Aion Shaping Up For US Launch 212
One of the most promising MMORPGs in development these days is NCSoft's Aion, a fantasy-based offering built on CryEngine. It makes heavy use of flight as a gameplay mechanic, allowing aerial combat and easy travel around the visually stunning game world. There are four basic classes — Warrior, Priest, Mage, and Scout — each of which have two subclasses. For example, Warriors can be tank-like Templars, or berserker-like Gladiators, while Mages can turn into a scholarly Sorcerer or command the elements as a Spiritmaster. Early previews of Aion almost universally comment on how polished the game seems — this is partly due to the fact that it has been up and running since November in South Korea. "Being stable, scalable, reliable and fuss-free is far from a given in MMOs, but Aion is all those things, and can already stand alongside the genre's usability kings, EVE Online and World of Warcraft. Its expansive, zone-free open-world environments look terrific and run smoothly on a wide variety of systems. It just works." Since the game is already in a relatively complete state, NCSoft has been running closed beta "events," where a portion of the game is opened for testing. MMOGamer has a write-up from the latest such event. Aion is due out in September.
Game is unplayable by all inelligent users (Score:5, Informative)
Given the presence of a rootkit that makes SecuRom look like unicorn dander and faery farts, I'll pass, thanks.
Re:Game is unplayable by all inelligent users (Score:5, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GameGuard [wikipedia.org]
After reading that, there's no way I'd install Aion.
What... money not good enough for you? (Score:2, Informative)
Are you really that wealthy? If not, what the hell's wrong with you?
I make a pretty good living, and not only would I touch it for $1000 per month, I'd play it for an hour even if I disliked it.
I know, I know. Figure of speech (sort of). It's just a particularly asinine one.
Played the Chinese and Korean versions... (Score:2, Informative)
The graphics are decent but it's a really boring game until you get a high level character for PVP. The leveling process is a long linear grind with quests that are even more monotonous than those found in WoW. If you play for PVE, World of Warcraft, Everquest 2, LOTRO and a variety of other MMORPGs are vastly superior in terms of quality and quantity of content.
The PVP available at level 25+ is quite fun, but your performance is primarily determined by your level and equipment. If I could start a PVP character at a reasonably high level with half decent gear I'd probably buy it. Unfortunately, to get to the fun part of the game, you have to spend hundreds of hours doing tedious PVE quests and/or grinding mobs.
Re:Game is unplayable by all inelligent users (Score:0, Informative)
Yeah... it's a great game except that it's NCsoft. Gameguard is in all NCsoft games... and that isn't the only bad thing about NCsoft heh.
Due to it's DRM I literally can't play. (Score:5, Informative)
In some issues Windows XP users may have problems with GameGuard due to the fact that the same "Windows Product Key" is installed on two computers and on the same router.
Both my machines have the same product key. Both are 100% fully legal. Both are on the same router.
I am doing nothing wrong yet their DRM will prevent me from playing the game.
Re:Eastern fantasy theme (Score:2, Informative)
Perfect World and Silkroad Online are notable examples of Asia-themed games, if you want to look into those.
Re:GameGaurd v. PunkBuster ?? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Game is unplayable by all inelligent users (Score:3, Informative)
No it's not. Neither CoH/V nor Guild Wars uses it.
Re:back in my day... (Score:3, Informative)
Quit it, it's ought. Ought means zero as well as naught, but to abbreviate a year, you would say ought, not naught. Gawd look what you made me write.
"Aught" [merriam-webster.com] and "naught" [merriam-webster.com] both mean zero, and either are acceptable in any context. "Ought" [merriam-webster.com] implies an obligation. Using "ought" as a variant of "aught" [merriam-webster.com] is archaic.
Re:A what? (Score:3, Informative)
You mean like this one [gamigo.com]?
Re:Aion. (Score:3, Informative)
I am a Aion beta-tester and have also played retail Lineage II (Hindemith/Phoenix) for the last five years. Whether your little birdies are correct or not depends on your definition of grindy and your past MMOs, I guess.
Aion's grind is nowhere, nowhere near that of Lineage IIs or other similar Korean MMOs. In Lineage II, if you don't cheat/bot and you play, say a couple of hours a day, it will take you a couple of years to reach level 80+ (especially if you choose to subclass) and you probably will never reach the actual level cap of 85. At levels of 79 and higher in L2, you'd be lucky to get one quarter of one percent (0.25%) of a level per hour, in a good party. Often much less (notwithstanding the vitality system that is pretty meaningless at those levels anyway).
On the other hand, you can reach the current level cap in Aion (which is an admittedly low 45) in a few of weeks of casual play. Now of course one would expect future expansions to raise the cap, but the point is, you certainly couldn't reach the level cap that L2 had at its launch (75) in a few weeks. In fact, it was almost a year before the first level 75s started appearing (not counting bots).
Having said all that, Aion IS certainly considerably more grindy than WoW (but then again, WoW's grind is much easier than most/all other MMOs). It's a comfortable middle ground between say Lineage and WoW, but closer to WoW than Lineage still I'd say.
Aion is NC's big attempt at bridging the gap between eastern MMOs (grindy, not very story-focused, hard to get gear but rewarding when you do, tough death and PvP penalties) and western MMOs (easier to level up and gain gear, but generally a much richer story and a greater variety of quests and other 'side' content outside of actually killing monsters). I think they've hit upon a pretty good mix and will further tweak it as beta testing continues. It has amazingly detailed character artwork ... it's simply wonderful and you can customise exactly how your character looks which should stop the cookie-cutter look of characters that has plagued other NC games like Lineage. The environments are not as spectacular as you might expect for the CryEngine, but one has to consider that it's an MMO, and besides I'd rather spend polygons on NPCs and characters than on environment (plus the environment still looks pretty good to me). Animations are also very well done ... the Koreans really know how to get the art and design aspects of things done well.
It's well worth a look if you think WoW is too easy or you think Lineage is too hard. Aion attempts to take the best of both. Its big shortcoming at the moment is lack of end-game content, but that's normal for the launch release of NCSoft titles (they tend to make sure the low level stuff is in there, launch, and 'finish' the rest of with updates and patches a few months later. For instance, L2 launched without its main feature, castle seiges, even existing yet ... it was added in the first main update ... but this was OK since there's no point in adding the end game content until there are enough players of a high enough level to use it.
I played the closed beta - you aren't missing much (Score:5, Informative)
There's really nothing all that spectacular about the game in my opinion. So far from all the closed betas all comments about how the client works, how the controls work etc have been ignored (it doesn't have any camera options for example, and it will not let you map any mouse buttons). It really seems the game is fully in Korea's control, and the US distributor (NCSoft WEST) has little to no control over the actual game system.
Every single quest - every single one was an incomprehensible request to collect x amount of rare drop, or y amount of monsters - no variety what-so-ever - and none of the quests actually have anything to do with lore until you reach level 10 and start working on your sub class quest, and even then the writing is atrocious.
The combat system borrows from FFO where you have skill chain combo's, and who gets to loot the monster is purely based on who damages it more - prepare to be griefed a lot by DPS classes anyone who dares play a healer or a tank.
Flight is incredibly lame. Not only is it on a timer (which means when you're "tired" you'll either glide down or fall to your death), but there are visblocks in places that you can't fly - not even WoW has this in places you are allowed to fly. The other thing - one of the core materials to collect Aether is only in the sky - one forum post commented it was "the mmo equivalent of cutting yourself".
You'd think in 20 years of multiplayer rpg games there would be something more revolutionary come along, but no Aion isn't it.
Re:Aion. (Score:3, Informative)
Current speculative thinking is that all the lead designers from WoW have been pulled to work on their next MMO, hence the changing of the game by the current lead developers.
Remember, even Blizzard was surprised at the success WoW had, and they certainly didn't expect to keep working on it for so long.