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Aion: Assault on Balaurea Launch Day
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
The first expansion for Aion, Assault on Balaura, has launched on all servers. Balaurea will give players new zones, quests, pets, weapons, items, skills and more. The best part is that the expansion is free for all Aion players.
New Instances: Aion hosts eight new instances each filled with fantastic challenges and enticing rewards. These new instances experienced at both lower and higher levels offer a range of challenges for all varieties of players ranging from solo adventures to full-on Legion raids.
Pets: Pets are no longer only decorative. Aion redefines how MMORPGs approach pets, creating an entire new subsystem for players to explore as they acquire functional pets capable of storing goods, assisting with crafting or acting as guardians by alerting their masters to nearby enemies. Pets are acquired through in-game purchases, quest rewards, item drops, NCsoft Store, and special promotional events.
New Zones: Players will explore the vast lands of Balaurea, the home of the Balaur, ruled by the Dragon Lord Tiamat. The Asmodians and Elyos have established fortresses in the two new zones: Gelkmaros and Inggison, each area featuring completely new environments, powerful monsters and unique flight mechanics for players to enjoy.
Increased Level Cap: Five additional levels can be achieved. With an increased level cap of 55, characters will discover new weapons, earn new items and learn new skills as they explore the dangerous lands of Balaurea.
Enhanced Flight Mechanics: Brand new flight options in the form of Windstreams allow characters to traverse the vast new zones of Gelkmaros and Inggison with increased speed and unlimited flight time. Windstreams have varying strengths and effects, adding a further layer of depth and strategy to Aion’s highly-acclaimed flight mechanics.
Find out more about Assault on Balaurea at the Aion site.
Comments
Here are some videos of bosses in the 12man raid introduced.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6QRQLEHykE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UdKRNt_1Hh8
Highly acclaimed flight mechanic.....you mean the one in which melee can't be involved in still to this day. Highly acclaimed is a bit of an overstatement.
Hope it goes well for them!
Seems more like a melee combat mechanic that is flight related. The flight mechanic in general in Aion is relatively good.
Can't wait for the servers to come back up.
For those of you who had problems with their flying PvP, it's being taken out in 2.0
New "ground abyss"
Misinformation. It's not being taken out. There's just a high-level ground PVP area. The melee problems while flying still exist.
For a vast number of early players anything ( and I mean anything at all ) they do now is too little too late , and that includes yours truly . They blatantly ignored all warnings during and after beta concerning the lack of content and the grind- factor , not to mention botting and goldselling. Only when they realized folks were leaving in droves did they address those issues - or at least attempted to - but by then their credibility had dropped to below freezing .
Concerning this expansion : it's mediocre at best . Pets isn't something completely "revolutionary " . Even a big number of F2P titles have elaborate pet-systems . The more I watch how Aion is being handled the more I think this title isn't worthy of a subscription .
It is a complete failure in western hemisphere in terms of retention of early players . That variable is always indicative of the long term success rate of any MMO . If and when folks start to quit en masse after a few weeks ,chances of you reversing that trend are extremely slim. And Aion only had the fancy looks going for it from day one ( unlike Tabula Rasa which had far more going for it ) .
Slander. The flying exists but is no longer used. You will never be "while flying" again.
It's better and more popular than any other MMO released since 2004.
ITT: WAR/AoC
Still has more subs in the west than everything but WoW so not sure where your going with this. This expansion is giving the western players exactly what they want. Personally it makes me very happy.
No it doesn't . The press has asked for subscriber numbers numerous times but NCsoft has steadfastly refused to supply them . So you are merely speculating how many subscribers they have ( or worse : you believe the PR-babble Ncsoft is feeding you ) . I have witnessed firsthand how the population declined very rapidly after just a few weeks ( to the point server mergers were in order ) never to rebound . Entire guilds folded due to members' mass exodus
It does not have more subs in the west than everything but WoW, they took far too long to release any updates at all, they suck at communicating any REAL information with their community, and it's definitely NOT a BETTER game than Age of Conan or LOTRO. It's level curve is ridiculous, and only a very small portion of players ever made it to 50 in the first place, so raising the level cap doesn't make much sense. Especially since I doubt they're really telling the truth about speeding up the progression rate with this update, they've said that like 3 times now and it's never made a bit of difference. That in itself is probably what discouraged people from keeping up with the game.
I hope this update is successful and that it brings players back to the game, I hope that they start building up their subscription rate again and somehow miraculously rebound, and I hope this update is what everyone wants, but until I see extended reviews of this expansion and hear from friends how it's adressed the concerns of western players I won't be playing again.
rikwes condemns Aion for the same kinds of things that every other game is guilty of. That's not a reason to satisfied with Aion, but it is a reason to not single it out. I've played the game on and off since beta, and I don't remember things quite the way rikwes describes them. I remember Aion reacting very strongly and swiftly to players. For instance they were combatting botting and gold selling even before the game was released in NA. Then when it got bad, they dropped the ban-hammer big time and that effectively minimized the problem. The last two updates addressed the grind-factor. rikwes has selective memory.
The average AoC/WAR server has 250-350 players logged in at any time. Aion servers have 4,000-5,000 logged on at any time. There are also more Aion servers than AoC/WAR. It's blatent going from one game to the other which is more popular. My Quad Core @ 4.00GHZ struggles at the broker in Aion.
This. I've been trying to explain to most of my real-life peers the population status right now, and they always bring up the fail comparisons of WAR and AOC. It's not even in the same ballpark.
That's not true, AOC and WAR has no way of accurately counting the amount of people on a server at any given time, the search function caps very low in both games. I can tell you though in Age of Conan they have several thousand people on actively on most of their servers at peak hours, I know this because of how many huge/active guilds I associate with on there when I play.
Aion does not have 4-5k on at any time :P theres like 1 server where they may have 2-3k at any given time, teh rest are ghost towns. Also the imbalance between Asmo and Elyos is pretty insane, so if you are playing Elyos you have a very 1 sided window to look through.
You search level 1-10, 11-20, 21-30 for each individual class and talley up the results. It was very easy in AoC as you only find maybe 4 or 5 for each result. In Aion, however, it caps out if you search for level 50 Clerics, and you have to search class by zone by level.
"Ghost town" servers were merged together. All servers are over flowing with activity at the moment.
Do a search on any server then if you think they dont have 4-5K.
Most servers have over 1500 level 50's alone on at primetime, with a ton more between 30-49.
Anyone comparing WAR/AoC's population to Aion is a bit misinformed.
Not to say that the game is perfect, or even good. It has way too many issues that I doubt NCFail in the West is going to be able to fix.
I play both factions, and both servers have pretty decent populations at all hours. All of the servers have a healthy population, balance issues are still there, but that's not population lacking in numbers, that's population being swayed one side on any given server. I have yet to run into anything remotely close to a ghost town since I resubscribed, the population was almost shocking at how high it can get, or seem.
The problem was that the game was advertised as being a quest-grind game like WoW, or at least it was made to appear that way, thus all the people that flocked to the game in the hopes that it was WoW's shiny successor, or WoW's primary alternative (and there are ALOT of these people), tried it out for a month or 2 and inevitably quit: Game was never meant for them from the start. There was grinding, ganking, Eastern art style, game got more and more group-based the closer you got to 50, it's a nightmare for any WoW player.
All that coupled with the gold sellers and bots were too much for these players => you have the mass exodus that happened during the first couple of months, it weeded them out.
What happened after the population took a dip after the first couple of months? it continued to decrease but at an extremely slow rate for a few months then stabilized => late server merges.
Disregarding the fact that free tranfers messed up server balance, Aion has now 13 fully-packed servers if I'm not mistaken, and is still hovering between #7 and #10 on xfire, has been that way since after the population's strong decrease after the first couple of months.
You make it sound as if they advertised and marketed Aion as a PVE game. It wasn't, it was well-known for over a year before the NA launch exactly how the gameplay was. Anybody who got caught up in that hype is responsible for it. You had plenty of chances to jump into the game on established foreign servers and play, or read the reviews from those who had.
That said, the leveling process of Aion is virtually identical to WOW if you ask me. This game IS a quest-grind game. I have never ran out of quests to complete through multiple characters, and they keep adding more and more content. If you grind, it's your choice to. Don't blame the developers. The only real difference is the time it takes to achieve max level. You quest as much as you do in WOW, throw in the instances every so many levels, and it's a pretty nice leveling experience. Don't make it into a race to 50, to be maxed out, and to super leet, the game can be very enjoyable and rewarding without feeling like a heavy grind.
Of course it's their fault, Aion had been out for a year before launching here. That doesn't change the fact that those who didn't research properly had a different idea of what the game was really about, it wasn't clear enough and NCwest didn't bother to make it clear who were their audiences.
Sure you can solo quest to max level, but it's mostly an awful experience. 2 of my friends quit the game because they played it like they played WoW. Quests used to give 2-3mobs worth of exp which is ridiculous, it's nothing like WoW's solo experience where you are drowned in solo quests from the get go to the endgame, and it's enjoyable.
To enjoy Aion to the fullest you need to have diversity, you simply cannot play it like WoW, and that's the main reason for the mass exodus after the first couple of months, coupled with the ganking and all the gold spams + bots.
Don't take it wrongly but the problem is, they dont want you to quest grind all the way to 50, which in my books is alright, because in wow, if you quest grind to 80, then suddenly change from questing to raiding, you'll really hurt yourself..
Aion will let you grind to 50, but the easiest way is ofc, is questing/ group grindin in abyss.
P.S. : I love wow, still subscribed, have some 80's and all.. gng to buy collector cata, so im no wow hater, but love it for what it is.
Majority of people who posted negative in thsi post you can tell havent played in months. The 1.9 patch basically (wowized) the game. It has no hard leveling curve anymore air pvp does still favor range or the fast. But thier was things put in place to balance that people just too carebear to learn how. Then they came in forums complained because it was too hard. All games are not meant to be hello kitty pvp. I see people complain in the same manner in conan and gw1. In fact wow the main reason for so many pvp qqers. Has stated their own pvp was inferior and needed revamp.
1. Leveling was never hard ganking made it hard. Now its laughable at best easily done.
2. Gold spam is everywhere every game its hardly a bother now in aion hasnt been for months.
3. Aion's staff constantly communicated with fans check their home page its littered with it. The problem with this game in the manner of changes is this. Thiers two sides of the coin west and east balancing both causes delay. East is more patience west isnt we qq bitch and act like we have no home training.
4. Western gamers are historically lazy asses get over it we are. So any game that makes us actually work and kill like old school rpg days you get high powered bitching.
5. Also if your gonna bash something and im talking to the previous posters. TRY LOGGING into the game researching BEFORE you come on here with opinions. Because its painfully obvious some of you havent played the game in a long long time. So your dated opinion is invalid at best.
Since the game doesnt have serious bugs, didnt have at the beginning eirher, poor trolls and haters can only say about gold spammers and grind. Its their job to find some things to accuse the game in order to "speculate" poor population. Aion is a very good game with healthy population, get over it pls.
He that lives upon Hope dies farting.