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Aion: First Impressions Part Deux
April 18th, 2009 by Malcom

In the world of movies, music, in fact, all forms of media, it is often difficult to tell when something is deserving of a sequel. A lot of movies have open endings, and if their ultimate fate is not decided by a saturday morning cartoon, such as Godzilla, then...wait. What am I talking about? Sorry, I was spacing out for a minute. Moving on. This is the second part to my first impressions review on Aion: The Chinese Tower of Eternity, the Beta. There are some things that were not discussed in my previous post, which are an important part of gameplay. Since I did not want to completely obliterate any articles below mine with a humongous wall of text, I decided to add a second part on here describing combat, classes, and an actual description of the flying system(not a praise).

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I. Classes:

Classes. Some people love them, some people hate them. It divides nations and destroys relationships. People want a class to blame when they're losing in city sieges. Others want a class-less skill-based system. It's a difficult choice for any company to make when developing an MMO. For the most part, a class system tends to be the more popular choice. Though not clearly defined in all of them, most RPGs have some form of class system. Aion is no different. In fact, it doesn't seem like they were being very creative when it comes to creating classes. You have your four stereotypical archetypes: healer dude, heavy armor dude, agile dude, and caster dude.

I'm not going to lie, the classes are all really fun to play, despite their very archetypical stereotypes and cliché names. You start off either as a warrior, a mage, a priest, or a scout. At level 9, you can complete your ascension quest, and then by level 10 you'll be able to choose your second class. Here's the breakdown:

Warrior: Your standard sword/shield or giant bashy weapon guy. These guys hit things up close, and hit them hard. They can turn into a Gladiator, which is an offense-focused warrior, or a Templar; a defensive warrior.

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