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.

The strongest weapon on Dragonica for each class is a Magma weapon. It requires an item called “Lavalon’s Heart” to craft it. This heart can be obtained by two methods

• Special dungeon that requires a key to enter – Lavalon Dungeon
• Crafted with 3x Lavalon’s Heart Pieces (obtainable from Lavalon Dungeon) and a Lavalon’s Heart Recipe (cash shop item)

Each player can obtain 1 Lavalon key a day. Only the party leader’s key will disappear upon entering the dungeon, which means that players are not limited to doing the dungeon only once. Generally players can only do it 4 times a day (4 players per party) where each party member will use their key once.

With that said this weapon is extremely hard to craft. I wasn’t so lucky and didn’t get the Lavalon’s heart after doing it many many times. I ended up buying the 3 heart pieces and recipe. It cost all my money and some of my boyfriend’s money too.

I really hope that this weapon is worth the cost. The image on the left is my character weilding my Magma Staff.

Recently I’m been playing this 3D side scrolling game by Barunson Interactive. I found this game through MMOSITE. It is a dungeon / instance base game, where pretty much everything is based around dungeons (i.e grinding, money earning, item farming and questing).

Grinding
At the beginning of the game there’s so many quest to do so it felt like a questing game, however around level 25 I only did main story line quest and the rest I didn’t bother doing. Quest don’t really give anything important or useful later. You’ll get all your items you need through doing dungeons.

Dungeons
This has to be the best part of this game. Everything is pretty much done through dungeons. There are dungeons through the entire game. Each dungeon has 5 levels to it (1-5 star). 1-4 stars are for leveling and farming items whereas 5 star is for the storyline quest. Most people will go to the 4 star map for leveling as it contains the highest number of maps and monsters per map.

At the end of each dungeon is a boss map. After killing the boss, each player will gain items and extra experience points depending on the rank they achieved during the dungeon run. Equipments can only be obtained at the end of a dungeon run. I personally think this is one of the best way to distribute items, there’s no fighting for loots or looting other’s items.

All class equipments (including special ones) are obtainable through dungeons, so anyone can easily farm these items without the worry that someone will kill steal their monster/boss or loot their items. There are a few special items that are only obtainable from bosses on special map (isn’t dungeon base, so bosses are open to everyone on the same map).

Money making
In some MMO that I’ve played, I have found that certain classes can’t really make money because they spend majority of their money on throwing darts/arrows/ or buying potions. This game however is very balanced. Money is earnt mainly from selling items to npc and as I’ve mentioned before everyone will obtain some items at the end of a dungeon run, meaning they’ll get money.

Highly recommended game for MMO lovers, both hardcore and casual players.