Screenshots on the bottom!
I've been waiting to write this all day but alas I was working *grrr*. I've seen some of the reviews posted and, aside from the obviously trolling reviews, it looks like everyone had a pretty good time. I would like to say that this review is both for people who have played and haven't played. It is, however, worded with the "haven't played" people mainly in mind.
I went into the event with HUGE expectations. Like many, I've been waiting for Aion to release for a little over two years now. That being said, I tried to approach the game with a balanced view. That's hard for me as I really want the game to succeed. However, I do believe that all of my comments are truthful and hopefully unskewed.
I started with a Templar. I'm not a Tank-only player by any means. I love to experience different classes given different games. I'm usually into a more caster/pet role but the Templar really called out to me for some reason. I got my Templar to 16 and started a Spirtmaster. Both classes were very fun to play and honestly I'm going to have a difficult time deciding on a main.
Note: I've played many MMOs including SWG, WOW, FFXI, EQ2, L2, GWars, MXO, LOTRO, COX, Vanguard, and yes even TR.
Note: I firmly believe that each game that I've played has value. I thought WOW was wonderfully implemented. At the same time I really believe that MXO had some of the best developer run events that ever were (given it's justifiably short time).
Graphics
Note: I had to manually set the bloom as it was off by default. I used a setting of Type 2 and I believe that this really completed the graphic experience for me.
I think it's obvious to anyone who has seen the screenshots that Aion is beautiful. Unlike games like Vanguard, which try for a realistic ultra-detailed view, and unlike games like WOW who strive for a more abstract view; Aion succeeds in a balanced approach that gives both a sense of abstract beauty and detail. The environment (world) in Aion is somewhat abstract in that angles and details are not represented in their absolute form. For instance, there's a ring of metal in Sanctum that's turning that is intended to represent a circle (ring) but is clearly reduced in polygons (angles are sharp). While some are quick to compare this to WOWs angular environment, they neglect the effect of the rest of the environment. There are many angular, abstract representations in the world of Aion. However, the world is not represented exclusively in this fashion. Aion makes use of realistic representations as well. The game seems to blend a couple different approaches to produce a very nice visual result. On the other side of the coin, the character detail is very realistic. Textures and polygons are very nicely detailed complete with animations for blinking and facial expressions.
In many games, the clothing that you wear clips through your legs, head and arms when your character moves. The robes in Aion, for instance, are very nicely done in that when you run, the robes appear in a more realistic fashion. The robes fluidly move with your legs. Conversly, the character/environment interaction does not work this way. If you /rest on a non-level surface, your character model goes through the landscape almost ignoring the terrain. The same can be said of buildings, etc. I don't think I remember playing an MMO that this wasn't the case. Still it would be nice if a game could address this issue. Again, not a big issue at all. It definitely serves to reduce the immersion facter even if it is slightly.
The draw distance is insane. I mentioned Vanguard earlier and I can't bring up draw distance without at least mentioning it. Even though Vanguard had a great rendering distance, it was flawed in its performance. It took ridiculus hardware to utilize the engine to produce what was shown in the official screenshots. While it doesn't seem like Aion's draw distance is quite that of Vanguard, and certainly the terrain isn't as detailed, it does perform well. The draw distance and detail at those distances in Aion is unmatched in any other MMO that I've played. My framerates NEVER dropped below 45 when rendering long distance detailed scenes.
Even in highly populated areas, the entire preview event, for me, was free of graphic hangs/sputters. I
never once saw a decrease in graphic performance that was noticable.
The game uses partical effects properly I believe. Bloom is nicely done (if enabled) and the colors are very vibrant in all the areas (even the bleak ones).
Environment
The quests are written well and serve to throw you into the environment of the game. Coupled with the music, the graphics, and the story, Aion is a wonderfully immersive game. Additionally, Aion holds some of the most interesting world mobs that I've seen. The imagination reminds me of the ingenuity in games like Lost Odyssey. From kobalds to pigs, the animations, textures, and shapes are very nice and unique.
There are small things in the environment that may not be noticeable up front that are really neat. Some trees have small spiders that dangle down on super thin threads (can be seen if close enough). They retract and extend from the trees and are hardly noticable unless your camera happens to swing the right way. I didn't notice it until my camera was turned a specific way on my avatar and I saw a spider on a thread come down on my screen about 1 inch across in diameter. My camera was positioned just right.
Aion has many
massive scenes in it. Sometimes you'll come into an area and look to your right and see this massive display of creatures in the distance all animated and drawn at vast distances. There are dinosaur-like creatures, massive flying whale-esk things overhead, and huge birds to name a few. The view is simply stunning sometimes. However, they serve only as paintings. You can't interact with those creatures or get up close to them. They're just for visual display. Speaking of...
Walls! Aion has invisible walls and lots of them. They restrict you from getting closer to the "paintings". They restrict you while in flight. They restrict your character from exploration. I understand the need for these but there must be some better way to create restrictions than just putting up a wall. Some people are complaining about these and rightfully so. Although it's way to late in the game to change something so base to the system. Plus, I kind of want my paintings even if I can't touch them. :P
Horse-blinder pathing! Aion also has a lot of zones that seem to herd you in a specific direction. This is sort of annalogous to the way that Final Fantasy X (not XI) was implemented in many areas. Rather than a wide open area, there is frequently a path and walls/environment on either side. Not all of the opening world (1-20) is like this but it is definitely noticable. The paths, at least, don't seem out of place. The game doesn't appear to have the cliff to restrict your path. Rather the game seems like the path is restricted
because of the cliff. In other words, the environment does a good job of justifying the paths, unlike the Invisible Walls issue (unfortunately).
Swimming! You can't swim. It's actually a little worse than that as the game still allows you to get into the water. If the water gets over your head, you start to loose health. I originally thought it was just me because I was wearing plate (on my Templar) but this is not the case. It would be nice if swimming could be added.
Music/Sound
Being a student of composition and music, I am usually very critical of music. Sometimes I like to turn the music off in my MMOs to listen to my playlists, etc. However, it's really nice when you don't feel like you have to listen to something else because the music in the game is so deficient. If anyone hasn't heard samples of the music in Aion yet I encourage you to go to the EU site and listen to some of the samples (especially if you're into music). It's obvious the effort that Yang Bang Ean (Ryo Kunihiko) put into the music. I'll let it speak for itself. All orchestrated! I haven't heard one midi/digi track yet.
One cool thing is the variety and way that transitions are done. Battle music in one area will generally not be the same in a different area. Environmental music changes even with given areas. For instance, Sanctum is an enormous city and has many different areas. Walking into the crafting hall you will hear a different set of music than walking into the library for example. Each track is very high quality and recorded with a live orchestra (London Symphony Orchestra specifically for orchestral pieces). I can't say enough about the music as it is my favorite part of Aion. It's a shame that games like LOTRO, while focusing a lot of its content on music, doesn't seem to have more prepared music like Aion does. Tolkien's entire world was started with one note. Why can't Turbine invest more into the music than they have. It's clear that the music in Aion was a forefront priority.
LOTRO does have a very nice feature in that you can play your own music with a set of in-game musical instruments (complete with accents, etc). This is a great feature that unfortunatly is easy to abuse (violating the environment with bad music). Anywho...
In Aion you can pick the voice that your character has. There are many emotes that use the voice. Unfortunatly in the preview event, you couldn't really change the voice in character creation and preview the voice. In fact, I'm not even sure the enlish voices are in-game yet. I really hope they preserve the option to choose the korean, etc voices so that you can still choose them. We'll see.
Character Creation
The character creation gives the user a lot of options. The face/detail choices look very nice. The guys are hot. There, now you know my reason for playing Aion.
They have some really nice options for tatoos. Hopefully they will expand this. COH, to me, has one of the most customizable character creation process out there. Granted, the facial textures are very limited. But in COH, the costume makes your character. It defines him/her. COH does a wonderfull job of allowing you to define this. Champions Online is working nicely in this area as well.
There are some custom sliders if you want to tweak your appearance. You can get some really funny results (not like Oblivion funny). Unfortunately the facial tweaking sliders don't affect the face "that" much. Other than physical size, it's very difficult to make a truelly customized face. This is partially because, as mentioned before, the face textures actually animate during gameplay so they have to fit on a somewhat standardized model. You can still adjust quite a bit including even giving yourself elf ears. And what's with the no butt sliders? They have breast sliders.
The name filter isn't very good. I saw some really crazy names running around. I assume that they haven't yet completed the filter. Although come to think of it, in Lineage 2 they had a pretty lax filter as well. I'm comparing it to more strict filters that don't allow alternate spellings of certain words. Although hey I'm all for certain words so...
Controls
Aion has pretty standardized MMO controls just like all the biggies (except for L2 and FFXI which are somewhat off the standardized list). Like Lineage 2, it comes with a click to move option which has always been an annoyance to me. I disabled it immediately and opted for a more standardized control scheme. The default flight controls are not intuitive. Once I changed the mapping it worked fine. Flight comes in two flavors, powered flight and gliding. You can toggle between gliding and powered flight easily, however, it takes some getting used to. After about 5 minutes of air time (limited to 1 minute intervals), I became very confident in the controls and was able to fly very realisticaly. Gliding is really fun btw as your character seems to be lofted by air currents sometimes. It is very graceful. I'm reminded somewhat of Varekai.
Flight is limited to a one minute timer. This restriction only proves to be an annoyance. If your character is in flight and runs out of flight time, they drop. If you're far enough up, you can wait a couple of seconds for a small amount of flight-time energy to build up (during the freefall) and glide back down by activating your glide controls. While I understand the need for a limit on flight, I do think that one minute is way to short. Honestly, this was somewhat of a disappointment. Although I knew of the one minute cap before I started playing, I didn't know that it would be so fun to fly.
Animations/Emotes
The animations are quite smooth in Aion and diverse. When your character is standing around they perform different animations based on the type of environment they are in and these are automatic (not explicit emotes). For instance, when standing in a pool of waist deep water, your character will often look into the water like they're searching at which point the game will spawn a fish to swim next to your character's legs. Your character will then try to catch the fish in the water. Your character will eventually catch the fish, bring it out of the water, and loose hold of it letting it loose. Another example is in a sandy environment. Your character will brush sand off them and act appropriately. These are small things but work together to make an immersive environment.
In Aion you can battle in flight. One of the cool things that they've done is that the animations for flight look really nice with the animations for fighting/casting.
To those of you familiar with flight in COX, flight does not feel the same in Aion. COX has a very smooth flight mechanic with acceleration (when you stop going forward you don't just stop, you decelerate). In Aion this is not so. It would be nice if flight was not so exact but buffered with a more realistic approach like COX. If the intention is to have them stop on a dime, then at least have the animation show an abruptness in the wings that communicates this. It doesn't ruin the immersion. It definitely helps to lessen it though.
The emotes list is somewhat limited. However, whoever did the motion capture did an insane job. Some of the animations for the emotes look beyond what I've seen in other games (even single player animations). For instance, when you point, you can detect minute movements in the arm. It's quick to see that the motion capture team for the movements was using a very sensitive system. It all serves to increase the immersion in the game.
Crafting/Gathering
Crafting is a punishing process and honestly I don't have a problem with this. I think that this approach yields better crafters. Meaning, I think that a crafter of high level is respected more and cares more about what he does by making it difficult to craft. Let's be honest though, anytime you put out a crafting system that allows players to fail an attempt and loose all components is a system that actively punishes the crafter. The flip side to this is that it actually rewards the crafter as well in that there aren't as many crafters. There will always be someone willing to craft it.
Gathering, however, is insanely cool. There are two gathering skills (after you become a Daeva). These gathering skills work on anything from plants to ore. You can even gather in flight as some of the resources are floating way up in the air. Also it's a cool animation with very nice effects.
Story/Lore
So far the story of Aion is very well done in my opinion. While there is lore, there's obviously not the sheer volume of lore that exists for something like WOW as there were books written well before WOW was released. However, the story is well thought out and the quest text leaves nothing to be desired. The quests are interesting, relavent, emotional, and well worded. Many of the quests don't have happy endings which is great imo. I think it's great when you go to find someone's pet for him and it's been barbecued and then you have to tell that to his face. If it's happy questing you want, there's plenty of that too.
Grind
I can only speak of the lower levels (1-16). They are solely driven by quests. While you can grind out your levels in this early phase if you want, the quests give much more xp relatively and allow you to grind while your questing as many of them make you kill standard mobs (pretty normal for the genre).
Quest Placement
So as not to violate the EULA with a given English quest example, I'll just say that there are some issues with quest ordering. Quest 1 might have you go to area A, Quest 2-4 might have you go to area B & C, while Quest 5 will have you come back to area A in a strange way. Other games have done this in the past but in Aion it's not as easy or convenient to travel all over the place. They have teleporters and flight points up. But it's still somewhat tedious to do these travels.
GUI
The GUI is slightly different than other MMOs on the market. There are options under the GUI to make it more standardized. I think that the new GUI works nicely though. I was able to use it exclusivly throughout the preview event. It's slightly more consolidated than the traditional MMO GUI.
Cut Scenes
There's cut scenes! Quite a few of them actually. They don't, unfortunatly, have speach as of yet, only text.
Macro/Scripting Functionality
Unfortunatly I didn't get a chance to check this out. I would have if I had more time. I have no idea if the GUI for Aion has an externally accessible API either such as WOW and many others now.
Skill System
The skill system in Aion places many of its most powerful skills at the end of chains. Chains frequently have a 100% chance of firing given that you trigger a starter skill. When the trigger skill becomes available, the skills available at that point in the chain will popup next to the mob. You can then click on the next skill next to the mob to advance the chain.
Example: Casting Skill
A leads to Skills
R &
S, Casting skill
R then leads to Skill
Y.
This does two things. Firstly it gets rid of some icons on your skillbar. Because you can never cast Skill
R without first casting Skill
A, there's no reason to have Skill
R on your skillbar (unless you want to view its cooldown timer which are quite easy to estimate given the length of time it takes to cycle a given chain). There's also no reason in this example to have skill
Y on your toolbar. Secondly it gives players a stricter definition of each class. It's no longer suggested that you cast Skill
A before Skill
R (as in many games) by giving a boost to Skill
R, it is required! This is a double edged sword (or at least a letter opener). Other games have used chains to complete various maneuvers but Aion uses them more frequently (as in every attack).
Pet System/Commands
The pet bar for Aion is very different than other MMOs. It has both an automatic mode and a manual mode (although I think only one has been implemented as of yet). I couldn't get the automatic mode to work. I started out as a Templar. When questing, I noticed that the spiritmasters around me rarely seemed to have difficulty with their pets. Other games I've played have a noticeble learning curve for new pet users. Some games clutter the UI with controls so that you can specifically control every state and action of your pet. I can understand why some people like this approach. The Aion Pet command bar is different. It simplifies many actions. After seeing the lack of unwanted pet mob trains (ala many other games), I decided to make a spiritmaster. Very Fun Class! I got him up to 13 before the servers shut off. I really thought that the pet system made it easier and more fluid to play the class. It consolidates a lot of the controls that many people just don't use and a clean, usable UI is the result. Additionally, the skills for each pet are consolidated into one skill that has different applications for each pet. For instance, the taunt skill for your pet is applicable for all 4 of your pets. It does different things depending on the pet. Once again, this serves to unclutter your UI.
Phasing
Ah phasing, the new cherry on the cake. Made popular by WotLK, this nice little feature will inevitably find it's way into more and more MMOs. Unfortunatly, I haven't heard or experienced anything relating to phasing in Aion. It's quite noticable when it's implemented as the developers always seem to want to show it off. I didn't see any indication of it myself. And I can think of a couple of instances where it would be more than perfect to use. For those of you not familiar with Wrath, phasing is a replacement for localized instancing. What that means is that if you're doing a quest in an open area with many other players, the game can customize a specific section of the world for you. So, if you help out an NPC in a field get his let's say pig back; When you approach the NPC's location, the game will throw you into a mini-instance as you're moving closer to the area (completely transparent to the user). When you get there the pig will be there, when your friends get there however, the pig won't be there (even though you ran there together). It's a really great feature used wonderfully in Wrath to tell/show stories and give you greater immersion. I remember the first time it happened I was in the same zone as a guildy and I was explaining how cool the landscape was. I started explain features and he was like "wait I don't see that". I had done a quest that he hadn't and so a portion of the zone looked completely different than what he was seeing. Blizzard's implementation literally places you in a separate instance. As a result, your friends vanish to you if they haven't completed the quest (if you're within the instanced zone). I remember asking for help on a specific quest and my friend not being able to get to me because he hadn't completed the quest chain. He was standing at the same building on the same server but we could not interact. It's a great tool that's been introduced and I hope it's refined a little bit in the future.
Instancing
I've read some reviews that complain about instancing. Honestly they must be pure troll posts. Aside from the main city being a seperate instance itself, I've not seen any instancing in Aion. Caves, zone-to-zone transition, and indoor/outdoor transitions are non-instanced. Maybe I haven't gotten far enough. I've been through multiple zones over three days of gameplay though. I can safely say that instancing is not a major or noticeable part of this game. There is
overflow instancing but not traditional instancing of zones. Overflow instancing in Aion is done via channels for when the server world/continent is filled beyond capacity. They are seperate instances of the main world. Other games have utilized this approach (COX, GW, Champions, etc). Usually there is a instance drop down that you can select from. Honestly, I can't imagine why anyone would want to go back to not having overflow instancing. Maybe those people should have played/remembered WOW on its first day to see the chaotic mess that was. You don't want everyone starting in the same starter zone on opening day. This is a modern MMO. There's no reason that it should be held back from using such conventions that have proved successful to other MMOs.
Lag
Some lag-spikes toward the end but other than that none to speak of.
Loading Times
Quick! Maybe the quickest MMO I've seen. The loading times between the main city and the continent are very quick! You almost feel like everything is preloaded, hehe.
Bugs
There are some bugs currently with some of the quests. There are some bugs with the UI. All of them were minor. This is due in part I'm sure to the game already being released in Korea for months now. No crashes
And lastly, some screens of my Templar and Spiritmaster. I took over 100 screenshots of my characters. It really is a beautiful game.
Gathering
Gathering a Resource High in the Air
My Spirtmaster & his Fire Pet
Wind Pet
Thowing a Fireball While in Flight
Looking Cool
My Templar in Newb Plate
My Templar tests out his Wings
My Templar and his Wings
Upon Entering Sanctum (this is all moving in the game quite wonderfully)
Sanctum 1
Sanctum 2
