As for the Grind, I’d hope NCSoft would have thrown more endgame baits along the leveling. An instance before 25 for example, a miniatyre Abyss for lowbies? What hooked me to WoW was getting to run instances after a mere few hours of gameplay and trying out the BattleGrounds. I thought “Hey, this is cool! I wan’t to do this at levelcap and fast!”, and I was hooked. Aion hasn’t sparked this in me, atleast not yet, and from what I’ve read in IRC and different Blogs, I’m not the only one with the problem. I can’t help but to feel that it’s a bit risky to spend a lot of hours on a game only to find out that the endgame might be lacking, but in this case as I’ve not invested any money myself, I’m putting it aside in terms of research and will continue further.

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.

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.

During those 4 years I played in few of the best European guilds racing for world and server first PvE kills, ran my own PvP oriented guild and even spent some time as a mere casual player. This blog will not be about what was fun or not in Aion, albeit I’d imagine if I find something that I really need to speak about, I would – BUT - I’m going for a stricter approach of trying to compare Aion’s features and gameplay based on my experiences in World of Warcraft. This project is funded by my school, TAMK University of Applied Sciences and will last about two months.

Stay tuned.