We’ve played many an MMO over our gaming career, and have more than a few MMORPGs as notches on our belt, but one that has always passed us by has been Aion; whilst familiar with the game and seen various aspects of it, this reporter in particular has never sat down and actually played the game from the beginning. We thought it was about time that this changed and so we put aside more than a few hours to begin our first foray into the game and give some first impression thoughts on a game that was released over 6 years ago.
When starting out it was clear that we didn’t, by any means, have any intention of judging this game for how it was when it was released, the kind of impact it had back then, and instead decided to ask “How does it hold up now?”. At the end of the day the game is still around, it still wants new players to join it, so why should they join a six year old MMORPG if there are newer games out there? That was want we were curious about… was the game worth playing?
To start with whilst the class choices are varied, giving players six classes with two primary subclasses (which do seem to greatly change the role), there are only two races/factions available, furthermore your faction chose it locked to your server (and linked servers) so that you can’t have characters from both factions on the same server. Faction locking isn’t a bad thing, but the lack of factions is a shame, though the two choices are quite pivotal to the over-arcing storyline. What does make up for this lack of choice is the appearance customization which is pretty extensive, lots of colours, sliders and pre-generated features allow you to make some pretty crazy looking characters, our own was a huge skinny Azmodian with an enormous head, hands and feet to match, with purple skin, bug eyes and a massive red afro; more than once other players stopped and stared at what we had made… we spent so long seeing if we could we didn’t stop to ask if we should…
The game follows a very traditional questing setup, and traditional is exactly what you would expect of a 6 year old game where going from one NPC to the next, picking up “Kill X enemies” or looting containers for items was all the rage. Nowadays, whilst it’s still done at an alarming rate, we personally like a little more from our quests than going to an area, completing a quest, going back to the NPC to hand it in, then being sent back to the same area with the next part of the quest… It’s extremely boring and extremely dated. This constant back and forth was made all the more painful by our presumed reduced running speed which had a very plod along pace; we did have a 30% speed buff item with around 20 uses that brought us up to a normal pace for 4 minutes. This was very annoying, it feels like the developers have deliberately made getting around harder for free to play accounts, giving us the speed buff is there way of saying “look how fast you COULD be if you just pay some cash”, we hate it when developers take from players and make things more difficult instead of just adding to premium accounts and making things easier than normal.
In combination with the above was the “WTF…” moment we faced with the teleporter/hearthstone type shrines dotted around the map located at the main camps. Our first encounter with them informs us that we can bind ourselves to these statues (for a small fee) and use our stone item to recall to them, we stayed bound to one of the early settlements as even though the quests took us way further there were still times that it wanted us to go all the way back to the camp, which would have taken about 5 minutes to run there. It took us until level 8 to realise that actually as well as binding to the stones you could activate them from the map and teleport directly to them for a charge, binding to them just allowed you to keep returning to the same one for free… this really was not made clear and would have saved us a hell of a lot of time and running around.
Unclear or unintuitive mechanics was the biggest frustration for our time playing Aion. The quest journal took a long time to make sense, the different icons and quest colours made no sense at first (again, taking us nearly the length of our test session to work it out). There is an active quest tracker to show what quests you have that was just a pain to use, with different tabs (that had no meaning to us) that didn’t always show all your available quests by default. The number of times we went to an area to clean up a quest, went back to the NPC to complete it to then find we still had another quest back there and had to return was ridiculously annoying. Quest givers with multiple quests would close the dialogue box when you got a quest, forcing you to reopen the dialogue to get the next one… it was just a pain. We got used to all of this, we worked it all out, but we’ve played MMORPGs for the best part of 18 years and Aion just didn’t make things particularly easy.
Combat in the early levels was pretty lacklustre, with only a handful of skills to use it was just a case of firing off the same combos for the best part of 5 hours and killing enemies that provided no challenge. If your early game content is going to be easy for new players, then it should at least be fun. The quests themselves, whilst well written, were kind of lame and lacked the action we like to be dropped into the middle of; going stealing grain or collecting feathers to make a coat and flowers from the lake to make a bouquet don’t exactly scream “epic adventure”. The only exception that piqued our interest was the cinematic elements that gave us a flash forward of some future visions where we were fighting in the Abyss, hinting that we had a long journey ahead of us, it came with a small battle that mechanically was boring and short lived (and pretty pointless) in comparison to the cinematic that followed. Hitting level ten we had just picked up our class specialization; an Aethertech, where we could summon a walking mech tank and ride around in it that gave us some extra abilities.
Shortly after this point we were rapping up, we did manage to go to the first area where we could experience flight, which we believe would be pretty interesting in combat, but movement was really clunky and stiff; it didn’t feel like you were hovering when you were stationery, just that you were frozen in mid-air. We’d have loved to try out PVP, but it would appear that this (among other features) are something reserved mostly for later levels and PVP at level 10, whilst possible, is typically only through random rifts that appear in the world.
Aion isn’t a bad game overall, the problem is that it is just very dated; the gameplay style is very old school, the graphics are dated, unlike other older MMORPGs that have reworked the game to try and keep with the times Aion seems perfectly happy staying as it is and keeping its current playerbase happy. For those new to the MMORPG market then it wouldn’t be the worst game to play for them, they would thoroughly enjoy it, though there are far better MMORPGs out there to play instead. For anyone who has quite a lot of experience playing MMORPGs already we’d say Aion is one to give a miss if you haven’t already, it offers a classic experience that for us just isn’t that fun anymore.
CONCLUSION
- Graphics: 6
- Performance: 7
- Gameplay: 7
- Pros: Impressive character appearance customization, decent number of classes, interesting story-arc.
- Cons: Traditional/dated gameplay style, graphics aren’t up to par, unintuitive mechanics.
Score: 6.5
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