In the world of movies, music, in fact, all forms of media, it is often difficult to tell when something is deserving of a sequel. A lot of movies have open endings, and if their ultimate fate is not decided by a saturday morning cartoon, such as Godzilla, then…wait. What am I talking about? Sorry, I was spacing out for a minute. Moving on. This is the second part to my first impressions review on Aion: The Chinese Tower of Eternity, the Beta. There are some things that were not discussed in my previous post, which are an important part of gameplay. Since I did not want to completely obliterate any articles below mine with a humongous wall of text, I decided to add a second part on here describing combat, classes, and an actual description of the flying system(not a praise).

I. Classes:

Classes. Some people love them, some people hate them. It divides nations and destroys relationships. People want a class to blame when they’re losing in city sieges. Others want a class-less skill-based system. It’s a difficult choice for any company to make when developing an MMO. For the most part, a class system tends to be the more popular choice. Though not clearly defined in all of them, most RPGs have some form of class system. Aion is no different. In fact, it doesn’t seem like they were being very creative when it comes to creating classes. You have your four stereotypical archetypes: healer dude, heavy armor dude, agile dude, and caster dude.

I’m not going to lie, the classes are all really fun to play, despite their very archetypical stereotypes and cliché names. You start off either as a warrior, a mage, a priest, or a scout. At level 9, you can complete your ascension quest, and then by level 10 you’ll be able to choose your second class. Here’s the breakdown:

Warrior: Your standard sword/shield or giant bashy weapon guy. These guys hit things up close, and hit them hard. They can turn into a Gladiator, which is an offense-focused warrior, or a Templar; a defensive warrior.

Mage: Another stereotypical class. Gee, I wonder what they do. These guys cast spells. Fire, ice, earth, whatever. They hit really hard with said spells, and can often dispose of enemies(monsters, that is), without ever having the monster come into contact with them. Mages can turn into sorcerers or spiritmasters. Spiritmasters are a pet class, they can summon pets, and still use their ranged missile spells. Sorcerers get no pets. Instead, they get highly devastating ranged spells.

Priest: Equipped with a bow and arrow, the priest lunges from the shadows to drive their twisted blades into their enemy’s throat. They then – what? They don’t do that? Alright, so priests are actually healers. They can choose either Cleric or Chanter as their secondary class. Clerics heal gooder, and Chanters buff gooder.

Scout: The scout can turn into a ranger or an assassin. Rangers attack with a bow, and assassins are melee DPS. There. Done.

So the classes aren’t very innovative on paper, but they’re done so well, you won’t really care that you’re the 5,000,000,000th cleric in the world.

II. Combat

Aion brings skill combos back into the equation. You won’t be arrow-mashing like you were in Age of Conan, though. Skills activate as soon as you press them; you don’t need to press up, up, left, down, left, start, abc, up, select in order to fire off your salvo. Let’s say you have “Skill 1″ and “Skill 2″, when you mouse over a spell or ability it will tell you what place it holds in a skillchain. Now, let’s say “Skill 1″ and “Skill 2″ are both in the same skillchain. Skillchains have a whole window dedicated to them, so you can memorize or reference how your spells are going to chain and what the effects will be. Additionally, we’re going to say “Skill 1″ is hotkeyed to the number “1″ on your keyboard. When you press “1″ to fire off “Skill 1,” the button for the next skill will show up on your screen. From there, you can either click the button, or press “1″ again to fire off “Skill 2.”

I’m a fan of how skillchains were done in Final Fantasy XI, and I wished that if a spiritmaster used “stereotypical spirit master ability #1″ that I, as a sorcerer, could use “stereotypical firey thing #2″ and we could create an effect together. Unfortunately, that’s not how it works; you create your skillchains by yourself. It’s still really well done, though. Get the skill chain right and you’ll trigger an effect. For example purposes, we’ll say “Skill 1″ and “Skill 2″ create a knockback effect. If both spells hit, you’ll knock your enemy back. Effects can also be seen on the skillchain window. Some effects will trigger every time you complete the skillchain, others will have a certain chance of success.

Finally, to wrap up the combat section, we’ll discuss something melee need to worry about. The game encourages movement during combat. They have implemented certain bonuses that are trigged by moving in a certain direction. For example, if you move left or right(strafing), you will see arrows pointing left and right under your character. It means you have triggered that directional bonus. In this specific case, that bonus is increased dodge rate. Pushing forward on your enemies will increase the amount of damage you do, and pulling back will increase your block rate. You must be holding down the button for the effect to remain active. If at any point in time you stand still, or move in a different direction, you’ll remove your directional bonus or receive a different one, respectively.

III. Flying

I know, I discussed the wings in my previous post, but didn’t really mention how to use them. It’s actually pretty simple. I’ll use the default keybindings to explain it(these can be changed). First of all, you’ll notice right away when you’re in an area where you can take off. You’ll see a green ring surrounding your “fly” button. To take off, press PageUp on your keyboard. You’ll be hovering just a few inches above ground, at this point. In order to increase your altitude you would press “R” on your keyboard. To decrease altitude, you would either slowly glide down using the Space bar, or pressing “F”. Once you’re close to the ground, you can land by pressing PageDown.

That’s all there really is to it. Note that you can glide everywhere, even in areas where you’re not allowed to take off and fly around.

IV. Happy Ending

That’s all there really is to the first 10-15 levels of Aion. Again, I wish I could’ve seen the Abyss, but the beta was only about 6 days long, and I’ve had a hectic work schedule recently. Nevertheless, most of these things apply to all levels past ten. You’ll be using skillchains and directional bonuses often. Obviously, you’ll be flying a lot, too. Needless to say, I’m still looking forward to this title and hope to play it with all my friends, and the people who have posted comments on my previous post(I made new friends!).

Despite so many of them ending in drama and despair, I’m still a great believer in the concept of guilds/clans/player associations/call them what you like, in MMOs. Maybe I’ve been luckier than most in the guilds I have chosen to join in my time, but I guess I’ve also made some of my own luck by creating some guilds from the ground up with the simple concept of creating the kind of MMO guild that I would want to be in. A pretty simple concept.

What I’m hoping to do with this series is record some of my thoughts on guild creation. Maybe my thoughts will work for you and give you something to think about. Or maybe you’ll write me some hate mail and tell me that this is a bunch of crap. Either way, let me be the first to acknowledge that, like most things in life, there is no single “right way” to create an MMO guild. What works for me, might not work for you – and vice versa. OK, that’s the intro done.

For our second outing, I thought it might be useful to talk about guild hosting. That is, once you’ve decided on your guild name (see part one), and are ready to build your guild’s website, where do you propose hosting it? There are two distinct options. The first is to buy a URL which corresponds with your guild name. In some cases the name will be available outright, but if you’re using a generic sort of name for your guild, you might have to get creative and insert an extra word like “guild”, or similar, into the URL in order to find something unique. With the name registered, you then need to find a plot of of hosting to point the name at. In today’s dog-eat-dog Internet market, decent hosting packages can be as cheap as a mere couple of bucks per month, with the only hitch being you need to pay for 12 months at once. I believe that if you’re confident about your guild concept, however, slapping down under $10 for the URL, and around $24 for a year’s hosting is a small price to pay. But more on that in a moment.

The other option relates to the large body of guild-centric web services that are already out there. I won’t name any service in particular as I don’t personally use them and, besides, don’t want to be seen as favouring some over others if I neglect to name one. But if you Google “guild hosting”, or similar, you will find tons. They are also regularly advertised on MMO-centric websites, too. In a sentence, they are kinda hard to miss. These services build a website for you in moments, with all the tools you need in a guild environment, like member lists, forums, and so on. They are really good for people who aren’t Web-savvy, but still want to build an online presence for their guild. They also come in two flavours: advertising-funded and paid-for. As the names suggest, an advertising-funded web service will stick banner ads and the like on your guild’s site. Sometimes this is done attractively and unobtrusively; other times it looks like a pile of crap. If you elect to pay for the service, meanwhile, your site will be banner free.

What’s best? Personally, I lean towards buying a URL and hosting and building a site. Among other things, I think it shows that you are serious about your guild. How serious? Well, you’ve gone out and paid real money for a URL and hosting, not to mention spent hours designing a website and an overall look and feel for the guild, while many of your competition are still scrabbling around on a freebie guild hosting sites. For many MMO gamers, looking for a stable and solid guild, this kind of thing speaks volumes. A freebie web service can give the impression, “Yeah, we’re here… but we could pack up tomorrow…” while a paid-for URL and hosting suggests you are more serious about things. Of course, the paid-for URL and hosting means you will need some kind of Internet savvy to build your site and forums (although with hosting add-ons such as Fantastico, that is becoming easier every day), and I appreciate not everyone has that. For such people, I’d recommend the guild hosting sites, but with the strong suggestion that the site is paid for (and advertisement free), so that even if the site looks a bit generic and “newbie”, at least the lack of advertisements gives the impression, “Here is a guild that might not be Web savvy, but is still pretty serious about sticking around and has been investing some real money into this…” You might not think people have these thoughts when checking out guilds, but they do!

Undoubtedly, someone is sitting out there reading this blog and getting hot under the collar because they have run their guild on a freebie, advertising-laden website for the past decade and are accordingly giving my thoughts the finger and shouting, “You’re wrong, Rob!”. To such people I say, “You are the exception, not the rule…” because I think if anyone sticks around in the MMO game for more than five minutes, they will see that the biggest, most-respected and longest-reigning guilds all take the path of buying a URL and hosting eventually, and don’t play with the freebie guild hosting services that are out there. At the end of the day, it’s all about perception and how you want your members, and prospective members to perceive you. Player or chump? Your Web presence, rightly or wrongly, can define you long before anyone reads a word about you. Consider that when you are debating whether to spend money on your guild.

Next time I will take a look at the next major step in creating a guild once you’re done with choosing the name and hosting package… the recruiting process. Bye for now.

I haven’t had much time to get into Darkfall since I was able to purchase a copy a few days ago, but I feel early impressions of a game are still important even if it’s only 2 hrs.  To me Darkfall Online made me feel the same way I did when I got my first hand-me down car when I got my license.  I knew it was a piece of shit, but I was glad to have it.

Right off the bat on the games first loading screen there was already a resolution bug.  I know it’s only a minor thing that doesn’t effect the game at all, but it does speak volumes about how polished the game is and that’s none, zero.  I’m sure there’s a ton of bugs more important than this one which is why it’s probably still there, but common, do you really want the first thing the gamer sees about your game to be a bug?

After you created your character, I selected the wolf race Mahirim, you start out in a little town where you’re presented with a 6 page tool tip guide that’s pretty much tells you how to move and drag and drop items.  A pretty useless guide, or so I thought.  Once I closed that I didn’t see my character so I though maybe it was still loading, I didn’t realize at the time that you start out in first person mode.  After a few seconds I tried to move and saw my cursor move but still no character.   I then right clicked and was suddenly able to move.  This is where reading the tool tip guide would have helped cause I didn’t know there was a button to switch between movement and interface mode.

So after I got acquainted with how that works I was ready to start on my journey.  Since the game gives you no direction I decided to try to find the closes NPC and get a quest.  Once I found him and got 2 quests I was ready to go, but again I found more things that bugged me.  First, it takes 3 clicks to get to your quest description.  You first have to open your journal, then click view quests, then select the quest you want and click description.  I don’t know if it’s just me, but every time I open my journal it took around 5-6 secs, even though there’s nothing in it yet.  It was taking me around 10-12 secs to get to my quests description because of the slow loading and because there’s no quick quest widget where you can easily see your active quests.

Aside from the slow loading journal/quest book, the mini map bugged the hell out of me also.  There are icons all over the map but no legend to tell you what those icons mean.   Then when you mouse over a dot as I did in the screenshot it doesn’t tell you either, just gives you the coordinance.  Telling me what it is would be a hell of a lot more useful.

Moving on, literally, I started to move towards my first quest’s objectives when I was hit with another annoyance.  Running.  I’m not complaining that I have to run, that’s a given when playing  a MMORPG, but as I ran it felt like I was being held back by a giant rubber band.  Randomly it seemed my character would run and slow down constantly.  It must be the lag but it happens every single time, on multiple days even when there was no one around me.  I know it doesn’t seem like a big issue, but honestly the running annoyed me more than anything else, by far.

Now we come back to the interface and movement modes.  As I was working on my quests, I had to loot some goblins bodies.  After you kill something, a few seconds later a tombstone appears that you can loot, but to loot you have to sheath your weapon.  Having a no “loot all” option, something I actually like, you need to open your bag and quickly drag and drop the loot from them before someone comes by and takes it first.  Once you’re done looting, you’re back in interface mode, so you first need to right click to get back to movement mode, then click R to re-arm yourself.   I might be getting picky here, but I don’t like having to click 2 buttons to get back to fighting mode.  After I’m done looting why can’t there be one button that gets me back quickly.

That’s basically it so far.  I’ve done about 5 quests and played for about 2 hrs which has left me with a pretty bad impression of the game.  I’m going to continue playing until my free month expires, however at this point I think it’s going to be pretty hard for Darkfall to win me over.

The internet is a truly amazing place; a gathering of people from all cultures and ethnicities. It is a place where people hate you for your ideas, not what you look like. That said, it’s usually a good idea during your travels through the magnificent digital world to make as many friends as possible, which is something I attempted to do with one of my earliest reviews on Atlantica Online. During this mind-broadening journey,  you might want to consider picking yourself up a couple of asian friends. Tales of old tell of oriental heroism and perseve…yeah, whatever, they can get you into NCSoft betas. This is exactly what happened when one of my friends, born and currently located in China invited me to play AION: The Tower of Eternal Awesome with him. After I downloaded all the files, and he helped me register my account, I was ready to log into NCSoft’s latest virtual fantasy world.

I. Graphics/Art – 11/11

When it comes to graphics, art, armor and weapon design, NCSoft goes to eleven. It’s not about whether you like their style or not. That’s not it at all. NCSoft excels in this department because their animation is always top-notch, their spell effects(if a bit exaggerated at times) look wonderful, and everything moves at optimal speed the whole time you’re playing. I know, eastern MMO combat looks a bit anime’ish, and perhaps a bit fake to some people due of the over-exaggerated acrobatic feats that some games add to their melee classes, but damn it, it’s a fantasy game. I’d rather my guy smoothly somersault off the enemy, reach orbit at the height of the jump, and then come crashing down furiously in a well-animated sequence, than have my guy take awkward stabs at his opponent.

It makes it all seem that much more heroic. It makes you believe that your character fights with confidence, and it’s a lot better than having to look at the way some races held weapons in World of Warcraft; it made me wonder if they really had any combat training at all, or if they just bought an adventurer certificate in Chinatown for 1 dolla, 1 dolla.

Animations, and NCSoft’s artistic excellence aside: a lot of the beauty in AION comes from the heavily modified version of the Cry Engine they use. We’ve all seen what the Cry Engine can do in FPS’s like Crysis. To see that sort of graphical potential in an MMO is truly astounding. There is no better word than breathtaking to describe the environments, characters, and how it all comes together to create this outstanding virtual reality. It’s true, there have been other games with amazing(er) graphics, such as Age of Conan in DX10, but…It’s Age of Conan.

One can praise NCSoft for its artistic prowess all day, so let’s move on for a little bit. Let’s talk about character creation. We’ll keep it short since there’s nothing too innovative here, but then again, it’s just character creation. How innovative can you really get after a certain point? Character creation has pre-defined hairstyles, faces, body types, etc. It also includes an endless amount of possibilities for facial construction by way of sliders. Want to make your character look like Barack Obama? Go ahead. You can do it if you spend enough time messing with the sliders. Although there are no races other than “human,” you can move the ear slider up to have pointy ears and look like an elf. You can also be as tiny or as big as you want(within humanly limits). It’s refreshing. I don’t have to play a hideous gnome if I want to be tiny, and me being smaller doesn’t give me any special racial traits over the towering behemoth standing next to me.

II. Gameplay – 9/10

I’m the kind of person that’s never really impressed by flashy videos. Previews, trailers, video walkthroughs, all of that stuff bores me. You could be showing me the birth of Jesus Christ on video and I wouldn’t really be impressed, unless I witnessed it for myself. AION was one of those things. My friends constantly bombard me with videos from this game or that, saying “look at this game, it’s so cool!” but I always end up closing my YouTube tab dissatisfied and bored.

It wasn’t much better when I got into the game and was given my first quest. I sighed and said to myself “damn it, not this again.” After following the very linear path of fruit theft and insect killing that was laid in front of me, I started to wonder if I really wanted to take this game further. Then, I started getting missions. Missions are like quests, but they advance your own personal storyline. At first, they’re not much different from the other quests, you get some short 5 second cinematics showing you which mobs you have to kill, as if they were something special. However, as you progress they start getting more intricate, and by level 10, I was foaming at the mouth for more.  PvE is PvE, and I don’t think it will ever evolve past “fetch me ten fish” or “kill six wolves,” but I get the impression from NCSoft that they’re at least trying by giving you your own personal storyline to follow(in cinematics) in-between fish-fetching and wolf-killing.

Overall, gameplay is incredibly smooth. Everything loads quickly, and even though I was playing on Chinese servers, I hardly got serious lag. I keep a pillow handy by my desk, since I play Warhammer Online and even at 4GB of RAM I have to take naps every time I switch zones. AION didn’t even give me enough time to fluff my pillow before everything was done loading. Here’s a not-exaggerated re-enactment of how zone loading works in AION, following this format: hours:minutes:seconds:microseconds.

AION(9:10:57:48AM): Loading… here’s a tip for you.

Me(9:10:57:49AM): “Oh, c-”

AION(9:10:57:50AM): Done.

Switching zones is so quick, they’re going to have to include their loading screen tips on a separate manual. I can’t imagine anyone can get past the first word in any loading screen tip before the zone’s completely loaded.  This is good,  and it can even add a fun minigame to AION.  See if you’re quick enough to take a screenshot of the loading screen so you can read the tip it included. Impress your friends with your lightning-fast printscreen reflexes.

IIa. The Grind:

The very thing that keeps us playing MMOs is rapidly growing into a scary word: grind. How much of it is actually in AION? Well, I don’t know, and I don’t think we’ll be able to know for a while other than what people playing the Korean release tell us. Even then, it’s all a matter of how much time you have to play, how you manage that time, etc. Levels 1-10 go by pretty quick, which is good, because level 10 is really where the game starts. You get your wings, you get your real class, you get praise from your fellow realm-mates, and most importantly, you get a new emote. That’s right. This emote allows you to stand in lowbie areas and lord your wings over everyone who still doens’t have them.

From what I’ve seen though, and the fact that the level cap is 50, if you’re PvEing the entire way there, it’s going to feel quite grindy.

IIb. The wings:

You probably skipped the rest of this article so you could read about wings and flying in AION. Here’s the honest truth: It’s fucking awesome. Everyone loves flying. Even if you hate planes or heights. We all dream of having wings so we can drop things on unsuspecting people below. AION finally makes that dream a reality. Starting at level 10(after you complete your ascension mission) you will be able to fly. There are certain areas where you can’t take off, but you’ll always be able to show off your wings or at least glide down a ramp. You can only fly for a limited amount of time, but as you keep leveling, this amount of time increases. You’re also subject to a flight cooldown whenever you glide with your wings.

Once you get to one of the first areas where your flight is actually not restricted and you can go up as high or as low as you want, you’ll shed tears of awe. It sounds like something boring, right? Flying around. Druids could do it in World of Warcraft, gryphons could do it, you can fly in Perfect World. You’ve even seen videos of people flying in AION on YouTube. However, you’ve never experienced it for yourself… BUT I HAVE! NYAH NYAH NYAH NYAH NYAH!

Honestly, until you get to fly around in AION, and do some combat or even some exploring up in the skies, I don’t think you can pass judgement on it. Watching birds fly is boring as hell. Watching other people fly on YouTube is not only boring as hell, but it usually also means having to stand the horrible background music people put in their videos. Try flying out for yourself when you get a chance, see how you like it.  Get some cardboard wings and jump off your rooftop, if you want.

Note: I will not be held responsible for any deaths that occur from my above comments, although if you suffer an accident you survive and develop psychic abilities, please contact me.

III. Overall impressions:

Overall I am very impressed by NCSoft’s latest MMO. I was obviously expecting the game to look truly amazing, no doubt, but the gameplay is really what exceeded my expectations. I haven’t even been to The Abyss yet, though I do plan on writing about that once I’ve experienced it. Still, even though I’ve been doing the same old questing stuff, there’s just something about the game that makes it all the more bearable than other recent MMOs. It could be the wings, I don’t know.  I can take a break every now and then from questing simply to soar into the skies and fly around a little bit. It’s really refreshing.

Even though it’s not a full loot sandbox, this game has an incredible sense of freedom. The game is still in beta, but it feels so finished. Other than issues caused by the eternal dark curse upon the earth, more commonly known as GameGuard(which I doubt will even be added for NA players), I never crashed, I rarely got lag spikes, and I was never once disconnected from the servers. Ever. No 10k latency, no 5k latency like some games had at release. I’m looking at you, Age of Conan. They could release this game tomorrow, in beta, and I’d buy it.

I can’t wait until the North American version is released, and I can play with all my friends(that’s right, all two of them).