TERA Korean Open Beta Live Streams

The Korean open beta for TERA began on the 11th of January, and information has been slowly leaking out ever since. Several people from the TERA Fans Community are in the Korean OBT and have been live streaming their play sessions. I've been watching DFH's (dieforhonor) stream because it's a priest demonstrating group play and I am curious how he/she has been playing. The full list of live streams is available here.

Aion Closed Beta 4: Wrap-up Coming Soon

Wow, what a weekend! Real Life intervened to keep me away from my PC for a good portion of this last closed beta, but I did get to spend a nice chunk of time on Friday playing around a bit more with the crafting system, Saturday night exploring Elyos lands in a small group, and Sunday rounded out with a failed attempt to polish off the last half of lvl 29 (there was just too much random stuff to do and see!).

I'll be writing up some comments, observations, and concerns for the live release this week, as well as posting some amusing screenshots. Right now I'm still feeling the withdrawal, and not really looking forward to tonight's WoW raid.

Aion Closed Beta 4 Announced

Levels 1-30 supported, which means that I am still lagging behind a bit and will have to stack on an additional 5 levels to stay competitive. I think NCSoft is trying to kill me.

Missing the second CB meant I started out at a 20 level deficit that I have been unable to eradicate. That's ok though. I'm not intent on busting through the levels and burning myself out before the game releases - I plan on finishing my current zone, checking out the desert zone a little, and playing a child sized Elyos to experience their content a bit. Hopefully it will help me chose which faction to play.

I can't wait for next weekend!

Aion Closed Beta 3: Asmodian 1-20

This past Fourth of July/Canada Day weekend was the third Aion Closed Beta. I'm sad to have missed the second one, particularly because it meant I had to start from scratch to catch up to my friends, and by the end of the weekend I had only managed level 18 and 1/4, largely due to my insistence on making one of EVERYTHING. No, really. My character selection screen looks like a harem.

I played most extensively as a Chanter, a competent fighter with moderate damage output, supportive heals and buffs. I was pleased with the class - it's got great longevity for soloing, and will be a nice class to start out with when the game goes live. The damage output wasn't that extraordinary, which is appropriate. I found that Gladiators, Scouts, and Assasins all killed faster than me, but with greater downtime due to their lack of heals and mana regeneration skills. I seemed to kill at the same rate as a tank, which seems reasonable. So it seems relatively balanced for now - I sacrifice power for my hybrid status.

Long ago I played a Warden in DAoC. It was one of my all time favorite classes, even though it was extraordinarily underpowered. My heals were so small they might as well be non existent (not to mention my mana pool could not support them as my buffs were chants that constantly pulsed, drawing mana) and my attacks were ridiculously weak (a few low damage physical attacks, but reliant on auto attacking), but I supported a group and I loved the class type. I was pleased to see that NCSoft has created a buffing class that can participate in fighting, too. After years as a prophet - a real player prophet and not a second box - I am glad to get back into the action. No more sitting to regen mana and buffing the entire party, one buff and player at a time, EVERY TWENTY MINUTES. Just thinking about it makes me want to cut myself.

I had a wonderful time exploring the Asmodian starting zones. The Elyos starting zone, of which I saw less (I only created characters and played until level 5 in the first beta), is beautiful and tropical. Lush and vibrant, with bright colors and burning sun. I was concerned the Asmodian zones might be homogeneous barren terrain since they are dark and cold places, but I was quite wrong. The frozen parts were gorgeous and shimmery, and there was a fantastic diversity of terrain, ranging from partially frozen lakes to farmland and forested mountains. I should have looked around more and taken terrain screenshots - I found myself amazed at the variation in plant life and even in critters. I was having so much fun just running around the world that I didn't take too many shots, unfortunately.

Compare (click for larger image):
Left: Elyos starting zone. Intact buildings, warm colors, lots of trees and flowers.
Right: Asmodian starting zone. Shattered buildings (same as the intact ones for Elyos) and tents, cool colors, different types of foliage.









As for the hunting - at first I was underwhelmed by the variety of mobs to hunt. The models they do have are pretty nice - birds, beasts, and some humanoids. But as I flew over the world from one town to another (a very fast endeavor compared to WoW - the flight points were short and flight speed was very quick) I realized how small the world actually is, compared to World of Warcraft. Rather than a flight point on a mount, you are given beautiful magic wings and you zoom over the terrain. I began to evaluate the size and structure of the world and made a couple of awesome discoveries about how the world's structure impacts the gameplay.

Firstly, the number of quests for the first 20 levels is perfect and is part of what kept me from realizing how small the actual world was. You don't out level a place with half the quests left, and you don't really run out of quests before are done with an area. Since there aren't a ton of quests, there isn't the need for a lot of different types and camps of monsters. The quests keep you moving through the world at the correct pace, so for the most part you don't spend a lot of time hoofing it from one quest hub to the next just for new tasks, or backtracking a ton just to polish off old quests. This gives the starting zones a good feel in terms of size - since you don't spend tons of time in transit the world doesn't feel frustratingly large, but instead "just right" even without the luxury of flight or increased run speed. As an aside note - these quests provide you primarily with money and consumables rather than gear which I love. The longer quests and those in the "story progression" tab tend to give occasional item upgrades, which is perfect. With WoW you get random green quality quest rewards from everything, and there's a real feeling of "lets just finish up this quest to get my free loot so I can move onto the next" that cheapens the questing and turns it into mindless repetetive behavior.

A brilliant new idea is the use of "channels". Each server is a world, but within this world there exist 10 channels which, for WoW players, function like a limitless instance. It's essentially 10 layers of the same world stacked ontop of one another. If you find yourself unable to kill an overcamped quest mob, change to a less populated channel. If you find that you're unable to clear through an area fast enough as a healer or other squishy class and actually prefer a crowded channel for the security, search one out. There are also two different "map" modes. One functions like a traditional map - it's small and displays an old style parchment map with towns, roads, and NPCs marked. The other is an overlay of your area and is quite useful for finding your way around confusing locations such as the massive capital cities.

Also visible in this shot of the overlay map: the campaign quest log (left) and inventory (right). The Character portrait displays my health (red), mana (blue), and DP (orange/yellow) - daeva points. The DP are what cause my character to glow, and are used in special skills and some types of crafting (level 3 glow is very neat). The inventory is annoyingly small, but as per Lineage II, items have unlimited stacking (or so I currently assume, I got well over 100 for some materials).

This allows for the second quality: a fluidly designed world that is both small and large simultaneously. In WoW, flying from one corner of a continent to another can take quite a lot of time, as can navigating through a zone (especially at the lower levels). Aion is smaller, and uses the channels instead of vast expanses of wasted space to give people room to exist. An additional benefit is that the smaller size of the world allows for it to feel more dynamic and detailed. For the most part MMO's trade in flat spaces in their effort to balance the realism of a dynamic physical world and a practical maneuverable one. Aion, with instant flight and the ability to glide even in "flight free" zones gets around this general rule. The world that I have seen thus far has been incredibly detailed, but also varried in terrain which gives it a nice realistic sense.

The NPCs are also detailed. See below for a number of images.

Left: NPC tending a fire

Right:NPC painting

Series 1: My character discovers that it's snowing and reacts accordingly. For Elyos, I found that characters responded to the rain. Both races also splash around in water :)

Series 2: Here are a few emotes up close: (left to right) Laughing, Pondering, Disapproval. The full list of emotes is extensive, and a number of them are lengthy as well. Some are a bit silly, such as "comfort" that attempts to console a player lying on the ground. This is due to the fact that one of the dejected emotes involves a player throwing themself down onto the ground. I just can't imagine two players managing to time and position it so that the two emotes properly coincide...

Series 3: Striking a pose - interracting with the terrain. I was really surprised to see that I was able to stand like this. Normally, my character would just be standing with one foot on the higher terrain and the other "hanging off" in mid-air. The fact that I was able to interract like this with a normal object in the world without any sort of specific command to do so (such as chairs in WoW) was unexpected. I had just logged in to check my mail and was surprised to see myself standing like this.

Agency and Choice in MMORPGs

So I have a few interesting ideas about the quests in Aion. Firstly, I'm overjoyed to see that NCsoft has fleshed out this title with a decent number of real quests. Lineage quests....well, they weren't really quests. They were more like "since you are going to go hunting for 10 hours to earn a miniscule bit of experience, why not collect me five hundred tokens while you're at it. Did I mention that only one person in your party can get a token off each mob? Oh, and don't expect a 100% drop rate." So far, these are more WoW type quests - "help, I can't find my xxx", "help, I can't defend my farm please kill x number of xxxxxx" etc. There are also "story progression" quest arcs. The thought of these gives me shivers, but they don't seem even remotely close to the class quests in Lineage.

Class change, subclass, noblesse, and other "mandatory" quest lines in Lineage II were, in a word, arduous. Part of me misses that, the concept of working so hard for something, because that so greatly magnifies the elation you feel upon completion. In fact, for some reason I am recalling my very first level 20 class change quest, and the line up in the hallway as all the players who needed to complete a certain step waited for the one quest monster to respawn. We all sat there, waiting in queue, behind a little line of adena (money) on the ground. As each player succeeded, there was a miniature celebration, and then we all moved along to the next phase. If we'd only known what was in store for us at 35, 37 and 39 for those quest lines!

The level 10 "getting your wings" questlines seems pretty simple and straightforward, which is probably an indicator of the game's decreased difficulty (a mixed blessing). I like that they distinguish between these two types of quest so clearly - I think it paves the way for a very rich quest system, which is further enhanced by actual cutscenes even for early, low level quests. WoW drops the player in the world with a small video, and then ushers you through 80 levels of rinse and repeat quests for rewards, with a bit of storytelling mixed in - the long quest lines are more explicative than interractive, done for rewards rather than exploring the world. It's not until WoTLK that you actually begin to feel a part of the "grand history" told in the Warcraft cannon.

Not only are there "cut scenes" in which your character (not your faction, but your actual individual self) is "placed" into the global conflict and explained, but it appears as though the developers might be setting the game up for actual choices. From the progression of the quest dialogues, it's possible that players might be able to chose from multiple responses while progressing through a questline. I wish I had proper screenshots to demonstrate, but the window in which the NPC converses with your character doesn't contain a "next" or "complete quest" button. Instead, you click on a "link" of text that is a response. It triggers reactions - more dialogue, emotes, cutscenes. Even if there is but one option for the quest to progress forward, the player still "incites" the event that follows.

This leads me to the previously advertised interesting topic: agency and decision making in games. This system feels as though it posesses the room to grow into a decision tree system, where players may actually make choices at certain points along a quest line. Don't like an NPC's request? Instead of not taking the quest, deny him. Does this change your reputation? Do other quests become available to you for refusing him? There was a bit of discussion raised when WoTLK had quests that involved torture (yet stealing babies for other quests is ok. in fact it's so ok that it's a daily!) - what if they offered you the choice to take a moral stand against it rather than use it to get information? Lineage II had one step in that direction with class change quests, allowing players to turn their "generally skilled" character into one of several types of "specifically skilled" classes, with no ability to change. Instead of popping into the world "fully formed" and following one possible path, you had options - paths that diverged and never reconnected, and affected every second of gameplay. Your decision made all the difference.

Speaking strictly as an enthusiast and not as a scholar, role playing games always follow a set course. The character and plot develop, typically following a traditional narrative framework that builds towards a final conflict of some sort, usually with an epilogue, There are occasionally small choices made by the player in an RPG that may have small impacts on the story (I think of the Final Fantasy VII example, where how you respond to the female characters throughout the game leads directly to which goes on a date with the protagonist, and also to the player's ability to "skip" encountering optional characters that are available to join the party). These nearly always fall under the category of "sidequests" and do not actively influence the game's progression and are completed out of a desire for "complete" or "perfect" games.

MMOs break from this lack of agency by allowing players to craft their own social experience of the game. While the "global plot" is contrived by the game developers, players drive the daily in-game experience. In World of Warcraft, for example, the quests progress from A to B to C along a linear path, as do the raid instances - kill boss A to access boss B, kill boss B to access boss C. There is often some wiggle room, but chosing to complete one wing of a dungeon before another, or which quest to complete first when one does not hinge on the other has no impact on the content of the game, merely its experienced order. The few and far between instances of actual choices impacting gameplay in WoW tend to come in the form of faction allignment - in the Burning Crusade players chose to ally with either the Scryer or Aldor faction and thus became hated by the other. But these factions were essentially "equivalents" so the choice was just window dressing. The same can be said for the choice between Frenzyheart and Oracle factions in Wrath of the Lich King - there is no real difference between them except that each faction offers different vanity items. And as with the Scryer and Aldor factions, a player is free to switch at any time (though the process of "leveing up" the reputation is time consuming) so it does not constitute a serious "life" decision that cannot be altered. In Lineage II players could chose which to fight for the forces of Dawn or Dusk every time the new cycle came up (it was bi-weekly or so, one week to compete, one week to benefit from victory).

In tabletop RPGs, which I admit to never playing, the direction of the game is at the mercy of the dungeon master, but the individual actions and decisions are up to each player. That type of responsibility requires players to be creative (as it's open ended) and engaged with the game and its content. RPGs and MMORPGs lack this quality - they are so caught up in mechanics and repetition that players have virtually no capacity to influence the story of the game, they are simply along for the ride. Lineage II managed to avoid this by turning the PvE (player vs enemy -- monster slaying) into a boring, repetetive device that was simply a tool for the actual content of the game -- the PvP (player vs player) combat and server politics. There was no "end game" content for Lineage. You didn't progress through one dungeon after the next as you do in WoW, replacing your tier 5 with tier 6, your tier 6 with tier 7 - linear, predictable progression. Instead, there were places to level, resources to collect, wealth to amass, and a world to dominate. The conflict between players was perpetual, and drove everything forward like a real world in miniature. The alliances and wars drove the economy and politics forward in an endless and unpredictable cycle. I hope that this possibly open quest system (fingers crossed!) might instill some of the same chaos and unpredictablilty to Aion that made Lineage so exciting to play. But there's a reason games shy away from that type of model -- it's definitely somewhere between difficult to impossible to pull off, so we'll see if Aion tries to make that leap into the abyss.

Aion Closed Beta 1: First Thoughts

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.

Aion Beta!

Yay, signing up at last year's PAX finally delivered. I got my beta invite today for the first closed US beta :) It's only running from the 5th-7th of June, which is weird, but whatever!

I'm a little excited. And jittery. Now I regret skipping lunch...

Aion Aion Aion!

Finally, Finally....

Via Joystiq - At long last - Starcraft 2 beta.........

/swoon!

I'm so there...I just hope I get a response. I signed up for Aion testing almost a year ago and have yet to hear anything back yet. I haven't been in any beta testing since Lineage II's Taiwanese beta (quite illegally) and WoW's later stages of beta.

I can't wait for a shiny new time-sink. Protoss for LIFE!