by Cody Bye on Jan 21, 2009
Over the past few years, the Ten Ton Hammer team has been eagerly
scooping up every piece of
href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/taxonomy/term/254"
target="_blank">Aion: The Tower of Eternity
development news that we could get our hands on. There hasn’t
been much
officially released for the US public, but we’ve done our
best to give
you the scoop on this epic game. But since the grand public unveiling
of Aion to North American audiences at
2008’s Penny Arcade
Expo, the US developers for NCsoft’s upcoming high fantasy
MMO have
gone relatively quiet. Thankfully, the Ten Ton Hammer staff was able to
nab a few answers to some nagging Aion questions,
and if you’re eagerly awaiting this beautiful MMO, make sure
you check out this interview!
Ten Ton Hammer: The archetype approach for character
creation has been attempted before to mixed results, most notably with EverQuest
2.
In that game the system ultimately didn't go over so well as it left
players feeling a bit disconnected from the class they ultimately
wanted to play, so was later dropped altogether. How has player
reception been with the archetypes in Aion so far?
Will there
be a more seamless progression between archetype and main class that
helps ease players into specific combat roles?
Chris Hager: Aion’s class
system is designed to be
intuitive. We want players to make an easy first decision and enter the
world to learn about the story, the combat, the questing, and general
game mechanics without having to worry about whether they picked the
right class. By providing four general choices at the beginning a
player can get in and learn the game before making game altering
decisions. The second class choice you make is fairly early on, within
the first 10 hours of gameplay. The classes to choose from are familiar
to the player so that they do not need to log out and scour the web to
look up some obscure word describing what is essentially a Ranger.