Aion Beta!

Aion Beta: Day 1 (Warrior/Gladiator - Level 14)

- Stunningly beautiful game, the entire game itself has color and life and gives a great sense of beauty and well designed art. The title screen merely shows the potential of the game, whereas going into the game shows a whole lot more. Quite comparable to FFXI's art.

- Starting area is seemingly crowded, with adequate reason. To help out with the release, NGSoft should consider raising the refresh rate of the beginning area's mobs slightly. Tons of people looking for those bags of oats will make for a very messy beginning if people stay there.

- Skill Chaining - Really awesome way to enjoy the fighting. With WoW, it is simply hitting a rotation or hitting buttons that are assigned to keys. With the Warrior class, you have to chain your attacks in succession to actually be able to use better skill. Skill chain 1 links to 2. Using Shield Block usually will give you more chances to block, thus activating a Shield Slam ability. Unlike WoW however, this one stuns! And does a massive amount of damage to boot.

- The fighting is fluid and nice to follow, however you'll notice some lag issues here and there from time to time. Reports have indicated that sometimes there are lag spikes between skills that really don't help chaining them together. As Chaining is a really nice part and somewhat essential for damage dealing, you would want to look at the reaction time between both.

- The idea of putting mini cutscenes is an amazingly good idea and the story drives you to want to learn more about your character. It is a well thought view, seen a lot in FFXI, and the scenes are actually pretty kickass!

- Character Customization....wow. So many options. This rivals The Sims 3's ability to change everything so you can have a unique feel to the class.

- Quests are interesting, but definitely not enough information in your subquest. There is no indication as to where the items could potentially be, nor does the "Locate" button really help out much. (Either gives you the entrance to the area in question or sometimes doesn't work.) Also, it is not very noticeable when you must find quest items. The quest refinement should be done in the idea of helping players know what they're looking for. Sitting for a half hour trying to find a pig when there are no indications as to where the pig would be remotely located is pretty dumb.

- Sanctum is pretty damn awesome. Really well done and prettied up for those Eylos folk. Big too, makes for some interesting areas to sit.

- The four beginning chat tabs are a bit excessive. I usually sit myself in the group chat and added my Legion to that bubble. This filters the combat chat. The All one is really really annoying and getting spammed by messages is just irksome. I've already deleted the extra ones out and simply keep Group with Legion turned on and Combat. This will be enough information if I need to look at something.

- Solo'ing is pretty easy, and so long as you're smart, you could take on two things at once without dying, of your own level. Every class has it's ups and downs but you gear accordingly and help yourself to that. Potions and healing accessories such as bandages are your friend. (Even though at one point they tend to only heal about 1/6th of your health. ><)

- The rez system is actually a pretty neat one. It follows a FFXI style of release with a WoW penalty. This penalty however can be removed by paying gold, and that's your cost for dying. Either wait it out or quickly get rid of it. Gold is easy enough to obtain in the game so dying may not have really much of an impact other than being warped to some other place.

- The trade section is nice but I'm not sure how a personal trade and an AH together will work out. One of them may not be completely used or we'll have a lot of people sitting by the AH and placing their wares there. It's an interesting concept however all those chat bubbles are irritating. Speaking of chat bubbles, get an option to get rid of that. (Haven't found an option to remove this.)

- What I found great is that you have many 'instanced' areas and may not always be in the same area as your friends. However upon entering a group together, you can key yourself to the group leader's zone and play together. I found this option to be really neat and a great way to try to keep the server relatively stable by splitting people from each other and assigning them to different 'instanced zones' so there is never too many people farming the same creatures.

- Really, the only complaint are the quests as I don't think the log really helps out enough. It really is not informative at all and as much as giving the option of clicking on important details is nice, it doesn't give enough. And with a new world where creatures have different names, it is very hard to find a creature by a name we're not used to and for them to assume that we know what they're talking about. Anyone who remembers the Pig scenario as an Eylos in the Kobald section could agree that we had NO idea what the hell his pet was until we accidentally stumbled on the pig itself.

- The game locked up on me..twice I think in the 13 hours I played. Not too bad for a beta, and one was just a connection drop. The other was a crash. Nothing too major to report there.