Aion Open Beta, Part One

It's Bryan's fault.

He wanted to play some new game called Champions Online. He was touting it in the bar as the most badass game to be made & telling everyone he was going to be playing it. So I decided to check it out, & got myself into the beta.

Of course, getting myself into the beta meant having relations with File Planet. I swear to God that website fucking rolled me. I ended up signing up for a month, just because it was so freaking confusing, with all the different account signups along the way, just to get into the damn Champions beta. Which I tried for about an hour & didn't like. Too urban. I need talking trees & dragons to get me off, ok?

How does this relate to Aion, you ask?

Well, Fileplanet then sent me emails about new betas & one of them was Aion. "Visually stunning," they called it. I looked over some of the screenshots thinking there was no way the game was going to look like that, but then when I watched the devs' little presentation video I realized I was going to have to find out.

I did get into the closed beta but I decided to just wait for the open beta, which was in a day or so. In the Open Beta, we could make characters of either Elyos (Aion version of high elves, I guess) or Asmodian (rugged human) factions. The demonic faction, the Balaur, was not available, although I think I might have some interest in that. Faced with pretty & prettier, I chose pretty & made an Asmodian mage named (of course) Tamastara. When Lemmer posted "WTB Healbot" on my Facebook, I rolled an Asmodian priest named Dunizel.

Aion offers the character roller several different face/hair combinations which can all be tweaked in some detail, although not as much detail as EQ2 or Age of Conan. Somehow, though, there seems to be a wider range of looks (at least in the Asmodians), which is a nice surprise.

I think I actually did a little better with Dunizel's looks than with Tamastara. Hey come on - Tam was my first try. I'm down with the evil eyes; I think it looks cool. I did notice a lot of female toons with the cute, big-eyed Japanese idoru face, & lots of variations on that. I spent most of my first day running around getting pictures of different female toons, mostly the ones I thought DIDN'T look like the generic cutesy Japanese idoru face.

Some of the girls in the early screenshots seem to be glowing; this is simply because I was mousing over them when I took the screenshot to make them stand out. Guess I shouldn't do that.



Anyway, I leveled both girls a little bit before I found out that my friends were playing on another server, & they were playing Elyos (the prettiest faction), so I didn't get very far as an Asmodian.

Late in the first day of Open Beta, lag got crazy & I couldn't even log in the next day.

Normally this would cause me to completely lose interest but there is something about Aion that is very enjoyable. Part of it is the prettiness. Sure, I tried to avoid being too pretty but frankly, I actually am enjoying the prettiness. I just don't want to look like a generic video game avatar. The world I am discovering is made up of what I have to say is the best-looking graphics I have ever seen, & of course the character details are excellent. Every single mob I have encountered is worthy of a long look - everything is so detailed & lovingly made. Aside from the graphics, the background music, which has never mattered to me before in an MMO, is truly enjoyable. The Koreans have done a good job with this game.

Next blog I will have pictures of my Elyos.