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Aion Review
Going to Korea for a business trip has its advantages, getting to play Aion! So here's my review. Just as a side note, I've played Lineage II up to 55, Wow to 80, and FFXI to 75 on multiple jobs.
The first thing I noticed is that this game is basically a perfect fuse of Lineage II and WoW.
The graphics, fighting animations, classes, and environment is VERY Lineage II influenced. Theres also those stone type things that you equip to your weapon to do extra damage and end up buying in the thousands.
The looting system, item rarity, party system, UI, quests and flight paths are basically cut and paste from WoW.
With that being said, I'm level 12 and liking the game. I played with 2 friends and we partied the whole time, doing all the quests together and had a great time. If you play by yourself, I'm sure you going to find it feels like WoW but with slower leveling.
For the flight system, think druid bird form...sorta. You have a green bar that charges while you are not flying. While flying it starts to decrease. If it gets to the end, your wings dissapear and you fall to your doom (unless your high enough up that you can charge a bit while falling and then open them again before you hit the ground). The controls while flying are same as WoW. I personally use W to move and then just hold the right mouse button and use the mouse to steer in any direction and the game responds very smoothly.
I didn't do much flight combat, but what I did experience was a bit difficult. Positioning yourself in three dimensions can take time, time that you dont have because of the green bar. I didn't do any flight PvP, but I imagine its not very effective because you can fly straight up, drop your wings to fall, or fly any other direction to get away if things get hairy. Basically both people would have to just hover and exchange blows...which you can do on the ground. But like I said, I haven't tried.
Along with the normal take and turn in quests, theres the story quest line which you have to do to get your wings and do the first class change at level 10. Every once in awhile the quest text would be accompanied by a cutscene full with voice overs which brought me back to my FFXI days and was awesome. For awhile FFXI was the only MMO which had that and I never really understood, definitly makes you feel more involved (and pay more attention) with the story.
Oh, also, the character creation is terrific! 30+ hairstyles, dozens of faces, height and width bars, and a full color palette for hair, skin, eyes, and lips.
With that note, I have a request. With the character customization, you have the option of making your character very tiny. Like...up-to-a-normal-height-characters-knees tiny. My friend told me when the game first came out, most people choose the normal height or a small variation of it. Then, when they realized the large PvP aspect of the game, it dawned on them that being tiny made you hard to find and target. And thus, now 80% of the Korean Aion's population could fit in a handbag.
Ok...so I understand the slight advantage it has in PvP. But honestly, having a bunch of rodent sized people scurrying around the towns kinda ruins the seriousness and epicness of the game for me. I don't know NCsofts opinion on this, or if they are going to do something about it for US release, but if they don't...please please PLEASE don't let this happen to the US version 
As I said, it just makes a beautiful and cutting-edge game feel silly and childish to play.
I don't care if theres giants running around everywhere...just don't make your character small v.v
And for the record, I do NOT believe this game will be a WoW killer. It took me 10 hours of hardcore quest grinding (and my friend has a level 50 so he knew exactly where to go for everything) while in a party to get level 12 (partying does not gimp you in any way for exp, questing, or other). My friend told me it took him a week to get level 12 when he played by himself. Theres enough quests so it hasn't felt like a 'grinding game' for me yet (unlike L2), but I've heard it does get a bit worse. I don't think the game is "casual enough" to beat WoW. To me, WoW is the MMO for non-gamers, and this is just a bit too hardcore for people like that and I can forsee them quitting after a week or two.
For me, as someone who used to wake up at 3am to camp Fafnir for 4 hours, it's not bad at all.
Comments
I agree with the whole being really small thing, it sucks that you can't have a great creation system without some people abusing it.
Unlike you I did get to try out some flight combat, and it does change things around a bit. you move faster, so people can close distances while you are casting more eaisly, and people who were fighting me told me some of their skills couldn't be used.
and it took him a week to get to 12? I got to 13 the first day of the beta event. sure it was semi hardcore grinding, it WAS my first day playing the game, and we all tend to get a bit into it right when we get a new MMO, but i also tried out 2 other classes part way up, and didn't know there was a /rest command, and was trying to /sit to regen faster.
also you give too much credit to WoW, many of the things you say Aion took from WoW.. have been around for a long time, they are simply the MMO standard. but many people do this, not just you.
ummm yeah... another Aion review from someone who got to their teens ;p i wish we could get some more but next beta only goes to 10, so no hope there.
Everything creates huge amounts of negativity on the internet, that's what the internet is for: Negativity, porn and lolcats.
Im sorry i like your review and all but it took me about 8 hours played time from starting a character to make it to level 12 or so, and that was having never played the game before and having bot trains 4 levels higher than the content i was fighting killing everything in seconds.
I made lvl12 in about 8-10 hours also, and don't expect flight combat to be any good at the lower lvl (you just don't have enough flight time build up). When you get in your 30's then you will see flight time and speed increase. You do get more exp fighting regular mobs solo but get ton's more exp in groups vs elite mobs.
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...
The problem is that what the experience is like for the first 10-20 levels means nothing at all.
Does everyone remember how AMAZING AOC was before it had a full release? When everyone had only played Tortage in the open beta and thought it was the best MMO ever. How about WAR and its FANTASTIC gameplay, balance etc when people had only played T1?
ALL MMO companies make us look fools by loading the start up with good stuff and letting people make thousands of 'reviews' on how amazing the first tiny bit of centent is.
Now I am NOT saying Aion will suck. What I am saying is we need more info on endgame. While 500 reviews of the first 10 levels is nice it really only helps MMO companies to trick us out of our money. I know its hard to get the end game info from people, but thats what really matters. Who really cares about levels 1-10 when you get through them in 3 hours. What we need to know about is end game where you could play it for 1000 hours.
Fuse of Lineage 2 and WoW is what I thought too but I'm talking about the graphics and environment as well!
nice reveiw a teeny bit one sided but i thought it was an overall nice reveiw
playing on the CH servers myself i can only disagree with one thing it only took me the best part of a whole day to lvl to 11 im currently testing all classes to get an idea of what to play on EU
but nice reveiw either way
have a nice day
You did that much grinding to get to 12? You musta haven't been doing quest. That's crazy. It took me no time to get to 12.
-In memory of Laura "Taera" Genender. Passed away on Aug/13/08-
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RISING DRAGOON ~AION US ONLINE LEGION for Elyos
Define "no time"?
I think if player's are reading the quest's and not going crazy there is a good 8-10(possibly more) hours of game time from 1-12.
If someone had came up to me in 1980 when I was on my Atari 2600 and said we will be playing games with thousands of people at the same time.I guess my response would have been,"but I only have 2 joysticks"
http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/thread/235780/page/8
Define "no time"?
I think if player's are reading the quest's and not going crazy there is a good 8-10(possibly more) hours of game time from 1-12.
If your actually reading the quest, you have a real sense to learn about what you are doing, even more about the story behind your character and your faction. That should not equal the amount of time you put into going from 1-12. If your doing that its more for an enjoyment as well too, if you know what I mean. I can't actually calculate, but i ran though with 3 characters and it got shorter each time. I think the first time will be longer than the next time you do going from 1-10.
When I say no time, it was fater than that of which it took the OP. To say it's a grind from 1 to 12, if it wasn't what would you expect later on? I don't think 1 to 12 is nothing to complain about. There is plenty of quest to get you to level 10 and even the last quest to leaving the island will boast you all the way up to 9 (with the last quest making you hit 10).
I think 10-12 is not gonna be fast unless the person has a goal of some sort. You got flying, more quest to get, etc. Now maybe if you straight grind it would hapen like that. The game from 1 to 10 should be solo, but it's optional. At the end you may need a party or a group to hang around (such as dealing with the Abyss Portal).
-In memory of Laura "Taera" Genender. Passed away on Aug/13/08-
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RISING DRAGOON ~AION US ONLINE LEGION for Elyos
I wonder if the exp rewarded in the US/EU version will scale differently than the other regions. Doesn't seem like it, since the quests and a minimum amount of mob path clearing was enough to reach level 10+ before the ascension to daeva. I didn't know pretty much anything about the game up to the beta and it still only took me Friday night to reach 12 with an chanter. Saturday and most of Sunday I almost leveled a cleric to beta max (the most fun I had was a party against some elite mobs). I also had time to check the other classes but didn't level them past level 10.
I did play more than I would normally do, but not excessively (was too sunny to miss the sea hehe). Maybe my exposure to both eastern and western MMOs helped catching up. Aion certainly borrows some game play elements from Lineage 2 (from what I could preview), like soul-shards equivalent, the hardness of mobs, weapon enchanting, speed of regeneration etc. The movement is pure WASD though with point-n-click strapped on the Left Mouse Button to annoy us (I would have preferred camera panning on that button). And of course the levelling speed is on par with western inspired games of the new crop. I still think 1-20 is a bit too fast, seeing how I reached it in just two days (and I was reading everything, I'm a lore freak hehe).
Xasapis, thats a good post there. You will learn things will get a little rough after 25, you will have a lot more to do.
-In memory of Laura "Taera" Genender. Passed away on Aug/13/08-
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RISING DRAGOON ~AION US ONLINE LEGION for Elyos
In 1.1 or 1.2 they implemented a Relaxed Experience system if you are logged out for some time which should help with the leveling. At least with the amount of mobs you need to kill and additions in the amount of quests you need to do.
I only leveled to 25 because thats a huge landmark in where you actually get to visit the abyss and see what it's like. I can probably do 1-25 in half the time now, maybe even less because the lag is very noticable as a Ranger.
A lax leveling system designed for casual players, that's definitely something that will be positive from this update.