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.
A Waste of Developer Time (Score:3, Interesting)
Most of these companies have the wrong idea. When I place an MMO, I'm usually using a visual angle that has me looking at a downward angle toward my character from above. Generally speaking, I miss all of the impressive scenic stuff. Occasionally yes, I do stop and admire the visuals or I may stop and look up if I'm searching for something. However I think most of these companies are wasting most of their talent on impressive visuals when in fact I would prefer these two things much more:
1)A game that looks good on something less than a top of line GPU - I would prefer graphic efficiency to graphic splendor. When you have 10-15 guys running around a raid inside of a huge environment with 50 monsters and lots of trees and other stuff my FPS grind to a halt. This then leads me to turn down the detail defeating all the effort these guys put in to their product. My system is a dual core with a ATI 4870 GPU, it still stutters unless I turn down the details.
2)Easy guild management tools for Guild Leaders - How about giving me some tools to manage my guild more effectively especially when I'm not online? Being able to assign a guild quest to somebody so they will go gather some resources fore the bank even when I'm not online would be nice. A lot of players will only do this when I'm online cajoling them in to it. How about using the quest journal like a PDA or a digital organizer?
Re:Game is unplayable by all inelligent users (Score:5, Interesting)
Hides the process, monitors the memory for stuff, blocks calls to Direct X and the Windows API, places hooks into dlls , sometimes breaks in Win7, breaks Google Chrome, SpeedFan, Eclispe, various drivers, Steam, anti-rootkits(but that was expected). Oh, and a security problem to top it all off.
The bright side is that Aion works on Win7.
And I expected something this bad to come from EA first.
Eastern fantasy theme (Score:5, Interesting)
I've wondered for a long time why none of these MMO games from Asia (Lineage, Lineage II, Aion, Granado Espada, etc) have an art direction from mythology and fantasy of the region. It's all a baroque looking western fantasy setting. Finely decorated plate armors, massive double bladed swords and axes etc. Personally, I think samurai look great, katanas, japanese armor, martial arts inspired magic ala Avatar (I know, it's not magic, it's bending). I know that the east Asia has more cultural diversity than I'm describing.
The only games I can remember that tried an art direction like that were Jade Empire, Throne of Darkness and, oddly, Summoner. I think Jade Empire did pretty well, but no word on a sequel from the company that gave us Neverwinter Nights 2, KOTOR 2, and is giving us Mass Effect 2.
TOD and Summoner are both relatively old games, and even though Throne of Darkness was made by a lot of Blizzard vets, it didn't do that well at the store I don't think. Certainly not well enough for Click Entertainment [mobygames.com] to make more games or even exist anymore. Summoner got a sequel, but I don't know if they kept the art direction. I guess Red Alert 3 has some anime influence in one faction.
If we expand into console games while we're on the subject of Summoner, there was Shenmue and I guess any fighting game.
This is all just from memory so I'm happy to be shown as wrong and learn about some good games I might have missed or forgotten.
Re:Aion. (Score:4, Interesting)
Once the top levels reach 100, we're going to have > +500 stat bonuses for plain blue items! Just starts to border on ridiculousness to me.
unless Blizz can find some way to resolve the inherent inflation in game stats with every expansion, some things will be interesting but more and more it will be just a rehash of past instances and game play. Wintergrasp was an interesting expansion of BG's but by itself wouldn't be enough to keep me interested.
i'm in the beta (Score:3, Interesting)
So far i can say, like Guild Wars (also by NC Soft)... it is gorgeous. It makes WoW look like a cat turd vomited by the dog. i didn't get far enough in to play with flight, but it's pretty fun. i'm looking forward to the next round.
However comma it's still just like all the other fantasy MRPGs. Grinding, twinking, gold farming, inane quests for golden rat spleens that change nothing. WoW - Warhammer look + Guild Wars look + Flying. Adding flight and gorgeous graphics isn't enough to make it truly different than all the other life drains for me. i prolly wouldn't play it for more than a few hours a week for a month or two.
i'm waiting for a replacement to PlanetSide. Something that involves... skill, teamwork, strategy, tactics, etc.
GW used instancing beautifully to move your character *through* the story. In other games, no matter how many golden rats you kill, there are always more. The NPCs don't seem to notice, neither does the story.
Re:Alternate Universe? (Score:4, Interesting)
In some ways you're right but in other ways it really doesn't matter.
The vast majority of what happens on "the screen" in EVE is simply eye candy.
The concept of actually flying your ship over selecting targets on the objects list and being auto piloted there is pointless. The flight sim aspect of EVE is a waste. Sadly this is what made the space sim genre great in the first place (I recall nearly pissing myself the first time playing Elite on the C=64)
Beyond that all you have is a bunch of text boxes. Seriously, what do you miss in the game outside of those boxes? The game is beautiful in terms of graphics but I've never seen a game with a GUI that uses it less. Once you step outside of the HUD data there's nothing to do but look around and admire some graphical artists work.
And that's the suck thing about the patch that was done in the last month or two. I used to play on an old tablet but their new client made it unplayable because the graphics chipset didn't support pixel shader 2.0 (I believe it was 2.0). But why not? Why not leave a stripped down HUD version of the game? I know that maintaining multiple clients has to be a pain for them but come on... I can play the game just as well from nothing but the HUD data and not miss out on anything as far as the true core of the game play.
Re:Game is unplayable by all inelligent users (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, thank you sir. That quite nicely explains why installing Aion brought my brothers' computer to its knees a week ago, forcing a reformat. We'd thought it an unrelated issue, but more research reveals the culprit is that shitty WoW clone, which he'd only installed to placate an online friend.
If you can't handle botting or cheating on the server end - be it via technical or design means - then you fail. Don't shovel a watchdog off on the client because your design team are too lazy to plug holes.