Aion
Aion: The Tower of Eternity is a fantasy MMORPG, set in the world of Atreia. Aion is set around a conflict between Aion (the benevolent creator of Atreia), and the Balaur (the protectors created to safeguard the humans). The conflict between them has split the world in two. Those that lived in the part of Atreia that
Aion PvP
still has light became known as the Elyos, and those that lived in darkness came to be known as the Asmodian. You start as a human in your world of choice, and through the completion of tasks, you ascend as winged immortal Daeves (sort of like demigods), and become holy servants to their respective peoples.
The world of Aion, thanks largely to the CryEngine can be stunningly pretty at times. Aion is quite possibly the prettiest MMORPG game ever made, having said that, Aion like many other games in the genre, still pales in comparison to most modern FPS games.
Character customization is one of Aion’s strongest features. You choose from two races (although the choice makes only cosmetic changes to your character and the gameplay), and you then choose from four classes: Warrior, Scout, Priest and Mage with further class specialization coming at level nine. The facial customization in Aion is excellent, allowing you to select hair style, skine tone, facial textures and facial features, so far as to say that it puts your characters in the uncanny valley (so real that the brain can’t
Flying in Aion as an Asmodian
possibly register them as real), which can be a tad unsettling. Aion allows you to fully customize the size, scale of body parts and the weight of your character; it can be a looming giant, or a diminutive midget. However an issue of contention with Aion is the character animation when you change size, larger characters appear to move in slow motion, and smaller characters move much faster than normal.
Flight is one of Aion’s major draw cards. Unfortunately its somewhat ruined by the inability to fly for more than a minute at a time before an atmosphere shattering alarm sounds and your forced to land and regain your strength. Quests rarely call on you to fly, and you’ll often run into invisible walls and be forced to land, with no justification given in game other than inferred uncreative design by the developers.
Quests in Aion are not varied, and after about twenty hours really start to have a grinding quality to them, and they become a chore, with only the choice of fetch, kill, collect and deliver objectives. Unfortunately there’s not a large volume of quests available, and you’ll find yourself repeating the same quests over and over again in order to level. Combat in Aion is fluid and well designed, and focuses on attack combinations, in a system very similar to that of Assassins Creed. The large PvPvE battles, which involve
Aion is avery pretty game, just not often enough.
players controlling huge fortresses can be a lot of fun when they’re balanced, however when there are a large number of players involved, the servers struggle to keep up and the game comes very close to being unplayable.
Overall, Aion is a missed opportunity. The quests become mind numbingly dull after the first 20 or so game hours, and you’ll find that to level you’ll simply be going through the motions without actually engaging with the game. A major issue for me at least, was the consistently horrible ping times on oceanic servers (always over eight hundred). If the game world were as well planned and full of life as the starting areas, Aion would be a winner, but in its current state, it’d be difficult to justify paying for Aion.
