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dkirschner's Aion (PC)
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| [September 30, 2012 04:45:50 AM]
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Tried Aion over the last couple days. P bought a hard copy like 2 years ago, and neither of us ever even installed it. But since it went free-to-play, I figured it was about time. It took me about a month to actually play it from the time I downloaded it because of various login issues and all kinds of stuff that I really can't believe I bothered with the tens of help tickets to fix. Only to play for 2 days!
So the big draw of Aion, when it came out at least, was that you got wings to fly. Sounds awesome. I want to fly around. This was supposed to radically change the way people PvP and give players unlimited freedom and blah blah blah. You get the wings at level 10, so let's talk about what you have to do before then. You slog through an overly long starting zone that has excessive amounts of sluggish running. I can only assume that this is to make flying feel liberating. That's a major problem with the game. It is sluggish, slow. My character felt drunk. There's no oomph in the fighting and the response time for the hotkeys just isn't as quick as I'm used to. I create a mage, and whenever I wanted to do a normal attack, she had to go through this annoying animation where she pulls out her tome, flips the pages, and then casts some magic bolt. Like, just do it faster!
Consequently, enemies take a while to kill. I did make an assassin character and melee is faster than spell casting. With the mage, I was out of mana constantly. There didn't seem to be many ways of speeding up mana regen short of buying potions. Health was okay. You start the game with like 30 bandages. Why wasn't there the same for mana? It's like non-mana classes get a definite boost in speed since they don't have to worry about mana. This is not the case in all MMOs at all. Most have systems in place so that you don't go out of mana every other fight. Otherwise, the mage is very basic and boring. Fireball, ice bolt that slows, earth spell DoT, and a root. Just like every other game. And nothing new once I hit level 10 and chose a 'specialty' class! Learning new skills are few and far between. I think I had a total of 5 abilities by level 10. And it was looking like I'd get one new one or be able to upgrade one every 3 or so levels. Way to spaced out to keep it interesting.
On the other hand, Aion has these things called chains, kind of like semiautomatic macros. So I had a fireball spell and a blaze spell. After using fireball, blaze lights up and you have used a 'chain.' Then blaze goes on a 30 second cooldown. Kind of neat, and they looked to get more complicated and let you have a couple options later on. Speaking of options, there don't seem to be more than a couple. You specialize your character at level 10. By 'a couple chain options later on' I meant like 3 of the chains had two branches. There are no talent points. You unlock some thing called a stigma panel at level 20 where you can like customize some skills or something, and you get 5 slots by the time you're 60. And that's...it? See what I mean about slow? This game is slow and grindy as hell.
The game is also really linear for an MMO, at least to start out. The starter zone was basically a few areas of interest/quest hubs off of a road. You just walk down the road, stop at various points to collect quests, and just continue back and forth down the road. And there is way too much back and forth, so much running, even with a flight path there. But I just really can't believe that skills and things are so few. And that after choosing my specialization, I didn't get even 1 skill for it.
So how about the flight? It is an unbelievable letdown. First of all, the game didn't even tell me I could fly when I hit level 10! There was no tutorial or anything until I found the button because I was like "man, can't you fly at 10? I hope it's not 20. I'll just mouse around the UI...Oh hey look!" Why don't they make a bigger deal out of it? It's supposed to be the draw, the cool hook. But flying is only slightly faster than walking, like any first mount in any MMO. So I thought, well at least I can fly over mountains and things. Nope! Magical barriers prevent you from going all over the damn place. So many barriers. So much for freedom! And there's a timer on it. You can't just go fly. You have to stop and land and let it recharge every minute.
And just a couple other comments and criticisms..the rest of the tutorials worked well in the beginning, the on-demand ones that pop up as you need them. Quest are dull, repetitive and uninspiring. Kill x of these, fetch x of those, and give this thing to that person. Every single quest, for real. And it was rather annoying that I typically only had to kill/fetch 3. It's not even worth the trip to the quest area to kill 3 monsters! Run for a minute, take 30 seconds to kill 3 monsters, run for a minute back. It's fair to say most of my time spent here was running. So not only was the game sluggish, but dull as well. Though it does look nice. The character models in particular are cool. You can make some hilarious characters at creation. Small body, giant head, super skinny legs, fat arms, all kinds of funny stuff. Oh, there is a nice help system with information links on important names and places, but oddly there are few tooltips. I have no idea what my character's stats are for. What is 'knowledge' and how is it different from 'willpower?' No idea. I'd have to go look it up outside the game. They do have this neat tutorial/reward thingy for new players called the Atreian Atlas. It tracks your first character through the main story (in a browser outside the game) and gives you periodic goals to meet and rewards for doing them. I found it quite neat in the newbie zone. But I can tell it would be something I'd soon forget about since the next item on there is level 16. If getting to level 10 took like 5 or 6 hours, 16 is probably another 10 hours at least. And that thing at level 16 is just a solo dungeon. Solo dungeon! What's the point of a dungeon if not for playing with others? I can go solo everything outside the dungeon. Oh, better loot? Man who cares! It's not like the game is hard yet. Story? Make the rest of the quest stories better! And finally, Aion has nice movable windows. I like that. More and more games are letting players move the windows around. I recall Rift's was particularly liberating. Aion also has some neat stuff with the map. There are 4 different levels of the map. You can actually draw on the map. There is a drawing tool in-game. You can also write memos in-game. And you can share locations with other people, which is awesome. I kept observing people doing this in chat constantly, and I'd click and some map would pop up on my screen of another area. Cool way of sharing spatial information.
Sooo, to sum, I'm not a fan. It has a couple neat features, but I was bored out of my mind playing it. Seems very generic and grindy. No thanks.
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dkirschner's Aion (PC)
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Current Status: Stopped playing - Got Bored
GameLog started on: Saturday 29 September, 2012
GameLog closed on: Friday 26 October, 2012 |
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