Aion: Hands On Preview: Part Two

04 Aug 2009 at 14:52:48 by Bill Vaughan

Last week I took my first look at the upcoming MMO, Aion, and described the incredibly detailed character creation process. Today's article will describe the early gameplay itself including the quests, graphics and overall experience.

After the good chunk of time I'd invested into creating my character, I was keen to get in-game and see if the rest of Aion was as impressive. The starter area was, as expected on the beta for such a hyped game, pretty crowded. The quest givers were easy to spot though, despite the absence of the somewhat familiar yellow punctuation marks above their heads. In their places were large blue arrows, hard to miss. So I took my first quest, which was the fairly standard “Go speak to this guy, he has work for you”, which lead on to “Go kill 10 of these nearby harmless creatures”.

I was pleased to find there were plenty of these quest mobs around regardless of there being so many of us in the starter area. I did a couple of additional quests, which took me to a nearby town. Here, there were vendors, trainers and plenty more quests. So far, all pretty normal for an MMORPG. Like any fan of this type of game, I've been in many of these lowbie towns, and at this point I normally take a deep breath, gather up all the quests and begin the grind. Instead, I actually stopped to take a look around; there was something going on everywhere.

In Aion, characters who are idle don't just stand around occasionally twitching. If it's raining, after a few moments they'll look up, feel the top of their head and look somewhat frustrated, then produce a large leaf to hold above them. If it's dry, they'll glance over their shoulders, turn around, see who's about. This changes depending on where they are when they're idle. If you happen to be standing in water, your character will catch a fish, only to have it slip out of their fingers. The result is that, while playing, you'll never come across a  bunch of motionless muppets, even while talking to an NPC, your character animatedly 'chats', and so does the NPC.

While on the subject of character animations, I can't fail to mention the emote system. While it's likely to be a somewhat brief period of amusement, watching your character go through all these actions is highly entertaining. They can cry, laugh, wave – all the usual things, but there's a vast selection of other actions they can act out on demand - around 30 of them. Want them to sit? Aion characters don't just plonk their behinds on the ground, they produce a small stool and rest on that. The sleep emote made my character create a man-sized floating cloud which he reclined on, a couple of feet about the ground, puffing up the 'pillow' until he was comfortable. They can act out virtually anything that springs to mind in incredible detail, within reason of course, and there's more fancy ones you can buy from vendors later in the game. See a video of these emotes in our earlier news article.

Characters look pretty cool when they're fighting too, with plenty of grand and elaborate moves. More work has been put into their appearance here; when your character is down to around 70% health, they'll stoop slightly as they walk, if they reach below 50% they'll stagger. This serves as a handy reminder of your health levels as well as a nice game effect. When you need to regain health and mana after battle, you can use bandages which are cheap to buy from vendors, or you can use the 'Rest' emote which tops you back up in a few moments.

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