Aion beta

Aion

So I ordered the Aion collector’s edition from the NCSoft online shop, and started downloading right away. After enjoying the Belgian internet speed for quite a few hours I waited for the next beta event to start.

Once started, I logged in right away.

I decided to choose for an Elyos female mage, which will then specialize to be a spiritmaster. I don’t know, I just like the feeling of having

The power to summon spirits!

Once choosing the above, I got to the first amazing aspect of Aion. Character customization. With over XX different face and body parts to change this is this is the most customizable character I have ever seen in a game. You have the choice to either use presets for the face and body, or you can customize it yourself using the sliders.

Finishing my look I created my character and hopped in game. As expected I saw over 50 people in my screen. The starting area was fully packed with first-time players. Here comes the second great feature of Aion: Channels.

You have the ability to change to a different channel if you think there are too many people in your area. There are 10 channels to choose from, so you should always be able to do your collecting quests without having other people stealing your items. I changed to channel 8 and the amount of players in the area decreased to a few, like 5. One of the first quests was to collect something from wine barrels. Sitting in channel 8 I saw a few people collecting these barrels, so I changed to channel 9 to find nobody do it. I had all barrels for myself and the quest didn’t take over 2 minutes.

While questing I was again amazed by the visual quality of Aion. Using Crytek’s CryEngine 1 this game was bound to look great for a mmorpg, and it really does. Every player looks truly unique, and the same counts for the NPC’s in the world. Also the terrain and vegetation looks amazing. The most brilliant thing of all is the quality of the water. I was truly impressed when I saw the water; it actually reminded me of playing Crysis.

It didn’t take me long to notice nice background effects. In the starting area Poeta there is a big manta ray flying over. I asked a friend over teamspeak with which I was playing at that moment whether he could also see, and it indeed he could. Really nice to see these things synchronized.

Now let’s look at the game play. I found questing to be a unique experience. I haven’t had the same amount of joy in doing what usually is so boring, leveling, questing and grinding. Having reached lvl13 I still haven’t had to grind. There are plenty of quests. Talking about quests, this is quite interesting. There are 2 kinds of quests, the campaign and the standard quests. The campaign follows the story of your character and how he advances through his life. Standard quests are sort off side quests which you can do. While a campaign quest might be a series of quests to rescue of a farm of attackers, a farmer near your questing area might give you a standard quest to collect some pumpkins for him. This is very neatly placed and balanced, and when doing all quests you shouldn’t have to do any grinding. Well I haven’t come across any yet.

The user interface is much like major other mmorpg’s. You will have the usual quest log, but now with 2 different tabs, one for the campaign and one for the standard quests. But here comes another unique and great feature. You are able to put check in the checkbox next to every quest to enable its tracking. Al quests selected for tracking will then show up on the right side of your screen. Upon completing the quest it will not just disappear, but then say something like: “Return to Meron and deliver the mushrooms”.

When reaching lvl9 a new campaign quest appears. This will lead you to become a deava. Every race, elyos and asmodians, are divided into 2 kinds of people. The humans and the deavas. The humans are normal people; the deavas could be considered the elite. They have the ability to summon wings to fly or glide. At lvl9 your new campaign quest appears to lead you to become a deava at lvl10. Then you will acquire your wings. Also at lvl10 you will be able to change your class, but more about that later.

An important and unique aspect of Aion is obviously flight. Once you got your wings you can start flying in only certain areas. While things like these are normal in mmorpg’s, many people think its lame and it doesn’t make sense. But not in Aion! The lore actually explains why this is happening. When the Tower of Eternity had it cataclysmic crash dividing the planet it 2 parts, it started leaking the magical substance “Eather”. You need this Eather to be able to fly, and it’s only present in certain areas. The first area you will encounter as Elyos will be the Verteron Citadel.

Flying gives you some very features. As a ranged class you can just fly above your target and take him down without even having the trouble of being hit. Although you cannot do this all the time as your flight time runs out, it is a nice way of escaping in an emergency. Next to flying you also have gliding. This can be used in area. When jumping press space again while in air, and you will star gliding. This only works when you are walking down a slope or jumping of a hill, you cannot go back up, only down.

Back to the classes. When creating your character you can choose between 4 main classes. Warrior, Scout, Mage and Priest. Each class has 2 sub-classes which can be chosen upon reaching level 10. As mage I had the choice to become a Sorcerer or a Spirit Master. Both classes are ranged dps. The Warrior will divide into the Templar, a tank, and a Gladiator, melee DPS. The Scout can choose between an Assassin, melee dps, or a XX, ranged DPS. At last we have the Priest who can turn into a XXXX.

Much like other mmorpg’s, every class has different skills and armor wearing ability’s. As a Warrior you’ll find yourself wearing plate or chain armor, while a mage will be running around in Cloth. Something very interesting is that the Chanter can also wear chain armor. This can turn him into an interesting healer or dps. I personally still haven’t quite understood that class or what roles it will be playing.

Also the creatures around the world are very fun to interact with. At a certain place you will be walking through “Spore Road”, where you will see the 4 NPC mushrooms called: Shroomy, Shroomo, XX and XX. I like these small additions of comedy in the game; it’s always a good laugh when playing together with friends.

Talking about friends, Aion also features an extensive social system. You can add friends to a friend list, and enter a Legion. When questing together with other people you can create a group and invite them. This might need some channel changing for some people. Also the chatting system is similar to other mmorpg games. You can chat to the world, whisper to friends, talk to your legion or type to your group.

Like all mmorpg’s, Aion has a huge open world. This means you will be traveling around for a great deal of your time. To shorten this time, you will have a few features for faster traveling. The first one is simple gliding. Once you become a deava you can glide down slopes and mountains, and this is a very easy way to boost your speed for a short amount of time. It also really makes traveling less boring.

The second way is to use flight paths. You can ride on manta rays from certain points to others. Although, riding on them is not quite the correct expression. The manta rays seem to hold you, which look really great.

For even further distance traveling you have portals. You can talk to teleporter dudes who will open a portal for you to jump through.

Basically there are plenty of methods to travel. Although some may cost more than the other, I haven’t had any problems to pay for them.

That’s another great thing I like in Aion. I have never had any money problems, or in the Aion currency: Kinah problems. While questing and killing mobs I simply look everything from the corpses, which I then sell to a random vendor afterwards. I soon discovered that this actually brings a lot of money; way more then you need to pay for your traveling. I actually managed to always buy the best gear from armor and weapons vendors if they had anything better then my quest rewards, and was always able to expand my cube if needed (the cube is your backpack, increases amount of inventory slots).

Reaching level 13 I had a nice amount of Kinah, over 30 thousand.

Traveling with a manta ray costs about 200-500, teleport 1000-1200 and when dyeing the cost to recover my lost XP is around 1500. I can pay for all those things and my Kinah actually still increases.

Here’s another thing I haven’t seen in a game yet. Whenever you die you will lose a, although it’s relatively small, portion of your experience. Once you resurrect you can buy, the lost XP back off the Soul Healer. The higher level you are, the higher the costs are. The good thing is you can keep losing all your xp, but you won’t level down.

This might raise another problem though. Once you reached level 50 and you start pvp’ing and pve’ing, you will eventually die… a lot… and loose your xp… But since you don’t level down anyway, who bothers to buy the xp back from the soul healer right? But what will happen once an extension comes out, and the level cap is raised? Will the people who want to advance from level 50 have to buy all that xp back of the soul healer? That would be a ridiculous high amount of Kinah, requiring hours of farming.

I personally think it’s too early to speculate about that, I’m sure NCSoft will recognize this problem and invent a solution. Personally I would ‘reset’ the experience of all level 50’s once the level cap is raised; only for the people who have reached level 50, so they can level on!

Leveling in Aion seems to be really fun as I mentioned before. Leveling to 10 took me about 6 hour’s total which is really good in my opinion. Once I try leveling above 10 it starts to go slower. I personally don’t mind, leveling is really fun in Aion. I don’t have the feeling of “get to highest level as soon as possible as leveling is just boring, and the game only starts at max level”. I enjoy every second, which I never had in any other mmorpg.

2 weeks later: Right, I think I have to change my opinion. Once you get to level 20 everything starts to… well… suck.  Leveling is boring and takes ages. I simply.. quit.