Aion Impressions

I've been half following Aion for the past 2 years, I think what caught my eye the most was your character being able to fly. It's finally getting closer to release date and people who pre-ordered the limited edition can get their hands on a beta key.

I managed to get my hands on one thanks to Jess and have been playing through a bit of it this morning and so far it's been brilliant. There isn't a lot about it that I haven't liked so far.

Graphics: The art direction they took is amazing, it is a mix between anime style characters with a tad of World of Warcraft in the environments. The animations for the characters are perfect, probably the best I've seen in an MMO. I should note too that my spec wasn't able to play the game on maxed settings and it still ran smoothly without any hiccups.

Sound: Hands down this game has the best soundtrack I've heard from an MMO. The music is relaxing and mellow while you're in a town but when you move out into a dangerous area the music changes with you and is always interesting and reflects what is happening.

Gameplay: So far I've enjoyed the gameplay, the quest structure seems good with 3 different types of quest, Campaign/Standard/Work Order. I never got a Work Order but I completed a quite a few of the other two. Campaign as the name suggests is to do with the story of the game with each quest having 3-4 parts each. The Standard quest was the usual collect X amount of rabbit hides.

I've only played to level 6 which took me around 2 hours but I've noticed that the level curve is starting to change fairly quickly. Battling plays a lot like most other MMO's but I did notice one problem (at least for me) The global cooldown on the mages skills seemed a bit too long, it's nothing that NCsoft can't fix but I did feel like I had to spam my skill buttons because I wasn't sure if the cooldown was over or not.

The diversity of the areas so far has been impressive, I've been in an open field, a farm area, a small village, a lake, a forest and barren mining area all before level 10.

I think NCsoft are on to something with this game, with a few minor tweaks it could become very popular and sell well.

I've taken some screenshots which are at http://picasaweb.google.com/terranova3y2/Aion#