Aion Beta! (Cont)

Aion Beta : Day 2-3
I condensed day two and day three together on the sole purpose that I did not have the time to really test it on both days. As we speak, I’m at work typing this and it gives me time while Aion’s installing on the PC at work. But here are my thoughts so far.
-Always remember to look at the gearset you can wear and take advantage of this. I levelled 3 levels without realizing that I could wear one set higher instead of what I was currently wearing. It really helped when I saw that and immediately I could see the difference in armor. Armor in plate > Armor in chain

-The mobs are starting to hurt. Bad. It’s becoming increasingly dangerous and I’ve died a few times so far through these last two days. Learning the class and what to do (Skill Chain’ing everything together at the right time and using your CDs at the best of times) and what not to do (Doing an AoE attack in an area that has three mobs around you without realizing. And yes, 7m (can only presume they mean meters here cause Americans still are using the old school Imperial crap :P), you notice the difficulty for solo’ing ramping up. I can still solo but I need to rest a lot more on the Gladiator. Furthermore, they may want to implement some sort of faster healing method than ‘resting’. The system of resting is archaic at best and really slows progression down. The healing salves are useful but they may want to consider doing it every five levels instead of 10. I know 300 a heal with a 15 second cooldown makes for some downtime when you have 1.5k health.

-Something’s bugging me about the game at the moment. There’s this feeling that I’m almost at the end of my rope when it comes to solo’ing stuff when it’s directly related to the campaign. This is in a way understandable but sad. This means now I have to start grouping up because in no way can I deal with the mobs that I must deal with, as they’re hitting for double the damage that a mob my level would. It’s a shame but it’s fine. What’s bugging me is that I’m running out of quests to do by this point to actually get to level 20. That, I don’t like. Some of the quests right now simply cannot be done due to the fact they ‘re asking for a group requirement (They hit hard. And by hard I mean one mob takes a quarter of my health, and these are taking damn near all of it.) This leaves the player with two options: Group up and do it, which some people will be able to do just fine, or grind. For a person that doesn’t really feel like grinding, I find myself slightly discouraged by that notion and hope that this is just the small loop. Maybe a small hovel of quests at level 18-20 is in order. Something for NCsoft to look at during the downtime.

-The game is more and more visually stunning, having a bunch of interesting color and beauty to the whole thing. Water’s an amazing attribute to this game and it really looks amazing. The character when stationary will interact with the surroundings: Try being at a pool of water and watch what happens! Or when it starts raining, another good example. All and all, roleplayers could potentially work great magic with this and make a world even more beautiful by the sheer mannerism that roleplay could bring out.

-One thing that bothers me as well that really disrupts the beauty of the game is personal trades. Now, I’m all for this idea, however when you have chat bubbles all over Sanctum when you’re walking, it really ruins the atmosphere of the area and really is something based way back in the Ragnarok Online games. It really doesn’t belong in a game this stunning and they should take a look at this and work on perhaps using the graphics to their advantage: when a shop is made, a small post of sorts appears behind the character’s chair. Perhaps make an option with a cog to be able to click on these messages and see what the wares are. Yes, it kinda removes the point of yelling out what you have, but it would really remove the clutter. I could only picture a bunch of bored level 50 characters (I believe the cap is level 50 at this time, 25 in the Beta we’re test) with a bunch of chat bubbles flooding poor Sanctum.
The levelling thing is bugging me a bit. I’m not a huge fan of grinding and they’re really pushing to make the North American release as good as possible. If they fix the 18-20 hub, they should be able to fix at least the first 20 levels so you can get used to your class and start exploring other options in the game. Also, some sort of looking for group channel could be a good idea instead of seeing shouts in your screen about it. Put some work into those screen channel s and try to make something a little more useful than an All, Normal, Combat and Group tabs. They are redundant and really don’t serve much purpose (I also found out you can’t delete those tabs at all. You can create new ones but you cannot remove the first four. Lame. Least you don’t see the tabs all the time, only when you mouse over.) In any case, I’m so far happy with the game. I keep dying, but it’s fine, the death isn’t too bad to deal with.
For those who were wondering, my PC doesn’t have the greatest video card: nVidia GeForce 8500 GT. I’m running the game full screen with all of the settings at max and am experiencing no lag. The only form of lag really was server lag and that’s to be expected considering betas are meant as mini stress tests. Other than that, I could say I suppose that my system’s a powerhouse on it’s own, bar the video card: Intel Core 2 Quad, 8 gigs of ram...pretty solid stuff. However really, it runs smoother than WoW and asks for less. If you can run WoW well enough, this game should be no problem.