Aion Beta

I entered today’s Aion Beta with a lot of ignorance. What I mean is I have not been reading lots of Aion forums, studying web sites or researching items, quests, classes, etc. I came into the game relatively naive, which is an odd thing for me.  I met up with my friend (dlangar) and we made a pair of new Asomdian characters o the Siel Server, he a scout and I a priest, and then we jumped in.

Due to my lack of time right now, I am simply going to bullet point some impressions.

Annoyances

• There were a lot of people in the starting area. Which tells me the beta for the game has some appeal but it also made doing some of the quests very frustrating.
• NO inverted Camera! How does a big title like this based off a FPS engine not have an inverted mouse option at this stage? A major downer for me, and frankly it sort of ruined my first hour of play.
• Quests that make you gather items in the world are not fun when you have to compete with other players to click first. Lotro fixed this design problem and I am shocked other games have not adopted their solution. Even if they don’t use that sort of solution, they need to scale the world items with the number of characters in the region. At some points I had to just stop running around, stand and do nothing near a spawn spot and wait to click. This is NOT fun.
• What the heck is up with enemy claiming? If there is some way to claim an enemy and get its loot, it needs to be made much more clear. Right now Dlangar and I were having to fight with the pack of people to try and claim monsters. This made quests that required a number of pieces of an uncommon drop off an enemy a big pain.
• I am not a fan of taking real time to unsheathe my weapon to cast a spell, or to sheath said weapon to gather.
• No buyback at vendor. If you click Sell then bye bye to the items in your cart.

Goodies:

• It is pretty. Sort of a cross between wow (the look of some of the textures) and Guild Wars (character models)
• The combat animations and sounds are good.
• Quest Text is pretty good.
• The use of quick cut scenes to highlight a quest are very nice.
• The highlighting and separation of “campaign quests” in the log. So If I wanted to focus on the main story of the game it would be easy to follow my progress.
• The ability to locate on the map NPCs and enemies from links in the quest is a nice quality of life feature.
• I did not encounter an game breaking bugs in my ~4 hours of play.

I will post some more after when I have more time later, and hopefully have some images to spruces things up a bit.