Considering trying the game...but I'm going to wait a few months at least. So what's not so good about the game? What are its strengths as well?

Originally posted by left4shaman

basically its a game that I can get the same experience from F2P mmos.

Well said.

Hi-Yah!!

After many very mediocre mmo releases, this is a pretty good game I think.  I am only at level 15 on my highest character, but so far this is what I think.

Positives:

Pretty graphics.  I can run the game maxed out graphically and it still performs well.  Music is really good so far.  Customization is awesome.  If they add vanity clothing slots so you could just use appearance of clothing and keep underlying stats of armor that would make it even better.  Flight.  Addictive gameplay so far.

Negatives:

Levels.  Linear gameplay.  Log in que's, but I'm sure that will improve as they add more servers.  As far as I know, no mounts.  Vanity pets would be nice, but the game just launched so maybe in the future.  No housing.  Inventory space is too small in my opinion.  You can't change your appearance in game at this time, but supposedly they will offer changes via a cash shop.  I don't like paying for a service which I think should be basic to the game.

That's it for now.  I haven't gotten into the pvp yet.  I'm melee so maybe once I start playing maybe I will find pvp sucks and get frustrated, but I'm not there yet. 

The good:

- The engine is very good, and easy on system resources. Characters are better rendered than terrain, but its still very competitive with other top-list MMOs.
- Character appearance customization is Oblivion / Fallout-esque.
- Its a solid game. I see few bugs or typos, and everything -works-. That doesn't mean its awesome or immensely creative, but its not broken. Classes are balanced.
- They fixed a lot of minor gripes from earlier MMOs. Resting is more effective, controls and quests are more streamlined, etc.
- They did good things with the healer classes. Its more D&D style Cleric, with heavy armor and melee weapons. So, more people will play them.
- Flight is pretty fun. You can only fly in certain areas, though... and you get fatigued.
- There are crafting quests that have you craft things from provided materials, which saves money. Collecting and crafting gives you exp.
- There are actual dialogue cutscenes with your character. Haven't seen that done right since Guild Wars or FFXI.
- The armor and appearance options are cool. You can take one armor with the stats you like and combine it with another that you like the look of. You can dye stuff as well. Nobody looks stupid unless they want to.
- You can teleport between cities for a fee, like Guild Wars or Diablo. Makes playing quicker and easier.
- There are just barely enough quests to level on them alone, if you do them all. Otherwise, grinding is just as valid.

The bad:
- Its really not innovative. Like, at all. Questing and combat systems are nearly identical to EQ2 or WoW. The only change to combat is that moving in various directions affects defense and offense. Really, flight is it.
- Crafting is incredibly simplistic, but at least they make it easy on you - you can queue things provided by a crafting quest and go AFK. It will be a time sink, still.
- PvP is pretty much the later levels. And the potential to get ganked in mid-levels is almost always there, due to the rift system. You can only play pure PvE areas up to a point, and then you have to accept the risk of somebody bigger and meaner occasionally popping in on top of you. Of course, later on you can do it back...
- You lose exp during death, but on the plus side, there's no equipment decay. You can also buy the exp back (for a substantial fee).
- The voices are -horrible-. Well, I only deal with female characters, but... Maybe somebody will argue this. Its an opinion.
- The two factions worlds and primary quests are very similar to one another. They take the light vs dark thing pretty seriously.
- Gameplay is pretty linear - there is a main quest storyline along with side quests. Not sure how this evolves post 25.

Altogether, its going to keep me occupied for 6 months to a year until something I like more comes out. I recommend it if you're looking for a time killer for a while.

Originally posted by left4shaman

basically its a game that I can get the same experience from F2P mmos.

Please do not base your choice off the above poster - he has a LONG history of trolling Aion forums on here and trying to turn everyone away from it.

Originally posted by Kaocan

Originally posted by left4shaman

basically its a game that I can get the same experience from F2P mmos.

 

Please do not base your choice off the above poster - he has a LONG history of trolling Aion forums on here and trying to turn everyone away from it.

If the opinion of a game can be so easily swayed by a simple forum post, doesn't say much about said game.

Originally posted by Tisiphone

The good:

- The engine is very good, and easy on system resources. Characters are better rendered than terrain, but its still very competitive with other top-list MMOs.
- Character appearance customization is Oblivion / Fallout-esque.
- Its a solid game. I see few bugs or typos, and everything -works-. That doesn't mean its awesome or immensely creative, but its not broken. Classes are balanced.
- They fixed a lot of minor gripes from earlier MMOs. Resting is more effective, controls and quests are more streamlined, etc.
- They did good things with the healer classes. Its more D&D style Cleric, with heavy armor and melee weapons. So, more people will play them.
- Flight is pretty fun. You can only fly in certain areas, though... and you get fatigued.
- There are crafting quests that have you craft things from provided materials, which saves money. Collecting and crafting gives you exp.
- There are actual dialogue cutscenes with your character. Haven't seen that done right since Guild Wars or FFXI.
- The armor and appearance options are cool. You can take one armor with the stats you like and combine it with another that you like the look of. You can dye stuff as well. Nobody looks stupid unless they want to.
- You can teleport between cities for a fee, like Guild Wars or Diablo. Makes playing quicker and easier.
- There are just barely enough quests to level on them alone, if you do them all. Otherwise, grinding is just as valid.

The bad:
- Its really not innovative. Like, at all. Questing and combat systems are nearly identical to EQ2 or WoW. The only change to combat is that moving in various directions affects defense and offense. Really, flight is it.
- Crafting is incredibly simplistic, but at least they make it easy on you - you can queue things provided by a crafting quest and go AFK. It will be a time sink, still.
- PvP is pretty much the later levels. And the potential to get ganked in mid-levels is almost always there, due to the rift system. You can only play pure PvE areas up to a point, and then you have to accept the risk of somebody bigger and meaner occasionally popping in on top of you. Of course, later on you can do it back...
- You lose exp during death, but on the plus side, there's no equipment decay. You can also buy the exp back (for a substantial fee).
- The voices are -horrible-. Well, I only deal with female characters, but... Maybe somebody will argue this. Its an opinion.
- The two factions worlds and primary quests are very similar to one another. They take the light vs dark thing pretty seriously.
- Gameplay is pretty linear - there is a main quest storyline along with side quests. Not sure how this evolves post 25.

Altogether, its going to keep me occupied for 6 months to a year until something I like more comes out. I recommend it if you're looking for a time killer for a while.

Seems like one of the most unbiased views here.

My personal reasons for not liking it is that it doesn't really seem to play or even try to be any different than your standard F2P MMO. To me the UI has a cheap generic feel to it. It seemed like a narrow shallow game to me. 

You have two races. The only thing I saw to differentiate between them is the models. Everything, all the way down to your starter area was the same basic thing, except they used different textures. You start at the foot of a hill that has a small village on it. You do a few quests for the guy you start at. Then he sends you up the hill to the village where you get more quests. Which send you down the other side of the hill into the small area with a lake. Then on to the area with the forest, etc. To me, if both sides are so similar there is barely any replay value in my eyes. If the world was more wide open maybe. But basically you're on rails riding the train from one area to the next.

Some of the names of the mobs you kill were just, I dunno, they bothered me. 2 day sparky? Beyond mobs and npcs, the names I saw on some of the community while playing also told me I'd be playing with a more immature bunch than people claim WoW players are. I know not all of the people playing it are bad. overall it just seemed like an average game to me with 0 new ideas or even trying to change it up a little. There was nothing here I saw that I can't get elsewhere done better.

I give a big thumbs up to the music in the game. It's some of the best music you're going to hear from any game. There are what i like and dislike. It's just my personal feeling about it and I'm not claiming to represent anyone other than myself. You may like the game, just make sure you read before you buy it, or any game for that matter.

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Originally posted by jmccarthy14
Seems like one of the most unbiased views here.

---

Originally posted by Kaocan

Originally posted by left4shaman

basically its a game that I can get the same experience from F2P mmos.

 

Please do not base your choice off the above poster - he has a LONG history of trolling Aion forums on here and trying to turn everyone away from it.

Troll or not, what he said pretty much summed up the same way I feel about the game and I don't troll here. I just saw this thread on the main page.

Agreed.  He summed up everything I have been thinking about the game.

Lots of goods and some bads.  Some people will like it and others will not.  Pretty standard stuff.

I'm seriously considering purchasing this game myself. Though after reading a good sum of the posts in this forum, it seems most people consider this simply satisfactory, mildly entertaining. That is a big deterrent to someone considering shelling out cash for the game.

It's WOW 2.0 with more grinding and an asian atmosphere.   You like that ?  I dont.

Well I can only comment on what I experienced playing levels 1-17 in open beta, but it was enough to prevent me from buying the game.  It is not overwhelmingly bad by any means, and has quite a bit to offer that in my opinion will keep it around for a good long time.  It just never "clicked" with me as a game i wanted to invest money/time in.  To me personally, it all seemed to feel like nothing new.  I mean sure, the wings gimmick is somewhat cool, and i believe i read that at some point you actually can fly unlimited (in the Abyss i believe - correct me if I am wrong of course), but once i got my wings at level 10 and realized they were only good for 60 seconds at a time, even if it is only at lower levels, that was a turn off for me.  Then i realized that they are only usable in certain areas, which was also much of a negative point for me as well. 

I have played a slew of the so called asian grind fests, and the overall appearance of the game, while graphically it is an accomplishment, it looked like one of those to me.  I know it is quite a bit different from those games, but the gear especially reminded me of some of them and that was a downside.  Don't get me wrong, the game is beautiful, but has an overall Asian grind fest sorta look to it in my opinion, and also seemed to be lacking in the use of strong primary colors.  There are a lot of pastel hue's going on there which after a while get to me.  Maybe that is an odd quirk of my own personality or just the result of the few areas that i managed to explore, either way it bothered me.  Being a graphic artist myself I have noticed similar use of primarily pastel colors in other games, usually asian F2P games and that can attribute a small amount to why it looks like another one of those to me, even tho it isn't.  I am also not a big fan of a slew of player shops sitting around all over the place either, it seems a bit old and trite in MMO's not to mention somewhat superfluous given there is an auction house.  (I say "somewhat" because the obvious benefit being that you do not have to take a hit on your sales or leave a deposit such as you would when using the auction house.) 

Overall, i loved the class i was playing - Cleric - for it was extremely easy to kill everything i needed to.  This Includes accomplishing a lot of quests solo that i saw others looking for groups for, which leads me to believe the class was just overpowered, or all the balancing is achieved at end game only - not sure which.  I liked the way titles are incorporated into the game, something that some MMO's seem to want nothing to do with, or it is just impossible to gain them, but then again the ease at which they are earned is something that depletes their value quite a bit as well.  In other words, they seemed to easy to get and therefore almost meaningless.  Something has to be said tho for a title that gives statistical boosts, that is indeed refreshing and new (from what i have seen anyways.) 

I also took some time to explore the vendors in the main city which sold the end game PVP earned gear, since this is indeed a PVP oriented game.  I wanted to check out the rewards offered for earning accomplishments in PVP.  I will admit the statistics on the gear were quite enticing, and they seemed to offer goals for PVPers of all levels (once you reached 25 and were able to enter the Abyss and actually able to PVP to begin with that is - again correct me if I am wrong.)  But the overall look of the gear was not all that impressive to me.  Again not saying it looked bad, but when the starting gear is as elaborate as it is, the end game gear doesn't have much room for improvement, and that is how i felt about the gear in Aion.  That is also a common trait among some of the Asian grind fests i have played which give very lush looking gear up front to starting level characters.  

The main drawback for me however was the pure and simple fact that the game seemed to be almost two different games wrapped up into one, in that it would totally and completely change once i reached the PVP levels.  I am not a hardcore soloist, nor am I a hardcore PVPer, but i could not justify buying a game that i feel may drastically change once i entered the higher levels not really knowing exactly what it would be like in those levels (having experienced that in games before - not counting end game levels because they all change a bit once you reach "end game".)  I like to everything from solo PVE, group PVE, to solo PVP and group PVP, and my mood and amount of time i have to play during any given session determines which usually.  Because of this, I will usually play on PVE or even some RP servers.  I have had my fill of getting ganked by a group of the opposing faction while I am soloing a quest, and frankly didn't want to take a chance on getting to higher levels just to find out that is all that will happen if my quests are all in open PVP areas and i don't have the time/desire to group up.  Again, I only played to level 17 and never entered the Abyss and never experienced any PVP so I am not stating that is how the game is, merely that it didn't show me enough allure into taking that chance.  

To a certain extent, I suppose beyond my limited experience in open Beta, I am just like you and waiting a few months to see what others have to say, but I still hope I offered something to help you decide just the same.  

I bought Aion, played it till level 17 and quit.... It just wasn't for me, currently playing fallen earth and loving it.

as far as voices, ya the eng are horrid but there is a voice pack for kor/jap versions                                                                                               

socialnetworkincome.blogspot.com/2009/09/aion-changing-english-voice-pack-to.html

Originally posted by Eben

Originally posted by Kaocan

Originally posted by left4shaman

basically its a game that I can get the same experience from F2P mmos.

 

Please do not base your choice off the above poster - he has a LONG history of trolling Aion forums on here and trying to turn everyone away from it.

 

If the opinion of a game can be so easily swayed by a simple forum post, doesn't say much about said game.

13 FULL/ACTIVE/BALANCED servers speaks volumes.
 

Originally posted by left4shaman

basically its a game that I can get the same experience from F2P mmos.

I have played plenty of P2P MMOs and a few F2P MMOs.  I can assure anyone who has played AION and F2P MMOs knows this statement is simply put, false.
 

Originally posted by Tyvolus1

Originally posted by left4shaman

basically its a game that I can get the same experience from F2P mmos.

I have played plenty of P2P MMOs and a few F2P MMOs.  I can assure anyone who has played AION and F2P MMOs knows this statement is simply put, false.
 

Just go try Requiem: Bloodymare (F2P) and you will change your post, it's like ctrl-c and ctrl-v but with different fonts.