Aion (Open Beta, Launch Day Info too!)

[Falconeer]

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.

[schild]

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.

[Falconeer]

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.

[Tarami]

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.

[Falconeer]

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.

[Hindenburg]

They're banking on aerial combat to change that.

[Engels]

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. 

[Severian]

Here's some hours in a row.

[Koyasha]

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.

[Falconeer]

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.

[Tarami]

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.

[Hindenburg]

Mind that aerial combat.

[Tarami]

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?

[Lucas]

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

[Nerf]

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.

[rk47]

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?

[Falconeer]

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.

[NiX]

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

[tmp]

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.

[Engels]

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?

[Tarami]

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

[NiX]

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.

[Draegan]

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).

[Lucas]

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

[tmp]

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

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.

[Engels]

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

[tmp]

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...

[Draegan]

I made a "dwarf".

[Salamok]

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

[Falconeer]

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?

[Goreschach]

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?

[Falconeer]

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?

[Auronp]

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?

[Lucas]

Currently waiting in a 25 minutes long queue :disney:

[Tale]

I made a "dwarf".

I thought you made Obi-Wan Kenobi.