Aion Tower of Eternity Quick-Review
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Aion Tower of Eternity's horrendous server queue times of up to 2 or more hours before you can log into the game are killing any fun.
Aion is a somewhat fun game to play if you are willing to get up very very early and if you do not have to work for a living. Because early in the morning is the only time of the day where you might avoid server queues of up to 2 hours and more! Otherwise you have to be very, very patient before you can start enjoying the game after you started it.
But before I start going into more deep about the aforementioned situation lets say something about the other assets of the game.
Quests:
The quests sometimes are fun but most of them lack diversity. They are just like kill 5 of that and kill 10 of this. This counts especially for the quests that come after you left the starting island. Boring Grind-Feast describes best what quest are like. Again something no one would expect from a modern MMPRPG.
In game items:
The in game items like weapons and armor look nice but lack diversity. For example, the last character I played was a Kantor using stave's, but unfortunately for a level 12 Kantor are only 2 or 3 stave's available that are really fitting for his level. The other stave's available where all way below or above his level.
I also don't liked that a golden axe I got as a quest reward looked exactly the same as the war-mace I was wearing before.
Transportation:
Characters can fly after they finished the tutorial area! That really is something nice implemented. On the other hand there are no mounts. However, teleporters and fix flight routes shorten the traveling times.
Crafting:
The crafting system in the game is not exactly what one would expect from a modern MMORPG. It runs like this: Gather resources, go to a crafting table, select the recipe and amount of items to craft and wait till the crafting is done. If you do big amounts, like when you craft boards from logs you gathered you may have to wait several minutes, depending on the amount you have chosen, just sitting in front of your monitor having nothing to do than watch. This not very exciting to say the least.
Graphics:
The graphics are nice but not great. Especially close up some textures look horrible. However the graphics do have their own charm. They are a bit more fantasy like than in other games of the genre. For example, even so it is nothing completely original, there are woods made of huge mushrooms and among them are walking little living fungus ... ähm ... yes, things like that. I do not know how to describe it any better, it's just a little bit more fantasy like than most others.
Sound:
The sound is not bad but not really good either.
The sound effects however are quite nerve wrecking sometimes. Especially if you are in crowded areas where lots of people fight or craft. This is for example the case in crafting areas. The machines and the player characters play sound samples every time a player crafts one item. If you have a room with 40 players all making lots of iron bars or boards you can imagine what that might mean.
Now back to the queuing issues:
I started playing MMORPG's when UO in the late 90's came out and have since then tried every major MMORPG and therefore experienced a lot of launches that didn't went smooth. From that experience I can say that the launch of Aion is one of the worst I've ever experienced, because of the ridiculous long waiting times you experience every time you try to log onto a server during prime times. But even outside of prime times the queuing times are often longer than 30 minutes.
What makes this issue even worse is the fact that the only things NCSoft does to counter this bad situation is setting up new servers and shorten the automatic log off times for when you have setup a shop in the game. Let me explain in more detail why this does not fix the issue.
Imagine you started playing on a freshly installed server that was marked 'green' (means low server population). After you just played for 4 days and leveled your character to level 10, what means in this game that you just reached the point where you have to choose the future career of your character and that you can leave the starting location for the first time, in other words the game really start to become interesting, the server is already that crowded that the queuing times went up to 2 hours and more. But hey don't worry, NCSoft launched a new server just on that day. But what about my character? Good question. NCSoft seems to think that it should be no big deal for you to leave it behind and start a new one! Yes, there is no way you could transfer your character to the new server. NCSoft expects you to start a new one! Ok, you start thinking, why not, let's start a new character and use it to try something different. ... BUT imagine, after 4 days the server is again crowded like hell and waiting times are again up at 2 hours and more. So would you like to start all over again on the next new server setup by NCSoft? So this is definitely not fixing the issue as long as NCSoft does not offer for characters to move to new servers. Very bad situation!
If you can overcome the aforementioned you will find a game that is not that different from other major MMORPG's on the market but still has it's own charme and is somewhat fun to play.
However, the extremely long server queuing lines are such an issue that everything good about the game becomes overshadowed.
Have Fun (better with another game
)
XiDragon
Aion is a somewhat fun game to play if you are willing to get up very very early and if you do not have to work for a living. Because early in the morning is the only time of the day where you might avoid server queues of up to 2 hours and more! Otherwise you have to be very, very patient before you can start enjoying the game after you started it.
But before I start going into more deep about the aforementioned situation lets say something about the other assets of the game.
Quests:
The quests sometimes are fun but most of them lack diversity. They are just like kill 5 of that and kill 10 of this. This counts especially for the quests that come after you left the starting island. Boring Grind-Feast describes best what quest are like. Again something no one would expect from a modern MMPRPG.
In game items:
The in game items like weapons and armor look nice but lack diversity. For example, the last character I played was a Kantor using stave's, but unfortunately for a level 12 Kantor are only 2 or 3 stave's available that are really fitting for his level. The other stave's available where all way below or above his level.
I also don't liked that a golden axe I got as a quest reward looked exactly the same as the war-mace I was wearing before.
Transportation:
Characters can fly after they finished the tutorial area! That really is something nice implemented. On the other hand there are no mounts. However, teleporters and fix flight routes shorten the traveling times.
Crafting:
The crafting system in the game is not exactly what one would expect from a modern MMORPG. It runs like this: Gather resources, go to a crafting table, select the recipe and amount of items to craft and wait till the crafting is done. If you do big amounts, like when you craft boards from logs you gathered you may have to wait several minutes, depending on the amount you have chosen, just sitting in front of your monitor having nothing to do than watch. This not very exciting to say the least.
Graphics:
The graphics are nice but not great. Especially close up some textures look horrible. However the graphics do have their own charm. They are a bit more fantasy like than in other games of the genre. For example, even so it is nothing completely original, there are woods made of huge mushrooms and among them are walking little living fungus ... ähm ... yes, things like that. I do not know how to describe it any better, it's just a little bit more fantasy like than most others.
Sound:
The sound is not bad but not really good either.
The sound effects however are quite nerve wrecking sometimes. Especially if you are in crowded areas where lots of people fight or craft. This is for example the case in crafting areas. The machines and the player characters play sound samples every time a player crafts one item. If you have a room with 40 players all making lots of iron bars or boards you can imagine what that might mean.
Now back to the queuing issues:
I started playing MMORPG's when UO in the late 90's came out and have since then tried every major MMORPG and therefore experienced a lot of launches that didn't went smooth. From that experience I can say that the launch of Aion is one of the worst I've ever experienced, because of the ridiculous long waiting times you experience every time you try to log onto a server during prime times. But even outside of prime times the queuing times are often longer than 30 minutes.
What makes this issue even worse is the fact that the only things NCSoft does to counter this bad situation is setting up new servers and shorten the automatic log off times for when you have setup a shop in the game. Let me explain in more detail why this does not fix the issue.
Imagine you started playing on a freshly installed server that was marked 'green' (means low server population). After you just played for 4 days and leveled your character to level 10, what means in this game that you just reached the point where you have to choose the future career of your character and that you can leave the starting location for the first time, in other words the game really start to become interesting, the server is already that crowded that the queuing times went up to 2 hours and more. But hey don't worry, NCSoft launched a new server just on that day. But what about my character? Good question. NCSoft seems to think that it should be no big deal for you to leave it behind and start a new one! Yes, there is no way you could transfer your character to the new server. NCSoft expects you to start a new one! Ok, you start thinking, why not, let's start a new character and use it to try something different. ... BUT imagine, after 4 days the server is again crowded like hell and waiting times are again up at 2 hours and more. So would you like to start all over again on the next new server setup by NCSoft? So this is definitely not fixing the issue as long as NCSoft does not offer for characters to move to new servers. Very bad situation!
If you can overcome the aforementioned you will find a game that is not that different from other major MMORPG's on the market but still has it's own charme and is somewhat fun to play.
However, the extremely long server queuing lines are such an issue that everything good about the game becomes overshadowed.
Have Fun (better with another game
![Wink ;)](./images/smilies/icon_e_wink.gif)
XiDragon