First impressions

So we began our weekend lan with Eero and Rami and it didn’t go down without problems. We got to the actual playing on Saturday since Eero got delayed on Friday and after reinstalling Ramis OS which got infected by a trojan downloader, due him expecting me to have a hardware firewall.. pfft. Oh well, after the hardships it was time to start playing the character I already created on Friday while waiting to get started.

Character creation was a pleasant surprise, there’s literally dozens of ways to customize your character, but only two races compared to World of Warcrafts eight available races (four per faction). In WoW, where every player were the exact same size as every other player that chose that particular race, in Aion you can tweak everything from neck length to foot size. As for pure looks there are gradients to pick exact colors for hair, eyes, lips and skin. There were 40+ hairstyles for female characters (I didn’t check male creation yet), and dozens of different templates for faces – which if you wanted – you could tweak to your own liking, by using sliders to shape, size and position every important and less important facial feature. We picked the good guys, the Elyos and I am playing a Warrior Templar, which is a tank class. Since I am quite accustomed to tanking in MMO-games, playing a tank is a good reference point for me when comparing these two games.

Character Creation

User Interface

Straight from the beginning it was clear that NCSoft had taken deep thought when creating the User Interface. In WoW I had to download a great number of add ons (user-created extensions to alter the default UI) to feel that I had all the relevant information available on what was happening while running around in the world and engaging in combat – in Aion the default UI seems to hold its own pretty well, I reached level 19 during the weekend and so far I’ve not felt the need to have any modifications. When you receive quests you can click to show the relevant objective on world map – on most cases at least – and if you wish, you can type “/where npcname” to find certain NPC’s which you want to interact with.

First impressions from actual gameplay were good, thought there were few features which annoyed me, but in the end, there were more features that gave me a pleasant surprise. Firstly, the combat in Aion takes longer than in WoW. You don’t just engage in combat, loot the goods after 10 seconds and move to the next mob. As a Templar the combat lasts about 20 to 40 seconds depending whether you are fighting a caster or melee type mob. It’s refreshing to actually have to keep in mind what the optimum skill rotation is, instead of just bashing all your damage skills and moving on. Already on level 10 I had more than enough buttons to press while fighting, to keep me from getting bored, but still straightforward enough not to be a nuisance. Other thing I liked was the campaign quests, they are special quests with longer storylines, and usually a bigger reward if you complete the whole chain. There are chain quests in WoW as well of course, but you cannot tell them apart from normal quests from first glance. In Aion the two are separated by colors, yellow for campaign and blue for normal quest.

Akarios Plains, starting area

Second and the biggest surprise was that I didn’t need to play for a while and then get to grab some gathering skill and have to go back to the starting zone to gather materials for crafting skills. You have the one skill required to do so right from the start and it’s used to gather everything that can be gathered, mined, fished etc. Well, at least almost. At level 10 when you get you get your flying skill you get another which is only used to gather stuff midair, and mind me saying, feels really annoying since the flight time is restricted to 60 seconds in the beginning and time required to fully gather a material node midair usually takes longer, especially when it might take you 10 seconds to get there.

Flying

Lastly about the flying, which in every other way except the gathering is a great addition, especially when you get it already on level 10 and can be used to travel faster even on the zones where you aren’t allowed to fly in the words traditional sense. When you run around from place to place enough it gets boring fast, even if you had a mount to speed it up, but for me flying really makes traveling more fun. On the no-fly zones you can double tamp the jump button to glide, which speeds you up and slows descent. Now I already perfected a little way of “bunny jumping” with the glide skill. Just before you touch ground you twist your mouse making your wingtip touch the ground and for some reason tossing you higher about 1-2 jumps worth of height, allowing you to glide even further. This only works well when going downhill though, but sometimes on flat surfaces too if you get lucky, but it’s not consistent. Compared to World of Warcraft mount travel and flying mounts which you cannot combat with midair the Aion implementation is a blast. I can only wait until I get to level 25 and enter the Abyss (Aion equivalent of WoW Battleground), where you can PvP against Asmodean (the enemy faction of Elyos) members even midair.

Next week I plan to talk a bit about gear, gear customization and continuity differences between the two games at least, and try to cover anything I forgot to add here, since first time in a game this vast can be a bit overwhelming.

~ by red on 04/11/2009.