Aion was released in Australia, where I live, a few weeks back. I've never played a MMORPG before and I've been thinking about trying one. The few reviews I've seen of this say it's better than WoW, and the graphics alone are nice enough for me to be considering it.

So, anybody who's played it wanna give me an opinion? Is it as good a place as any, or better, to start playing MMORPGs?

lslines:
Aion was released in Australia, where I live, a few weeks back. I've never played a MMORPG before and I've been thinking about trying one. The few reviews I've seen of this say it's better than WoW, and the graphics alone are nice enough for me to be considering it.

So, anybody who's played it wanna give me an opinion? Is it as good a place as any, or better, to start playing MMORPGs?

Well, it's not as hardcore as origional EQ or DAoC, but has some of the same elements. It's decent enough to get into in my opinion. It definitely isn't going to hold your hand like WoW does at this point, so it may be fairly easy to get frustrated.

I find the graphics to be quite impressive and it runs decently on my and my wife's machines. Even in high population areas, such as the main cities, there's little to no slow down. The flight, though a bit disappointing that you can't use it 100% of the time, is an interesting mechanic that makes for some interesting PVP battles.

The crafting system I find much more engaging then WoW's, as you don't actually have to go and harvest to level your crafting. As long as you have cash, you can do what's called "work orders" to raise your skill. The NPC gives you the main materials you need, you purchase a couple extra materials from a vendor, craft all the items, and turn the quest back in for a random reward (generally more of the secondary crafting materials or sometimes non-purchasable recipes). In both gathering and crafting there is a pass/fail system put in place. There are two bars, one pass, one fail, that slowly increase randomly while you craft. Which ever reaches the end first dictates if you succeed in your gather or crafting or not. As your skill goes up, the higher your chance for succeeding increases. When you finally do want to craft actual items though, it's not such a bore that you go collect 3 things and boom, you have your item. I found that crafting like that (such as WoW's) was actually quite dull and you had no real feeling of accomplishment. You actually have to gather decent amounts of mats, so when you get that epic item crafted, you actually kinda puff up your chest and say to yourself, "yeah, that's right, I worked for this and it's cool."

The combat is fairly basic. You target a mob, you start attacking it, you use special abilities, it dies, you loot and move on. Though one aspect that I found somewhat refreshing is the combo system. You have some skills that are "unlocks" to other skills. For example, you use a special slash attack with your sword, that unlocks two new skills, say, another slash attack for slightly more damage then the first, or a bleed attack. From what I've seen so far, you can have up to 3-4 combo abilities in a row that can unleash some pretty devestating damage. This aspect adds in a degree of strategy to the fighting as well, instead of sitting there spamming the same button/skill all day long, you actually have to think, well should I use this branching attack, or that one? If I use this one now, will it hamper me when the enemy uses their attack later because my other attack is on cooldown? I know I'm not explaining it perfectly as you really need to play it to get the feel for it.

There is a PVP aspect to the game, seeing as the endgame (actually from lvls 25-50) is PvPvE. It adds a sense of excitement to the game that when you're in the PVP zone, called the Abyss, doing quests and the like, you can run across a member of the opposite faction at any time and duel to the death. Granted, you should usually run around in a pack of friends at that point, but it's still exciting if you don't. The PvPvE means Player versus Player versus Environment, as there is a third faction of computer controlled monsters called the Balaur who will distrupt the PvP aspects from time to time. Sometimes you actually have to band together with your enemy (the other faction) to actually defeat the Balaur that have dropped in on your party, otherwise you both will not survive, then turn back to destroying each other after the Balaur threat has been dealt with.

There's quite a scope to the game and they've changed it quite a bit for the western audience over it's Korean counterpart in a good way. It's definitely worth a look if you're wanting to play a decent MMO. It's not for everyone, and it does have a huge scope, but they made it very fun for the casual and first time player as they did for the "hardcore" or long time player.

I'd say give it a shot, seems worth it.

Definetely seems like a worthwhile game.

By the way, I'm new to the website, if anyone wants to send me a message about how to get badges, I have no clue but I would like some.

So far, I like it. But. It has a lot of faults. And I mean, a lot. The crafting for one, is completely retarded. Basically you're stuck with RNG'd RNG'd RNG which is never a good system. Targeting flying players in PvP is complete shit, and the camera controls could use some work.

So far the group quests have been easy, and the instances have been easy, although, one of them (west fortress if I remember right, you've got a group of 6 which you had to split into 2 teams to gather treasure boxes before the timer ran out) was pretty interesting.

PvP has been the only thing that has kept me playing. It's a lot of fun to go out ganking people. The flight aspect of the game makes it easy to juke people, which is always nice for epeen factor ala dota. So far, the fort capturing on almost every server I've seen has been completely unbalanced. On Yustiel the Asmodians haven't taken a fort a single time, we've almost always have all of the forts in the lower abyss. So, meh on that aspect.

It's really hard to judge considering that a lot of people are still below 30. However, I'll say this now, if you hate grinding, then don't play Aion. Once you hit the abyss (26ish, you start running out of quests) it's basically grind repeatables, with some more repeatable grinding, then you go to down and grind Work Orders when you feel like afking.

Mihz00:
So far, I like it. But. It has a lot of faults. And I mean, a lot. The crafting for one, is completely retarded. Basically you're stuck with RNG'd RNG'd RNG which is never a good system. Targeting flying players in PvP is complete shit, and the camera controls could use some work.

So far the group quests have been easy, and the instances have been easy, although, one of them (west fortress if I remember right, you've got a group of 6 which you had to split into 2 teams to gather treasure boxes before the timer ran out) was pretty interesting.

PvP has been the only thing that has kept me playing. It's a lot of fun to go out ganking people. The flight aspect of the game makes it easy to juke people, which is always nice for epeen factor ala dota. So far, the fort capturing on almost every server I've seen has been completely unbalanced. On Yustiel the Asmodians haven't taken a fort a single time, we've almost always have all of the forts in the lower abyss. So, meh on that aspect.

It's really hard to judge considering that a lot of people are still below 30. However, I'll say this now, if you hate grinding, then don't play Aion. Once you hit the abyss (26ish, you start running out of quests) it's basically grind repeatables, with some more repeatable grinding, then you go to down and grind Work Orders when you feel like afking.

Wow, your review sounded eerily similar to what I've experienced in another NCsoft game, Auto Assault. Crappy crafting, unbalanced PvP, dead zones, etc...

Unfortunately, that would apply to many other MMOs :/

Mihz00:
So far, I like it. But. It has a lot of faults. And I mean, a lot. The crafting for one, is completely retarded. Basically you're stuck with RNG'd RNG'd RNG which is never a good system.

Not a goddamn clue what RNG is, but the crafting system is better then most MMOs I've played.

There's nothing wrong with the PvP. Most servers Asmodian outnumbers Elyos, but Elyos seem to be taking more keeps across all the servers, which is interesting. When I played Elyos for a while, everyone I met was a goddamn retard.

crafting in the game is actualy very useful, and the addition of the chance for critical success adds a good egde to the process.

I would actualy say its better then a few other systems I have tried
e.x Lineage2 which was terrible for crafting.
WOW which seemed to only be useful at max lvl.

as far as unbalanced pvp, well the game hasent even been out a month, most people havent even reached the pvp zone yet.

and dead zones? are you serious?

they had to create channels for the zones so that people could actualy kill without waiting in line.

as far as the asmodians not haveing a chance, I have been on 3 servers so far and each is pretty balanced (the servers control faction population balance). Usualy with asmodians being slightly behind, but still powerful enough to defend there zones and go on the offensive.

Chi:

Mihz00:
So far, I like it. But. It has a lot of faults. And I mean, a lot. The crafting for one, is completely retarded. Basically you're stuck with RNG'd RNG'd RNG which is never a good system.

Not a goddamn clue what RNG is, but the crafting system is better then most MMOs I've played.

There's nothing wrong with the PvP. Most servers Asmodian outnumbers Elyos, but Elyos seem to be taking more keeps across all the servers, which is interesting. When I played Elyos for a while, everyone I met was a goddamn retard.

RNG means Random Number Generator aka luck. So far, at 35, trying to craft any gear that would be as good as what I got from abyss points would mean that I'd need to get crit mats on gathers, then I need to craft crit mats, then I need to crit on the armor itself. It's just not worth the time and mat investment to try and make something worthwhile that will last me a long time.

Also, the PvP is great. I love the ganking. The forts are just skewed as hell on both servers I've played on. Again, that doesn't mean much since most people are still under 30, but, yeah.

Having DP increases your chances of getting crits in crafting. I had 4000 DP when I made my Worthy Noble Titanium gear and made each piece within 2-3 tries. It can be very frustrating when it doesn't happen though, but if it happened all the time, the gear would be worthless.

Yea, I would definately give it a try. It seems to be one of the most promising games out there to rival WoW.

Chi:
Having DP increases your chances of getting crits in crafting. I had 4000 DP when I made my Worthy Noble Titanium gear and made each piece within 2-3 tries. It can be very frustrating when it doesn't happen though, but if it happened all the time, the gear would be worthless.

I'm not saying that it should be easy, but, I'm saying that in most cases it's not worth the effort(at least not yet, I assume it would be 40+ when you're likely to keep what you made for a looooooooong time). Especially so if you've got bad RNG. Personally, I'd prefer if they did something like triple the mat costs and remove the RNG factor. But, eh, I'm just QQin up a storm aren't I.