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AION: Chinese Beta Impressions
April 11th, 2009 by Malcom
The internet is a truly amazing place; a gathering of people from all cultures and ethnicities. It is a place where people hate you for your ideas, not what you look like. That said, it's usually a good idea during your travels through the magnificent digital world to make as many friends as possible, which is something I attempted to do with one of my earliest reviews on Atlantica Online. During this mind-broadening journey, you might want to consider picking yourself up a couple of asian friends. Tales of old tell of oriental heroism and perseve…yeah, whatever, they can get you into NCSoft betas. This is exactly what happened when one of my friends, born and currently located in China invited me to play AION: The Tower of Eternal Awesome with him. After I downloaded all the files, and he helped me register my account, I was ready to log into NCSoft's latest virtual fantasy world.
I. Graphics/Art - 11/11
When it comes to graphics, art, armor and weapon design, NCSoft goes to eleven. It's not about whether you like their style or not. That's not it at all. NCSoft excels in this department because their animation is always top-notch, their spell effects(if a bit exaggerated at times) look wonderful, and everything moves at optimal speed the whole time you're playing. I know, eastern MMO combat looks a bit anime'ish, and perhaps a bit fake to some people due of the over-exaggerated acrobatic feats that some games add to their melee classes, but damn it, it's a fantasy game. I'd rather my guy smoothly somersault off the enemy, reach orbit at the height of the jump, and then come crashing down furiously in a well-animated sequence, than have my guy take awkward stabs at his opponent.
It makes it all seem that much more heroic. It makes you believe that your character fights with confidence, and it's a lot better than having to look at the way some races held weapons in World of Warcraft; it made me wonder if they really had any combat training at all, or if they just bought an adventurer certificate in Chinatown for 1 dolla, 1 dolla.
Animations, and NCSoft's artistic excellence aside: a lot of the beauty in AION comes from the heavily modified version of the Cry Engine they use. We've all seen what the Cry Engine can do in FPS's like Crysis. To see that sort of graphical potential in an MMO is truly astounding. There is no better word than breathtaking to describe the environments, characters, and how it all comes together to create this outstanding virtual reality. It's true, there have been other games with amazing(er) graphics, such as Age of Conan in DX10, but…It's Age of Conan.
One can praise NCSoft for its artistic prowess all day, so let's move on for a little bit. Let's talk about character creation. We'll keep it short since there's nothing too innovative here, but then again, it's just character creation. How innovative can you really get after a certain point? Character creation has pre-defined hairstyles, faces, body types, etc. It also includes an endless amount of possibilities for facial construction by way of sliders. Want to make your character look like Barack Obama? Go ahead. You can do it if you spend enough time messing with the sliders. Although there are no races other than "human," you can move the ear slider up to have pointy ears and look like an elf. You can also be as tiny or as big as you want(within humanly limits). It's refreshing. I don't have to play a hideous gnome if I want to be tiny, and me being smaller doesn't give me any special racial traits over the towering behemoth standing next to me.
II. Gameplay - 9/10
I'm the kind of person that's never really impressed by flashy videos. Previews, trailers, video walkthroughs, all of that stuff bores me. You could be showing me the birth of Jesus Christ on video and I wouldn't really be impressed, unless I witnessed it for myself. AION was one of those things. My friends constantly bombard me with videos from this game or that, saying "look at this game, it's so cool!" but I always end up closing my YouTube tab dissatisfied and bored.
It wasn't much better when I got into the game and was given my first quest. I sighed and said to myself "damn it, not this again." After following the very linear path of fruit theft and insect killing that was laid in front of me, I started to wonder if I really wanted to take this game further. Then, I started getting missions. Missions are like quests, but they advance your own personal storyline. At first, they're not much different from the other quests, you get some short 5 second cinematics showing you which mobs you have to kill, as if they were something special. However, as you progress they start getting more intricate, and by level 10, I was foaming at the mouth for more. PvE is PvE, and I don't think it will ever evolve past "fetch me ten fish" or "kill six wolves," but I get the impression from NCSoft that they're at least trying by giving you your own personal storyline to follow(in cinematics) in-between fish-fetching and wolf-killing.
Overall, gameplay is incredibly smooth. Everything loads quickly, and even though I was playing on Chinese servers, I hardly got serious lag. I keep a pillow handy by my desk, since I play Warhammer Online and even at 4GB of RAM I have to take naps every time I switch zones. AION didn't even give me enough time to fluff my pillow before everything was done loading. Here's a not-exaggerated re-enactment of how zone loading works in AION, following this format: hours:minutes:seconds:microseconds.
AION(9:10:57:48AM): Loading… here's a tip for you.
Me(9:10:57:49AM): "Oh, c-"
AION(9:10:57:50AM): Done.
Switching zones is so quick, they're going to have to include their loading screen tips on a separate manual. I can't imagine anyone can get past the first word in any loading screen tip before the zone's completely loaded. This is good, and it can even add a fun minigame to AION. See if you're quick enough to take a screenshot of the loading screen so you can read the tip it included. Impress your friends with your lightning-fast printscreen reflexes.
