Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Quick Links
Aion 3.0 First Impressions
MMO_REVIEWER
Member Posts: 371
I'm going to be extremely straight forward and do my best not to give you the great wall of text to sift through. Aion 3.0 is 'nearly' everything that NCsoft promised and a bit more. Granted there's no swimming and flying in all zones, but what we do get doesn't disappoint.
F2P AND PAY 2 WIN
First, before I delve in head first into this, I'd like to clear any overhead. By that I mean the "F2P" sticker that just got placed on Aion's head. About half of the market looks at F2P and instantly says "pay to win" which is definitely not the case here. The closest thing to pay to win that aion did in the past few weeks was the distribution of the fabled tahabata weapons with the prepurchase of a cube. Sure they practically handed out a fabled class weapon(for about 40-60 bucks) but you have to think about this logically. The level cap was just raised to 60 and the weapon is level 50. I'm sure you are all pretty familiar with the 10 level rule. After 10 levels its time to regear yourself, unless what you have is the end all, beat all. So even if you did fall prety to their little scheme the weapon would hardly do you any good and you definitely wouldnt do any "winning" with it alone. Aside from that its not something thats not accessible to players as is. You can run the dark poeta instance, achieve S rank(which is easier now than it ever was) and [hopefully] have one drop. Now aside from that (which is a promotion that is no longer available) nothing is pay 2 win. Here is the link to their STORE feel free to browse it at your own leisure and see for yourself that nothing there is pay 2 win.
THE NITTY GRITTY
Alright now down to the nitty gritty; the patch itself. It was a pretty big patch, and there were a few issues downloading it. Most were directly related to Pando Media booster. I personally had to uninstall and reinstall that tiny piece of software 3 times before the install completed itself. But after that; smooth as butter - or maybe a baby's arse(?). So what came in this behemoth of a patch?
Simple breakdown:
Housing
Mounts
A few new zones
A ton of new quests(my quest log is FILLED)
New weapons
New skins
New armor
New pvp weapons and armor
Level cap increase to 60
New instances
More pets(including a tonka truck)
New skills and more stigma slots - as well as new stigmas
So theres quite a bit that came in it, and I'm only touching on the main features. There were several graphics fixes and bug fixes that were implemented as well. I dont know if anyone other than myself noticed, but before 3.0 shadows only rendered about 20 meters infront of you. That clip distance has been greatly increased. Just a small example of one of the fixes. Some armor skins also enjoyed a nice texture update as well.
SO HOW IS IT, REALY?
So, after I did a small rain dance to get it installed, logged in (to some INCREDIBLE login screen BG music) I got in the game and instantly dove in. I will admit I watched the intro video on youtube a few months before (in korean) and it sounded 100000000 times better than the english dubbing. Oh dear sweet baby jesus the some of the voices were terrible and others were not so bad. But then again who realy plays with the game audio on?
After bleeding from the ears I got into Sarpan (the first of 2 new zones). Dear god this place was huge. I was grouped with a cleric friend of mine. I think we ran circles around that place for an hour before we got to the first quest. The sheer scope of that city is absolutely incredible. [mod edit] The music, graphics and attention to detail just flow together so incredibly well that I may have put kleenex out of business from my massive amounts of fapping to my newly found nerd pron.
Not only was that main city huge but the forts were equally as breath taking. None, however were as awe inspiring as Tiamat's Eye. That place is just massive. Unnecessarily massive(that's what she said). There's a labyrinth of wind streams that will take you around the majority of it, but even traveling by windstream took FOREVER. I would look to my left and just see these massive walls that are just daunting. They look at you, laugh at your tiny siege weapons and proceed to face roll you, taking all your cerealz, pancake mix, and jail bait.
FOREVER ALONE
Now I will mention that the Tiamaranta region was a bit empty. When i got into Tiamat's giant massive big dick fortress I ran into one person of the opposite faction and that was it. Now I'm going to chock this up to it being the patches first day out, and everyones still hovering around levels 56 and 57. Hopefully when everyone is up in levels that place will be an absolute madhouse, sort of like the abyss was on release day of Aion: and the tower of eternity.
I got to try one of the new instances (Rentus base) in my time in the game. I have to say they are doing their best to come up with creative and challenging dungeons. However, we all know its a matter of time before a video pops up on the ol' jewtube showing how to solo the boss, or how to loci-method that ho. But until then try to enjoy the challenge and not be lazy bums who want hand outs *holds out his hand* now where's my next piece of eternal +15 gear...
Looking back to the new zones, both Tiamaranta and Sarpan are ABSOLUTELY MASSIVE. Imagine Inggison x2; That's Sarpan now multiply it by 3 and you get Tiamaranta. I realy cant describe with words their size...you just have to look and see for your self.
I logged out of Aion today feeling satisfied, thinking I had taken in all my poor little brain could handle. Then I realized "I completely forgot to look at the housing area." [mod edit]
Now as far as the houses it seems like they still have a bit of work to do. Most people are stuck with a studio at the moment. The studios are tiny, they're studios what do you expect. Tiny in real life and tiny in game(thats what she....no...too easy). But hopefully once everything is up and running full steam ahead the housing will be awesome. I toured the ENTIRE zone and it looks pretty killer. Now don't quote me on the housing info. I'll admit that I dont have all of the details.
WRAPPED WITH A BOW
3.0 and truly free just bring so much needed change to Aion. I've never seen the servers so populated ...well not since release. It's nice to see the game some-what thriving again. In every zone i went to, even the newb zones there were tons and tons of players, new and old alike. So if you're thinking of picking it up because youre a cheap arse and like free stuff then dont hesitate to download. Now is probably the best time. And don't worry about the leveling curve It's nowhere near as steep as it use to be, and not only that the mentoring system added in patch 2.7 will move you along nicely. It was a smart move by NCsoft to launch 3.0 and F2P. Now I think aion atleast has a leg to stand on. Now if only they'd send me chocolates wrapped with a bow.
~Cheers
P.S. Damn gave you a wall of text anyhow.
MMO's are the ark of the gaming world. Let it take us in new directions.
Comments
thx, was a nice review but too much more information left, along next weeks the game will be outstanding i think with all those new features, maps and skills
what was the name of your cleric friend? =P
Thanks for the nice write up. Can't wait to re-visit the "new" world.
Unfortunately I think the game might be doomed:
Why?
1 - Servers are spammed with non-english players. I'm not sure if these servers i'm connected to are for the entire world or what? WoW, DAOC, RIFT, LOTRO, EQ2... you name it, any game i've played in the past few years had nowhere near as much non-english channel spam as this game. I think it really turns off American players to only understand 10-20% of what gets said in chat.
2 - The Cash Shop is not Pay 2 Win, in fact it isn't pay 2 anything. If they gave me 10,000 credits free I wouldn't know what to spend it on. There just isn't anything useful in the shop at all.
3 - Zero moderation will kill the community and eventually the game (again). I see more bannable (in just about any other game) player names and guild names in this new Aion than anywhere ever.
4 - Zero moderation (again)... the chat channels are spammed with horrible non-sense. I'm not talking about chuck norris jokes or the random nerdrage cause someone got killed. I'm talking about constant flood of negative, racist, and hateful chat directed at every random person and comment.
5 - Grouping, how can you find a group when the LFG channel is the only global channel and is being used to spam non-english and general global spam.
Honestly, moderation is probably the number one reason this game is going to fail again. If someone nerdrages in global cause they got ganked once in a while, thats fine, ignore it. But the chat in Aion is by car the worst of any game I have ever played. And yes i've been in many Barrens WoW chats, AoC... you name it.
I agree with the hateful racism and such in chat. They have been doing a bad job of banning for that kind of thing, but then again NCsoft have always been really bad at banning people. I just end up blocking all the racist trolls and I've seen a few posts for groups in there so far. Mostly just people discussing the game which I'm okay with. The shop having almost nothing shouldn't be something that makes the game doomed. They are being very careful with it to make it so it isn't pay to win, which is why they have little anything in there so far.
The way I see it with that is that it's impossible to moderate something like that. If you banned people for saying hateful or racist things you would have to ban your entire playerbase atleast once. Aside from that there is a very handy block list...Utilizing that can make your life and LFG a bit calmer. In most cases the "hateful" things being said aren't as hateful as you may think. Usually (from what I've seen) it's two guys who know each other pretty well just being goof balls in LFG. The only time actual hateful and racist things are said is when someone brings it on themselves(from my experience).
LFG is not the only place to advertise for groups. There is the LFG window. Post your group there wait all of 3 seconds and boom! grouped. The chat doesn't fly by nearly as quickly as Painlezz exclaimed. There is a 30 second timer on the LFG channel and it goes by at a pretty steady pace.
If community is what kills games for you then i suggest you leave the MMO market entirely. Ever since the release of World of Warcraft MMO communities have never known peace. WoW brought in a whole new generation of gamers and attracted people who had never been gamers and converted them to the nerd side. So hating a game for its community is, at this point, fruitless. Unless you go back to old school Everquest or DAOC you will never see a good community. Why? because those same guys spouting "nonsense" in LFG will be checking out the same games as you, and theres nothing you can do to stop them.
On another note NCsoft cant exact afford to go on a banning spree. Their player base is slipping as it is and they had to go F2P to get their numbers up so banning people would be counter productive.
As to the cash shop there are actually pretty useful items in there. Just because they weren't useful to YOU doesn't mean that 100,000 others didn't find it useful. Some things are just novelties like the costumes and weapon skins. NOW with that said...would you actually want something useful in the shop? Lets say they put a pack of Manastones on their, or high-level enchantment stones, or even some mediocre godstones. If that happened youd be singing "that shop is so pay2win!!!!!1@12!". I know i would be. They did what they could to keep a revenue stream without putting gamebreakers up for sale.
and lastly "non-english spam?". I'd like to know what server you are on, because everyone on Tiamat speaks prose english or atleast ebonics. occasionally you will see some korean text in LFG but that's normally from someone mis-typing something that was meant for group chat. And are you some kind of non-english language hater? Would it realy bother you that much if someone asked a question in spanish in global chat? Does it honestly bother you that people actually speak other languages(I know, we should take them out back and stone them for not speaking english: the language of the gods!).
That aside I think the game might enjoy alittle more success before laying down to rest. It may even save itself. They're doing everything they can to make a comeback. This is, seriously, the hardest I've ever seen a dev team work to try and save a game. NCsoft obviously believes its salvagable. Either that or they have something realy big planned for its future(other than F2P and 3.0).
MMO's are the ark of the gaming world. Let it take us in new directions.