At PAX this weekend I played a new mmo from NCSoft called Aion. It looks very beautiful. I got an invite card to go to their “lan party” where I got to play it for 2 hours (I think) where I basically got to create a new character and play in the starting zone. I think I made it to level 4? Overall it was pretty fun.
The good:
Very pretty graphics engine. I guess in later zones you can fly around – I didn’t have a chance to test this. The controls are very similar to WoW – I’d suggest implementing some of the camera features in WoW as well (example: left mouse button to change the player view of the character – which is very useful in pvp, right mouse button to change the character view of the world – this was working).
The bad:
I actually found several bugs, but was never able to report them. One was – any quest that had scroll bars you couldn’t accept until scrolling all the way to the bottom. The other bug I ran into – is I was grouped with my brother – and sometimes while running along he’d be facing me (running forwards, but going backwards).
By far however the most annoying bug was if you spammed any spells – sometimes they would cancel casting. Not good – all this means really is that if you don’t time your casts properly you’ll screw up your casting timer and do less dps because you’ll be waiting for the global cooldown.
I’m sure they will iron out these issues since they were really obvious. Ultimately it will come down to what the dungeon, raid and pvp experience is if it is going to compete with WoW or not.
