A few weeks ago NCSoft released their latest MMO, Aion: The Tower of Eternity. Having got the chance to first see this game at GDC and wiggle my fingers through its incredibly beautiful guts, I was both trepidacious and excited to get to play it. Why was I so hesitant you ask? Aion reminded me too much of that gorgeous guy I had a crush on in high school. And just like that chisled chin and blue eyes, this game caught my eye immediately. I admit after playing with the character creator for an hour (or two) last year I had a bit of a crush. But crushes make me nervous, and I was worried that just like my high school crush, I would one day actually hear Aion speak, and realize it's not what it's cracked up to be.
And so I loaded the game with my guard up -- I admit it. But as it is with all love affairs, you have to start somewhere, even if that somewhere is from behind a barbed wire fence.
Hello Gorgeous
The first thing to love, again, is the character creator. Whether Elysian or Asmodian, the character you create is highly customizable. Highly as in I've seen no two characters alike as I wandered around the starting area. Here is where I started to let my guard down a bit. Honestly, this is a gorgeous game. There really isn't any other word to describe it. The visuals are breathtaking, even at lower settings. Turned up it's almost too beautiful. In fact, after a while the beauty that infested every square inch of the area was actually getting to me. I liken it to the Quickening system in Final Fantasy XIII. Since every action is shiny and spectacular, every spec of dust shimmers and every attack has some sort of glow or effect, alluva sudden nothing seems very spectacular.
The nay sayers out there will tell you I'm just reacting to the Elyos and their starting area, but in reality I started playing Asmodian first, and wonder at how fast I will reach this overload when I start a character from the opposing faction. My eyes might begin bleeding onto my keyboard. Only time (and rerolling) will tell. Really, though, you can't fault a game for being too beautiful. Et tu Folkflore?
If you have the graphical capability, the game will also treat you to a series of helpful little cut scenes as you quest. The cut scene system is also used to progress the story in incredibly fun ways, but that's all I'm going to say about that.
Intelligent design
I love it when a game makes me say "well isn't that smart," and Aion accomplished this in multiple ways. First, the user interface is a dream of simplicity and efficiency. Not only is everything easy to read and understand, the choice to put the mini map at the bottom of the screen enables you to see more of that stunning world of theirs without it getting chopped up by UI elements.
The brilliance of the UI design also continues into the quest tracking system, which pops up the quest in the upper right hand corner of your screen and gives you a few seconds to decide if you want to track it or not. While this might seem a small thing to some, for MMO players this streamlining of elements translates to less time spent navigating menus, which means more time spent actually playing the game.
Knowing that this was originally a Korean game, I am fairly impressed by the localization. In reading through quest text I found only one grammatical error, something you will often find even in English-only MMOs. The dialog leans toward the overly flowery language you expect to see in fantasy games, but at least that gives you something interesting to read while you're questing.
Even more impressive is the game's engine and server structure, which operates almost lag-free. Also, players can switch between server instances at a whim, which means that if a certain mob is being camped, you can switch over to an instance with a light population load and kill it with impunity.
A tad too basic
When you strip away the visuals and the UI, Aion is at its core a standard Lineage-based MMORPG. The quest structure is all elementary (kill x of this, collect y of that), something that stands out like a sore thumb when other MMOs are being so inventive with their quests. At its core this is still a grinding game, and the quests will only get you so far. The class balance isn't really an issue, since everyone is overpowered. I started playing a mage, and had absolutely no trouble bringing down things more powerful than I. That is to say, there isn't much glass in my cannon.
There's a lot in this game that normally would bore me. I love questing, I hate grinding. I love the deeper storylines, and the lore of Aion is a bit heavy-handed, and at times too convoluted, for my taste. Angels and Demons? Ya, we get it. I'm not sure why though, but I find myself enjoying the game. Perhaps all the intelligent innovations on the upper levels of the design make up for the basic go-kill-loot-repeat structure. Maybe it's just pretty enough. Maybe I really, really like to fly. I'm going to see. But so far, this one has snuck up on me and made me like it. Dammit.
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