Having been addicted too World of Warcraft since the day it found its way onto our games shelf, I thought it was time for a change. That change came in the shape of Aion: The Tower of Eternity.
I had played a couple of Beta weekends, and at first, I was not really that impressed. During these weekends, I had to endure the usual pain and aggravation of the 12 year old boys running around ‘loling' and clicking duel on every person they see, no matter their class or level. This is something we all have to face when starting a new MMO, and Aion was no exception. Still, I dug my heels in and persevered.
Today, I find myself in the ranks of a very large, and widely well know Guild within the MMO world, I have entered pre-selection stage and reserved some names for my characters. Tonight's(20^th sept) the night, at 8pm, I will be able to fight against thousands of other like minded people as we battle against the Lag Gods to try and enter the Aion world and gather those first few quest items.
As time wears on, and the starting areas become less and less frequented with new players and old players of high levels trying to duel with the ‘noobs', I then have to face a second challenge. This challenge is one that all females have to go through in order to gain their status in the gaming world when the game at hand is online. "Pic/Voice or not true!"
Yep, the old "are you a real girl" slowly begins to trickle into any conversation you have with another player.
Now, I can completely understand the reason for males choosing a female character to play in a game, they are fantasy games, so you can be whatever you want and staring at a girls behind during your game play would be hell of a lot easier on the eyes than some incredible hulk sized ass bounding about in front of your screen.... At the same time, give us some slack guys?
There ‘are' female gamers out there, and yeh, sometimes we play a female character! Do we really have to ‘prove' ourselves to every male out there by jumping on Skype/Vent/TS or sending the usual "here's me" pic of us sat in front of our PCs just so you can get a kick from knowing the female character before you is played by a female?
Anyway, I digress - Aion. So far, I have been a little put out by the lack of different races. I know you can customize your character to have green skin, pointy ears, and even horns! But that is not the same as actual different races.
Everyone still looks the same, not in the sense of exact copies, but running around the game, we all look the same. Same armour, same stance, same spell casting, but maybe that is just because I have played Warcraft for such a long time and I am used to the various races that you find in most MMORPGs like Lord of the Rings, Warcraft, Lineage , etc.
I could not fault the spawn times of mobs, especially in the start areas where 50 people are all chasing the same single type enemy for a quest item, that, I was definitely happy with.
The questing was a nice pace, the leveling so far has been fun with no worries about ‘spending' of points, all that is taken care of automatically.
Overall, it seems like your typical MMO that comes out of Korea, same clunky user interface, same graphics, same landscapes, strange variation on the enemies where they appear to have taken two animals and thrown them together, like Kangaroo/Rabbit hybrids, but it still works well.
Tonight will be the final test and after some bad errors during the pre-select stage, most of which were the standard and to be expected faults that come with any game of the genre when its first released en mass.
I shall fully expect to not be able to log in until 2hrs after the announced ‘Live' time. By then, I will have had time to reflect on the good old days from Warcraft, and prepare myself for even better days of Aion... hopefully.
A new adventure awaits!
It sounds extremely derivative and appears to push few boundaries.