Slashdot Mirror
Aion Shaping Up For US Launch
One of the most promising MMORPGs in development these days is NCSoft's Aion, a fantasy-based offering built on CryEngine. It makes heavy use of flight as a gameplay mechanic, allowing aerial combat and easy travel around the visually stunning game world. There are four basic classes — Warrior, Priest, Mage, and Scout — each of which have two subclasses. For example, Warriors can be tank-like Templars, or berserker-like Gladiators, while Mages can turn into a scholarly Sorcerer or command the elements as a Spiritmaster. Early previews of Aion almost universally comment on how polished the game seems — this is partly due to the fact that it has been up and running since November in South Korea. "Being stable, scalable, reliable and fuss-free is far from a given in MMOs, but Aion is all those things, and can already stand alongside the genre's usability kings, EVE Online and World of Warcraft. Its expansive, zone-free open-world environments look terrific and run smoothly on a wide variety of systems. It just works." Since the game is already in a relatively complete state, NCSoft has been running closed beta "events," where a portion of the game is opened for testing. MMOGamer has a write-up from the latest such event. Aion is due out in September.
thing
think*
Very beautiful? You'd think a game powered by CryEngine would produce scenes far more beautiful than what the video shows. WoW doesn't even lose to those graphics, IMHO.
Given the presence of a rootkit that makes SecuRom look like unicorn dander and faery farts, I'll pass, thanks.
Since when is EVE a shining example of a MMO UI? EVO works (for some people) very much *despite* the cluttered, poorly laid out, typographically flawed UI.
TODO: Something witty here...
Blah, I mean can we at least pretend to come up with some original ideas?
I guess original ideas don't make money these days.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
Honestly, doesn't really look too much like WoW. It is a fantasty MMORPG so you can draw comparisons quiet easily, but in terms of the graphics and what they they aren't overwhelmingly a like. And there is a light and a dark gloomy side of the the game depending on which you choose to be a part of, read the synopsis, so you can at least post semi educated. I'll agree that the inventory and health gauges and windows are nearly mirror images, but so many other MMORPGs have the same dashboard making it hard to criticize. I don't play WoW anymore and have no intention to purchase or play this game, but any Fantasy MMORPG is going to draw comparison with WoW, but none will be able to beat it. Someone needs to find a new niche market to exploit in MMORPGs.
Just because you are wrong and I called you out on it doesn't mean I am a Troll.
0 = naught=nothing.
And some mod has no sense of humor.
Sent from your iPad.
Most of these companies have the wrong idea. When I place an MMO, I'm usually using a visual angle that has me looking at a downward angle toward my character from above. Generally speaking, I miss all of the impressive scenic stuff. Occasionally yes, I do stop and admire the visuals or I may stop and look up if I'm searching for something. However I think most of these companies are wasting most of their talent on impressive visuals when in fact I would prefer these two things much more:
1)A game that looks good on something less than a top of line GPU - I would prefer graphic efficiency to graphic splendor. When you have 10-15 guys running around a raid inside of a huge environment with 50 monsters and lots of trees and other stuff my FPS grind to a halt. This then leads me to turn down the detail defeating all the effort these guys put in to their product. My system is a dual core with a ATI 4870 GPU, it still stutters unless I turn down the details.
2)Easy guild management tools for Guild Leaders - How about giving me some tools to manage my guild more effectively especially when I'm not online? Being able to assign a guild quest to somebody so they will go gather some resources fore the bank even when I'm not online would be nice. A lot of players will only do this when I'm online cajoling them in to it. How about using the quest journal like a PDA or a digital organizer?
For an asian game, it's definitely raising the bar on visual and gameplay quality. That doesn't mean it's a leader.
As far as having a lasting impact vs Eve and Warcraft, no, it doesn't. Not even on the heels of Warhammer. People in the beta have said the game has no more potential as an endgame than wow does except that the game isn't that polished endgame wise yet.
There is nothing unique or wonderful about this game, it's "yet another rehash" of any of the dozen other games out there.
I'm not saying its a bad game, it just offers nothing worthwhile other than a change of scenery and backstory.
I think they need to start developing evolving worlds and quit developing games. Quests should be a one time occurrence.
Goblins start raiding supply caravans from one city to the next. In the city over there is a shortage of x, y, z now... players can be recruited to make up that difference via tradeskills. In the mean time in the first city the merchants are losing merchandise and are interested in getting any of it that is salvageable back, players can do that, so can mercenary npcs. They go kill off a large portion of the goblins, recover the goods, but the goods are already replaced in the second city so the price on goods goes way down, and now there are excessive mercenaries in the city with nothing to do so they over throw the local government/become drunken louts in the bars/etc so on and so forth. Make every person, place, and thing in the world respond to the events around it... a player murders a npc or pc, they should suffer the consequences if they get caught, warrants go out on their head, make a death system that makes some sense (legends of kesmai had a cool one compared to any current mmo), make a rebirth and reincarnation system (ala batmud)... there is so much more mmo's could be doing and they seem to all get stuck in the mud with "lets be a clone of wow (or previously eq) that won't take 1% of their population." It's completely absurd at this point.
Innovate, not duplicate.
There is room for polish, a lot of room, but to make it effective you need to be at least reasonably accessible and you need to be innovative in at least a few areas. EVE does a lot of things right (but I'm not interested in space sims), and I'm looking forward to World of Darkness just for that reason... hopefully they don't screw the pooch.
Don't kid yourself. WoW isn't original at all. It is a copy of every previous MMO (all the way back through MUDs) and even pencil and paper D&D.
"Just for that reason alone, I wouldn't touch that game even if *they* paid me $1000 per month"
Are you really that wealthy? If not, what the hell's wrong with you?
I make a pretty good living, and not only would I touch it for $1000 per month, I'd play it for an hour even if I disliked it.
I know, I know. Figure of speech (sort of). It's just a particularly asinine one.
The developper kind of disagree, as per the article on spirit master : Spirits persist, rather than being short-term and useful for only one fight. Once your character summons a spirit, it stays with your character until it dies, the spirit dies, you log out, or your character crosses into a new zone. It sound it will be as much zone free as other MMO are. Visually you can go from one place to the next seemlessly, but there are still zones.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
If the beta was any indication, I'd move along. It was at best describable as "the worst of the barrens" most of the times with rampant kill stealing and other lovely fun behavior.
Shadus
Not that I am installing it either, but how is GameGuard really any different from PunkBuster, which sets itself up as a service and continues to run in auto mode even after a restart ? Granted there was an click to install window for punkbuster and it seems gameguard may go in the back door so to speak, but they both auto-update silently, and accomplish...or try to accomplish the same thing.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
The graphics are decent but it's a really boring game until you get a high level character for PVP. The leveling process is a long linear grind with quests that are even more monotonous than those found in WoW. If you play for PVE, World of Warcraft, Everquest 2, LOTRO and a variety of other MMORPGs are vastly superior in terms of quality and quantity of content.
The PVP available at level 25+ is quite fun, but your performance is primarily determined by your level and equipment. If I could start a PVP character at a reasonably high level with half decent gear I'd probably buy it. Unfortunately, to get to the fun part of the game, you have to spend hundreds of hours doing tedious PVE quests and/or grinding mobs.
Millions upon millions of players in WoW and you couldn't find ANY you liked?
Yeah, good luck in Aion. I'm sure their players are from Mars, or somewhere else where they might be up to your standards.
In some issues Windows XP users may have problems with GameGuard due to the fact that the same "Windows Product Key" is installed on two computers and on the same router.
Both my machines have the same product key. Both are 100% fully legal. Both are on the same router.
I am doing nothing wrong yet their DRM will prevent me from playing the game.
I find being offended by me offensive.
I've wondered for a long time why none of these MMO games from Asia (Lineage, Lineage II, Aion, Granado Espada, etc) have an art direction from mythology and fantasy of the region. It's all a baroque looking western fantasy setting. Finely decorated plate armors, massive double bladed swords and axes etc. Personally, I think samurai look great, katanas, japanese armor, martial arts inspired magic ala Avatar (I know, it's not magic, it's bending). I know that the east Asia has more cultural diversity than I'm describing.
The only games I can remember that tried an art direction like that were Jade Empire, Throne of Darkness and, oddly, Summoner. I think Jade Empire did pretty well, but no word on a sequel from the company that gave us Neverwinter Nights 2, KOTOR 2, and is giving us Mass Effect 2.
TOD and Summoner are both relatively old games, and even though Throne of Darkness was made by a lot of Blizzard vets, it didn't do that well at the store I don't think. Certainly not well enough for Click Entertainment to make more games or even exist anymore. Summoner got a sequel, but I don't know if they kept the art direction. I guess Red Alert 3 has some anime influence in one faction.
If we expand into console games while we're on the subject of Summoner, there was Shenmue and I guess any fighting game.
This is all just from memory so I'm happy to be shown as wrong and learn about some good games I might have missed or forgotten.
When the axe came to the forest, the trees said, "Look out - the handle was once one of us."
The video doesn't do it justice. I play WoW on its maxed out settings and played the last beta Aion event. Aion looks a whole lot better.
I don't think it plays particularly better, but I didn't get that far into it.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
Quit it, it's ought. Ought means zero as well as naught, but to abbreviate a year, you would say ought, not naught. Gawd look what you made me write.
What sets Eve apart is the single shard server and player made factions ... neither of these is in the game.
It's more like WoW minus battlegrounds&arenas and a larger Lake Wintergrasp and less focus on end game raiding (although in the end they will put in PvE end game raiding anyway, just like Warhammer). I don't see anything Eve like in it.
What kind of world are we living in where a comment like this doesn't get modded 5 funny? Or at least -1 troll?
except for Eve, they all either tanked or were cancelled before release, because nobody wants to play stupid sci-fi games.
as a long time WoW player and mostly casual player at that...WoW is going to go quietly into the night. Not from this or any other game, but from itself. It probably has 1 maybe 2 more expansions left before it's all pretty much done.
Once the top levels reach 100, we're going to have > +500 stat bonuses for plain blue items! Just starts to border on ridiculousness to me.
unless Blizz can find some way to resolve the inherent inflation in game stats with every expansion, some things will be interesting but more and more it will be just a rehash of past instances and game play. Wintergrasp was an interesting expansion of BG's but by itself wouldn't be enough to keep me interested.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
So far i can say, like Guild Wars (also by NC Soft)... it is gorgeous. It makes WoW look like a cat turd vomited by the dog. i didn't get far enough in to play with flight, but it's pretty fun. i'm looking forward to the next round.
However comma it's still just like all the other fantasy MRPGs. Grinding, twinking, gold farming, inane quests for golden rat spleens that change nothing. WoW - Warhammer look + Guild Wars look + Flying. Adding flight and gorgeous graphics isn't enough to make it truly different than all the other life drains for me. i prolly wouldn't play it for more than a few hours a week for a month or two.
i'm waiting for a replacement to PlanetSide. Something that involves... skill, teamwork, strategy, tactics, etc.
GW used instancing beautifully to move your character *through* the story. In other games, no matter how many golden rats you kill, there are always more. The NPCs don't seem to notice, neither does the story.
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
You win.
I concede.
The day is yours, Trebec.
Sent from your iPad.
For an asian game, it's definitely raising the bar on visual and gameplay quality.
Hmm... the graphics look a lot like every other Korean MMO. This photo-realistic anime-esque like art style, akin to Final Fantasy art. I personally think that's "good thing"(tm) since I like that art style, and it's certainly a good thing because it's semi-fresh to the "western" market. Though, Sword of the New World and other MMO's that have penetrated the Western market have just as beautiful and similar art styles and very good animation to boot. It's not all just beautiful backgrounds, like LotRO is.
Gameplay? I've not heard anything about the gameplay yet. I'm still waiting for the next beta, since I just missed the last one. But I'm going to be very skeptical about it being anything close to WoW's gameplay. Regardless of how "cool" it looks and seems, how it plays is an entirely different ballgame. I would like to hear how "casual" friend it is compared to WoW. Korean MMO's are notorious for grind-mills and micro-transactions. This one claims to be more "western" friendly with tons of quests and such, but I'll have to see it to believe it.
Regardless, I'm looking forward too it. But I also scoff at the system requirements. The summary makes is sounds like it's as requirement friendly as WoW, but that's hardly the case when you look at the system requirements. I looks like my rig will be making the near minimum. Admittedly, my computer is a couple years old, but pure gaming machine.
"The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth." ~1984 George Orwell
You won't be missed. Thanks. :D
I was a wow player (hardcore on us dark iron before I swapped servers and later quit), tried aion, tried warhammer, playing eve, tried almost every mmo under the sun including free asian ones, sco (not the company), flyff, shattered galaxy, planetside, lineage, atlantica, a wide gamut of styles. The only major mmo ones I skipped were D&D online and hardcore EQ1.
I agree that wow is heading to burnout. With that to say, the word I intend to add is "thankfully". The game was a game-changer at first, but now it's just gimmick. I wonder how much activision had to do with that.
To be frank, I found Aion incredibly boring. Most quests are "collect X amounts of Y" or "kill Y enemies" and they are just text to read at, and even the "story" quests present cutscenes that are bland to say the least (this is an area where FFXI, with all its faults and limits, is still strong). Also, literally zero interactions with the other players: for the time I looked it at, Aion just seemed like an online version of Diablo (style of play wise), and for sure I'm not even thinking about paying a subscription for this type of play style.
A CC-licensed illustrated horror novel
"Plus it'll be the one's who reject the 'fashionable' MMO for one they like despite the critics, who I'll game with."
You shop at Hot Topic too, don't you?
Aka the developer that releases like 2 new and utterly generic MMOs every single year? Forgive me for not getting too excited.
OK, ignoring the bullshit rootkit, what sets Aion apart from other MMOs?
You've got to be shitting me. Surely you mean World of Warcraft and Warhammer Online, instead.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a bigger fan of EVE than World of Warcraft. But the EVE GUI has been shit since inception. And Customer UI suggestions go completely ignored for literally years , and that's just one thread that was alive for years with no sign of improvement.
EVE is wonderfully good at many things (nowhere else will you hear the term "pvp shakes"), and I've been in battles of over 1000 players with the game completely playable, but the UI?! That's their biggest failing.
Question everything
The Old Republic is what you'd be looking for (some time in the future). There's plenty of sci-fi MMO's out there. Even NCSoft had Tabula Rasa for a while. The quality of sci-fi MMO's is usually not too good. I have hope for the Old Republic.
Quit it, it's ought. Ought means zero as well as naught, but to abbreviate a year, you would say ought, not naught. Gawd look what you made me write.
"Aught" and "naught" both mean zero, and either are acceptable in any context. "Ought" implies an obligation. Using "ought" as a variant of "aught" is archaic.
I really only meant with PVP as far as gameplay, sorry I definitely didn't make that clear. Outside of that, it's basically lineage with newer graphics. Many people have indeed said the animations are impressive but I didn't pay much attention.
You mean like this one?
Don't be fooled by dictionaries either. Dictionaries record how words are USED (rightly or wrongly), not just what they mean. If people used 'bagel' to mean "stuff a cabbage in your ear on Tuesday", Webster would create an entry for it. Fucking descriptivists.
Let me get this straight... We should not believe a dictionary because their definitions are derived from the commonly believed meaning of the word. However we should believe you, some random /. clod who carries around a soapbox and an affinity for standing on it with no more credibility than your typical AC.
I'll assume the answer is yes.
So then, wouldn't it be safe to assume that the same idiots you are trying to win over to your side are the same idiots who got you up on the soapbox in the first place? If so, it is probably also safe to assume that those same idiots will follow the next wild-eyed slashdotter with a soapbox and a point who comes along.
Again, I'll assume the answer is yes.
In conclusion, I think you should just shut the hell up and go back to looking for porn. No one cares unless you have boobies, and even then, no one cares unless you are showing off those boobies. When you do finally show off those boobies, no one will be actually listening.
[an error occurred while processing this sig]
Korean MMO's are notorious for grind-mills and micro-transactions. This one claims to be more "western" friendly with tons of quests and such, but I'll have to see it to believe it.
I have been told by little birds that it is still pretty damn grindy, in spite of the claims to the contrary.
um, I specifically said 1-2 more expansions in the rest of that paragraph ;-) and quoted level 100 lol
What part were you disagreeing with again?
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
And drinks Clamato juice...
Ever since I saw the ads in the technical trade rags that NcSoft did for Microsoft and their "truth" campaign I de-installed the three games I purchased from them and haven't reinstalled them yet. I'll stick with other game vendors, thank you.
I must admit, this game looks very pretty. Far prettier than WoW. It'll be interesting to see how it runs and more importantly, plays. Sadly, even if it is as playable as a game like WoW, I doubt it'll be half as popular. Some interesting backstory in this interview with the NCSoft Community Manager in this video: http://www.elecplay.com/watch/19/167/3/16
I agree that wow is heading to burnout. With that to say, the word I intend to add is "thankfully". The game was a game-changer at first, but now it's just gimmick. I wonder how much activision had to do with that.
Nothing, since WotLK was announced and probably half done before the merger occured?
11 was a racehorse
12 was 12
1111 Race
12112
Actually, according to the link you posted, 'Aught' (or 'owt' in Northern English dialects) should really mean 'Anything' or 'All'. 'Aught' meaning zero is a false division of 'A naught' that has gained common use, like a napron or a nadder (snake).
Ok, I'm nobody. I go back to AO every now and then despite graphics that looked dated a decade ago and the fact that it's group based and my group long since dissolved.
I'd sub instantly to something like AO with nice graphics, a few quests (let's be frank here, AO has none to speak of), less tedium and a halfway decent playerbase.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I gave up when I logged in after the last expansion and saw Tauren riding around in motorcycles. Ugh. (And it doesn't help that, as mentioned in many of the posts here, WOW is *really* starting to look like ass. Actually it was released looking bad, but now it's simply ridiculous.)
Comment of the year
I've thought the same thing about WoW as well. In the current expansion you can see it already happening. Items from Ulduar already have >+100 stats. In BC this didn't happen until Sunwell or so.
My theory is that blizz will rework the game mechanics again, possibly for the next expansion. So far the track record has held that Blizz likes to introduce something new in each expansion that will cause people to have to regear. In Vanilla -> BC they introduced the rating system and emphasized things like +hit, which caused people to have to regear completely. In BC -> Wrath we've seen, or at least initially we saw, an emphasis placed on the need for +spirit in casters (I'm sure melee had some stat they emphasized as well). Resillence also became an important part of PvP, compared to BC (You need resil or you die in PvP 9 times out of 10, no ifs ands or buts about it.) So I wouldn't be surprised to see Blizz rework the mechanics once more so that there isn't stat inflation.
For the rest of your post I concur. Blizz is falling into the rehash mentality. Each new expansion will provide a burst of new content but the rest of the lifetime of the expansion will pretty much be populated with reuses of other content (look at armour, weapons, and mounts, its all the SAME but with a few minor changes). I don't think Blizz really cares though. In fact, I think Blizz is banking on WoW dieing out here in the future and then having all the player base move to their new MMO they are making so they can restart the cycle all over again. They're even hoping that all those that have quited will return to the new MMO. I'm sure they only need a few million people to sign up and play for a few months in order to recoup production costs.
Eve and WoW are not even in the same category. Putting them together like that is probably causing kittens to explode somewhere.
Support a great indie game: http://www.abaddon360.com
If World of Warcraft ever fizzles out, they probably have a backup plan already in place.
I'm guessing that they're working on a World of Warcraft 2. A bigger, better engine that looks better and can do more. If 1 ever fizzles out, they'll wait a little while and bring out 2.
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
Actually, according to the link you posted, 'Aught' (or 'owt' in Northern English dialects) should really mean 'Anything' or 'All'.
Huh. When I read it (the noun form, natch), it says "1: zero, cipher" underneath the etymology, at which you appear to have stopped.
I am a Aion beta-tester and have also played retail Lineage II (Hindemith/Phoenix) for the last five years. Whether your little birdies are correct or not depends on your definition of grindy and your past MMOs, I guess.
Aion's grind is nowhere, nowhere near that of Lineage IIs or other similar Korean MMOs. In Lineage II, if you don't cheat/bot and you play, say a couple of hours a day, it will take you a couple of years to reach level 80+ (especially if you choose to subclass) and you probably will never reach the actual level cap of 85. At levels of 79 and higher in L2, you'd be lucky to get one quarter of one percent (0.25%) of a level per hour, in a good party. Often much less (notwithstanding the vitality system that is pretty meaningless at those levels anyway).
On the other hand, you can reach the current level cap in Aion (which is an admittedly low 45) in a few of weeks of casual play. Now of course one would expect future expansions to raise the cap, but the point is, you certainly couldn't reach the level cap that L2 had at its launch (75) in a few weeks. In fact, it was almost a year before the first level 75s started appearing (not counting bots).
Having said all that, Aion IS certainly considerably more grindy than WoW (but then again, WoW's grind is much easier than most/all other MMOs). It's a comfortable middle ground between say Lineage and WoW, but closer to WoW than Lineage still I'd say.
Aion is NC's big attempt at bridging the gap between eastern MMOs (grindy, not very story-focused, hard to get gear but rewarding when you do, tough death and PvP penalties) and western MMOs (easier to level up and gain gear, but generally a much richer story and a greater variety of quests and other 'side' content outside of actually killing monsters). I think they've hit upon a pretty good mix and will further tweak it as beta testing continues. It has amazingly detailed character artwork ... it's simply wonderful and you can customise exactly how your character looks which should stop the cookie-cutter look of characters that has plagued other NC games like Lineage. The environments are not as spectacular as you might expect for the CryEngine, but one has to consider that it's an MMO, and besides I'd rather spend polygons on NPCs and characters than on environment (plus the environment still looks pretty good to me). Animations are also very well done ... the Koreans really know how to get the art and design aspects of things done well.
It's well worth a look if you think WoW is too easy or you think Lineage is too hard. Aion attempts to take the best of both. Its big shortcoming at the moment is lack of end-game content, but that's normal for the launch release of NCSoft titles (they tend to make sure the low level stuff is in there, launch, and 'finish' the rest of with updates and patches a few months later. For instance, L2 launched without its main feature, castle seiges, even existing yet ... it was added in the first main update ... but this was OK since there's no point in adding the end game content until there are enough players of a high enough level to use it.
It was like that in the L2 beta too. The beautiful thing about a completely open PvP game like L2 though, is you can just kill the bastards who are doing it ;)
You ought to be modded up.
Hmm, guess this shows you can only please some of the people some of the time.
I'm the opposite. Can't stand the cartoony look and feel of games like WoW. Much prefer the stylised look of Aion (and other Korean MMOs like Lineage II). I love that the effects are 'over done'. I don't want menace. Western games are always like that it seems, dark and menacing and using a colour palette consisting of 47 million shades of grey, brown and dark green.
Oh well, luckily there are many games out there to suit all kinds of players :)
PS. And yeah I still play new Mario and Zelda games :(
You can get Lineage II running in WINE, so Aion should be able to as well with a bit of fiddling around.
Sci-Fi at least has a relation to the physics of the freaking real world.
Not some superstitious retard crap from some idiots who still believe that there could be unicorns and pots of gold and Tinkerbell and a god and miracles, etc.
Of course the very point of that crap is that they do not think. Which makes any arguing pointless, and all they want is to stone one.
People finally have to realize that it's a gave disease. A total loss of any acceptance of causality an reality, where they base all and everything on some bullshit that makes them accept their shitty lives, jobs, etc.
It's a form of schizophrenia. That's all that it is. And it has to be handled like it. People with schizophrenia also do not want one to help them. They really think that the world is that way and everything is good. Even when they constantly get ripped of, made do idiotic things to help others gain power over them, etc. They just say they wanted it that way.
And religious people say god wanted it, and blame it on themselves. Which works eves better.
And nobody dare to attack their bullshit stories with any "logic". No. That would be "discriminatory". But they can of course force their sick disgusting twisted reality on everyone and not be discriminatory. Nooo, you not letting them is discriminatory too. *Of* *fuckin* *course*!!! How could I have doubted that.
Either heal 'em, or throw 'em out of society, because everything they touch becomes one disgusting piece of sick shit with perverse "values" and total madness.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
I don't know about that one. WoW's graphics are so dated that I was running WoW maxed out and it didn't skip a beat.
Meanwhile, other games such as LOTRO and even AoC look great. I'd say Aion is closer to these games as far as graphical quality. I've been following the development of this game for some time, and the videos don't really seem to do it justice. Check out some screenshots and you'll change your mind.
Also, your opinion isn't humble, it's more of a forceful opinion. You're stating that a game that hasn't been released and you've only seen a low quality video of is of lesser quality than an already established MMO. Nothing humble about that.
There's really nothing all that spectacular about the game in my opinion. So far from all the closed betas all comments about how the client works, how the controls work etc have been ignored (it doesn't have any camera options for example, and it will not let you map any mouse buttons). It really seems the game is fully in Korea's control, and the US distributor (NCSoft WEST) has little to no control over the actual game system.
Every single quest - every single one was an incomprehensible request to collect x amount of rare drop, or y amount of monsters - no variety what-so-ever - and none of the quests actually have anything to do with lore until you reach level 10 and start working on your sub class quest, and even then the writing is atrocious.
The combat system borrows from FFO where you have skill chain combo's, and who gets to loot the monster is purely based on who damages it more - prepare to be griefed a lot by DPS classes anyone who dares play a healer or a tank.
Flight is incredibly lame. Not only is it on a timer (which means when you're "tired" you'll either glide down or fall to your death), but there are visblocks in places that you can't fly - not even WoW has this in places you are allowed to fly. The other thing - one of the core materials to collect Aether is only in the sky - one forum post commented it was "the mmo equivalent of cutting yourself".
You'd think in 20 years of multiplayer rpg games there would be something more revolutionary come along, but no Aion isn't it.
Current speculative thinking is that all the lead designers from WoW have been pulled to work on their next MMO, hence the changing of the game by the current lead developers.
Remember, even Blizzard was surprised at the success WoW had, and they certainly didn't expect to keep working on it for so long.
That looks like a gnome / goblin based expansion for WoW.
There is a war going on for your mind.
I really only meant with PVP as far as gameplay, sorry I definitely didn't make that clear.
All good. But I would have to ask what's interesting about the PvP? It sounds pretty much like DAoC to me, PvPvE. I think the graphics (beautiful) and flying are the big ticket gimmicks to play this game. I guess I could say the lore/world is fairly cool too. How cool is an "apple core" world? hehe.
"The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth." ~1984 George Orwell