Chunders Aion Beta Weekend Review

The following is a review I just made on our Absolution Legion forums:

1] Download
This took bloody ages! No other way to say it Im afraid. Considering the size of the file, nearly 24 hours is unreal. I disabled my Avast antivirus, my Vista firewall and ensured that no other PC's were online in the house. This should have given me as fast a connection as possible. Admittedly Im only on a maximum BT exchange throughput of 3Mb but I have never taken that long to download something - even a proper full lenght movie used to take half that time. If it was a trickle download then there was no reason for it. However it was good that it would reconnect from where it left off if you had a shut down (as I accidentally forgot to disable "auto-shutbown after 4hrs"). Fortunately barring any unforseen eventualities, I will only be patching from now on, or installing the full game from DVD when it hits the shelves in September.

2] Installation
I kind of missed this and am still trying to figure out what happened. Unfortunately I was at work when the download finished. As space on my C:\ drive is limited I wanted to install the game to my D:\ drive. Now either it self extracted its ass onto my C:\ drive without asking, or my son - who I asked to keep an eye on it while I was at work - decided to install it to my C:\ drive. Under interrogation using waterboarding and warm urine he has so far failed to remember whether he was instrumental in the process.

In order to play Aion (or even download the game) you need an NCSoft account. This is a simple thing however it leads onto my greatest issue with the whole experience and this is the Gameguard software NCSoft use. They have a number of solutions to issues with the game failing to run, and one of them was a major problem for me. The solutions offered ranged from updating drivers on the PC, to enabling Admin settings, disabling your firewall and closing antivirus programmes. Now my PC is one I built myself so I know its still a relatively decent rig, albiet a couple of years old now but top notch back then, so I know Aion will run well on it. However I also know that enabling Admin, disabling the firewall and closing antivirus programmes is generally considered a "no-no" thing to do. Unfortunately it was what I had to do to get the Gameguard programme to work and allow me into Aion. I dearly hope they remedy this problem before launch in September as Im uncomfortable to say the least with this procedure.

3] Character Creation
I was impressed with the splash screen effects. Having what appeared to sound like a choir of angels sing "Aaaaiiiiioooooon" is pure class and made me smile every time I launched the game. As I am a member of the soon to be great Absolution Legion I chose my race as Elyos, and although I wanted to try all of the other classes and the other race, I stuck to my guns and chose to play a Scout which would lead me onto my chosen Ranger class. I chose the Female and went for the standard physical build. Its nice that they will show you what the character would look like in three stages of dress, from underwear, to starter armour, to full-on-robot-chubby armour.

There are 2 tabs to choose from. The first allows "basic" changes such as face, hair, decorations, lip, skin and hair colours, then theres another tab which allows changes to body dynamics like bust size, hips, legs, biceps, etc and changes to facial features. Anyone familiar with the scope of creation on COH & COV will be right in their element.

One feature which didnt seem to work was the voice sample, and I have to admit that the little girly squeeks she made in game were becoming a bit annoying later on so it'd be interesting to see whether something more "adult" can be wrangled from the character's vocal chords.

Following all the changes, you give a character name which is checked for duplications with other people already playing and then you're in-game.

4] In Game Character & World
Okay my first niggle is with the face. Im sure my graphics settings were pretty optimal but I could clearly see that it didnt render as pretty as it was in character creation. Additionally, on some occasions when looking at her face, I could see that they have tried to do what they did lateron in Guild Wars, which is to give the characters teeth. In GW this was so they could create a proper animation of the jaws when characters spoke and before it was corrected initially this caused a lot of concern from people whose characters had suddenly changed appearance. In Aion they have teeth which when the character smiles seems to make them look a little bit like the Joker out of Batman. Not pretty as you can see below!

Having said all this, I can live with it as I will naturally spend 90% of my in game time staring at her butt - which is in my opinion a far nicer prospect.

Control of the character is very much like the traditional Guild Wars model (I keep refering to GW as apart from COH / COV this is my only NCSoft title I can compare with), as is the scale of the character and world although its obviously a different game. However you can clearly see the inspiration gained from GW and its pleasing to see that all of the best stuff is carried through in minute details.

With my chosen character being a Scout initially, I begin by not being able to use a bow, and instead have the option of a sword or daggers, soon being able to buy the skill to dual wield. Once you progress from the beginners gear you can get weapons and armour which has slots for different types of upgrades which seemed to be plentiful in creature drops.

5] Starting Area
For the sake of full enjoyment when the actual game is released, I decided to not read every quest in depth during this beta weekend, and so skipped to the end where youre told what to get or where to go. The additional bonus for me was this way I got to experience as much as possible as quickly as possible and levelled up faster. Suffice to say that you begin with the usual "collect 4 of these", "take this too..." and "go see..." type quests and soon are in your first town where you can buy & sell stuff, get new skills and upgrade your armour. A series of quests throughout the starting area will continuously take you back and forwards to this town until you hit level 9 or 10 when you can do a quest which takes you to one of the huge main towns / cities and ascend. Im sure the starting area could be done a lot faster by those who wish to, but it took me most of the day although I wasnt trying hard to get to the end. I did die once very stupidly and all of this area could be easily traversed with no dieing whatsoever.

There are two main travel points available in the starting area, one at the aforesaid town, and one about 5 minutes run down the road near a strip mine area. Using these travel points costs money, but this is not a problem as by virtue of quests and drops you have plenty to spend and its not until later on that travel by this method eats into your pocket. Travelling by these two points is carried out by getting strapped to the underside of a semi-transparrent giant bird.

The other method of travel between points is by Teleporters, although I couldnt get the one in the starting area to work.

Two simply brilliant features: the first one is by pressing "N" you got a map on screen which showed all of the area you have travelled locally. Its semi transparrent so you can keep it there as you move around and there is a cursor on it to indicate where you are currently. If they could ony either make this map moveable to the side or scaleable as well then Id be in cloud cuckoo land. The second brilliant feature is when you call up your quest journal you can click on a link in it (either the person you need to see or place to go) and on the map a little "x" will appear. however its worth pointing out that the "x" isnt 100% accurate as I discovered when trying to find a guy who was close to the mark but far enough away in another building that I spent a fair while on Sherlocking him down. In the main city I also noticed a small "will-o-the-wispy" thing flies off to show you the way.

6] Ascending
This is a trivial thing. I was fully prepared for some kind of quest which was going to take me over 5 attempts to do. Instead, having completed the final quest in the starting area, youre taken to the main city and from there have to go into a hall to see some bloke who rabbits on about you being well cool and hip, he then gives you your wings and sends you off to see the Scout trainer who asks you to choose between an Assassin or a Ranger as your chosen class. To be honest it was kind of an anticlimax considering its a special event in your career through the game. In fact I suspect that the quest to do this was a darn sight easier than some of the other ones.

7] Post Ascended Areas
Okay this is where I began to fade a bit. Play time became limited for me and I made the mistake of collecting as many quests as possible (as usual) which only caused me to become confused as to where I was going and where I was a lot of the time in respect to where I had been. In the beginner area I had solo'd all the way but now I was picking up quests which were clearly beyond my capacity. This confusion was making me do a lot of travelling by teleporter and either the travel prices were increased or I was walking round with a hole in my skirt because I was bleeding cash.

The two cities I travelled to were beautifully done though - the first one being freaking massive and a stunning thing to behold. I suppose the second one was really no more than a town but still it was a main area to congregate for the mass of players on the server. Rendering of the rest of the world is similar to the starting area - amazing.

It was outside of this second town that I tried my first bit of Ranger kiting, of which I discovered I "need to try harder". I had also bought some seeds as I gathered they were needed to make traps with, but clicking on them didnt do anything and so their use has not been made clear. Exactly how to sue them remains a mystery for me. As for the bow, well you need to buy arrows for it, but these are cheap enough, so my kiting was conducted with no traps and only a snipe attack plus a "slow down" attack. The amount of times I was jumping about like a ripe tangerine kiting a creature, only to find it had trotted off back to its spawn point with 100% health returned is incalculable. There is nowhere to tell you when you have travelled beyond its "tether" point at which time the game AI says to it to return, but its bloody annoying.

On the flip side of the coin, on my first exit from the town, and trying out my wings for the first time, I landed right by some kind of giant spider. This spidey, who was 2 levels above me, then proceeded to chase me all the way back to town, up some steps to the ramparts, off the side onto a roof, down to the ground and right across the town square, where it would have carried on after me too if it wasnt for a bunch of players deciding they would kill it for me. The agro range seems a little inconsistant to me.

7] Overall Impression
I loved it. Sure I have a few quibbles about it, but nothing which is going to disturb me enough to not buy the game and enjoy myself. Hopefully on release there will be more servers going than the few for the beta. The queue to get in sometimes was worst case 40 minutes for me and thats just wrong. Even 10 or so minutes is too much to ask imho.

Also the lag in the main town was irritating a few times and we can assume a lot more players will be subscribing on release. Fix those things and sort out the apparent mass of people who had GameGuard protection problems and all is sweet.

As for my Ranger class, Im not as confident with it being the right one as I was before playing - but then thats part of what I was playing for - but all of the other classes seem equally as interesting to play so Im sure somewhere there is at least one or two to suit me. I read that the Ranger doesnt come into its own until level 19 or so anyway and I'd be happy to play until that point in time to try it. As you can create a few characters (is it 5 or 6?) theres plenty of scope to create alts.

Naturally there is nothing I can write that will convey the great game this is to anyone who hasnt played it. Hopefully this is an honest taster for people. You're never going to get perfection in any game and there will always be things wrong, needing fixing, seemingly never fixed, or just things which you personally dont like. There are things Ive mentioned here which others will see as stupid and things which I havent mentioned as I forgot or didnt see. Take it as its meant - a personal review. If you choose to buy the game, great. If you dont, then I think its your loss, but its also your choice.

My score would be around 9/10. Im not sure what a 10/10 would be - maybe a 3D Holographic version - but this certainly seems like the game for me to play while waiting for Guild Wars II - and even instead of it...like Guild Wars with wings. Through infinity...and beyoooond.