fill up finding a name not already taken will be a chore. I hope they add this functionality.
i693.photobucket.com/albums/vv293/davidmanvell/Mage-Female.jpg
i693.photobucket.com/albums/vv293/davidmanvell/CharacterSelection.jpg
i693.photobucket.com/albums/vv293/davidmanvell/Body.jpg
i693.photobucket.com/albums/vv293/davidmanvell/Face1.jpg
i693.photobucket.com/albums/vv293/davidmanvell/Face2.jpg
The game graphics really are nice. Think of it as a cross between Lord of the Rings on-line world graphics, Age of Conan character graphics and World of Warcraft’s (When not lagged) fluid movements. The game world looks outstanding. About on par with LOTRO, possibly slightly better. The looks of the characters and their animations beat out Age of Conan. Even with all the enhanced graphics, the game is still way smoother then WoW even on a lag free day. If you see still screenshots of Aion, just know that the animations of those screenshots are even more impressive. All the screen shots you see here are with all graphic options turned on. Something I can’t even start to do in WoW or Age of Conan with this computer.
Audio is great as well. I am concerned that the audio pretty much stays on all the time though. I’d rather have it where the music turns off after time and restarts later or when you change areas or actions otherwise I will get sick of it no matter how nice it sounds. Even so the music flows well and the sound effects of the toons are great. Unfortunately many of them are still in Chinese and I can’t hear the final English translation yet.
The attention to detail with the character animations is outstanding. From the changes in eye shape, flowing robes, even the smallest hand and finger gestures for virtually every action. There is a large number of emotes I was able to activate from the emote screen. Unfortunately I was not able to just type /dance /wave etc. as that does not seem to be working yet. I suspect once again due to translation issues. NPCs move around and won’t always be in the same locations.
In game day and night and weather is active and although I did not verify this myself supposedly it affects game play to some extent. I’d like someone to verify this however.
The User Interface is very easy to use and simple. I was up and running in no time using it. Nice to have a simple lock button right on the action bars to lock your action bars. You can also move UI to various parts of the screen. Opening bags and moving things around is very easy. The icons are extremely clear and recognizable. I give the user interface a solid A.
Here is a screen shot of the character screen:
i693.photobucket.com/albums/vv293/davidmanvell/CharacterScreen.jpg
Her is one of just the basic controls:
i693.photobucket.com/albums/vv293/davidmanvell/CharacterScreenshot.jpg
Here is the friends list (Apparently I don’t have any friends):
i693.photobucket.com/albums/vv293/davidmanvell/FriendsPanel.jpg
There are also search panels for groups and guilds and also an in game notepad.
Looting is pretty straight forward with an autoloot option available:
i693.photobucket.com/albums/vv293/davidmanvell/ManaStones.jpg
Training new spells is done at the various trainers throughout the world. They sell books you use to learn new spells and abilities. You can purchase these in advance if you know you will be leveling soon and have the money and space.
i693.photobucket.com/albums/vv293/davidmanvell/MageTrainer.jpg
The in game world map is extremely well done. Works very similar to the one in WoW and LOTRO but is much improved over those.
i693.photobucket.com/albums/vv293/davidmanvell/Map2.jpg
i693.photobucket.com/albums/vv293/davidmanvell/Mapandhelppanel.jpg
There does seem to be some type of in game macro and script file language but I have no information on it other then what you can see here in the screen shot. I don’t know if Aion supports any type of addon.:
i693.photobucket.com/albums/vv293/davidmanvell/Macros.jpg
Gathering in game seems to work well but I think it is way to slow in my opinion. You can see the requestor here in this screen shot. It seems to take anywhere up to 5 seconds to gather an item depending on your skill level. It appears you don’t really just pick it up as you do in some games but you draw the essence out of the items. The animation it does when you gather is really well done. When you gather an item, you gain a small amount of Experience
Quest giver and other NPC markings are above the respective toons heads like in most games. Very crisp and easy to read. Quest turn-in locations are shown on the minimap and world maps with a duplicate mini icon.
i693.photobucket.com/albums/vv293/davidmanvell/HotNPCs.jpg
The quests are very straight forward. Much of the same variety as you’d find in most games. Collect x number of body parts from x number of creatures, collect items, find certain locations, timed quests etc. There are repeatable quests as well. In addition to normal quests you also have Missions and Work orders. Work orders are crafting quests. Missions are story line type quests and are usually much more involved. The quest text is well written and easy to under stand. I did encounter a few translation issues but those should be worked out soon. In addition wherever in the requestors it mentions a person, place or thing you can click it and it will bring up additional information on that person, place or thing. Also there is usually a ‘Location’ button that when pressed will show the the location on the world map. All the requestors are really some sort of hyper text based as they are all interlinked. It’s really nice. You can track up to 7 quests on the right side of the screen.
i693.photobucket.com/albums/vv293/davidmanvell/Questgiver.jpg
i693.photobucket.com/albums/vv293/davidmanvell/LordSlut2.jpg
i693.photobucket.com/albums/vv293/davidmanvell/LordSlut.jpg
Death sucks like usual in every game. When you die you get a nice animation of your character keeling over gracefully as the screen turns and goes dark. You can rez at an Obelisk easily. When you die you actually lose XP. You can gain the XP back by spending cash at a nearby Spirit healer (Not the correct name). You can change the location of your home Obelisk at any time but there is a price to do so.
i693.photobucket.com/albums/vv293/davidmanvell/Death.jpg
I only visited a fraction of the world so far. It is huge. I couldn’t really say how large in comparison as to the world in some games but looks to be large enough to keep us all busy for a long time.
i693.photobucket.com/albums/vv293/davidmanvell/Sanctum2.jpg
The game does have an in game coordinates system but I was not able to find a way to keep the coordinates on screen all the time. Perhaps someone else found a way?
There are Teleporters in various towns and cities. Short range teleporters will fly you to nearby areas. Long range ones will teleport you directly. All for a price of course. Money so far has not been an issue in the game.
The Auction house (Broker as they call it) seems to work well. I had one major issue with it however in that you can only put into the Broker 10 different items (Or stacks of items) at once. Maybe this is a beta limit? I couldn’t possibly see how this could be a real limit. The game would have no economy at all with such a limit. If this is a real limit it needs to be changed fast. Real fast.
OK. Now this is very important: Whenever my character uses bandages to heal herself, she says something in Chinese that sounds like ‘Chicken and peace’. This is driving me nuts. Can anyone who speaks Chinese please tell us what the heck what sounds like ‘Chicken and Peace’ means in Chinese? All I know is I keep getting hungry the more I play and I’m going nuts trying to figure it out!
There are 6 professions in the game (Weapon smithing, alchemy, jewelry, armor smithing, tailoring, cooking and gathering). I tried both cooking, tailoring and gathering. I do not know if there is a limit to how many you can learn. I was also able to learn an additional language although I don’t know what advantage this does for me.
Crafting seems to work well. Only hang up is I tried making some cloth armor items and it would not allow me to do so. No error messages, it just would not allow me to click the Create button. Turns out I needed to be standing next to a Loom in order to make the item. It would be nice if there was some kind of requestor or text in red stating what was missing for me to make the tailoring item. Same thing with food, I needed to be next to a stove in order to do so but there was no indication as to what was wrong, just could not make it.
Weapons and Armor all have manastone sockets, similar to WoW’s gem sockets. Some items have multiple sockets. When you socket an item there is a chance it will fail. If it does fail all existing manastones will be destroyed.
There is a really convenient Lock Action bars button on the action bar itself. Just click it and you won’t accidentally drag icons off your toolbar. Very nice.
As you progress through the game you earn various titles. Each title grants various stat bonuses. You can choose which title to display and when you change Titles you also change which bonuses you have currently.
Each character can set up at any time a Private Store. Just bring up the menu to activate it and select which items you wish to sell and for what price. Also choose some text to display over your character. When you activate this, your character sets up a mini store in game on the spot and anyone walking by can browse your goods and buy things from you. It was very easy to set up and such. The text you choose is displayed over your toon to advertise what you are selling.
In addition to standard abilities (Tossing fireballs and such) you also have chain spells. These are combination spells when done in the correct order have additional effects (Bonus damage etc.). Very easy to use and not at all complicated. Very well implemented.
Combat is quick and very well done. Even though I am connected to a server on the other side of the world the lag was not an issue. The game is very responsive and I suspect will be more so when played on a local server. You really do feel drawn into the combat. Character movement is very smooth. Difficulty was about what I would expect. For a character leveling up I am able to kill any single target of equal level without much issue. Two is a pain but doable. Three is too much. My character is a sorcerer though so all DPS and not much defense. I had just learned the sleep spell (Crowd Control) and what appears to be sort of a reverse blink spell. Even in groups with lots of mobs around and everyone doing various things the combat was simple and fun. Great graphics and no lag that I could see. Character position and facing makes a big difference in this game, especially in 3d combat.
Flying: At level 9 you receive your ascension quest line. Just a couple of easily done quests that automatically advances you to level 10 where you learn to fly (So you basically skip level 9). Flying has a limit to the amount of time you can stay in the air. At level 10 you can stay flying for 1 minute. As you go up in level the flight time increases. I also found several potions and saw some other items that will grant you extra flight time. Flying was simple with take off and landing buttons, also up and down buttons. You move forward and backwards and turn like normal. Anything you can do on the ground you can do in the air including combat.
I have a few gripes about the flying however:
As you go through the world there are some area you can fly in and some you can’t. No rhyme or reason as to why which is which. The icon for flying highlights when you can is you can tell for certain.
As I was flying I kept running into invisible walls. Not sure why. Seems they should just open up the world completely and allow you to go where you wish.
In order to unfold your wings and take off you have to select one icon then you select another icon to rise up. These should be one and the same button. Same thing for down. One button goes down and the other tells your character to collapse his wings. This should be automatic. If you say go up your character should unfold his wings and fly up with one button and if you fly down to the ground it should be obvious you want to land. Shouldn’t have two separate buttons.
I did not do any dueling or pvp. I have no idea what kind of instances the game has at all. The only time I saw the load screens other then game start-up was when I changed continents.
Throughout the game there are numerous short videos that play. Sort of like a cut scenes in a movie. These break up the grind and add a bit to the ambience of the game. I suspect they should add an option to turn those off though as some folks will not like them. Personally I do.
I was not able to find a way to adjust the camera angle via keyboard shortcut. If you know of a way please let me know. If there is not a way this really needs to be added. Having to adjust the camera angle via mouse is cumbersome and slow when you are a keyboard user. I had no problems modifying the keyboard controls of everything else in the game. I saw several posts of people who were not able to reassign some of their side mouse buttons. I don’t have those so could not test that.
At level 10 you choose what subclass you wish to be. There are four main classes and each class has two subclasses. I do not know if there is a way to switch at a later date if you chose the wrong one. The 4 classes and their subclasses are: Warrior (Gladiator and Templar), Scout (Ranger and Assassin), Mage (Sorcerer and Spiritmaster) and Priest (Cleric and Chanter).
There are two factions players can choose from, Elyos and Asmodians. There is also a third computer controlled faction called Balaur. Balaur are basically demons and are intelligent NPCs. They may help or hinder either of the two player factions at any time. Each faction has their own starting area and zones. The Asmodians occupy the upper part of the shattered world while the Elyos occupy the lower half. The Balaur occupy the center area (The Abyss).
Each character also has 5 Stigma slots. Stigma slots may be filled with stones that grant your character an ability of a different class. At level 20 you get 2 slots, 1 more at levels 30, 40 and 50.
Under your health and mana bars (After level 10) you will also see a Divine Power bar. As you combat others you slowly build up Divine Power. When you have enough you can unleash some very powerful abilities. At the levels I was playing at, it took a good 30 minutes or so for me to build up enough Divine Power to unleash an ability so it’s not something you get to use often.
Aion has a built in help system, unfortunately the English translation did not have most of the help system included. There are in game videos as well as text help, none of which is working in English yet. Fortunately the game is so easy to figure out you don’t really need much help.
Aion is produced in Korea so naturally they released it in Korea first. The Chinese market is the largest market in the world so it’s expected they would open it up there next (Already released in China now). Japan is the next release area (Slated for July 2009 or so). Translation to Japanese will take minimal work and all the data centers running the servers in Korea could be used to run the Japanese ones so that’s why I suspect they chose to release Aion in Japan next. They are close enough distance to run them all out of the same data centers. Japan is a large market with minimal work involved.
I suspect the long delay for the USA and Europe release (Sept 2009???) is due to all the translation work to English, re working all the quest lines and recording all the voiceovers. In addition the installation software and documentation will have to be converted as well. The biggest delay in bringing the game to the USA and Europe will be building all the data centers to house and connect all the servers to the Internet. Not an easy task and extremely expensive. I suspect they will need all the cash from the other markets to do so. Those kinds of datacenters are not easy to put together nor cheap.
All in all Aion is a winner. I suspect in a patch or two they will have fixed the majority of the little items and the other translations will take a lot of time but I’m sure they will get it right. It’s amazing this game is already this good and they have not even released it in the USA yet. As far as the lower levels go Aion is already better then the other on-line multi-player role playing games I’ve played so far and they are just getting started. I can’t wait for the finished product.
Now if I could just figured out what that ‘Chicken and peace’ thing means…
Fan sites:
AION-On-Line.com
aionicthoughts.wordpress.com/
www.aionarmory.com/
www.aionglobal.com/
www.aionsource.com/
www.areyouhellbound.com/forum/
www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/game/253
www.onrpg.com/
Official sites:
www.ncsoft.com/global/
www.aiononline.com/us/
eu.aiononline.com/en/
Comments
Nice writeup well done. Is there any chance of playing in OB now? And how do I do this?
Ok....it appears to be WOW with flying combat.
I hope that you'll find that customer service based in China will give you a better experience than WOW's CSR gave you.
Well, Aion is suppose to be based on a western style of MMO design with asian style graphics. So for those who say "uhh ... duh ... this looks like WoW." Well, that's what "western style" means now. It's not that it looks like WoW, it looks like what we have been producing into the market for like the last 6 or more years.
WOW appears to be AC2/EQ with updated graphics and far dumbed down. A MMO is a MMO is a MMO is a MMO. You don't want something different. You want the package you know your comfortable with, and that's what you're delivered.
No one wants anything new, or games like Spellborn wouldn't flunk-out. There is nothing revolutionary in this title, just the fact that everything is extremely polished, and plays out much better than WOW. Not to mention, last I checked, RVR in a form (PvPvE) is the end-game here. WOW has their 25 man raids and broken arena system. You go kill raid bosses and farm them, I'll kill raid bosses while in a pretty sweet RVR setting.
Also, OP, could you resize the pictures? Open up your editor for the thread, right click them and resize to about 500 width. Great review, tho.
Still waiting for a reply Synthetick.
The Open Beta closed about 4 or 5 days ago.
The Open Beta closed about 4 or 5 days ago.
That it did -- @ the OP: your game account was credited some free game time, you're not in beta serves. The beta servers are the live servers, there was no wipe or anything. It just transitioned from beta => live.
The Open Beta closed about 4 or 5 days ago.
Ok he posted today that he is still playing it that is why I asked. Thanks for the info though.
Sorry about that. I had already started fixing it after I posted it. I didn't expect the forums to hack job the photos. I changed them all to links so you can see the original high resolution images by clicking on them.
Fan sites:
AION-On-Line.com
aionicthoughts.wordpress.com/
www.aionarmory.com/
www.aionglobal.com/
www.aionsource.com/
www.areyouhellbound.com/forum/
www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/game/253
www.onrpg.com/
Official sites:
www.ncsoft.com/global/
www.aiononline.com/us/
eu.aiononline.com/en/
Sorry about that. I had already started fixing it after I posted it. I didn't expect the forums to hack job the photos. I changed them all to links so you can see the original high resolution images by clicking on them.
lol, no worries, just wanted to see the shots, eheh.
The Open Beta closed about 4 or 5 days ago.
Ok he posted today that he is still playing it that is why I asked. Thanks for the info though.
Well, you can still play the retail. It just isn't considered OB anymore.
The Open Beta closed about 4 or 5 days ago.
Ok he posted today that he is still playing it that is why I asked. Thanks for the info though.
Yes I just logged into the game again and yes I'm still on what i think are the beta servers. There are only 6 servers listed when I pull up the server list. I am logged into the last one. I believe live has a lot more servers then just those 6 unless it is just showing me those 6 and not the others. It is possible I am now on a times account. Anyone know the command to check time left?
Fan sites:
AION-On-Line.com
aionicthoughts.wordpress.com/
www.aionarmory.com/
www.aionglobal.com/
www.aionsource.com/
www.areyouhellbound.com/forum/
www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/game/253
www.onrpg.com/
Official sites:
www.ncsoft.com/global/
www.aiononline.com/us/
eu.aiononline.com/en/
The Open Beta closed about 4 or 5 days ago.
Ok he posted today that he is still playing it that is why I asked. Thanks for the info though.
Yes I just logged into the game again and yes I'm still on what i think are the beta servers. There are only 6 servers listed when I pull up the server list. I am logged into the last one. I believe live has a lot more servers then just those 6 unless it is just showing me those 6 and not the others. It is possible I am now on a times account. Anyone know the command to check time left?
I don't know a command, but it tells you your time when you first log in.
But a new client wasn't released when the game went from open beta to live. All the servers that were in the beta switched over to retail servers. They didn't close the beta servers and open retail ones, they just used the beta ones as the retail servers.
If for some reason you are seeing another server list, try changing your region. If that didn't work, I'm not sure what it is. The client for beta and retail are exactly the same and nobody migrated servers. My retail character is the same character I've been playing since beta, in the same guild I've been in since beta, on the same server. So I don't know why you would be on a completely seperate server list; the server list has been exactly the same from beta => retail.
Like I said, the server list being empty, I'm not sure. But each account is credited a few hours of free game time, and when you log in to your character a message will come up saying your remaining time in the chat box in yellow.
Those are region's, there are 6 region's and about 15 servers under each region. (could be more servers now, have not checked in a long time).
Velika: City of Wheels: Among the mortal races, the humans were the only one that never built cities or great empires; a curse laid upon them by their creator, Gidd, forced them to wander as nomads for twenty centuries...
^^ what he said.
Ive got a 5 year old HP running this game real smoothly and a gaming computer running it smoothly. No lag whatsover while playing aion on each machine. Just play it on a computer with the proper graphics card.
how do u change the region, my friend picked a differnt one than me and i only know how to change servers in the game
how do u change the region, my friend picked a differnt one than me and i only know how to change servers in the game
When you first launch the game you get the "patch screen area" to the far right is where you change your region.
how do u change the region, my friend picked a differnt one than me and i only know how to change servers in the game
Click what I have circled in green on the patcher.
how do u change the region, my friend picked a differnt one than me and i only know how to change servers in the game
When you first launch the game you get the "patch screen area" to the far right is where you change your region.
Far left.
how do u change the region, my friend picked a differnt one than me and i only know how to change servers in the game
When you first launch the game you get the "patch screen area" to the far right is where you change your region.
Far left.
Doh..I meant left! It was the "other" right
how do u change the region, my friend picked a differnt one than me and i only know how to change servers in the game
When you first launch the game you get the "patch screen area" to the far right is where you change your region.
Far left.
Doh..I meant left! It was the "other" right
Haha, what's funny is, after I posted my screenshot, I reopened it and clicked everywhere on the left side just to make sure there wasn't another link for it lol
I have to read the rest of this later, but so far it is a good review
^^ what he said.
They opened a new region with only 6 servers or so which are free till 24 more or less, so he must be playing there.
Nice review btw, and i think that in fact the chars are not speaking in chinesse, so maybe the "chiken and stuff" when you bandage yourself means the same to them that to you
Great write up and right on the mark with my experience in the game. You might also mention that there are non instanced elite zones that you need groups to quest in.