Aion sure got a lot of attention from MMORPG gamers.
And somehow, it was compared to the best selling MMORPG, World of Warcraft.

After many days and nights of test-driving Aion, we now understand why people are debating and comparing Aion to the best selling MMORPG. And through our experience, we agree that Aion well deserves the attention it’s received, and then some.

Before we go on, we want you to know that this won’t be our only Aion impression. As you might already know, MMORPG is a very progressive genre that can change dramatically with patches and expansions. It wouldn’t be fair for us to do a review and give them a static score for an ever-growing world.

One of the first things you encounter before playing Aion is the character creation system. We wouldn’t usually make a note about obvious steps like creating an avatar, but Aion’s a bit different.  Aion features an incredibly advanced character customization system like no other. Take a look.

That is some serious customization.

If you spend some time with it, you can re-create almost anyone you can imagine, physically of course. Handsome, cute, nice looking, mean looking, fat, short, thin, buff. You name it; you can do it. You can select your favorite out of the avatar presets and start your adventure there. Or you can select one from the presets, then change every major body part to be original. And while you’re creating and customizing your avatar, you have options to put clothes or armors on and off.  It’s like a whole new mini game.

Run little friend, run!

Obviously, we haven’t tried EVERY MMORPG avatar customization system out there so we can’t say Aion is the top of the line, but so far, it’s definitely high on the scale for character customization. And with CryENGINE under the hood, the game runs great with rich colors and details even close-up.

With a video card that costs little over than $120 (we used Radeon HD 4850), we set every visual setup to the max, and it had no hiccups at all. And for those of you a bit behind on the video card roadmap, Aion gives a nice optimization graphic option so that if the player visits areas with many players and NPCs, it’ll automatically tone down visuals a bit so that your computer won’t slow down.

The animation of NPCs and their AI was very nice too. Some of the action emotes are very well done. Characters don’t move around like robots, and if different territorial monsters see each other, they actually interact with each other.

"There's a perfectly good reason why I pee there!"

The background music and audio quality is something you’ll enjoy as well. There is a little bit of bad voice acting here and there, but not compared to many games out there, and you probably won’t even notice them with the great presentation and visuals. Sometimes the music can sound over epic, but not too much that players would notice. It blends in nicely and gives the game the right atmosphere. Yes, we haven’t played too much on the later chapters of Aion, but so far, none of the audio work has disappointed us.

Enough with the technical stuff; let’s get to the game systems and interactive experiences.

As we said, this is only part one of our Aion report, and as of yesterday, we have reached level 14, which is about 20 something percent of the max. level cap; 50. We’ll share our Aion experience to the point where we are at today, but some stuff can change over the duration of our play. And we don’t want to spoil you with anything so even though our information can be limited, please do understand our purpose.

Before you create a character, you have to choose a server to play on, then you have to choose a side; between Asmodian or Elyos. Be careful which one you choose; once you pick a side, you have to play as that race for the server you decided to play. It’s very hard to communicate between Asmodian or Elyos, so I suggest that you consult with your friends, or just check out the Aion galleries around the internet and pick your favorite.

The one thing some gamers point out about MMORPGs is that players have to grind a bunch to reach a point where they can actually enjoy the game. This is true with some games, but not entirely true with Aion, at least thus far. We’re at level 14 and we haven’t had a moment where we had to level up or beg hunt for money to enjoy the game. We simply did some side quests along with the main campaign, and so far it’s given us enough XP to progress to the next level. Yes, some quests involve dealing with monsters, but compared to many hardcore-grinding MMORPGs out there, we really felt like we were following the main/side storyline with undivided attention. If you hate quests and love hunting for goods/rare items or money, Aion provides that as well.

Quests or hunting, you'll be leveling enough to progress..

If you’re an avid MMORPG player, you won’t have too much trouble learning Aion at all. If you have a limited experience with MMORPGs, you might want to leave the key settings as default because it feels like any other major MMORPG controls. If you haven’t played MMORPGs at all, you shouldn’t have too many problems either, thanks to the helpful tutorial with videos. If you’re a space monkey from another planet like ClassicMoments, you might need some time to figure everything out, but it took less than an hour to master the keys, so kudos for the video tutorials.

One interesting control system that we can point out is the macro system. Gamers who want to cast several spells or skills in order, won’t have to press a bunch of keys to make it happen; you can just macro it so that one key can cast many different spells or skills to your enemies/group members. One step away from carpal tunnel syndrome before we quit gaming, yeah?

Once you reach level 9, it means that the avatar is qualified for Ascension. The main thing about Ascension is that you’ll be able to pick a class to carry on with the storyline, and you’ll get a nice set of wings! First when we heard about flying around with wings, we didn’t expect much. But boy were we wrong. We didn’t realize how much of an impact these wings had on gameplay.

How do you like my wings, you mere humans?

Whenever we fly to do quests, fight or just mess around, we felt our hearts pumping because first, you don’t get to fly around forever. You have a limited time to handle your air-time, so whatever you’re doing, you better use your time wisely. And second, flying around feels just damn cool. Controls are tight and simple, so anyone who can use a mouse and a keyboard simultaneously shouldn’t have any problems.

Another very interesting system is the “Trade Broker” system. In game, there are NPCs throughout the world who act as item trade brokers. You can give these trade brokers items to sell at the price that you want, while you’re concentrating on gameplay. It’s like a simple trading forum, and a very useful feature that’ll save many people’s precious time.

Trade Broker will do the dirty business jobs for you.

Another convenient feature we found is the ability to sell all the ‘misc.’ item drops to NPCs with a single click. There’s a “Sell All Misc.” button that will automatically put all the non-equipments and non-crafting materials to the selling cart. These little touches will be really appreciated by the time-sensitive gamers.

The only thing we had trouble figuring out was changing certain option settings. Aion has option settings for almost any player’s convenience, but some of them are hard to find. One of the settings that we wanted to check out was in between options that had no relevance to the settings we wanted to change whatsoever. It’s very nice that they thought of every possible taste; we just wish that the list of settings were a bit more organized. One of our editors pointed out that it would be cool to add more hotkeys like selecting the nearest item drops. We’re sure that they’ll patch things up once they receive requests from players. After all, this is the mere beginning phase of the game.

And though cinematic presentation was excellent, we wish there were more informative cinematics about the storyline itself. Though we can read texts and find more information about the story on the internet, good storytelling is never a bad thing, especially for an MMORPG.

If anyone asks about how Aion matches up to other major MMOs, I can safely assure them that we’ve found many good, working and proven elements of MMORPGs, with relatively standard controls and very nice graphics; yet, it’s very original. It’ll take us more time to make our words final, but we understand why almost 400,000 copies of Aion were pre-ordered. We haven’t reached the high levels yet, and we haven’t discovered all the cool places either. But we’re eager to find out more about Aion: Tower of Eternity, and we’ll definitely keep you in the loop with our future impressions.

The future of Atreia looks bright.

Get Aion: Tower of Eternity from Amazon.com
Get Aion: Tower of Eternity Collector’s Edition from Amazon.com