f13.net

Retail Information:

Servers are up, you can make two characters. When the Head Start goes live on Sunday, you can make all of your characters.

Launch Server: Asphel
Launch Faction: Elyos

I'll be playing as Non.

If Asmodian is your thing...

Asmodian Server: Vaziel

Though it's likely I won't really be playing there.

I have the game installed at home with an account.  I'm just stuck at work.  Looking forward to giving it a whirl.

Gah, this is way too much of a pain in the ass.

Not really.

This torrent might have good speed (3.2 MByte/s - atleast from Sweden):

http://isohunt.com/torrent_details/71349789/aion?tab=summary

No, it's not a pain in the ass. It took me ten minutes to register and, eeeerrr, verify my age.

PS.
I don't think Chinese ID are illegal to spread, just unethical. Like many other countries' IDs, they're just numbers computed from birthdate, birth place, gender and so on. Not sure however, so at your own risk. :why_so_serious:

More effort than I am willing to put in for a game that I'm only vaguely interested in in the first place. 

Ah nice, just wanted to open a thread for the AION Beta.
Here (http://sayasun502.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!DF5D8DC071D53FEC!166.entry) is a pictured explanation on how to register at the website.
And thanks for the link to the en-languagepack.

Good find!

Any idea how long this is going on for? I won't be home much until after Sunday and am hoping it's not just a weekend stress test

No idea!

It's fun, though!

Add me to your buddy list ingame (press V), character name is Lockdown

Start goldspamming. If anyone asks, you're based out of Flint, Michigan.

They'll try to buy your house. That's all the rage now, rite?

My installer seems to have frozen. The progress bar is full, but it won't do anything from there. Clicking the one available button, it seems to be asking me if I want to cancel the installation.

Has anyone had this and resolved it?

Yeah, teach 'em how we love to grind it, baby!  :drill:

Then why even open up a thread entitled Chinese Open Beta if you're only vaguely interested?  :oh_i_see:

Awesome, Non. Thanks a bunch!

Downloading. Should be able to join you tomorrow.

This is rather strange. It seemingly won't accept any name I try. They're all illegal or taken. Is there a trick to it?

But I'm loving the character generation :-)

How is it fun?

It has (lots of!) sliders that do meaningful stuff. Unlike those in say, Oblivion. I can get my toon just ugly enough without having to go full retard.

After choosing it once, it is not letting me change it.

The anti-cheat software for this, Gameguard, does NOT work with Windows 7.

There is absolutely nothing compelling about this game other than it's prettier looking than WoW. Not one tenth as pretty as Blade & Soul. It really serves no purpose. NCSoft is weird.

Yay me for finding this out *shakes fist*

You are not missing anything.

I'll find out soon enough, I'm patching it on a vista computer right now.  It might be shit, but as much as I loved L2 I have to give it a shot.

Anything with a sword is completely different to me now, after Demon's Souls.  :oh_i_see:

Are you just trying to be adorable? I'm OK with it, btw. As in, I agree. Swords just aren't the same anymore.

10 years after EQ, part of me could still accept, appreciate and be fascinated by dikus. I came from a time were fantasy was A to attack and R to run, so the grind, repetition and lack of dynamism never really bothered me that much.

Aion, I still think it'll be a very good diku experience, and I'll probably spend a very good amount of time there. I put "my money" on it as a commercial success and despite being, once again, THE turd with a different polish, I am ok with it. Hell, I still watch lots of animes, I know a lot about decorating turds.

But tonight, Aion left me empty cause for the first time EVERYTHING bothered me. Demon's Souls changed my perception of videogames. Maybe it won't last, maybe it's just like when you are so much in love with someone that you forget you don't do monogamy, but today Aion got slaughtered by Demon's Souls and all the little sweet warm things it did to me.

I was there, with my brand new Aion character, wielding this cute big sword, and feeling the total lack of control over her...

I felt unimpressed and empty.  :oh_i_see:

这一切发生之前，将再次发生。

Supposedly the endgame is focused on PvPvE rather than just raiding.

Howabout some screens sir?

Screens are everywhere. Do you need ours?

Anyway, you hit my soft spot. I'll provide some Lefteye goodness soon.

Is that the technical term for being ganked while killing an NPC?

I believe warhammer called it 'keep taking'

From what I understand the best endgame PVE stuff needs PVP stuff to happen.  Or something like that.

I want to be morally abused by The Grind. Downloading  :drill:

"Prettier-looking WoW-clone*" would equal "Money hats". I'm guessing that's NCSoft's thinking.

(*addendum: "that doesn't suck, unlike the last couple of diku-MMOGS")

And it's not even grindier than your usual western generic MMORPG.

I hit level 10 all on quests in about 4 hours or so taking my time and not knowing where to go.  I also played a priest which killed things sloooooow.

I think they did a good job with it.  I have no idea what the curve is like though.

oh so i was right.

4 hours for level 10 on a none combat oriented class is kinda decent. But korean mmo's have a tendency to let you blast you through the first few levels and tripple the grind per level. So I'm sorta wondering if it will take 4 hours to get to 10-20.

Some screenies, mainly from character creation which is very, very satisfying.

God damn it's gorgeous and runs well. Shame about the ball busting latency.

Aint working for me, it refuses to install the game. Its giving me trouble over data.zip wich is incidentally password protected.

Oh well! Might want to contact tech support!

Password protected? I'd say you got the wrong (fake) zips somehow  :awesome_for_real:
I got a .zip error but I realized it was because firefox crashed, and when I resumed the download it renamed the files someting like data.z01(2). Deleting the (2) fixed it.

I fell in love with it from the get-go. I think I'll buy this just to prototype PnP RPG characters' appearance. :-)

Im pretty sure i have the correct files, i got em from the same link as the OP suggest. And they seem to be working for everyone else. But i guess i could try and download it again. Damn error being all chinese! :uhrr:

They look nice and all, but how often are you going to see your character's face? How are their butts?

On the topic of appearance, are there more than one armor set option per level or is clone central except for face/hair? Do you get the next tier of armor all at once or is it one of those breastplate at 40, gloves at 41 systems that has you looking like a mismatched hobo for the majority of the game?

So how's the EXP Curve btw? It looks great.

Recalling from memory, the visual gear is divided into top, bottom, feet, hands and head. There's also an option to wear a guild cloak. I've seen people wear various gear between levels 1 and 10, so stuff that drop don't appear to share any sort of hard "tiered appearance".

The customization isn't just about the head either, the body customization is actually pretty good too. What's really missing to make characters look quite unique is choosable animation sets. It wouldn't have to change every animation, but having different run styles and idle stances would help diversity alot. With everyone moving the same way, it still looks sorta homogeneous, despite the other great options.

What bothers me is that you can get a little too extreme with the sliders. People make toons that are 4' tall with limbs like pool cues. As a member of Filthy ArrPeers worldwide, I say it's immersion-breaking! And it looks stupid.

rp n asia dont mix.

You're playing a game where people can sprout wings and are complaining about immersion?

It's all about context! :-) Owlbears aren't exactly within the domain of probability either.

Anyway, just as a sample point, to get from level 4 to 5 you need 8700 XP, with a level 4 kill giving 200 - 300 XP. That means roughly 35 mobs, each taking me about 20 seconds (as a priest) to kill with this outrageous latency.

So yeah, it's a little rough even early on. I'm going to turn in a wad of quests and see how far that gets me.

Edit:
Turning in a "mission", a story arc quest, netted me 1000 XP. So.

My south Korean friend said they don't have the slightest idea what tabletop RPGs are. I guess that's why the concept of "immersion breaking" keeps escaping them.

On a funnier but dramatic note, my Israeli friend got seriously worried when I told her "me and my friend have regular RPG (http://www.motionpicturearmourer.com/rpg.jpg) nights". You should have seen the look on her face.

(https://dl.getdropbox.com/u/829607/tabletoprpg.jpg)
 :awesome_for_real:

Hahhaha, now that was funny in a awkwardly kinda way :D

By the way, tried the game and while it seems decent enough (I only played an Asmodean Mage so far), nothing I see myself devoted to for a long period of time. I enjoyed the Lore on the website, though. I'm too a spouse of the lost cause of MMOG Roleplayers, so I understand the pain :P

I finally got the thing to install. Incase anyone else is also getting data.zip error during install, im afraid you have to download everything all over again as one of the files is corrupt. Not neccesary data.zip btw.

I did, worked for me. If it matters, i used the torrent.

just, putting this out there incase anyone else has problems.

Watch out for Itto.  He doesn't believe RPers exist, so he'll tease you mercilessly.

fix'd.

The fact that I won't be able to take the setting atleast a bit seriously will probably be a deal breaker for me. The /sleep emote summons you a cloud to lie on. /sit (or /chair, in fact) produces a chair et cetera.

It just seems unnecessary.

Did anyone noticed what happens when you are idling and it's raining?

Yeah. And if you're standing in a stream it starts to chase fish with the hands :-P

Oh, and you can't swim. At all.

I played a mage up to level 10 and it took my just short of 2 hours.  Not too bad.

Damn you Windows 7!

Following the old DAoC tradition, you can't make characters of different factions on the same account, so I needed a new one to try Asmodians chars.

Meet Odette Falconeer.


I like Asmodians' glowing red eyes when in attack mode.

 :drillf: <--- too.

Hey, had a quick question...i set up a username and password and all that then hit enter and it said successful. Is that it? No email registration or anything?
Also, do you have to pay to play or no? Thanks in advance, can't wait to play!

It's an open beta, Lolschach.

Lol, guess that shoulda tipped me off...is the ddl faster then the torrent? Cause my eta is 14hrs or so

I hate it when we have "how to sign up" threads here because people come along and expect us to be tech support.

We are not fucking tech support.

See the DJ Portable Max thread in the schild chronicles for other examples of this shit.

Loot is NOT the usual Korean cookie-cut tiered crap. I already looted a couple of uncommon (green name) items, at level 6.
Also, the manastone thing to customize every piece from the get go is nice.

And cutscenes are so cool.

Too bad the gameplay is barely gameplay.

Maybe I'm totally turned off by the horrible way the game starts. Might as well have been kill 10 rats.

It IS kill ten rats. Pardon, ten web slink, ten lake brax and ten cute ribbit (and I'm not even joking).

Still, more screenz:





The game is the same you played in the last 10 years, now with more frills and polish. It's all up to you, and how much you can take of the same soup. Yes, the gameplay is barely gameplay, as usual.
I want to like and play this game so much, but I guess it'll all depend on the quality of PvP.

I'm in a similar situation here. I do want to like it, because it is very pretty and it does have some nice features, but at the same time it's really even more bland than both WoW and LotRO. Somehow it lacks soul in the same way almost every K-Diku does.

That's not my problem. WoW was a turd since day one to me, and LotRO was a much better game save for the sluggish combat. But they were 5 and 8 years old repetitions of EverQuest. Aion is a 10 years old repetition, and that is my only problem. It doesn't have to do with soul or the lack of. Being the same identical game with different visuals and lore, the poor and uninspired soul of diku is all there. But it's a soul I would not eat even with bacon.

I could play and love Aion, but I need more than kill ten rats or do ten raids. I need kill ten players and siege ten fortresses. Let's see what will happen in the Abyss.

They're banking on aerial combat to change that.

About the Adult ID thing. Do you mean you can't play 6 hours -in a row- or 6 hours period? Because last time I catassed 6 hours in a row it was against Bertie in Plane of Disease, which ain't gonna happy any time soon.

Edit: Nm, found that it is 6 hours per day, which is more than enough. Now, if there's a secret 'flash boobies' emote that requires adult ID, I will revisit the matter.  :hello_kitty_2:

Here's some hours in a row.

(http://img14.imageshack.us/img14/1169/11hours.png)

I'm reinstalling Windows XP to try this.  Been running Windows 7 as my only OS for a while even though I partitioned my drive to allow for dual boot, cause I haven't had a need for anything else.

That said, I will be very angry if I like it, and the release version doesn't support Windows 7.

Newest screenshots look prettier than ever.  I haven't been paying close attention cause usually when I do it's a dissapointment.  Got a lot of learnin' to do.

You won't like it that much Koyasha.

I mean, I think everyone who played dikus for a while now won't ever get back to EverQuest or World of Warcraft levels of involvement and amusement. Because of that, everything will always look bland no matter what, unless they start doing something really new with it.

You will like it, just moderately. Good PvP (court is still out on that) and good friends can make the experience ten times better, but the sense of wonder and the positive addiction of the old times can't come back because of polish and better visuals.

EDIT: court is still out on the flying mechanic as a real gameplay improvement too.

Mind that the flying isn't really a feature beyond Aion's comtemporaries, it's just a variant of having mounts, since flying will be assumed in many places (such as Abyss.) With the entire game being built around the assumption that everyone will fly everywhere, I don't see how it can make that much a difference to just having a normal mount except for the novelty of having an additional dimension. This isn't 1994 after all and 3D just isn't that cool anymore. In WoW, flying is swell because there's an alternative (ground mounts) that appears as tedium in comparison. There's no alternative in Aion so there's no real tedium to be compared to nor relieved of.

Mind that aerial combat.

I know it has "aerial" combat. Quotation marks, because I doubt there's any actual aerial physics involved. Hotbar combat with another dimension for people to run away in, does it sound appealing?

I like cutscenes too: loved them in Guild Wars so I hope they will be at least as good as those ones. But yes, the very beginning is almost unbearable with those serial killing quests.

Ok, ok, it shouldn't surprise anyone, but c'mon (and add to that the lack of the "prologue quest/cinematic" that we aren't able to see in this beta)...At least, yes, there is some uniqueness when it comes to beasts, they are pretty odd looking. No more dealing with "Razorhide X".

But hey, I'm sure Black Prophecy and/or Jumpgate Evolution won't let us down and will request us to kill "Razorhide pirate vessels" or "bristleback frigates" one way or another :P

I ran into my first botters last night, 3 of them setup just outside the ice lake killing the leh..somthing spies and goons.  I'm curious as to what program they were running, from the movement/detection, it looked alot like l2walker, but since Aion runs on a different engine I'd be shocked if they adapted it so quickly as EvE still uses shitty shit macro programs all these years later.

Either way, I hope they can put a stop to it, because botting made lineage2 unfun unless you were botting too, and I'd hate to spend real money on a game full of them.

it's china. I heard it's P2P on 16th. It's ready to ship I guess with this sort of content, what do you guys think? Ready for retail?

Polish and bug-wise, yeah. Content, who knows? Who is high enough to tell?
Still, doesn't matter to us, as it won't ship in NA and EU for a few months more, and by that time there will be probably more content anyway.

Boo to not working in Windows 7. Did anyone try changing the exe properties of the defender?

Suspect it's not as much Aion itself, but the nProtect GameGuard thing that comes bundled with it.

which is heads up i guess, for these who don't like this type of application installed.

what 'type' of application is it? Is it essentially a punk-buster for MMOs, or is it some odd form of anti-piracy?

The former. Unless it's doing something in the background.

Nah, it only runs when the game runs from my experience with it and is easily uninstalled. I was actually referring to the GameGuard when talking about the exe properties. I know it launches as a seperate app.

Playing through most of the first two Elyos areas.  The game is very polished and full of content.

Some good quest lines in there among a myriad of gather and kill quests.  Animations and spell effects etc are well done.  The UI works, it's simple and effective.  Nothing is broken there.

It's probably a mixture of me being on the East Coast (US) and China being on the other side of the world (hardly ANY lag at all surprisingly) but there are some delays in actions taking place and the animations.  It's somewhat awkward, skills are getting cancels are not firing right away.  It may be a LOTRO type of situation where another spell doesnt go off until the animation is finished.  Can't really tell.

But I always have enough quests in my log to get me to the next level so you don't have to grind.  I played through 11 as a Priest and became a Cleric.  I played as a Mage then Spiritmaster to 16.  Level does take longer as you go up but my 11-16 stint took forever because I didn't know where a lot of the quest objectives where.  You have to explore to find them (imagine that!) since there was no database website and everyone spoke chinese (except the 50 or so people in or Legion).  Kinda neet playing a game again where so little is known about classes and end game and the leveling process.

Overall, if you like another Diku experience that supposedly has a more PVP focus in the end game this game is going to be amazing (if the quality of the first half of the game continues over onto the next). 

Things that will trip this game up.
1.  Content (which we've seen in the Korean release) isn't in the NA/EU release.
2.  Localization is terrible (which means it's worse than installing a ENU.pak for the Chinese client)
3.  The experience curve is horrible after level 25.  Could happen!

Basically if they fuck up the leveling curve the game is screwed, but other than that the game is great (if you like DIKUs).

Servers went down a few minutes ago. Looks like they should be back by 2 or 3am CET (8 or 9pm EST)

It's technically anti-cheat software, but the way it goes about the work might cause issues for some users...

"The key issue being that GameGuard bypass the OS safeguards in order to:

Hide the game application process.
Monitor the entire memory range.
Terminate specific applications without the user consent.
Block specific calls to DirectX or the windows API."

... mostly the 'terminate applications' and 'block API calls' i guess. I didn't run into any apparent problems with it personally, but some are more picky about what they allow to run on their systems.

now if they can only make an anti-virus program that smart

Speak of the devil

"Gamemon.des is trying to download driver in a hidden way. Kaspersky anti-virus will not be able to control application activity after installation.

suspicious object: \aion\kekeke\bin32\gameguard\gamemon.des"

not sure how these two will play together, guess will find out soon enough...

(http://www.fohguild.org/forums/attachments/mmorpg-general-discussion/106706d1239665533-aion-tower-eternity-dwarf1b-copy.jpg)

I made a "dwarf".

is it possible to run this in a win xp vm on win7?

Why is everyone using Win7? What's the deal? Wasn't considered a stupid thing to use new OSes without plenty of service packs and bugfixes?

7 is basically the service pack Vista has needed since release?

Really? I didn't know.

And I know nothing about these things, but is the install of early versions of a service pack a good idea anyway? How much stability and compatibility do you really expect from that?

I love the game so far, been playing more than a couple hours and just hit level 10 (that includes server down time and a lot of reading). My only gripe is that for some reason on the character creation screen I can't hear the voices so I got a voice I wouldn't have normally chosen, but beyond that I love the game. It's nice to see the history of the world that I read about flushed out in the game.
Also I know theres a way to glide but can't remember it for the life of me...can someone tell me how to do it?

Currently waiting in a 25 minutes long queue :disney:

I thought you made Obi-Wan Kenobi.

You're in a thread about trying a frustrating foreign language beta version of an obscure videogame. These people try Windows 7.

But but
The Chinese videogame doesn't fuck up my everything else when it fails to make sense.

Just double jump.  It doesn't work everywhere though and of course you need a down hill slope to do it effectively.

For some reason I'm enjoying this game.

Why exactly should people enjoy WoW and not enjoy this?

Good call.  I have another one where the beard is longer and fuller.  It was more dwarf like.

Win7 is going to be the strongest OS MS has released since Windows 2000.

It's fantastic.

I don't think there is a reason, but like LotR and FF11 ultimately no one cares. If Aion is a solid game it will get enough "I don't want to play WoW or bored of WoW but not tired of WoW players" to be moderately successful.

For sure!
But.. now?

Ten screenshots for your viewing pleasure (1920x1200 max detail, AA 8x, 8800GTS 640MB). Enjoy the sights with Jill, my sexy dominatrix sorceress.

(http://img511.imageshack.us/img511/7439/aion0000v.th.jpg) (http://img511.imageshack.us/my.php?image=aion0000v.jpg)(http://img511.imageshack.us/img511/4453/aion0001y.th.jpg) (http://img511.imageshack.us/my.php?image=aion0001y.jpg)(http://img511.imageshack.us/img511/8480/aion0002s.th.jpg) (http://img511.imageshack.us/my.php?image=aion0002s.jpg)(http://img511.imageshack.us/img511/2617/aion0003e.th.jpg) (http://img511.imageshack.us/my.php?image=aion0003e.jpg)
(http://img511.imageshack.us/img511/4943/aion0004o.th.jpg) (http://img511.imageshack.us/my.php?image=aion0004o.jpg)(http://img511.imageshack.us/img511/2545/aion0005z.th.jpg) (http://img511.imageshack.us/my.php?image=aion0005z.jpg)(http://img511.imageshack.us/img511/2677/aion0006.th.jpg) (http://img511.imageshack.us/my.php?image=aion0006.jpg)(http://img511.imageshack.us/img511/9930/aion0007p.th.jpg) (http://img511.imageshack.us/my.php?image=aion0007p.jpg)
(http://img511.imageshack.us/img511/7034/aion0008.th.jpg) (http://img511.imageshack.us/my.php?image=aion0008.jpg)(http://img511.imageshack.us/img511/9817/aion0009b.th.jpg) (http://img511.imageshack.us/my.php?image=aion0009b.jpg)

Aion is about the closest gameplay to WoW I've seen yet.  I liked the bit I played of the beta.  I'll likely buy it when it comes out.  I suspect, though, that like WoW I'll get bored at the cap and quit unless there's endgame that doesn't require me sitting at my PC for hours without the ability to get out of my chair when my family needs me. 

EDIT:  Super props on a unique looking game though.  I really like the style.

Here is something that was described to me in the Korean release of the game.

After level 20 or 25ish the PVP in this game opens up.  Other than the Abyss and the activities that go on there you have what they call Rifts.  These are portals that open up randomly between the two different sides.  There is a game wide annoucement that a rift has opened in such and such area.

At one point everyone on one side got in and started taking over that area killing NPCs and PCs alike until the other side pushed back and drove them out.  Apparently there were hours of fun to be had.

The key I think is the rewards for killing people.  What do you get for killing.  I still don't know much about the ranking system/reward system for PVP.  Hopefully it's not WAR bad.

It lets people do away with XP and play with Vista without having to admit it's pretty silly to hate on Vista after it had years to shape up and get solid driver base. And since it basically *is* Vista, it's pretty stable from what i hear.

Anyway re: Aion, played it to l.10 yesterday. Overall impression so far is, it just tries too hard. The constant, exaggerated animations whenever a character stands still for just a second, equally exaggerated facial animations that turn your character in some sort of Joker minus the face paint, the weapon and costume designs that make art deco an example of refined restraint... these just don't help. There's also some leftovers from old games that don't help the experience either (NPC dialogue panels and other things like 'inspect' panels closing as soon as you select something else, for quest dialogues it frequently means you have no way to get that text back ... lack of a 'try on' feature is minor but also annoying after playing games which do provide it) Out-of-combat regen is for some odd reason kept low and the individual mobs can hit pretty hard, forcing the player to spend some seconds after every other fight on sitting down and getting up... don't know what for, exactly, it doesn't add anything.

The bunch of cliches aka the grand story of "you were the ultimate bad-ass, one of chosen few, and now you're not only the ultimate bad-ass but also the one person who might save the world. But alas, you have amnesia." doesn't really work in the MMO where you can see million other players go through the same motions of hunting the same ten rats and reach their own identical enlightement. Nothing new, but the exaggeration again backfires and just makes the silliness even more apparent.

Oh and the range of character size slider together with the head size slider result in experience more freaky than Second Life can provide. If there's one "wtf" feature in this game, that's it.

There's some nice touches and ideas here and there (occasional nice spots in the world, combo skills, skinning the appearance of gear unlocked for later levels) but they're generally buried under thick layer of what feels like ten different cakes someone has barfed all over the whole thing.

Overall it seems like a solid game... but very meh. Like a blockbuster that fails because it tries to one-up everything made so far, and so it goes from start to end cranked up to 11; and after short while it just tires the viewer out.

That's some really stunning art.

You can "try on" item by ctrl-left clicking.

There is also an NPC that lets you pay to change the appearance of an item to the appearance of a donor item.  So if you have a level 10 breastplate that looks fucking amazing and don't want to get rid of it, you can make your end game super rare raiding item look like it.

Should do away with the cookie-cutter looks.

The Chinese version isn't what's going to get released over here though, so some of the typical Asian exaggerations might be tuned down once we get to buy it. Atleast that's what they've claimed, who knows for sure.

http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/61732

But yes, it's definitely trying too hard. The vast majority of the emotes make me cringe, and at the same time, the combat looks so goddamn boring since I've been spamming my single offensive spell for nine levels. :oh_i_see:

Yes, now. The copy I have expires 3/1/2010. I'll be supporting it in the workplace at release, no doubt, as they rolled out Vista here ASAP as well. Everyone is going to be using it, you might as well get accustomed to it now.

It'll keep you away from shitty Korean grindfests at bare minimum.

Well, not everyone. Just companties who actually upgrade software.

Have I mentioned we still run Windows 2k and Office 97 on lots of machines recently?  If not, I just did.  Sorry, but it's a bit of a sore point that I have to send stuff home and save it down to be able to open it at work.

I was the same way, pretty much. Win 2k pro is great, as far as I'm concerned. We were using Office 2k though - not 97.

The place I work at got gobbled up by a huge company last year and now we're state of the fucking art and it is time consuming.

Seriously?  About time a game had this designed in from the start.

that is amazing feature, but is there any crafting at all in the game? If there is any is it anything like Lineage 2 painful drop hunts ?

Rest (sitting) is for emergencies while to kill the downtime you are supposed to use bandages, who are available to all classes if I am not mistaken. They serve the function of minor money sink too. Potions work the same way they did in AoC apparently (heal over time only).
Crafting, I don't know, butr harvesting is the usual thing with an additional layer of coolness. Sweeet.

This turd makes so many little things the right way.

Gathering is easy.  The higher the skill the faster your gather takes and there are sooooo many nodes to gather from.

I havn't done crafting yet but I believe it's the same old stuff.  Alchemy is really good though from the potions etc you can make.  I have no idea about the viability of the others since I hate crafting in games so I havn't really looked into it.

Regen is fine.  I have abilities to regen my mana and health called treatments.  Not sure what there is for Rogues and Soldiers outside pots and bandages.

Huge props to NCsoft.

For the first time I can do a beautiful overweight character.

(http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3540/3442933998_00c2411c0b_o.jpg)

FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUURRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRY

Seriously though, the game really put me off with the feet and "extra fur" thus practically ensuring I'll never be able to tolerate it even if they make the opening less 'meh' for America.

Otherkin, maybe. Not enough fur for furry.

Furry? Wait, no way! Oh fuck, no! And I am playing an Asmodian now cause I'll definitely go with a human at launch.

You know what Schild? There's some kind of mild excitement peak at level 5 or something when you trigger the cool "flying vision" cutscene. That is a good opening.
I wonder why they didn't make anything like that from the get go. In 2009 when you get at level 5 with no surprises you are (with good reasons) already jaded.

She's way too muscular to be overweight.  Allowing a character to have some bulk is nice though.  I'm tired of being a twig.

Wow, why does your character look like the girls around my neighborhood  :ye_gods:

Their eyes glow?

When their wearing contacts sure  :awesome_for_real:

Yeah, but the catch is using the bandage involves animation of character kneeling down and the induction bar that together take about as long as enabling sit mode for the couple seconds it'll take to regen the same health amount. So it's minor money sink which doesn't really work because there's no compelling reason to utilize it -- either way ii'll be spending time with ass on the ground, just in one case it also costs me game money to boot.

Good news about the "try on" function; feels really silly i missed it when LotRO has the same ctrl-left click shortcut for it and i've been using it there for months.

Dabbled with crafting today, it's quite decent. Similar "gather stuff and click to combine" approach like in the other games, though it has the extra cockblock that's a chance to fail making the item (related to level of crafting prowess vs required skill level)  On the upside, they provide "craft quests" of sorts which allow to easily increase the craft level and earn some regular xp to boot without having to gather billion raw hides or pieces of iron ore in the world.

re: trying too hard. Found something that shows it in the nutshell.

this eyesore is what happens if player doesn't die often enough. There's apparently some DP points gained from monster kills, as you gain these points you also gain extra particle effects which are fortunately only visible to the player themselves i presume, since i haven't seen anyone else running like that. Screenshot is with the DP gauge at level 3 which is max for my lowbie character. The effect is pretty permanent and the only way i could find to get rid of it is to die :awesome_for_real:

edit: logging out clears the DP gauge so that's another way to get rid of it. It's just i'm guessing that gauge signifies some helpful effect, so the visual punishment that comes with it is just hard to explain.

He likes big butts and he cannot lie.

You don't have a DP skill?  I think I had one at level 10.

Aside from some cosmetic things (it "feels" like I'm running slow, hitting autorun while pushing any other button won't enable autorun, small things like this) I don't have any complaints so far for this type of a game. It's fun, and grouping with people when I have no clue what they're saying is good times.

Edit: Oh, and bonus points for the transparent map

I was waiting for someone to say that.

Aion is the first thing I haven't been able to run outside of Daemon Tools. Neither are a necessity.

For the record, this is incredibly stable and has amazing performance. But, this is all for another thread.

Yeah i have one... 2k points for 2 minute long buff. Never used it yet, typically i realize i could've used some extra punch the hard way and by then my DP gauge is clear. :grin:

I love the music the kobolds have. Heavy slow drum rhythm, you hear it first (Elyos side) in the deforested area, and in the strip mines. I've been leaving it on in the background when doing other things. Nothing else made much of an impression, and I have grown to dislike the main menu theme. But those kobolds know a good workin' song.

Another idle animation: fanning your face and wiping off the sweat when it's heat-waves-off-the-ground hot.

I'm not going to lie to you, seeing that fortress or city wall vista alone made me want to play this.  Ah so what if all their other ideas fall flat, at least it will have me drooling over scenery for the first time since I left Tortage.

Where do you live? I am moving tomorrow.

Capitol Heights, Maryland. I'm afraid to play Aion now, considering how much drool will foam from my mouth just by playing next to a virtual representation of 1/3 of the girls i talked to in high school.

The first time I used my DP was about 10 secs before my summon died. It would have been helpful in the fight but I forgot I had it and what it did till it was too late.

I made a really tiny character so it "feels" like I'm running fast but I really like how my pet is much larger than I am.

I personally love all the animations.

The positive nature of this thread is really frightening.

Only if you want another DIKU game.  I've heard some positive stuff coming in with the release of 1.3 which is the next Korean patch.  More zones, more quests, more pvp.  I'm only taking another person's word from another forum since I can't read Korean.

My char is small, the height meter is down to about 1/3. The shortest height was way too small even for my standards, and I normally love playing gnome type characters.



I agree, I love these animations (minus the chair, wtf is that about?). I think it's great to have. In fact I prefer them having too many compared to having almost none like some other games and I think they hit this note just right. Hell, when I am standing in a body of water, like a lake, and if no one is around, I'm going to play with the water in some fashion.

It's the first week. T-20 days to OMG THIS GAME SUX MMOS HAVE FAILED US AGAIN.

Is there PvP in the game?

Yes, but multiple types of armour use identical models as it is.

Did everything in the OP yet when i click the launch icon on my desktop a screen comes up i click the lower right button and it then says error. Its all still in Chinese.

Push the other button. The large one. The same you used to patch, right?

A screen comes up that i am assuming is a server list. 5 items each on their own line with a slide bar on the side. I highlight one of the names and a greyed out button becomes usable. I click it some shit flashes and then an error screen comes up

Edit: my bad im getting the error at the patching stage.

Edit edit: i accidentally altered that file and installed the English patch before updating.

Ok problem solved  :oh_i_see:

Are any of you guys playing on a particular server?

Umm, I unistalled the game a couple days ago; beta should have ended yesterday, with retail starting today, right?

Still can log in and play as in, right now. There's some talks the beta was extended for 2 more days, at least on some servers... maybe that's why. The server announcements keep mentioning "23:58" so maybe it ends at midnight or smth.

So i downloaded it and installed the day it ends.  :heartbreak:

FWIW I've been following Non's server selection quoted below, even though I haven't seen anyone. Grats on getting a few hours to play before it closes :p

I have to admit, I won't probably play the game long once it gets released (unless PvP kicks ass), but to be cut off right now sucks. I love to login just to look at my character and the world.

And it will be what, at least 5 more months?  :uhrr:

Anyways, I just read on Aionsource.com that the japanese version should enter open beta by mid-july; maybe we'll be able to, hmm..."get an invite" for that too :D (and possibly the japanese client will include some of the early big korean patches).

Sigh...it was fun while it lasted...sucks to be cut off so soon. Guess I'll wait till next chance...or if it ever comes out in America

Vapourware in America! 

Why do people keep doubting it will be released in North America?

People turn trollish when the are bored?

They'll be wrong when Fall rolls around :)

Hi , i have just a little question , afther the beta will stop , Aion will still be f2p or will transfer to p2p ?

I am afraid i'm not gonna play so long this game ( if aion will transfer to p2p ) ... and i like this game ..

Anybody who knows can answer me on this question ?


Thanx , Tanaka .

You can't possibly be that dim.

Most people are.

You can't possibly be that dim.

Well played.

Well, he did sign his post.

Now if we can only get a US.OB timeframe.  I'm looking forward to see if anything other than language is changed for the US release.  Time will tell.

I call all games Vapourware.  It's a tradition.  I was right about Darkfall and LoTRO, wasn't I?

anybody can answer at my question please ? if aion will be p2p or f2p , for now i see is f2p ...but i heard will transfer to p2p .

Please help me with this question .

You heard wrong. It'll stay f2p.

And an american or european opening when is expected ?

The American Version was released last year in June.  You should go to your local game store and demand a collector's edition.  It's free to play, but you have to pay 50$ for the game.  But if your character dies 10 times you have to buy a new game and start over.

Huh? Where did you hear that Aion is going to stay F2P? Aion in China, like in Korea, is P2P (using timecards in China). In the US Aion will be subscription-based.

Saved for posterity  :why_so_serious:

You guys are mean!

I deleted it. And I don't feel bad.

whats it called on the second on of zo1 and i click save but it takeing forever can some plz help

should i stop dowlad cause i here it  the beta
stoping

Damn. I think I just accidentally clicked into Yahoo! Answers.

Behold, the power of Google!

Yes you should stop downloading. The China Beta is over.

Any idea when China is going live?

April 16th.

This game is WoW 1.5

Feels more like if L2 and WoW mated and Aion is their offspring.  Which probably isn't that far from the truth, considering it very much seems like they were trying to combine the two gameplay styles.

I'm liking it a good bit, I'd really like to get high enough to pvp some before this is over but I doubt it's gonna happen (especially since I just got kicked off for 'using my alloted playing time' - probably that limitation on time per day or whatever).  I'm not even sure what level I'd need to be to take any real part in PvP, but I'm thinking it's around 30 since that's the minimum level for all the armor bought with abyss points.

So far what I don't like is that flying feels too limited (by FAR) and too slow.  1 minute of flight time at what feels like extremely slow movement speed.  Plus the flight meter doesn't recharge faster if I sit.  If this ramps up at higher levels it's not a major problem, but if it stays this limited I don't think I'm going to like the flying much.  Other than that I haven't spotted any major issues.

One thing I'm impressed with is that I can crank all graphics settings to maximum.  Shadows, textures, visibility range, everything - and still get 60-100 FPS depending on the area.  I cannot do that with any other game I've played recently.  Even WoW, which looks vastly worse.  So whatever they've done with the graphics they've gotten them running very very smoothly.

Edit: And one other minor (mostly silly) quibble is that the Asmodian side of the world is supposed to be dark, right?  Then they should stop using such bright colors and lighting.  Shadows should be nearly nonexistent there.  I'm not saying it should be actually 'I can't see the enemies in front of me' dark, but their art scheme for that side should have reflected that its supposed to be dark better than their current choices do.

It's as dark as the dark sides of Azeroth. I think that's the(ir) point.

I have to say that certain areas of the Asmodian world seem appropriately dark, but others seem to have way too much light pouring down from the sky for a part of the world that's supposed to be eternally dark.  The lake and forest in the starting area look fine.  The first field where you begin in, on the other hand, does not.

And as to the flying - if it eventually gets up to the speed and movement as shown in the cutscenes you get during the starting area / class change quest, then I'd be happy with it as long as it's not still limited to 1 minute.  If it remains the speed actual flying is at once I'm 10 even when I'm maxed level, I won't be too happy with the flying part of the game.

Thanks for the great impressions and shots. I'm definitely gonna try to get on the US Open Beta when it's out to give it a whirl. Hopefully by then I've upgraded my graphic card.

Apparently you were able to log into some servers yesterday as part of Beta.

Edit:
In regards to flight time and speed.  There are mods that extend time, speed and regeneration.  I also believe, though I don't know for sure, that it increases with your level.  I didn't actually time it, but it felt like I had more flight time at 17 than I did at 10.

FWIW, supposedly pvp really beings around level 25


I don't know about speed, but max flight time does increase up to 2 mins I think it was. I agree about the speed though, and think it needs to be increased maybe every 10 levels or so get a 10-15% boost in speed.


Yeah, now if only I could get the program to allow me to open more then 1 account on a single computer. It wasn't allowing me to do so, and a message popped up in Chinese.  WIth how smooth it runs I honestly wanted to see how many accounts I could open and have it still run well.


I thought this too, since the Asmos are 750 years evolved into the darkness. It's why they are pale and have claws/talons.

I do have a few more issues with the game, things that I'd really like fixed, but nothing game breaking. The short worded version would be this:

-When dialogue boxes are open, any movement at all closes them, it sucks.
-Turning any amount while casting cancels the cast. I could understand jumping or moving cancelling it, but not turning.
-Autorun! They have it, but if you bind it to a key, you cannot be doing anything else or pushing any buttons when trying to start it. I hold the right mouse button to turn my character, if I'm holding this down and try to turn on autorun, it doesn't work. If you push any button, including instant cast abilities, autorun disables.
-Autoattack issues: Sometimes autoattack just doesn't turn on, or randomly turns off. This needs to be looked at.

Otherwise, I think this game is very well done and it if the first MMO I have played since WoW started that I could play for more then 2-3 hours without needing to know people to truly enjoy it. If the pvp is balanced, fun, and meaningful then I think I foud my next addiction.

Unless you gpu is 5+ years or older, I almost wouldn't worry about it. It seriously runs that smooth.


The Asmo server Non picked for the first post in this thread was still running yesterday. Also, I thought I saw something saying 16-18 which leaves me guessing that the open beta on some servers will be running through the 18th. Most likely not, but you never know.

As for mods extending flight time/speed/regen, I hope not. I love mods, but not if they change the gameplay. This is from a TTH interview: (http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/61732)


I actually kind of like that. Also, if you went to the crafting area in Pandemonium there was an Aether trainer of some sort, the text mentioned something about extending flight time and wanting to be in the air as much as possible. It cost 20k or something, which I didn't have so I couldn't test.

Now THAT is hardcore.

When I said mods, I meant exactly what you quoted, not addons or anything.

Having played L2 for a while, I'm not looking forward to once again having essentially zero influence on the continuing development of the game.  Always being several months behind in content and/or fixes, and never being directly addressed by development are definitely not things players accustomed to WoW are going to have a lot of patience with.  If NCSoft were as serious about the western market as some have claimed they are, wouldn't it have made sense to hold back on the eastern releases and try to synchronize with the west? 

Ahh my bad, thanks for clearing that up. That would have been really shitty if we weren't talking about the same thing

Hmm well the game client says now i've used up the time allowed for my account so i guess the party is over, not far off from lvl.19. Some final impressions:

* crafting is pretty fun. Even gathering can be sort of fun. Was sceptical when i first heard about the change they did to the usual progress bar (adding the 'fail' bar and turning the regular bar into a 'pass' one) but in practice having these two race against each other reduces the boredom somewhat. The amounts both bars move are seemingly based on checks of the craft/gathering skill vs required skill level, so it doesn't feel fully random and creates impression gaining the craft skills gives more than just unlock new resource/item tiers.

the 'craft quests' really help to advance the craft profficiency... it takes roughly 10 craft/gathering attempts to advance the skill by 1 point, and already at lvl.15 or so the basic items require 70-80 points in the crafting skills. The pile of resources needed to get to these levels would be huge. Even with the craft quests it takes dedicating some considerable time (and cash) to keep the craft skills at levels the game considers 'matching' the level of character. Random small rewards and recipes from these quests are a nice touch too.

* the Auction House is terrible, or maybe it's just the UI they gave it. There's no obvious way to search items based on required level, and searching by name goes through the whole thing rather than active item category. End result is either you know exactly what you're looking for, or you have to click through endless pages of low level stuff if you want to browse things for lvl.20 or higher. Endless being 30 pages or more. Problem is likely to go away when the playerbase collectively moves to higher levels, but doesn't make the basic design any less primitive.

* most of the mobs have lots of hp. Too much hp, in fact. Gets even worse in the higher level environments as the mob populations get more dense, half of them starts aggro on sight and their aggro circles get bigger (the circle for selected mob is actually visible on mini map which is pretty handy) This is aggravated as...

* ...level 18 is very clear point when h the game goes "ok pal, the honeymoon is over" and menacingly waves the cock needles it's been hiding behind the back. The solo quests marked as suitable for this level only get ~half experience needed to advance and the rest (along with handful more quests/missions which the player is expected to get done) take place in open environment designed for groups. Mobs there are packed dense, hit like a truck (medium armour character can be killed in 2-3 hits) and take the "too much hp" to whole new level -- it can take group of people literally couple minutes to kill one such mob. Saw some players 10 level higher than what the area is designed for still struggle and die if they went in there on their own.

The group content would be probably less of an issue on server where the population speaks the same language. But it'd definitely remain one still for the hard core solo players. The shift to the group-oriented gameplay feels very much like how LotRO was on launch -- suddenly and without much warning the player is presented only with options to either grind mobs for the levels, or have to group with others to get anything done. For LotRO that design didn't end too well, and eventually they were forced to address it by adding whole new area where the players could have their solo fun and skip these group zones altogether. How it works out for Aion, guess we'll see.

Got a character up to level 5 on each side but that was as far as I could make it. I could hear the siren call of achievement whispering in my ear, but he list of chores on the right side of my screen was just one uninteresting thing after another. Wandering around fields and woods trying to get my quest bits off the mobs before someone else with the same quest tags them, bleh. Deliver this to that other guy, *snore*. I just can't see myself paying money for this when f2p games like Runes of Magic offer the exact same thing.

The whole flying and pvp hooks were absent and I'm not falling for the "it gets better at level 30 when your shadowknight gets feign death" routine anymore.

A mmo's demo (open beta) really should put a taste of their best stuff in those lower levels.

Just a guess at this point but I'd bet there's areas and/or quests you didn't run across.  From the rate of expansion it seems like that's around the point where you should be getting more than one or two small areas per level.  Quests seem easy to miss and it's possible you missed the breadcrumb quests leading to other area(s) you could go to.

Flying is at level 10, but it's damnably slow.  As for putting good stuff in early, I rather agree.  I've said once or twice before that an MMO is probably well-served by having players experience a high level 'intro' (insert whatever story justification is needed, kinda like the cutscene/fight at level 9 during the ascension quest) just so the player gets some sort of feel for how that class will play at max level.  As it is, it's easy in all these games to get up into the mid-levels before discovering you don't really like this class that much, after all.

I had the whole area explored at this point. Scanned all the NPC places for the possible new quests multiple times too since yes, they do sometimes appear on "old" NPCs without any real notice. I just have to conclude either the game does expect you to group at this point (especially given some of the "missions" in the chain you receive when you enter the area for the first time do require  you to kill mobs in that group area) ... or the game hides some of its single player content from the player so well, an average player is unlikely to find it and arrives to the same conclusion i did.

On more positive note, the game update they did today included some patching for the Gameguard thing, and it apparently now works in Windows 7 too.

At level 5 the group content was what? Those footed-whatnot monk furry things in the forest by the witch?  Not really group content, they just have bring-a-friend aggro, but its quite easy to solo-pull them.

I only grouped once, right at level 10, to finish a quest I didn't need to, and then everyone but me died and I solo'd the whole thing anyways. (Asmodian scout)

The thing is, there's a fair, fair chance they will dramatically up the XP for quests in the North American release.

Really? Why would they do that?

Edit: NM i read that wrong. I thought it said dramatically increase the XP as in making it more grindy.

Warhammer is over there -->

No, better rewards. As in less grindy. Why? Because no one likes it grindier. So unless they don't like money, they better do that (but they know already, and that's most likely one of the reasons it'll take so much more to launch in NA. To retouch it as much as possible).

Ya i barely made it to level 5 so did not really get a taste of the exp curve. Game is beatiful if it released in the US i would probably give a go. I just have yet played a Korean based MMO that i did not hate.

Edit by Trippy: that's a gold spammer site

This makes me feel like a superior lurker.  :awesome_for_real:

I have become confused and disoriented again.   :ye_gods:

Edit by Trippy: Removing gold spammer link.

Ya, that post looks pretty legit to me.

Is there any way to play passed beta? I would really like to continue playing AION. Can people in the US pay for a Korean account? I am just wondering. I really love this game!!  :cry2:

(http://www.tkfu.com/forums/images/smilies/FUCT.gif)

I wasn't aware that Googled Message boards read as "Support" to your average joe. When did Google make that change?

Around the same time Texas seceded.

Yeah, see, I keep hearing this and I'm left wondering what game after the masses touch it in an open beta has ever LESSENED the grind? Magically?

I'm sure there are at least 200 quests they're holding back just for this. Yep.

I would be quite happy if Aion doesn't turn out to be grindy, maybe than I might feel happy to pay for an mmo instead of sick to my stomach. But I'll retain my "this is lineage 3 before lineage 3 is launched" stand point until someone makes it to the end game.

From what I've read over the last year or two, they "learned from Lineage 2's mistakes" and understand that a game that does well in Korea does not necessarily translate to what Western gamers want. So here's to hoping. Still haven't played, I'm not impatient enough and I don't like spoiling things for the "real" retail experience since I'll probably be purchasing the game when released.

One of the NCSoft devs been posting about "westernization" process on one of the fan boards (aionsource) ... basically i wouldn't expect any changes to the xp in the game, it doesn't appear to be on their list of things considered. They're "at the moment not intending to make any major game-altering changes here, since that would change the game to something that's not Aion anymore. It wouldn't make sense."

The changes mostly include stuff like tweaks to quests which reference Korean folklore, dubbing the voices, adjusting the UI so it deals properly with usually longer english text etc.

XP curve seemed ok to me from 1-20.  I can't comment afterwards, but it was the same case in WAR though.

It seemed rather ok to me as well, the only potential obstacle i could see was introduction of group quests as part of the "storyline" and the xp from these areas was quite clearly included in the calculated amount of xp player would gain on given level. Which would mean determined soloers (or classes not seen as essential in party) might need some regular mob grinding to make up for it, at that point.

Even if they adjusted the xp to remove that issue, it still leaves the player forced to find groups if they want to get these quests done... no idea if getting them done is required to advance the character development, though.

True, but one thing this game during 1-20 had down a lot better then WAR was that it didn't feel empty and grindy. The times I was playing would be off hours for China, and even with a smaller amount of people, who I didn't even speak the same language with, it was still a fun experience. If they can keep that up, even if it actually takes longer to level then WAR, I'd enjoy it.

I think a lot of this is because the areas for these levels aren't enormous. They seem to be just about right. They aren't splitting up the areas so at all times there are 3 zones with multiple areas in each zone to level in. Some faster mob respawns would have been really nice (namely at that first farm with the fighters and sentinels), but otherwise I don't think I was really ever bored even though it was the same shit as all the other clones.

i was wondering if anyone else has go the message about expired game time? it wont let me log on for 3 days now, says i have used all my game time. plz let me know what this is about and any possible way to fix/go around this problem.  i am really enjoying Aion but i would really like to be able to get above lvl 7 and see what else the game has to offer, so far it seems to have good gameplay and deep lore, and i have noticed a surprising low amount of bugs.
On a personal note, i generally prefer grinding over quests.  i don't like being an errand boy, and npcs telling me to go get them this or that really feels demeaning.

DamienEbon

"Words, so innocent and powerless are they as standing in a dictionary, but so potent for good and evil are they to one who knows how to combine them!"

Why does this keep happening?

Because no one has invented knives you can use to stab people in the face through the internet. Yet.

I dunno, but I'm disappointed at losing the punk gurl.  We need more of those around here.

She was far too young to be using "Punk" and far, FAR too much jailbait for you, M'am.  Plus, she was just daft.

Ah yes, Lantyssa the predator   :pedobear:... I always knew the panda was a front.

Beat me to it.



Isn't the red panda was the lesbian cousin of the pedo bear?  :why_so_serious:

Stop picking on Lantyssa!  I will defend her with all the strength in my vagina!  (http://www.sheknows.com/graphics/emoticons/icecreamexercise.gif)

I'm actually disturbed and mesmerized by that.  You win.  Lantyssa has the lollipops over there by that unmarked van.

Wait - we had a Daft Punk girl? Fuck, first I missed the beta and now this.

Yes, and she was harder, better, faster, AND stronger.

Actually, I think that pretty much describes Signe to a T. She's the one member of f13 I never want to get on the bad side of and/or meet in a dark alley. Everybody else I might have a fighting chance with.

Amusing how much astroturf a bad Korean game attracts these days.

This game just hit 1 million paying users. (http://www.jlmpacificepoch.com/newsstories?id=146326_0_5_0_M)

I was going to post that the mmo industry was waiting for a game to hit a million subs besides WoW. You know to renew the fading interest in putting any real ideas into the mmo world and here comes Aion doing exactly what I thought it would while being generic as hell. Take that "IT NEEDS TO REVOLUTIONIZE THE INDUSTRY TO BE REMOTELY SUCCESSFUL" arm chair game designers.

I'm pretty sure the lineage games already broke the million barrier

Thats combined.

Wrong answer

It sounds like that announcement is saying that Aion hit a million paying users in China.  I think.  Considering it released this week in China, that seems significant.

Either way, got to look a few months down the line for retention, considering other MMOG's have done really well out of the gate and then sunk like rocks lately.

And yes, Lineage, Lineage II, and Final Fantasy XI have all broken 1 million at some point in their existence (independently).  Along with probably other KMMO's that I don't know about.  There just haven't been any western MMO's other than WoW that've done that, as far as I'm aware.

This game will do well on both sides of the pond.  I know alot of people who plan to play the NA version when it launches here, myself included.  After playing the China OB and seeing how cleaned up it already is + how well it plays even on lower end systems will make it successful.  Will be interesting to see how much they promote / advertise the NA version or will it be one of those under the radar launches im wondering. 

Sorry if I missed this skimming the previous 8 multilingual pages, but what's the endgame?

(http://img16.imageshack.us/img16/6622/grinderwings.jpg) (http://img16.imageshack.us/my.php?image=grinderwings.jpg)

So far our guild feedback is decent on this game. Asian MMO's have a rep for being grindy, but our testers suggested that this isn't the case........at least in the pre level 25 range.  The PVP zone of course gets our interest, but none of us have gotten high enough to participate.

SWTOR and GW2 are at least a year out, Warhammer is getting boring, so we're sort of shopping around for a filler MMO.  I don't know if AION would be it, but if its not a grind and has a decent PVP end game it certainly could be.

I love that picture.

From descriptions it's sort of like EVE played in single constellation of 0.0 space, crossed with LotRO monsterplay. There's limited number of keeps/hotspots players can control, owning the hotspot provides some in-game income and other advantages. Keeps can be controlled either by players or NPC faction. In the middle of the zone there's Delve one keep to own them all.

I hope you'll keep us posted about your friends' progresses and especially about PvP! I am counting on that.

> crossed with LotRO monsterplay.
What's this?

In Lotro there's only a zone devoted to PvP. It has keeps to hold, resources to gather. You can go there with your high level character OR create a mob-like character among a few like wolves, orcs, skeletons and the likes, and go battle for the keeps against the humans. Basically you can PvP with your char, after leveling it up to max level, or jump right in with a mob, which is already max level but can level up plenty of skills by battling against humans.

It's a great system. It works. Would be a good idea to work on that concept and make it better and stronger.

I don't like it cause once again feels like a not-so-worldly although large arena, but it's definitely cool.

Ya, how's that related to what Aion is doing?

Oh, sorry. The lack of a proper /quote confused me and I replied out of context.

No idea about Aion's endgame. I guess it'll be something like mobs trying to recapture your keeps. Aion was promoted as PvPvE since the early days, with three factions, one of which being computer controlled, battling for territorial control.

The Balaur are an NPC race that live in the Abyss and they hate the Daeva (Elyos and Asmodians).  Supposedly these Balaur will sometimes aid the losing side in the abyss but are "unpredictable".  Basically they are supposed to act as a balancing force for the lesser side but sometimes they will do what isn't expect.  Not sure how it actually works in the game.

Balaur wiki. (http://aion.wikia.com/wiki/Balaur)

I was thinking mainly of the part that's having semi-independent NPC faction in control of some of the capturable hot spots and/or areas of the PvP zone; this NPC faction is hostile to both sides turning conflict between 2 player factions into 3-sided fight. Aion devs are referring to their model as "PvPvE" or something to this effect, which is similar.

Are the instructions on the first page up to date? Can I still get into the beta somehow? :uhrr:

Dunno and no.

Beta is over, but if you download the game and set up an account somehow you do get 5 hours of free playtime supposedly.  Google a little bit and you can find a 3rd party website that'll give you chinese time if you really want to play.  Many people are doing it so apparently it's working.

I can wait until it's released in NA.

I would think that if you're gonna pay for and play one of the Asian versions, it would be better to go for the Korean version, since they get the patches the soonest, and maybe you don't have to fake an ID to get it running.

I believe you need to be from a valid Korean IP or something like that.  It's far easier to play the Chinese version.

Is that with the grind settings turned up to eleven?

You're not a very clever troll.

For those of you still wanting to try the chinese version of Aion:


source (http://www.jlmpacificepoch.com/newsstories?id=146510_0_5_0_M)

A sign of things to come ... spam seen on a cycling forum (http://www.cycling.net.au/t-463275-15-2.html):

News at eleven, MMOG has gold farmers.

Further breaking news: ranged AOE is overpowered.

does window 7 works with this because i did all this stuff and when i click lower right start button after the nprotect something i got a blue screen

bye

You didn't even say Hi :(

So, Aion has 3.5 million subscribers. And is slated to release in more regions. (http://uk.pc.ign.com/articles/985/985368p1.html)

Yeah this game will barely get the subs of 300k in NA/EU.

Not if WAR can help it :awesome_for_real:

If it gets 500k subs I will laugh.

Laugh at what/who?

From what I experienced in the chinese beta (not all that high of course), it's pretty standard quest/kill stuff with standard loot dropping variety and a reasonable advancement pace and very very pretty graphics that nevertheless manage to run extremely smoothly.  If the PvP doesn't suck (and it probably won't, we're basically talking about Lineage 3 here) it's going to get a decent number of subscribers.  I expect it to sell boxes as well as AoC or WAR did, and retain subscribers much better than either of them.  Six months in, half a million NA/EU would not surprise me one bit.  A million would to some degree, but it wouldn't floor me with astonishment, either.

At the 300k subs figure. There is no real reason why this game won't be moderately successful here.

Well at least we now know that even you don't bother paying attention to the shit you spew. Remember this statement and about 4 dozen similarly themed posts? Schizophrenic or just full of shit?

I don't play WoW and I fully don't expect blizzard to not to make a grindy piece of shit if they decide to make an mmo. Will that mmo be very successful anyway? Yes, with or without my $15 a month. I have always said Aion will do moderately well in the west and has also said the game will be too grindy for me to even bother subbing once the free trial is over. So please do a better job of skimming through my post history.

So when you said.


When lineage 1-2 had below 100k NA subscriptions what you meant was this game has no reason not to do well?  :uhrr:

Lineage 1-2 was unsuccessful because it managed to be too grindy, which is almost impossible, but they managed. I doubt that the devs learned there lesson due to the overwhelming love they get in asia, so there is no real reason why they would change their business model significantly even if they are serious about getting the NA market. However most people in NA will defend the need to have ball busting grind in the first place, so a game simply doing horrible in NA for the same reasons lineage 1-2 did, even if that game is just as grindy is simply catching lightning in a bottle. Aion is generic, pretty, and stable and doesn't look too geeky so the game will do moderately well regardless of how soul crushing it will probably be.

Thanks for clarifying.  :uhrr:

Lol, all I'm saying is that bad games can make lots of money.

Also, the sun is big and hot.

Apparently WAR is F2P with an item shop in Asian regions.

That's interesting... I wonder how they represent that in their subscriptions? If claiming 300k in their last report includes f2p registered players that would be a very poor showing, probably both for NA/Europe and interest in asia.

I don't think it has launched in Korea yet.

Loudly, and with much gesticulation.

*shrug* If it's a graphically improved WoW I'll pick it up for a month or two.  Probably the main reason I don't play WoW now is that I feel the character models look like something from 8 years ago.  Which they are.

Gonna be Aion like a L10N in Zion.

Aion L10N Zion.

Is it still possible to test/beta/whatever this game for free in english?

Don't think so.

I think the chinese billing system allows you to play for ~6 hours without paying.  At least I know I could play for several days after the beta ended, but my accounts kept expiring after six hours of playtime and I kept being able to create new accounts and play some more.

MMORPG.com is giving away weekend beta keys for the NA version right now.

Gone before I got there.  :(  If anyone finds another source, lemme know please. 

W00t, got a european beta key ;)

when i download Data.z01 file i get a data.zip file whats up with that?? please help me:)

Is there an NDA?

We are NOT tech support.

vaan82 got tech support!

vaan82?

Tale temporarily defeats Schild. (http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=16646.msg651875#msg651875)

I don't know where that quote came from. Stop making stuff up.

I got an Aion NA beta key at gamestop and played around with the weekend beta event today.  Runs smoother than the COB.  I don't remember signing an NDA.

If so, care telling us if there are any actual differences between the NA beta and the COB? To be specific, any "cultural adaptations" they said they were going to make.

I didn't really touch Elyos during the chinese that I played, so I can't compare directly.  I do notice the translation is questionable on occasion as there's sentences that are poorly phrased and that sort of thing, so either they've still got some work to do on it or it's not going to be particularly good a translation.  There's also one bug that comes directly from the translation file where a quest cannot be completed because the dialogue the NPC needs to give you to progress is missing.

I remained impressed with how well it runs, though.  Lag was nearly nonexistent (I only noticed it once) even in the starting area swarming with people, and with all options except anti-aliasing maxed, my FPS remained in the 30-45 range despite over a hundred characters on screen much of the time.

Anyone who had a paid Tabula Rasa account when they announced its closure was invited to the Aion weekend beta. There was definitely an NDA when signing up for it that way. Not sure why though, because so much info on this game is coming out, unofficial gameplay videos are all over YouTube, and everybody's being positive about it.

Is the game better than Chronicles of Spellborn?

He doesn't remember. That doesn't mean there isn't one. Be patient. Seriously.

Feh, if I didn't have a life, I probably would've used the beta key they gave me for canceling Tabula Rasa.

Oh well...

This is NOT tech support. We repeat: This is not tech support.

It's a pissy offer anyway - they promised to invite us to the Aion beta as the main form of compensation, and what we got was an invitation to a three-day weekend beta event. The email to TR cancellation victims then says if you want to play the next weekend's beta, you have to pre-order Aion. Technically they delivered on their promise, but they couldn't resist the temptation to use it as a sales pitch.

Well then, who is going to help me with 如何看待居民消费价格和工业品出厂价格双下降？这是否意味著通货紧缩？

How to regard the resident consumption price and the industrial product producer price double drop is your own problem.

But it might mean the deflation!!

I would still be playing Spellborn if the grind wasn't so shitty.  I actually liked the combat mechanics.  Unfortunately the PVP realm on that game was dead.

Aion is just a pretty version of WoW but with more PVP focus I think.  I myself never got passed level 20.


 :oh_i_see:

I think it would be hard to keep an NDA on a game where you can walk into a Gamestop and the person behind the counter can hand you a Beta key.

  I havn't looked it up to confirm it but the US version could be a few patches behind the Korean game.

Someone other than me admits it and it only took 2 months. Sorry just had to point that out. Back to Aion who follows NDA's again?

Spellborn grind would be fine if the quests didn't reward you the same amount of experience a single mob kill gave you.

We do.  Mostly because we like getting group beta invites but, really, there is no reason to bite the hand.

Also Trippy is scary when mad.  Breaking NDA makes him mad.  Don't make Trippy mad.  You wouldn't like him when mad.

People who like staying in beta :)

This thread needs a new title.  Or subject needs a new thread. 

By all means, kick DLRiley out of all the betas, I can give you his IP and email address. He's enough of a flake troll here.

Fixed it for you!

Har har! :awesome_for_real:

lol @ Lyzira avatar + that statement.  :grin:

Anyone know how to get this running under Win7? The gameguard workaround was easy, but the NA client has a DX error claiming it's not up to date.

I didn't have any problem running it in windows 7 64 bit, other than the gameguard workaround.  Could be an error in your install or a driver issue.

Gameguard pisses the hell out of me though, since it seems to fuck with Chrome's ability to...uhh...work.  New tabs don't work at all and I can't use the address/search bar with it running.

Ttranslated/Interpreted Patch notes for 1.3 (http://www.aionsource.com/forum/news-announcements/16696-content-update-1-3-semi-official-content-news.html#post419412)


Interesting.  PVE battleground?  Race another group in PVE achievements however you can go and just PVP the other players to screw them up.

Quest instances for leveling casual people seems interesting... if they implement it to be dynamic in a way.

Ok this looks way better than I thought.  Fawk.

Check out the RvR clip.  I can see why WAR kiddies are twitching.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9LPPwGV_YU (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9LPPwGV_YU)

I got a chance to play a Spiritmaster up to level 20 in the chinese beta.  I wonder how they fare with flying PVP etc.

Patch sounds hot. I am so going to play this (for a little while).

I didn't see anything interesting about the combat dynamics there.  It reminded me of fighting underwater in DAoC. 

The z axis is one better.

This one goes to z.

NA NDA was lifted by the way.

Where does that put this game on the Mark Jacobs scale of NDA dropping?

Looks legit.

Alright guys, here we go. Ready to be shocked?

Aion is an incredibly bland, mediocre diku with some nice graphical touches here and there. It does absolutely nothing new and does not alleviate the korean-ness of the design. Next.

So, better than Warhammer Online then? :rimshot:

The first time I saw a video that WASN'T a shiny trumped up promo, I had a feeling this was going to be the case.

That's my question. I.e. are Mythic people going to be looking for new jobs after Aion launches over here?

Uh, no. I'm not even sure why you'd compare the two. They're both terrible meh games for totally different reasons.

The Chinese open beta was polished at least.  Of all the betas I've been in the past few years it was the most functional 'out of the box' experience I've had.  I agree, though, that it does nothing to move the genre forward.  Then again, if they develop a strong PvP game they don't need to move it forward as long as there's people paying them. 

I'm going to play it, likely.  Hard to say.  I can't seem to get hooked by MMOs anymore unless I can get into a consistent group, and I rarely have time/unwavering attention to get that far. 

PvP is at least as group dependant as PvE is in the MMO arena.  I enjoy the hell out of PvP, but found that it was only enjoyable in a strong group with good communication.  DAoC has been the only exception as I was able to get quite a few toons over RR8 solo.  

I see no reason to play this game unless a) you are dying to play a mediocre pvp diku mmo and b) your only other MMO PvP experience is WoW.  

I don't get it and I don't think I ever will. Button pushing with flying is exciting?

Sounds about right.

Wonder how long until it goes freeplay in NA/EU?

I wouldn't fuck Warhammer Online with Bea Arthur's dick. :rimshot:

P.S. - RIP Bea, one of the funniest comediennes ever.

F13 hates on Diku MMOG, news at 11.

You guys are under estimating this game.

That's not quite how it works.


NDA has dropped man, if you have some way to prove me wrong, by all means, have at it. But please, don't be a knobtard.

There some easy way to download and install this? I'm just interested enough to check it out but not interested enough to jump through hoops with downloading one language and bolting on the English language part. And I certainly ain't re-upping with Fileplanet.

This is why browser MMOs will soon rule the planet.

Half-ass interest.

"Wanna play this game?"

"I dunno. Not really. Maybe if it... Does it take fourteen seconds to log in?"

"Yes!"

"Sold."

I dunno man. We're still a ways away from the West replicating the huge success of F2P games in the East. FR and Fusion Fall only somewhat apply, because they're neither strictly F2P nor in-browser. In-browser lightweight low-risk Flash crap feels like the current bubble. If it pops, the same lessons as always will be once again re-taught: have a good idea and competently deliver it.

You'd think it'd be easy. The problem is all the rest of the people that show up looking for their paycheck  :grin:

FYI - Fusion Fall is not lightweight Flash crap. EDIT - Erm. I think I misread you. Carry on.

Don't wait too hard. Lineage 2 (same company) still has a monthly fee, and launched flopped in 2003.

FusionFall also gets to market existing characters directly to kids on a fucking cartoon channel. Their marketing edge = unfair to some.

All things considered I don't think L2 is doing badly.  It's probably making money, especially considering it's a port of a blockbuster hit over in Korea that requires minimal effort to translate and has had even less effort than it needs actually put into it.

It also has a few particularly good points that I haven't seen in most other games (among a veritable ocean of problems, but yeah).

Aion will likely be successful.  I won't be surprised if it becomes the second biggest MMOG in NA markets (as far as I know it already IS the second biggest MMOG worldwide, with it's Korean and Chinese subscriber base).  It's a well-done polished game that looks like it may have decent pvp that, from what I've heard (since I haven't actually played high enough to take part in it) is pretty much L2 castle sieges lite, accessible starting at low levels instead of requiring grinding billions of exp before being able to participate - and almost everyone who I know that's been in an L2 castle siege tells me that they're extremely fun.

While this game looks enticing, the series of clusterfucked MMOs that have come out recently have made me, at the very least, gun shy of anything coming out. I am not looking for anything life altering in gameplay and seem to enjoy the relative safety of an ordinary DIKU MMO. Aion should serve as a mild distraction...

Thus, I'll probably plop down the debit card to add to my gaming box collection on my shelf. Someday soon, I see my games outnumbering books on my shelf, and at that time I will have to seriously contemplate what went so horribly wrong and when.

Kind of my same mindset. At this point I'm just looking for a new competently-done diku that isn't WoW.

Obama plays Aion (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-2BzE4fqsU)

So how many of us are basically going to choose between Aion, ChampO, and JGE? (might as well throw in f2p DDO also)
I'd say a lot of the potential release-time success of those 3 are going to be who releases first and/or how successful their OB is.

Personallly, I've already got too much on the plate traditional fantasy diku-wise and with DDO going F2P, I dont need Aion.  Perhaps if it was more "different" I'd stab at it, but word is it aint. 

Too many damned games coming out this Fall, during the busiest time of the year for most peoples.  dumb dumb dumb there's nothing this summer 'cept frakkin webgames  :oh_i_see:

What do you want to know?  Details of the game have been released for a while any many people have played the game which made the us nda confusing.

The game is stable.  It works.  The rvr design is much better than war by which I mean is its fun.  
The classes are fun.  And its all typical diku fantasy.  

The only issue is the grind in certain spots in v1.0 whereas the are allievating them in the soon to be released 1.3 update in korea.

The grind is not lineage bad but its like wow + 10 or 20% .. which may change but I doubt it.

Its a shinier asian wow.  Its full diku where you get wings and from what I've experienced its well done for what its trying to do.

@darniaq
Goto gamestop or something and they'll just give you a beta key if they have any left.  Or you can preorder from amazon.

If you want to play 6 hours free in china its a hassle.

My money is ChampO and Aion taking the gold. JGE online ain't going to pull the subs if its honestly releasing at the same time as those 2. It must literally be perfect with balls dripping with jesus sweat in order to turn the average "hey its tie fighters vs x fighters " gamer into a bug eyed fanboy in mass numbers. All Aion has to do is have stable servers...

How much overlap is there really, if they manage to break more than niche numbers?

this is the post-AoC post-WAR great white hope for many

Many at ncsoft, maybe. The rest of us fully expected it to be yet another crappy asian MMO and are looking forward to bioware's starwars game.

You're wrong if you expect this to be another crappy asian mmog.  Though if you think wow is crap then you're going to think aion is crap.

A close analogy might be eq is to lineage as wow is to aion.  Or eq is to ffxi as wow is to aion.

LOL! I'm still not convinced their (swotr) not making hellgate london  :grin:. No Soln is right, go to the AoC or WAR forums, its Aion is rapter riding jesus wearing Arnold's Terminator shades  :drill:. This is a group of players that have been broken down like a race horse, you know the type who would go on and on about how the wow clones are dead and only something totally new can ever hope to be successful. There was given their new (well in WAR case something old sold like its new), they tried to fanboy it, but as the ship sank deeper and the respective playerbases realized (but still won't admit) that what they were asking for were really bad ideas after all, Aion the bland korean grinder that could, looks shiner and shiner. The irony is delicious. Aion will probably ran over the limping WAR with a truck and will haul the remaining playerbase as it drives away, AoC might live if it decides to speed up the "remove suck maximize what little fun that exist" process by a factor of 1000.

I'd rather go down on my grandma than play either lineage or ffxi.

Speaking of analogies, allow me to phrase it in SAT terms.

Question
WoW : Aion ::

a) EQ : Lineage
b) EQ : FFXI
c) EQ : Colonoscopy, hot sauce, no anesthetic
d) EQ : Just kick me in the nuts and take my $50 already, I give up. I'll be off weeping and pissing blood if you need me.
e) All of the above are equivalent.

Answer
E

I'm just saying that EQ was a terrible game.  Shit grind and buggy.  WOW improved upon that and made a fun game.  I share the same opinion that Lineage and FFXI were shit games as well but Aion improved upon them and made (at least the first twenty levels I played through) a better game.  Using FFXI and Lineage since they are both eastern games.

Based on the handful of hours I got to play the game I was fairly impressed. Far more captivating than WHO,TR and LOTR at the very least. Definitely worth giving it a shot.

I'm sure once the honeymoon is over, it'll be the same griping as always.

I think your list of pros for the game talked me out of trying it.  I don't really see anything you wrote that is mutually exclusive to what Schild wrote.

That's fair.  If you want different gameplay than WOW this is going to be a boring game for you.

the PvP kids are angrily waiting for this is all I'm saying.  It won't move the PvE crowd that much I expect.  But it will eat WAR alive.

Isn't making a game primarily for WoW customers a short ride to Fail?  WoW players already have a game to play.

Not when it has lots of flashing colors  :awesome_for_real:

Nah I think Mythic dodged a bullet by doing that before NCSoft got a chance.

Well, if it's WoW + much higher fidelity visuals + extra appearance customization... all MMOs have churn, WoW too. Plenty people are out there willing to give new thing a try, vide inital sales for AoC/WAR and the Aion doing well in areas where it already launched, even though WoW has been available there for long time.

If you ever type a paragraph this stupid again, we will ban you.

Period.

NDA dropped. Doesn't matter what I saw in the beta and how much I liked it or not. Some of my screenshots are the coolness and the awesomeness, but that's not nearly enough.

The tiebreaker will be PvP.

We all know what Aion is when it comes to gameplay, repetition, and dull automatic combat. It's still EQ++ after 10 years. The same is true for LotRO, WoW, EQ2, all of them...

Beside the fact I don't think the auto-attack combat turd can be polished anymore, should PvP prove to be even just slightly satisfying (the way it really plays out, not the metagame shit) then I'll be playing it.
If on the other hand they expect me to still hold any interest in questing, XPing, capping and blandly looting, I'll get what I can out of the first month and then gladly move anywhere else as long as it is out of the box, or requires more than a monkey to play it.

(sigh)
<trudges to Gamestop for a beta key>

Might as well get this over with now.  Beta servers open tomorrow yes?

They actually broke the auto-attack thing in a way, it tends to turn off on itself a lot so you basically have to mash it together with other skills to ensure it does its part... i guess it turns it from "auto-attack turd" into a "no manual aiming turd" or smth.

(unsurprisingly a few old time MMO players have voiced their displeasure at such difference in functionality)

I think, though I'm not sure, some of the abilities that turn off autoattack on purpose so you don't break an effect or something.  Though I couldn't puzzle it out on my own when I was playing.  I just chaulked it up to NA to China lag when I played.

I thought it's combination of turning it off after certain attacks yup, and also when the auto-attack was attempted while the mob was out of sight and/or out of range. Though the lag was noticeably adding to it, too.

The auto-attacking really felt random and broken. It may have been some lag, but considering there was almost no lag at all during off-hours of the Chinese OB I really didn't think that is what it was. Although that is the most likely reason seeing I was connecting from NA to China.

It could have been after certain abilities, but even that would need some polishing if that was the intent. I say that because the auto-attack turned off using abilities that would damage and/or stun the target. If it was turning off because of a pacify ability that would be great (even better if able to toggle that option), but it wasn't the case.

Overall, I only had some small complaints with Aion. The auto-attack turning off, having to unsheathe your weapon to cast a spell (resulting in just always keeping my weapons unsheathed), and any turning of character (not taking steps, just turning to keep focus on moving targets) cancelling casts. I can see how some would say those are features, but to me that is annoying as fuck. The only other real complaint I had was the slow quest mob spawn rates in small areas (making them incredibly overcrowded even in off-hours) such as some of the level 6-10 starting areas.

Even with those problems, I still enjoyed this game during the China OB and I'll be picking. Hopefully the PVP really is fun.

What's culturalized content?

Supposedly they're not just translating material, but are taking things and trying to make them culturally relevent in terms of folklore, cultural references, etc.

I'll be interested to see if it works out. While they did a crappy job, K2 spent a lot of their development time to make Grenado Espada more acceptable to the US market and then spent the first year taking all of that out so they could keep up with patches coming over from Korea.

Ugh, sounds horrible and just plain wrong. Whoever needs content culturalized to enjoy a game should be imprisoned in some international college to have his or her mind opened with a crowbar if nothing else works.

They gave example of a quest which involves something like going in the woods in search for axe for a lumberjack, and then encountering a stranger who gives the players two choices concerning that axe. This quest was apparently based on Korean folk tale, and being familiar with that tale would allow the player to know consequences of either choice they'd take. A player unfamiliar with it would be instead picking blindly.

I'd rather play the game sooner with.  Just give me a game without Engrish.

The biggest problem I see with this game, aside from the obvious Lineage-esque stuff, is that it will act as a repository for disgruntled WAR and Darkfall fanbois. 

Just give me the entire Korean Folk tale in the quest text so I can be enculturated *and* make a good game decision.  No need for crowbars, my dear sir.

You're still getting it wrong.  This game has more in common with WOW than it does Lineage imo.

Yeah, but the second half of my statement is oh, so right!

Let's start predicting then.  Draegan's taking too much flak here. 

I predict 600,000 launch and 1.2mil six months from launch here in NA. 

I also predict that for a long period of time it will be #2 MMO in NA, for exactly the reason posted in the second half of that statement.  DF/WAR are going to collapse entirely when Aion launches, and I wager it'll stay that way. 

Sure... but any game that has PVP will get disgruntled players from any game that was PVP focused.  Don't play PVP MMOGs then?

Predictions?

I would say you will get at least the average between AOC and WAR boxes sold in the first month... what's that 900k? 1mil?

Depending on which version NA gets at release I will say at least a 65% retention rate at the bottom, 75% on the high end and then after a few months of Steam and other marketing they will see a small rise.  I see their ceiling and pie in the sky prediction at like 2 million, but more realistically I see anywhere from 700k through 1 mil after 7 months or so.

Here's the catch though for initial retention, the version of the game NA/EU gets.  In the most recent patches and the upcoming 1.3 patch there is more filling in areas with quests later on so there is a more smooth of a transition.  If we get the version where there are more quests then I will go with my above prediction, if it starts off with 1.0 then I will guess the game will sell high initially and settle around 500k or so.

Draegan, are your numbers assuming Aion releases before JGE/ChampO or after?
A lot depends on this as well as how well those 2 games are received.  There aint enough market room in the Fall no matter what the genre is.  I've got money and even I dont plan on playing all three.  It'll be the best game that gets my sub after I've betaed them all.

speaking of which, my Aion download now ceases to exist (the floodgates have apparently opened)

I haven't seen any compelling reasons why Aion would buck recent trends, so for my first prediction around these parts I'll say 750k boxes out of the gates, 250k subs at 3 months, 100k subs at 1 year.  Pop, whimper.

ChampO, JGE and Aion are all different sets of players.  I don't think any will effect each other.  I think ChampO will do the worse of the three, JGE might hit 500k at the start and become a 200-400k player game, while my prediction for Aion will stand.

400k boxes in NA.  250k subs after a month.  100k after 3 months.

It's not new or innovative enough to keep the WoW crowd entertained beyond a month or 3. 

The issue here is that the 'right' solution to some quests in Aion are the antithesis to what the NA player might consider the 'right' choice. Cultural differences need to be reflected for each player group in order for the game to have the best chance of success.

Oh, it'll get a million boxes.  There's still demand for a new MMO.  500k at six months.  I'm giving them credit for subscribers WAR and AoC lost due to bugginess or lack of content.

Depending on how it is, it could go up or down from there.  Expecting more than 50% retention is too optimistic, and even if it is good enough to grow, it will take some time for word of mouth to drag sufficient numbers in.

But people will learn that new and innovative isn't as important as "does it work".
I think you might want to flip the results of ChampO and JGE. Nothing about JGE indicates that the game is going to pull 500k. If anything having to compete for pvp status is going to hurt JGE a lot and it defiantly won't draw in the pve crowd like ChampO will.

I hate to do this, but for once I agree with you, strictly from the standpoint that I hang out here, yet I had to google JGE to figure out what game it was being discussed.

300k boxes in NA, 150k at 1 month, 50k after 6, close down in 12

If that was supposed to be an example of content that only makes sense in Korean culture it's a bad one considering that quest is based on the Aesop's Fable known as the Golden Axe (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Golden_Axe) or the Woodsman and the Axe.  I ran into it in the chinese beta and it was pretty much the same story I'd heard years ago in an Aesop's fables book.

Since I played Asmodian a lot during the chinese beta, I'll be able to compare and see what the differences are, if any.  But I didn't see anything during my time from 1-12 or so that confused me in some 'I don't get it cause I've never been exposed to this background' sense.

People leaving WoW to play something just like WoW will either quit from boredom or quit to return to the better version of WoW.  

Innovation matters if you want to get and maintain solid sub numbers beyond 6 months.  

People will quite a badly made WoW. Aion will simply be seen as an alternative to WoW. If innovation is the only way for an mmo to keep players why aren't FF11, LoTR, and EQ2 not on life support? Why do we have countless successful f2p mmo, free realms a soe game being one of them and maple story being one of the most successful korean grinder (and boy is that game grindy) to date yet people are seriously arguing how much better it is then Wow not withstanding the small fact that there is nothing special about maple story. There is more than enough room for generic crap. I mean are you expecting serious critical thinking skills from a playerbase that happily spends 15 dollars a month to be a hamster in a shared wheel?

I have no idea what point you are trying to make...

Who said ONLY innovation?  Innovation is just one of many important factors.  Noone is stupid enough to think it's the only important factor.  

Its not only that.  Its really hard to throw away literally hundreds of days /played in one game to go to another, unless that new game has something REALLY great to offer me.  Even if AION was every bit as polished, high quality and content rich as WoW, it sucks to throw multiple max level characters, the ability to easily level up new characters, thousands and thousands of gold spent away on a game that is really just the same thing but a little different, so you can start over with no high level support system and a little warrior with a stick to hit people with.

The stupid thing is still downloading, but I don't expect initial sales to be high. I'm very much looking forward to it and I've heard nothing but good things about the game really. About the worst thing I've heard is "eh... it's another diku" But I've mentioned preordering it to some friends and there's just no recognition at all. I've seen a couple of boards asking people what they're planning to play and its barely a blip. The hype isn't there. If people have heard about it, the only thing they know is it's some Korean thing.

The point being generic grinding pieces of shit will continue to make money because the mmo playerbase likes their hamster wheels shiny.

On another note Numtini is right, this game going to have a problem if the only buzz is when people are playing it free. I think the initial sales won't be as impressive but it will probably build steam then temper off.

So the correct choice is to kill Death=Adder?  :grin:

Without knowing the specifics of the quest, if you are looking for something and are offered a choice between that item and a better version of the same item, the RPG-trained player will probably pick the better item. Why would they take the Wooden Axe when they can get the Axe +1? Most RPGs have item progression as a major feature.

The other example I've heard of is a quest where familial respect for one's father is the correct choice in Korea; good luck translating that to the NA market.

Does anyone have any actual information on the game to report, as opposed to meta-complaints about how its a diku?

I don't see how this could possibly approach the initial box sales of AOC or WAR, considering that those games were promoted heavily for months and this game barely at all. I'd say 1/3 to a 1/4 of the box sales of WAR.

Good word of mouth amongst the MMO community probably goes further than an advertising campaign. What is discussed positively by people you game with, or is the place they are heading next, carries a lot more gravity than a banner on the commercial (/spit) MMO sites. I'd say 7-800k and with a better retention profile than War. I haven't seen much information on the high end game but I suspect it's going to hit Warhammer, L2 and Darkfall a lot harder than WoW.

I'm mostly interested in seeing the point at which low population causes warhammer to failure cascade, I'd not personally play a game that has a PvP focused end-game.

I am slightly apprehensive about this whole "cultural translation" part of the story. I don't want cheeseburgers and Taylor Swift crap gaying up my fantasy world. Not that they will run that deep with NA culture, but still it is a "fantasy" and it will only be soon enough that all the quests and rewards will be plopped into some database on the net - one click away. You have a quest with two choices, one gets you the uber axe of wrath, the other gets you a wood chopper. As was said before, of course the RPG world is going to go the route of the better axe, but at least make a little mystery in getting it. Why not just take the woodchopper ot and be done with it. Bad choices are there for a reason. God forbid we learn from our mistakes...

Really though, it all boils down to how you are going to dress up your virtual doll and run around somebody else's world in your new clothes.

The choice given was the same one from the fable.  Basically you yank an axe out of a tree and it goes flying and falls in the pond.  Somebody shows up to offer it back to you.  First you're offered the golden axe, then a silver axe, and finally the real axe that fell in the pond.  It was blatantly obvious to me that I should refuse the golden and silver axes, because it was clear that the choice was a test of honesty, and if I lie and say that I dropped a gold axe it's being dishonest.  Only an idiot that didn't bother to read the quest text or think about the choice could fail to see that the 'correct' answer to the test is to be honest, not greedy.  You're not offered an axe +1, it's a gold axe clearly noting the monetary greed that's present in the fable.

I'm not saying that some changes aren't necessary, that other example was a good one that probably would be confusing.  Just the axe example is a very poor one since even without being based on an aesop's fable, it's pretty clearly a test of honesty.

Well as long as the real axe was the top quest option. You always choose the top one, that's how it's designed so you don't have to read it? right? (I confess, the other day I ran into one of the very few quests in EQ2 that doesn't work this way and click through'd it three times before actually reading it.)

I think the cultural translation is an interesting gamble. Will Aion attract NA gamers from the AAA gaming crowd who expect a fully realized western game or will it attract the Asian wannabee crowd that generally plays import games who will want it to be true to its forms because for them its a way of cultural exploration (sad and pathetic, but cultural exploration nonetheless) and who puzzle over Korean sites anticipating every new patch and screaming bloody murder if the NA version more than a few weeks behind.

Quick edit: I got the client up and running and the gameguard thing. Bad idea. Not because its good or bad on its own, but it sends the message to players "hi, I am a cheap piece of crap Korean grinder."

Something I always wanted to know: does Gameguard actually works? I mean, are Gameguard games really free of cheaters?

From Grenado Espada I'd say no it doesn't. There were lots of macrobots even though you had a 90% ability to afk without them.

You can ask me any question you like.  I played the game for 20 hours or so (maybe more) and got through the first three PVE areas up to level 20.

What kind of report card are you looking for?

No.  Not in the slightest.

Edit: Ok, that's probably an exaggeration, it might do something, but not from my perspective.  There may be some cheats that would be even more possible without it, but I doubt it, especially considering you can bypass Gameguard entirely so it doesn't even run.

I left my little minions in GE up AFKing during the day and when I removed in, it blocked VNC from moving the mouse, but not logmein. Or vice versa. But it did block one. And it didn't block the other.

What? Seriously?! Haha!

I don't know about all gameguard games, but I know there's workarounds for Lineage II and Aion.  I imagine any others that are popular enough have them too.  Gameguard screws up Google Chrome's ability to browse, so I discovered these while searching for a way to fix that.

Honestly I think it's kind of the opposite for me. The hundreds of days /played is EXACTLY why I am done with WoW and ready for something different with similar gameplay. I still enjoy the basic quest/loot/levelup gameplay but I just can't fathom making yet another WoW character and going through the same zones and quests I've done over and over again only to get to an endgame based largely on raiding for which I have no interest.

Really all I need is a new setting, new quests, new abilities, etc. I'm fine that the gameplay is largely similar. A PvP-focused endgame is just bonus.

Anyway, I went ahead and preordered on Amazon.

Seriously, what is /played worth? I thought the point of gaming was having fun, not growing a beard.

New to MMO's? 

(you know I'm kidding)

Yeah, I've never thought of my played time as any kind of "investment."

The only sense I've ever thought about an investment in an MMO was in terms of social investment--that I'd rather be playing something else at the moment, but I've worked my way into a social network that lets me raid or whatever and if I leave this, it will be difficult to be able to go back to it.

I have 78 days played, I have a rune etched helm and I'm mastered out?! Omg I can't leave EQ2--no. Never thought that.

"I have a main tank group healer position, three nights a week early evenings, with people who are adults, if I give this up when I'm tired of the new shiny, it could take six months or more to find that kind of a situation again" -- that's been a concern more than once.

These are my thoughts.  I personally don't get incredibly attached to a character in an MMOG.  I view my characters as tools to play and enjoy the game.  After I play a while and get bored I either quit or start a new one.  Once I quit and MMOG and come back some time later I very rarely play an old character, I almost always play a new one.


I can understand that as well.  If you're locked into a social setting with people you like then sometimes it makes a dull, old game more entertaining.

The group is more important than the game.  Always.
As cynical as we are about gaming and MMOs these days, the above still holds true.

Since f13 isnt a guild-based site though, I'd like to say most people here are a little less group-biased toward their game reviews.

Someone please explain how the pvp works on this.  I read something about having 3 sides but one being npcs? pvpvr is what they called it.

I understand what you are saying, I just find that starting from scratch in new games is incredibly laborious and not particularly fun the vast majority of the time.  For me its like this: "Why give up my mage that has a full compliment of abilities, spells, etc, for a mage that has 1 or 2 spells"  Sure the content is different, but its really just a change of scenery most of the time.  Like I said, if a game plays VERY different, then I'm interested, because I'm not doing the same things I did in another game, just with differently named spells and quests.  For instance, a game like Global Agenda or APB piques my interest,  where as a game like Aion seems like it would be nice if I wasn't already playing another diku. 

ETA: The group thing is also extremely important to me.  I am in a really excellent guild in WoW that I've been a member of for nearly 4 years now.  I've stopped raiding a long time ago, but I am still welcome with open arms in the guild, and there are plenty of people who still do the non-raid content on a regular basis.  Having this sort of grouping available to me is a huge thing that keeps me going back to WoW, even when I suspend my account for a few months here and there.  The social aspect is huge for me, and I've never played an MMO past my first month that I wasn't playing with a group of friends.

Yeah, at heart I am a soloist in these games. Even in WoW, I was a guildhopper. I did have a few really good groups of people I played with at varying times, but then I'd take a break, come back and start a new character and find an entirely different group of people. Since I never got into raiding I never really got into a mode where I depended on guildmates to do what I wanted in the game - they were just a purely social aspect that kind of rode alongside me playing the game itself mostly solo.


As an alt-oholic I find starting from scratch highly enjoyable. Just not when you're doing the same quests and visiting the same places for the 5th time.

Specifically addressing your question regarding the mystery of "3 sides", I previously had read a comment which probably answers your question: http://www.warhammeralliance.com/forums/showthread.php?t=279522

c/p for the lazy:

It's Elyos vs. Asmodians or Light vs. Dark.

You fight in the Abyss which is in the middle.

There is a NPC third side called the Balour that are supposed to work as a balancer though I don't know if it works really.  Once int he abyss you fight over fortresses.  This allows you to get into some PVE areas and stuff.  So you're PVPing for PVE or PvPvE.

That's a quick synopsis.

Anyone know is that like a single keep open RVR zone or is it a battleground with a beginning and ending?

I'm pretty sure it's open.  But let me find some details for you because that's a good question and I'm not 100% positive.

Not just open keeps. I heard something about pvp "relics", something that tickled my DAoC friends' weak spot. Problem is publicity stunts are one thing, while finding trustable informations is a different matter.

Here's what I got.  You have three different levels of the Abyss.  The "higher" the level the harder.  You can take forts and keep them and the open up vendors etc and other resources.  Initially they are kept by the NPC races and you have to group up to take them.  Reports have the lower ones taking single groups and the higher ones taking raid sizes groups.

The next part is unclear but I want to say there are windows in which you can take PC captured fortresses.  Some say they are always open (from an interview in 2007) to they have a 2 hour window once a day and it's random (which doesn't sound right).  I can't find a clear answer just yet.

There are also vortexes that you can enter and pop into the other sides leveling areas and PVP in there.

Rewards are Abyss points which are used to get gear etc.

There's some (though not much) info at aionsource wiki -- the Abyss (http://www.aionsource.com/wiki/The_Abyss) and PvP (http://www.aionsource.com/wiki/PvP) though the latter has mostly speculations.

the Relics/artifacts are apparently sort of control points (31 in total) around Fortresses located in the Abyss. Each of them provides some specific effect to the side who controls it.

Siege Information Tutorial (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_Jg1PHvsIs&feature=player_embedded)

Am I seeing another raid PvE mobs to take PvP objectives game like WAR? Or am I misunderstanding what I'm watching?

Initially it's all PVE but you can compete against the other side while doing it.  The other side can race you, fuck you over or whatever.

After that I *think* you may have NPC's to assist you though I'm not sure at all on that.

All reports beginning to end takes 20-30 minutes on some of the lower level forts.

I'm sorry. I didn't watch the whole thing. But why are they fuckin with the gate? why not just fly over?

Apparently there are shields or something in place.

My five minute review is very positive. it's your standard bunny bashing, but the client is responsive, everything is reasonably well laid out, character control has a good feel, and with everything turned to max it looks pretty damned good and I'm getting over 100fps.

Wish I would have gotten a beta key........................too late now I suppose. :heartbreak:

I am starting to feel like Charlie Brown again. Maybe this time Lucy will actually hold the ball in place!

One thing I hate:

I can remap my mouse look.  Normally its left mouse button, but here it's shift right MB.  Fuck.

Thats all though for now.

Take a look at the textures up close, even on the highest graphical settings. The textures are clever and colourful, but ridiculously low res. The flashy effects surrounding the textures sort of make up for it, but look at anything up close and you can see why it runs so fast.

In a PvP-semi-centric game, isn't that the pinnacle of implementation?  A game that looks good, but is using low-res + bald face trickery to keep frame rates high for everyone even if many people are onscreen.  I read what you typed and thought, 'well someone in that shop knows what he/she is doing'.

Can, or can't remap your mouse look?

I can't imagine he'd be so pissed about being able to adjust the setting :-)

that... That is so dead on it needs to be framed. :drill:

Yes, it wasn't really a criticism. The low res textures work. But it felt a little odd to see WoW-esque low res textures in a 2009 game because it could look really old up against new release games in a couple of years. Maybe the slick Cryengine and flashy effects will save it from that.

Oh come on, Wow lowres felt old in 2004. Every time we think there's a collective raising of the default visual bar, some new game comes along to show us that tech unto itself doesn't matter as much as style.

Guild Wars would probably be a better comparison.  Low res but looks really good.

Again, I'm not criticising, just wondering how fast the "look" of Aion will age. I grew up playing Commodore 64 games so I know resolution doesn't matter for gameplay. Aion's textures up close look like WoW 2004, but like I said, maybe the better engine and effects will continue to hide it well. Just pointing out something that stood out for me. You're all correct, it runs like liquid.

The game looks good.  But I'd rather performance trump looks when it comes to something having to be subpar.

Especially in a PvP game.

You know it could just as well look like shit AND run like shit ala WAR.  I'll take one of the two any day, preferably performance.

I must be taking crazy pills I find the graphics pretty impressive.

The graphics are impressive. I only mentioned the texture resolution.

This is a very "efficient" MMO.  If it had released before WoW we'd be pissing ourselves with excitement.
As such, I'm not sure if it's enough for me to sub. even though it's a nice game done well.  I need something new.  If I wanted "same," I'd just save myself the grind and work my AoC endgame.

<patiently waits for JGE/Champo betas>

So it's EQ2 with anime graphics?

no

What's the status of PvP in the beta?  Are they actually showing the mass scale battles yet?

This beta weekend is capped at 10.  PVP basically starts at 25 when you can enter the Abyss.  There will be weekends where you start with a high end character.  I think I posted a schedule somewhere.

Well like I said, so far it's just bunny bashing--from what I'm reading the beta today only goes to 10th level. I didn't have much time to play.

But a lot of betas, I have played for five minutes and already found major issues that made me sure I wasn't going to play the game. Characters don't feel right when they move. Systems don't work in an intuitive way. IMHO if you get those kinds of feelings, there's only so much a game can do to make up for them. And sometimes they can--LOTRO's engine is really squishy, I always feel like I'm playing in mud or with like a 500ms ping, but it does so much else right, people learn to live with it. But one thing I've noticed with really popular games is the basic character control just feels right, feels natural. You just hop in and play. And that's how this feels right off.

I mentioned the FPS because post lich king, I had to start dumbing down graphics even in WoW with my 6750/8800gts system. MMOs even ones designed to be highly playable on low systems generally don't have that great a performance.

A little tip I found out while playing the COB, if you click on a blue "link" in the quest log it opens up a box describing that link.  You can hit the locate button in that box and it'll give you an "X" on your map/mini map on where that thing is so you can get to it.

You can locate quest objectives and locations etc. 

For some quests the location of objective will be hidden but for most of them yup, it's basically built-in quest helper thing.

iirc it's also possible to get the tracking on map through typing /slash commands directly, haven't looked into it though.

That feature, to me, is the best in the game.
Everything else is pretty plain.  Fun, slightly grindy, but plain.

Oh, and they need to fix the cutscenes and looks like they still have some verbal translation to do.

Don't you like the overlay "n" map? I love that.

What do you mean by "n" map?

Edit: Oooooh I see.  Cool.

It's an opaque map that overlays your main screen like diablo2.

Crafting is non grindy so far.  First I did a quest to craft some iron things and got a dagger recipe.  Then I did a craft order and the dude gave me the supplies and I hit craft and I get free crafting levels.  Awesome.

And I get crafting supplies for doing it.  Sweet.  I guess the only grindy thing you need to do (so far) is grind out mats for shit you want to craft.

I pre ordered, dont have a code yet.  Is there anywhere i can dl it so i can jump right in when i get the code?

Torrent perhaps?  Not sure.

Edit to add:
Screenshots (http://www.flickr.com/photos/38160534@N05/sets/72157619925672019/show/with/3644157375/)

I love personal stores.  Good times.

As you gain crafting levels the new NPC orders will require you to spend some money on the additional components. But yup, it's quite more friendly than having to farm mobs/nodes for the piles of components needed to get through the levels, i liked it. You even get regular xp from that crafting, not much but it adds up.

Yeah when I got to 10 point orders I had to buy 2 components per item.  But each item was like 30 gold,  which is nothing.

Yeah it took me about two days to get my code from Amazon, just started the DL a few minutes ago. Going through the NCSoft site you do have to enter the code before you can start downloading.

Guess im gonna pre-order this to get some beta going. Even if it breaks my personal rule of not pre-ordering MMO's. :ye_gods:

Caution, the beta isn't running consistently, it's only every other weekend.

Upcoming Closed Beta Events

Closed Beta Event #3 - July 2-July 6
Focus: Asmodian levels 1-20

Closed Beta Event #4 - July 17-July 20
Focus: Elyos and Asmodian levels 1-25

Closed Beta Event #5 - July 31-August 3
Focus: TBD

Closed Beta Event #6 - August 14-August 17
Focus: TBD

Good save :heartbreak:

Wouldn't even get a chance to play it until July 17th

Wonderful. I wait over 8 hours for this thing to dl and install, and finally think I'm going to play, then this fucking Gameguard shit launches, spits out some gibberish "Error 114", and that's that. Nice.

Windows 7?  Gameguard needs a fix in order to run in W7.  http://blog.integrii.net/programs/GameGuard.rar  That's the fix that worked for me.  Replace the GameGuard.des file in your Aion\Bin32 folder.

Course, if your GG error is different or for another reason, this may not work.

I gave it a go and it's just okay so far.  Early this morning, there were so many personal shops set up at this one camp with their stupid text over their stupid heads, that you couldn't even find yourself!  Horrible.  Horrible.  Horrible.  Just like nearly every Korean Mish Mash PoS, though the game itself isn't as bad as most Asian Grindfests.  Maybe after level 10 something amazing happens but it's just so so for me right now.  And, of course, PvP - don't know about that yet.

So far its... not bad.  You know what you will get, same as every other game but its well done like WOW rather than a failure at every single opportunity like WAR.  The graphics are nice, it runs incredibly well on my machine that has trouble with the vastly inferior WAR graphics and it looks "pretty", i had trouble making a character that looked like a man rather than a flat teenage girl with short hair but after playing around with it for a while i managed, the Heihachi Mishima hairdo helped.  It doesn't feel grindy at all in the first 10 levels, i don't know how badly that ramps up later but its no worse than any other game at this point.  Depending on how the pvp is i think this is going to be my game of choice, whether their plan to deal with faction imbalances works or not is yet to be seen but you know what? at least they HAVE a plan which is more than any other game has come up with so far.  I was looking forward to champions online but their lack of villains and real pvp makes Aion the winner so far.

The textures are not low resolution.

The first few maps are split up like AOC so you can move to another channel if you like.  Theres a button on your UI and just move to another channel if it's bugging you.

I personally like the shops.  I set one up to sell manastones and went out.  Came home later and I sold my inventory.  I think it's pretty cool.

I'm very torn on personal shops. I like shopping in games, but they create lagfests in the cities. It's one thing now where there are a dozen people at most in a town. It's quite another when there's two hundred in the main city which was my experience in my short time in Lineage2/Taiwan beta. I would like to hope they add some kind of auction house or that there's one somewhere. That siphons off the majority of sales, but still allows an entrepreneur to set up shop with pots or whatever near a dungeon.

As contrasted with the other Korean grinders I've seen, it has a lot more customization, it's quest rather than grind driven, it seems to not require a buffbot, it seems to have a lot more care put into it, and it seems to have something as a progression other than kill more mobs.

Anyone know if there are instances at some point?

They have some added in patch 1.2 and 1.3 it seems.

BTW is there any hint at a release date?

September 25th. Deliberately unconfirmed.

I had to change some kind of user control security setting in Vista to get Gameguard to work. And now of course vista keeps warning me about it. Kind of weird, no other game has made me do anything like that. Game itself is okay, though I kept having Lineage II flashbacks ... not even sure exactly what reminded me of it most. Maybe just the player character models.

I think ~launch-era EQ2's model of Player Shops was the closest to tolerable. Players could sell, but only from their instanced house; there was a Broker with a more WoW-AH style interface that allowed you to browse what people were selling. Then, you could either buy from the broker and pay a markup, or you could walk directly to their house to buy directly from the player. Dealing with 100+ people all sitting there with a block of text over their head is just  :uhrr:

There are some in the game but at higher levels.  They've added more to the game in the other patches.  I think anyway.

Thanks for the tip, Draegan.  I like personal shops, too, as long as they're not too intrusive.  It was just all these tiny campsites with dozens and dozens of them and you couldn't even figure out which text belonged to which shop.  My favourite thing in MMOs, however, is auction houses.  I could just play auction house in WoW for hours sometimes. 

PS  I was told the release date for NA was September 1 by some unnamed game guy recently.  IGN says it's September 30.  So, I'm assuming it's in there somewhere.  I don't know if I'll play.  If post level 10 is the same, probably not unless it has some sort of extroidinary PvP or crafting or something.  I don't hold my breath for good PvP, though.  It very nearly almost always ends up crappy.

I popped into some of the higher channels and you can have an entire server to yourself essentially. It's kind of creepy. Nobody there at all, just you and the NPCs. It's like playing Warhammer or something  :awesome_for_real:

Giving it a run yesterday and this morning, I gotta admit... the scenery looks strikingly similar to WoW in some parts. And that is not a slam by any means. Being a priest, I don't have any wtfown abilities, however the animations for it are pretty fancy - aside from the untranslated audio. I do like the added cutscenes for some of the epic-line missions, being just long enough to develop an idea of what the hell is going on or what to do and where to do it, but short enough to not frustrate my ADHD side.  

Reaching level 10 and doing the Daeva quest was meh, but having wings is pretty slick - I do, however, think that novelty will wear off soon enough. But for now, I like the fly-fly. I will have to run my chanter around later and fool with the first subclass stuff when the wife releases me back onto the net.

The only real drawback so far is running/walking. My character seems like it is running at a frantic pace but my distance and time say otherwise. Perhaps he leans too far forward when running, but meh... its a small detail. Nice, short, quick and dirty little MMO.

edit: Enter key, why do you fail me??

Priests don't own until you get combos which I think are around level 11 or 12.  Clerics are one of the best classes in the game apparently.

Also if you're curious when you open your skill screen with "K", in the upper right hand corner is "Chains" click on that and you can view all your chained abilities.  Also you can click on the tab for Skill List and you can see all the skills your character gets.  Before you pick the subclass you only see the skills from 1-9 then once you pick your class you can see everything up to 50.

edit to add:
I just figured out how to make your weapons +1 etc.  At a general store there is some powder you can buy for 800 kinah, click on it and then on a weapon or armor and it transforms it into cloud of something.  You can then click on that and then a piece of gear.  I got my Mace of the Lake to +2.  Woot.

I actually found that out when I was screwing around opening and closing everything. There is a ton of options if you care to look. I am digging the Chanter and his bo. Good tip on the +1 stuff. I'll check it out when i jump on later this evening.

Wow Draegan you seem real excited to play Aion. I'm counting on you to take one for the team.

I've been following the game for a few years now.  I don't think this will be "taking one for the team".  I enjoy the game enough in the first 30 hours of playtime (during COB) and thats good enough to pick it up with the NA launch.

One thing I really hated about GW is how non-intuitive the terrain was. Like, you walk up to a ledge that would be just a ledge in WoW, and in GW it's an impassible "wall".

Is there any of that in Aion?

No.

Plus you couldn't jump there, while here you can. Not to mention fly.

Seriously, I understand everyone concerns here, but since many keep wondering what is it like, I have a honest question for everyone who tried it:

could you find one single thing this game doesn't do better than WoW in the first 10 levels? I am all ears.

This goes back to my little innovation rant.  People want something slightly different from WoW and will accept less polished if it delivers a new type of experience.  I think this is why AoC and WAR attracted so many box sales.  Both titles were advertised as not WoW. 

Unfortunately for AoC and WAR, they both delivered not WoW in playability as well.  Both titles gave us a VERY fun experience early on (1-20 in AoC and Tier 1 in WAR) but suffered greatly in late game progression and "stickiness".

First 10 levels... the mobs seem to have relatively more health, take noticeable time and handful of attacks to defeat and you can actually die fighting just one of them, let alone two. Think it's mostly drawback of playing a scout (they're weak in PvE for looong time) but the longer 'time to kill' is noticeable for other classes, too.

It's a full open world.  Or they do a good job tricking you of thinking so.  The first area, by looking at the map, is pretty enclosed where there isn't much outside the path you're following, though it is pretty large.  But you can jump off cliffs and other things.

But you can't fucking swim.  I don't get it.  But it's as open as any WOW zone.


How can you use WAR when you talk about a new experience?  Aion is just as "different" as WAR was when compared to WOW.


I've played each class up to 10 at least if you take in Chinese OB and this last weekend.  Scouts are by far the hardest class to play early on.  I played a warrior for shits and giggles yesterday and 1-10 was quick and easy.  I was killing mobs probably faster than WOW's newbie experience.

For the first 10 levels order of ease is probably Warrior, Priest, Mage, Scout

Oh, one more thing i almost managed to block out by now (played the chinese open beta thing) ... the UI can be infuriating with its inflexible "move but a pixel and kiss that dialogue window you had open goodbye" and similar junk.

I wrote down some more detailed impressions (both positive and negative) earlier in this thread i think, but too lazy to try and dig them out.

Is there any way to customize your character abilities like talent points or something in that style, or is everyone of the same class always the same?

Thanks, tmp.

And Threash customization lies in the still unexplored (by me) "stigma" system. So yes, everyone is different in a "talent" fashion.

Stigma System Guide (http://www.aionsource.com/forum/general-discussion/8915-guide-stigma-system.html)

Thanks for that, it doesn't seem to offer a whole lot of options sadly.

Sorry to place what is probably a stupid question in here, but how are the tank classes playing.  In terms of soloing, and any dungeons/group pve you have done.  Since ChampsOnline looks like it won't be out until too late for me and my buddies, we'll probably pick this one up, and I'm always the tank of the bunch.

That's a very good question.  One I'm interested in as well, particularly as far as PvP is concerned.  I know that the beta hasn't allowed much access to pvp yet, but a severe problem in pvp balance lies in the balance between ranged and melee dps classes.  With the addition of flight, being a melee player could really be a nightmare. 

Basically same old same old.

Well, getting 5 additional skills picked from ~15 available (some more were added since that guide was posted as level cap was raised to 50) does allow for some decent customization. Although obviously some skills will be deemed must-haves but that's par for the course.

Keen has a post here: http://www.keenandgraev.com/?p=2625 in which he shows some low level PvP footage as a tank class.  Looks kind of meh to me, but it might tickle someone's fancy.

No, not really. 4-5 skills out of 10-12 sounds piss-poor. If they were class altering would be one thing. If they are not, it's my biggest MEH so far.

About melee classes and flying PvP, there's an option you can turn off but it's on by default that automatically zeroes in on the target of your current action. If someone flies away, as long as you have him/her/it targeted you should auto-follow him until you are in range to unleash your attack.

Malakili: that PvP video looks bland to me too, but I still have to see a good PvP video, from any game. My vote, of course, goes to some AoC ones but they are still in the meh-zone.

Just realized that their are tank classes. Am I suppose to expect this game to be balanced?

Someone define troll for me, pronto!

And:


This sucks.

The only customization you get in WoW is one of three cookie cutter specs. Yes, you could put your 70 points into some new unique variety. But more or less, you're a prot-war, a shadow-priest or whatever. So 5 skills could be large or small depending on how significant they are. And the fact they're drops could add diversity as people take what they get or it could end up as a camp-a-thon.

However, arguing about what should go into those specs is an important part of WoW's out of game that you play at work on the forums and that builds a lot of hype and interest in the game. Even when 90% of the players just go and copy the stock specs off of wow-wiki anyway.

It seems that at least some melee classes have skill (http://www.aionarmory.com/spell.aspx?id=525)s which can pull enemy from range right in front of them. There's also sprint skills and such.

Ouch, that does suck.  Having played melee in DAoC, it seems to be similar to water fights in NF.  A good group can exploit the z axis in crazy ways rendering melee pretty worthless and allowing ranged classes to have a field day.  This will be problemmatic with cc being available as well. 

As for the abilities that melee get, I'm getting visions of Magus pulls in WAR.  Noone likes them.  Let's hope that the devs at Aion find a better implementation mechanic. 

Having played the game, I like what I see in KeenandGraev's video.

Troll more.

Looks like DAoC with a z axis and stylized graphics.  The UI is also cleaner.  

Can anyone recommend a fansite where I can read more about the specifics of the mechanics and class balance?  

I'm sorry I stopped being Charlie brown when I was 14.

They are adding more stigmas apparently in a few of the newer releases.  Customization comes in the form of manastones.  You can make yourself have a magic defense sets or evasion sets or crit sets or whatever.

Templar's are your sword and board tanks.  They have a pulling ability I think.  But they are very useful in mass PVP.  Gladiator's are awesome with giant two handed weapons.

As for websites, aionsource is the biggest community but it's like reading WOW general.  But you can find some decent posts if you have patience.

I also read the beta boards as well.  Other than that.  I have no idea.

http://www.aionsource.com/

Is fine if you can get past the kiddie talk and the anti-WoW bitching. Seems a lot worse on those boards than before, but this is just about the time for the suck to start on a forum for a new game.

And as for CC and flight... Nothing better than waiting for someone's flight timer to run out and CC them high enough so they are in for a nice fall from grace. I used to love drowning asshats in WoW.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-xwNeuNwaM&

Skip to 0:34. (Borat Voice) Very nice.

Uh oh.  I didn't get to play DAOC, so my only other experience with completely ridiculous CC was with Mythic's other title.  Maybe it's just me, but can we have one titile of late where CC isn't the deciding factor in who wins in PvP? 
That being said, I will still be trying this one and hoping for the best.  It certainly gets a gold star for realease date.  It doesn't have to be good, it just has to not badly suck after the first month is up.

I think he was being a little dramatic with the CC stuff but I never played end game pvp so who knows.

Is it still possible to get in the Chinese open beta?

yes

Fine. You don't want to play. So get the fuck out of this thread and quit being a cockholster.

So your telling me that only the people interested in buying this game when it launches can post in this thread?

 I know he's trying to get banned so hard, but can't you people make him happy just this one time?!!!

You need to wait 30 days post-release for the honeymoon period to wear off. Then the bitching can begin in earnest.

We get that you don't like it, stop shitting up the thread.

Well, the game now has official release dates set (http://www.aiononline.com/us/news/general_news/aion_launches_this_september.html).

North American Release: September 22, 2009
Europe Release: September 25, 2009

Additionally, and this I'm personally excited about, they're releasing on Steam (and their own site apparently, plus Direct2Drive).

Yeah, but the steam and direct2drive versions will either cost exactly the same or cost more than the retail SKUs, and when you buy from gamestop or amazon etc you get a free hat or slow mount or whatever. As well as a physical box, a DVD so you don't have to spend an entire day downloading 20+ gigabytes interrupting your interracial midget bukakke torrent empornium downloads, and maybe even a laughably inaccurate manual.

Only if I'm lucky.  The translation errors in that alone could be worth the box price.

To anyone who got an Aion beta key as compensation for Tabula Rasa shutting down - apparently it's also a live key that entitles us to the Aion digital download for free, plus preorder benefits and more.

The email they sent us seemed to imply we only had one beta weekend's access, but according to the old Planet TR forums, we have access to all beta weekends without having to preorder. When Aion launches we can get the client free from our PlayNC accounts, plus we get 30 days' free access and in-game items.

Someone posted that they received this follow-up email. I didn't, but my "TR victim" key seems to be the same deal: http://www.planettr.com/forums/showthread.php?t=11072&page=7

Thats cool of them.

That's quite the compensation, considering they realistically could have done absolutely nothing and no one would have noticed/cared. From an outside perspective, they seem fairly confident in this game.

I think we (former players) would still rather have a Tabula Rasa server up and the client sold to the shooter-heavy audience on Steam. The order of events was they closed their MMOFPS-ish title TR, then announced all their remaining games were going onto Steam, the one place that would have been a good environment for selling TR.

If I can find an old TR box and enter the key, can I get the compensation package?

Theoretically you shouldn't be able to find a game box, but if you did, I'm sure they've stopped accepting keys for it.

Theoretically I shouldn't find boxes for Auto Assault or other games, either...  Half-price and other resellers often still have copies though.  Usually I tell a clerk the games have shut down though.  Saves them the hassle of an upset customer.

I tried that once with Asheron's Call 2.  Earlier this year.  Yep, I found an AC2 box on shelves this year, 4 years after the game shut down in '05.  Told the clerk the game had shut down ages ago.  They told me they had to leave the box up until the computer said to take it down. 

I hope someone bought it and gave them a really hard time over it when they returned it.

Earlier this year I found a store with a shelf full - 6 copies - of Fury. At full price. Which is especially rude since the title went f2p for a good while before collapsing.

:-) The compensation package was given to people who already had an open, paid TR account at the time of the closure announcement.

There's more flexibility being worked into the system - NCSoft's attempt to make the game appealing to the west includes an understanding that we love customization (just consider the flexibility this game offers in character creation), so there's no doubt we'll be seeing more of this.

In a recent update, they have announced a) More Stigmas b) They're "High Grade" and require "High Grade" stigma slots c) There will be 3 High Grade Stimga slots d) Some require the use of other Stigmas to "activate" d) You can still socket "regular" stigmas in said slots if you wish.

Source (http://www.aionsource.com/forum/general-discussion/17595-1-3-update-new-stigmas.html)

I am very curious as to how they will handle the patching situation since it seems to be centered on the Korean version and ripple out to the rest of the regions. Add in the fact that the patches are created for the Korean version and there needs to be a western filter applied, well how exactly will that work itself out? And no this is not a "sky-is-falling" problem in the least, I am just curious.

I'm curious as well.  If the US gets version 1.0 instead of 1.2 then NCSoft will shit the bed.

If they're just transculturalizing the quests as well as literally translating them, then it should only be a matter of some competent translators working on it. In a sense, I'm more optimistic if the cultural translation stuff is mostly bs and that it's the basic core game.

If they try to do any changes to the actual codebase other than simple spreadsheet stuff like changing an xp multipllier, my prediction is they revert it within the first year to keep up with the codebase, which as I said above is what I saw happen with Grenado Espada. (Except they never did get translations or voiceovers nearly as good as the ones in the "global" edition out of Singapore.)

I'd be interested in how much influence non-Korean versions have on the overall development or what kind of numbers it will need to do to have that kind of influence. Example, I don't know whether or not they have an auction house, but if they don't, it's something that I think most western players would prefer to personal stores. Does the US division have enough cred to get that done or do we just take what we can get. Westerners don't like that, we're used to ruling the world and having it our way so there's a multiplier.

My understanding is there is a little more then just translations, they are trying to make parts of the game more Western market friendly/relatable.

The example they gave was a quest that relies on a Korean folktale which they said was redone so it would be more friendly to players who didn't know the original folktale. It's unclear whether or not they just rewrote the quest prompts a bit rather than a literal translation to make it more obvious what the point of the quest, totally replaced the text rather than translating it, or whether they actually changed how many quest prompts there were or replaced the item graphic with something else more western or what have you. Two of those are just replacing text blurbs which they're going to have to do anyway since the originals are in Korean, the third is a structural change and Gods help the coders.

Certainly most of the importers of Korean games have enough trouble getting a literal translation in correct English right, nevermind anything else. I saw nothing of that in Aion. The quests I read were grammatically correct colloquial American English and made sense. I'm thinking that's all their talking about. My impression is the game is already designed around more of a western sense of customization and pacing--certainly the level of customization I saw was nothing that could have been grafted on at the last minute.

I found three stores with FUry and Hellgate London. It was pretty sad when the third store I went to was pulling this shit or they completely forgot about their PC section.

Well, I hope you guys did the right thing and informed the floor manager that these games can no longer be used. I live in Canada and did this very thing when I noticed Tabula Rasa in a Future Shop. A couple days later when I revisited the store I found they had indeed taken it off the shelves.

These stores are generally stocked by people who have zero interest in the gaming world, and of course don't pay attention to news like game X closing, just as I'm sure most of us here don't pay terrible amounts of attention to the fashion industry. Once alerted though, it only takes them a quick internet search to verify your claim, and generally they'll take it off the shelves. It's not like the employees have any personal fiscal loss associated with throwing the games out.

And to remain on topic: Aion.

Well for that example you gave, all they did was attach a quest item in the form of a book to read which explained the folk story. That's the easiest way I am assuming. However, that takes time. I am sure the patches could drop quickly if they are just gameplay modifications. It will get hairy when they put in stuff that needs a quest to proceed.

Well, I guess you could theoretically still pay Hellgate: London single player in its out of the box state.  :ye_gods:

Beta even this weekend, July 2-6.  Both sides and levels 1-20.

I've got a legion with a friend of mine running (or plan to get it running) if anyone is interested and want to join something for the beta period.

http://geistguild.com/

Elyos? I missed round 1 and had no clue you could roll elyos last round so all i saw was asmodian side. Probably play Elyos Thursday night and see the differences.

I think Asmodian.

You can snag the patches from fileplanet.

FWIW someone is buying it, I tried to upgrade my order to a CE and they're out of stock at Gamestop.

Got a beta key with my (FREE) fileplanet account before they ran out yesterday. Have it installed and ready to go. Should be interesting.

Everyone get back to me when this turns out to be another piece of shit Korean MMO.

I hope it has quests where you have to trust either a white daeva or an asian one, and the white one betrays you and gives you worse loot, to teach the traditional lesson that white people can't be trusted. 

Very impressive. A very popular question has been, "What version is Aion coming to NA/Europe" with - I'm pretty sure that was even asked here in this thread. Just announced today that they'll actually be launching with version 1.5, the third major update and one that isn't even released yet in Korea/China (though it will be by the time the NA edition is released).

This does seriously calm a vast number of concerns regarding responsiveness for updating and balancing, as quite a bit of work already went into version 1.2 and 1.3. I believe 1.5 starts adding a number of new PvE raid encounters as well.

Source (http://www.aiononline.com/us/news/general_news/aion_launch_version.html)

Answers my question. I don't think you could do it any other way without alienating the other regions. China has been what, two patches behind so far? I doubt that would work in the EU/US regions.

This is big, big news.

Well big for Aion anyway, shows that NCSoft isn't that stupid and they are going to try to be serious in the US/EU regions.

I figured the US would get 1.2 and have to wait a quarter year after the koreans got 1.3.

Can you tell me what you like about this game? Or rather, like enough that you set up a web page for it to recruit for your erhm... guild?

Aion has only one strength going for it: It will be the least shitty, fantasy-based pvp MMO available for the 200k or so people wanting such a title. 

It's like being your mother's "favorite son" when you're the only child. 

Well first of all, my crazy friend who has to much time on his hands set it up.  He's a hardcore MMOG player that just discovering the ways of 9-5 work.  So we'll see.  I thought anyone else that wanted to play in the beta could join in and have a good time and if they don't have another guild or bat country didn't go to Aion they could stay if they wanted.

Anyway as you know, I love Diku games.  This is new and shiny and has pvp.  I'm beginning to sound like a broken record here but the quality of the game is top notch.  When I first played WAR back in 2007 or so I knew the game was terrible, it stayed that way until late beta.  Aion's gameplay (playing in China) impressed me.  They got me at least with the "first impressions mean everything" schtick.


I think AOC and WAR have proven that more than 200k or so people want a PVP based fantasy MMOG.

Looking at the way both of these games are being played early on, I'd argue that the crowd you're describing wants a pve game with pvp in it.  There's probably a market close to 500k for a well built pvp MMO, but Aion isn't it. 

What do you see as "new" about Aion?  From the videos that I've watched it looks like a shiny version of DAoC with better handled pve.  I really don't see much "new" about it. 

Your first impression was much different than mine then.

Hell, the first quest few quests were all kill 10 rats. Or harvest 10 things near rats.

Some of us aren't looking for anything new, just something not incredibly fucked.

This.

I'm not immediately turned off by the kill 10 rats at the beginning of the game.  Like I said, I enjoy the current WOW formula but I'm tired of WOW.

I'd be happy with that as well.  Adding a z axis and holding on to antiquated cc doesn't seem like a step in the unfucked direction.  Especially for those of us that enjoy playing melee.  

I'm still going to give it a shot at release.  I'm just not optimistic that the pvp will be better than DAoC.  Only the PvE. 

I've heard people saying that CC is as crazy as WAR or DOAC was.  I've seen videos that weren't terrible, but actually fun.

Apparently there are potions that break CC and stuff you can buy. 

All 3rd hand knowledge though.

Dreagan,

Myself and a few guys will probably be playing this. Having a guild would be cool.

Your're more than welcome.

Have everyone sign up on the forums, and when you post in the "Give me access" thread just have everyone reference you/F13 so I know who you are and I'll give you access.

Played for about an hour and.... its just feels like another damn MMO. Boring quests, spamming the same 2 abilities, hearing the dame casting sound every single time.... I dunno.

Your boredom was well polished boredom  :awesome_for_real: Kinda makes you forget you can do the same thing for free  :oh_i_see:

Were you expecting an RTS or a first person shooter? i don't get it.

Look, lets be clear here, because there's a bunch of people getting their panties in a bunch over this game. 

Aion is a good, polished diku MMO.  It will be the second largest MMO in NA a year from now. 

That said, it is still a diku MMO.  It's World of Warcraft with Asian Zing sauce and flying PvP.  That's it. 

It will be wildly successful and sent to the graveyard moments after it launches. 

People are getting their panties in a bunch because of trolls like DLRiley.   A people like waffel sounding like Re Tards.

Anyway your post is spot on.

Basically yeah, if you're not looking for a new slightly different spin on diku, then you're not. If you are, this is probably the first AAA title to launch in anything like decent shape since LOTRO. And the most promising IMHO since WoW.

I'd agree with this, and would add that some of us are also playing the beta in order to get to 20-25 for future beta weekends and check out the PvP.  I'm not looking for anything earthshattering or innovative in gaming at the moment (it'd be nice, but I just don't think it's out there).  I AM, however, really hungry for an MMO that has a solid PvP focus and PvP well-integrated within the endgame. 

Some of us are interested in AION for that reason alone.  If anyone else is in a similar boat, you may or may not want to get involved with the Aion beta.  While the game is in far better shape than Warhammer was at release, you'll just be leveling for the moment.  I'm playing partly out of sheer boredom, partly to see whether healing classes are horrible to level,  and partly in the hope that I can eventually experience enough of the PvP to get a sense of whether I want to play upon release.

But if you are considering the beta, or the game, because you want to be part of the Next Great Leap Forward in gaming, I wouldn't bother.

Yeah, I've got the game prepurchased with Amazon, and I actually won't be spending too much time with the beta, because just from my limited experience already I know I'll enjoy it, so I don't want to spoil too much of the content or waste too much time with characters that will be wiped.

I'll play it.  Then, as with most games, I won't have enough time to play to really enjoy it and I'll get bored and quit.  It's all teed up and ready to go, pre-ordered on Amazon. 

Should be fun!

Yeah, don't want to spoil that amazing content like collecting 6 boar hooves or killing 15 worker goblins.

Hay guyz. i baugt dis "fps" game n all you do is shootz peeps. Booooooooooooooring!!!! Why dont devs make n fps that do somethin diff???? seriosly wtf?!

Isn't that like trying to evaluate WAR PvP basing it solely on Tier 1?

Absolutely, yes.  If I implied that I was going to draw anything more than tentative conclusions about Aion based on level 20-25, then I did a bad job of expressing myself.  I don't expect to get more than just a glimmer of what it'll be like at endgame.  My expectations are low in terms of what I think I can learn from the beta.

But it's not like there's much on the gaming horizon that claims to include PvP as a core element.  I'm not checking Aion out because I see it as the best choice amongst a richness of options out there.  I'm just hoping that it evolves into a reasonable option.  I have friends, guildies, and old DAOC alliance members who are all scattered again as a result of Warhammer...it'd be nice to find something that we can play together again.

Eh, I like exploring environments and seeing new creatures and stuff. The less of it I see now, the more will be fresh when I'm playing a character that "matters."

I'm playing very casually so as not to spoil myself too much. Mainly I'm just trying to get a feel for the classes so I can figure out what I want to play. (Inevitably that means which healer.)

Can anyone thats playing give a breakdown of how the classes they have played, play.

Umm, you have a warrior class they pokes with a sword, a rogue/scout class that pokes with a dagger, a mage class that shoots fireballs, and a priest class that pokes with clubs. NCSoft didn't reinvent anything here.

Not to sound flippant about things, but its a standard MMO with a new coat of paint and new stuff to look at and beat on. nothing earth shattering.

Such insight. I am staggered by your informative response.

What I was talking about was a little more detail. I know there are several warrior classes, what I dont know is are there like Tank spec and DPS spec, do they do less damage than a rogue as in standard Diku, or is it more of a WoW diku where a DPS specced warrior can put out almost the same damage as a rogue. Can Priests only heal, or are they able to play like a Shadow Priest.

Quite a shit ton of information regarding 1.5 located here:

http://news.mmosite.com/content/2009-07-03/20090703043556049,1.shtml

What's not to love in this?

Or this?

(http://images.mmosite.com/photo/2009/07/02/aions385wCFy1d6x73.jpg)

So does 1.5 add anything for people below 40?  Sounded like it was all high-level content.  That's great, but why is that news for a game that hasn't even released yet?

(The dresses are pretty though.)

Because the game is released in China and Korea, with people at max level? *shrug* NA will just have the luxury of starting at 1.5, which means more content to start out.
Patch Notes for 1.1, 1.2, and 1.5 (http://www.aionsource.com/forum/news-announcements/20119-ncsoft-reveals-version-western-aion-will-launching.html)

As to DPS spec or the like, my understanding is outside of adding stats to armor and such, the only way to 'spec' a character is with Stigmas; they add different abilities to the character. Stigma Guide (http://www.aionsource.com/forum/general-discussion/8915-guide-stigma-system.html)

Cleric is currently sort of OP, so yes, they can do the whole Shadow Priest thing; at least that is my understanding. My Cleric is only 13. Once you get your second chain attack you can certainly plow through things with pretty much no down time. (Lower levels at least.)

Besides, the game has killer corn monsters. How can you resist?  :awesome_for_real:

Here's a couple of critters I liked. I hope they don't westernize and replace that fabulous pet.
So, I took 396 screenshots in my one week in the Chinese beta. Seems I liked the graphics. And it ran like buttah.

Anyone know if I pre-purchase the EU client directly from NCSoft, I get to take part in the closed beta events? It says I can join, but it never mentions anything about EU beta, I guess it is the same as the US one, right?

Pre-purchase the "client"?
I preordered the EU collector and I am in. I think you get a spot with the collector, not sure with regular preorder, but it should be written up there somewhere on the EU Aion website. Oh, a friend of mine spent something like 5€ on a pre-order online thingie cause it was supposed to warrant him a spot, and it did. Got his key 22 hours later.

The game I mean. I bought the regular from PlayNC, downloading now. Will see if it lets me play in a few hours.

Crafted and rare, Funny Weapons (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnpMpYqHOGY&feature=player_embedded)   :awesome_for_real:

Play more JRPGs and watch more anime. Nothing new here.

So I pre-ordered and have been dinking around in the beta.

And I can already tell I'm not going to make it past my current level 15.

I have mentioned here before that I am absolutely desperate for a good team-based PvP game (I guess I've never gotten over yearning for something like DAOC), and there's nothing to do in the beta but quest or grind and level up.

That's OK for awhile...it lets me get a feel for the game mechanics, get a sense of whether leveling (especially as a healer, which I always tend to play) will be a burden, and see whether I like the art and animations.

I knew going into it that it wasn't going to be a cutting-edge, stereotype-shattering game.  I don't need or expect that.  Everything about it seems fine (not compelling or brilliant, but fine), and it surely does run more smoothly than Warhammer.

I can already tell I'll be able to tolerate the leveling - though I don't know how tough it gets at higher levels, so that may yet be a problem.  Either way, I  just can't go on, heh.  There are no BGs, no nothing.  Just PvE.  I can't take it any more =P

Soooo....methinks I am done with the beta, as I'm just not interested in leveling up twice.  I'll stick with my pre-order for now and hope that the endgame is worthwhile.

The thing is, and it's hard for me to articulate this, so I may miss the mark...even at low levels, DAOC and WoW and even Warhammer felt more engaging somehow.  I can't describe this very well, but Aion just isn't pulling me in.  I'm not sure what that's about.  Maybe I'm just jaded, but I don't think so...because I am pretty certain I could roll a new character in any of those other games today and feel more connected and interested in what's going on.  I wish I could sort out this odd feeling of disconnect from Aion, but I guess I'll just have to be inarticulate about it for now.  I'll still give it a chance, I think.

Summary: Things stop being new and exciting after the 10th time you've seen them. 

Aion will be successful if they can provide an interesting and organic pvp experience.  It doesn't have to be new or innovative, it just has to be less broken than WAR and less gear dependant than WoW. 

Good summary ;)

It's certainly true for me that the endgame will seal the deal with Aion (or not, depending on how it turns out).  I'm just not willing to do all that PvE leveling during the beta -- without even a BG to break the monotony of PvE -- to find out.

But there's something else in Aion that just isn't clicking for me, and it's not exactly about having seen the same thing 100 times before.  That reality doesn't explain the fact that I am pretty certain I could roll a new character right now in, say, WoW, and have more of a sense of engagement and connection than I would in Aion.  It's a weird feeling, but this probably gets into the realm of pure subjectivity and sort of arcane impressions, so I'll shush before I get denned.

I haven't played Aion or DAoC, so I don't have comparisons there.  WAR though feels like something big is happening right from the start.  The Order races are under seige or about to be (though I found the Elven area to give the best feel for that), and the Chaos races are crushing their opposition (with again the Dark Elves really getting into it).  WoW is a little slower, but if you've followed it lore at all, then it's pretty easy to get right into it.

Warriors:
Templar: Sword and Board.  Shield bashes and sword strikes.  Your tank.  Has a pulling skill that can yank someone to you (must be on the ground and target must be on the ground as well).  Good in PVP.

Gladiator: DPS warrior.  Can tank some (I think) but can dual wield and use 2h weapons with some melee aoe abilities.

Scouts:
Ranger - Range dps, lower than Sorc, CC and traps.  One of the best "gankers" apparently.  Has rudimentry stealth.  Out of combat 30seconds.
Assassin - Typical stunning backstabing rogue archtype.. good burst dps.

Mages:
Sorcerer: Good CC, Great range magical DPS, squishy, has defensive spell that help.
Spirit Master: Pet Class. Dots and slows and other CC.  Really solo efficient, good in pvp as well.

Priests:
Cleric: Badass main healer class. Very survivable in PVP.  Sword and mace, strong healing and decent ranged magical dps.
Chanter: Buffer, but staff melee dps with HOTs single and group based.  Stuns a lot with other procs.  Pretty good in a group.  Must have at the high end for some of their auras.


Thats what I have so far.

Some of this might be the fact that you know what to expect at end game in those other games. Looking forward to the pvp of end game is usually my drive for leveling. Seeing as how some of us don't know much about it, or how it plays its hard to push through the beta pve.

Preordering games in hopes that the end game, which you've never played or experienced, will be worth it is very warhammery.

To be fair, I preordered WAR because I knew that I'd get enough play in the first two tiers to be worth the box cost.  If people think Aion will entertain them for a week or two, then it's worth the preorder. 

Is there any way of leveling with PVP in this game? After warhammer, and now with WoW catching up on that as well, no game should try without that option.

Anyway, the game is pretty pretty, but I've seen this stuff before. Suprisingly, there doesn't seem to be a lot of gear involved. I played to like level 5 without getting any upgrades.

From what I understand after you can go into the abyss (lvl25) you can get xp from players and level that way, I heard the mobs there give really good xp as well.

Maybe I've got it all backwards but I'm always more concerned with how fun and engaging the leveling game is when I'm interested in an MMO. I figure if the leveling is entertaining enough, I'm getting my money's worth even if I don't do much at endgame - pretty much the scenario that kept my interest in WoW for 4+ years despite not liking raiding or grinding out honor. Warhammer, it only took me a few hours with beta to realize I didn't care for the leveling game or have much interest in the gameworld. My time with Aion has shown the opposite, so that's all that really matters to me. And any kind of PvP endgame is going to be more entertaining that PvE raiding, as long as it doesn't degenerate into some kind of repetitive grind for gear.

As opposed to pre-ordering any other game?

How much is the preorder.

5 bucks.

Hmm in that case I may gives this a first hand try.

Pre orders are free, you can't be charged until a product actually launches.  At least amazon hasnt charged me anything so far.

You could probably walk in and ask a gamestop person to just give you a preorder case.  It's just a small DVD case with a card inside.

They can't supposedly.  They're bar coded and require a scan to leave the building with a preorder attached.  So I was told, twice.

If you preorder online from Gamestop, they claim it can't be cancelled if it's purely online and if you are ordering direct to store that if you don't pick it up within 48 hours you'll have a $5 restocking charge. I imagine if you call and whine and don't have a record of doing it every single release they'll relent, but that's the official policy. I'm pretty sure if you pre-order in the shop they take a $5 deposit.

Yea but you can cancel that $5 deposit (albeit with much kicking and screaming) and still have your beta key.

Has to be scanned? lol, what a load of shit. I'm still on GameStop's payroll, btw.

I simply walked in and took it out of the drawer. We had extras, and practically no one who shops at that store does so for PC.

Key please and thank you!

lolwut

When did they make this asinine policy?

I still haven't picked up the only thing I've preordered in 2009, BlazBlue, because I haven't been able to get to the store (no car!).

It only took a combined "stop payment via CC" and BBB threat after their standard "can't be canceled" spiel to get my cancellation through.