Aion Open Beta

[Shellie]

Aion is now in fully open beta..no file planet subscription required, though you do need to go through fileplanet for a key. Dont bother with the download from FP, Aion's registration links you to their download or you can find a torrent.

Im checking it out now on the Vaizel server. Char name is Serafina

[SineSwiper]

Pffft, Fileplanet. Such sites are obsolete with the advent of torrents.

[Shellie]

So I've been playing with a friend of mine...he's one of those crazy Korean gamers that can level like crazy heh.

Overall, it's pretty decent. I have a lvl 12 Elyos Cleric, and a lvl 8 Asmodian Sorceress.

The basic jist is that this happy world was ran over by this 3rd faction called the Balaur, some stuff happened and the planet literally split into 2 halves. The residents live inside the 2 halves, not on the outside. So one half is shrouded in darkness, and the other in light. So some hunks of rock and land float around the broken core of the planet, and this is called the Abyss..where PvP(they call it PvPvE because you also fight the Balaur NPC faction) takes place.

It's your basic MMO questing and whatnot, but when you hit lvl 9, you start your Ascension quest to become a Deava at lvl 10. When you Ascend, you pick a subclass and..you grow wings! In Aion, you can fly and even do combat midair. You move out of the starter area into a really beautiful capital city, at least on the Elyos side, I havent seen the Asmodian one yet.

The environment is very pretty and colorful, character creation is very detailed. The starter area is just like any other MMO, but once you Ascend, it adds the flying element and that makes it pretty interesting.

However, even though the game has been out in Korea for over a year the interface still seems a little clunky to me at times. There are a ton of features from LOTRO that I miss in this game. I do really like Aion's private store ability. You can set up a little shop anywhere. You just put what you want to sell in a panel, and hit Start and you sit in a chair with a little banner and people come up to you to buy things from your store. This is handy sometimes out in the combat areas to help get rid of some of your loot that's taking up space. There is also an auction house and vendors, so you have those options as well.

One feature I do really like and is in some other NCSoft games is the channel changing. There are different servers and in each server, different channels. If you are in an area that has a ton of people grabbing all the mobs you need for some silly starter quest, you just change channels and use one that doesnt have as many people. Pretty nifty.

It's a fun game that adds a little twist to the conventional mmo, but I could take it or leave it. I don't think I will be playing after launch (even if I didn't have something to keep me busy coming soon!).

[Shrinweck]

I suppose I'll give this a try. Looked at the website and it looked pretty interesting. Yikes, 9.1gb zip.

Edit: Ugh I forgot how awful public trackers are.

[Shellie]

I don't think Open beta is available anymore. The game launches on the 20th.

[Shrinweck]

Oh, you're right, it ended today. Shucks.

[Shrinweck]

I'm weak. It's been a top seller on Steam for way too long. I pre-ordered it.

[Shrinweck]

So I've been playing a bit and I've been having a lot of fun. LOTRO was probably more interesting and well done in an all around way, but Aion does quests really well. Even most of the kill quests aren't just "I'm pissed at *blank* so kill it for me." The campaign quests are also fairly fantastic and a lot of them I'd have to say are better than the story quests in LOTRO.

I've ascended three characters - a ranger, an assassin, and a gladiator. They all play exactly how they should and that makes me a happy camper. I was most looking forward to playing the ranger but I forgot how incredibly boring I find kiting. I was hoping by the class description that it would play a lot more like nearly destroying the target and then finishing them off at close range, and some fights are like that, but when doing quests where the 'boss' spawns on top of me, I find that it's 100% kiting or 100% surety of death.

My assassin is my highest leveled character and I'm having fun with him, although I couldn't even play him tonight as queuing prevented me from playing him for a 35 minute wait. This character plays a lot like it should - stealth up to a target and just wreck it with skills and stuff. At 13 and 16 you unlock rune skills that are kind of cool - you apply up to five runes on a target and then detonate them for massive damage and a possible stun.

The gladiator almost seemed too powerful, but once I hit harder enemies it became a bit more of a challenge. Since I played the equal of this character in LOTRO (except the gladiator focuses more on two handed stuff as opposed to the champion dual wielding), so I'm completely used to the game play. While they're very easy classes to play.. there's something very satisfying about hitting things with big weapons.


While the private stores are a very neat feature that allow you to go afk for dinner and sell your not-so-vendor trash people are abusing it to get around the idle kick feature where if you're idle too long, you get kicked off the server. With queues going it's very disheartening to walk into areas with dozens of people abusing the private store to get around queues by keeping a 500 kuria (or whatever the currency is) item for 999,999,999 kuria. The auction house system is very well done and even when I did wait for 15 minutes last night to play did not lag at all. This is something WoW never got right when I played it - and I got into it months after it was out when a feature so rudimentary should no longer be an issue.

Also the people in general chat are morons. But what's new? LOTRO is the only MMO where only a few morons slipped through here and there most of the time, but this is worse than WoW. Watching dumb asses get trolled is somewhat satisfying at times, though. This did finally give me a chance to test the channel/instance changing feature and to my surprise the populations aren't balanced at all. Which fucking rocks. I love how nearly no one knows how to (or cares) change channels. I started out in a newbie zone surrounded by at least 20-30 people, switched channels from four to nine, and was instantly transported to nine where... there was one other dude in the initial starting spot. Awesome.

[Shellie]

I was hoping the kids in Aion would disappear when it hit retail, but I guess not.

And yeah, LOTRO is the only MMO that I've played (except maybe AC) that has had a more mature player base with very little "Barrens chat".

[Shrinweck]

Apparently there's a guy from way back when (closed beta) who has been trolling the server my main character is on, so that's the cause of a lot of it. The less populated server I'm on is a somewhat better. Still, when the kids go back to WoW it should be okay.

I started playing AC when I was, like, 12 so I can't really talk about maturity :P

[Eric]

This game started out fun, then when you get to around 40 you find out that each level after that takes as long as it takes to go from 70->80 in WoW, and your tolerance and patience with the game falls off, as it did with the rest of the playerbase as there are handfuls of level 50s on alot of servers.

[Shrinweck]

I was still having fun playing it until Borderlands came out and with Dragon Age coming out this week I haven't felt like playing for quite some time. I'll probably unsubscribe in a couple weeks if this trend continues.

[Shellie]

My fried quit playing as well, I guess it doesnt hold up in the long run. *shrug*

I am having a blast with Borderlands and am looking forward to Dragon Age as well though