9/24 recap.

• (+) The previously mentioned Gymkata is supposed to arrive at my house today, in plenty of time for Bad Movie Night.
• (-) At the time of this posting, however, it has not yet arrived.
• (-) [Justicebringer] failed to drop for me again.
• (+) On the upside, we downed the new Onyxia as well as Sarth+3 tonight.
• (=) The changes to DKs this patch make unholy Oblit useless, while buffing SS to a roughly reasonable level. Rotation is borked, but might be good once I get used to it. We’ll see.
• (-) The change to Bone Shield (one less bone, 1-min duration, 1-min cooldown) is obnoxious to work into a rotation.
• (+) This week is flying by, speeding quickly toward Bad Movie Night.
• (-) Aion retail has hit stores this week. I really wish I had gotten into the beta earlier, as I may have enjoyed the game more later on. Unfortunately, it wasn’t good enough to grab me right away, and hey – that’s how you sell stuff.
• (-) Pearl Jam’s Backspacer was released for Rock Band 2 DLC this week – I have no interest in purchasing it.

Aion Open Beta, or Why I Don’t Like NCsoft.

Let’s talk about MMOs.

*cough*

Ok, now that I’ve cleared out anyone that really doesn’t want to be reading this blog in the first place, allow me to begin.

Now we’re just gonna slide right past the fact that every MMO since WoW has done very little but try to either beat (at best) or be (at worst) WoW. While I’m certainly not immune to the impulse to compare each and every facet of Aion against a myriad of potentially-similar aspects of WoW, I am going to make a serious effort to accept the game as it is and judge accordingly.

First things first – and I’ve said this about the last two NCsoft games I’ve tried – this game is pretty. Very nice to look at, fluid movement, excellent character appearance options (just check the selections!), and very attractive surroundings. This is something I’ve come to expect from NCsoft games, especially after playing Guild Wars and Tabula Rasa (yeah, I own it and I am not ashamed), but unfortunately for them, it’s still not enough to get me to keep playing. Private stores are great (though unoriginal and often the bane of other MMOs in cities), and I love the visual character customization, but if all I cared about was making highly customizable things, I’d play The Sims or Spore. I want to kill things and have fun while doing it. Sadly, the game falls short of that.

The game itself has four base class choices, though technically you branch off fairly early on in the game into one of two specialty paths within the basic construct of your chosen class. The gameplay uses a combo system that, while fun, is very much like a repackaged Guild Wars, while the intro-pve is very standard quest-based MMO-style. So we’re looking at something that looks like a standard MMORPG format meets Guild Wars, which isn’t really much to say, but hey, at least it’s pretty, right?

But then you move, and you’re immediately pissed off (unless in most third-person games you play you never use the mouse to move or look around at all, in which case, well, you’re doing it wrong to begin with). Let’s talk about the terrible movement for a moment. You can’t lock your view in a direction you’re not running (no, really) and while you can double-mouse click to run forward, you cannot TURN while double mouse clicking. Only that’s not really true, because SOMETIMES you can. Sometimes you can’t. Sometimes the cursor glitches out and/or locks on view movement and your toon can’t move until you alt-tab out and back. Movement bugs a week away from launch are fun. If by fun you mean insulting.

Flying (the big push for the game, their whole “look how different and innovative we are!” angle) involves the R key for climbing and the F key for declining, SPACEBAR switches your flight mode into “gliding”, and get this – you have a flight timer (1min at level 10) that, once gone, makes your wings just vanish. You take fall damage, too.

So recap movement/camera issues: The turn ratio is odd, the ability to mouse-move is, er, “sticky” (sometimes it works; sometimes it doesn’t – come on, terrible coding), sometimes the mouse icon just vanishes and I have to alt-tab to get it back, and I can’t lock the camera angle. The camera can’t be locked in one direction while I run in another. This would be fine if I were playing, oh say Diablo II. But a fast-paced pvp-oriented 360°-ready (aerial combat without lockable cameras? really?) game? Awful.

Then again, maybe I’m being a little hard on the flying, seeing as my toon just got her wings, right? I mean, for a game that pushed the aerial aspect so much, maybe later it won’t matter as much, plus I can fly all over the place, right? Oh, no. Not at all. Yes, I have wings, and can use them here, at this fortress, to attack things in the sky that are high enough that I can kill two or three before I have to fly to the ground (else my wings vanish and I plummet to my death) and go do some other quest while I wait for my flight time to refill just so I can finish the quest. But then, 50 yards over there? Invisible wall that I can’t fly through, for no particular reason. WEAK.

They do, however, promise that it’s different in the Abyss, and sadly, I’m probably going to have to take their word for it. I fail to see the logic of paying $50 to not enjoy something now because it might be less annoying later. Sorry, guys, make it fun right off the bat, not later on. Give me a taste of the awesome that is to come. Something. Anything.

The UI is gorgeous and clean but, at the risk of comparison, it does bring to mind one thing that Blizzard did very, very right – customizable .lua user interface. I’m a fairly particular person when it comes to my bindings, HUD, and interface, and when forced to use what someone else considers to be the “best” layout for given commands/information reception, chances are I’m not going to like it. Console games? Ok, it is how it is (but I still want more controller options than “standard” and “southpaw”), but PC games? No excuse. Give me customization if you want my buck o’ five.

Speaking of PC games, that’s it – it’s not for Mac. Sorry, Huge Chunk of the Gaming Community. Not supported.

Now again, this is just a beta, and I haven’t seen endgame. Maybe it’s cooler later on. Do I really want to spend $50 to find out? Highly doubtful. It’s a very pretty game that I’d definitely pay $30 to have and play on occasion if it weren’t a pay-to-play, but just like every other NCsoft game I’ve played, it seems like it’d be a nice break from other stuff for, say, a month (just like Guild Wars and Tabula Rasa were),  but in the end, it would fall short of being engrossing due to lack of polish, content, and/or variety.  Is it terrible? Not really, per se – it just has a lot of room for improvement, compounded by a lot of (to me) fairly serious issues that prohibit my better judgment from allowing the spending of $50 on a game that I’ll play for a month and then not care about ever again. For all I know, this will end up being another Tabula Rasa, with a handful of people buying the game and then NCsoft shutting down the servers in a little under a year due to lack of interest.

It makes me sad; I had high hopes. Not high hopes of finding a wow-killer (like so many people seem to want), but just of someone post-Blizzard doing it right. Looks like it’s back to the drawing board.