Why MMOs aren't holding me.

We've all heard the accusations leveled at the dreaded WoW Tourist. For the first few days of Aion, nothing was discussed in general chat other than World of Warcraft. It's the big elephant in the room that somehow simultaneously feeds other MMOs while pushing them out of the way.

I very much enjoyed Champions Online and Aion. I purchased both, and thought they were both fun, well-produced, streamlined takes on the genre.

Notice the past tense there.

I let both accounts lapse. This was partly because of my life-consuming addiction to League of Legends, which, by the way, makes terrible blog fodder because it requires so much specialized knowledge to have a discussion about. But my lack of continued interest in other MMOs is mostly because of how grindy they are. And I don't really mean that as a criticism, since they are exactly as grindy as World of Warcraft has always been. It's just that I can't healthily have room in my life for more than one grindy game. I already went through the grind in WoW to get where I am today, and I just can't stomach another grind to reach an endgame that I don't even know will be exciting. At least with WoW, I know I'm going to enjoy instancing and raiding and gearing up and learning my class and playing with my established guildies at 80, so I know that the grind of an alt is going to be worth it. But I really have no idea how worthwhile the effort I put into CO or Aion is going to end up being, and that makes it very difficult to put in the effort required.

(note: I played both games extensively in beta for months. So even though my live account only lasted a month, I actually played the games for longer than most current subscribers have had enough to time to. So I'm not sure I can really be called a "tourist" at this point.)


The core of the grinding problem is the same complaint that was leveled at WoW, even in its first year: it's two different games. After 60 levels of solo questing through an exciting world, perhaps sprinkled with the occasional 5-man group, the transition to max-level play was jarring, as it was suddenly completely dependent on grouping, and to a large extent, raiding, which is a very different activity from leveling. Very little of the WoW leveling experience prepares you for the max-level experience; it's almost like starting from scratch. CO and Aion felt the same to me.

So far, the MMO genre has suffered greatly for grafting together a grind engine (leveling and questing) with the actual game (grouping, PvP, raiding, etc). It's starting to feel a lot like saying that you can't play Team Fortress 2 or Starcraft unless you do 20 hours of Minesweeper first.

So I'm calling for MMOs to all start giving you the "real" game UP FRONT. From 2 hours in, at the latest. Questing can be fun (though this is highly dependent on setting and art direction), and I'm not saying you need to get rid of it. There's a reason it's been so successful as a grinding device. But Cataclysm will need to let you go to Deadmines or whatever around level 12. Champions needs to have some kind of real grouping content starting as soon as you get to Millenium City. And Aion needs to find a way to open up PvP and grouping sometime in the mid-teens. Hopefully, APB will let you engage in its core mechanics early, and SWTOR will launch you into the core story immediately, and STO will let you have some Starfleet battles and away teams right after the tutorial. Those activities, not questing, are the reasons why those games are interesting. Let the players actually play, instead of requiring they invest hours and hours of time to grinding first before being allowed to start the game they actually paid for. If you must have grinding, let me grind the actual game instead of some unrelated pre-requisite.

League of Legends has a progression system, called the "Summoner" system, where you as the player gain meta-levels outside of matches, allowing you to unlock talent points and rune slots to augment your in-game abilities. And how do you gain experience for your summoner?

Playing the game.

Let's have more of that, please.

Aion: character selection for head-start is today

If you pre-ordered Aion like I did, then you've had access to the open beta for a while, and will be able to use the head start coming soon. Another bonus to pre-ordering is early character selection to reserve your name and server before the masses appear (though judging by the pre-order numbers, the masses are already there).

Pre-selection is today. A few hours from now, I'll be able to reserve two characters. I've been trying to get on the same server as Ixobelle, but recent developments in how the servers are differentiated has made his "last pvp server in the alphabet" policy seem a bit ill-fitting for this situation. Let me explain.

Out of nowhere, NCSoft has announced that half the servers are "west" and half the servers are "east", denoting which time zone they sync up to. This is important mainly because certain raids and pvp areas are only available at certain times, and it's expected, but not confirmed, that it will be related to the server times. Though I'm on the east coast, I expect to be playing Aion later in the evening, so I'll probably pick a West server, and I assume Ixo would want a west server as well, given his residence in California.

Beyond that, I've done a bunch of research on Aionsource.com, which is basically the MMO-Champion of Aion, to try to learn more about the West servers. Here's what I've come up with:

Yustiel is looking to become the west RP server, just as Lumiel is the East RP server.

Nezekan is actually an official Oceanic server now even though it's designated as US-west. This was announced rather suddenly, sending US guilds on that server scrambling to find a new home.

Vaizel is the self-proclaimed "roaming PvP server", and is looking to be that new home for the harder-core refugees from Nezekan.

Siel is one of the original beta realms, and has a chip on it's shoulder about it. The returning testers expect the server to be highly populated with knowledgeable, long-time players. Even though I've been in the beta for a long time, the implication that they are somehow special for it naueseates me a little.

Kaisinel is quiet, and is looking like it will be a lower-pop server. The early adopters expect this to make it more mature and family-oriented than the "ZOMG PVPZ" servers.

Ariel's community is looking pretty solid, and it's also the home of a large LGBT guild. Not to get political, but I'm a straight guy who strongly supports the LGBT community and enjoys hanging out with the LGBT people I've met, so I find that aspect kind of appealing, if only for the fact that they are less likely to use "that's gay" when they mean "that sucks", which is a pet peeve of mine.


So right now I'm leaning toward Ariel. Granted, the community on Aionsource is a limited sampling of only the most devout Aion fans, but hopefully it will at least give me some insight to help pick a server.

If I don't hear back from Ixo about a server soon, then I'll likely make on character on Ariel and another on the last pvp server on the list alphabetically, which means Zikel [East]. [edit: looks like Yustiel may be a better bet because it's west, so I'll probably be rolling Elyos there as my main server] For now, I'll be rolling Elyos on both unless I'm unable to make an Elyos with vaguely blue skin. So if you happen to want to come play Aion with me, just check if you can make a blue-skinned Elyos.

Oh shit, Zikel is going to be the home of the Goons! Can't decide if that makes me more or less likely to roll there. Certainly seems like it's going to be attracting some unsavory "competition" to that server.

I'll be naming them both Hatch, but the only question is, which class should I roll? I know for sure that my main will be a Gladiator, and my alt a Summoner. So should I roll two Gladiators because I don't know which server will become my "main"? Or should I roll one of each, and then roll a new Gladiator if it turns out I guessed wrong? I've got a few more hours to figure it out before I get off of work.

Happy weekend! *

*I don't live there anymore, but that's one of my favorite bars from back home

MMO Roundup: 7/31/09

Champions Online: I really want to be a part of this hype train, hopefully it starts up soon. As it stands, I can't really say much because of the NDA.

They've begun outlining the powersets on the Champions website. This is a great idea. The powers are one of the main attractions. I really can't wait until someone codes a web-based character planner (are you listening undoubtedly-overworked CO web team?) Then again, I'm exactly the kind of geek who can pass half an hour playing with a WoW talent calculator, though I wonder if I'm the target audience.

I had been wondering what the end game would be, and a recent interview with lead designer Bill Roper revealed that, at launch, the endgame will mainly consist of a randomized series of 5 daily team missions that can be completed to unlock a 6th, more epic mission. These missions will reward tokens that can be redeemed for rewards. So in the fashion of the Champions so far, they've taken an idea from WoW and rebuilt it from scratch to fit their game. And it's right up my alley: randomized, small group, alternative reward system . . . it's like they read my post about endgame grinding! Or at least part of it.

Beyond that, the Nemesis system sounds like good fodder for mid- and endgame content. At level 25, you can design your hero's own arch-enemy, and then get special missions where you face him and storyline seeds such as ambushes from his minions (whom you also designed). And these are all shareable with other players, so for instance you could be doing a 3- player mission and run into a supervillain who turns out to be your teammate's nemesis.

But this is all speculation, it remains to be seen how this will play out in reality. I'm looking forward to the beta becoming open next month, when I'll be able to talk a lot more about this game.

Cryptic recently announced their pre-order bonuses as well. Puzzlingly, Amazon and Wal-Mart do not offer head-start access (log into the live game a few days early), while Gamestop and Best Buy do. So ordering from GS or BB seemed like a no-brainer. Since I'm not a fan of Gamestop, I wanted to pre-order from Best Buy. Unfortunately, Best Buy doesn't have any preorder bonus details up on their website, and in fact even has the wrong release date for the game. Rather than risk missing out on the open beta or early access or even the first week of the game due to BB's lack of interest, I ended up swallowing my distaste and pre-ordering from Gamestop. Hopefully Cryptic can get BB to get their shit together. Champions recently topped GS's sales list, and I'm betting that's because they were the only retailer to offer early access and detail the preorder bonuses on their website, so GS is probably receiving the bulk of the preorders.

Retailers, take heed. Paying attention to the MMO audience pays off.


Aion: Surprisingly slow simmer on this front. Voices were added to the game for this weekend's beta event, which is nice because the first version of Hatch ended up with a hilariously high-pitched voice when I was forced to choose without being able to preview them (and they were still using the Korean voice acting). Still on the radar, but I have to say that while this one looked solid to begin with, the more polish Cryptic applies the Champions, the more it looks like Aion won't be getting my full attention this September.


WoW: As we await Blizzcon, a few things of interest have popped up.

By now, you've all heard that Sam Raimi will be directing the WoW movie. This announcement makes me think 2 things:

1) Cataclysm might be the name of the movie, not the xpac. I hope it's the xpac, because nothing short of a world-changing revolution is going to keep me interested in WoW for another 2 years.

2) Sam Raimi is not to my taste, so I'm disappointed by the pick. His direction is serviceable for the most part, but I find a lot of his unconventional camera work to be more annoying and unprofessional-looking than creative (see the scene from Spider-man 2 where Doc Ock first wakes up and kills the medical team that was about to remove his tentacles for an example). It feels cheap. And though I enjoyed some of the humor in Army of Darkness, that's largely due to the writing and acting; I don't think the directing helped it along much. Though Spider-man is my favorite comic book character ever, I was disappointed with the films overall, and most of that can be attributed to the directing (and the casting and the acting, except for J. Jonah Jameson). This news is almost as bad as Shia LaDoof getting cast as Y the Last Man (sidebar: DEAR GOD WHYYYYY?!?!?!!?)


Other than that, the WoW zeitgiest is focusing on the patch. Evidence is mounting that the patch will be released this coming Tuesday rather than the post-Blizzcon release I predicted.

1) MMO-Champion pointed out that the current PTR patch is labeled "Retail", a sign that it's almost ready to ship.

2) Blizzard released a Q&A today about the two major new features in the patch: the pve instances and the pvp battleground. As we know, PR is done when a weakness needs to be covered. I think they are seeing a lot of confusion from players about how things will work, and the fact that they chose NOW to clear it up rather than later points strongly to an impending release.


As a player, I don't really care either way. As a blogger, I'd like to be proven right. :)

We'll see how it goes. Until then, have a great weekend!

More Aion Impressions

Aion is the kind of game where you fight things like this:

Sadly, I failed to get a shot of the tog during the most recent beta event. A tog is what you would get if you crossed a wrinkly-faced bulldog with a pig, then hired a manga artist to draw it all cute-like. The effect of something that ugly trying to be cute makes vomit well up in the back of my throat.

For the uninitiated, Aion is an upcoming WoW-alike MMO imported from Asia and currently in beta. It has a Final-Fantasy-meets-softcore-porn aesthetic running beautifully in the Crytekimabob engine (or something impressive-sounding). It plays just like WoW: you hit action buttons to use abilities to slaughter an unending stream of NPCs to steal their armor and complete a string of quests for people with symbols over their heads. The “hook” is that your character has wings, making gliding, free-flight, and airborne combat a central part of the experience – in theory. So far, up to level 14, I have done almost zero flying, as all of the questing areas so far have been ground-bound.

I’m told the flying combat comes into play in the outer zones that border a giant rift between the two halves of the world. Each half is populated by a different faction: the angelic Elyos and the attractive-but-emo Asmodeans.

Having explored the first section of the Asmodean experience as a spear-swinging, plate-wearing Gladiator (Part 1 and Part 2), I spent some time in the most recent beta weekend visiting Elyos and trying a different class, the Scout.

Being another melee class, the Scout plays a lot like the Gladiator did at earlier levels, except the Scout is way squishier. I had to stop to bandage after almost every battle. In return, I got stealth and the ability to stun (via a counterattack). Until you pick a sub-class at level 10 – assassin or ranger – the Scout plays just like an early-level WoW rogue, only instead of combo points you have escalating Chain Techniques where move 2 only becomes available if used immediately after move 1. However, Chains are part of the game for all classes, hardly unique to the Scout. Again, as with the Gladiator, attacks seem only limited by their cooldowns. I didn’t appear to have any energy-like resource to keep track of. I did have a mana bar, but I never saw it move. So far, both melee classes echo the design philosophy of the Retribution Paladin: just hit whichever button lights up!

As you can see, Elyos is much sunnier than Asmodae:

Oooh, pretty! (and keep in mind my computer is crap and playing on low graphics settings)

And the capital city is almost blindingly so:

Yes, I managed to get a character named “Pimpn” in the shot. That’s a photojack.

The Elyos land uses a warm color palette, except for pure reds, which are reserved to keep Asmodae (I’m not going to look up how to spell that, thank you) from being too grey. The monsters I encountered in the first ten levels were mostly different from those in Asmodae, and the quests, while largely variations on the same kill or fetch designs, were at least set in a different storyline.

But sadly, the two worlds are disappointingly similar. The quests are nearly identical. The starting areas are both surrounded by camps of little kobold-type mobs that gather some type of food you have to steal from them. The skins are different colors, and maybe the models are slightly different, but in the end, one tiny fat mole-person is no different from the other 500 you brutally murdered, palette-swap or no palette-swap.

What I’m saying is: there’s not much replay value in the first 10 levels of the game. Nominally, there are only two starting areas. In reality, there’s about 1.5 of them. This isn’t anywhere near damning for the game, given that 1) I loved my first play-through, 2) Many other MMOs only have one or two, including my current favorite non-WoW game, Champions Online, 3) WoWs starting areas are pretty similar to each other when you get right down to it. The similarities are just better masked by the art in WoW. In WoW, you have to stop to think about it to realize how similar the starting zones really are. In Aion, you have to work to avoid noticing how close they are to being identical.

According to these NPCs and my mom, I am super-duper awesome.

Hopefully, this will change in the higher levels, and the endgame PvPvE (apparently raid monsters will attack you during your massive PvP fights?) will make up for the repetitive leveling experience.

There’s another beta weekend coming up, and I plan to try out a caster class and get my Gladiator a little bit higher to see how the game changes as you level. Also, I’ll try to get a picture of a tog so they can haunt your nightmares as they have mine.

General Laziness

Swamped at work. Here are some brief things I've been wanting to get down, but haven't put in a post yet:

Aion, overall: Best described as "satisfying" and "pretty". If you like to play WoW, and you look at pictures of this game and like the asthetic, then I recommend it. It plays well, is serviceable everywhere that isn't impressive, and actually works this early in the beta process (owing much to already being out in another country). I had fun with it.

Champions, Online: I'm worried about two things about the publicized powerset system:

1) Will it be too easy to "gimp" a character? I know they are keeping this in mind, but it still worries me. It would be very comforting to see some sort of recommendation stuff in place. Like, "it's highly recommended that you take a defensive power at level 5" or "block replacers may not look like much, but they are actually usually one of the most powerful and useful abilities you'll have" (I don't know if those are true, just making up fake examples). This goes hand-in-hand with:

2) It's dangerous to have each powerset have "hidden purposes". What I mean is: I recently read an interview with one of the CO designers about powersets, and he starts talking about how "such and such is actually a tanking set in disguise" and "this powerset won't do as much damage as this other one, even though they both look like basic blasting powers". This seems like a really dangerous route to go down. It's going to be all too common for someone to pick a powerset because it looks cool or goes with their character, then find that the higher in level they get, the more they fall behind because the powerset was designed for some other role without any indication before you select it. If you are going to design the powersets around roles, then you NEED to tell the player ahead of time what those roles are.

Hopefully these will be addressed before the game hits. If not, the open beta is going to be a clusterfuck as a massive number of people find that their character is nothing like they had every reason to expect it would be.

PuGs, being douches: I ended up the de facto raid leader for my guild because no one else felt like doing it. When I pug things like VoA, I purposely refuse to lead the group. PuGs are my time to be just another member of the raid. You know why?

Because leading the raid is more effort than just being a member.

Let's keep that in mind as we go forward, shall we? This is the reason why your entire faction can stand around the Wintergrasp portal spamming "/inv plz" when there is no raid group, and none of those 50 people will form a group themselves. It takes one person to finally give in and be the one to do the work of inviting people, just so that things will finally happen. These are the people whose impatience outwieghs their laziness. I would normally be this person, except I already lead raids for my guild for pretty much that reason.

So when someone else forms a pug, remember that they are volunteering to do an unpaid job that you aren't willing and/or able to do yourself. If you don't like the way they run the group, then that's fine. Constructively criticize, offer to help (and I do not mean "pass lead plz" after they've done all the work starting it up and you just want to invite your undergeared friends), or leave the group. But give the raid leader at least a tiny token of respect, or else they are going to feel like even more of a sucker for being the one to take on the extra work for your benefit. And pragmatically, that leads to there being fewer suckers on the server who will start a raid for you. Even if your impulse is to be a douche, or you really are just such a waste of a human that you can't be even halfway nice, at least try to stretch your tiny brain to think one step ahead to realize that the worse you treat pug leaders, the fewer of them there will be. And since you aren't willing to start a pug, that means less loot for you. Think about it, random childish pug douchebag who I'm sure doesn't read my blog. I'm sure I'm just preaching to the choir.

I say all of this because enough of my guildies and friends were all standing around WG together just after a victory, spamming "LFG VoA 10", and they started suggesting that I put one together. Which is the biggest curse of being the raid leader: people expect you to be the one who assembles pugs as well. You have members in your guild who will say "we should do ____ ", but they almost never actually put a group together themselves? They leave that up to the one sucker who got in the position of raid leader? Yeah, thought so.

So I finally got tired of waiting and just put together a pug myself. When I make a VoA 10 pug, I aim to get as close to one of each class in there as possible. Murphy's law dictates that if you don't bring a class, all of the loot dropped will be for that class. This way, everyone has a better chance of getting a drop. I was playing my resto druid alt. This becomes important later.

So I'm forming this group, and we need 2 more dps. So I say in chat, "LF2M DPS VoA 10", and am immediately inundated with tells. To be fair, the majority of them are perfectly nice. But most of them are classes we already have, so I decline, and keep advertising. One of the people who whispered me is a douchebag and someone I had recently had a fight with in a pug. I wasn't going to invite him, and it amazes me that he even bothered to try to get into a pug I was running, considering what I had said to him. I don't respond.

After a bit, he whispers me saying "Why didn't you invite me?"

"Don't you remember how a week ago I left your group because I didn't like you?"

His response was "Baby gonna cry?" which borders on nonsense. I promptly put him on ignore.


Then, I get a whisper from another druid. He says "why didn't you invite me?"

"Because I'm trying to get one of each class"

"Aha! You just don't want competition!"

"That's right. :)"

"Don't smile, that's fail!"

"Of course I don't want competition. I'm not going to apologize for it. It's not just for me, every person in my raid is happier because they don't have to compete. If you don't like it, make your own group. If you can't be bothered to do that, then you don't get to complain."

And it went on like that for a bit.

Sigh.

People were such entitled dicks to me that it made me never want to lead a pug again. And I'm pretty good at it. So good job, douches. The funniest part is that you don't even realize this is 100% your loss.

Aion Beta Impressions and Details: Part 2

The tradeskill system in Aion sucks.

OK, maybe that's not entirely fair. First of all, in the early levels it is at least as good as WoW's. Except WoW's also kinda sucks.

But maybe I'm taking it too personally. Let me explain. I'll have to start from the beginning.

Here's a shot from a "vision of my future" that I got to play out as part of the ascension questline. You see yourself as powerful flying warrior, and get to wtfpwn a few other Daevas before the cutscene ends.


So there Hatch was, having just completed a questline for an imprisoned Daeva in the starting area, and dinging level 10. He got teleported to the major Asmodean hub city, known as Pandaemonium. Teleporting gets you between the major zones, while the flight paths I talked about in my last post take you from hub to hub within each zone. It's possible there is no physical geographical link between zones; it's too early for me to tell.

Anyway, I show up in Panda, and the first thing I see is a city square that is positively mobbed with players. About half of them are seated on little stools with word bubbles permanently displayed above their heads, saying things like "Buy my stuff!" and "Manastones, cheap!" These are personal stores. Any player at any time can set one up, plop their character down in a highly-trafficked area, and go afk if they wish. Other players will be able to use them like a vendor, buying whatever specific items the player put up for sale. I ended up using some of these people to gather manastones and tradeskill materials later on. But first, I wanted my wings. A questgiver gave me a little cutscene showing off the zone (these are pretty common on the main "Campaign" questline, which has a separate slot in your quest log from "standard" quests that are just there to supplement the grind), then sent me on my way to the high priest or something.

There was a cute little ceremony, and I got my wings. At first I wasn't entirely sure it worked, because you can't fly in the city and there is absolutely no tutorial on how to use your wings. This should really be remedied before release.


After the ceremony, I got to pick which of the subclasses I would be. I chose Gladiator, because on some forum I heard them described as "devastating". So clearly that's the one for me! The trainer offered me some new skills, a very nice polearm well beyond anything I could buy at my level, and a limit break (by some other name). There was no explanation of the limit break that I noticed, either. As I kept playing, I wondered at first why the move never seemed to activate when I pressed it. Then I noticed it used a third bar that had appeared under my mana bar. This meter filled as I killed enemies without dying. It filled very slowly. I got to use the limit break a few times, and while visually impressive (I speared the foe on my polearm and slammed him into the ground around me a few times) it didn't seem to do very much damage. Disappointing, especially considering that you can't use it unless you manage not to die for about an hour of questing. Which, to be honest, I couldn't accomplish more than twice all weekend.

A few quests had sent me off to another area, and I was eager to try out my wings and new polearm, so I payed a fee to teleport there. Most quests reward you in large sums of cash, but everything you do costs a ton as well, so it evens out. At least this early in the game, the economy feels lively and getting even small sums of money is genuinely exciting and meaningful. Thoughtfully, the developers gave the teleporting NPC in the city a repeatable fedex quest that sends you to the bank and back and rewards some cash, just in case you accidentally spend all your money and find yourself unable to afford a teleport out of town.

I immediately tried flying, figuring the controls out as I went along purely from the keybinding list. During my first flight, I stayed in the air too long and fell to my death right in the middle of town. You can fly for about 30 seconds to start with, though I get the impression this extends as you level in some way. One thing I didn't know at first was that you could fly longer if you used the "glide" key. This would cause you to glide forward but stop consuming your flight meter. At first, I would continue pushing W to go forward, and gliding would cause me to lose altitude quickly. I thought that was all it did.

Then, I started questing in an area that forbade flying (all of the questing areas I've encountered so far are like this). From time to time, I'd see another player go by on their wings in these areas, much to my puzzlement. I figured out that you could at least get some air time in these areas with the glide button, but I'd almost immediately hit the ground again. Late in the weekend I was in a group, and mentioned that I couldn't figure out how other people were flying so much. Both of the people in my party, at the same time, said "don't hit forward". It turns out that glide works a lot like the flight hat in Mario 64: if you press nothing, you'll stay level and slowly lose altitude while maintaining speed. If you tilt forward, you will gain speed but lose altitude. If you pull back, you'll gain altitude but lose speed. You can stay in the air for quite a while by alternating forward and back and using the built-up speed from descending to create wind resistance and pull yourself back up. Eventually you'll land, but it's still very useful for travelling and escaping.

None of this was explained to you by the game itself anywhere I could find.

While questing, I came across ore nodes and plants that could be gathered using a skill I gained at level 10 called "gather essence". I liked that you just got the skill automatically, and the same gathering skill applied to anything you could gather. The only exception is "aether", a substance you can only gather from flying nodes high in the sky. That had it's own, separately-leveled skill. Leveling gathering worked just like WoW: every few gathers you'd get a skill up.

There is a chance to fail, represented by the fail bar, which fills in competition with the pass bar. I'd estimate I failed about 1/3 of the time.


So I did a few levels of standard questing, then made a trip back to Panda for ability books. While there, I explored a bit. There's a vendor district, a residential district, and a pvp arena. There's also a bank/auction house. The AH works, though I couldn't get the search function to operate. Your bank includes an "account warehouse" which is presumably accessible to all of your characters of that faction on the account. Nice.

Then there's the Alley of the Damned, also known as the tradeskill area. Here, hundreds of players while away their few beta hours endlessly cooking, brewing, and smacking a hammer noisily onto an anvil.

Tradeskills require no "play". Just like WoW, you click a button, and wait for a bar to fill. Except this time, the success bar is accompanied by a fail bar! Luckily, I only had a few failures in all my boring, grindy attempts.

There are a bunch of tradskills, and you aren't limited at all in how many you can try. However, you can only specialize in one and max it out to level 450. All of the others stop at around 375 or something. The ones I remember are Cooking, Alchemy, Accessory crafting, Armor crafting, Weapon crafting, and Paint Dehydration Observance. Well, OK, I made that last one up, but they are all about that exciting.

Having a hard-on for giant weaponry, I, of course, selected Weaponsmithing. After paying a fee to the trainer to start learning it, I checked out the patterns available on the vendor and noticed at 40 skill I could craft a sword that was an upgrade over my polearm. I checked the equip level against what the vendors were selling, and I saw an identical sword that couldn't be equipped for 4 levels later! "Cool!" I thought, "the benefit of weaponsmithing is you can make weapons a little bit better than what else you could equip at that level!"

It turned out I was only partly right.

Being a naive little Daeva, I went to work skilling up. One of the nice things about Aion's profession system (he says begrudgingly) is that you don't have to repeatedly make useless, unsellable items to skill up. The trainers actually offer a repeatable quest, represented in it's own tab in your quest log entitled "work orders", where they supply a quest item and you have to buy a few side mats (like sand or cooling water) from the vendor and transform the given items into something else. Then you give the trainer the new items, getting some skill-ups along the way, and receive in return a small reward of side mats. He gives a new, more expensive variation on the quest every 10 skill points. The bottom line is you spend a few hundred gold and about a minute of time, and you get one or two skill ups per quest, and a small fraction of that money back as random materials. I ended up spending about an hour and 10k gold grinding up to 40. It was not fun at all, and I could feel my minutes of beta time, in which I could have been impaling giant bear/wombat creatures on my spear, being sucked away. But thoughts of instead impaling them on a giant, more powerful sword kept me going.


Finally, I reached 40 skill, and bought the pattern for the sword. Then I realized that one of the materials I needed, some kind of weaponsmithing orb, was not available from the vendor. A quick internet search revealed that they only dropped off of random mobs, and I needed 6 of them! To the AH!

I had to check all of the personal shops and sell every extraneous item I had saved in my warehouse, but after another half hour or so I managed to scrounge together the 6 orbs while keeping juuust enough money for a teleport back out of town. By this point I was pretty tired of crafting, but looking at the sword in my inventory made it all worth it. Now to quest up those last few bars of XP so I could level to 13 and equip it!

During those 20 minutes of questing, a green-quality sword dropped that could be equipped at level 12. It was significantly superior to the one I had just spend nearly 2 hours crafting.

I hate tradeskills in Aion.


Said hatred notwithstanding, I had a great time in the beta last weekend, and I'm looking forward to the next beta event. Friday, I'll give a brief recap of the highlights and what I liked and disliked. My Aion preview: the brief and judgmental version!

Aion Beta Impressions and Details: Part 1

Meet Hatch.


Hatch is a warrior. His likes include swords and killing things with swords. His dislikes include the Elyos and togs, which are about the ugliest creatures ever created. Think of one of those ugly bulldogs with the squished-up, wrinkly faces that look like a stack of gross vaginas. Now mate that with the ugliest boar you can imagine. That merely begins to describe these fucking togs.

As an Asmodean, he lives in the inside of the bottom bowl of what was once a sphere, before some great battle felled the "Tower of Eternity", and the warring factions, consisting of humans, ferret people, and immortal "Daevas" (angels), were split amongst the two remaining bowls, with a chunk of earth extending between the two halves, creating a chaotic Abyss. While the Elyos are all shiny and pretty and would fit perfeclty into an Abercrombie and Fitch catalog shot in heaven itself, the Asmodeans have greyish-blue skin, talons, and a severe case of back hair.

Much ado has been made about the graphics in Aion, and for good reason. My computer is by no means up-to-date, but it can run most games reasonably smoothly, and I had to pump down the graphics settings to get it to run at a consistent framerate. That said, once I had the video settings squared away, this beta ran like a dream and was still quite beatiful, which is a testament to both the engine and the art direction. If you have a crap computer, you can still play the game, and it will still look good. It will look like a modern game. But if you have a state-of-the art system, it's going to look really, really good.

I pointed my camera straight up at the sky to get a shot of some beautiful art up there, and out of nowhere I caught an airship floating by.



My understanding is that Aion is already out in China, and is in the process of some serious Westernization. Though I ran across some localization errors, the rest of the game is mostly stable, given that even in this early beta I encountered no crashes or gamebreaking errors whatsoever. The only technical problem I encountered was that I would be unable to launch any programs on my computer after exiting the game, but that was easily remedied with a system restart.

The biggest technical problems are control limitations that the localization team claims to be working on. For one, you can't invert your camera controls. For someone like me, who has played FPS games for over a decade and WoW for 5 years with up being toward me and down being away from me, this makes the game nearly unplayable at first. But I really, really wanted to play it, so I just dealt with the annoyance and pushed on through, adjusting the camera as little as possible. The other is that certain actions can't be bound to certain keys. I'll get back to that later.

As I said, the art direction is top-notch. It's drawn in an eastern style, and shows many parrellels to the style of Final Fantasy, to the point that it was a bit uncanny. This is a good thing. If you like the Square/Enix asthetic at all, then you are going to like this game. The character animations sing. They just feel right and look great.

The polish level is top-tier. Like Tobold said, this game would have given WoW a run for it's money if released 4-5 years ago. I mean, even the flight paths are eye-popping, with a transparent ghostbird ferrying you from gorgeous vista to gorgeous vista:



But enough drooling. How does it play?

Gameplay is in the now-standard MMO questing idiom. After spending a lot of time in the character creator selecting hairstyles (all of them are extremely well done) and playing with various sliders that adjust everything from eyebrow height to hand thickness to neck length, you are dropped into a comfortable and pretty open field, a noobie area, with an NPC with a glowing blue diamond symbol over his head. So that's what exclamation points look like in Japan!

During this weekend's playtest, I focused on a single character, Hatch, a Gladiator that I leveled to 13. Next event, I'll make it a point to try out the other classes. At the start, you can pick from 4 basic classes, and then each of those specializes into one of two advanced classes at level 10. If, like me, you start as a warrior, you take some time to become familiar with all kinds of basic abilities, then you are given the choice between the tanking Templar and the plate/melee Gladiator. Scouts can eventually become Assassins (rogues) or Rangers (hunters). Mages grow into either Sorcerers (mages) or Spiritmasters (warlocks), while Priests go on to become Clerics (melee priests) or Chanters (paladins). As you can see, they've got everything but druids and shaman covered. Expect some kind of "Elementalist" xpac down the road.

And so Hatch and I began our journey through lower Asmodea. The quests are pretty standard "kill x gerbilmen" or "gather x fruit baskets". Quest items in the environment are easy to pick out because they shimmer, though at present the game lacks the type of map quest objective guides that are in Champions and are being added to WoW in the upcoming patch. At first, it appeared that I'd have to read through all of the quest text, but as it turns out important locations, NPCs, and mobs are highlighted in blue in the text, and clickable. Clicking them brings up a little window with basic information about them, including a rough location and other tidbits (including notes on NPCs like "She doesn't take kindly to strangers". A nice little touch.).

Here's a screenshot of the quest log:


So far the quest writing is surprisingly good. The NPCs get personalities, and there were a few points that were memorable. On top of that, the enemies and animals you fight are quite imaginative, though often based on a fusing of two real animals (fucking togs!) or screwing up the proportions of something familiar (giant spindly elephantosaurs!). I was surprised to find the lore of the game and its NPCs as fleshed-out as it was. I expected something fairly generic, and what I found, while quite standard, had enough personality and heart put into it to make it enjoyable.

Combat is, at it's base, standard MMO fare. As a melee character, you run up to the target and autoattack. And as though the game weren't already accessible enough, it will actually run up to your target for you. How courteous.

Once you reach the target, you use hotkeys to activate attacks, which are on cooldowns. My warrior didn't use the mana bar, or have any discernable resource that was actually consumed, so it appears their abilities are mediated solely by their cooldowns. This does force you to use all of your abilities, rather than spamming your one best ability over and over. On top of that, some abilities are part of escalating, branching chains. For instance, I use Ferocious Strike, and the key is replaced by a second chain ability that I can only activate after a FS. At level 13, I had reached the point where FS could chain up to 3 steps in total, and had two branches: one of them had a self-buffing "shout" at the 2nd step of the chain, and one of them was a combo of 3 increasingly spectacular melee attacks. The shout and the 3rd move were each on a cooldown twice the length of FS's cooldown, so it made sense to alternate them rather than just repeating whichever one turned out to be mathematically stronger. Because of this, combat is a lot more mentally involving than WoW. Granted, I was still low level, but I was using my full suite of abilities every single fight. And just to drive the point of "polish" home, whenever you use a chain ability, the game both: 1) flashes a border around the buttons of the next possible steps in the combo, practically shouting that they are available to you, and 2) shows the icons for those abilities right next to your character model, in much the same way a WoW addon like Powerauras or Satrina's buff frames would.

I also found myself more engaged by the combat because regular old mobs could actually kill you. It was possible to win consistently, but only if you were paying attention. And pulling two mobs at once usually meant that you either had to pop a potion, beat an undignified retreat, or get a one-way ticket to resurrection city (death sends you back to town and incurs a small xp penalty and 30-second sickness, but you can get the xp back for a small monetary payment to a Soul Healer at the graveyard). I like this tuning because soloing is very possible, but requires forethought, attention, and smart play. It also has the benefit of making grouping much more appealing than it is in WoW. Towards the end of my playtest, I grouped up for an unusually difficult quest to face down a named mob with 2 henchman (far beyond my abilities - by the way, group quests aren't labeled as such in Aion). The templar and I fared much better against the small groups of bandits, though we still couldn't be entirely reckless. He ended up inviting me to a small guild, called a Legion. The game automatically added to my outfit a black cloth displaying my Legion's crest, which was a nice touch.


The grouping, legion, and raid interfaces look and function exactly like WoW from what I could tell from my brief overview of them.

You gain new combat abilities as you level, roughly every 2-3 levels. You gain the skills from books purchased from a trainer, which is nice because you can buy the books ahead of time if you expect to ding while out in the field, and start using your new abilities immediately instead of having to take a trip back to the capitol. So far I haven't encountered anything like talent points or other character customization options (though I have yet to discover what the "Stigma" pane, which looks suspiciously like the WoW Inscription pane, does). The closest thing is gear, which works along the same lines as WoW, with each piece giving certain stat bonuses and certain armor classes favoring certain stats. You start out with only a basic sword, pants, and shirt, but over time you'll fill up about a dozen slots with different pieces of gear. Gemming is in the game from the start, with even the earlier peices of white gear sporting a "manastone socket". Manastones drop randomly from mobs, and grant minor stat bonuses.

Itemization so far runs on a very sensible tier system. You can buy white gear from a vendor that is minimally appropriate for your level. The next step up is to craft white gear that has slightly better stats at the same equip level. After that are greens and blues, which escalate predictably. I don't get the impression that anyone is decked out in even all greens in their teens, given their rarity. Here's a shot of my character pane, showing my equipment and inventory, and demonstrating how the system auto-compares my loot for me, with green text denoting where the new shield is superior to my current one.


The stat system is quite a bit simpler than current WoW. Casters can improve their magic power and MP. Fighters like Attack bonuses, physical crit, and accuracy. Survival can be augmented through dodge, parry, shield block, physical resistance (in place of armor value) and magic resistance. It's pretty straightforward.


So far, the game is beautifully polished, combat is engaging, and though the questing is cliched and derivative, it is executed well. It's shaping up to be a nice alternative to WoW. Though I can't imagine it being anything close to a WoW-killer, it has the potential to be a really fun and worthwhile game. I can't wait to see how it develops as its release approaches.

I've run out of steam for today, but check back on Wednesday for Part the Second , wherein I will discuss tradeskills, the hub city, economy, flying, and Ascension!

Friday Laziness: Aion

Based on all the buzz I've been hearing on Ye Olde Internetworke lately, and especially a preview from Ixobelle, I've pre-ordered a copy of Aion. Aion is an upcoming MMO in which, to oversimplify, you play an anime version of a winged angel in what looks like a gorgeous fantasy world. From the looks of the website, it has a great aesthetic, a standard MMO levelling experience, a mixed PvP and PvE endgame, and clones all of the WoW classes except for druids and shaman. I'm pretty confident it will be worth as much to me as a single-player game at that price even if I only play for the first month. And better yet, pre-ordering gives me access to the beta events, so hopefully I can give you some more in-depth impressions to decide if you are interested in the game as well.

Between this and Champions Online both releasing in September, I wonder if I'll be able to fit WoW in anymore?