Well I was among those whom got to experience AION's first beta event for the US/Euro crowd. I admit i was starting to get a bit ticked when I hadnt gotten my key yet and I was a guaranteed beta tester before this site got their keys. But its all cool and I got mine i time to play.
First off...the graphics are just beautiful. Thankfuly my vid card was compatable to the game engine. I have one of those newer ATI HD Radon 4800 cards and some games have issues with compatablity cause they are in the process of adding the new HD vids specs to their game codex. One warning ...several of the older NVIDIA cards do NOT work well with AION. Makes you all green, blue and red. NCSoft support says its an issue they are currently working on and should be patched by the September US/Euro release.
Now on to game play. Before your ascension at level 10, you will see alot of simulariteis in game play as to that of EQ2, Lineage 2 and Guild Wars. The quest setup is a good example. Also the Scout profession seems to me to be setup like the origial EQ2 scout profession where at level 10 you decide between ranger and assasin. At first it looksl ike you are limited to 4 professions but at level 10 each splits into two choices so actually there are 8.
Now I have heard alot of nae-sayers lable AION as an asian grindfest. It is far from that. Much of your xp comes from quest kills. Yes I would higly recommend kililng a few extra during those quests since I think the quest xp is a lilttle stingy. But its by no means an grindfest..
Flight combat...I didnt get to experience much on this due to time contraints on my end but what I did was spectacular. This alone in my opinion sets the game appart from anythign else out there.
Crafting..yes folks there is crafting in this game. You do have to gather resources simular to how you do in EQ2 and WoW. So if you are into crafting,..this game has something for you as well. I tried the crafing system out and found it fairly user friendly least to me. Im a crafter in sevreral games and suffered through that mess Vanguard originally called crafting so I picked u on this pretty quick
Housing..currently there is no player housing but we are being told its in the works for releas sometime in 2010.
Overall, AION so far looks to be a great game to play. It combines elements from serveral successful game francises plus it has that unique arial combat so it does have somethign for jsut bout everyone.
