Very first reaction: Yep, I'm preordering.
I thought I would finally sit down and write up a little bit about the first Aion Closed Beta event in NA since I was a jackass and missed the second one that apparently everyone was playing together *grumble*.
For starters (and not surprisingly at all after seeing screenshots and playing at PAX) I spent a very large portion of time creating characters. This was also my chief form of entertainment when I stalked out a place (repeatedly) at the NCSoft booth at Pax 2008. I just can't get enough of the excellent graphics and level of customization. The first closed beta event opened up the first zone and 10 levels for the Elyos faction, who closely resemble humans and light elves from Lineage II. The girls are, of course, absolutely adorable. The male characters aren't that bad either. I was torn between making a cutie with freckles and messy hair or a hottie with a more polished look. In the end I settled for a girl who closely resembled a black haired Ashe from FFXII. My humorous aside note on this point is that in the second closed beta Jake managed to create an Asmodian Spiritmaster who looked quite like my Elyos Priest. What were the odds!
There's been quite a lot of discussion regarding the character creation so I'm not going to go into it very deeply, especially since the screenshots I thought I took of my harem of characters are missing. All that really needs to be said is that the characters you can create are unbelievably diverse and lifelike. As an extension to this, character emotes and idle animations are also unbelievably, well, animated. Facial expressions, reaction to weather and environment, and even "hawking your wares" as a personal shop (no more sitting on the ground, you get a stool now!).
I spent Friday night installing the beta and was only able to play for a few hours on Saturday, and I was still blown away by the level of detail in the environment and the obvious attention to each character action, whether it's talking to an NPC, setting up shop, or exploring the world.
It was most interesting to me to see how the game fused NCSoft's artistic style and gameplay with elements adopted from World of Warcraft. I have always and will always believe that Lineage II is a superior game to WoW (but that's a topic for another day) but there are many clever elements WoW introduced to make the game accessible and enjoyable to play. I was pleased to see Aion encorporates many of them.
Primary among the new features: a quest log (it looks better than the WoW quest log at first glance, with 2 seperate tabs to keep "questline" and "random" quests apart), an actual graphic interface (more minimal and aesthetically pleasing than WoW's and reminiscent of Diablo II, at least to me), in game mail, and the ability to jump and move fluidly with the keyboard. The NCSoft style is still heavy though (and it's mostly a good thing from what little I saw): point and click motion remains, everything costs money (even "binding" yourself to a location), and you train by buying books. As different as it looks from Lineage (the colors, oh my god...everything is just so detailed and colorful! Lineage had a fantasy mixed with realism art style, this is pure fantasy) I could immediately feel myself back in an NCSoft game. As dorky as it sounds, it felt like a homecoming.
I'll post some thoughts about questing later. For now I'm just going to smile and watch more gameplay vids and wait for closed beta 3.
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