Aion: The Tower of Eternity

Introduction-

Aion: The Tower of Eternity, is another MMORPG that was released September 22, 2009. This RPG has been up and running in Korea for a couple of years now, and the anticipation level of its release in all other parts of the world have been high. Aion is being release by NCsoft, who also created City of Heroes, City of Villains, Guild Wars, Lineage, and Lineage II. With all these other great predecessors, you cannot expect anything but greatness from Aion: The Tower of Eternity.

First Impressions-

Upon entering the game, you get to choose your race, class, and what your character looks like. With Aion, NCsoft took an extra couple steps in character customization–everything about your character is unique to you! There are multiple colors and scales to use to adjust your characters nose height, width, eye width, eye angle, head size, head shape, chest size, eyebrow thickness, eyebrow angle, and much more. Once character creation is out of the way, you enter the world, and the graphics are unbelievable! On my laptop I currently run the game on medium-high settings, and everything looks great, and the game runs smoothly at the same time. So it is obvious that NCsoft really wanted to concentrate on the overall look of the game, but how about the actual content? The game starts you out with some quests that help you get the basic controls down, and then you quickly move on to more adventurous quests and zones. The quests in this game are nothing compared to the quests in World of Warcraft, but they are still neat. Overall first impression, solid game with good graphics that has a world of space to continue the game with new content.

The Good-

Aion: The Tower of Eternity has a lot of good characteristics. First, the graphics. The graphics in this game match those of Half-Life 2 games, yet the game still runs very smoothly. Second, they have a great system for class creation. You first create a main class, and at level 10 you get to choose your subclass, each main class has two subclasses. This brings even more diversity to the game. Also, each subclass is very balanced, unlike in World of Warcraft. Thirdly, They have a really good PvP (player vs. player) system that adds an extra challenge to leveling. At level 25, you must go to a zone called the Abyss, which is a complete in-air PvP zone, with in-flight combat, cool! The challenge to this zone is that every time you kill a monster or another player of the opposite faction, you gain what are called Abyss points. However, if you die to a monster or another player, your Abyss points go down and you will lose experience. This twist to the game adds a challenge not yet experienced in any other MMORPG.

The Bad-
The main issue that I have found with this game that there are a lot of points in the game that you will find yourself with no more quests to do. When this happens, you have to start grinding to the next level, or until more quests become available (which could be 1-4 levels). The term grinding refers to when you sit and just kill the same group of monsters over, and over, and over again for a given amount of experience. Grinding is the most boring part of any MMORPG, but almost always will be an inevitability. Another problem with Aion is the lack of GM (game master) support in the game. The chat channels are constantly being flooded by Kinah (currency in Aion) sellers, however this is fairly easily stopped by blocking the spammers.

Overall-

Despite the long, hard core grinding sessions you will encounter, and the Kinah spammers in trade chat, Aion is actually a very good game. Leveling is for the most part fun, and the game is actually rather challenging, unlike many of today’s MMORPGs. I would definitely recommend that anyone looking to play an MMORPG at least give Aion a shot, because once you start to play it, you probably will have a hard time stopping.