I know there are a ton of these things out there and pretty much everything has been said in one shape or another about this game. There are a lot of haters and a lot of fan boys out there and while I am not either one, I thought I would share how I felt about the game.

First off, My system is about 4 years old so it could cause some of the small problems that I encountered.

Graphics in this game are very nice. The artistic style is not for everyone. I have played a few asian type games and feel that it pretty much falls within that style. Now, while my system is old, it was still able to run almost everything on high and for the most part, ran very smoothly. The only issues I ran across was some graphical glitches here and there, I.E. part of the ground disappearing when looked at by a certain camera view. Some jagged edges here and there but overall, I felt it was still very good.

Sound is a double edged sword. While some of my friends can play games all day long and have the sound turned off, I like to have the sound on and be able to hear everything going on. Overall the sound is fine but can get annoying at times. Some things typical of asian style games may or may not do well in the US. I think the two biggest complaints I have with the sound are:

1. I dont need to hear my character grunt,yell, chant, etc.. every single time I swing, block, cast a spell, or do anything that involves a click on the action bar. On a few occasions, I was talking to my real life friend on the phone while I was playing and my sound was not up very loud at all and it was even starting to annoy him listening to my characters grunting or chanting all the time.

2. The spiritmasters fire pet is down right annoying. Its loud and constantly making some type of loud humming sounds. God I hope they fix that.

Lag. Frankly, I did see some lag from time to time and even though my server almost always stated it was low in population, I really would have hated to see a high one as there was always tons of people around. Most of the lag I saw was very short. Small rubber banding issues where you might jump back a few feet and run forward again and longer than expected reaction times on casting spells/abilities. Some instances I saw it take up to 5 seconds for it to register my ability going again. Again, all of the instances above were very brief. Considering that I spent roughly about 22 hours or so playing this weekend, it was almost a blip on the screen compared to the rest of the time that it ran smoothly.

Gameplay. Well, what can I really say here. It played like your typical MMO. WASD keys worked fine, Point and clicked worked fine. I always end up turning off click to move because it can get very frustrating when your trying to click on an npc and your guy/gal goes running off past the npc your trying to talk to. I also found that if click to move was on, it seemed to disable one of the nice features that I liked about the inventory system and that was hovering over an item and it showing you what you currently have on, comparing it to the item your looking at. As soon as I turned off click to move, this feature started working and worked very well.

Like I said earlier, I spent roughly about 22 hours playing this weekend. I got 2 classes to level 11 a third class to level 16 and a forth class to level 6. I played a templar,ranger,Spiritmaster,cleric in the above order of levels. I found each of them to be fun to play even though by level 11 you really dont have many spells/abilities to use yet. The templar seemed to me, to be the lesser of the bunch. While it is supposed to be your meat shield, I sure did end up spending a fair amount of time severely hurt. I was really expecting the templar to take much less damage than it did. I was slightly disappointed in that but who knows how much better/worse it gets in the upper levels.

The ranger surprised me a bit. As long as your abilities were not on cool down, you could mow through stuff without a problem and take very little damage in the process. This was not due to kiting. The stuff I was fighting, I might get three arrows into them and go toe to toe with them till the end. Comparing the ranger and the templar, I can say the templar seemed to be the most cost in terms of upkeep. Lots of bandages in the early levels, trying to keep your gear upgraded throughout kept my templar pretty dry  of money. Even with rangers having to buy arrows, It was still far cheaper dealing with the ranger than it was the templar.

The spiritmaster was an interesting class. I have always been partial to pet classes and this one seemed fine as well. While I didnt have enough time to get my cleric all the way up to 10, By far, the spiritmaster was the cheapest class to play. In my 16 levels, I only died once and that was due to me grouping with some other guy and he got a few to many creatures on him and my pet. I did get the chance to try out the air,fire,earth pets. The air pet seemed pretty good if you wanted to kite some big creatures around. The fire pet did decent damage and didnt die as quickly as the air pet, but by far, the earth pet was the best in tanking, hands down! When you got enough DP to activate his 10 minutes of uberness, he was an unstoppable force going up against creatures that were 1 or 2 levels above me. Of course they all did very well under that same spell.

The cleric seemed decent to play. Mana costs did not seem very high for heals/buffs/damage spells. I did notice however, that the cleric seemed to get a lot more resists than my spirit master when it came to casting spells on creatures. I do not know if this is the developers way of trying to level out the playing field when it comes to a class that can heal itself, but I can say it felt like there was far to many resists to the smite spell. Who knows if I was just extremely unlucky, and it would have to be extremely as I usually had 1-3 resists almost every single fight. It seemed to be far more than I would have expected. But the class itself was pretty easy and fun to play. Buffing others on the run is always a good thing.

Frankly there is nothing new that they bring to the table. Yeah, you have the flight thing, but it seems to limited currently. And for spiritmasters, it could be a detriment as the only pet that was able to keep up with me was the air pet, many times he still also fell behind and poofed along with the others. Not a good thing for a class that relies on its pets to live, they go poof everytime you go flying or get a good glide going. Other than that, it pretty much plays like most other mmo's I have played before. The quests are pretty good actually, the cut scene are nice the first couple times you go through them but then your probably just going to skip them with your other characters. The UI does fine. nothing spectacular about it, it does its job. The one thing that I have always hated about asian type games and feel that it takes away from the overall feel its its free barter system that lets anyone setup shop pretty much wherever they want. It always makes towns laggy because everyone wants to setup shop right at the entrance of a town or right in front of the teleporters. If they would force that into its own zones and not subject everyone to the lag fest they create, it could vastly improve the quality of gameplay.

Overall I think I would rate this game around an 8.0 out of 10 in terms of early level game play. The later levels are yet to be determined but its enough for me to be anxiously awaiting for opening day.

 Issues I ran into:

A few very annoying things that does in fact bother me a fair amount.

Gameguard disables the g15 keyboard. Ok, I dont have a problem with that, but it also disables the display. Meaning if you have the clock up, it stops the time at whatever time you enter the game and doesn't release it till you quit the game. On friday, when I started playing, Even though once an hour it tells you that you should rest because you been playing X amount of hours, I would still look down at my clock and see, hey its only 6:39... I still got plenty of time. Oh I hate that.

Gameguard also disables my amBX lighting system. I downloaded aion many weeks ago as I was going to try out the beta and never got around to it. I did launch it a few times and my amBX lighting system actually did work. With their last big patch, it now does not. And for some odd reason which I have not tried to seek a solution to, gameguard does in fact die when the game first launches giving an error with a file that is in the aion directory (msvcr80.dll). Also, when exiting the launcher after playing, it does give the same error message now (well, I tried to load a newer version of the file into the directory to see if it fixed it but it didnt.)

Edit note: Changed 15 to 16 on spiritmaster and added issue I ran into.

 nice review..game gets sooo much better 25 +

I'm having a good time with it...with the exception of the sound effects.  The whole 'Bruce-Lee-getting-kicked-in-the-nuts' combat sounds gets real old, real quick.  Hope that is tweaked in 1.5.  Other than that, no real complaints. 

I agree, great review and you talked about many things I had questions about so that helps. Thanks!

Great Review...  That said I have a few hints on templar. 1 at least ear;y on slot green gear with Shield defense and +hp stones will make things go a lot easier. 2. When tanking figure out your attack order this can and will change depending on the mob you are fighting. Weaken > then 1st combo starter, then shield immunity , then all your other attacks , then block buff stance till your shield immunity is almost back up then start over.  This sometimes changes to combo starter then shield immunity,  then weaken on tougher mobs or mobs that cast high damage initial attacks. At higher lvls it will change again to your ranged attack first then one of those or a variation on those combinations. Don't forget to use that block stance after your shield immunity drops you can use shield stun to further damage and slow your target (those proc of blocks). Also don't forget to move your feet you get small buffs for block parry etc.. by moving vs. staying still. Also the active shield stun should be used only when you have to stop a mob from casting a really nasty attack or to finish off a mob if all your attacks are on cooldown.

     This is only what i have found out so far about the class (lvl 17 templar and loving it (but lvl 21 gladiator  :D). I am sure many with more class experience can give you better / more advice. But so far templar is fun and i haven't reallly run into cost issues i use the spell you get to heal (it uses lesser odellia or something) never use bandages they do cost a lot and the badages heal for less than the spell.

      One last thing don't forget to use your taunt to pull mobs till you get your ranged attack especially when soloing. Running in and aggro'ing a bunch of mobs WILL get you killed and your team wiped (unless its full of gladiators and a good healer...).

     - thats my 2 cents.....be glad i don't have a nickel

/carry on

Originally posted by DoomsDay01

Frankly there is nothing new that they bring to the table. Yeah, you have the flight thing, but it seems to limited currently. And for spiritmasters, it could be a detriment as the only pet that was able to keep up with me was the air pet, many times he still also fell behind and poofed along with the others. Not a good thing for a class that relies on its pets to live, they go poof everytime you go flying or get a good glide going. Other than that, it pretty much plays like most other mmo's I have played before.

I also found the flight a bit limited - it only working in certain zones irks me a little, but probably because I've played other mmos without those restrictions (eg. CoH).

But spiritmaster pets are fine going poof when you fly off. They're very quick to re-summon.

Originally posted by spdkilla

Great Review...  That said I have a few hints on templar. 1 at least ear;y on slot green gear with Shield defense and +hp stones will make things go a lot easier. 2. When tanking figure out your attack order this can and will change depending on the mob you are fighting. Weaken > then 1st combo starter, then shield immunity , then all your other attacks , then block buff stance till your shield immunity is almost back up then start over.  This sometimes changes to combo starter then shield immunity,  then weaken on tougher mobs or mobs that cast high damage initial attacks. At higher lvls it will change again to your ranged attack first then one of those or a variation on those combinations. Don't forget to use that block stance after your shield immunity drops you can use shield stun to further damage and slow your target (those proc of blocks). Also don't forget to move your feet you get small buffs for block parry etc.. by moving vs. staying still. Also the active shield stun should be used only when you have to stop a mob from casting a really nasty attack or to finish off a mob if all your attacks are on cooldown.

     This is only what i have found out so far about the class (lvl 17 templar and loving it (but lvl 21 gladiator  :D). I am sure many with more class experience can give you better / more advice. But so far templar is fun and i haven't reallly run into cost issues i use the spell you get to heal (it uses lesser odellia or something) never use bandages they do cost a lot and the badages heal for less than the spell.

      One last thing don't forget to use your taunt to pull mobs till you get your ranged attack especially when soloing. Running in and aggro'ing a bunch of mobs WILL get you killed and your team wiped (unless its full of gladiators and a good healer...).

     - thats my 2 cents.....be glad i don't have a nickel

 

/carry on

Thanks, I in fact was doing many of the things you mentioned on order of abilities. I have to say though that being able to afford green gear early on was not an option for me. Most green items I found ended up being weapons (on my ranger), My spiritmaster around 13 or so started finding some plate greens but my templar never found a green armor piece at all. The problem with the shield skill was that, while it did in fact block some of the damage, far more damage was getting through than I felt should have been. It is why I felt the templar was not the meat shield I was expecting it to be. It was still fun to play, and oddly enough, if I used a big 2 hander sword, I usually ended up taking less damage overall during the fight. Go figure lol...

Oh, I did add something to my original post about issues I had with gameguard...

Originally posted by green13

Originally posted by DoomsDay01

Frankly there is nothing new that they bring to the table. Yeah, you have the flight thing, but it seems to limited currently. And for spiritmasters, it could be a detriment as the only pet that was able to keep up with me was the air pet, many times he still also fell behind and poofed along with the others. Not a good thing for a class that relies on its pets to live, they go poof everytime you go flying or get a good glide going. Other than that, it pretty much plays like most other mmo's I have played before.

I also found the flight a bit limited - it only working in certain zones irks me a little, but probably because I've played other mmos without those restrictions (eg. CoH).

But spiritmaster pets are fine going poof when you fly off. They're very quick to re-summon.

In PVE, I agree. However, not knowing what the abyss has in store for a spirit master. I have seen videos of people flying and fighting, I think that could cause a serious balance issue with the spirit master in pvp.

Once again we see Gameguard causing various issues. What is it with Asian games that they insist on using this poorly coded app, rather than taking security seriously from the start of development? As I've long suspected, the decision to use GameGuard is likely made by suits, with little or no real knowledge of the technical side of matters.  Its a one stop, feel good bandaid to address issues that should have been dealt with at the very start of design.  MMO's are some of the most complex software that exists.  They do NOT need the added issues of poorly coded, intrusive apps like GameGuard.

mmmm, weird, gameguard would let my G15 work flawlessly this beta, I had problems on CBT4 but they were fixed for me at least.