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Aion Review

Take flight with the latest MMO from NCSoft, though be warned that your air time is limited

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Aion is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) released by NCsoft, and developed by a dedicated Aion team. Initially, the game was known as "Aion: The Tower of Eternity" but it was released in North America under the one-word title. The game combines PvP and PvE as many other MMOs do, but with its own set of twists and small changes to the formulaic gameplay. Unlike many modern MMOs, Aion requires a definitive time commitment in order for players to progress through the game and unlock the best that it offers, which can be considered both a blessing and a curse for the players. While there is a lot of interesting and engaging PvP content to be found, it is all mostly hidden away from the lower-level players by hours upon hours of repetitive PvE quests and map exploration. Nonetheless, Aion is a great-looking MMO that plays great and requires some time commitment to fully unlock its potential to the player.

Aion: The Tower of Eternity
Players will see alot of this for quite a while

The story of the Aion world is told through various cutscenes and quest dialogue, though they are not very clearly told at times. The cutscenes do a good job of showcasing the world and your part of the story, but the best explanations don’t arrive until later levels which makes the story a bit thin and hard to follow at the beginning. There is much more story to be found in the various campaign quests you complete, but there is little incentive to read through the many paragraphs given. In short, the world of Aion (called Atreia) was once whole and all its inhabitants prospered. However, an evil nation called the Balaur has attacked the center of Atreia, which was the Tower. Balaur charged the tower and destroyed it, and the resulting cataclysm broke the world in half. The two Guardians of the Tower decided to sacrifice their life energy to ensure the two new fragments of their world would not separate into space. This new layout has caused one side of the world to be always covered in light, while the top half of the world was now in eternal darkness. Those that lived in the light part of the world, the Elyos, saw little change and continued to recover from the disaster and rebuild society. On the other hand, the inhabitants of the upper part of the world, the Asmodians, had to adjust to their new conditions and this reflected upon their appearance and personality. The once united nation was now two distinct races bound to battle each other until either side prevails, though at least they both remained human. The Balaur were not destroyed in the explosion, and instead now occupy the Abyss, a centered piece of land that floats in the center of the planet. This presents Aion’s players with an interesting mix of PvP and PvE that occurs in the Abyss.

As you start the game, there is a choice to either be an Asmodian or an Elyos. The game begins with you at level 1 character that has lost their memory. From this point, the player experiences various flashbacks of their life (Aion’s way of tempting the player to advance the storyline so they may unlock various awesome abilities). Depending which race the player selects, you will be placed in either Elysea or Asmodae and spend all of your first 24 levels in that world. The story and tone of the game differ greatly between the worlds, as do the landscapes and characters - however the basic linear progression is the same. Compared to other games in the genre, Aion really shines when it comes to character customization. There is the usual set of height, weight, and shape customization, but it is done to a greatly varied degree so that you can have truly huge or very tiny characters. The facial features, hair and tattoos also create tons of combinations and it’s very unlikely that you will ever run into a character that looks exactly the same as you. Unfortunately, this feature is offset by the very similar looking armor found in the game – though the height of your character will always be a unique enough factor to define the player. The game does allow the player to dye their armor in various colors which adds some personality. Once your character is ready to go, and you enter the world for the first time, you are looking at around 20 hours of PvE play before any kind of PvP can even occur. There are four primary classes, and eight specialized classes in the game. Players start the game by choosing one of the four primary classes: Warrior, Mage, Scout, or Priest. Later in the game, players will also have to choose from two specializations associated with their chosen class. Warriors may become a Templar or a Gladiator; Mages may become a Sorcerer or Spirit Master; Scouts choose from Assassin or Ranger; and Priests from Cleric or Chanter. All of these classes have different abilities and skills, while specializations share some abilities with their class but have a few distinct features that make them different from the other specialization. All of these classes play extremely similarly for both the Asmodians and Elyos to keep the game balanced.

Aion: The Tower of Eternity
The architecture is excellently designed

The players of Aion will spend a very long time during their first 25 levels playing exclusively PvE, and this is an odd design decision. The PvE in Aion is very repetitive, to the point where you can often know what the quest requires without even reading it. Kill a certain number of monsters, kill a number of monsters until they drop a certain item, or talk to a bunch of NPC characters scattered across the map – are all the variations of quests found in the game. It’s not terribly original, and often there is little motivation or story to complete these quests other than for the XP given. The quests are divided into two categories – regular, location based quests and campaign quests. The regular quests do their best to somehow tie into the central story, but are often no more involved than yet again killing a certain number of monsters. The campaign quests, on the other hand, are often a huge source of XP but there is often quite a noticeable level jump between them, so the player needs to complete more regular quests before attempting another campaign one. Things are made a bit easier because almost all of the quests allow you to see exactly where you need to go, which monster to kill and who to talk to by placing markers on your world map. If you wish to explore though, there are also quests that ask you to find a hidden item or gather a rare material. While a lot of the XP will come from completing quests, the major addition will come from the thousands of monsters you will slay in your travels. The PvE combat in Aion is based on skill chains, which adds value to the gameplay and requires some strategy in combat. Executing chains is both precise and satisfying, and can often prevent the enemy from taking away too much of your health. While the player combat is sharp and involving, the monsters you hunt aren’t very clever. They will simply hit you with a physical attack that looks and sounds almost the same across every monster type, and occasionally perform a skill that inflicts a negative condition on you. This kind of gameplay repeats itself for 24 levels in Aion, as there is no option to engage in any kind of PvP until you reach level 25 and are able to enter the Abyss. The experience curve is also shifted towards greater time commitment, making levels 20 through 24 take hours of your time. If you are not afraid of time commitment and want to see your dedication rewarded at level 25 and up, Aion is an interesting experience. However, if you are a player not ready to spend 20+ hours in repetitive PvE before you can unlock player versus player combat, you may want to re-consider this title.

The biggest marketing attraction to Aion is the ability to fly, though it’s not as perfectly executed as it could have been. You gain your first set of wings at level 10, and there are many cutscenes before that to constantly remind you what fun it will be. Flying is indeed a great fun – diving off a cliff and spreading your wings is more satisfying than any other MMO or game in recent memory. Flight is effortless, fun, and looks great overall. On the gameplay side however, there are issues. While the player can fly freely in the Abyss (that great area you won’t see until level 25), the rest of the world has been completely restricted. There are a few large open areas (usually around a city or a landmark) that the player can take off and fly at will (for a limited amount of time). However, the problem is that these areas take up a very small percentage of the game world and there is often little to do in these areas that require you to be flying, which is a missed opportunity to give players an actual reason to fly as high as they can. In the rest of the world, you only option is to glide. Gliding is faster than walking, so you will see many players take advantage of this ability. Simply jump off a hill and double-tap spacebar to spread your wings and glide for a short distance. There is a cooldown timer on how often you can glide or fly, but it is short and does not interfere with gameplay. The ability to fly in PvP is actually not used a lot either, because many of the skills require player to be on the ground or directly facing an enemy. So, unless you want to take the risk of enemies on the ground shooting you out of the sky with ranged attacks, flight is only used to gain a better ground position in battle.

Aion: The Tower of Eternity
Reaching level 25 finally unlocks the Abyss, and the PvP

As discussed earlier, players will not be able to participate in PvP until they reach level 25, which requires many hours of play. The game world does have “rifts”, randomly appearing portals that allow one side of the world to travel to the enemy side and engage in PvP. However, this often leads to nothing more than you getting killed by a randomly appearing bunch of enemies at much higher levels than you. Once you reach 25 and enter the Abyss though, the real PvP can begin – at least until you’re ganked by another level 50 again. The PvP in Aion is based on an open-world setting, with Abyss being one huge PvP area where anything can happen. There is also the above-mentioned Balaur that roam the Abyss, and add a PvE aspect to the gameplay. Things become really interesting when a Balaur ship appears in the sky and begins dropping enemies right in the heart of a PvP battle. The Balaur are hostile towards both player races and act as a balancing and randomized factor in the Abyss control gameplay. The Abyss has various towers and outposts, which act as a minigame. The attacking faction must fight their way through the NPC defences (as well as any players that come to their aid) and defeat a boss in order to take control of the outpost. These outposts then provide various bonuses to the players as well as a place to resurrect as needed. Along with Rifts, there are also a few Spy quests in the game that allow a player to teleport into the enemy world in order to complete a quest. These teleportations offer the only alternative to rifts to gain entrance into the other world to explore it. Many players even save these quests until they are sufficiently high level so that they may enter the other world at will and gank some helpless players. Overall though, I did not spend nearly as many hours in PvP combat to make a solid judgement as I did in PvE, and this is due to the very long time and effort that is required to reach these areas. From the few players I’ve engaged, the PvP played nearly the same as PvE, except of course your opponents this time have a huge arsenal of skills at their disposal that require careful chains and timing, as well as healing.

Since there is little groundbreaking in Aion, the developers instead focused on polishing the user experience. The game looks great, and borrows heavily from the Asian style of animations and locations. The characters and players in the game all borrow heavily from Anime in their style and color palette, as well as voiceovers. The game world is not geographically huge, but is beautiful and diverse, with each area’s style and feel flowing seamlessly into another. There is little voice acting outside of cutscenes, and your character is understandably mute, but what is there is done with style and polish. The music in the game is great, though it is relatively subtle as if it doesn’t wish to interfere with the game – which doesn’t make sense because the sound effects in the game are very poorly made compared to the soundtrack. The sound of hitting an enemy, taking damage, and even walking are all muffled and sound well below average quality. The user interface is intuitive and does the job well, allowing freedom in arranging your skills and managing inventory with a few clicks. Aion looks great, and it also runs great – allowing our test machine (Q6600, 8800GTX, 4GB Ram, Win7 64x) to max the game’s settings and resolution without any framerate loss.

Aion: The Tower of Eternity
Flying is very fun, but limited

As with many MMOs, it is difficult to judge exactly the kind of experience that players will get. Depending on your race, server, and even character class, the experiences in MMOs vary greatly from player to player, which is partly the huge appeal of the whole genre. At the same time, it becomes difficult to critique these epic titles as there is simply too much content to explore and cover to provide a unifying opinion for all players. From my experiences with Aion, it can almost be considered a PvE MMO because there is nothing else that a player can do until he reaches level 25. This could spell danger for the player community, because there is 20 or more hours of PvE play for almost everyone before any kind of PvP battles can take place. This is quite a large amount of time that not everyone will be able to dedicate to the game without any signs of the whole reason some players take part in Massively Multiplayer games. The first 24 levels are essentially single player or co-op battles in varying locales, and needless to say there are better single player RPGs out there. Aion is at least very pretty and stylish to look at, which prevents PvE from becoming completely stale and monsters vary enough in looks, if not gameplay, to keep going. Flying is great but very limiting until that often-mentioned Abyss, so again this may not be a strong enough selling point to keep players interested. The development team is aware of the issues and they are keeping the community involved, as seen with the introduction of the double-XP weekends. Aion is still a very young MMO, and there are many lessons to be learned and changes implemented down the road, but as of now it is a game that has many interesting features and engaging PvP gameplay that is fenced off by 24 lengthy levels of repetitive PvE.

 

This review is based on the experiences in the game from level 1 through 26. A review trial was provided by the publisher.

Our ratings for Aion: The Tower of Eternity on PC out of 100 (Ratings FAQ)
Presentation
80
A beautifully constructed world, with Anime style visuals and good battle animations. User interface is intuitive and battle controls are sharp and responsive.
Gameplay
70
The game requires a time commitment, and offers no PvP until players hit level 25. The PvE is repetitive and gets very tedious at times.
Single Player
NR
None
Multiplayer
80
Players are generally friendly and willing to help out. However, a group of enemies that just appeared from a rift will not hesitate to slaughter you. Message system is somewhat clunky to use, legion system is well organized. Abyss makes for great PvPvE.
Performance
(Show PC Specs)
CPU: Intel Core i7 CPU 930 @ 2.80GHz
GPU: Sapphire Radeon HD 5870 Vapor-X 1GB
RAM: 6GB DDR3
OS: Windows 7 Professional 64-bit
PC Specs

90
Runs solid on any system, while still looking great. Lag is rare, though it does occur and may result in your death more times than it should.
Overall
77
With flying being limited and PvP non-existent until level 25, Aion prevents the community from truly experiencing the game's best features until many hours of PvE grinding are completed.
Comments
Aion: The Tower of Eternity
Aion: The Tower of Eternity box art Platform:
PC
Our Review of Aion: The Tower of Eternity
77%
Good
The Verdict:
Game Ranking
Aion: The Tower of Eternity is ranked #690 out of 1957 total reviewed games. It is ranked #41 out of 63 games reviewed in 2009.
689. NHL 10
PlayStation 3
690. Aion: The Tower of Eternity
691. Killing Floor
PC
Screenshots

Aion: The Tower of Eternity
22 images added Jan 16, 2010 19:42
Videos
Aion - Official CG Trailer
Posted: Sep 28, 2009 00:28
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