The Game Dame

In my previous post I told you about character creation in Aion and today I’ll continue describing my experiences with the Aion UI in terms of how  it compares to WoW. (Click any image for gigantor version.)

Graphics

The graphics are nothing short of spectacular. The regular gameplay graphics are on par (and in some cases better) than WoW’s cut scenes. I delight in exploring to find new stunning sights and new critters. Sometimes I come around a new corner and just gasp at how amazing the view is.

Home cities

The home cities – there is only one per faction – are stunning and large, along the size of Orgrimmar. However, they are not very intuitively structured, unlike Undercity or Ironforge, but the maps are labeled so you’re never lost.

NPCs

Having said that, the NPCs leave a bit to be desired. I really can’t tell one from the other because they’re not very memorable. Also, there is only one throughline story on each faction (up to level 14 where I am) that has a recurring, vaguely interesting character. There are no Thrall/Jaina storylines, no Tirion Fordringers or Sylvanas’s (Sylvanae?).

Animations & emotes

Lastly, the character animations are entertaining. If it starts to rain and your character is standing still for a minute or so, she breaks out an umbrella-sized leaf over her head. If it’s snowing, she puts her hands up to marvel at the snowfall.

You only have about 10 basic emotes to start with – laugh, dance, greet, etc. There are more complex ones that you can buy from vendors, like a birthday song or a marriage proposal!

User interface

You can see that the UI looks extremely familiar, no? It’s a little cleaner and more compact and you can put it on the bottom or the top of the screen.

1) Standard HP/MP bars with one addition: DP. I think this stands for Daeva Points. (At level 10 you get your wings and you become a Daeva.) These build over time as you kill creatures. For every 1000 DP you get a special attack. You can save up to 4 attacks (4000 DP) or use them as you go along. Unfortunately, they take a LONG time to build up and they reset when you log off. I’ve played for as much as 2 hours and only JUST gotten to 1000 DP.

2) You get lots of attack bars: 2 sets of 4 each.

3) Your options menu and a monitor of your faction influence. Since I haven’t gotten to any PvP yet, I am not entirely sure what this meter shows. All I know is that you don’t build rep over time like you do in WoW, it’s a dynamic bar that moves during combat. Or something like that.

4) This is your flight timer. At first you get 60 seconds of flight time, longer if you glide once in a while.

5) Mini map, of course. By default it does NOT point North (the top of the map is wherever you are headed and changes accordingly), however you can change the settings to keep North at the top.

6) Optional quest tracker. This is very intuitive to use and stays out of the way, unlike WoW’s built in quest tracker & some add-ons I’ve used.

Map

The coolest thing about the map is that it has a second option. You can display it normally by pressing M, or you can display it as a transparent HUD, like the picture to the right. Very useful when you need to see more of a general direction than the mini-map shows.

Surprise! Bet you forgot you had me in your feed reader, amirite?? Well, you know I can’t hide from you for very long. It burrrrns!!

I received Aion for my birthday from my most wonderful husband and I’ve been playing it instead of WoW since it launched. (Well, technically, since the day AFTER it launched because the servers were foccacta on launch day. Must have borrowed Blizzard’s IT folks or somethin’. HA!) So, for all my WoW buddies, I decided I’d give you an overview of the game for the next several posts. [Note: click any picture for a super-large version of it with tasty detail!]

Summary impression of Aion

Holy cow am I having a ton of fun playing this game! It’s absolutely gorgeous. It’s also a stunning new world with new kinds of creatures that don’t rely on fantasy clichés (no elfs or goblins). The gameplay is fun and exploring is entrancing. If it falls short so far – and I’ve only played to a max level of 13 – it’s in the areas of story and tutorials. But even those shortcomings are not overly bothersome and later I’ll explain why. I have not played any PvP, since I’m still in the starter zones. Once I get there, I’ll let you know if my opinion changes.

Starting an Aion character

The game is pronounced “eye-on,” not “ay-on.” It loads from the main NCSoft launcher, which can also launch Guild Wars, CoH/V, or any other NCSoft online games. Here we get to the biggest beef I have with the game: after you click “Aion” on the launcher, it takes about 5 minutes to load. That sounds like an exaggeration, but it’s not. I click it and then go load up the laundry or scoop the litter box and when I come back it’s usually STILL loading. It takes a crazy long time.

Then you get to the server selection screen. No, your eyes do not deceive you: that’s the ENTIRE list of servers available. Worldwide. When it says “High” population, they are NOT kidding around. I definitely recommend getting on one of the new servers because lag is a definite factor in the starting zones.

Then you choose your faction. I’ve pasted together the screenies above so you can compare the two worlds, but normally you only see one world at a time. That’s because you can only have one faction on each server, just like on a WoW PvP server (in Aion, all servers are PvP). I also added the green labels to the pictures so you know which is which.

Now let me explain what you’re looking at. The lore says that Aion was a god (or energy beam or whatever) that existed like a pole through the axis of the world and protected it. Then, a horrible event occurred called – wait for it – the CATACLYSM (no joke!) and it split the world in half. Imagine breaking an egg in half and holding one half above the other so there’s a space in the middle but it still forms an egg shape. That’s Aion’s world: still rotating, but ripped in half. (Why the god Aion couldn’t stop the cataclysm or even still exists is unknown to me as yet.) The bottom hemisphere is known as Elysia; the top is Asmodae (AZZ-mo-day). Since the planet rotates skewed on its axis, even more so than Earth, the light from the sun comes in at an angle and is only able to light the bottom half, Elysia, leaving Asmodae in permanent darkness.

That’s not as bad as it sounds. Asmodae in practice is actually quite light for game play purposes. (It’s not like Bioshock or the caves of Oblivion or anything.) You’d probably never know it was the “dark” half of the world if they didn’t tell you that. Think of it as Netherstorm. On the other hand, Elysia is very bright-eyed and bushy-tailed during the day, along the order of Elwyn Forest.

Classes

You have only 1 of 4 classes to choose from at first: Warrior, Scout, Mage, and Priest. The selection screen is cool because it shows you what the class looks like in max level-capped gear, so you know just how awesome you will look. (You look pretty cool at lower levels too, actually.)

Those classes do exactly what you think they do from their names. At level 10, each class breaks into 2 subclasses and you can only choose one.

There is only one main healing class in the game (Cleric) and there is only one tanking class (Templar). There are no hybrids (Chanter is the possible exception). Only one class has pets (Spiritmaster) and they are more like ghouls/minions than hunter pets. Here are your WoW equivalents:

Customization

Now you can go completely nuts. Customization is way beyond anything you can do in WoW. There are literally so many options that I don’t think there could possibly be two characters exactly alike in Aion. Lemme show you…

Above is your basic screen. (Note that the “Basic” tab on the right side is selected.) There are about 50 hairstyles per gender. You can see the color combinations.

And now I’m gonna blow your mind…

If you click the “Advanced” tab, you get sliders to monkey with every single aspect of your appearance. EVERYTHING. You even get to choose the type of voice your character has!

Keep in mind that those screenshots are ONLY of the appearance choices. I didn’t even show you the character size options. You can be as huge as a Tauren (and fat or skinny) or tinier than the smallest Gnome you’ve ever seen. You can even make your head large or small, regardless of body size.

More in this series!

In the next post, I’ll talk about entering the world, the graphics, and the gameplay, including the UI, combat, flight (you can fly at level 10!), and other goodies. With screencasts! ZOMG!