Ten Ton Hammer - Taking MMO Gamers to the Next Level!

Your first steps into Aion as an Elyos will land you on the island of Poeta after having woken from an odd slumber that has left you searching for answers and a desire to recover lost memories of a former life as a Daeva. This will be the main storyline that will sweep you through roughly the first nine levels and ultimately drives you to recall having been the leader of a great legion in the Abyss who fell in battle, which is a clever way of guiding players towards their subclass selection, but I’ll get into that a bit more later on.

The first thing that struck me which I feel deserves special mention here, is that Aion is not only an incredibly beautiful game, but that I suffered only the most minimal of performance hits when I first logged in to see the starting area flooded with literally hundreds of other players. With all graphical settings turned up to their max I never fell below 30 fps, most often seeing closer to 100+ which is no mean feat considering how visually stunning both environments and combat animations are. It’s also worth noting that I was playing on a somewhat middle of the road PC, with a 2.60 GHz dual-core processor, 4gigs of RAM and a 9800gtx GPU; so not a powerhouse machine by any means. The graphics also scale incredibly well, so that even with everything turned down to the lowest settings Aion still carries that otherworldly glow of a believable and visually appealing game world. Throughout the weekend I had an entirely stable, lag-free experience which just goes to show that once the localization efforts for Aion have been completed, the game is certainly ready for prime time and will hopefully offer an equally solid experience for a broad spectrum of PC users.

Another thing I took an immediate liking to is the slick, one-piece UI. While there is the option to toggle the placement of your character’s status window and the mini-map at the top of the screen which has become somewhat of an industry norm, I’m one of those players who will typically opt for a less cluttered screen in exchange for a better view of my surroundings. Many of the other bells and whistles you’d come to expect from a newer western MMO are also present such as the option to add more hotbars at the click of a mouse or even being able to preview armors before attuning them to your character. During my exploration I also discovered such perks as being able to retain the visual appearance of a particular piece of armor while gaining the benefits from a newer equipped piece by paying a simple fee (which is currently only available at level 30).

While I’m on the subject of fees, many gameplay elements eventually will end up costing you Kinah, the main currency in Aion. Examples here would include travel or teleportation between areas, removing the XP debt obtained upon death or even some of the advanced work orders you’ll likely end up doing as a means of advancing your crafting skills. Thankfully Kinah is also generously handed out as quest rewards and even the most basic dropped items sell to vendors for a decent price, so I never really encountered an instance of feeling a pinch in my coin purse even when teleporting back and forth from the crafting workshop and the bank numerous times or paying the fee to bind my recall point to a new area.