Summer is here, Yogg is dead and that means there is time to stop and smell the new MMO's. There are a bunch of new MMO's scheduled to be coming out over the holiday seasonand beyond. From Champions Online, DC Universe, Star Wars, Star Trek, and a whole bunch of other games that are trying to carve a niche in the empire that Blizzard currently owns. One of the games that has recently caught my eye is the new Aion game coming to computers this September. I hadn't even heard of Aion til recently. One of our forums post pointed out a trailer to the new game so I decided to check it out. The trailer just looked amazing. The environment's looked varied and beautiful. The combat fun and stylish and characters looked epic in design.
Warcraft while a fun game gets repetitive after 4 years of play. I want a game like WoW but from a different person's attempt to do it better. I check out the website and noticed that a beta is in effect and access is available with pre-order. I head down to my local Gamestop and put down some cash and walk away with a beta code. I proceed to follow the instructions and download the game. I try logging in but unfortunately it doesn't let me in. I do some research and beta's are only open a weekend at a time every other week. So I had to wait until this weekend to try it out. I jump on the servers and start creating my class.
You start out with the ability to join 1 of 2 races. At first glance it looks like a battle of light vs dark. The Elyos which are more angelic in design vs the Asmodians which are more demonic. Whether this is true or not I have no idea but its what I get at first glance. No matter what game I play from Elder Scrolls to Knights of the old republic I always find myself creating a good character. A saviour of the universe out to save the world and whoever needs help on the way. So I decided to create an Elyos male warrior. You get a choice of 4 different classes ranging from warrior, mage, scout, and priest. Each one has eventually splits off into 2 different classes with my warrior being able to be a Gladiator or Templar.
A gladiator is akin to an arms/fury warrior and templar a protection warrior. The one thing I have always liked from Warcraft is that you get character arche types that can do a variety of different roles and if you decided that you wanted to be prot instead of fury you had that option down the road. I'm not sure if Aion lets you change once you pick your sub-class. Considering this was a beta it didn't matter much but that will be a hard decision to make if it is permanent.
So my new warrior named Bladez steps into the world of Aion into Akarios Planes. I look around the world and while it is beautiful lacks some of the artistic brilliance that Warcraft has. This is the beginning zone so there is probably some beautiful zones awaiting for me in the future. I see a man with a blue arrow on top of his head so i figure this is Aion's version of the yellow exclamation mark. I run over to him and get my newbie quest. Go help the farmers with a problem of Kerub's taking over. I go over kill my 3 quest npc's and go back and collect my reward.
If you play warcraft a lot of things are familiar. Movement, inventory management, menus, leveling up, hp, mp, skills are all familiar. But as warcraft players we want to be able to customize everything the way we want. I am so used to being able to right click and swing my camera around to be able to see the environment. I was pissed to find out that I couldn't do it. I searched thought the options but I would just keep running to whatever spot I clicked on the terrain. I was able to change most other bindings but I didn't really need to considering there were very few abilities in the beginning. I continued on my quest of reporting from one person to the next and completing their objectives. What is nice is the fact that they have a built in quest helper. While looking at your quest locations and npc's would be marked with blue text. You could click the blue text and get a little blurb about it or click the locate button and it would put an x on your map.
As I leveled up I got a few abilities but nothing all to impressive. You basically get a strike ability but that strike was able to combo into a new ability that you get at level 3 that has to be used right after the original strike. It had a 10 second cooldown so you were basically left auto attacking until the mob died. I'm sure combat will get better as I level up but I just sat there hoping the mobs life dropped to zero before mine did. A few times I wasn't so lucky. I'm not sure if there is a penalty for death. You basically resurrect where your bind point is and since I didn't have a bind point yet I just arose where the game started. I wasn't sure if you get exp penalty or anything or if you take durability loss but I'm sure there is something there.
I had gotten up to level 5 before i stopped doing roughly around 20 quests. Most of the quests are the traditional kill X mobs, loot X items, or fedex quests. With the type of quests lich king had it felt kinda silly but this is the beginning of the game so I'm hoping things will get better as time goes on. Though like most mmo's there is a certain addicting quality about it. You create a character and you want to make him stronger. You want to get new abilities, more powers, make your swings hit harder and equip new gear. The game deffinatly delivers on that fact. Apparently at level 9 you get your quest to start getting your wings to be able to fly and choose your sub-class.
I enjoyed my time in the game and it was fun. Unfortunately beta's only last for the weekend so I won't be able to play past monday which sucks. I'm not sure If I am going to end up buying the game when it releases. While the game is good I'm not sure if I want to invest $50 into another MMO at this point. It has been said before but nothing is going to be better then Warcraft until blizzard makes something better. Most people who leave to try new things usually end up coming back. Plus by the time the game releases there will be more to do in Warcraft and the holiday season of console games will also start releasing. I might just wait until the price of the box goes down and they fix the majority of the release bugs before I step foot into the live game.
