Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Quick Links
Chinese Open Beta First Impressions (Spoilers)
Just wants to put my 2 cents in on the Chinese Open Beta. I've been playing this for about a week now, started last week, quickly jumped on the English translation pack and was good to go to actually play the game and give it a LVL 1-15 beta overview. Basically I came into this with medicore expectations. I don't normally expect much in a game from NCSoft, L2 was the only game they've ever created that I give them 'props' for. This game would probably be the 2nd, mainly because of the great graphics engine and character customization options. It's not quite AOC graphically, but the gameplay is much better (doesn't say much at all).
Since it's open beta and there arent many servers, I'll start by saying that the queues are HUGE in the AM for me (i'm in the U.S., but otherwise I can get in fine. Hopefully this wont be how it is when the game is retail but who knows.)
Character Customization
Probably one of the high points for Aion. There are only 2 races, Elyos (the good guys), and Asmodians (the bad guys), both have pretty cool customization options. Even though there are only two races, you can make yourself look like an elf, a dwarf, a fat giant, pretty much whatever. They have options for making each body part larger, thicker, skinnier, etc. Lots of faces, hair types, and facial hair types, ensuring that everyone doesn't look exactly the same.
Starting area
Not much of an intro at all in the Beta, not sure if this will change. You basically start off in a newbie island type area where you have forgotten your memory. Apparently at some point in time earlier you were an elite warrior of some sort who was defeated by some retarded looking Medusa like creature, which you find out a bit later. You travel through this area and do various WoW type quests (kill 6 of these, loot 5 of these, etc) to advance to level 9 or so in which you will pick your specific class and move on to the main city of your race.
Classes
I'm sure most people who have read anything about the game know that there are sub-classes ala EQ2 back in the day before they got smart and did away with the linear class progression stuff. Warrior/Scout/Mage/Priest. Each of these has 2 classes to choose from upon leaving the newbie island at level 10. All the skills you get up until level 10 are shared skills between the 2 archtypes, and once you choose your class you'll start gaining unique abilities that the other archtype doesn't have access to. The classes for the most part are pretty cool, it's very WoWish in more than one way, but nonetheless it's not bad. It looks like all of the classes can solo pretty well, as I'm sure a lot of this game will be spent solo quest grinding. Not really anything new in that category but hopefully at higher levels I'll have more to report on.
Leveling
At low levels pretty much all of the classes suck besides mages who can just annhiliate the crap out of the newbie area mobs. Everyone else is spending double the time killing the mobs and constantly bandinging or healing themselves (if you're a priest). Bandaging is available to everyone, and the bandages are hella cheap so you'll never have a problem carrying at least a hundred of those bad boys. They heal for a lot and have a short ~15 second cooldown, so after each battle you can do a 3 second bandage and you're GTG for the next fight. There are also various alchemic potions in the game for in combat health and mana restoration.
Skills
For the most part the skills are very much like other MMO's, minus the "Chain Skills" that are somewhat new to the genre. Basically a lot of your combat abilities are going to trigger a chain of other abilities that you can choose from. I.E., opening sword attack followed by either 1) additional damage or 2) a small damage shield (this is a low level warrior example). It looks like they have the potential to be pretty cool.
Grouping
I've been playing with mostly Chinese players so I haven't done a LOT of grouping minus the groups I've done with a few RL friends. Again, very WoW-esque in the looks of the group UI as well as the rest of the UI. Will report on this more as I have time.
Itemization
It seems like there are a lot of armor choices in Aion. Once I left the newbie area and started seeing more and more players around 20+, I've been seeing lots of cool looking armor. This is one thing NCSoft did a great job with. Regardless of everything else, you get to look like a badass. Weapons and armor look great. I haven't seen any "class specific" armor yet, but I'm hoping that there is some.
Botting
Botting sucks. There's no doubt about it. When you see someone that is obviously botting, it pisses you off and you want nothing more than to be able to turn on FFA pvp and kill the bastard who is leveling while he's dead asleep IRL. Unfortunately you won't be able to do this unless he's the opposite race as you, but I've already seen some instances of Grade A Douchebag botters in Aion. They're already in the game, and the highly acclaimed GameGuard anti-hacking system that Aion uses apparently doesn't have all of the kinks worked out of it. Hopefully that will get fixed as botting is something irks me to the point that I don't want to play a game any longer. Luckily it's pretty easy to spot a botter and if the GM's are quick to respond they'll hopefully be taken care of swiftly. I'm sure farmers will be an issue in this game just like every other MMO, so we won't even go there.
Final thoughts
Aion has some potential. It didn't make me shit my pants with joy, but I wasn't expecting to in the first place so I'm not upset about it. The game has some solid points, however in most ways it is a WoW clone with some tweaks like chain combos and cool looking angel wings. I think it'll give people a good option between staying with WoW and trying a similar game in a different world with different graphics and some new things to do. Hopefully once I've gotten past 20 I can comment more on the PVP side of things and how the progression in the game continues, but at the early stages of the game I am not overly impressed.
THANKS!
Comments
perhaps Character Customization in Aion is an epic step among mmos .
The graphics in Aion is the most sparkling point catch my mind
Forget to say, much grateful to your share
Gameguard isn't highly acclaimed. It's a terrible anti-hacking software. The only other one I know of that's worse than it is X-trap. While I'm not a hacker (I do know programming though) it's so ridiculously easy to bypass Gameguard. I was going to post an easy method for a hacker to bypass Gameguard, but I'm going to refrain (any decent hacker will figure it out anyway). Punkbuster is a far better anti-hacking software. All these anti-hacking programs do nothing but create problems (for instance I can't load up a Ventrillo Overlay program with some of them) and I haven't seen any of them make a good effort towards cleaning the hacking problem.
World of Warcraft has "The Warden" a program designed specifically by Blizzard. It's actually a pretty decent anti-hacking software and unlike the others it generally won't cause issues for people running non-malicious overlay programs. It definitely doesn't solve the problems of botters (it does a good job on hackers though, but even it doesn't solve all of that), but it does a decent enough job. Far better than any of those stupid anti-hacking programs.
good review
but
wow is not the god of all games
as you mentioned
Grouping
I've been playing with mostly Chinese players so I haven't done a LOT of grouping minus the groups I've done with a few RL friends. Again, very WoW-esque in the looks of the group UI as well as the rest of the UI. Will report on this more as I have time.
Who would bot on a beta? Also its chinese ppl we are talking about, maybe the guy was just playing like that did you interact with him, most ppl cant even communicate in english. We managed to setup our guild and invited a couple of friendly chinese guys that we could communicate with everytime we did party with them they were like bots, so it could be that you simply are mistaking bots with chinese tenacity.
The game was really great for our guild, to the point we are actually considering purchasing and playing on the chinese servers until its released in europe, we went just to test the game and see if it was any good, my veredict , YES! it is very good, the game is very polished, crafting has alot of depth and is meaningful.
Group quests are awesome, we had a solid group for Krall (Elyos side) we started off at 18, first time we went into Krall it really felt epic, no instances, an unknown place, felt like Dragon Valley (for the old L2 players) when you enterered the first time back in C1 and it was really hard, then we did some exploring and found the chieftain Kraka which did reward us with some nice blue belt, havent had this much fun in a while, where you dont feel like you have to rush through levels.
Its been alot of fun these last few days... and lastly MY favorite feature , "Express Mail" when a squirrel thingy with a backpack comes and delivers the mail to you (genius the guy that came up with that).
I like the review, its nice to see impressions coming from all different people. Although you do tend to have the bias of comparing this game with WoW, unfortunatley its become somewhat of a benchmark to gaming which is both a good and bad thing.
One thing I'd suggest is to read more on the lore of the game too, there are no 'Good & evil' races, both are potentially either.
Im sure I read somewhere (or watched) that the idea of Aion was not be some amazing groundbreaking game, graphically, gameplay wise or other, but the intention was to polish up the best of Western and Eastern MMOs to create something that is truly enjoyable for all types of gamers. Whether that will prove succesful over here is something that remains to be seen, but looking at the numbers in the east, it definitely has a good chance.
It'll be a long while until anything takes down the giant behemoth that WoW has become, and it'd be naive to expect this to be a 'wow killer' (I love that phrase), but we can only hope the mainstream gamers remain in WoW so that MMO communities become the way they used to be. *Dreams of the old school Ultima days*
--edit-- Typo ;-)
Which Final Fantasy Character Are You?
Final Fantasy 7
Just want to point out that I in no way think WoW is the god of all MMOs. I was comparing Aion to WoW because they are similar in a lot of ways. I'm much more of an EQ guy as that was my first MMO and longest played. I'm still playing the Chinese OB but it ends tomorrow. Since NA may not see an OB and retail won't be until Fall, I'm most likely going to subscribe on one of the Chinese servers. One in particular has a good number of English players and guilds who don't want to wait for NA retail. As I've now pretty much played all of the classes to 15 I'm going to start pushing forward with one (Ranger) and update more and try to do a more indepth review. BTW Armor just keeps looking cooler and cooler as you progress.
Any chance you could give me more info on the servers the english speakers are likely to live? (and any guilds would be awesome too), im tempted to join the chinese retail myself, albeit temporarily until our release anyway.
Thanks in advance ;-)
Which Final Fantasy Character Are You?
Final Fantasy 7
Same here. If anyone knows where the english players are going to head to once it goes live, do share.
Just want to point out that I in no way think WoW is the god of all MMOs. I was comparing Aion to WoW because they are similar in a lot of ways. I'm much more of an EQ guy as that was my first MMO and longest played. I'm still playing the Chinese OB but it ends tomorrow. Since NA may not see an OB and retail won't be until Fall, I'm most likely going to subscribe on one of the Chinese servers. One in particular has a good number of English players and guilds who don't want to wait for NA retail. As I've now pretty much played all of the classes to 15 I'm going to start pushing forward with one (Ranger) and update more and try to do a more indepth review. BTW Armor just keeps looking cooler and cooler as you progress.
i will wait EU release unfortunately
Believe it's spelled Azariel. Good luck.
Just want to point out that I in no way think WoW is the god of all MMOs. I was comparing Aion to WoW because they are similar in a lot of ways. I'm much more of an EQ guy as that was my first MMO and longest played. I'm still playing the Chinese OB but it ends tomorrow. Since NA may not see an OB and retail won't be until Fall, I'm most likely going to subscribe on one of the Chinese servers. One in particular has a good number of English players and guilds who don't want to wait for NA retail. As I've now pretty much played all of the classes to 15 I'm going to start pushing forward with one (Ranger) and update more and try to do a more indepth review. BTW Armor just keeps looking cooler and cooler as you progress.
I felt the same way. It was like playing a much prettier World of Warcraft.
I'll reply to a couple things here without quoting since they're common topics discussed about Aion.
1. Yep, Aion is a -lot- like WoW. Shouldn't be a shocker since that's basically what NCsoft set out to do from the start. More correctly they set out to make a 'classic RPG game'. The major difference is that Aion focuses a lot more on PvP. The high level zone, I forget the name of it at the moment, is super-pvp oriented. There are at least 15 or so forts that you can fight over and claim for your guild. Your guild then gets direct benefits from controlling forts. PvP also gets you access to gear through some resources system (points of some sort).
Basically Aion is more like WAR as it should have been, imo. I played on the Korean release for about a month and it was a blast. Only reason I'm not anymore is because it was just too much of a hassle and I didn't feel like losing a year in the switch to NA. The air combat was really plain, but they were working hard on improving it.
2. Aion is -not-, I repeat, -not- an Asian grinder. I don't get why people keep saying that. Look at the company, not the game. The only real hardcore Asian grinders NCsoft has made was the Lineage series. However they also made Guild Wars (asian grinder? lulz), City of Heroes and a slew of decent casual games (ex. Exteel, Dungeon runners, etc.).
3. Even with how 'WoW-like' (WoW isn't exactly all that original, let's not forget that) Aion is it does what it does better, imo. There's more pvp. The pvp is more meaningful and is generally more well designed.
To be completely honest Aion was shaping up to be a good game back when I played it. While we may not have gotten it first, we'll be getting a game that will have had nearly a year to be in release state and mature from there. That's a major plus in my book. As long as the western localization team stays quick and current with patches (meaning within a week of Korean release) I think Aion will be great. I think people are kind of sick of how just plain silly WoW has gotten, I know I have. It will be nice to have a game that's fresher and still has very focused minds behind it.
nice review. I do have 1 question which you might end up adding to your review. The actual fighting. To my understanding Movement has alot to do on the outcome of the fight. moving left or right or strafing left or right when the mob is about to attack give you more evasion. moving backwards lowers dmg taken ect. and movng foward while attacking leads to a harder hit. Ok that is what i got from the video that came out not so long ago.
While i did play aion for a bit i couldnt put much attention to the game due to some wars im participating in eve, so i really didnt get to test this in combat. If you have done so comment more about it. is it very annoying or is it actually fun to pull off?
Watching Fanbois drop their soap in a prison full of desperate men.
I tried to instal the chinese open beta client but could not run the program as it keeps giving me the error message and boot out of the client. I have already off my firewall and still unable to run. I dont have any problems with other MMOs at all.
Anyone can advise what is the problem with it? Also is this open beta turning to P2P today?
2Moons/GuildWars/FFXII
The botting programs need to be beta tested too
. Not a joke actually heh. The people who sell leveling services like to be up and running on day one and they will test thier programs throughout. Also the gold sellers will want to use those programs too as the higher level you are the faster you can accumulate gold and gear to sell.
For the companies that dont think its worth shutting down bots in beta as the stuff you gain will just be erased anyways miss the whole point. Beta is the perfect time to test anti botting policies and procedures just as much as it should be about finding programing bugs etc.
Just like the fact there are never magic builds to make a piece of crap into a rose garden at release, there is no magic pill that is going to suddenly get rid of all the exploits, botting etc that are rampant in a beta by the time of release. IE if you see this stuff in large numbers in beta you will see it in large numbers at release and chances are the devs will be a month behind the botters/hackers/exploiters and remain that way for a long time.
If it is indeed a better WOW, I'm intrigued. From all the videos, the art style is sort of similar leaning a bit more anime, nice high fantasy, bright and colorful. The animation is superb. It all moves very smoothly. The UI seems nice. And from what most people have been saying, its not riddled with bugs and doesn't play like your typcial Korean grindfest, so I'm in when it releases in NA. Having a nice head start in the East to work out the problems is great in my book.
I've waiting for a MMO thats better than WOW. WAR and AOC certainly never came close at least for me.
Just incase any of you guys are wondering, now that China is live, timecards are able to be purchased through various online sources that sell that type of thing. It's extremely cheap and apparently there will be no required retail box purchase so it will most likely cost you between 10-12 a month USD if you were actually interested in playing on the Chinese servers (in English, of course). Unfortunately, it's also obvious how much farmers have come into play ALREADY with the server barely being live, as it rolled over from COB and didn't wipe. Farmers are sadly already selling millions of in game currency on farming sites. However, on the CHINESE servers, it's not hurting the economy whatosever as I have seen so far, Chinese players aren't biting. I think buying currency is more of a lazy NA thing, none of the auction house prices reflect an inflated economy. Hopefully it will stay that way.