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Last year it was a real gem at E3 since it showed actual gameplay. It appears to still be on track for being a good game for those looking for something a bit different. It's supposed to come out in 4th quarter of this year.



And they have a mocap video too.



You can probably find the trailer yourself - I don't watch trailers anymore unless there's something controversial about them. They tell you nothing about the actual game.

NCsoft West finally has a site for the 4.0 patch live, so everybody can watch that site for more news about the patch. Hopefully, the patch notes will go live soon. The news has finally been released that 4.0 will be coming to the NA Aion version on the 26th of June. Along with it, there will be some pre-events to get all daevas ready for the big 4.0 patch. These events generally give a variety of free buffs for those looking to level up before 4.0 hits. These events start on the 5th of June and run up to the launch of 4.0 on the 26th. We are still waiting for the original patch notes, but they should be closely related to the Korean patch notes for 4.0.

Code Red Atreia Free Buffs

• Prosperitin: Available Monday through Thursday, this buff grants attack speed +2% and crit strike +20; it lasts for one hour.
  
• Turbonel: Available Monday through Thursday, this buff grants casting speed +2% and magic boost +20; it lasts for one hour.
  
• Dexteritrol: Available Friday through Sunday, this buff grants drop rate +10%; it lasts for one hour.
  
• Abysaline: Available Friday through Sunday, this buff grants PvP defense +3%; it lasts for two hours.

Daily Quest Free Supplies

There are daily potion quests where you will receive 30 of a potion and scroll quests for a batch of 50 scrolls along with 200 stigma shards. The potion choices are the following:

• Major Recovery Potions
  
• Major Recovery Serums
  
• Fine Recovery Potions
  
• Fine Recovery Serums

Remember that the fine potions are only usable by levels 50 and above. The scroll choices are:

• +30% Running speed: Greater Immortal Running Scroll (Rx: Accelerox)
  
• +9% Attack Speed: Greater Immortal Courage Scroll (Rx: Blitzopan)
  
• +9% Casting Speed: Greater Immortal Awakening Scroll (Rx: Castafodin)
  
• (for level 50+) +120 Crit Strike: Major Immortal Crit Strike Scroll (Rx: Critozyne)
  
• (for level 50+) +40 Crit Spell: Major Immortal Crit Spell Scroll (Rx: Mojocycline)

Over the past month you might say I went a little nuts in playing Age of Wushu. For the tl;dr crowd, my overall review would be that Wushu is a very good open world pvp game with horribad translation and combat that's a little on the wonky side. For more information on the actual game, you can follow our thread on it. DK has even made several videos that you can watch.

The importance of the game isn't in the unique use of putting offline players into the world to have "jobs" where they can make money or be kidnapped or the ddr type key presses for a T'ai chi based dance that converts "cultivation" points into real skill xp. The importance of the game is that it's one of the few good games for those that love open world PvP. Age of Wushu, much like Eve Online and similar games has real, meaningful, open world PvP. Unfortunately, you'll have to slog through a ton of poor translation (the original game is in Chinese) and a lack of general information about the game before you can enjoy it to its full extent. I'm still confused about the game sometimes and I've been playing a whole month.




The game is based on martial arts fighting specialties (they operate as regular mmo game classes) called schools. Besides determining your initial fighting style, a school also has rules (such as wearing clothing or not killing others in your school) that you're penalized for breaking and schools operate as a soft faction in the game. Schools have wars with each other and also elect their own leader with the help of weekly school tournaments.

Additionally, there are guilds in the game that are not school-based (members of all schools can be in a guild together) and guilds can both own property and declare war on each other. Throw in the fact that all of this takes place in the open world of the game and you'll begin to see the real charm in Age of Wushu.


Open World - Wushu's Main Strength

There are a lot of problems and difficulties with open world PvP. Wushu uses a combination of flags for several PvP components to the game that take place in its open world along with fairly harsh penalties for random pk. The Jianghu PvP system is Wushu's greatest strength.

Players will only experiment once with random pk. One of my guildie's certainly did when he let his Scholar spin aoe attack loose in a crowded market square of afk players and then was held back from playing (due to jail) for about a day before having his head chopped off publicly. He never did this again. Players that don't go crazy can kill rivals, but generally they must then spend time to "repent" or beg for a reduction in their infamy points (which costs money). This means that people stop to think before flagging to kill.

There are several events in the game for PvP players that take the place of what one normally sees these days in instanced PvP. Here's a list of the main ones:

• Spying or Patrolling at school: As a spy, collect 10 pieces of spy information from offline players or npc's operating as spies at another school. If you're a patrol, then catch the spies trying to get your school's information. Either side can kill the other without penalty after the spy is exposed (patrols have a special skill to expose spies). There's a nice weekly quest that gives school honor certificates for lots of spying. As a spy for extra PvP, flag yourself as exposed at the beginning of the spy mission and kill your way through another school.
  
• Guild Wars: Be in a guild that's big enough to own land (land is limited as it's all in the open world). Then keep track of up to 3 allies and many more potential enemies declared on your guild through the guild interface. Declare war on enemies and help your allies win their wars. Burn down the enemy base and eventually take it through extended war activities.
  
• Cart Escorts: Escort carts from a major city to an outpost for guild money, but watch out for those that are flagging as bandits (touch a cart and flag to raid it). Neither side has any PvP penalties and successful escorts also earn xp just like successful cart raids earn xp. For extra PvP, escort a cart to the edge of Chengdu and then park it. Invite people to try and raid the cart and kill them all.
  
  
  
  
• Kidnapping: You can "knock out" offline players with jobs in order to kidnap and sell them to the local human trafficker on the corner. While you're carrying around the kidnap bag, you're also flagged to be killable by anybody. People that kill a kidnapper or rescue kidnapped players gain good points. You gain 1 evil point and money for every kidnap. Beware of kidnapping if you're from one of the "good" schools - you may have to "repent" if you kidnap people. Also, offline npc's seem to commonly be sold to whore houses or gambling establishments. I've never seen so many whore houses in a game before - there are commonly more than one per city in Age of Wushu.
  
  
  
  
• Player Bounty system: If somebody flags and kills you twice without provocation, then you can put a bounty on their head. Their name will be announced whenever they enter an area and constables can go looking for them in order to get paid for the bounty. After they're captured and killed, as the person who placed the bounty, you will be invited to visit them (free teleport) in jail. Have fun taunting them.
  
• School Wars: On Friday and Saturday nights join alliances between schools as they seek to capture each others school treasures. Remember that if you are the last hit on a leader, then you can carry them around and tie them up to a post near one of your capture points.
  
  
  
  
• Script stealing: 2 schools are chosen per day at 7pm server time and for 30 minutes you can steal their skills through script stealing. Of course, they'll be there trying to stop you from stealing and even your friends may try to kill you for the script on your back.
  
• Duels/Arena: You can put down a flag and get ranking as well as xp for dueling outside of towns. Great fun for those that like to duel and practice against other schools. There's also an arena that seems to be similar in nature to what the duels are.
  
• School Tournament: This is for those that want to become school leaders or prove how elite they are. This is also a spectator sport since it takes place in the open world.

Since I'm talking about PvP, there are also some instanced PvP opportunities that take you out of the open world. Note that there aren't as many of these opportunities and that's the main reason why open world PvP is so strong in Wushu:

• Dungeon Assassins: Become a nameless helper NPC for an instance boss and try to take down the players doing the instance. It doesn't take long as a box pops up allowing you to apply to enter the instance. You then port in, fight, and are ported out at the end. You get rewards for it too.
  
• Battlefields: There are solo and group battlefields. This option was only recently released and if fairly normal for what you see in regular mmo games. The benefit of the battlefield right now is that you gain chi very fast doing them, but the main drawback to them has to do with having to get the last hit on somebody to get a kill for ranking.

Combat

So the PvP is epic and meaningful in Age of Wushu, but how is the combat? Well, I've got to say that my first day experience with the combat was miserable. The tutorial and first day skills make the combat into something that just comes across as clunky. Part of this is that the combat is different from standard mmo game fare, but I firmly blame part of it on how combat is initially presented in the game. You've got to get over the first day (week?) of how things are presented in order to let the combat grow on you. I do find that the combat grew on me once I understood what it was all about.

First, combat in this game is based on core fighting game mechanics. You have only a few "types" of moves:

• Attack: meant to deal damage
  
• Block: meant to block attacks
  
• Feint: meant to break through block
  
• Special: a special high damage attack gained after enough "rage" is built up.

There are other skills that then add to this list as they involve pulling an opponent closer, charging, knockdowns, stuns, doing more damage in the air, and even throwing money at your opponent for damage. There are also some utility skills that give mana regen and such. Almost all schools are meant to be melee, except for Tangmen darts and Royal Guard chain skills. A very nice feature of the game is that you can gain almost all other skills from other schools by getting their scripts/books (this is why script stealing is important). In order to keep balance in the game, there is a 7 second cooldown time between using skills from different "sets".

Now, I'm not going to say this game is perfectly balanced. Some schools are definitely stronger than others in terms of PvP thanks to the skills they get at the beginning (Royal Guard, I'm looking at you). However, the main charm of this game is that what's difficult at the beginning may not be forever difficult as you start to learn how to counter them.

That's right - unlike a lot of modern mmo games, this one is designed with counters in mind due to the underlying throwback to fighting game mechanics. You can get a hint of this just when you look at a good post about dueling.

Just considering these skills isn't enough and would make the game very frustrating due to the CC. However, there are "flying" skills gained from dungeon instances. These skills allow counters to many of the skills with CC as they get you out of range quickly and allow you to counter attack. One of the most important skills in this category is "Goose", which allows a very quick side step of several meters. You can also get skills to run up walls and even run like a ninja on water, which in an open world can provide benefits for specific circumstances. I find flying skills very helpful for events like script stealing and you'll find as you start to get these skills that whole new levels in the cities you thought you knew open up. As an example, criminals generally hide out in buildings at the top of cities that you can't get to without certain flying skills.

I also like that once you get over the general leveling hump where you go from being weaker than everybody else to being similar in hp levels, then skill matters a lot. The combat is also slower than in a lot of mmo games - I know this has helped my NZ friend a lot. He's one of the top rated pvp'ers even with his lag.

Beginners run into a lot of trouble with the game as they choose to constantly attack. I once went pig hunting in a beginner zone. A player that wanted me to stop killing "his" pigs (lol) ran up to me and attacked over and over. All I had to do was block, block, and block while waiting for my rage meter to fill up. I then let go on my special skill and killed the guy outright. This sort of thing happens a lot, especially in school wars, where you tend to see a lot of new players.

What About PvE and Crafting?



Well, I haven't spent a lot of time on PvE outside of the first story and school quest lines (highly recommended for everybody to do). PvE does have some interesting features that bear mentioning:

• Random Encounters: Sometimes, a random npc will run up to and give you a bowl of slime covered soup that's worth essentially nothing in the game and sometimes the npc will allow you to purchase walking on water or will start a quest line for you. I find these encounters to be fun, because they're rare and unexpected.
  
• NPC's in the game can be given gifts and sometimes upp'ing or down'ing your rep with a specific NPC can lead to a quest line. I haven't personally experienced this, but I do occasionally get little +'s and -'s coming from NPC's when I walk up to them. This is one of those confusing areas where it would be helpful to have more information from China translated.
  
• Faction-based instance runs can lead to gaining skills in the game.
  
• Instances are "graded" and there isn't a lot of information available about how to get "A"'s. So for some people the act of figuring this out may be a reward in and of itself.

Crafting has several unique features as well, including a Bejeweled mini-game for leveling, leaderboards, custom outfits/titles for the top crafters, and the ability to bid on stalls in the game to sell your wares on a weekly basis. Everybody can pick up all main gathering skills: mining, fishing, farming, hunting/skinning, and wood chopping. Everybody then gets one main craft: cooking, poison making, herbalism, black smithing, craftsman, or tailoring. Everybody gets one cultural skill: wei qi (the game Go - gives buffs mostly for instance arrays), Musician (group buffs from playing a guitar hero type minigame), Painter, and Scholar. The last two skills that everybody can obtain and level are Begging (helps to reduce infamy if somebody gives the beggar money) and Divinator (VIP player only skill for giving cultivation speed buffs).

Crafting is limited by the amount of Vigor a person has to spend per day. This helps to avoid extensive over supply of items.

While players have individual stalls in towns, their wares are also accessible from a per town-based trade center where specific items may be searched for if you spell their names exactly - complete with correct capitalization.

Problems with the Game

While I think this game is one of the best I've seen recently in terms of open world PvP action, it also has a lot of problems. Chief among these problems are poor localization coupled with a lack of general information about the game.

To give you an idea of how poorly the game is localized, it took me well over a week to understand the stats in the game and the only reason I did was through watching a video on it (very good video with very poor background music imho). In this video it's explained that posture and balance actually refer to the same stat. Internal damage is just like magic damage and external is your regular physical damage. On top of that, Hard damage is sometimes referred to as "Gold" damage in the tooltip on skills and Soft damage is sometimes referred to as "Wood" damage. All I can say is wtf if a game company can't even get its stats translated right. And most of the people I play the game with skip all in-game cut scenes because with the exception of the tutorial scenes, they're almost impossible to understand the English in.

Remember back to the days when you had to ask your friends if they knew something about a quest, because it just didn't exist online? Well, this game is very much like that. There's a wiki, but it never seems to have the information I need and there just isn't a lot of information out there that's in English for the game. Of course, you'll probably find a lot of information online, but most of it will be in Chinese. Which means that it's very helpful to join a large guild of players that understand the Chinese version. On my server, there is a large Vietnamese population that plays the game and seems to understand things from playing the Chinese version. I am thankful that they are very nice and willing to help English speaking players.

The game has some quality assurance issues as well - sometimes characters bug out in team practice (they can't hit the key they're supposed to hit) and I've had the game crash occasionally. Sometimes multiple clients are not synched up very well. I had a guy I stopped to talk with after turning a kidnapping bag in tell me that he could still see the kidnapping bag on my back along with the PvP flag that goes with it. Relogging did fix the PvP buff issue, but he watched me ride off with the bag apparently perma-attached.

Like most games in the mmo genre, this one has bots and gold sellers. Snail appears to be slowly adding more features to help report and ban them. There are also some annoying cash shop advantages that come with the whole "free to play" business model - chief among them is that you can convert real cash into in game unbound currency and basically buy anything that you need to gear up. It is recommended to buy the monthly "VIP" tag at $9 so that you'll get more xp and drops.

The last thing that's particular important to mention is how you buy your VIP tag. I noticed that this is a Chinese company going through a Russian billing system and half your receipt ends up in Russian when you purchase anything. This seems potentially problematic on a number of levels and so I don't recommend giving your credit card information out. Instead, use the xsolla payment option and buy game time with Subway gift cards (very strange I know, but it works) or through one of the many other xsolla options. If anything ever happens to one of the components in the frankenstein payment system you'll then be covered.



The main thing that's annoyed me from combat has been the last hit gets the kill mechanic. This is particularly annoying in battlefields where everybody is trying to get their leaderboard points from kills.

The last thing that I suppose I should talk about is that Age of Wushu is free to play and with that comes some very annoying cash shop advantages. None of the advantages have broken the game for me, but everybody is going to have to make their own call on what they consider acceptable. The cash shop sells custom 30 day outfits which are entirely cosmetic, but also sells horses (which are faster than in game horses - and very helpful for those wanting to live a life of kidnapping or spying fame). These are minor inconveniences. There is also a monthly VIP purchase of $9 that everybody should get. It raises the cap on your xp per day and allows you to gain xp while offline. I was pretty amazed at the difference before getting VIP and after getting it.

The worst cash shop feature however, is the direct real life money to gold conversion. This is particularly bad in terms of skill gains as it basically uncaps skill xp gain through the "Practice Martial Arts" option in the Cultivation window. So there are a certain number of rich ravens out there that just buy their xp directly. Of course, they also buy top end gear and weapons, both of which make a difference in terms of combat in the game. While skill matters in the game, there are a small number of people that both spend money and have the necessary skills. I call them hardcore players, although maybe Elite players is a better description. You will likely never be able to beat them and should go into the game with the realization that the playing field was never level and probably never will be level due to the direct real life money conversion. We figure that some of the top end school leaders have spent over $1k on the game, assuming that they're spending legit in game money and not gold seller currency.

For myself, that's been ok. The game has enough refreshing components to keep me busy without hitting that particular wall. I also find that I do very well in terms of ranking in school war as well as general PvP without having spent any money outside of the monthly VIP pass. And for the $9 price point, it's cheaper than what most games charge.

This post is located in the "Gameforge European Server Forums" category on the main forums page.

There's now a location to discuss cross server rivalries and nyerk. Have fun!

It looks like EU Aion is finally catching up to NA Aion with the introduction of the rookie server in tomorrow's patch. It's unknown if the addition of the rookie server will have the same effects as the NA version of the server, but I'm linking to the game guide version of it just in case.



It looks like the patch will bring the EU servers back into line with what's currently on the NA servers as demonstrated by the conglomeration that's available in the official patchnotes. Of particular note, the patchnotes include 3.7 as well as the current patch. Gameforge is currently calling the patch 3.9 as adding in the rookie server (obtained much earlier for NA people) is a major patch.

Some of what are in the notes were a part of a minor patch applied on NA servers January 30th, 2013 , so it looks like the NA and EU servers are both at around the same patch.