Aion Initial Impressions

I must admit that playing large quantities of MMOs has really messed up my regular blog writing. I start playing one, then play it for 2-3 weeks during which I seldom have anything more interesting to write than "we killed 10 turtles, then gathered 8 shells, then..." Furthermore, the "end" is usually so far off that I feel ridiculous trying to write anything resembling a review. So, 3 weeks into Aion, I'm going to drop down some of my initial impressions as that's about the only thing that feels "right."

How would I describe Aion? It is definitely a game that seems to borrow a little bit from lots of various MMOs. Its general feel has a lot of WoW in it, the grindy nature of combat and crafting reminds me of FFXI, the PvP is reminiscent of Dark Ag of Camelot (or so I'm told), and the whole wings/ability to fly seems most like Champions Online (probably only because I had a winged flier there). As seems to be the case with most MMOs that come out these days, it does a pretty good handful of things right and some things wrong. I'm going to analyze various things one at a time:

Combat. I really have no complaints with the combat. It's very WoW-like with the addition of some skill chains and the addition of movement based bonuses/penalties, e.g. if you move forward while swinging you gain offense and lose defense, if you move backwards the reverse is true. The game has a very standard array of taunts for the tank, heals for the healer, and damage dealing moves for everyone else. In general I would say that combat is more interesting that most other MMOs I've played, but that's probably like saying that Return of the Jedi was more interesting than Empire Strikes back. It's still basically the same despite the differences.

Crafting. Crafting is a place where I think they got it half right and half wrong. The part I really like is that you generally level your crafting skill exclusively from doing work orders. You pickup a work order, buy whatever mats you may need from the nearby vendor and start crafting. Doing a work order requires creating a certain number of items (6 in the lower tiers) and usually grants you a single skill up point (a 1 to 450 scale) and a random item (more mats, designs, etc). The advantage of this model is that people are not creating armor/swords/necklaces to level up and thus completely devaluing the market for said items. Furthermore, those items are not worthless and easy to make (pointing finger squarely at WoW). That means that the items you craft are not only semi-decent (you'd actually use them), but there is actually a market for making and selling them. For that to happen with the lowest tier of items is quite remarkable in my opinion. The problem with this model is that doing work orders is spectacularly boring. You can only get a single work order at a time, which means you need to: get your work order, buy mats for 10ish work orders (this saves time), move 5 feet to the crafting table, craft your six items (while waiting/doing something else), move the 5 feet back to the work order NPC, turn the quest in, get another quest, and then repeat your crafting/turn in motions 9 more times. Once you do this (assuming you actually got your 10 points from the 10 work orders), you get the next tier of work order and start over. Even doing 10 work orders feels really boring. I kept feeling like I should have been able to just pay for my mats and have it give me the points automatically. You would literally spend dozens of hours doing nothing but what I just said to raise a crafting skill to max.

Quests. The quests are very much like the combat here. It's okay, but nothing really sticks out. At any time, you have a set of "Campaign" quests to do and regular side quests. The campaign quests generally have more steps required, or even a group, but the item and XP rewards are often phenomenal. While there are some small cut scenes that take place in the campaign quests, the majority of the quests are presented in the time honored MMO fashion of dense blocks of rather pointless text. I actually made a sporting effort to read a lot of the quest dialog, but there just really wasn't much point. I could see someone really getting into the lore here, but there really isn't enough here to get me overly excited.

Grinding. Aion is a grindy MMO. That's pretty much all there is to it. The XP and item rewards from grinding are nearly always better than doing quests. In fact, some of the quests are even grindy, like the group quest we did where each person had to collect 50 "Krall Marks." (Luckily, each mob dropped one for each of us, so we only had to kill 50 mobs, rather than 300). While that may very well be a deal breaker for some (go play Champions Online; that game has NO grinding), I actually think it's part of the game's charm. Of course, in all fairness, I spent around 5 hours hunting a rare mob that dropped a shield I really wanted (I got it!). I personally don't think it's a very big deal, but may be to other people.

PvP. PvP in Aion doesn't really start until level 25. After 3 weeks of not very heavy play, I'm barely level 20. I've heard that the PvP reminds people of DAoC, and supposedly it's quite decent, but I can't speak to it at this time.

Wings. If I had a disappointment in Aion, it's the wings. First off, you don't even get them until level 10. That wouldn't really be a problem, however, if they were more interesting. You can only fly in a very small number of areas. In the level 10-20 zone that I've mostly been in, there are only two relatively small flying areas that surround quest hubs/cities. The game gives some sort of random excuse for why you can't fly everywhere, but it felt pretty flimsy to me. The border between the flight and the non-flight areas is often just this invisible wall in which the game informs you that you can't fly there. When you are outside of a fly area, you can still pull your wings and glide downhill/across flat areas, but it's really not much of a mechanic. I could probably overlook these problems, if flight time was infinite, however, it is not. At level 10, you get 1 minute of flight time that takes 2 minutes to recharge. At higher levels (30, 40, 50) you get new wings with longer flight times (I think up to 2 minutes) while the 2 minute recharge remains. There are also items/potions/food that increase your flight time, but nothing very significant. I generally found flight to be little more than a gimmick or something that I had to sit around waiting for so I could gather more Aether (a resource that you gather out of the air). In all fairness, flight apparently plays a lot bigger role in the Abyss (level 25+), where there are even rings in the sky that increase your flight time, but as a whole, I am very unimpressed with flight.

I'm not quite sure how I would sum up my overall feelings. So far, I'm liking it well enough. Draenoth expressed his concerns (and he'll probably quit over them), mostly the fact that the story/lore is not at all interesting. I'd really like to get another ten levels or so in at least and see some of the instances/abyss content... just to give it a fair shake. Aion is definitely not a game for everyone, and certainly not a game for the average WoW player, but I think there are plenty of people out there who will really find something to enjoy.