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Anyone here heard of the new MMORPG called Aion? For those of you that are illiterate, that's Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game. There's a reason it's commonly shortened to MMORPG. Well, anyhow, I've got a month's free trial for it and some thoughts to share on my experience thus far. Not to mention my constant denial that this blog is dying and I'm not writing anymore.

To quote a wise man...well, to quote a kind of crazy guy...well, to quote a certain person, "All MMOs are trying to be WoW." Aion is a superb example of this. From the second I sat down with the game and booted it up, for a gamer who's spent far too much of her life on WoW, this game was almost like slipping on a glove that fits really, REALLY well. If you want an idea of how much I've played WoW, I've owned the game for about 6 years, playing on and off. I played pretty consistantly from the summer of '07 to about February of this year, when I decided the game was no longer worth the $15 bucks a month. Yeah. Blizzard's made quite a bit of money off of me, eh?

So back to Aion. It was developed by NCsoft, those same blokes that made City of Heroes/Villains and Guild Wars, both MMOs I've played before, along with Lineage and a bunch of other games nobody cares about. Guild Wars was pretty O.K., CoH/V was somewhere below O.K., and I've never played Lineage. That doesn't leave a very good legacy for Aion to begin off. But it's a product all its own, so it's worth looking at as its own product, not the product of a bunch of sub-par MMOs...right?

There is definately a few things that Aion does well. For example, the graphics are stunning. They look really really good. Here, I'll just log in and talk about it, because I don't really remember the graphics well enough to talk about them too much.

...So I logged out in Dalar--Pandaemonium, and man, it is laggy in here. Getting anywhere takes a while, though, if you're rich you can just teleport around. On the other hand, all of the trainers are nicely grouped up throughout the city, so hopefully you don't have to do too much running around. And of course, the place is really LAGGY. It takes a bit for it to load up (perhaps just my computer), but it is really nice to look at. The buildings are all nicely textured, with colorful flags above the entrances to buildings providing some contrast between the grey of the buildings. And there's the intelligent, calm, spam-less chat in trade -- BWAHAHA, oh man, that's funny. In the game, you can type little images, like smilies or whatnot. Man, people love to spam that shit. And NCsoft hasn't figured out how to get rid of gol--kinah spammers.

Trade chat's awesome.

Guilds in this game are called Legions. If you don't know what guilds are, they're just a conglomerate of people with a little title under their name. These people usually do stuff together. Right now I'm in a Legion (I joined based on whether there was an option to turn off the profanity filter, which there is) and there's a guild level system of some sort, I don't really get it because I haven't been playing long enough. Whatever. Doesn't matter.

So, all of that's kind of miscellaneous information. "What's the gameplay like?" and "Don't you get wings in this game?"; these are questions I can hear in your head, if you've read anything at all about this game. Yes, you do get wings in this game, in the handful of places you can use them. You don't get them until level 10 (although the quests in the beginning of the game foreshadow them a bit), and you can't fly everywhere. And while I'm only level 11, and I imagine that your flight time increases, or you can buy a flgiht time increase, it is pretty lame I can only fly for a minute. Nevermind the fact there's shit you have to kill in the air, god forbid one of NCsoft's pop-ups kick you out of the game while you're in the air, 'cause you're gonna die from not being able to get back in the goddamn game in time to land safely.

Having wings, I think, gives everyone some sort of combat boost. For me (I rolled a scout, then went Assassin; oh by the way you start as one of 4 classes then branch into one of two from there), I get a critical bonus when I fight something with my wings out. Whenever I do, though, mobs tend to run 'cause I'm just out of range (somehow, lawls at the fact I'm a melee class), and god forbid they run into some water, because you can't get remotely close to water with your wings out without jumping backwards like it's poisonous.

Also, go into water too deep and you just fucking die. You can fly, but damn, if you fall into some deep water, you're fucked.

Anyways. Combat's pretty good. There are some attacks that become chains, doing different abilities and such. I only have one so far, but I hear they can get somewhat complex and have different outcomes than "Do a lot of damage". Then again, I am an Assassin. The tracking system for combat - the system that decides where you are relevant to the mob you're killing - is a little tricky. I know this because my backstab doesn't always work properly. It does like 30 if you don't hit the back, and about 200 if you do. Pretty noticeable. Unfortunately, they didn't just make it so the damn thing doesn't work if you're not behind the mob, so if you're a little off, you get to wait 16 seconds to try again. And who has that sort of time on their hands?

That's my opinion so far. My aversion to others in MMOs has stopped me from doing very many gui--LEGION or group related things. I guess I have to keep playing if I want to give a more informed opinion.

So yeah, Aion is better than WoW, but that's not saying much because WoW is shit and mind-numbingly easy right now. Then again, at least Aion doesn't pretend it's not retardedly easy because it has a built-in quest helper, effectively eliminating any thought process required for the game.

I just wanted to give a shout out to all of my homies in...Canada, India, France, and Germany. Wow, that's really cool. Someone from fucking INDIA's been here. Then they probably realized this blog sucked and left to go warn all of their Indian friends. Damn. As for the one person from France, you should post a comment, so I can attempt to read it!

And for the three of you that care, I don't know how much I will be updating my blog through November as NaNoWriMo will be starting TOMORROW, and with it my own novel. Unfortunately, I can't write 2000 words a night of high enough quality for daily updates. But in December I'll make it better and then maybe even start up my own website so I can post up all of the different aspects of my life for the world to see. We're talking art projects, more henna (maybe, I've posted up all I have so far here), more than just writing on games, and maybe even some other projects I work on as time goes by. But that's a ways off, so don't get too excited, I seem to be bad at keeping my promises.

Want to tell this author what you think, but you don't want anyone else to see it? Think she's full of it and need to set her straight? Want to worship the ground she walks on? Well, good luck with that last one, but you can email Chrys at catharticgamer@yahoo.com and at least tell her what you think.