Aion Open Beta: First Impression

Aion has been a game that I’ve taken noticed off since the release of Guild Wars. I sort of gave up on Aion after a while as it kept been delayed.

Then one day I was on Ventrilo with my friends and they went “we pre-purchased Aion” so I thought I might as well play Aion since most of my friends are going to play. It’ll be great to be able to play together. I pre-purchased the game but didn’t get a chance to try out open beta till Saturday/Sunday.

I was a little disappointed with the scenary graphic really. People made it out to be totally amazing and like never seen before graphic. To me it felt normal and graphic wasn’t that super duper amazing. Don’t get me wrong though, the graphic is really good and definately better than most. I just wasn’t as amazed by it as others were.

I only managed to play the game for a few hours to level 10 so didn’t really get to try out many of the features of the game. From 1-10 it was all questing so wasn’t anything new as many games now are questing base, though there were some nice cut screens for main story like quest which most games don’t have. I wasn’t too impressed by the questing system and I felt that other games like Ether Saga Online and Cabal Online had a slightly better questing features in their system. What I think would be a great improvement to the questing system is showing a list of available quest that the player haven’t already obtained or completed. Like Cabal Online and Ether Saga Online, there were a list of available quest somewhere in your quest window.

Aion allows you to locate quest monsters, items and NPC however you can only locate one at a time. It should allow you to locate more than one and indicate by different colours. Players can then located all the quest monsters, items and NPC in one go and see them all on the world map and mini map. It will make life easier when trying to complete serveral quests.

Overall I thought the game was ok, I didn’t really play enough to tell right now. I really liked the animations of the skills, I’m really looking forward to seeing high level skills as I bet they’re really cool looking. I pre-purchased the game so I’ll be able to play in 6 days time. I’m really looking forward to playing it properly.

I should also mention that the character creation is cool, you can completely customise your character. My friend thought I’ll be totally amazed by that, well I wasn’t really because Perfect World has a similar character creation. I wasn’t really suprised that Aion would have a completely customisable character creation as I’m pretty sure that this is starting to become a very common feature in most games with human like characters (non-cartoon/non-anime like). This one is slightly better than Perfect World‘s character creation because it has many really nice pre-set faces and body shapes that you can use to modify.

I didn’t manage to take many screenshots, but here’s two that I took.