Aion: Impressions from Closed Betas #4 and 5

It's been a few hours since the server shutdown commemorating the end of the 5th closed beta test for Aion, and as of right now, my thoughts on the game are somewhere between cautiously optimistic and enthusiastic. On the one hand, the game didn't seem to have anything particularly compelling. In damn near 20 levels (out of the maximum 50), I didn't find one thing that hasn't been done in another game. On the other hand, the only time I felt genuinely let down was when I discovered that flying is constrained to a few select areas. The game has been going strong in Asia for quite some time now, and it really shows; despite being a beta, the only flaws I could find were related to the localization.

In beta #4, I spent most of my time playing an Elyos sorcerer. Sorcs are the glass cannon of the game, and the class certainly delivers on both fronts. The kind of damage that a sorc can dish out is jaw-dropping, and it comes equipped with the standard compliment of control and escape spells to (hopefully) avoid getting your squishy ass blown up in 5 seconds (not an exaggeration). The class plays like a mixture of a WoW mage and a Guild Wars elementalist, with a good blend of nukes and instant casts. Like all classes, the sorcerer utilizes various ability chains, which is (imo) a much more effective way of limiting the power of various abilities. For instance, early on, you receive an instant cast, 30 second cooldown spell which does decent damage and knocks your target down, but it can only be used within a few seconds of your 2 second cast ice nuke/snare. The class was fun, but too fragile for my tastes.

In beta #5, I played a gladiator, which is a warrior of the no-frills, smash stuff with a 2-hander variety. The class makes much more extensive use of the ability chains than the sorc; by level 19 I had two different 3-move chains. One interesting aspect of the class is that you actually make a solid tank while wielding a 2-hander, thanks to the ridiculous amount of parry that the two handed swords and polearms have innately. I'm sure the class won't be a viable main tank in endgame PvE, but for leveling, a gladiator gets the job done just fine. Damage output was also quite respectable, and the class has a variety of knockdowns. I have a feeling that this will be one of the mainstay classes in PvP.

The crytek engine ensures that the game looks relentlessly pretty while still running on my 5 year old computer (albeit barely). Even with the bare minimum detail settings and a resolution below my monitor's native 1680x1050, this is the best looking MMO I have ever seen.

Zone layout and quest design felt very solid overall. Things progressed at a natural rate, and there was only one time where I ran out of quests and had to grind out monsters for half a level. Quests are the standard "kill X of Y and then talk to Z" that we've all come to know and love, but they were well organized and rarely felt tedious. Quest hubs were well dispersed and easy to find. Also, in a stunningly intelligent move, the game can locate virtually any NPC or "pick this up off the ground" item for you, eliminating the need to alt-tab into a browser window to look up the location of that quest goal who's location was not adequately explained in the text. Levels came on at a slow but satisfying pace, and each level up brought a noticeable and rewarding boost in power.

Flying is a ton of fun, and you can do it within your first few hours of playing. Even in the zones where you can't fly freely, you can still jump off a tall object and glide around for a good amount of time. The control felt natural, and I have high hopes for the aerial combat, though I have yet to really experience it.

One pleasant surprise was a lack of instances. Perhaps they are there at higher levels, but there was not a single one in the first two zones for either race. If things stay that way, I think that the endgame could be very promising; WoW largely lost its charm for me when Blizzard started instancing everything under the sun. If NCsoft manages to cultivate the sort of spontaneous, open-world PvP that used to happen in WoW, they would have at least one happy subscriber.

Of course, the game is not without its drawbacks. The style is typically East Asian. Women are cute and girly, men are slightly less cute and girly, armor for both genders is revealing and feminine, and the animations are hugely over-the-top. I prefer a more gothic* style to my fantasy games personally, although the azn-a-rific styling isn't enough to put me off of a game by itself.

Also, as mentioned, the flying is disappointingly limited. I had assumed that a game which advertises the fact that your character can fly would actually let the player, you know, fly. Instead, the vast majority of the areas I encountered would only allow you to glide off of a high point. The reason is obvious, of course: players would bypass content if they could fly everywhere. But to my mind, this kind of reasoning represents the height of developer arrogance. If people are bypassing your content, then the solution is to make better content that your players won't want to bypass. I bought this game in part because I liked the idea of 3D combat, and it was disappointing to see such a good concept be so under-utilized.

The UI is also barely adequate. It certainly looks nice, but the functionality feels very hacked-together. Even in the default configuration, it is common to have important displays covering each other up.

Additionally, while it may be seen as a good thing to some (and I am of a more or less neutral opinion on the matter), the game starts to become very unfriendly to solo play in the late teens. This was a bigger problem in the beta than it will be on live, since the developers had global channels (including the looking for group channel) disabled, and the LFG interface is pretty poor.

And finally, the in-game auction house is mediocre, at best. It lacks any sort of powerful search system, forcing you to sort through 20 or 30 pages of low level stuff to find things you might want to use. On top of that, there is a limit of roughly a dozen items that you can put up for auction at any given time. This limit is somewhat compensated for by the fact that you can list something for sale to other players directly from your inventory, however effectively using this feature requires you to idle in a busy area, lagging the place up for anyone trying to get something done.

On the whole, though, the game was enjoyable. I'm hoping to make it to the abyss in the final closed beta, so that I can see whether the PvP is worth the price of admission, but on the whole, I feel that my pre-order was money well spent.

*As in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gothic_art, not the pussy kids that dress up like vampires.

Why I will always be a PC gamer

People have been decrying the end of the PC as a gaming platform since the original Playstation was released (and probably even before that). Looking at the current generation of titles, it isn't hard to see why; there are precious few AAA PC-exclusive titles, and the power of the current generation of consoles has hit the point where you really can't tell that PC physics/graphics/etc. are "better" without a lot of scrutiny. And the increasing multimedia capability in machines that, even at the high end, are cheaper than a new gaming PC, makes the price gap harder to justify. Hell, you can buy an Xbox 360 for the same price as a new mid-range videocard.

But despite all of this, there is one critical thing PCs have that no console will ever possess: an open platform. The PC is not controlled by any one company, and is sold with the intention that the user will have a very great deal of control over how the hardware and software is used. With the advent of the internet, this capability is, to me, the defining feature of the PC as an entertainment platform. User-made content such as mods, additional levels, new skins, widescreen patches, and more help add longevity to today's titles, and can breathe new life into the classics of yesterday.

As an illustration, let me talk about my current replay of Final Fantasy VII. This is one of the classics of gaming, and yet the PC version is practically the definition of "shitty console port"; the graphical options are severely limited, the music is done in horrible-sounding MIDI, and several areas of the game still bear the Playstation's circle-X-square-triangle button designations. The videos are forced to run off of the CD, leading to some nasty lag in the game when one of the hundreds of FMVs is queued up. Worst of all, the minigames lack a CPU limiter, so on a modern computer, they run so fast as to be unplayable (the motorcycle game can be over in a matter of seconds)! The game was widely panned solely on the basis of this sloppy porting job. And yet, for the PC gamer with an internet connection, some time spent googling, and a bit of patience, the game today is better than the PS1 version!

Fans of this classic, especially the community over at Qhimm, have done marvelous work restoring and enhancing the game. Some quick poking through the registry revealed that the path to the videos can be altered, allowing you to copy and paste the files from the CD to your hard drive, giving instant load times. The old 640x480 max resolution has been obliterated by an ingenious hack that allows for any resolution you could possibly want, even widescreen (albeit of the "black bars on the side" variety). Another program allows you to replace the low quality MIDI music with either the original Playstation music files, or your own set of MP3s (say, a CD rip of the original soundtrack, which sounds gorgeous). Think the game is too easy? There are hard mode mods. Think the 9999 limit is bogus? That can be hacked away. Hate the blocky, no-hand models on the field map? There's a hack to replace the main characters with their battle models, and some players have even started an ambitious project to completely re-make every NPC model with a higher polygon count. There's also a mod that just adds hands. There's even a project to add a full voice script. All this on top of the dozen or so fixes for the shitty porting job. None of these patches requires anything more intimidating than editing a text file or modifying a few registry keys.

There are countless other such hacks, fixes, and projects out there, for a myriad of PC games. Any title with enough fans likely has a similar community out there, keeping their favorite games alive and poking around to find ways to enhance them. This kind of thing simply isn't possible on a closed platform like a console, and it never will be unless Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo want to give up their hardware monopoly (not likely).

And that is why the PC will remain not just a viable platform, but a great one. And also why it will continue to be my platform of choice.

EVE Update

Atlas, Sc0rched Earth, and the Curse coalition have pretty much broken the once mighty Red Alliance, capturing their home system of C-J6MT, and locking down untold billions worth of assets in the process. Admitidly, our efforts were assisted greatly by a failed internal coup, but given the progress we had been making in Insmother, that only accelerated the inevitable. With KenZoku finnaly out of the picture, Goonswarm and Pandemic Legion (mostly PL) are now starting to bring us the fights that our pilots have been hungry for. So hungry, in fact, that they took a sniper BS gang that was lacking in support out to fight a PL sniper HAC gang. Oops.

It will be interesting to see see what happens to the political landscape now. Already, the drone regions have gone through a bit of a shakeup, with XIX resetting Intrepid Crossing and Etherial Dawn. And while nobody ever believed the NC/Goon/PL NAP-fest when they said they would reset each other after BoB/KenZoku were dead, stranger things have happened. The only thing that makes me nervous is seeing how Atlas will fare on the defensive. We have proven to be quite the powerhouse on the offensive, to the point that we literally scared away most of the fights we could have gotten in Detorid and Insmother. But we are fairly untested in defending space, and most of our recent acquisitions are not yet fortified.

On the carebear front, my Caldari missioning alt is finally through with level 1 missions, and is now owning the hell out of level 2s in a pimped-out Caracal that I haven't even insured because 3/4ths of the value is in the modules. I must say, I really enjoy the change of pace that pounding through a few missions can provide. It is also pretty crazy what a huge difference all the tech II modules make; missions that broke the tank on my poor little Maller can't even drop the passive shield tank on my Caracal below 40%. I can't wait to see what a Drake will be able to do.