Aion - Open Chinese beta w/english patch, been playing for 60 hours so far. It is a killer APP, you guys still got 2 days to get involved, go to Naomi Cheungs' myspace page and follow her instructions.
Any MMO fan should take this oppertunity to test this game out.
I was worried it would be one of those -_- Knowing me, I'll buy it, play it for a month then it'll sit on the shelf next to WoW, Warhammer Online, Galaxies and Guild Wars.
Played in the closed beta event. Only one thing bothered me and that was you can fly but only in the most useless of places like in one of the three towns I went to and no where else on the maps. I would hope they get rid of that and just allow you to fly every where. Started to get pissed off having to run back and forward to places since the maps are so big.
This game is far from Korean rice farmer territory, exp gains are fast, quest exp is a lot. You can easily lvl on quests alone and faster than just grinding on mobs for hours.
Last edited by Magee on Aug 19th, 2009 at 11:47 AM
Hey, don't even group GW in with the rest of those
Quests that consist of nothing other than "go kill xxx numbers of yyy" (which is all I came across in Aion while I played) is grind. Doesn't matter that they lessened the amount of it present in the western release (I have heard that the Chinese/Korean version is much, much worse), it's still a grind-based game.
The hidden player stats combined with the look of the armour not necessarily having to match the armour stats creates for a far superior PVP experience, where you can't be entirely certain how powerful a certain character might be; it adds a greater sense of risk to PvP combat.
The character customisation allows for far more diversity, which is important in giving the player more of a sense of individuality in an MMORPG.
And lastly, it actually has an underlying storyline that directs and drives the player through the contents of the game - fundamental for any kind of RPG (and something that WoW lacks).
Not to mention the far superior graphics and more captivating artistic design.
Are all mmorpg not basically grind based? You need to spend a considerable amount of time leveling to get any where in them. Really this is one of the least intense mmorpg I've played, I just wouldn't class Aion as a no lifer grind fest.
There were many quests that didn't involve hunting mobs and they were the ones that pissed me off, running back and forward between NPCs some times on opposite sides of the map. I got to lvl 13 in the three day beta event just playing casually a few hours a day but I prefer to lvl on mobs while doing only the main story line quests. I just think this will be one of the best out there for a while and can't wait till it's released.
Not really. Most are, though, which is one of the things I tend to dislike about MMOs (well, one of many things). Grind sucks.
The only one I play is Guild Wars, which is pretty much grind-free. You can fully level up a character in a dozen hours without much of a problem, and that can all be done while just playing the story and doing sidequests and not killing mobs at all.
Well I can understand why you don't like Aion if you're not really in to MMOs. Although what do you do once you reach lvl cap on Guild Wars? I've always seen lvlin to be a slow process where the max shouldn't be reached in a couple of days, weeks or even months. It's the main part of the game that once you finish theres not much left other than pvp and getting better items for pvp.