Aion is out tomorrow in Europe and North America, and the pre-order has been topping direct-download charts for weeks. But are you going to be playing? Did you get on the beta? Did you pre-order? Have you signed up for the full game? If you are playing, what’s the appeal? Do those wings really make all the difference? Or is this a case of hype over content? RPS communal-voicebrain: speak!
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Played a couple of days in the open beta. I had to force myself to keep going after the first session, and after the second it was clear that even though I hadn’t gotten to the point where you get wings (and I’m certain it gets more playable from there), I just couldn’t muster the interest. I wasn’t doing anything I hadn’t done a hundred thousand times in other MMOs, and neither my class nor the world nor the quests were in any way exciting or original to me. I was also missing some UI conveniences that I’ve grown accustomed to in other current MMOs (especially WoW, with its thousands of UI mods.).
It’s probably just as well. I don’t like PvP and I’m better off not spending my money on an MMO where that’s the endgame focus.
Certainly not playing, well, until they concider removing GameGuard or remove the retail price. But i certainly will not pay retail price for a game with gameguard, nor will i pay 60 euros for an asian MMO (not to mention subscription too.)
They ended up scrapping GameGuard and it’s not used in the current live version of the game.
Please excuse my asian mmo ignorance, but what’s the problem with gameguard ? Isn’t it the anticheat application that’s has been installed since a while with many asian mmo’s, I had to install it on a couple of occasions, but have never seen anything wrong with it, or is there some kind of a hidden wrong with it ? Like say with starforce ?
As far as I’ve heard it causes problems with quite a few anti virus programs and also doesn’t play nice with “macro keyboards” like the G15 (I assume it considers having a keyboard play the game for you is a bit of a cheat which, when you think about it, it kind of is).
There might be other issues but those are the ones I’ve heard of and I haven’t had any problems with it myself.
Well, a friend of mine -is- playing Aion and reports the gameguard is still in, i just asked, 2 minutes ago no less. The issue with Gameguard is mainly this: 40-50% of people cannot play the game. It also brings other compatibility issues, not only with G-15 keyboards or antiviruses, but sometimes it has caused as bad of an issue as a spontaneous driver corruption (to the point that the entire OS had to be reinstalled).
In addition, it markets itself as ”anti hacking” program, even if it is only a badly programmed macro stopper, and doesn’t stop people who want to ”hack” (use cheatprograms) in the game. Basically, gameguard is an extremely good way to ruin your game for half of the people trying to play.
For how gameguard operates, it’s a trojan of excessive. It generates a rootkit for itself, allowing root access to your computer. (if you’re not familiar with terminology, this is higher access than the admin. ”Admin’s boss” could be said) And reports about what is going on in your computer to their server (privacy issue) without your explicit allowance. In addition to this, it doesn’t only check running processes, but freely rummages through all the files on every harddrive and other on your computer, searching for whatever has been (wrongly, or rightly) deemed as “hacking programs”, should it find one, it will take actions, this means, it will crash the game, and mark you as a cheater.
Damn, this looks like a pretty bad piece of program, this shouldn’t be required to be able to play the game, it’s not a part of it, it’s almost like a third party program. Well thank you for the clarification, I won’t play Aion anyway, be it trial or paid subscription, I am feeling good were I am at the moment, hidden in the world of EVE, watching for what will be my next MMORPG, I tried AOC before it came out, in the beta and thought already this is not going to be the DAOC killer or successor for me, it felt too arcadish and instanced, more like a guild wars than a DAOC, but what killed it most for me was a bit before its launch there were some interviews released, and the guys really marketed it like a toy or I don’t know what kind of other childish game. “And here we show you some of the minigames you gonna play in”, “minigames” !!! omg, I thought it was supposed to be a reproduction of the Conan world and lore, destined for mature people !! minigames…. geesh.. But anyway, I could continue to play EVE indefinitely if I had to, so I will just fix a high objective, and prepare to immerse like those nuclear submarines, resurfacing only each twelve months, to see what’s the status. I hope I will live someday an experience similar to the one I had with DAOC, I don’t think I would play today or in the future anything that doesn’t match even the three quarters of it.
I haven’t gone into beta but I pre-order a copy of it. My friend told me that this game was really great and the leveling is pretty quick. Also, they say that it has a lot of great features like the PvPvE system, skill chain and etc.
Has anyone done a skill-based MMO where your unused skills actually degrade?
What I’m thinking of is something where you can be a super awesome specialist (but lacking a lot of possibly important skills), or a pretty decent generalist (but not really specialising in anything). Your skills would naturally follow your play style, yet you could also change your play style and your character would adapt.
I’m not talking about degrading with time, either. Rather, as some skills advance, others decrease, turning it into a zero-sum game (once you hit the max, since you presumably start as a minimal-skills newb).
Grinding would only be something you’d do if you really wanted to drastically change your character in a short amount of time, i.e. 99% optional (barring those cases where you really manage to screw yourself and need to grind to recover).
You’d eliminate the concept of newbies never catching up with older players. I gather this is something akin to EVE, where I hear that although the oldest players will always have more stuff than you, the various limitations mean that you can still be generally as useful as them in the general case.
Obviously, you would need something more than grinding for levels to entertain people. It would need to be something like the more player-driven MMOs, or have a lot of fun group activities and whatnot to keep people busy. But then, that’s definitely a good thing — the “G” in “MMORPG” is a bit of a misnomer these days. Then again, so is “RP”… and some places are starting to skip that first “M”… and, well, yeah.
@Wisq
That would be Ultima Online.
no
Yep, UO got that kind of mechanics IIRC.
Thing is, Aion and EvE can coexist with no problems at all. What is wrong is for example when WoW is described or sold as *the* Mmorpg. I mean, The Sims tops the charts, but that doesn’t matter to people successfully designing Braid or Arkham Asylum. Same way, there’s no longer only one MMO doing the buzz and draining all the online playerbase to it.
Again, will Aion kill WoW ? dunno, but they’re certainly pulling the same strings gameplay wise, and therefore you’ll end up doing similar things from one to the other. The real question you have to ask yourself is: do you have fun doing so ? Originality isn’t a token of quality or an assurance that you’ll like it.
Aion isn’t sold as the new groundbreaking software that’ll push the genre into the future. The main concern is that it succeeds to hold itself together. There’ve been so many mmos that were sold as the hype and just managed to disappoint players and fail as a whole.
In the end, yes it’s an EQ-like just as WoW, and yes you’ll probably end up doing most of the things you did in the other EQ-likes. However, having played hundreds of hours on doom II, quake, Unreal, etc… doesn’t mean I didn’t enjoy Call of Juarez II lately. It’s all about playing what you like to play.
If i made a fan copy of RPS, and did it clumsy, ( while snagging a couple of bits from other such releases, that really quite won’t fit) would it kill RPS?
This is the rethorical question to ”will Aion kill WoW”
In short, no.
Not that I care about killing WoW – my post wasn’t on that topic – but that seems like a pretty subjective point of view you got here. Don’t see where Aion is more a copy of WoW than of DAoC or Everquest. Don’t see how you can qualify it as “clumsy” either, considering its relative success and positive reviews.
After all, everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but using peremptory arguments aren’t gonna make them true. Myself, I play EvE, don’t care about WoW anymore and will not play Aion. Therefore, internet fights between WoW fanboys and *insert random game* fanboys bores me to death.
What I’m just saying is: mmo gaming is entering cruising speed imho. There’s no point now in comparing games, or you’ll have to go as far as UO, Meridian and the like. Older titles are now admitted as being acceptable references, and revolutionizing the genre isn’t a must anymore to be successful.
Hell, with UO as the first in the line and EQ second, you may wonder how can anyone in the past ten years could have bought the innovating argument about mmorpgs. Just now, there’ve been enough quality titles retaining enough similarities with sufficient differences to erase the argument as a whole when you review a new game.
Take what you want from the oldies, add what you think is needed, as long as you produce a solid, honest and worthy game, I call it a fair deal.
I consider this a diversion from WoW for now. Played through 10 on all four base classes, and had some fun with it. We’ll see how it goes once I hit 20, PvP, etc.
One thing that is better about it is that it feels much more optimized than WoW. It runs much more smoothly on older hardware (GeForce 8400) than WoW does. I think the CryEngine was a good choice.
Kinda looking forward to them exposing an interface addon sdk.
I played in both elyos and asmodian weekend closed betas, I was originally extremely hyped over the game but after a few hours of playing it turned out to be just one big grind. True there is enough quests to reach lvl 20+ atleast without ever having to farm exp but the quests itself are the grind; Kill 10 X, Collect 15 Y from monsters X or Run around delivering stuff and chatting with NPC’s.
I first played elyos and then I thought I’d find some variety on the asmodian side, but no. Both sides are essentially mirrored, while asmodian is more moody and cold but the simple layout is still the same. Monsters, quests and areas are the same, if only slightly altered to give a different feel to them. There is certain unique areas for both sides but those are still too few in between.
The flight system does bring interesting variety to gameplay but it also turned out to be unsatisfyingly restrained. In most of the areas you cannot fly, and it is in those areas where you would usually need it. You can glide everywhere, but that requires a downhill or an appropriate cliff to jump off. You also tend to aggro everything when you glide down a hill trying to escape a mob, only making the situation worse.
I didn’t get to the PvP part, I suppose it could be interesting with massive raid parties but I wouldn’t play this just for that. I’m gonna wait until guild wars 2 comes out, it should be way more interesting and for no montly-fees involved.
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