Going deeper under the skin
The past week I was quite busy so I had less time for actual gameplay, and instead of leveling too much ahead on my Templar (lvl 24) I played a bit more on my Chanter (lvl 16) in order to catch up to Eero and Rami, since I’m hoping we’ll take on the Abyss and the first instance together once they get closer to lvl 25. I also spent some time digging around how to optimize my client since I was experiencing FPS drops in larger areas even thought my PC isn’t that old. I think every WoW player recalls Shattrah city in Burning Crusade expansion and Dalaran now in Wrath of the Lich King. Both are small towns, where both factions are cropped together in a no-fighting zone full of merchants, banks, battleground NPCs and so on.
Even players with a good PC that could handle raids without problems had disconnects and huge load times if they made the mistake of logging out on such area. Now in Aion the main town of the Elyos is.. well.. vast. It takes few minutes to run from end to end, and the NPCs are scattered throughout the whole town so at first it feels like a nuisance to travel back and forth.
After you get used to the idea, it doesn’t bother you that much, that and the fact that there is a teleporter statue in the city, making it easy to travel to the far side and back. In the end it’s good that NCSoft opted to make the city big, it helps people with slower PCs and eases the lag, when they can divide the town into segments so theres less strain on the server. Still the auction house and banking area can get quite crowded, especially on the evenings when majority of the player base is logged in. I found that theres a hotkey to disable other players, so that you only see nametags floating in the air. CTRL+F12 and poof, quite an FPS increase. This is something that I imagine every big MMO should have, it really makes interacting with the NPCs easier and reduces the strain of your PC.
Like I said before I also dug some info about optimizing the client further. In WoW you could add a few custom commands into your configuration file and reload the game to disable shadows completely etc. Minor tweaks that helped the low-end PCs cope. Now as Aion is based on the Far Cry engine, an engine that was developed for a First Person Shooter game, I thought that perhaps there were more ways to change things rather than tweaking around in the options compartment. I found a way to manipulate the configuration file in the Aion folder to enable console, so now I could tweak Anisotropic Filtering and Triple-Buffering for example, two important things that are missing in the options window for some reason. I also found out you can tweak FOV (Field of Vision) via the in-game console (accessed by Pause Break key after enabling it). I switched the FOV value to 90 from the default 60 and after doing so I’ve no longer had patrols surprising me behind my back since I don’t have to sporadically jack my camera back and forth in densely populated areas. If you have a superb PC, you can increase the eye-candy quite a lot via the console, but I won’t go into more detail on how exactly – if you are interested – Google is there for you.
Now, the other thing I discovered was that Aion isn’t a single player game. What I mean is that in most of the casual friendly MMO games you do not have to group up, you can skip some content without it having much of an impact on your gameplay and character developement. As was with WoW, if you knew how to play you could solo most group quests that Blizzard had deemed to need 3 players. Such isn’t the case in Aion, I imagine ranged classes with snares could do to this some point, but it would be both – waste of time and a tad bit too risky. Doing the group quests of the 2nd zone (Verteron) with two other players took us a hefty 3 hours and brought each of us almost two full levels. The mobs also dropped a lot of gear for us, and the rewards of the campaign quests were really good. On top of that, there was some good lore that kept the whole thing interesting. It’s a rare condition that I find myself sitting at the PC for 3 straight hours, playing a game without taking as much as a smoke break. Epic.
Campaign Quest Boss
To cap up the technical mumbo-jumbo, I give props to NCSoft for having Aion in a good shape from the get go. I haven’t experienced any loot bugs or other common oddities that I’ve come accustomed to when trying a MMO that was just launched. There still some rubberbanding and I think the server-side doesn’t update your position as often as it should (cut a corner and the server might think you walked through and rollback your position making you warp back to the corner for example). But all in all, the game is in quite a good technical condition, at least when compared to WoW or Warhammer online launch.
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