Aion was my entertainment of choice this weekend. I spent the better part of Friday evening and Saturday playing it. I’ve rejoined MMO comrades from the Casualties of War (COW) guild, first formed as a group of bloggers going into Warhammer Online. The guild has since branched out into a number of other MMOs, including Aion.

Community

Even if you prefer to solo, having a good in-game community is important. This is especially true in PVP oriented games. Being back among the members of COW is fun as always. They’re chatty, extremely helpful and generous. A good guild helps to offset the sometimes “Barren’s chat” atmosphere of newly released or heavily populated games. Your guild is your sanity buffer.

Exploration

I play MMOs largely to exist in fantastical settings ripe with natural phenomenon, myth and magic. Aion is nothing if not beautiful! On land, air and sea, every corner of the world has been detailed with care. Original World of Warcraft was pretty to me. I especially loved the quaint zones like Goldshire, impressive cities like Stormwind and themed zones such as, Booty Bay and Darkshire. It wasn’t until Burning Crusade (BC) that Blizzard added vivid exotic zones like Zangarmarsh, Netherstorm and Terokkar Forest. And while I loved those zones, the abrupt transitions of the BC landscapes seemed awkward. Aion manages to deliver the same variety in zone design but with more fluid and natural transitions. I find myself roaming around new zones to take in the scenery before I begin questing.

Progression

Leveling

I did quite a bit of leveling over the weekend. The “dings” come slower than in a game like WOW. The XP doesn’t flow as quickly and combat takes longer. I haven’t minded the difference so far. If this is the “Asian grind” then it’s fine by me. You don’t get new skills like candy in Aion. The drawn out combat allows you to use your brain – strategy and tactics, to win a fight. You can’t win simply because you got in the first hit. In fact, you can kick a pending-defeat in the teeth by staying composed, thinking ahead and using everything that’s at your disposal, including the terrain. This game is the least rock-paper-scissors I’ve played to date and feels very balanced. You’re not meant to stand toe-to-toe slugging it out until one of you drops. Somewhat similar to Age of Conan, directional movement during combat will increase blocking or damage output. Those directional arrows at your feet have a purpose. *Smile*

I’m doing more quests than grinding which is a compliment to Aion’s PVE content. I must now concede that perhaps, I don’t actually hate quests. Everquest 2 and Asheron’s Call 2 being the exceptions, where I started questing, and how I came to believe that I hate quests. WOW’s quests past level 30 didn’t do much to improve my opinion of quests, which is where I really reverted to grinding and instances to level. In Aion, I’m mostly doing quests, as was the case with Age of Conan, Warhammer Online and Runes of Magic. Aion PVE isn’t perfect but it’s definitely good. If I encounter a quest series that has me running back and forth, I bail once I’ve had enough and move on to something else. At this point there’s been more content in a zone than I need.

Group Content

I did my first group quests with COW this weekend. It was an experience not to be missed. Dealing with the Black Claw Tribe is the first content that really requires a group. It’s an outdoor zone with elites, patrols and treacherous named-bosses roaming the area. Just getting to the NPC Quest Hub can be a death march the first couple of times. The previous content doesn’t prepare you for a zone of tightly packed mobs, with strong social aggro and a long chase leash.

The first time I tried to reach the area I almost died. I was totally unprepared for how densely packed the mobs were and came running in with a train on my butt. It’s amazing how many mobs you can aggro trying to run just a few yards from the safety of the Altgard Fortress. It’s not a zone you can do at the appropriate level and solo.

I have to admit that I liked the heightened sense of danger you don’t typically experience outside of a PVP setting. Black Claw has named mobs roaming around that can and WILL wipe a whole group if you don’t burn them down before a patrol comes along, mobs re-spawn nearby or someone moves around too much and pulls another pack. People don’t like dying in Aion. I certainly don’t like dying. I was proud of my 14 levels with no deaths status. I didn’t want the XP debt. I didn’t want to pay to have the death de-buff removed which get more expensive as you level. Besides, I usually have a nice stash of DP points accumulated for my special skills which you lose when you die. Doing the quests with the COW group was a piece of cake. There was only once occasion when things got out of hand and a few of us died – oh wait, we wiped. *Smile*

Drama and Mayhem

Late Saturday evening, I was sneaking around Black Claw, trying to turn in a couple of quests. I noticed someone in trouble and healed them. He invited me to group, asking if I could just escort him up the road a bit. Sure, no problem. On the way he started attacking random lone mobs and was shocked at how hard they hit. I told him that most of the mobs in the area were elite and to stay as close to the path as possible. Even that doesn’t give you a free run through the zone but at least the mobs near the path aren’t elites. On our way, we ran into a patrol whose route intersects the path. It wasn’t a piece of cake but we successfully dispatched them. I guess he got over confident. He started zigzagging the area killing mobs for a different quest. We were doing okay so I didn’t complain. The coin and loot was dropping at a nice pace so what’s to complain to about? Suddenly, in the blink of an eye, we had our Leroy Jenkins moment…

It happened so quickly but felt like slow motion. I saw the Spellcaster biotch and her pet approaching (Elite mob pair). I started backing up while trying to type, “DO NOT attack her. Run!” But it was too late. Johnny Come Lately Gladiator ran in for the kill. Nooooooooooooo! I knew this was going to hurt. He was taking damage like stomped tomato. I de-buffed the Spellcaster with a couple of hits then start healing Johnny, which caused the pet to attack me. All I could spare for myself was a heal-over-time. Johnny was going down fast. I knew that if he went down, there was nothing between me and face full of dirt, so I kept healing. I drank a health potion and popped my BP shield (last-ditch-hail-Mary, on a loss ass regeneration that is based on building DP points that clear if you die or log out) skill, to soak up some damage while hoping to survive. “Stay alive! No matter what occurs, I will heal you!” *Snicker*

Other Players are Helpful

Another player noticed we were in trouble and joined the fray. I buffed the newcomer, applied more de-buffs the hell-raising Spellcaster and kept healing. A patrol arrived. Oh lord, we’re gonna die. Two more players rushed in to help. By this time my fairy sized character couldn’t see shit. Body blows and magic – BAM, kick, thrust, fire, smoke and block animations were flying every which way. They kept fighting. I kept healing. And we managed to survive. When the last mob feel we looted them quickly and scattered like rats. I jumped off a nearby hill and glided to safety. Immediately after my Gladiator friend whispered, “Damn, I guess BC is serious business!” I fervently agreed and got the hell out of the zone.

Our little escapade capped my Saturday evening in the game. I’d had all the excitement I could take for one session. I flew back to the capital city and began crafting myself into poverty, but that’s a tale for another day.

Can’t stop Saylah from blogging :) – Tipa

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Leave it to the creative player-base to find a way around the 3-hour queues on the high population servers. Some have decided to stretch the “Personal Shop” feature that allows you to sell items while unattended, into a means of keeping their characters online 24×7. I mean – seriously, all I could do was laugh my ass off when I logged into the game and saw the sea of players who are mostly just AFK, setup as vendors. I felt like I was in the market district of some turn of the century ghetto. Mind you, somewhere in that mass of “For Sale” slogans and messages are quest NPCs and people that really have things to sell. Can anyone say, “Where’s Waldo?”

I can’t complain or blame them really. If you’re on a server in this situation but don’t want to leave your friends or legion behind, I suppose it’s every gamer for herself. Supposedly NCSoft is going to limit the duration of the inactivity of being in the “Personal Shop” mode to 24 hours, after that if you’re AFK you’ll be disconnected. If I had the time I’d check into how these shops play out in Korea. They are rather painful on the eyes even when people aren’t using them for queue avoidance. I like the idea of the shops but a few features like the ability for me to turn off seeing the signs/messages would be a good improvement. I’d also suggest that the AFK-timeout on them be somewhere between 2 to 4 hours, versus 24 hours.

And no, you can’t just tell people to leave high pop servers if they don’t want queues. Server and race access is very touch and go – minute to minute, making it impossible to migrate as a group. Our legion is now in limbo with some members sitting on the high population server progressing characters. While others reverted to the secondary choice so they could at least start playing. When we tried joining them on the secondary server, which was at least low population last night with no queues, we found that while low population, the server wasn’t accepting more players for our faction. Goodness grief.

I only have this week to play much Aion. In a couple of weeks I’ll be away on business for 12 days and then starting the next writing workshop. It’s a tad bit annoying having to deal with this in my window of availability. I’ve decided to be a bad girl. I’ve succumb to using the unattended vendor trick to log into the game late in the afternoon, so that I can actually play when I get off work. It’s a comically sad situation but when in Rome…

Another guest post by the always awesome Saylah! — Tipa

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Three hours in a log-in queue, was the price my family paid to create characters on servers with friends or acquaintances. I knew the wait would be long but nothing prepared me for that length of time. It exceeded any of the long queues I’d experienced in the early days of World of Warcraft, following our AC2 guild to Illidan. The pre-selection opportunity hadn’t yielded the ability to get on the servers where we knew people. Initially, it wouldn’t allow us to create new characters on our intended server as Asmodian, stating we had Elyos characters there. The only Elyos characters we had were from Beta, which aren’t persisted and shouldn’t have mattered.

My workday is extremely busy. I didn’t have the time to muck with it again on Friday, until late in the evening. By then, the servers where I wanted to go where all locked. By the end of the pre-selection phase, my family and friends were scattered all over the place. Toward the end of the pre-selection I took a chance and deleted one of the two characters you were allowed, in an attempt to join my nephew but couldn’t get on that server. When I tried to go back to where I’d come from, I couldn’t do that either. Not in the mood to mess with it further, I decided to defer my attempts until the head-start.

Head-start day arrived at 3PM ET on Sunday. Thousands of players attempt to log-in all at once. I felt this was a poor choice on NCSoft’s part. If they’d opened the game at midnight, there would have been a trickling affect. The most avid new players could have stayed up to get on their servers while everyone else would have done so as they woke up and had the time to log into the game. With a Sunday afternoon start, there was pent-up demand, all attempting to get into the game simultaneously. I suppose some might have considered that an unfair advantage (midnight start) and servers could have been full before they even woke up? Dunno.

With players having a difficult time getting on to servers with friends, people made multiple fall-back plans. My family decided to just wait in the queue to get on our primary destination then double back to the second and third choices in case legions (guilds) had to utilize them. Under these circumstances, attempting to get dozens of people on the same server is daunting. Many of us aren’t real life friends with each other’s phone numbers, so it was very hit-n-miss with watching email, forums and IMs.

In the end, I decided that if I couldn’t get in with the Casualties of War’s Asmodian legion on their server, I could fall back to being Elyos on that same server with WingedNazgul’s legion, as it appeared the creation of Asmodian characters was locking up as fast as whole servers. If both of those were bust, I could use the character that I’d put on a server with my son but in the wrong time zone, play Elyos somewhere in my right time zone or just wait and see what happened in a week or so. While none of this is the end of the world, and I understand NCSoft’s need to control server population and faction balance, as a pre-order customer, it was an annoying experience.

During the days of hour-long queues on Illidan, being disconnected in the middle of group activity was a freakin’ nightmare, especially when raiding. It took Blizzard several months to implement functionality that allowed you to by-pass the queue and get right back into the game. I remember well, the long waits when the main tank or healer was disconnected. Avatars stood around in an instance, while we listened to periodic updates on their place in the queue and the estimated wait-time. I hope Aion has taken being disconnected during group-play into account and has implemented something similar.

If you braved the long waits to get on your server of choice, the performance was superb and worth the wait. I logged into the game 3 minutes after the servers went live and I was the 3018th person in the queue for our server. I’m really curious about the simultaneous player-cap being used. I never saw more than a couple dozen players at any one time.

I am so very pleased to welcome Mystic Worlds‘ Saylah as a guest blogger while she lets her blog lie fallow for awhile. — Tipa

Aion wasn’t on my radar – at all.  I didn’t have any preconceived notions going into the Open Beta (OB) other than the game looked attractive from all the screenshots I’d seen.  And I’d received enthusiastic emails from Mallika about her experiences in the Closed Beta.  I’m going to keep this accounting short since it’s being graciously hosted on West Karana.  I don’t want to kick-up any dust over at Mystic Worlds since I am by no means, ready to started blogging regularly.  *Smile*

General Impressions

There’s nothing new or earth-shattering about Aion.  Even player controlled flight isn’t new.  If you’ve used a flying mount in World of Warcraft then you’ve done player controlled flight except this version is considerably more restrictive and not in the least intuitive.  However, they have added a unique twist – flying combat.  Other than that, you’ll find what you’d expect in a modern fantasy MMO.

• Good character customization
• Gear customization options
• Holy Trinity class selections
• Class build/spec customization
• Adequate PVE – quests and dungeons
• Robust crafting system – LOTRO-like
• Beautiful and stunning vistas – art direction that is a cross between Vanguard and LOTRO
• Grinding for gear, loot and currency – nothing new here
• PVP – consensual duels, arena style PVP, open area FFA PVP zones and fortress captures

When someone releases a fantasy MMO aimed at a mature audience that is not these things, we’ll be sure to let you know.  For good or for bad, today is not that day.  That said, Aion is a good game and I had fun playing.

I enjoyed Aion because I’m not looking for a Holy Grail MMO.  Every game that has promised to be “the one” since the huge success of World of Warcraft, has failed to deliver on the hype.  These days, I find myself content if a game is reasonably bug-free at launch, it runs smoothly, provides decent PVE content, diverse crafting, engaging environments and an interesting back-story.    Aion meets these requirements and wraps it up in art direction that is moody and full of ambiance.  The towns and cities are nicely conceived in representing a world where celestial beings exists.

What I liked Best

• Combat is smooth and stylish, leaning toward WAR and AoC.  Some skills have optional combos that execute ferocious theatrical moves.  Combatants (avatars) have an attitude and sense of urgency when fighting which adds excitement.
• No rock-paper-scissors PVP.  The average encounter takes a while and will border on feeling long for some players.  This however, is a very good thing for PVP.  You will not be subject to being killed with one, two or even three hits in combat.  This means that you have ample opportunity to employ skill and strategy!  Say what!?! Me likey!  The “whoever gets the first shot in wins” doesn’t exist from what I’ve seen.  I’ve watched players 5 levels lower than their opponents and not in great gear, consistently steal wins.  When I congratulated them and ask them about their background, they all came from PVP centric games.  It’s refreshing to see that skill can win over level and gear.
• Quest hubs are mostly towns, not people standing in the middle of nowhere handing out quests.  This is one of the things I liked best about ROM as well, as it adds a pinch of RP to the experience.  Our people live here which is why I care about what’s happening in the surrounding environments.
• Art direction and visualization of this world is gorgeous.  It’s hard to describe.  At times you could be walking around LOTRO, it has such a similar feel.  Yet it’s also very whimsical and there is what I consider steam punk elements splashed here and there that I enjoy encountering.
• Gear customization is very good.  You have the visual option of dying your armor which is nice.  Beyond that you have slots that can be used to tweak the stats like gems from WOW or runes from ROM, which is especially useful for hybrid and healers.
• Players can put their avatars into a selling mode and auto-sell items they’ve listed for sale, while off doing something else in real life.  Talk about making an area feel alive.  I think it’s a nice compromise between only having an auction house (WOW, WAR, LOTRO, etc.) and EQ2’s player housing that can be used as a store front.  EQ2 is the only fantasy MMO I’ve played that supports selling low-margin items in a hassle-free manner, without the risk of losing your tiny profit to AH expirations and posting fees.
• Uh yeah, I’ve been known to grind mobs.  Some days, I don’t want to run around doing quests, I just want to kill stuff.  AC2 and WOW both supported this ability with tightly packed mobs in visually engaging areas.  Occasionally, I wander into an area and decide I want to kill these things for a while – I like the scenery, mob combat style, challenge or they drop good loot.  Aion had plenty of pockets to support this option.
• Champion/heroic level quests chains that explain the lore and give you nice rewards.  EQ2’s brand of heroic quest chains made me hate all chains.  So much so, that I almost ignored these altogether but I’m glad I gave them a try.  They were worth the effort and weren’t monumentally annoying.

What I liked Least

• Oddly enough, flying hits the top of my dislike list.  The mechanic used to implement flight has to be one of the least intuitive implementations I’ve run across in a long time.  If it were just a mode of travel I wouldn’t care very much but it’s not.  It can be used strategically in PVP areas and I don’t want to get my ass kicked because I suck at flying.  The base mechanic should have been mouse driven like flying in WOW.  You can of course remap all the keys.  However, since there are 5 basic maneuvers needed and they don’t toggle (ex. open wings/close wings), you must bind them to 5 distinct actions/keys AND account for directional movement AND be able to execute combat skills.  I spent much longer than I’d like trying different mappings before I could execute things rather seamlessly and it will still take time getting used to, which you don’t have much of in the beginning with all the restrictions.  I ended up using the arrow keys with Shift, Control and Alt modifiers to keep the finger reaches down to a minimum.  Let’s get real here.  I can’t be roaming all over the keyboard trying to fly when I’m fighting for my life!
• More skills please.  Compared to other fantasy MMOs you don’t get many skills to work with in Aion.  This can make the combat become rather rout if you grind through it too much.  On the other hand, the classes feel VERY balanced.  This is perhaps the price to be paid for balance?
• Too many long distance Fed-Ex quests.  Whoa! Wow!  This is the first game where these stuck out like a sore thumb.  Running back and forth long distances between NPCs for trivial messages is glaringly annoying, especially since you can’t fly to do it!!!!
• Large capital cities for the sake of having them.  I’m over this – really over it!  Hoofing it around huge cities that are sparsely populated and running long distance back and forth for no good reason is SOOOOOOOO passé.  PLEASE stop doing this.  You don’t need them to be any larger than what you find in EQ2 or LOTRO.  NO ONE is going to have enough players, like the millions of players running around in WOW to populate these grand gestures to… what?  I’m not impressed after the first time I see the city when most of the areas are empty rooms, halls, cathedrals, markets, etc. that I have to traverse trying to get things done.  If you insist on building these grossly oversized areas then at least fill them with NPCs.  I swear it pisses me off running up, down and around buildings with dozens of empty rooms, save for one or two NPCs.
• The whole tram in the sky thing is genius – please make it more practical and useful (frequency and wait time before taking off) like the ships in other games. It’s a wonderful way to see the city and travel within its confines but not at its timing.  It’s needs to run more like the frequency of the tram in WOW but more often and wait longer.  This could be a gem.

That’s it.  As you can see the list of dislikes is very small.  There is much to enjoy about Aion.  I’ve wanted to get into one of the longer haul games such as L2 or FF but felt it was much too late to catch up to veteran players.  I want the longer haul game since I don’t rush to the end-game.  I want the horizontal growth and options to dabble in when I don’t feel like leveling.  I think the PVP and crafting will give me that out of the gate in Aion and I hope for other options, as the game matures.