Aion

(Wall of text may or may not happen)

I was lucky enough to get some help from a buddy and able to play the Korean Open Beta. Not sure what my review is really worth as I cant read korean so there is a lot I don't know. But here is some tidbits.

The servers were defenitly jam packed, there seems to be a Queue of sorts almost all hours of the day. When a new server was brought up it had a 4000 person Queue.. The character creation is prolly the second best I've personally seen. You can litterally edit every portion of your toon that you can imagine. I think CoH had a little better character creation only cause it had a few more accessory options. However with only 1 race of each faction you litterally would think there was tons of races in game. It's so easy to make a character look like your own unique race.

The first 9 levels have you on an island with various WoW type quests. Collection quests, kill quests, travel quests, etc. With little town hubs along the way, teaching you the basics, trainers etc. Once you are level 9 you begin a quest chain to get your wings and then your able to select what class you want to branch off to.

Combat is very fluid and the animations are nice. After playing WAR for the last month this was a nice change. Mobs do have a degree of difficulty, atleast what ive played for the first 10 levels. Expect to die a few times. I often died from either a mob that was a level or two above me or if I got 2 mobs of the same level as me I almost ALWAYS died. I think this is a page out of EQ but not quite the hardcoreness. Theres also xp loss upon death that you can get partially recovered from a NPC for some cash. Overall so far questing and combat feels like WoW but that mobs are not quite as pansys as they are in WoW.

Again, I can't read korean so it's kinda just tidbits here in there as I come across them. Other things I discovered is, crafting can fail. I saw a player setup a lil shack in a small town/quest hub selling items if you clicked on it. (I have no idea about a faction wide Auction house yet.) I never crashed or got stuck yet so far. The game seems pretty stable.  If your worried about specs 2gigs ram and a pci16 512mb card runs the game very smoothly, i think a 256mb vid card would work just as well. And I don't feel as though it's a grind so far. 1-10 in Aion seemed like 1-10 in WoW/Warhammer.

Thats about it so far, I haven't gotten to test any PVP yet nor do I know if I'll get a chance or if there is a chance in Open Beta. Any other not worthy things I come across I'll post if anybody is at all interested.

EDIT: Little thing to add on it being scary to die besides the xp loss. Atleast as far as I've exp. When you die you re appear at your bind spot. (Think hearth or whatever) So if your binded at one end the zone and die all the way across at the other end. GG. Could be worse I suppose, atleast you dont have to retrieve your corpse and there are flight paths.

UPDATE:

Just another lil update. ..

And again, being that I don't know korean and could be missing out on skills or there fullest ability and/or wearing totally crappy gear. (I judge equipping gear by highlighted green/red numbers even though I cant tell what stat is what. I can spot out weapon speed and min/max damage on weapons though so that helps!) It seems grouping is definitely encouraged and tends to be A LOT more funner and faster even with just questing.

Mobs time to kill and difficutly is definitely noticeable. (Actually the time to kill isn't bad but the mobs are generally hitting you as hard as you hit them :P ) You definitely CAN solo and I'm sure you can do it all the way to max level. And who knows I'm just going off my level 12 ranger. So far anything my level I have been able to kill but most the time I'm giving a quick bandage right after. I'mdefinitely not shredding through mobs constantly. I think if your grinding solo in this game you'd most likely have to go after mobs 2 levels below you, in most games that's the case anyways.

Clearly though any the healer archtype classes are going to be a huge asset to any group. I personally am enjoying the more challanging mobs thus far. It seems like a lot of the named mobs take a good group near it's level range to take down as well. Not sure if there are soloable named mobs or not, atleast if its within your level range. I hope there isn't. They tend to drop a set loot table and higher level "random world" drops.

P.S. for those who don't like the UI it's completly customizable. You can break it apart and move stuff how ya want etc. I haven't had much time to play but with the weekend maybe I'll be able to update some peeps again with a little more info.

Awesome! Those are/were my impressions (I haven't played since late, late August (PAX)), but it seems like not much has changed.

I'm very excited to see it translated and brought over here for it's final NA polish + preview thing.

thanks for the info, glad to hear your reports. gives me hope for aion!!!

Thanks a lot for the post man. its really helpfull to see that the game is actually working properly. i think the server queue and stuff will be fixed they will ad several servers on oficial launch.

the computer specs, i was dying to know. most ppl think that they need to put up a HUGE pc to play this and its actually pretty decent settings that any1 can afford i think.

combat wise, you could see in vids and other info that the mobs were way tough than the ones from wow, but its kinda cool. u get wings at lvl 10 so i think its worthit. xp loss as a death penalty actually works well, not just run back to your body and keep the non stop grindfest.

thanks again for the post bro! really apreciate that!

Thanks for the info ^^ hoping for more :P

Thx alot and keep posting!!!

So where are all the Aion haters? Oh ya thats right from the sounds of things everything is going great for NCsoft Except for the fact that they are bogged down with an unexpected 150K people trying to get in OB. Not much to hate on.  

Just think when it finally gets over here it will be extra polished.

Does anyone know if they have started the CB for The US yet? If not does anyone know when they will start it? I would love to be a part if the CB.

Originally posted by toddze

So where are all the Aion haters? Oh ya thats right from the sounds of things everything is going great for NCsoft Except for the fact that they are bogged down with an unexpected 150K people trying to get in OB. Not much to hate on.  

hate to say it but OB numbers don't mean much, NCsoft showed that with their NA launch of L2.  every time they'd open a new server it would be so incredibly packed that you couldn't get into it (no ques) and they'd open another.

then when the game went live, bartz and sieg were full... all the others turned to ghost towns.  most people see betas as free trials, lots of people are willing to not pay for a game.

but to be serious, how did the game compare to L2?  my only 2 problems with L2 were the grind and the horrible PvP balance.  i've they've improved that a bit i'd really like to give Aion a try... and buffs, if buffs aren't pretty much required... but we didn't learn that right away in L2 so i doubt you'd know about that.