ÆON Community

So I got my sticky hands on an Aion closed beta key through preordering this game.

God knows I love me a decent MMORPG.

Now people talk about stunning worlds and graphics and all that when it comes to this game…tbh, its pretty average.

When you look closely (well you barely have to try) you can see that the sky and all your horizon pictures are hastily drawn still images…I compare this game to WAR simply because WAR was the last Pay to play MMORPG I played and as always I expect new games to beat any predecessors (although most dont).

War had great visuals, granted not so plentiful as Aion, but they were there nevertheless…now Aion got hold of the cryengine (used to make the first Farcry game) but I dont think their modellers spent enough time really carving out decent textures.

If you have the Beta..simply look at the roots of any large tree…the textures are stretched to death. God awful.

This game isnt terribly noob friendly either…you have to dick around and press a lot of keys to find things, once you know how to use them its simple…up until that point its a nightmare.

AND DONT GET ME STARTED ON USELESS ALT AND CTRL KEYS! When I press ctrl I want to see the HP bars of all enemies in my sight range, and when I press alt I want to see all friendly HP bars and item drops…I FUCKING HATE HAVING TO DO 360 DEGREE TURNS ALL THE TIME TO SEE SHIT!

Flying is fun albeit annoying…you sprout your wings at lvl 10 as you ascend to become a Daeva…which as far as I know does nothing else other than make you hated but loved and you now have the ability to teleport without dying or something. Pretty vague really.
But yea…jump and then hit space and you’re gliding…cool beans…except at no point does it tell you how to flap your wings – in fact its a completely different motion. You have to press pageup to spread your wings for flight (I know you can change it…but srsly wtf? Couldnt they have done something along the lines of tap space for glide and hold to beat wings?). But yea…walls pose no problem…but ankle deep lakes do! When you’re being ganked and you wanna make a quick getaway by flying…do NOT walk into water! It makes you useless! …although you can jump and then hit page up (which takes your hand off the mouse) to fly…but 9 times out of 10 you’ll lag and miss and die cause you couldnt fly in time.

ONWARDS!

You live in an odd world named Atreia designed and built by a loony god called Aion (AND ITS PRONOUNCED EYE-ON YOU BASTARDS!). The world has been shattered into two parts due to some epic battle that you can read on the wiki page should you so care (tbh I found the story so boring I didnt bother)…you have the people living in the upper half – The Elyos, and the Asmodians who live in the bottom half. Basically the Elyos are the goody-two-shoes mumma’s boys who had it sweet…whereas the Asmodians had to develop claws and rock hard feet to survive in the hell of Asmodae…goooooo the bad guys (Their eyes also glow red…awesome!).

Naturally I chose to be an Asmodian and keeping in typical Dante style I picked an Asmodian Scout in hopes of becoming an Assassin. For those that dont know, I typically choose the high melee DPS/low armour chars in most MMO’s (like the Witch Elf in WAR)…I do this because I believe its actually one hell of a challenge…if you get ganked you need to micro manage your enemies and use attacks on all of them else you’ll simply die. Makes it a little bit of a challenge.

Anyway we’ll skip lvls 1-10 because its all the same old shit really…every MMO is the same. Oh except you can travel between major towns by using the Aether Flight option…where you pay some absurd amount of cash and you get flown all the way across the countryside in a scenic root just for fun…Its awesome the first couple of times…dead boring after about the 3rd of 4th time.

Lvl 10! Booyah bitches I gotz me sum w33ngz! (See above text for rage on actually using the wings).

Changed main class to an Assassin…found some creatures…blasted them. I love my assassin when I play him right…hes FANTASTIC if I plan an attack but utterly useless if I get ganked..the way an assassin should be.
Each combat I go into must be planned as to when and where to use an attack…if I’m attacking a creature that I havent encountered before I have to test him and see what skills he has so I can plan my defensive and offensive skills to beat him.

Again it all turns to pots when two creatures attack you, especially if they’re different creatures. This is because the cool down on most skills is FUCKING AWFUL! and the standard attacks are piss weak (again much like WAR).
So you need to use your main skills to hurt things, but you cant use the fast enough…making combat a little drawn out – hence the strategising…not sure if that was their plan but thats the only way I could work around it.

DP Ulti attacks pwn :3 three hit assassin combo for mass raepage.

You’ll almost never use bandages unless your bored…this is because its just as fast (and free) to simply hit the “rest” key and sit down for 5 seconds…instead of it being a steady increase of HP…its on some weird timer which if you get right will restore like half your half just as you sit down…You get potions too…but you only really use them when you’re getting ganked…and by then you’re stuffed anyway.

Also NCSoft…wtf is with the MP? I have an MP bar with like 400 available MP…but it never even moves? No matter how many attacks I spam…nothing happens…I bet the mages have trouble managing their MP…but as for every other class, why even bother assigning MP to attacks?

Anyway, theres much to be fixed imo, especially the visuals which were meant to be the selling point of this game. They still have till September to work on the small things, i do hope to god they fix the badly drawn horizons.

Hmm not sure what else to say here, although it sounds like Im just straight flaming the game, I really do enjoy it. It doesnt have the charm of WAR not the replayability of WoW but it certainly has its own factors and gameplay.

PS: Get used to running around heaps at early levels…it gets dull but its necessary. If only there were more sound effects when clicking people and whatnot, like it MMO’s when you initiate a conversaion with an NPC they make some sort of grunt or say some cliche line like: “Oh its you!”…without it, NPC conversations are stupid…you just click them…spam next and then open your journal to read the summary of what they just said.

Anyway for a beta Im not sure its relevant but I will still give it an initial rating then come back and do a full review once I have played the actual release through.

Rating: 7.5/10 Great game, lacks replayability. It also promised too much and delivered not enough.

Official Site:

Wiki Page

Glossary:

- NPC: Non-playable character

- HP: Hit/Health Points

- MP: Magic/Mana Points

- MMO/MMORPG: Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game

- WAR: Warhammer Online

- w33ngz: Wings

- FUCKING AWFUL: Really bad