Played the open beta for a couple of hours yesterday and I like it so far. The graphics are nice and I like the way your character is presented in the storyline. I played Asmodian and so far I have made it to level 12 as a Ranger.
It's certainly prettier than WoW. I wonder if the gameplay and community will ever match it however. WoW's graphic engine is woeful: They've been resting on their laurels for far too long. I'm downloading the bloaty 9GB Aion as we speak.
Only issue I've had so far is the lag. Tried a few servers, but they were all spiking between 300-1700ms. I've played at some points without any lag, so it's pretty annoying. When it isn't lagging, the game is amazing.
More beta keys came out today. All the Eurogamer ones are gone but FP And Boomtown still have a few: http://eu.aiononline.com/uk/news/more-european-open-beta-keys-are-on-their-way.html
It looks really nice. I have some issues however. You can't intuitively switch between controlling your character with the mouse, or keyboard. By default, you can't run/steer JUST with the mouse... you need keyboard and mouse. In order to run and steer with mouse, you need to disable left button camera look. However, once you do that, you can no longer look around while running in a straight line.... annoying when you're being chased, or just just want to look behind. You have to stop in order to do that... NOT good if you are being chased. In Wow you inevitably end up needing both, and being able to switch between mouse and keys to move depending on what you need to do at any give time. Aion makes this difficult. Everything in buried in menus instead of being an icon on the UI. Sure.. you can keybind them all, but unless you're a lame ass "clicker" you'll be keybinding your spells and abilities, and using up 14 keys just to access your character sheet, or other item on the UI interface is not something you want to be doing. There's no in game co-ordinate system, so if you want to tell someone where something is, you have to rely on linking them a cross on their map. You can group with people on your friends list even if they're not in the same channel, resulting in a great deal of confusion when you can't actually see them in game. It's too easy. Mobs hardly attack you at all, and your aggro radius is pitifully small for such a low level. It takes an age to load. I've heard rumour that their game guard system uses a rootkit.. no idea if that's true or not, but worrying. Rumours that game guard will make it almost impossible to develop addons later (something that is unthinkable now in WoW). Because it's clearly a WoW rip off.. in game chat consist of nothing but talk of WoW. Although it looks nicer than WoW, it doesn't play as well as WoW. I feel the cry engine lends itself to photorealism better than the cartoon style graphics they've used to copy WoW with. It's too close to WoW... and I don't see the point in paying for a Flawed Wow copy, just because it looks better.
I was in the beta. It was ok. Nothing more, nothing less. Right now I'm playing Champions Online, now that's silly levels of fun.
I too have heard worrying stuff about gameguard. I agree about most of the above points apart from taking a long time to load. I've found it to be very acceptable on my rig which is an old E6300 @ 2.8Ghz with 4GB ram. Of course load speeds is down to personal perception of what is slow I guess. I find that Aion fits closer to WAR than WoW, once again all down to play styles etc. That and my vengeful hate for WoW.
Weird. You on Vista 64? Overclocked i7 here... 6GB... 2.5Tb of disk space free... HDDs that shift over 120MB/sec sustained... and it takes over a minute to load. It's the only piece of software I have that takes this long. I wonder what it doesn't like about this rig?
Win7 64 here. PC's are PC's though, weird randomness all over the place The other half couldn't get the beta installed untill removing all the data from her temp folders, the installer just hung half-loaded. Gotta love the world of PC's!
Was going to give it a go, but couldnt find any beta keys. Not sure I want to spend £34 on the pre-release
On the note of load time, After launching the game it sits at that NC Soft screen for a good 30-45secs, Using dual monitors you can see the software come up with the "Not Responding" line on the start bar, however it does go through and boot. Once into the game menu however, Log In is instant ( when it doesn't fail authing - and it is annoying that when it does fail it closes the whole game down and you have to restart it and go through the NC Soft lag screen ), and from selecting character to actually being in game takes mere seconds, Much faster than wow even without any add-ons.
Had a bit of a play this morning, got a scout to 7. Was fairly enjoyable and was visually appealing. So far I prefer it to WoW, although that may be down to the fact that everyone on the server was new and very friendly. Will think about giving it a months sub and see how it goes.
This has been fixed in the 615MB patch released yesterday. I never had problems with the UI -- it's quite similar to WoW. A lot of the options are already bound by default so I'm not sure why you're making this an issue. I've yet to actually use the menu except to change channels. There is a system; but its not fully expanded yet. If you open your quest journal, hit an NPC and hit "Locate" it'll find your objectives for you on the map and a nice arrow on the mini-map will point you in the right direction. Additionally if you look at the Chat/Combat screen you'll see that the game actually displays 3 coordinates. Linking to map items is also a useful feature, though I rarely use it since the Journal locates all objectives for you anyway. Not for long. The Level 18-22 quests require groups since the entire zone is nothing but elites. From click to running around in-game... ~12 seconds. Just to make this CLEAR. As of September 11, 2009 NCSoft has DISCONTINUED GameGuard on Aion effective immediately as of the 615MB patch. GameGuard is no more. And WoW ripped off half a dozen MMO's before its time. It's a circular argument. If you fall into it then I feel sorry for you. Carebear is carebear. Aion is PvPvE; from level 20 onwards you're in PvP zones mixed with PvE quests. Unless you deliberately move into the lower population PvE only zone which isn't all that great. It's not WoW. It'll never be WoW. There's a dozen different reasons why. If you can't figure them out, then I suggest you stick with WoW.
Unfortunately not - Ended Monday morning. Next chance to play will be the Pre-Order head start on the 20th Sept (NA/EU) before release 22nd for NA and 25th for EU. Character Pre-Selection will be 18th Sept to reserve 2 character names and create them.
