It’s 2:40am and I’m putting a bit of time into Aion.
At the moment, I haven’t played for roughly a week, and I’m not really sure why. I love mmorpg’s, however, I’m beginning to think that I may be done with with genre for a while. I have been really enjoying Aion so far, but I think it’s just a mental block of getting involved in an mmorpg again.
After playing WoW for nearly 4 years, you begin to be spoiled with content. I can’t help but compare a lot of the features and play style to WoW, it’s instilled into my conscious. I find myself only playing Aion now for only about an hour max before loosing interest.
Another thing which I think attributes to my lack of interest in mmo’s in general is that I’ve also begun to be much more involved in my own web projects. I’ve stepped up my involvement with my work and freelance designs. Also, I think it’s because I don’t really feel like leveling at the moment, I just want to experience end game content.
It’s been about a week after the release of Aion, and today we’re going to take a look at how the game holds up to expectations and handles in game play.
One week later, it doesn’t seem like a long time to asses Aion, but I feel it’s important to take note of the initial impression of the game and how it holds up to my expectations and how it holds up to other MMO’s I’ve played all over the years.
A Little Background…
I would like to consider myself an MMO veteran, playing the genre for almost 8 years now. Certainly not as long as other MMO veterans, but I’ve gotten around .
My first introduction to MMOs came with Everquest, no surprise at all. Although I did not spend a lot of time with this game, seeing I was still dominantly preoccupied with console games, it made the impression on me. From EQ I moved onto the abysmal game known as EQOA, however, I did have a lot of fun as it opened the door to guilds and meeting many awesome people online. From EQOA, I believe my next major game I moved to was Star Wars Galaxies, where I played almost every class, making quite a nice name for myself on Lowca as Seef Murlu. I still have very fond memories of pre-cu game play, and am anxiously waiting on the SWG EMU. From SWG I moved between a variety of other games such as Ultima Online, Maple Story, and many other free mmorpgs. Finally, when WoW came out, I purchase the game on the first day, and had massive amounts of fun raiding on Shattered Hand as Droogie in my guild Forgotten Lords. After years, WoW lost its luster and I decided to take an indefinite break from the game.
From early roots in EQ to SWG to WoW and then on to a slew of free mmorpgs, I’ve finally come back to P2P mmorpgs with Aion.
Enter Aion
Steaming with excitement, my friend Dez prepurchased the game after his GF had been playing the Open Beta. We all needed a fresh start, due to the fact that WoW had become more than dull. A few days later, I also purchased Aion. As the prelaunch came around, I entered the game and decided to take the path of the Spiritmaster, as detailed HERE.
Level 10 and upwards
I work full time (more like 60+ hours a week), so I tend to play casually, only playing about 2 hours a nigh, if that. I didn’t play any this weekend due to a rave (which was amazing), so I was only able to reach level 17 within the first week of the launch. I believe I have enough information now to make a reasonable assessment of the game.
One Week Later: The Good
These are some of the things I’ve really been enjoying about Aion thusfar:
Player interaction has been pleasant
Every player I’ve run into, besides the trolls, have been fairly nice and generally leave me alone. People aren’t kill stealing or been extremely aggravating. There seems to be a different level of maturity within the game so far.
The Play Style and Graphics are fresh
It’s nice to see a new game with new graphics and game style. I applaud WoW for being able to run on basically anything, but the cartoony graphics have hit their wall for me. Although Aion isn’t that far off from WoW graphics, I’ve been enjoying a lot of the scenery. I also have found my skills to be very fun, as I don’t have to bind every possible skill just to do a chain.
SpiritMaster Rocks
At first, I thought that the SpiritMaster was a mistake for me, until I got my multiple dots and DP skills. Once I pop my skills, I’m able to multipull and chainpull, which I love because I love multitasking. It adds a whole level of excitement having to handle multiple mobs.
One Week Later: The Bad
Aion has been quite an interesting game thusfar. Although I have no major complaints, I do have a few pet peeves about the game:
The controls feel a bit sticky at times
While casting, it seems that my character seems to either casts and moves around fluidly, or seems to get stuck in animation even though I’d like to move. I guess I’m too used to WoW, where I can cancel my casting by moving, but with no sort of stickiness.
The Quest tracker is a bit blah
The quest tracker is a bit annoying at times, because it’s somewhat helpful, but then also completely worthless. Some quests in Aion are very detailed, telling you where to find items and NPCs, while others simply just say to “do this”, but without any sort of location. I guess this would give me a better reason to read the quests, but I generally don’t care for stories in MMOs (as I think many people probably don’t either). MMOs for me are more about interacting with other players while having fun, not reading pages of text just to go grinding. It’s more like doing chores so that you can enjoy harder chores at different levels, which is one of the only flaws of mmos.
The Quests seem to be circular
Again, this is a subject that I feel I’ve been spoiled on. Many of the quests in Aion have you running back and forth in circular patterns, but there doesn’t seem to be any sort of interaction at times with the game. One quests you’ll have to go kill a group of mobs, just to run back to do something mundane afterwards such as open a box.
What’s Next?
Well, I intended to be level 20 by Sunday, but that day has already passed, and I’m 3 levels short. My friends and I don’t want to out level each other too fast, but with everyone’s odd schedule, we’re not able to keep in sync as well as we’d like. However, each of us have been enjoying the game throughly and it looks like Aion will stick around for a while (so far). The future holds a lot of temptation with the release of KOTOR, but being able to micro manage multiple games is equally fun.
I took it a bit easy today because I was really exhausted after getting home from work, however, I did manage to put in about 2 1/2 hours
I am what you would call a “Casual Gamer”. It wasn’t always like this, nooooo sir! I used to play my PSX/N64/Sega/NES/SNES until early morning, which is probably why I have such bad insomnia these days. As I progressed from consoles to computer, I found a home in Everquest. From there, I moved on to SWG. A year here, a year there, and I found myself bouncing between games, until WoW dropped.
After WoW came out, I put easily 9 hours a day in, and that’s even during High School. After HS got over, although I should have been doing something productive, I found myself in a raiding guild, putting in 18 hour days, 6 days a week. Now THAT’S a grind! Flash forward to today, and I’m now a casual gamer. I have too much work to do for my job and the freelance projects I work on to merit calling myself “hardcore”. But I digress, today is about Aion.
Let’s Log In
Well, as expected, I was hit with a queue, which was surprisingly not too bad, only about 400 people in front of me with a wait time of about 30 minutes. Quite glad we chose this server now after hearing all the horror stories from the other servers. So Dez, Mandi and I decided to run some quests. Dez and Mandi had already been leveling during the day to catch up, and were ahead of me by a level, along with a couple quests, but we went back and did the ones I needed to catch up.
I Chose SpiritMaster!
Yup! I decided on Spiritmaster because I’ve always loved pet classes but I haven’t played one for ages. In EQ I was a cleric. In SWG I was a TK but went Creature Handler for a while. In WoW I was a mage and warrior. So this time I wanted to play something that is a bit more support, but would also allow me to solo a lot since I’d be playing casually and may not be able to group as often as I’d like.
I went over and drop a ton of money on my new skills, and grabbed myself a fire elemental.
I paid good money for that mustache.
To Verteron.
Killing crabs, bandits, and all sorts of goofy critters, we got our asses handed too us by some GIANT ENEMY CRAB.
But that’s no biggie, cause it was quite hilarious to see a bunch of other people getting wrecked by him as well.
After about an hour, our quests started to get a bit wonky and out of sync, so we decided to take a look around the Sanctum and I decided to finish up any last quests in Poeta.
Finishing up some Quests
Back in Poeta, I only had a few more quests to do, including a yellow one. After grinding my way through the mine, I collected all the little trinkets and blew up the gate, woop woop. Afterwards, I turned in all of the quests and got a round of applause.
"Good Job" said the weasel demons.
Finally, I went back to Verteron to take a few snapshots, and man, this one really is something else. I gotta hand it to NCSoft for creating a pretty beautiful game. I love the elephant creatures in the background, they’re very Dali.
So that wraps it up for Day 1. GREAT SUCCESS!
Oh yeah, before I go, here’s something for you to think about…
It’s Day 0 Part II, and with the sever change, I was able to get a lot game play in.
The new server: Ispharel
The toon: Tihkal
Thoughts: Hell Yeah!
Beginning
On Day 0 I checked out the feel of the game for a few hours, which was right away good fun, however, I wasn’t able to queue into the server I wanted to play as, so I didn’t bother doing much.
Before I got home from work, I checked my Facebook, which Dez sent me a message saying we’re changing servers. Once I got back, I queued up for the server, which surprisingly was only a 4 minute wait. I created my two toons: Tihkal and Pihkal after the books written by Alexander Shulgin and his wife. I also had a bit of influence from METHOD Man
Upon logging into Aion, I began a few quests, actually reading the quest logs, which had a pretty decent story. This didn’t really last too long as I wanted to just level and check out what the higher levels were like. I also wanted to get away from the starter area, an away from the general chat trolling.
I began checking out the first area for the Elyos called Poeta. I really like the visuals in game, and each of the mobs felt pretty fresh for a change. It’s been almost 5 years since I’ve truly played a new mmo. After running around and getting acquainted with the UI and controls, I began to run some quests. After about an hour I was level 5 and pretty much had the controls down.
The first fun skill chain that I go was Flame Bolt I -> Blaze I. This started quite the killfest. Blazing through the mobs, I continued to grind out quests. Finally Dez logged on and I changed up channels to meet with him, which was about 1 level lower than me.
Around the same time, Keegan logged on to play as well, he was already level 11 and was mostly checking out how to fly and setting up a Legion, which we’re currently using SQUAAARE (inside joke).
What I noticed right away is that Aion appeals to the ‘big numbers’ crowd. Damage at low levels was already doing hundreds of damage.
Continuing on with the questing, I went into the later areas, such as the Daminu Forest and Kabarah Strip Mine. Each of the quests were no problem, but it still surprised me to see so many people dying to passive mobs, lols.
I decided to test out the private shops as well, setting up in Channel 1 with some of the green items I found from killing some rare spawns. These sales went pretty well, selling for a couple thousand. Sitting still was getting boring so I decided to continue with my quests.
Along the way, I saw a guy named SexualChocolatte (a lengthy black man, quite smooth with the ladies):
Mandi eventually logged on as well, creating a new character after we bounced servers a couple times. She’s a complete technoweenie, but we accept her.
At level 9, I received my…
Ascension quest
While running over to the Cliona Lake, I ran into another gentleman:
SUPERFLY!
He's a bad mothaSHUTYOMOUTH
So I filled up my vial and took it to the tree dude, I call him Stumps. He goes into some sort of seizure and tells me to go finish my quest. Cut back to a psuedo video where you’re flying around…
Weeeeeeeeeeeeee
Where you quickly dispose of 4 mobs. Then the boss comes out, which is quite easy, which also cuts into a cut scene…
Falcooooooooooon.....
OOF!
You got knocked the FFFF out!
It was a lot like this, minus the bike:
So you fall back down, and pop back out to do your quest. Which takes you to the Sanctum!
But that’s all for Day 0: Part II, I’ll tell more about the game tomorrow during the official launch!
So, Dez decided that we’ll be playing on Israphel now instead. That’s no problem because we haven’t actually started our real characters yet. The change was due to the high queue times of Azphel, which was hitting the thousands. It’s no fun to wait more than 2 hours to get into the game, and having to play casually, I don’t get much time to play in the afternoons.
So, this is Aion Overload, the game blogs of some of the players of the game Aion (durr). We all purchased the Aion collectors edition, so we are able to get into the game early, 2 days early to be exact.
On Sunday afternoon, at 3pm, the servers opened up. Then the headaches. Don’t get me wrong, we’ve all experienced this before back when we played WoW (Shattered Hand was one of the worst servers during launch – such headaches). No biggie though, it was Sunday afternoon, so nothing really to do except play the game.
We plan on playing on the Azphel server as Elyos. However, this dream is put on hold, queue infact, of about 2011/2011 aka. over an hour wait. So, eager to play, we hopped on another server and began to feel around in the game.
I haven’t played WoW for about a year, but I did play it pretty hardcore for a while (generally 12-18 hour days), and I must say, Aion is quite polished. Lately, I think everyone seems to be MMO shy, because they are so used to a system (WoW) that anything new seems like it’s not good (isn’t WoW). The transition was really great feeling, a new game, a new style. Nothing seemed foreign, yet it all seemed so new. The old excitement of playing an mmo came back.
There were hundreds of people running around, which made it hard to get anything done, although since we were just exploring the game at this moment, it really didn’t matter. We got a little tied up trying to find out how to switch channels so we could play together, but we figured that out fairly quickly.
So, we ended up up playing a few hours, feeling it out, and I think we have one awesome game on our hands
.
So that wraps it up for Day 1. GREAT SUCCESS!
