In-depth Aion Overview from Games Convention

[Empyreal Rhapsody]

Originally Posted by Lojik

most higher level items in all games look better than the low level ones

Two words:

1. Optical
2. Hat

[Elphaba's Devout]

The first area we were presented was Azul, the starting region for the Elyos faction.

Azul means Blue in Portuguese, my favorite color
And I'm happy to read that there are cut-scenes... I love cinematics :P

[Cynthe]

Not the dreaded O-hat!!! *Runs away*

[[PhiberOpticks]]

Good point, aptly-named Lojik. Although it does still seem like a developmental cop-out, it does kill two birds with one stone.

[skimike]

Originally Posted by [PhiberOpticks]

I didn't like their idea of item customization. Instead of letting you wear the facade of certain equipment and wearing other equipment, why not just make all the equipment look good enough to wear? Seems more like a cop-out than a solution.

The problem with this is that, even if all equipment looks good enough to wear, it doesn't necessarily mean it'll look good together. People like sets of armor that match and, while some sets look absolutely phenomenal when completed, when you have to pick and choose pieces of good-looking armor, you can come up with some truly hideous combinations.

[Kyuzo]

I been gone for a few days and come back to this? nice.

[dalin]

i didnt see this picture referenced anywhere... swamp concept art

[Orphaned]

gonna take the best weapon and throw a level 1 dagger skin over it.

[Diablo]

It helps avoid the every level max anyclass all wearing the exact same armor and weilding the exact same weapon as far as appearance goes.

Also it hopefully allows them to get really creative of 'lower level', I hate level based equipment and prefer level based use, and have them look cool not leaving the really cool still just to the uber stuff.

[Knite]

----------Quote:
Originally Posted by [PhiberOpticks]
I didn't like their idea of item customization. Instead of letting you wear the facade of certain equipment and wearing other equipment, why not just make all the equipment look good enough to wear? Seems more like a cop-out than a solution.


The problem with this is that, even if all equipment looks good enough to wear, it doesn't necessarily mean it'll look good together. People like sets of armor that match and, while some sets look absolutely phenomenal when completed, when you have to pick and choose pieces of good-looking armor, you can come up with some truly hideous combinations.------

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Not only this but just because the best armor in the game is your favorite looking, too doesn't mean its mine. Maybe I like white armor and the best in the game is green, but the set two tiers before it was white. its not a cop-out. Its the best possible solution for giving players their own creative expression. This avoids everyone from running around wearing the exact same gear. SWG failed with gear, Lineage failed with gear in terms if it all looking the same, and Vanguard, while there were different armors, made you look like a damn rainbow with the weird color schemes and things they had going on. A simple option to change your armors appearance to what you want it to be (even if its a fee at a blacksmith) would have solved those issues.

[Aseenus]

yeah i watched all of curses vids, well done to them honestly there growing well as a gaming group

[Kyuzo]

Hmm, changing stats on armors and weapons w/o appearance changes? Can anyone say +++griefing?

[Niteo]

if they did do that they better not have a chance in failing thats gonna suck but i do like your idea.. i hate it at the high lvls when everyone is running around in the same clothes its so boring looking i wanna see 20 maxed lvls running around in all different clothes so it really does make you char really individual

[Marchosias]

Forgive me, for I am about to reference WoW again. I don't know how many times in that game I would get a piece of armor that looked phenomenal and ended up replaces it with some armor with better stats that ended up looking like hot-pants or some other horrible thing that made me want to throw up. We had a running joke with a bunch of my buddies that one of them was the "Rainbow Paladin" because literally every piece of armor he had was a different, bright color that, when combined, made him look totally ridiculous.

If I were a Paladin in WoW I'd have hated the devs with a passion. See, Paladin Tier 2 armor, Judgement, is some of the best looking armor in the game. However, their Tier 2.5 makes them look like a power ranger. Tier 3 made them look like a Gundam, Tier 4 was normal-ish I guess, but nothing overly cool looking, and Tier 5 looks like a friggin' teletubbie. Now, this is an extreme example of Armor looking amazing and getting progressively worse as the stats get better, but in lesser forms it happened all over WoW.

Granted, people will be able to disguise their gear making them look like a lowbie, but I think on the whole that's actually a very good thing. It has the potential to make people think twice about going out and slaughtering people that have no chance of fighting back. I've never thought this to be a healthy part of an MMORPG, but a necessary one to maintain the overall feel of the game. This is a perfect, although inadvertant, solution to this problem. You'll never be able to go into a fight knowing based on how the enemy looks whether you will win or not... you'll have to constantly be on your guard and treat every opponent as a real threat.

Beyond that, I love the face value of this feature. Honestly when I saw that I called a buddy of mine that's been watching Aion with me to tell him about it, because I was that excited. Sometimes you just get that one set of armor or that one weapon that tickles you just right (dual samurai long swords in L2 for me... still the best looking weapons I've seen anywhere, game, life, or cinema, imo). Now, the only problem I could see is if you could cross weapon/armor classifications. By this I mean given a robe a plate armor's graphic or vice versa, or a one-hand sword a two-hand sword's graphic, again, or vice versa. However, I assume that the devs aren't that silly and will make you stick to the item's classification when crossing stats and graphics.

Edit: My buddy just brought up a really good point. The article wasn't really clear on this, so we were wondering what happened to the two items. In Lineage2 you could sell your old crap that you didn't use anymore, so what happens when you cross the graphics and stats. It's assumed that you keep the item with the better stats, but what about the old item? Is it combined with the new one into a single graphic-stat hybrid, or is the graphic simply transferred over to the new item letting you sell the old item? This could have a very significant effect on the economy. (This all assuming that there is no item binding, which as far as I have read hasn't been finalized).

[Mark]

We don't know very much about this feature right now, to be honest, so I can't answer your question. Feel free to watch people argue over it, though.