This weekend was apparently Champions Online's Blood Moon Weekend - their version of Halloween, I suppose. I was pretty eager to give this superhero MMORPG a try, especially since it was being offered for free up until Monday morning at 10 A.M. I downloaded the launcher easily and then began to patch. And then I wated. And waited.
And waited.
...And waited some more...
Fast forward to Saturday morning. The game still wasn't patched and up to date yet. To make matters worse, Steam needed to patch and update too. This means I had to restart my Champions Online patch, tossing more frustration into my face. By this point I was so annoyed I thought about throwing in the towel, but I perservered and restarted the client. It went back down to 0%, though the size of the file it needed to patch was much smaller. This was a small bit of consolation, but not much since I needed to still patch an additional three hours before the client was finally ready around 7 pm Saturday night. Then trick or treaters started appearing at my house, so I had to put off playing again.
I finally found a small slot of time to play the game at last and begin to enjoy the free weekend. I start up the game client, everything seems great until I noticed the graphics rendering is off. Way, way off. So off, that I couldn't even really make out what that strange blob was on my screen...until I realized it was supposed to be my super hero. So I messed around with the video settings for a while, to no avail. Rebooted the system, tried again. It didn't work.
Now I have thrown in the towel. This obviously was not meant to be, and well...I shouldn't get this frustrated and angry over something that is supposed to be free. This was a wonderful showcasing of how awesome Champions Online has been so far, and while I normally wouldn't make an assesment over how a game is just from the shitty client patcher or the fact that I don't have the correct video driver for something, I think it's fair enough for me to say: Thanks Cryptic, but no thanks. All you've given me this weekend was a free headache and relief that I don't feel the urge to blow $35 on your game because frankly, it won't even run properly and I spent most of your free weekend just trying to play it.
Thank you, and goodnight.
Why Aion Is Losing Me
As a five-year World of Warcraft veteran, let me just state that Aion is nothing like WoW, and I'm extremely glad. You'll probably hear a lot of Vanilla-WoW players reminisce about the "good old days" of when the game first started, where getting your epic ground mount was the big gold sink of the game and getting a legendary weapon truly felt legendary. Enter Wrath of the Lich King: To me, everything started out okay. We took a trip up North to visit Arthas an entire year ago, just about (in about a week or two, anyways) and have battled undead armies and experienced Naxxramas...again. Wait, what?
Okay, enter the problem with Wrath of the Lich King. Extremely easy leveling on top of a 10 and 25-man raid that's already been done before, on top of Arthas twiddling his thumbs except when he wants to pop in all-spooky like and be like, "HEY GUYS I SEE YOU!" on top of riding ponies in his backyard for hot loots and jousting fun times.
The lore was destroyed. I think the Warcraft lore ended when I finished the Frozen Throne, and I think I actually prefer it this way. I am not returning to World of Warcraft. Oh no, I am not. Especially not when we now have worgen, space goats and goblins. Things are just getting a touch bit weird around here, and not in the good way.
So, enter Aion: Tower of Eternity. This is NCSoft's newest endeavour and attempt at bringing the east to the west, so to speak. The game has been out for a year over in Korea, and is a big hit. Sounds like a recipe for success, right? I mean, thousands of people in another country already love this game, it's going to be a hit over here in North America! Let's take a look at the good, the bad, the very good and the very bad of Aion.
The Good
One of the first things I noticed about Aion was the beautiful artwork that graced each loading screen, and the phenomenal next-gen graphics. The game is visually stunning, and you can't even argue this. The environments are lush and breathing and totally immersive. There are giant manta-rays and creatures that look like "sperm" according to one of my friends that soar in the sky just for ambience and to create atmosphere.
You can fly in this game right at level 10, and the controls work very similarly to World of Warcraft's flying mounts. I simply use my mouse to get from point A to point B while gliding or flying with my pretty angel wings, I don't mess with this "Page Up" and "Page down" nonsense. Why would you? Anyway...
Flying is fun, though you can only fly in certain areas and for limited amounts of time that is dependent on whether you have flight potions, special wings or manastones. These will give you a boost to your flying time.
The controls are easy enough, and it's definitely not difficult to steer your character around. The user interface is easy to navigate and it is aesthetically pleasing to look at. The maps are great - pressing "N" will pull up a map right onto your screen that is somewhat transparent so you can run around and still see where you're going while looking at the map. Or, you can pressing the "M" key and you can pull up the entire thing that takes up the whole screen.
The cities are impressive and beautiful, and the soundtrack boasts a fully vocalized theme song by some Korean singer that actually managed to sneak into the game itself as an easter egg of sorts.
The cut scenes, while some don't like them, I find them positively charming. I love the immersive effect it has on you while you're watching your character duke it out against a bad guy. Even smaller quests, such as escorting a little piggy back home to its owner can initiate a cut scene that kind of gives you a small sense of fulfillment and accomplishment, as though you actually did something good for another person.
The Very Good
Character customization in this game just can't be beat. You cannot touch the customization, it really is that good. Just take a look at some of the player-created characters in these threads:
Hottest Aion Male Character
Ugliest Aion Character
Wanna be fat? Go nuts. Wanna be 15 feet tall with a mustache and abnormally huge arms? Yep, you can do that. It's worth tinkering around with the character creation screen for a while just to see how ridiculously ugly or ridiculously beautiful you can make your character.
Besides customization, there are these small weasel-like creatures in the game called Shugos. Upon meeting one I was created with a very cute, "Nyerk-nyerk!" This is somewhat of a signature sound they make, and it's worth clicking on them over and over again just to hear them yell it out. The shugos add a bit of soul to the game, even though there are some people out there that are resolved to thinking the game lacks one. I'm probably one of the very few people out there that thinks the crafting system in Aion is "very good." I enjoy not getting my way all the time, and struggling a little bit so I am completely and 100% fine with failing while crafting an item. And yes, when you fail at crafting an item, the materials are ruined and you'll have to get some more. Quite a few people have whined about this, but I just love how you can "crit" while crafting say...a piece of food. If you are normally making a piece of food that would last for 20 minutes, when you crit on that piece of food, the item will then give you a buff that will last for about 40 minutes instead. It adds to the overall experience of crafting and makes things a bit more interesting.
The Bad
Unfortunately, no game is perfect and the flaws in Aion are a little bit...garrish to say the least. You know they're there, as though a big, fat elephant is standing in the corner of the room. Here are some of the smaller problems the game is facing at the moment:
Disconnected? Be prepared to sit through the loading screen again.
Every time you disconnect, you are immediately tossed out of the entire game client. This is frustrating, because in other MMORPGs if you are disconnected, you are normally thrown back to the login screen. No need to wait for the client to re-load, you're just automatically back at the login where you can hop right back in.
Camera panning while flying sucks so much. The camera whips back to its default setting while you try to pan around, making flying around a pain in the ass when you're trying to find a stable place to land.
Gathering in this game is almost cruel and sadistic. First of all, if you accidentally target something else while you are gathering, you are forced to stop and the gatherable material is destroyed in the process. Yep, that's it! It's just gone, you can no longer pick it because you targeted your friend 10 feet away while doing it. This just isn't smart, nor is it necessary. Another part about gathering is that in order to level it up high enough to gather in the next zone, you will need to spend a long, long, long, long, long time doing it.
Whispering your friends is banned until that player hits level 10. This was supposed to deter the RMT people from abusing the hell out of the playerbase with their gibberish, but it's not actually doing anything but frustrating brand new players because they can't communicate with their friends until level 10. For those of you who don't play Aion, once you hit level 10 you are free to move back and forth between your faction's capital city, but not before. You also gain your wings at level 10 after participating in the ascension quest line.
That is an entire zone where a player potentially cannot communicate with their real-life buddies. Sure, it's only until level 10 but like I mentioned before, it's not helping against the RMTers because they're just leveling beyond 10.
The lore of the game feels almost a little...tacked on. I blame this on the lack of quests that you receive after you've hit the abyss. Quite a few players will deny that this problem exists, and I can understand - I mean, there definitely are still quests that you can do. The lore is a bit...missing, though.
The Very Bad
So now that I've sifted through the non-game breaking issues (or they could be game breaking depending on the person), I'm going to take a crack at the fatal flaws that could potentially diminish Aion's playerbase and cause another Tabula Rasa if left unchecked. I am optimistic this will not go the way of Tabula Rasa, but you never know.
Client instability is a huge, huge, huge problem here. I haven't been on a fortress siege yet, but I do know about this problem and it's a doozey. There are many, many players that crash repeatably during a fortress siege, and this is game-killing. If the playerbase cannot feasibly complete game content without being thrown back to the desktop, it's just going to hurt the game as a whole. While running through Sanctum (The Elyos city), I crash at least six times per visit. This is not only annoying, but it makes me not want to log back into the game after the second time it's happened. Why bother, when the game keeps crashing?
Botters and RMT are still running rampant despite NCSoft addressing the community every week with a "we're working on it" statement. I understand that they're working on it, and this actually isn't the game's fault. This has nothing to do with how the game plays or functions - these are groups of people trying to sell kinah, steal credit cards from paying customers and turn a profit illegally within the game. They whisper you with macros outlining how much kinah they'd like to sell you, they infest every zone and steal gatherables and mobs from legit players and spam chat channels with such vigor that LFG no longer stands for "Looking For Group", but rather "Looking for Gold." After a week of not logging into the game I had high hopes that I would see little to no spam, but the moment I logged in this afternoon I was nailed by a wall of text for kinah.
The grind really is apparent in this game. A lot of people on the forums also deny this is present and will shriek, "Go back to WoW!" if you disagree or point out this flaw. Grinding on mobs day in, day out has nothing to do with the skill level of a game but it DOES make a game either really fun for someone or not fun at all. I fall into the latter of this group, in that I don't actually like mind-numbingly tastes such as "kill this monster over and over until your eyeballs bleed." I've heard that it only gets increasingly worse as the levels progress, too, and that once you hit 35 you are pretty much killing monsters over and over again or crafting items over and over again. Some may find this enjoyable, I for one do not.
Lack of group experience or interesting dungeons takes the MM out of "MMO." When a player isn't encouraged to group up to finish a dungeon with other people, it really makes you wonder why you even bother playing an MMO in the first place.
The first dungeon isn't available to you until level 25 when you hit the abyss, and it is as dull as a stale piece of white bread. Not only that, but I've done this dungeon about six to seven times and have not seen a single piece of loot drop. Bosses in this game more often than not reward you with...nothing. That's right...empty loot tables. No blue item for your troubles, nothing to encourage you or give you a friendly nudge to go on.
I'm not really concerned about the lack of end game right now because I'm still only in my high 20s, and many players will scoff at that and go "go back to WoW, nub!" The fact is, is that I don't want WoW. I don't want things handed to me and I don't want the WoW community. What I do want is a fun time when I log in, and when I feel as though there is nothing to do inside a beautiful, immersive world such as Aion's, there's a problem. I have my choices, of course. I can craft, I can kill monsters over and over for experience, I can do the dull dungeon (but only once every 18 hours) and get nothing for my efforts, or I can gather items.
I'd say I could go into the abyss and PvP a bit, but even this is a bit of a wash-out. It seems whenever you do want to run into a player of the opposing faction there is none to be found, and when you're legitimately trying to get a quest done you are instantly ganked by a higher level. I also chose a spiritmaster from the get-go, and spiritmaster pets cannot fly. The abyss is almost a purely flying zone. Many players call it "rock hopping" due to the nature of having to fly from one rock to another.
My pet cannot go with me when I fly from place to place. If I travel too far into the air, it despawns and then I have to resummon it. This makes it extremely tricky to PvP in this manner, since the creature that basically makes you your class is out of the picture. I have been in several scenerios where I could have potentially won a fight...if I had my pet out.
The game is also a huge money sink, which was to be expected from the beginning. When you die, there are consequences. I have no problem with this at all, actually. What I do have a problem with is how everything in the game, from summoning other players in your group (which is the spiritmasters job) to getting your experience back that you lost in death costs heaps and heaps of kinah.
Overall, I believe what we have here is the makings of either an epic fail (but a pretty fail! Such a pretty, pretty fail) or an epic masterpiece that could blow World of Warcraft out of the water. I want to see Aion do well, and it is for this reason alone that I haven't cancelled my account yet. I want Aion to do well, I want people to enjoy Aion because I believe Aion has a tremendous amount of potential. But that's just it - it has potential, and potential alone does not keep subscribers.
If the NCSoft team can work out a way to communicate with their playerbase better and fix the problems that so many people already see, I think Aion will be in great shape!
