Aion - what's with this game?

[SanguineDeath]

So don't know if this was spoken about before but what is that game all about? Any good to try? Is it fun to play? I heard it's free. Anyone with first hand experience that can shed some light?

Thanks

[batou079]

So don't know if this was spoken about before but what is that game all about? Any good to try? Is it fun to play? I heard it's free. Anyone with first hand experience that can shed some light?

Thanks

pretty gfx, subpar gameplay.
kind of a typical chinese/korean turned F2P anime-style mmo.

not as well balanced as Rift imho.

[Eughe]

Aion is a great game ran by a crappy company.
It is Korean-y, but not as Korean as it used to be. They casualed it up quite a bit.
If you don't have time to invest in it, don't bother.

PvE is meh, most things are group oriented but they have been adding raid stuff when i last played.
But it's very pvp focused and gear focused. Classes are balanced in a sense that everything is OP.

[SanguineDeath]

Aion is a great game ran by a crappy company.
It is Korean-y, but not as Korean as it used to be. They casualed it up quite a bit.
If you don't have time to invest in it, don't bother.

PvE is meh, most things are group oriented but they have been adding raid stuff when i last played.
But it's very pvp focused and gear focused. Classes are balanced in a sense that everything is OP.

What do you mean that

everything is OP

The armor is over powered? You can easily beat boss fights? Thanks for clarification

[Anuhart]

Aion is a great game ran by a crappy company.
It is Korean-y, but not as Korean as it used to be. They casualed it up quite a bit.
If you don't have time to invest in it, don't bother.

PvE is meh, most things are group oriented but they have been adding raid stuff when i last played.
But it's very pvp focused and gear focused. Classes are balanced in a sense that everything is OP.

This.


BUT. It did offer good solo progression too. If you were prepared to invest the time (or sadly the real life money). Heroic pieces as very rare world drops and some of the best gear in game being craftable, albeit with a huge RNG and grind element, the group orientation wasn't a necessity but rather a lesser resistant path.

Edit on re-read, if you meant group as opposed to raid, then yes. Although there were open world raid encounters. Bloody hard ones too.

[Eughe]

I was more talking pvp since its pvp oriented but yes, armour and weaponry scale extremely well to the point of making up the entire pve experience trivial.
But it's been a long time since I've played so I don't know how true that is.

However to give some examples:

Templar is the tank class but most content can be tanked by warriors, a dps class.
As well as dodge classes (ranger and sins)
And a few thing can be tanked by heal classes (cleric and chanters)

Clerics are a heal class but can and at the point of time I played, did dps.
Chanters were a support class and was able to main heal quite a number of things since they had access to 2 extremely strong heals.

SMs eventually became the go to support soul since they had scaling buffs and were able to tank some stuff and had great cc. When they fixed the max debuff stuff I think they became more in demand and could easily replace sorcs in groups.

Of course most of this depended on gear (such as tanking) but its mainly because the way classes were designed and how much they nerfed pve.

[Anuhart]

A few memories and ^^'s

Templars were better tanks with 2H because of the threat and DPS, rendering a Glad a better choice anyway then.
Physical resistance was formulated stupidly meaning that it had little to no effect/difference between types of gear.
Because of the above, theory crafters found that Templars in leather made better avoidance tanks for a lot of encounters where you could risk avoidance tanking.
Because a lot of attacks were magical, Glads turned to chain, which carried magic stats.
You could take a ranger and auto attack in melee with the right set up and do silly deeps.
Clerics could solo Heroic bosses with adds lol.
In flight combat sucked for melee.
Spirit masters were just insanely overpowered.
A sorc could one shot a full group with DP skill.

[Tolmos]

So don't know if this was spoken about before but what is that game all about? Any good to try? Is it fun to play? I heard it's free. Anyone with first hand experience that can shed some light?

Thanks

TL;DR- For the price it's worth trying a free month, sure, but I seriously doubt you'll want to stick around for it.

The graphics are the best you will see in any MMO out right now, IMO.

The PvP, on paper, should be the most fun PvP of any themepark MMO out right now.

The flying, on paper, should be exceptionally fun.

In reality? It's the best looking failure I've played. I got to level 50 and that was all I could stand. The level grind has been reduced very very nicely, but the gear grind is still nightmarish. Add on top of that little annoyances, like manastones (items have between 2-6 manastone slots. Manastones are kind of like Rift's lesser essences... but for items. The problem is that they have a chance of failure when you put them on, and if one fails then EVERY manastone on that item already socketed will be destroyed as well. So, look at it in Rift terms- say you have a sigil. You farm up 80 inscribed shards and tons of planarite, and buy 4 really awesome lesser essences. You put 3 on the item. The fourth one fails. All 4 essences are now gone. Go farm again, please.).

Combat is fast paced for some classes, slow and crappy for others. PvP is the most gear based of any game you will ever play, and properly gearing for PvP can take from 6 months to a year. Its story is... well, most Aion players just say it has no story. =D

PvP is open world. That I like. Say you get past the grind, you get past the manastones... then you have a real PvP game at your fingertips. Capturable forts that give real bonuses to the side that has em, making em worth keeping. A third faction, made up of NPCs, to even out fights so that one side wont completely dominate the other. Aerial combat can be pretty fun too. When you kill another player, you eat some of their AP (the pvp currency... imagine if you gained favor for killing another player in Rift, but not because that Favor is popped into existance by the game like it is in Rift, but rather it comes from your enemy's Favor pool. You kill them, they lose favor and you gain some). Makes killing other players both risky and profitable, as opposed to Rift where dying to a play is just a mild annoyance at best. But getting to the point that you have a character worth doing this in? Yea... THAT is frustrating.

On a final note, none of that was the final straw for me. For me, it was that NCSoft Korea despises its US market. We get the shaft on everything. But in that respect, don't take my word for it. Go to their forums. Go to google and check out the differences between Korean Aion and ours. And I'm not just talking about the "Oh we get patches later". That can't be helped- they have to translate for us and all that. I'm talking about the events we never see. The shop that is cheaper and has better options. The lack of removing their vet rewards when we lost ours.

[Eughe]

The story line is actually interesting (especially comparing to rift which outside the concept of factions, I haven't been drawn to). You actually wanna know wtf happened when you do the final relevant story line upon reaching 50.

But then it goes on to balaurea which was boring for the most part except when you find out that humans were actually there worshipping or working with the balaur which was a major wtf moment.

The story wasn't bad, the presentation was however.

[SanguineDeath]

This.


BUT. It did offer good solo progression too. If you were prepared to invest the time (or sadly the real life money). Heroic pieces as very rare world drops and some of the best gear in game being craftable, albeit with a huge RNG and grind element, the group orientation wasn't a necessity but rather a lesser resistant path.

Edit on re-read, if you meant group as opposed to raid, then yes. Although there were open world raid encounters. Bloody hard ones too.

I'm sorry, could you elaborate a little on the "real life money" bit? I thought the game was F2P. Thanks.

[Anuhart]

I'm sorry, could you elaborate a little on the "real life money" bit? I thought the game was F2P. Thanks.

Indeed.

Aion had quite a grind to it, not on par with many other Asian grinders but for the Western market it was a huge grind. I actually like that but that's just me. The problem was in the way the game was designed and even coded, currency played a huge part, RNG played a huge part, competitive PvP played a huge part and time investment played a huge part. When those 4 things come together you need to not make RMT an easy option. Sadly it was, it actually looked like the game was designed with botting and RMT in mind, so many things done client side only.

So sadly, though not legitimate, you could RL money buy your way through a lot of the RNG and grind.

[Eughe]

That is true but they did a fine job at banning RMT users (couple in my old guild got banned).
Unless you are a major figure (and even then, Naruto got banned tons of time, not for RMT afaik, but he was a major figure, so no one was really safe from bans), and considering the time it takes to do anything gear wise, I wouldn't risk it.

Not in that game anyway.

[Anuhart]

Yeah I remember, and Eleven too (EU). But it didn't stop him openly returning and even changing his new mage to the same name, running the same shop in the same guild.

NCWest did ban, they did huge blanket bans, which caught a lot of innocents too. I know I had my doubts about the 'innocents' but it turned out there were a lot of false positives.

Still, even if NCW had been 100% accurate and 100% on top of it, it doesn't detract from just how poor a set up they had to deal with in the first place, that being the design of the game they were running.

[faye007]

I played aion until about 3months ago, its a pretty good diversion and well worth a look as it went free. It was very grindy at release (i played in the chinese beta) but its much better now. There is a hell of a lot of fluff in the game if you like that kinda thing and the graphics i always though very beautiful.

[Rainman]

Good game ruined by miss management from the then NCWEST. Devs in Korea do not care about the western audience.