Aion Hands-On Report
Another hands-on report was released on the website of MMORPG.com wrote by its Community Manager Richard Cox on his hands-on experience with NCsoft`s highly anticipated MMORPG, Aion Gold.The details are as below: When I was getting ready for PAX I was told one of the primary reasons for going would be to check out Aion Gold. PAX would be the first time the general public in North America would be getting their hands on the game. Much like most people out there, I really didnt know a lot about the game. In fact I was going in with a lot of preconceived notions and assumptions. It is a Korean made game after all, so as such it comes with certain stereotypes. Ive played more than my share of Korean MMOs and I have to say for the most part the majority of those stereotypes exist for a reason. While at PAX I spent probably an hour chatting with various members of the development team and probably between two and three total hours playing the game. Now to the good stuff, all the juicy info I managed to get out of the various developers I talked to. Most of my tour was handled by Brian Knox, the Associate Producer, though various others came and went throughout the hour, including the main producer. This is going to be rather sporadic as we jumped from topic to topic as they came to my mind. Ill start off with character creation: Aion Golds character creation is set up in a multi-tier system. You start off by picking your faction; Elyos or Asmodian. Then you pick your archetype: tank, support, melee dps or ranged dps. From there you select one of two classes per archetype. For those who arent as concerned about the appearance of their character, you can take the simple route of just picking through a couple of pre-generated faces, hairstyles, etc. But for those who want absolute control over how their avatar looks, you can then drill down and adjust just about anything you can imagine using sliders. There is also a random button for the impatient among us. Playing around with that for a while brought up some pretty funny combinations; it seems that you dont have to keep everything proportional with the sliders, resulting in some characters with big heads or extra long necks and such. Another great addition to the character creation system is a preview option, which will let you see how your character will look with some example mid and high level gear.