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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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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."
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.
You won't be missed. Thanks. :D
Because every game I've ever bought that had PunkBuster included gave me the OPTION of installing it.
Three days from now?? Thats tomorrow!! ~Peter Griffin
Aka the developer that releases like 2 new and utterly generic MMOs every single year? Forgive me for not getting too excited.
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
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.
You mean like this one?
Because Punkbuster is still under your control, mostly. At least if you're not completely clueless. You can turn it off and on as you please (of course, programs using it require it).
This thing installs itself not unlike the classic rootkit and getting rid of it is near impossible, not even talking about turning the processes off and on (or finding out whether or not they're running in the first place).
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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
*yawn* back to waiting for the KOTOR MMO, which I know WILL be innovative (Bioware usually doesn't let us down).
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.
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.