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.