The MMO with largest launch of the year appears to be Aion: The Tower of Eternity from NCsoft, but does a big launch equate to a good game? MMOs are hard to pin down around their launch dates, but the 80% average at GameRankings points to a decent title. Critics enjoyed the unique visuals and flight combat, but cautioned that you really need to be interested in both PvE and PvP to make the most of the game. So what did you think of it?
Here is a snip from my thread regarding my opinion of Aion compared to AoC. The whole thing is too long to post here but feel free to follow the link if interested.
I'm the type of player who likes to make alts so long as the journey is fun and rewarding. I started over in Aion twice as friends would take the plunge. Having started over again that many times from 1-20 till everyone caught up, and we could make our way to 30 left me mind-numbingly bored. Rolling an alt in aion and starting over is the worst ever as everything is identical. Gear won't speed up the grind, Kinah won't speed up the grind. No matter what it feels like a chore.
Imagine the perfect scenario for making an alt in Aion. You transfer millions of currency so you can buy premium gear for every level of your character and afford crafting.
You still have to....
1. A: Grind up your levels. Nothing will boost your exp and after 20 it's impossible to solo for decent exp. Quests fall very flat.
B: Crafting still requires hours upon hours of gathering to get your skills up because the trade brokers rarely ever have mats due to everyone buying gold.
C: All that great gear goes to waste when one of your group mates fudges up, breaks CC, and gets the group wiped. It just takes 1 add to start you very far back.
D: Same old quests, same linear zones, and this time you get to compete over the exp spots with bots who have filled the server slots of players who left before you.
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Here is a rundown of things I compared between Aion and AoC having reached level 30 in both games. I've since hit level 50 in AoC and it's only gotten better. Aion was canceled before the free 30 days were up.
Creating alts:
Both Aion and Conan feel linear when having to go back again and level an alt up. Aion takes it to an extreme tho and the areas/quests are exactly the same to the point you want to stab your eyes with ice picks. At least in Conan you have 3 areas to branch into when you hit your teens, and Tortage will always be fun no matter how many times you do it.
Characters:
In Aion and Conan your character slots count across all servers. What you see is what you get. Conan has a much wider variety of characters to create and thus could use some more slots making Aion look more attractive in that department.
Questing:
Aion's questing is very very very generic. They are 100% fed-ex quests of go here and kill that for x item. Campaign quests are exactly the same thing, only the reward is a tiny bit better and every once in a while you get a 5 to 6 second cut-scene which is nothing more than the camera panning around an area you must explore or boss to kill. Aion's quests do little to tie you into the region or make you feel like you want to help the quest giver.
Conan's questing is similar but far more engaging. What really tips the scale in Conan's favor is the voice acting you experience early on in the game, then sparsely later on. With every patch if they give 1 or 2 more npcs a voice... eventually they will get them all and make Hyboria much more immersive. Also there is an attachment to the lore behind the world Conan has in it's quests that Aion severely lacks.
World Travel:
Travel in Aion is done via teleporters and flight masters witch you have to pay for to use every time and becomes quite costly. Aion has no mounts but it does have flight via wings. Sadly it's implimented poorly and your flight is on an extremely limited timer which can be upgraded over time via gear and wing upgrades. Flight controls are clunky and not as smooth as WoW's. Falling damage is also extremely high so deaths occur quite often due to server lag or falling through the world.
Conan has the merchants and smugglers that take you to different areas. As for mounted travel they use horses witch require carrying degrees of riding skill. It can be costly to train but are good money sinks for various stages of a characters career.
Death:
In Aion when you die you lose a chunk of exp called "debt" witch you never get back without visiting a soul healer. Prices vary on how much you lost and what level you are making death VERY VERY expensive. The constant deaths due to unforgiving camp pulls lead to players buying gold from farmers/bots, and perpetuating a whole other problem eating away at the game like a cancer. In Conan you have stacking debuffs with the ability to remove the debuff if you recover your grave stone. I find this a good solution to keep suicide players from throwing themselves at a situation yet not punish the general public too harshly.
PvP:
In Aion the classes are almost perfectly balanced, and also perfectly boring. PvP is one big snore fest of running around hunting for rifts or getting ganked while simply trying to gather crafting materials or grind mobs. They get an "A" for effort but in Aion with the poor camera controls and targeting, along with the worst UI in the world for healers, pvp boils down to small skirmishes at best. Later on you can take keeps and control zones for world buffs like in Warhammer, but they are largely uninspiring and get stale fast. You earn points in pvp for doing damage, killing, and completing objectives much like honor points in WoW yet you earn no points for healing making it a thankless job. These points are spent on the best gear in the game from special vendors. I've yet to pvp in Conan so there is no comparison from me yet.
PvE:
In Aion pve is like watching paint dry. Boss encounters are all tank and spank. The encounters are entire based around how much CrowdControl spells you brought with you. Then simply CC the adds, kill 1 at a time.. repeat... ZZzzzzz. It's bad... not just grindy bad but "OMFG EYES BLEEDING IF I KILL 1 MORE" kinda bad. It's also entirely way too unforgiving. Soloing is impossible for the most part and if you or a group-mate break the CC on 1 mob that is all it takes to wipe the group.
In Conan the pve can seem as bad at certain stages of the game but all the quests they've added help a lot. Also in Conan you have things like fatalities to spice up pve and while I've only gotten as far as doing the Black Castle, most of the encounters in there were entertaining and I loved the addition of traps. That goes a long way to showing off the imagination of AoC developers compared to Aion's extremely generic feel.
Crafting:
In Aion the crafting extremely fun and you can start at level 1. You have 2 simple ways of gathering materials. Vitality and Aether gathering. Vitality covers anything that comes from the earth, while Aether is energy based and other-worldly. With mats in hand you take them back to the extremely laggy and over crowded crafting areas. There you purchase npc sold components and start to make your wares. When making an item it has a chance of critting, thus turning it into a higher quality of item.
Say I'm making a white quality ring and it crits. Then it turns into a green quality ring with better stats and a new name. Then via world drops you can find crafting patterns that use the crit rings to turn them into a more specialized ring. When crafting a green specialized ring, if that crits you will end up with a blue quality ring.
To Recap - Silver ring < Noble silver ring < Caster version/Melee version < Rare quality Noble version of the specialized ring
This gives crafters the incentive to want alot of mats so they can grind items hoping for crits. Not only does this fuel a healthy economy but there is a great deal of satisfaction when you crit all the way up to a blue item. It's like using a slot machine and watching it hit all the same numbers for a big jackpot. Crafting is also ultra expensive even if you farm your own mats witch causes players to buy from gold farmers and drags the game further down. In Conan I've done some gathering so far but have not gotten around to crafting yet so no comparison.
Graphics:
In Aion the graphics are pretty good but not amazing. The texture quality and shaders is far below Conan's quality but on the up side Aion does run alot smoother on lesser computers than Conan. On the down side every character in Aion looks like they escaped from the circus more or less. The men look like women, the women like men. The fashion and overall style of the armor and weapons is very cartoon like. Aion also suffers some extreme issues when you have 15+ people on the screen even when you normally run at 73fps.
Controls:
The controls in Aion are very old fashion. You will feel like you're in daoc or eq again. They do not let you customize the UI, and do not allow add-ons or mods for the game making healing a nightmare without any grids. The camera has no option to turn off the snap-back and due to the poor translation from Korean to English, it can be difficult to figure out which options affect what you're trying to tweak in the menus. Over all the combat animations are smooth and a bit too flashy in Aion, and get really repeditive. In Conan the controls are top notch. They broke into a new genere and pushed outside of the box to come up with a system that feels unique from other mmorpgs. My only beef with Conan here would be lack of variety in the skills. My ToS has cast the same lightning spell for the last 29 levels and from what I hear, he will be all the way to 80. Boring!
Support:
Aion does not offer any in game support and has no in game GMs. Everything is handled by petitions, reporting, and emails. You can imagine the kind of disaster this entails as you have people running around with names like "Cumhonorface, Fittytucker, Endofallfags, and Ngrslayer". If that wasn't bad enough... the guild names get even worse. On top of no policing for the players this also means bots are running rampant. Sure I'd expect to see some level 1 bots farming gold in wow but in Aion they are in their level 30s now since the entire game is based around grinding camps of mobs. Bots literly choke players out of good exp spots and nothing is done about it. Spam in chat channels is out of control and a players block list is not very long filling up in a day or two before it has to be cleaned up. Careful if you like sending mail to alts with crafting mats. Mail 5 or more things in a day and you could get flagged as a spammer and restricted to 1 mail per log in session with no timer when the penalty expires. Only an email to NCsoft can get it reversed, if they bother to reply.
I finally had to deal with Funcom's customer service for the first time and they are sterling. I had purchased a 6 month subscription and a few days later they lowered the prices of subscription fees. I sent an email to customer service asking if I could get a refund and then re-subscribe with the lower fee but I would understand if they said no. They got back to me within 1 business day and had no problem with the request at all. I was so pleased I bought a years subscription out of thanks and to support them further.
Now for the icing on the cake. When I bought the 6 months it gave me my veterans reward points for it. When they reset my account and I bought 12 more months it let me keep the points from my previous transaction, and added the 12 month rewards on top of what I had before. So in turn they thanked me back with enough points to get a free swift mount!
TL;DR version
Aion is a generic asian grinder with outdated game mechanics, zero atmosphere, and populated mostly by bots. If it was as simple as "I don't like this game but you might" then I would have chosen a "Mediocre" score but instead I went with "Poor" because I've been gaming in MMOs over 10 years, and this one is nothing more than a glorified console game in terms of quality and depth from my personal experience.
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Anime men who look like women who look like men. Eventually people will end up forgeting which hole to stick it in or which hole they want it in. Lets all look alike and let test tubes make the babies
Last edited by lockwoodx; 11-04-2009 at 01:38 PM..
The only reason I played this game was because I was in Tabula Rasa when it went belly up, so I got access to the betas, and a free month.
Over that month I got up to the mid level 20s, but I would never consider going back, nor would I have paid for it.
The graphics are really pretty, the animations are solid, and the massive PVP battles that take place in the PVP area can be a lot of fun.
The problem is, you can't go five feet without running into some gold spammer, and god forbid you look into the general chat channel. By the end of the month, my block list was full. Also, pretty much everything you can do within the game involves grinding, and it gets worse at higher levels, as things take longer and fail more often. Also, the writing is atrocious. A race of cat people called the "Mau"? The translators also seem to have really gone to town on the vegetables, for example, giving the common carrot a "Final Fantasy" name.
I've been playing this game awhile, and I don't think it's as bad as everyone thinks. Technologically, the game is extremely good and beautiful. It's got some immersion (sense of you belonging to a race/the world).. which is what makes WoW so popular.
I don't understand why people complain about GRIND. All RPGs are grind. Grind is less noticeable if you are able to pick your own areas to level in, skip areas that don't appeal to you, etc. Grind can be improved by boosting XP gained, adding more simple quests, etc.
Gold spammers are pretty annoying/common in Aion, but seriously? You don't want to play a game because of that? It's pretty difficult to get rid of them entirely. Even WoW can't do it.
I don't feel Aion needs a whole lot to be really good. It's stable, usable, lots of good uniqueness about it. They can always improve gameplay. If enough people complain about, for instance, not being able to fly EVERYWHERE.. I'm sure they'll add it in. WoW caved to a lot of people's demands, too.
Aion is a great base to start with. It's not perfect, but no MMO is. The problems can be remedied with spending some time on tweaking
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We are men of action, lies do not become us.
So few people liked it, they didn't bother to vote lol
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Quote:
Anime men who look like women who look like men. Eventually people will end up forgeting which hole to stick it in or which hole they want it in. Lets all look alike and let test tubes make the babies
