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Rexz

This is a review i made on another site that I visited so i just copy paste it here (a few people requested it so i may as well). Also, one or two info may or may not be correct, as I only know as much as I do while playing the Beta and while asking some questions about the game to my Cousin who is playing the full version of Aion in Korea.

And yes, you may ask me any question that you are wondering about that is relevance to the game, i'll try and answer it as best as I can.

Some useful links:

This is the server status to keep track of the server and when they will open it for Open Beta Test, be sure to check it out.
http://kindred.aion.tv/status/

Here's the NCsoft presentation site, You can see the really really awesome trailer there, to see how massive the game is.
http://us.ncsoft.com/en/aion/

Enjoi


So far, freaking awesome, just too bad Beta wasn't longer or i'd get to lvl 30 and start PvPing and show you the large PvP maps in the Abysses. Beta end just now so im gona write a review and add some ingame info based on what i found out.

I got to lvl 18 after roughly 20-25 hours of game time, not mentioning I was AFK merchanting for like a few hours so it should be around 20 hours or so.

Anyway, after 3 days of gameplay, i got to lvl 18, which is around the level that you leave to go to the next area for the lvl 20s progression. I was geared pretty well so I was tanking for a few raid with my Templar to Black Claw Outpost (one of the hardest area in the Altgard map) and it was fun. For some harder areas that you need to go to to finish your quest or quest chain, you will almost always need a group with at least 1 healer.

Progression takes very long in this game, like going from one section of the map to the other, but that's because the game offers a lot of quests for you to do, so once you are in an area, you will probably do all the quests in that area before you progress to the next section of the map. Each section is pretty much a note of progression, because the mobs may have different level from the next and quest giver will also be giving out quest only at around that lvl. You pretty much are on par with most of the mobs lvl, for an example, a LvL 20 person soloing will probably take on only lvl 19/ 20/ 21/22 mobs but definitely shouldn't try 23 as it's a waste of pot and you may die easily. A lvl 16 person going into an area where there is a bunch of lvl 19 or 20 mobs isn't a good idea, so they will go back and finish their remaining quests in their "lvl 16 " section of the map and lvl up before they head on into the higher lvl section of the map.

Questing is the major form of EXP as they calculate it just right so that you will always get to the next lvl to obtain your next set of higher lvl quest when you finish doing all your older quests. Meaning as long as you do all the quests in your area, you will almost always get to the next lvl for more quests to do. Questing can range from killing mobs, obtaining items from mobs or gathering, crafting items, doing specific things with specific objects and scripted questing that makes you do complex stuff like summoning a mini boss and fight it.

There are 3 form of quests, Campaign quests, normal quests and crafting quest. Campaign quests is Lore Related, and will require you to do them in order to progress in the game, it's an important part of the game as it tell the story or bring you into the setting of the game. Almost all campaign quest are CHAIN QUEST, so each quest will have you do multiple thing, seek multiple people before you finish just one. Campaign quest is also very good for character development as there are many of them that offer weapons, armors and gear as reward so almost everyone will be doing it. Normal Quests are just filler quest that helps you gain EXP or money/usable items, as you progress from one section of the map to the other, you will find new normal quest giver as you progress on your character's lvl. Crafting quest are required for your profession and help you lvl up a certain profession, these quests are optional and do not require you to do them in order to progress in the game.


There are only 2 gathering skill and they are default skill for every player, one is the basic for gathering plant/mining for materials use in certain profession and the other is for absorbing these weird floating crystal thing in the sky ( i duno what those are for yet). So pretty much all gathering skill are default and are put into 1 basic skill so you don't have to focus on a bunch of other crap, simple and clean. There are 6 item making profession in the game and from what i heard you can only master 1 or 2, almost all profession require items that can only be made by 2 or 3 other profession, this is to stimulate the economy as everyone can focus on a specific niche in the market.

Weapon Crafting And Armor Crafting - is pretty obvious
Handiwork - making jewelry + accessory items like belt, ring, earing, neck, offhand items for caster ( jewel crafting pretty much)
Cooking- making food that heals and do other effects
Alchemy - making potions
Tailoring - making armor/clothing for casters

Although there are only 6 right now they will have 10 profession in the final version from what I heard.

Flying and wings, this is an interesting concept in Aion as everyone have a default wing they can use to fly in certain areas of the map and glide in ALL areas of the map. Flying only can be done in specific area of a map or in specific map. Gliding is different from flying as you can't control how high up you are going to be. For an example, I am in a no fly zone, but i am standing on a hill and I can glide down from the hill for a temporary quicker travel instead. Just jump off the hill and then press the jump key again and you will have a wing to glide down the map! The thing is, gliding requires the skill of the player, you need to do specific thing with the WASD key to keep yourself in the air longer. Flying and Gliding is LIMITED, so you can't fly or glide all the time, there is a cool down bar to let you know how much flight time you have left. Combat is 100% possible while flying an in the air while you have your wing activated. Certain class get certain buff while flying depending on their passive skills. You can purchase different types of feathers from the Wing NPC so that you can fly faster/ longer/ have different buff while flying and so on. (in the beta version they only have 2 wings, one that fly faster and the other have longer flight time)

Banks and Inventory are consist of a thing call "Cube", Cube in the game is considered as your bag, your inventory. You can purchase more space in your bank and inventory with your money and they increase as you aim for more and more bag space.

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Classes There are 4 basic class Warrior, mage, priest and scout They can spawn into sub class later on Warrior get to become either DPS (gladiator) or Tanker (templar, the class i play) Scout can be assassin (melee burst dps) or ranger (physical ranged dmg dealer) As for mage, you can be a DPS caster (WoW's Mage) and a Caster that have minions and can debuff (WoW's Warlock) All priest can heal, but they can advance as an Enchanter (Healer/buffer) or a Cleric to further enhance their healing (Healer/Healer) ****From what I heard, Priest can wear chain armor in higher lvl. ****Some skill and ability are Shared by multiple class, although some can obtain them earlier than other and some class only have a weaker teir of that certain skill. For an example, Templar can get the passive HP boost Tier 5 at lvl 16 while the Gladiator and Priest can only get it at lvl 25 and they only get the weaker Tier 3 spell (just an example) ****Majority of class spells books are sold from their respective NPC, however as you progress deeper into the game in the future, some quests will give you class specific spells that you cant purchase from the NPC and some spell book will only be dropped from certain mob or boss

Combo system, I duno if this is just for melee, but as a Templar and Gladiator, I can preform combos with my abilities. For an example, some ability will be unusable until you preform a specific attack. So after preforming my core attack, I will then follow up with my combo exclusive attack that does more damage. Almost all attack spell have cool down so you can't spam them, you have to follow a specific chain of attacks that can varies depending on how you play. Each time you use a core attack to activate a combo, you only have a certain amount of time to use the combo attack or else you will miss your chance to preform that combo. For an example, this is what i use in one attack chain:

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1. deal debuff with one of my armor breaking attack 2. use Core Attack #1 follow up with a combo attack #1 used to absorb dmg 3. Use an attack that deal dmg and increase aggro 4. Use a slash attack that does either small dmg or a lot of dmg (chance based) 5 . Raise shield ability, increasing my chance to block by a large margin as well as my defense by a crap load 6 Once I block an attack after raising the shield, 2 combo abilities that is shield exclusive will activate, giving me the ability to hit the enemy with my shield. One of the shield attack combo is use to do a small amount of dmg and stun it, and the other to deal large dmg and to hold more aggro. Good thing is the combo timer on these two skill are longer, so once i block i can preform both of them within the combo timer limit. **** this mark the end of chain #1 - Around this time, my debuff attack should be cooled down already and I use it again to break the enemy armor (this is the start of a new chain) -I use Core Attack #1, but since my combo Attack #1 (for absorbing dmg) is still cooling down, i used combo attack #2 instead, dealing a good amount of dmg to the enemy - start at step #3 like on the first chain and repeat

When you have more combo spells, you will have different options on how to use it at certain situations. For an example, DPSing will use different combo method than while tanking mode for me. Also, with Templar there is a lot of varying in my chain of attacks, for an example, if i use one of my core attack to activate a combo so i can deal one extra attack ability on an enemy, and my shield block JUST about then, i can choose to use the shield attack combo abilities instead since I can deal 2 attacks instead of 1. If i decided to use my normal combo and not my shield combo, i will miss my chance to deal one of the 2 shield combo attack (and i can decide if i want to do that or not depending on the situation I am in).

Swapping weapons/shield. You have 2 set of slots for your mainhand and offhand, meaning you can armed a sword/shield on one set and a 2h sword on the other. This is interesting because certain people can utilized this feature to make them more effective in PvP and PvE. For an example, you can use a 2h sword to deal more dmg on an opener to someone, and then switch to shield and 1h sword so you can do your class specific spells. Certain people may have the intention of having different bonuses on one of their set of weapon or shield and then switching them back and forth as they see fit depending on the situation.
Group + Alliance (party/raid). In Aion, you can get into a 6 man party with other people. As you do things together, you will very often encounter other groups too, one option is to invite that other group to join your group, forming an Alliance. Up to 4 groups can form 1 alliance and all party leaders will keep their power upon their own group. Once you are in an Alliance, you can have alliance wide chat or private group chat with your own group. In PvP, alliance is really recommended as an organized group of people in an Alliance is very powerful.

Guild. Like a lot of online games, there are guild of course. Each individual person's score will be added to the guild's server wide achievement in the abyss (abyss is the main PvP areas consisting of 3 floor maps, the bottom, core, and top with different PvP objectives) From what I heard, there are also guild specific achievement, such as if your guild hold a certain fortress in the PvP map. Sine there is a 3rd Race (the "real" evil race in the game) that are NPC, they will hold the majority of the Abyss until the other player controlled race rape them). From what I see, it's really tough to tackle these guys because i've only seen 2 or 3 guilds take on a certain objective in the map (there are like a few dozens objective points in the abyss guarded by the 3rd race). as your nation advance in PvP, there is an "influence" bar that will determine the tax in the game. For early game, the bar will be dominated by the 3rd race until your nation advance and take them out as well as taking on your enemy faction. Guild will have more features soon in the future as more instances and campaign objectives opens up. Right now, guild can advance up the leader board and get capes that they can wear to show their ranking.

Item and Gear progression.
http://www.spooncraft.com/featured-a...and-godstones/

If you have anything you are wondering about, you can ask me. And here are those awaited screenies.

Here I am showing off my stats


At the guy that will help me get my next class advancement


Showing off stats again


Gliding down a huge mountain


Showing the Combo Tree, Combo is a really cool concept in this game for melee classes.



Showing the alliance window frame (duno why i did that, just to show how similar it is to the Raid Function in WoW)


Im in on of these really cool campaign quest instance thing. It's Lore Related.




I was only lvl 3 on this screenie but since there is a glowie thing under the lake i decided to take a picture of it's prettiness


More kickass flying action in the campaign quest storyline




Here's one of the cutscene showing a genera welcoming me to the major faction city, the other two are guards.


Me at one of the main gate leading into the city, it's a lot more larger on the inside


Welcoming party and I was dubbed by the king or something? I became an official "Deva" or something, the name of the people that were living in the city.



Here's me at the room with the booths for buying class specific spell books


The dungeon, keeping prisoners there, this is under the fortress of Algard or w/e, the place that everyone went after lvl 10.


Gliding with some friends i met in the game (imagine in PvP with 24 black wings in an alliance just flying like that down onto some enemies, they'd shit their pants)



Epic scenery anyone?



Here I am tanking for a raid into Black Claw Outpost


One of those awesome pictures I took in the game


comments:
Now, let look at this carefully. There's about a dozen more sections of the map that I did not take a screenies of in the two maps that I have been in (the starting area and the lvl 10-20 map). And all these screenies were just some of the few that I have taken from the hundreds in my folder lol. And that map was considered to be small by lvl 30s. It takes literally like 10 minutes just to get from one place to the other on one map and sometimes you have to sneak a shortcut or two because you don't want to pass the area where there is a lot of higher lvl or higher tier mobs, that's just some of the thing that makes you more attached to the open world of the game, it's really realistic in a virtual sense. And if you don't wanna walk, you can still use the flying teleporter NPC or the return skill, pretty simple.

Here are extra screenies, mostly from when I was still in the starter Area and i took some pictures of the class selection screen.

Xenthydos

You couldve posted this in the free mmorpg section, overall its a good review.

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korncob

They are moving shit to Aion forums now I guess, how lame.

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kaitamasaki

Since you said something about it being quest based, it wouldn't be like runes of magic would it? It was boring how you would always have to solo most quests, and I rather there be a little more grind put in between instead.

erickblumb

Thanks for the detailed indepth look at Aion there, very informative. Nicely done

korncob

Well if you gotta party for lots of quests it makes it so you gotta wait to find a party for each quest. There are a lot of group missions starting at level 18, I think every 2~6 levels there's a party quest, then later at 30+ there's instances like crazy.

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Sopzoorse

Hello guys, a few months ago, the awful mmo with the name aion came into the game stores. I got it for free and now I'm lvl 37 and I just love the game!
There are lots of gamers who like the mmo pretty much, there exist even some gamers out there who use an aion bot.

Did you hear of the nice game aion? Will you buy it?
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