Post Beta Aion Impressions
Back when NCSoft was running closed beta weekends for Aion, Rynala and I played a little and enjoyed it greatly. Since it was only for the weekends, we did not spend too much time with our characters. We only ever got up past ascension to see if we enjoyed it.
We then downloaded and played the game a bit on the Chinese servers. With Rynala playing a Gladiator and myself playing a Cleric, we got up to about level 15 or so. The problem with both of these is that they were not the most recent versions of the game. Both servers were running the game at version 1.0. Korea was currently up to version 1.3 (version 1.3 would be renamed 1.5 for the North American release). For open beta this past week, NCSoft was running the game with version 1.5 and all the bells and whistles that came along with it.
The first couple days of beta were plagued with server and GameGuard problems so I did not even try to log in. Around Wednesday, I started an Elyos scout and played around a bit. The changes since 1.0 were minimal at low level since the patches mostly added more mid to high level quests, numerous dungeons, and content at the level cap. Either way, the experience was still a blast and I am anxiously awaiting release next week. In the mean time, I decided to list a breakdown of all the major features I like and all the major features I do not like or wish would be implemented.
Likes:
No Mods - I know this is probably one thing many people will not like about the game but I think it is a great feature. I have come to loathe mods. It came to a point in WoW where you cannot play anymore without mods. Be it raiding, pvp, crafting, trading, whatever. Unless you use mods, you are not competitive. Without mods, everyone is able to be on the same footing and we are all able to avoid the headaches of patch date mod updates.
Character Creation - The Aion character creator is hands down the most advanced I have seen in an MMO. The amount of customization is ridiculous. After playing around with Aion's character generator, it really makes the flaws shine out of other games. Plus, the variety of characters you see is hysterical. It gets tiresome to see everyone looking perfect and like a beautiful model. You can make some truly hideous looking characters. While some people may complain about not having different races, with the character creator, you can make just about any race you can think of.
Crafting Experience - I enjoy crafting. I usually always like crafting in games. One of the problems I have though is that crafting will often slow down my leveling pace if I focus on it. So getting experience from crafting is a boon for me. While leveling this weekend, one of my guildmates was talking about he got half way through level 24 just from crafting. While experience from crafting is not as fast as questing and killing, it is better than nothing.
Crafting Limits - Or better said: the lack of limits on crafting. With Patch 1.5, you are able to take all crafting professions from 1 to 399, but you can only take two to the 450 crafting cap. Taking a crafting skill to 399 will get you majority of the good things useful from your character all the way to the level cap. The 400-450 crafting content is just the highly specialized top of the line gear for the most part. The gear you craft from 400-450 seems only slightly inferior to the best gear of the game, but will take a mighty effort to craft it.
Crafting Usefulness - Crafting is useless in World of Warcraft until you reach the level cap. When you craft gear, you have usually already greatly outleveled it. From what I have seen in Aion, if you focus on just one or two crafting skills, you can craft pretty easily as you level. If you want to focus on every crafting skill, that might slow you down a good bit.
Trade Contracts - You can level your crafting from 1 to 399 without ever leaving the crafting district... that is if you have enough Kinah. Trade contracts are repeatable quests that provide you with the major crafting mats and only require you to buy the general crafting reagents that are purchasable from the nearby supplier NPC. The rewards are certain amounts of random crafting reagents or sometimes recipes. While it does get a little costly to constantly buy reagents, it means you never have to farm for materials unless you want to craft something for yourself and your crafting never gets left behind because you did not find enough resource nodes in the world.
Dislikes:
Chat Customization - You can create custom tabs and channels, but for some reason if you are in a private channel it will not save that setting if you log on, forcing you to rejoin the channel every time you play. I am not sure if this is a bug or intentional but hopefully it gets fixed. You can also not change the background opacity of the chat box. I do not like having no background to the chat box as it makes the text harder to read. I always keep a black background in games so this is a stark difference to me.
Interface Settings Between Characters - There are a lot of settings you can change but they do not save between characters. So for every new character you create, you have to redo all of your key-bindings and settings.
For the most part, my dislikes are fairly minor and often cosmetic things. Both the chat customization and interface settings changes could be easily patched in.
For those of you that have played, what are your major likes and dislikes?