Aion Review #1 (CB4)
July 30, 2009 | No Comments | featured, reviews
This will be my first review officially *ever*. I’ve never really reviewed something, but I have posted my thoughts, so thats kinda the same >.> right? I’ll try and keep it unbiased as much as I can too. This from my experience in Closed Beta 4, so I didn’t get to do all the things the game has to offer.
Quick first impressions:
I loaded the game up, the log in screen appeared. The graphics alone were very smooth, and quite pretty 
The game itself didn’t take long to load the first time either. I was pretty excited ^^
Character Creation:
Very nice! You can choose to be Elyos or Asmodian. I haven’t personally checked out Asmodian char creation yet, but I did make an Elyos You can choose presets (face and body) or you can customise it and make your own style. Pretty much any aspect, you can change. Whether it be height, muscles, head size, lips, eyes, everything! I didn’t see any 2 characters that looked even close to each other when I played. I love how this game allows you to be unique. You don’t really feel like combination #24 running around. And for the curious, theres about 44 female, and 45 male hair styles for Elyos. And 45 female, 39 male hair styles for the Asmodians.
Classes:
I like how you have a fair about of choice where you go. Some people don’t like the branching idea, but I do Once you get in game, you’re either a Mage, Priest, Warrior or a Scout. I took the roll of a Priest
Warriors > Gladiators / Templar, Scout > Assassin / Ranger, Priest > Cleric / Chanter, Mage > Sorcerer / Spirit Master.
Graphics:
100% Awesomeness I love how they’ve made the game very optimized for a lot of machines. It ran quite fine on my machine, and it was built last year. I had good fps aswell (showing them is an option in the settings). The armor’s are so detailed its great 
From cloth to plate, it all looks very cool. You can also dye your armor. It was about 1k or so for 1 colour (not sure if thats for each recolour or it has several charges) and you make everything match I’m also not quite sure if you can restore the original colour though. Its just another step towards being very unique
Scenery is just amazing. All the environments feel real. If you’re out in the hot, the character changes its idle animations to fan themselves. If it rains, you pop out a leaf umbrella I haven’t seen the cold area’s yet, but I hope its just as cool ^^ I’d imagine you’d rub your arms and have frosty breath or something similar
Fighting it just cool too, the graphics on the spells are spectacular I love how each fight looks important ^^
Combat:
A very important thing in an mmo, is to have a good combat system. I like what they’ve done here in Aion. Remember FFXI’s combo system? If not, basically you have combo’s that can be done, but you’ll need to set it up with party members (discuss which ones to do) before / during the fights or resting. You did have TP, like DP in Aion (Divine Points are used by specific and powerful skills only Daevas have access too – ie after ascension at lvl 10). With the Aion combo system, you have skills that go in order with others. You can use skill 1 and skill 1a will pop up on the right a bit on the screen, and glow/blink type thing on your action bars. You can even choose to just show the first skill on the bars, as they change over when the 2nd skill is ready to use
Quests:
Questing for me, was quite good As you start off, you might see loads of characters around you, but in a way you feel unique. True from the character screen, no one else will look like you, but theres a underlying urge to become something more Doing the quests around the area, and going to each new town, was fun. Even tho I did a few quests that were the same idea of questing mmo’s have got, like kill 10x of those etc, it didn’t feel like “Oh here we go again”. I actually felt like I was helping the npc’s and their towns. Even with other players doing it too, the quests gave a sense that some things (like kill x of these mobs) were an ongoing threat for a little while. Not like the feeling some people get in other mmo’s were it feels like its just the same old quest again. You felt you had purpose!
Cut scenes are everywhere too! Lately in the last few years, mmo’s haven’t really shown that many cutscenes as you quest. FFXI did, and that was great, and its also nice to see it again in Aion. Some scenes are big epic ones, were some are a simple look on the area. Some just scare you if you’re not expecting it 
I did all the quests I could, and it didn’t feel overwhelming either. Some unlocked as you lvl’d up in the area also. Theres a few nice features aswell to questing. One would be that in your quest log, the quest technically stays in your log until that chain is finished, and in the quest write-up, it shows you all the parts you’ve completed.
Also, when you get a quest, key items / npc’s are blue, and clickable. When you click them, a little information box will come up, telling you about the npc and where they can be found. And theres a Locate button usually just under that info. It’ll mark the npc on the map, or where the mobs can be found. If its something is “hard to find”, it will tell you, and you’ll find it pretty easy without a marker.
Quest rewards were good I think, depending on your luck from finding greens out on the mobs themselves. Usually most quests gave you a choice of 4 things, depending on what you can wear. The longer story lines (main storyline types), gave you quite nice rewards too.
Theres also repeatable quests you can do throughout the day. Like dailies, but the ones I found were just continously repeatable for some money The one you’ll most likely find first, is in the main city, and he just wants you to run to the other side of town (or pay a small fee and take the port) and deliver (or was it pick up?) a package. It had 100 goes, but I’m not sure if that was daily/weekly/forever.
Group quests were fun Unless I just had a great group, I enjoyed it. As I only got to lvl 18, I was doing grp quests with a full grp (6) in the Krall area.
There’s also quests for professions too. I did a few for cooking, and that was fun too. You gathered the items along the way anyway, and could take them back to town to cook them up for some nice buff food.
And of course theres a quest tracker on the right side of the screen
Other features:
Flying / Wings
Love it! One of the big features of the game is flight. You can use it to gather, fight, travel, and pvp later on in the Abyss. You have a time limit of how long you can fly (otherwise when it runs out, you fall and go splat from high heights), but that will increase as you lvl and get better wings + gear with flight time on them.
You are restricted a little bit from where you can fly. But I didn’t find it a problem, since I’m so used to running on foot in mmo’s for a while. You can however glide off higher areas/little hills, and fast travel like that. That helps in getting around quicker
Animations:
The animations are very well done! The emotes are good too, and soon we’ll get to check out the english voices for them At the moment we have koreon voices, but none the less, still quite cool. All the emotions have an animations (correct me if I’m wrong), and they’re quite smooth.
Fighting is done well too, it doesn’t look repetitive imo.
Chat:
I like the chat window. The only gripe I have, is that you can’t seem to make the bg darker. BUT I’m not sure if they’ll add that soon, since we were only playing with build 1.0, where as the games coming out with 1.5. Since they’re westernizing the game, it might make it in there too. You can sort the filtering too, make combat scroll in a different window if you don’t want to watch it. Theres also scrolling combat text, more so popping up near the mob rather then scrolling but good, big and quite cool imo ^^
Armor:
Armor looks great! A lot of detail on the smallest of earrings I love how much attention has gone into that area. They want to make items be able to suit other items too, so if you get totally random items rather then a set, it should look fine all together! Specially mixed with the dye system, people should come out looking pretty good! I don’t think there’s outrageous colours to pick from, I think there’s presets, I’m not 100% sure. You can prob make custom colours, I’m not sure. Don’t quote me kk
Music:
I loved the music! Worked well with the environment too, I hardly ever turned it off. I turned it down a little, but that was just personal preference
Conclusion:
I reckon this games going to go very well. Coming out on September 23rd for us here in Australia. Every mmo (mostly) has the usual things in it, questing / grouping / raids / pvp, and NCSoft have done this spectacularly! Its a very polished game (compared to others at launch and even later on), and defiantly worth going out and pre-ordering and getting it ^^ At the moment, if you preorder any edition, you’ll get a preorder pack, which gives you a code inside (its a skinny DVD case) for all beta events aswell as rewards in game later on. Depending which version you preorder, you get a different ring. Obviously if you preorder standard, no in game rewards, but there’s also Limited and Collectors still there to preorder, which have different contents inside and the same ingame items.
One big thing in the game is PvP, and from what I hear, its been done very well I didn’t get to experience it – hopefully in CB5 this weekend – so until then I can’t really tell you what I think of it.
But check it out at Aion Online, official website Also check out the Powerwiki they have there, as that will show you a lot more info then what I’ve covered Aion Armory is also there to show you quest items, quests, gear, all that kind of thing If you’re looking for a good community, AionSource is the way to go! Biggest official fansite there is, along with forums, dev tracker, news and galleries
Popularity: 23% [?]
).
