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.

Have mmo players become too spoiled?

Just recently I read that Warhammer is allowing you to take something like apprenticeship, which allows you to temporarily participate in higher level battles. This works by raising you to the level and ranks required to play these battles, this also works the other way by deleveling you to play in lower level battles.

So what does this mean? Because of social media, we’re always tightly connected with friends and online acquaintances. As I sat late night in WoW, I realized that I treat it more as an interactive instant messenger than a video game. I think because I haven’t really met anyone new in Aion, that I don’t have as much interest.

But that’s another thing. I don’t really want to get to know a whole new group of people. I do miss my old guild, but those days are long gone. I guess I’m just babbling, so excuse my sidetrack, and let’s talk about Aion for a bit.

Jumping into Aion

Since I last played, Aion has been patched so that personal shops now have a timer. This will stop people from abusing it just to stay AFK in game without being disconnected. Although I like the idea of personal shops, I don’t want other people to not be able to play the game because of queues, while someone is AFK for hours.

One thing I noticed which was very interesting is that when I bump my graphics to all of the maximums, it almost runs better than when I run it with everything on bare minimum. I don’t really mind running everything on low because I rather sacrifice graphics for a smoother game play. I do need to buy a new computer soon, so I’ll have to keep an eye out and start putting away a bit of money.

When I last left off, I had recently reached level 17.

One thing that I’ve been really loving about the Spirit master is the DP ability: Spirit Armor of Light I.

This makes my pet go into hyper drive, that wrecks everything in its path. Combined with my new ability Summon Fire Energy I, which creates these two balls of fire which do damage to a target, I can really wreck mobs. Because the summon is able to handle mobs by itself more proficiently, I now do multiple pulls. Doing multiple pulls allows me to keep increasing my DP so by the time the first Spirit Armor of Light I wears off, I can use it again.

Sidenote: Why the hell doesn’t Aion have swimming?!

I’ve been leveling up my extracting as I go so that I don’t have to go back and do it later. I recommend you do the same, since you find stuff along the way anyways. You’re also able to sell these items for a pretty piece as well. Additionally, some quests require that you extract some of the zones items, so that’s basically free exp!

I make my way to Zumion Canyon, and boy does it look really great:

One major gripe that I have with the game at the moment is that the quest tracker seems very vague at times. Some quests have plenty of information, while others tell you basically “it’s somewhere”. I don’t mind reading into the quests, but when you have a quest log of 20 or more, you begin to loose track. With only the option of looking at completed and in progress, I wish there was a better way to organize your quests besides just having them display a snippet on your screen. But as the wise METHOD Man said, you gotta concentrate on getting the power of booty in yo common ass.

I’ve also noticed that there seems to be a ton of gold spammers now as well:

Anyway, I only put in a few quests before I realize that it’s almost 3:30pm and I need to be up early in the morning o.O

That’s all for tonight, I should be able to get some time in tomorrow

Cya everyone!

Random Video for lulz:

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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.

Here’s to the next 10 levels, /cheers.

I wish I was a balla.

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I was really tired after work so I took a nap, but then when I woke up I had to work on a bunch of projects as well.

I did manage to sell about 5,000K worth of stuff in my private shop after a few mins which was pretty decent.

This weekend, an awesome beach rave is coming up. 3 days of partying, so probably no Aion this weekend as well, but we’ll see.

Have fun everyone!

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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…

FOLLOW US ON TWITTER!

http://twitter.com/AionOverload

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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!

Stay tuned!

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See ya on Israphel!

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Hey everyone!

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

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