Short post, just touching on the two topics in the header — as they are in Aion.

Starting with helmets, you’ll notice something different about them in Aion than in other MMOs. They’re accessory pieces. Yup, that means that you don’t depend on your armor restrictions when choosing one, they’re all fair game. Here’s an illustration:

Leather Helmet

Plate Helmet

That’s my Chanter, who typically wears chain armor, wearing both the leather and plate helmets. Without the armor class restrictions, the choice is either cosmetic or stat based (I wear the leather one unless I’m just feeling bad ass, then it’s all plate).

I quite like the choice; I’ll have at least one Sorcerer that wears a plate helmet with their dress.

The next item is the broker, or auction house (AH). There’s two forms of selling in-game, the broker and private stores. If you’ve played any other Asian MMO you’ve likely run into the private stores, for those who haven’t — basically you can go anywhere in the game, open up a shop with items you want to sell at prices you set and let people look/buy themselves. It’s great when you’re AFK for a bit, or want to set up in an area that’s far from a broker.

Anyway, the broker is similar to most — here’s a screenie:

Broker

List shows what’s up for sale, just use the obvious drop down menus. There is no bidding, everything is buy out. Register is where you list your items, you can only have a certain amount up at once — around 10 I think — so make sure you use the spots wisely. Settle Account is where you check to see what’s sold and collect your money. No running to the mail box for it; if you’ve played Everquest 2 you should be familiar with this style.

The broker works quite well; I don’t see many people using the private shops apart from some in the main/large cities. That could be the population on my server (not too high I think) or that I’m still in the relatively low-level areas. Also, could be the Asian subscription method, and using the broker to keep from paying to sell goods. Probably a combination of all three. When NA launch comes, I suspect there will be a healthy use of both the broker and private shops since we don’t pay per time played. Should be interesting.

NCSoft is portioning out the Aion beta over weekends, broken up over the course of a few months. If I remember correctly, they did the same thing with Guild Wars and it worked out well for it. However, Guild Wars’ success could be attributed to other factors, like the no subscription fee (you know, something small like that). It makes me wonder, is this the right way to beta?

Traditionally, beta’s have their closed beta period where players are strapped down with an NDA and test the full game out for a period of time (typically months) before open beta and launch. What Aion is doing is having their closed beta over certain weekends, with certain limitations in place. Such as this past weekend’s 1-10 on the Asmodae side (and Elyos, if you hadn’t already leveled up there). This is certainly a good idea, from the developer’s perspective, in testing out a certain range thoroughly, but how is it going to work for the players? I know I’ve already leveled up several characters through the newbie zones, and I can already get through everything in just a few hours without looking at maps or quest text anymore. How will this effect launch, if the players get burnt out on the starting zones before it? This likely won’t be a problem, and I’m certainly over thinking it here, but it just seems that going over these areas is a waste. I’ve played them through on the C-Aion client and they worked fine; I could barely tell that there were many or any changes from it.

The game is still months away from launching (Sept. 22) so there’s plenty of time to test out the later content, when they allow it. I’m guessing that’s their strategy, to have players get the character’s ascended and the basic classes they want to try early on — then do the real testing later on, with launch even further so the initial leveling won’t be as fresh (in memory) and boring. With the exception of open beta’s leveling, of course.

One of the big bonuses I’m seeing to the beta events is media coverage by the gaming sites. Massively in particular. For the past two beta weekends they’ve had quite a few articles being posted during the weekend and immediately after, this past beta weekend especially it seems. Even on this blog (the one you are or are not currently reading) the number of views to Aion related posts is going up quite a bit lately. The hype machine is picking up steam quickly.

Perhaps that’s the biggest bonus of the events — hype. In a traditional beta, without an NDA, the game will pretty much be picked apart by previews and beta reviews before it’s even close to launch — from beginning to end game. Having limited events allows NCSoft to get the parts of the game they want ‘tested’ and previewed by the media, while making sure there’s plenty of game left to be explored and be ‘new’ to the players come launch — should they not see most of that content through a foreign copy, like C-Aion. For a game that’s already been launched elsewhere, that is pretty important.

The last reason I can think of, at the moment, is player burn out. I, like many other players (I’m sure), play a new game like crazy — getting as much time into it as possible — before getting burnt out later on. Staggering the events weeks apart from one another ensures that I don’t get to play it heavily and for a long period of time — taking away the burn out. If done right, they’ll likely keep people interested and bait them into buying a copy at launch or before.

Beta events, a marketing ploy?

The first Asmodae weekend is over, didn’t spend a ton of time on it — just maxed out a Ranger. No real need for new screenshots here, the previous post on Asmodae will more than cover it (since it’s pretty much the same thing).

I didn’t notice too many differences between the C-Aion version and the NA one. I didn’t get the drop quests that I did in C-Aion, but that could of been poor luck on my part (or they simply left them out for now, allowing some surprise and ‘new’ stuff for launch). There were a lot of people playing when the servers launched; the newbie area was swamped. I’m quite sure this was the plan, however, as it simulates launch day. The channels made a difference. For those that don’t know, or never played City of Heroes, the channels are instances of the same zone that allow for overflow when the zones fill up. This helps with lag and, more importantly, questing. I think there were around 10 or so channels open when I played. Pretty much all of them had a good amount of players.

While the zones weren’t any different from C-Aion’s, getting to play a Ranger was. When you level up a Scout type, it feels like it takes after the Assassin more — likely because of the lack of ranged attacks (duh, right?). It took a bit of hunting to get a hang of the Ranger at level 10. This is mostly because you only have two ranged attacks — Snipe, your average direct damage attack that’s instant cast on a 8 second cooldown (can’t move while firing), and Entangling Shot, instant cast snare that slows the enemy for 8-16 seconds that’s on a 16 second cooldown (can fire while moving, yes the snare length is random and can last the entire cooldown or break early). Auto attacking with a bow also works while moving, but remember to keep the enemy in your view; I found snaring and back peddling were most effective, you need a lot of room to do it though. As long as everything works properly, and the monster you’re attacking isn’t naturally faster than normal, you can kill stuff without it ever touching you. That is fairly rare, however. I’ll have to wait till the next CBT weekend (in August…) to level the Ranger up further and actually get more skills. Oh, one last thing: the Ranger’s DP ability is a type of shapeshifting, it turns you into a Mau (humanoid cat with an indigenous feel) for a minute and gives you some very nice buffs.

Apart from the Ranger on NA-Aion, I played my Chanter on C-Aion. Chanters are one of the Priest sub-classes, the other is the Cleric. Wearing chain armor and wielding staves, the Chanter is a buffer that can stand toe-to-toe with any other melee, throwing heals while bashing things over the head. If you’ve played a Bladedancer in Lineage 2 you might be somewhat familiar with the buffs, or perhaps a Paladin from World of Warcraft. Essentially, you have different Mantras that you activate and anyone in your party that’s near you will receive the buffs. You can use more than one at a time. I have two buffs so far (at level 14, still pretty low) the first you get increases Physical Attack, the second increases all of your defenses (Physical Defense, Block, Evasion, etc). Very useful. The Chanter’s attacks focus on melee and are quite effective — not DPS class effective, but certainly better than your average healer in most MMOs. The chain armor is nice too, though the Clerics get Plate and shields. I haven’t tried a Cleric yet, so I can’t say how they’d perform in a side-by-side comparison, but I’d guess the Cleric does a bit more damage and doesn’t have the buffing or de-buffing the Chanter does — making up for it with higher personal defense and healing ability. Because of that it’s hard to say which would be the best in PvE or PvP, if you only had to bring one. I’d try to bring both. Simply looking over the skills, though (not seeing them used, or using them), I’d say the Chanter would be a bit better for PvP, and the Cleric a bit better for PvE — group-wise. Solo’ing, it may be the same way — for PvP — but PvE shouldn’t matter, they’d both do well at it. It’s really hard to tell by simply looking at the skills. Clerics are obviously ranged magic oriented, and their numbers should not change much, but the Chanter is melee and the numerous buffs do change the damage output and damage received. They could have similar damage outputs, they could be completely different. I would think, though, that the Cleric would have an easier time dealing damage as it doesn’t have to chase down it’s targets (in PvP). Should a Chanter get a hold of someone, though, they’d be in a bad way. The Chanter has plenty of de-buffs, including one that decreases flight speed by 50%. The Chanter’s DP ability increases Physical Attack by 100% for 30 seconds (as of level 14). That’s one I really want to try out in PvP.

I still want to try out the Cleric and Templar, after those I’ll see about Sorcerors. Not sure about the Assassin, I’m not much for sneaking about or backstabbing.

In preparation for this weekend’s beta test, 1-10 Asmodae, I’ve given the Chinese Aion (C-Aion) a go. Having played a Warrior up through Gladiator on the Elyos side, I decide to go a different route and choose Mage going Spiritmaster.

Asmodae

The first and most noticeable difference between the two races is appearance. You could liken this to some type of Light Elf/Dark Elf type situation. The Elyos tend to look the most human and pretty much only have natural skin tones and features, while the Asmodae have wildly different skin tones and features like horns, claws on their hands and feet, and fur running down their spines. It’s difficult to call them demons, really, since the people are not that different on the inside — with the exception of the Elyos being more arrogant and ‘peace-loving’ while the Asmodae are a bit harsher and war-like. You can see some of this harsher behavior they have in their combat stance, their eyes light up:

Red Hot Anger...

The Asmodian portion of the world does tend to be a bit darker and less ‘cheery’ than the Elyos side, but there’s plenty of beauty and color:

Scenery

That’s taken from the newbie area, one of the first quest areas. I won’t cover the questing here, most of it is similar to the Elyos side, with the difference in some of the monster types and stories — all of which are worth reading through, good stuff there.

Once you’ve leveled up to 9, gone through the quests for ascension and ascended (won’t spoil it, but the story here is different, pay attention!) you’ll be treated with the major city — Pandemonium. Unlike Sanctum’s floating fortress, the Asmodae city is located on an island in the middle of what appears to be a pretty lush jungle. Lots of plant life and water feature exist in the city, which has a sort of Roman feel to it instead of the high fantasy of Sanctum. Here’s a screenshot of one area inside Pandemonium:

Pandemonium

The city serves all of the same functions as Sanctum, though there are likely differences in quests — I haven’t had time yet to really explore it all deeply.

Hitting 10 and ascending grants you your wings and class change. The Asmodian wings are different from the Elyos:

Asmodae Wings

They’re a nice black, as you can see. I also think they may be a bit more ragged, or shaggy — but haven’t given the two types a real side-by-side examination.

Apart from my shiny new wings, I also got my Spiritmaster class change. I tend to love pet classes so I really wanted to give this a go, the first 9 levels seem like they would play closer to a Sorcerer. The first pet you get at level 10 is the Fire Spirit:

Fire Spirit

He floats about, the little wheels revolving, and his body turns a nice dark orange when you send him in to combat — kinda like him getting really angry. You can see the pet bar immediately above my character’s status bar. There’s just a few simple options there. Not much micro-management for these pets; I just dragged the Attack command to a hotkey and use it. The pet stays in what I’d call a follow stance by default. Apart from his own auto-attacks I have two abilities I can use on him so far, one triggers an attack (does a good bit of damage, helps him keep some aggro) and the other is based on the DP and provides a nice short-term buff for 2000 DP (for those that don’t know, DP is the green status bar below my mana, it fills up as you kill things and is used to activate the bigger, special skills — it depletes when you die and when you log off, I think).

That’s the bulk of stuff, the rest is going to be minor things I noticed, or covered in the Elyos section but didn’t have screenshots of.

Mini-Map

The mini-map/compass/radar combo on the bottom left of the UI has some neat little tricks that many MMO’s don’t incorporate. You get a radar view of the NPCs that are in your viewing range, just rotate the camera around to see what’s nearby. White dots are passive creatures, teal are friendly NPCs, and red are aggressive monsters. When you select an aggressive monster you’ll notice a small orange circle around them that acts like a radar — this lets you see their aggro range. Handy? Oh, yeah. The arrows around the edge point towards different areas/points of interest/quests/etc.

Combine the souped up mini-map with the quest tracking, location finding (blue words in quest text, just click to get more information and most even have the ability to mark their location on your map), and other UI features and it’s one of the best, standard, UI’s I’ve used in an MMO. As far as Asian MMO’s go, it’s absolutely the best.

Inventory and Titles

To the right we have the Profile and Inventory windows. The ‘My Info’ is your paper doll screen, ‘Stigma’ is Stigmas (haven’t leveled up high enough to use them yet, but it’s basically where the character customization comes in), ‘Abyss’ which tracks your Abyss rating stuff, and ‘Title’ which is open now and displays the titles you have acquired. Used in games past, titles show up next to your character name, are gained through various ways, and provide small buffs to your character. It’s a little bit of extra customization.

Below the Profile window is the Inventory, it’s known as a ‘Cube’ instead of a backpack. The bottom bar of the cube displays useful information and has some buttons. Starting from the left, you have filled slots/total slots, a trash can, a button I haven’t checked out yet (sorry…) it obviously deals with money though, your current amount of wealth, and the last button auto-organizes your inventory. The last button in particular is very useful.

You can see tabs in the inventory window, these are for your default and expanded cube. The first cube expansion happens in the newbie zone, not sure when the others do. Essentially, it’s just getting more bag space.

Might as well go over some of the items in the cube, and how it organizes it. First, if you have any gear (armor and weapons) it’ll be sorted first and placed in the first slots. Next you can see resources, material used in crafting — the first 5 items in my case. A recipe for crafting. Consumables, starting with food, then potions (the last potion, before the scroll is a flight potion — there’s a few strength of it and they all add more flight time while in flight — it’s how you extend your flight time far past the usual 1 minute), scrolls, stones, power shards (I think they’re called, if you’ve played Lineage 2 you know about the SoulShots? they’re like that, kind of), and bandages. Right at the end is where the miscellaneous or quest items go. When you head to a vendor to sell drops, they have a convenient little ‘Sell All Misc.’ button. A little piece of the UI that helps save a lot of time and makes the game just that much more enjoyable.

So, I’ve gone into the inventory a good bit, and touched on some of the items in my cube. Now, how did I get a few of those (crafting materials)?

Gathering

Within Aion there’s a couple of gathering skills. Neither has to be ‘trained’ per say by a ‘trainer’ before you can use them. But, both do need to be used and skilled up to gather from higher end nodes. To the left you can see an Iron node being harvested, pre-ascension. The ‘pre-ascension’ part is pretty important as you do things a bit differently. Post-ascension you gather the ‘essence’ of something, instead of digging it out like you would before. It’s largely just an animation and lore-type change — the skills you build up before will carry over.

I’ve covered crafting before, and don’t really need to go back over it, but I do get to explain it a bit more easily with the screenshots that I didn’t have then. Gathering works on a pass/fail basis. You have a chance to succeed, and a chance to fail — what you see when you begin harvesting is not a timer counting down, but those two chances playing out. I haven’t timed every gathering I’ve done, but it does seem to vary — especially with the amount of skill points you have and luck. The flash at the end of the pass bar is that luck. During your harvesting you can sometimes get what I’d call a ‘critical success’ where a large chunk of the bar, or even the whole bar, will suddenly appear shaded then fill up quickly — this can mean a very short gathering time, sometimes only a second or two. These don’t always happen, but it’s pretty safe to say that skill points to play apart in the chances. You also have a chance to automatically fail, so if you start harvesting and it suddenly stops, that’s likely why.

As a side note: I don’t think there’s any upgrades to harvesting, or items that increase harvesting. And, you do have the chance to get special resources while harvesting. One last thing — you gain experience while harvesting. Yup, experience that helps level your character. Gathering gets you resources to use for your own crafting, to sell on the auction house or personal store, and gets you experience. It’s good stuff, very good stuff.

Crafting -- Alchemy

Already covered crafting, previously, but here’s the window. It’s pretty simple, as is the process. Alchemy is looking a bit more useful at the lower levels than Armorsmithing was, or it’s at least easier. I’ve gotten mine to around 20 in less than an hour this morning — got a couple basic potions that I can make, as well (health and mana, the two staples — as a side note, the ones I can craft early on are better than any that I’ve gotten from quests so they are worth it). It’s hard to say what will be the best form of income early on when Aion launches. Typically it’s consumables, and likely will be, but as I said — it’s pretty easy to do. Which means lots of people will be doing it. Cooking is likely the same, but food isn’t as big a requirement I’ve found — it’s kind of just that extra edge. Expect to see food use in the Abyss, though. Lots of it, and lots of potions/scrolls.

That wraps up Asmodian 1-10ish. Tomorrow brings the NA CBT2 with the Asmodian 1-10 — not sure what they’ll have open, unfortunately. I’m thinking just the newbie island and Pandemonium. If they do have Altgard open, it’ll be a great time to try out the different classes and make plans.

Also, Asmodians RULE!

Found this on Keen and Graev’s forums, through Massively (the original source is on Keen’s post). Listing the beta dates, or at least the potential ones (subject to change from press release date, etc, etc).

They are:

June 19-21

July 3-5, 17-19

August 14-16, 19-23

The June weekend is this coming weekend, featuring Asmodians with a level cap of 10. July 3-5 will feature Asmodians again, with a level increase (I’m guessing through 20). July 17-19 will be focused on the Abyss, both races I assume, and the article mentioned unrestricted flying… I’m not sure if that would be the already open flight available in the Abyss or taking the flight timer away for the weekend — either way, I’m going to be enjoying a ton of PvP. The end of July will see the end of the closed beta weekends, starting from August 14-16 will be the first open beta weekend, with the 19-23 seeing the second open beta. I’m assuming we’ll see the release date in early September (if not the estimated first), and the pre-order head start starting a few days after the end of the second open beta. Most likely running from the last weekend (28th-31st) till launch.

I can’t wait for all of them, should be plenty of fun. For those that are waiting to pre-order or buy the game, the two open beta periods should give you plenty of time to check the game out and get a solid feel for it. I’ll have more Aion posting before them, and posts for each weekend.