"Not Forced Perspective, She's Just That Short"

“Aion: The Tower of Eternity” is the new MMORPG from NCsoft. The initial beta for US and Europe wrapped up last Sunday and both my wife and I were able to play it (the game has been out in Korea since November).

The premise is that there was a big ancient war that tore the world apart. There is now a dark half of the planet and light half, with a strange abyss in the middle where huge battles constantly break out. To make it clearer, imagine a ball ripped in half, with the inhabitants living on the inside part of the halves. The aesthetic is very cool, as it allows you to look up to see the the other part of the world way off in the distance.

But how was the game?

Let’s start with the character creator. I play Warcraft and one of my complaints is that the character creator is pretty limited. This is definitely not the case with Aion. It uses a similar system of sliders as city of heroes, giving you a lot of control over the look of your character. Rather than choosing a race, you just make a guy that looks like one.

I ended up making a warrior that is as large as possible and a mage that was as small as possible to see the contrast. As it turns out, the smallest characters barely come up to the waste of the larger ones.

You start with the choice of four main classes: Warrior, Scout, Mage and Priest. Once you get past the first area, each of these break off into two much more specialized classes of which you can pick only one. There is a lot more variety once you’ve hit this point (around level 9).

The game plays a lot like World of Warcraft, which is to say like most MMO’s. There wasn’t a lot in the UI to change that. It did do two specific things that sucked me in.

First is that there are combo moves, even within magical attacks. You can cast a fireball that you can then follow up with a combo move that causes a pillar of fire to do even more damage. With my ice, I was able to hit them with a generic ice attack followed by a big ball of ice damage (hadoken style) that also caused knock-back.

The second, much cooler way, is that you get wings. You can only fly in certain areas, but the flight feels really natural. Using your mouse for control, you can fly around doing aerial attacks on enemies. From what I’ve heard, a lot of the end-game content will revolve around this mechanic in the abyss.

Overall, both Brittany and I had a lot of fun playing the beta and if they are able to do some more to make this game unique from all the other MMO’s on the market, it will definitely be worth checking out.

Tags: Aion, Aion: The Tower of Eternity, beta, character creator, MMORPG, video

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 11th, 2009 at 5:00 am and is filed under Features. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.