This past weekend was Aion’s second Closed Beta Event, and I made sure to play as much as I could before the event and the weekend ended. Also, I know there are two playable factions to this game, Elyos and Asmodian, but I simply didn’t take enough worth-while pic’s of the Asmodian side of the world. Sorry.
I’ve been waiting for Aion since I first heard about it, which wasn’t so long ago. I haven’t been anticipating it’s arrival for years, like the hundreds and thousands of U.S. and European fans chatting up in forums. I’ve merely been waiting for about the last eight months. I even downloaded a Korean launcher and tried to get into the beta they were having and did the same when the beta went to China. All of the work was for naught, and I was unable to experience true gameplay, first hand. Until this past weekend.
Me so tiny. ME SO BIG.
After the 20+ hours of downloading the launcher and game files, I was finally able to log on. I was greeted with a sort of Japanese version of holy-pop-concert music that made me feel like I was about to watch a kickass anime. The login screen was pretty pimping, too, with a display of a large, white city built on a mountain side with overflowing lush greenery and smooth flowing water falls. After I was finally able to stop gauking at the login screen, I went into character customization and spent about an hour making eight different characters, one of each class and four for each faction.
The customization options for characters has more options than any other pay-to-play MMO I’ve ever seen, even more than SWG. Lip size, smile arc, tattoos, breast size, hair styles and more! I actually spent a good bit of time customizing some of my characters to look like real people I know. It turned out well. To illustrate the incredible differences in customization, I took a pic of the smallest and largest available heights.
After I got into the actual gameplay, I was beamed into a generic sort of starting area remeniscant of many Chinese made MMORPGs. For the first 10 minutes, the game felt very much like Runes of Magic, actually. Running around, picking up quests while killing level 1 mobs that are just walking around, and gathering nodes of plants nearby.
But as I ventured farther and began to accept more quests, I noticed that not all was as similar to free-to-play MMOs as I had previously conjectured. When I approached the first city or small village, I was just sort of running around turning in quests and picking up new ones, checking out what the vendors had, but then I stopped for a minute to just look around. Everything looked fantastic. From the textures on the floors and walls, to the NPCs and other characters around me. The food vendor was holding a basket of food and picking items to show off to the crowd. I decided to take a bit of a closer look at the scenery and ventured to a small stream nearby.
Catching fish in the stream. Sushi time, bitches!
The only reason I went to the stream was to check out the water effects (which were great), but then I got something extra. My character started reacting with the environment around him, started checking out the fish. He’d reach in to try to catch one, miss, try again, and catch one! It didn’t loot an item to put into my inventory or anything, it was just for show. In fact, the character even threw the fish back into the water.
Hiding from the rain.
From then on I would stop every so often to see how my character would react to new environmental conditions. The rain was great. It wouldn’t always just storm harshly or sprinkle lightly, in fact, it would alternate. Also, the rain wouldn’t start out of nowhere, the sky, environmental lighting and sound effects would clue me as to what the weather change would be. I remember seeing a flash of light and everything in the forest I was running through, all the objects, static, player and NPC, having yellow light cast on them, but not overlayed. Instead, it was faded from one side, as light hits an object in real life. Then thunder. Flash and thunder, again. Then I heard the rain falling through the trees before I finally saw it.
When it wasn’t raining, the scenery was just as beautiful. Critters were running around with the overt and passive mobs. Everything was attack-able, except for the NPC’s. Which leads me to another part of the gameplay, the quests.
A lovely day for giant-insect extermination!
I enjoyed the story-line, very much. But in the structure of the quest a feature I enjoyed the most was the ability to make choices in a particular quest line. For instance, one quest had a a smitten fisherman wanting you to give flowers to a nearby fisher-woman for him. After gathering the flowers, I opted to take the flowers for him, hoping maybe I could get some nooky or at least some sort of reward, but instead I got a disgruntled fisherwoman and a heart-broken fisherman. I wonder what would have happened if I told him to take the flowers himself?
Frank's meat pie was always the hottest dish on the plains!
Another feature of the quests that I really enjoyed were cutscenes. This little tidbits would help show you where you needed to go for what part of the quest, just in case the instructions on the quest journal weren’t clear enough (you, dumbass). The best part about the quests, however, were not how some merely tied into the local culture and people, as most quests in MMOs do, but how the main story-line unfolded to let you in on you being a part of something much bigger.
Turns out, all this fighting skill that you have is not natural; you were trained. You just don’t remember. A giant tree in a mystical forest helps you figure that out. He’s guarded by walking trees, sort of Wizard of Oz-esque, and helps you remember things long forgotten. You start to remember a war that happened a thousand years ago that tore the planet into two halves, and that you were a part of the war that rages even still. You are a great warrior, and you don’t get to just hear about and watch cut-scenes about it, you get to play as it!
You’re transported to this other realm, well, not really, you’re simply remembering it. But either, way, it’s still cool. There’s a line of soldiers there to greet you and you’re dressed all like a badass. They salute and cheer for you, proclaiming that now that you’re here, the war will soon be over! You get to fly around through the rift of space to a small chunk of land, forged around what look to be wyrm bones. You easily fend off several beastly looking mobs at a time and then a boss appears. The he/she/it thing goes down pretty easy and it looks like you’re about to win, until CUTSCENE! It knocks you back and flings you into a wall. You struggle, but end up passing out and wake up next to the crazy talking tree, again.
BAMF!
From then on out you realize there’s definitely something spectacular about you; you are some kind of chosen human-type dude with wings that can fly’n shit. So, you get some help to be transported to the friggin awesome city where all cool wing-type hero people hang out. It’s effing beautiful, btw. Once in the city, a parade of people salute your awesomeness and your return to the war effort. You are knighted as a true badass of badassed-dom.
After I was crowned King Badass of Badassadoria, I decided that the first thing I should do is run around, prancing like a sissy woman-like-man and check out what the city had to offer before I got booted off the server. I stopped at every shop I came by to check out the cool armor and weapons. The accessory shop was pretty spectacular because it offered different types of masks and sunglasses, all with different looks and all with stats (I like them not being jsut for show).
I'm sexy when I cook.
Then I spent the rest of my time checking out the crafting system. As far as I can tell, there are four professions. I only got to check out cooking and tailoring. It looks like a player could learn as many crafts as they have money for and what was pretty awesome about the crafts is that they give you quests to level. For levels 1~10, they give you all the materials you need to complete the quest and you simply repeat the quest until you hit level 10. Then a new quest becomes available for 10~20. It’s at this point that you begin to buy some of your materials yourself from a vendor that’s 3 steps away for dirt-cheap.
OH! That’s another thing. The commerce of the game. I forget the currency used, but it might as well be called “gold”, and it didn’t separate into silver and copper or whatever, it was just numbers. Like, at level 5 I had 1,300 gold and then at level 10 I had 15,000, with learning a new crafting skill costing about 6,000, I think? Also, I was clicking around on the user interface and noticed that as you gain reputation with areas, prices on things you buy decrease and you get more gold when you sell stuff in that area. Then I saw something else about taxes and there was a percentage next to it. Maybe that’s how much you would pay for a house or something? I didn’t see anything about lodging, hotels, or user decorated rooms.
I assume that if the game has any sort of personal lodging, it will be very similar to mog houses of FFXI or maybe even neighborhood-thingies, like in LotRO. The world didn’t look anywhere near expansive enough to build player cities, like in SWG. But that’s fine because I’ll trade player cities for streamlined gameplay and environment, any day.
All in all, I’d say from my experience so far, I rate this game an 8/10. It’s not perfect (which would be a 7), but I can already tell that it’s going to hook me in for a long run (going to be a 9 in later levels), but I have yet to play the perfect game (which would be a 10). I think I might have actually fell in love with this game because of the music and scenery coupled with crafting (I love crafting) and story-line.
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For more information on all of Aion’s features visit AionOnline.com. For information concerning discussion of classes and game play and much more, visit AionSource.com. If you’re a part of the closed beta, find out updated information at the Aion Beta Forums. If you want to get in on the closed beta, I suggest either pre-ordering the game or following the Aion members on Twitter: @Aion_Ayase @Aion_Liv @Aion_Xaen
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