Well, the Aion launch is nearly upon us, and it’s safe to say this is one of the most highly anticipated releases of the year. NCSoft has really done a great job building the hype for the game, but can they deliver the goods? Gamers who pre-ordered copies will find out tomorrow when the early start begins. But you oh-so-lucky MMOMFG.com faithful don’t have to wait until tomorrow to catch a glimpse of the beautiful and dangerous world of Atreia. Sit back, relax, and take it all in with our Aion Preview!

Aion has had the MMO world buzzing for many months now, so when their open beta week began 2 weeks ago, MMOMFG.com staffers Dustin, Cam, and myself dove in to see what the hype was all about. Right from the beginning you are introduced to the kind of visual beauty that Aion is going to be known for. The character creation is marvelous, as should be expected from the makers of City of Heroes. Players are given the option of choosing from a large number of preset face and hair combinations, and each can be completely customized by interchanging any of the individual parts. For extreme customization, players can even access a menu with sliders controlling all kinds of face-shape options. Players can choose from around 7 or so preset body types, and each can be adjusted by using a slider menu to make a character’s shoulders or hips wider, arms bigger, or a number of other options. One of my favorite aspects of the character creation was the ability to select the voice of your character. There were only a few options, but that is still a really nice touch in my opinion. Simply put, the character creation in Aion blows away the traditional MMO competition such as World of Warcraft or Warhammer: Age of Reckoning. While there may not be as many component options as you might find in City of Heroes, the ability to completely customize your character’s physique ensures that your character will be one of a kind.

It is good that the character creation in Aion is so robust, because they really do not have the class/race depth of other MMOs. Again like City of Heroes (are you noticing a pattern here?), there are 4 main class types and no race options (apart obviously from the 2 main factions). This causes a couple of problems for the game in our opinion. First off, the game appears as if it will be heavily skewed towards DPS classes. Within the 4 initial classes, there is one tank class and one healing class. This is good balance. However, once a player reaches level 10, he must choose to specialize in one of two sub-classes. The net effect of this choice is that within the 8 sub-classes, there is one true tank and one true healer. Warning signs are going off in my head while looking forward to endgame PvE options. A dearth of tanks and healers is the downfall of any high end MMO population, so hopefully NCSoft as a plan to ensure that players have viable PvE options throughout the course of the game.

The second problem with having such generic initial class/race options (or, in this case, no options for race) is that everyone starts in the same area. Trying to to kill 5 mobs of a certain type to complete a quest becomes and experience in frustration when there are 50 other players looking for the same mobs. NCSoft has partially alleviated this problem by using instanced “channels” which automatically place players in instanced versions of each zone. This can be both a blessing and a curse. I found it very helpful when trying to escape hordes of players camping my quest mobs. I switched to a different channel and found no one at all in the zone I needed to quest in. On the other hand, when first starting the game I was cursing the name of NCSoft because I couldn’t find Dustin to group with him because he was in a different channel and we had no idea how to switch. There is an option for switching channels in the in-game menu, but I would never have known it was there if someone hadn’t mentioned it in global chat. Presumably this information will be in the game manual, but it might not hurt to try and make it a little more intuitive. Dustin is of the opinion that channeled instances are unnecessary and will be a problem for PvP options. None of us were able to experience the PvP of the game in the time we had to play, so we are unable to speak as to how that plays out. I would have to assume that PvP areas are not instanced. Overall the jury is out on the channel system, with myself leaning towards it being a good idea and Dustin preferring it to be left out.

All 3 MMOMFG.com testers found the generic starting area to be problematic. Playing through it was fine and gave a great introduction to the world of Aion and how to play within the game, but we feel that players have less incentive to want to begin a new character and play through the same content they have done before. I frequently find myself rolling alts in other games just to see what a race’s starting zones and quests are like, and that is impossible in Aion. The whole time we played we felt as if we were constricted to an entirely linear path along with everyone else in the game. Again, it is possible that things could change at higher levels so we don’t want to give a false impression of the game. But we do feel that our comments are entirely accurate for new players beginning the game.

Both Cam and myself found the game’s combat system to be very good. The chain skill feature is really a great addition in our opinion. When a player uses a skill, there are skills which can be chained to it. Whenever a chain skill becomes available, its icon pops up to the right of your character. Clicking on that icon will activate the skill exactly as if you had pressed the key bound to that skill or clicked its icon in the ability bar. It is a button-clicker’s dream. Other games, WoW comes immediately to mind, have had UI mods which allowed customization of action bars and could, with some effort, produce the same functionality, but having it built in to the game’s default UI is a really great thing. To make combat flow even better, chain skills can be activated by pressing the key bound to the skill that opened up the chain skill again. For example, on my Scout character, I had my default attack skill bound to the second action bar button. When I reached a higher level and was awarded a new attack skill that could be chained to my default attack, I placed it in the fifth action bar slot. However, in combat, I was able to activate both skills just by pressing the “2″ key twice. For many players, including myself, this makes combat very manageable and low-stress. For other players, like Dustin, they may find that it simplifies the game too much and makes combat repetitive.

One of our biggest qualms with the game during the leveling process was the lack of healing abilities and a general imbalance between a player’s health pool and the amount of damage received. We found ourselves bandaging very frequently, enough to make it a noticeable annoyance. The quests themselves are set up very well. We really liked the campaign quest series that Aion makes use of. As you enter a major zone, talking to the “head NPC” of that zone will open a lengthy quest chain that is set apart from the other quests in your quest log. Quests from this chain frequently involve in-game cutscenes that take place while talking to NPC’s. It is a nice addition that really increases the epic feel of the game. Unfortunately we found the cutscenes to be very buggy overall and on occasion they even caused my game to crash (right in the middle of my Daeva ascension ceremony no less!). Hopefully NCSoft will take care of this problem prior to the game’s release.

NCSoft’s defining game experience in Aion is their PvPvE system. As players attain sufficient experience, they can enter portals from their world into the Abyss zones floating between the two halves of Atreia and do battle with players of the opposing faction and NPC enemies from another race that lives only in the Abyss. On the official website, NCSoft proclaims, “The story of Aion is rife with conflict between factions.” Unfortunately, we were unable to experience any of that conflict. On the whole I consider that problematic. I don’t want to criticize the PvP of Aion without having actually partaken in it, but if PvP is considered vital to Aion then NCSoft should have made it more accessible to lower level players. Warhammer Online is far better at this than Aion. That game is centered around factional conflict as well, and players can enter a PvP scenario from level 1 and fight players of the opposing faction. I can’t say that PvP is poorly executed in Aion because I wouldn’t know, and I think that is a problem in and of itself.

Probably the biggest buzz surrounding the game is the ability to fly and fight simultaneously. To be perfectly honest, we found it underwhelming. You begin with the ability (at level 10) to fly for 1 minute and that time can be modified by items or abilities attained at later levels. Unfortunately, flight is restricted in many of the areas we were playing in. While that may not be a big deal, it did lessen the impact of being able to fly for us. I did enjoy the ability to jump off of ledges or cliffs and use my wings to glide faster than normal running speed, and that is something that is capable even in no-flight zones. We also found combat in flight to be clunky and awkward. On the whole, it was near identical to underwater combat in other games, which is to be expected as both scenarios are essentially the same. Perhaps with more experience players will become more adept at moving through the air while in combat, but I didn’t see it happening. Once again we have to be disappointed at the inability for us to test out the flight mechanics in PvP. It isn’t the fault of NCSoft that we didn’t level high enough to experience PvP, but we feel it was a mistake to not involve lower level players.

What can we conclude about Aion then? Well, to be honest, very little from our limited experience with the game. We felt like we were able to highlight some high and low points of the game’s fundamental structure, but were largely unable to critique the overall game experience. That doesn’t come as a surprise to me, I would be disappointed if I was able to learn everything there is to know about a game in a week’s worth of time. The game has some very good things going for it. The graphics are stunning, the combat system is excellent, the UI is clean and functional, and the quest content and story lines are well written and executed. Like any game, there are also negatives to Aion. There is an overall generic and bland feel to the starting classes and zones, the game feels too linear at low levels, the flight ability is underwhelming, and players can’t experience PvP at low levels. I think that Aion will find moderate success about on par with NCSoft’s other major MMO venture, City of Heroes. There simply isn’t enough of a departure from other MMOs to draw players away from games they have already invested in. Gamers who have moaned and complained about problems in World of Warcraft for the past several months may try it out, but I don’t believe that the majority of them will find it stacking up favorably to WoW. Many of them probably will view it as a new game to play while waiting for the Cataclysm expansion to be released. Perhaps the best thing going for Aion is that NCSoft appears to have realistic expectations for the game. Looking at the release date server list (which you can see here) only 12 servers will be available for the North American launch. For a prime example of what can happen if a developer overestimates its launch numbers, just look at what happened with Warhammer. If NCSoft dedicates themselves to keeping servers with a well balanced population and maintaining those servers to provide the best gaming experience for their customers, they will be able to remain a viable MMO option for players for years to come.

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