On the Aion bandwagon

We waited until the last minute, but decided to jump on the bandwagon for Aion.

Contrary to AoC and WAR last year, I think Aion is going to take those 500k+ pre-launch subs and keep them...and keep growing.

In the past few days since we've had a chance to play on the headstart, I can say this:

It's flawless. No glitches. Amazing graphics. Smooth as silk. We get 65+ FPS regularly, dipping down to around 50 in the most crowded cities...and with 1 hour queues during prime time, they are crowded.

Combat is a lot like Fable...very fast-paced, but also very complex. The higher you get, the longer your chains become, and the more branches become available. I can see this being a strategy game at the higher levels, needing to choose which branch to take dependent upon where the fight is, or if you are in a group or not.

Gameplay is easy, a lot like WoW. Very easy to pick up and learn. The storyline and cut-scenes remind me of the single-player storyline in Guild Wars, so it's very easy to get sucked into being "the main hero" of the story. While there is a lot of extra fluff quests to do, the main storyline is very linear, so it's impossible to get lost along the way.

Harvesting reminds me of EQ2. Crafting is fairly complex, actually, but also reminds me of EQ2.

Flying around with wings is...pretty damn cool. The first time I experienced it I was literally giggling like a little school girl with her first Barbie doll. Was pretty epic.

Also, the leveling is fairly slow in comparison to some of the recent games I've played. Took us about 5 hours to get to level 10, which is about twice as long as it takes in LOTRO or EQ2. Hell, in EQ2 you can get level 10 in about an hour, hour and a half.

So far...I'm impressed. It's a nice, new, fresh MMO, and I think it's going to keep us busy for the winter months. LOTRO just kind of grew stale, and the fact they are going to start charging for book quests now on top of the monthly fee just kind of put us off, even though it's Middle Earth and all. We may still play, but...probably only when Rohan and/or Gondor/the major expansions come out.

Anyway, yep...on the Aion bandwagon in our spare time, and loving it.

Old School Games vs. New School Games

In the past few years I have been sorely disappointed by the amount of content that games are putting out. Having been an avid gamer now for roughly 25 years, I've experienced most of the game world since the inception of MUDs, the first gaming systems, and so on and so forth.

To highlight a few of the games I've played in the last year: Halo 3, Assassin's Creed, Mass Effect, Fallout 3, just to name a few. And while those games have great graphics and awesome cinema sequences, the amount of gameplay is crap. Not a single one of those games gave me more than 20 hours of gameplay. I beat all of them within 2 gaming sessions, three at the most (Mass Effect was 3).

The point is, I got to thinking about the games of yesterday. One in particular that stands out, and is regularly pointed to as the crowning achievement of RPGs, is Baldur's Gate II. The game has roughly 120 hours of MAIN questlines and over 100 hours of additional side quests, bringing your total game time to over 220 hours if you play through the side quests for your party members and class quests.

Games today boast 40 hours of gameplay at most when they market the games. Fallout 3, for example, boasted 40 hours of gameplay. I beat the game in 14 hours. I know a friend who beat it in 9 hours. Now, granted, that's doing mostly only the main questlines, but for the main questlines to be beatable within a single game session? Pathetic!

To top it off, the game studios charge 60-70 bucks a pop for a few hours of entertainment. Back in the day I could spend 50 bucks on a game and know that I was going to get WEEKS of entertainment out of it. Now, I'm lucky if I get two days out of my favorite games.

I re-installed BG2 the other day and I'm already 20 hours into it and nowhere near the 120 hours of main questlines offered. The game is nearly 10 years old but the world graphics are still fairly good (character graphics are, sadly, not), and it just got me thinking about how epic the games of yesterday were compared to the crap that gets farmed out these days. Sure, the modern games LOOK great, and are fairly entertaining, but you don't get anywhere near the bang for your buck that you used to get.

Some games have multiplayer aspects that can make up for the lack of a single player element. Games such as Halo 3, sure. But what about the single player games? The closest thing I've come to old-school was Neverwinter Nights II, which gave me about a week's worth of play, doing 3-4 hours per session.

I'm looking forward to Dragon Age: Origins, but the foremost thought in my mind is the thought: Is the game going to give me more than 2 or 3 days of gameplay? I know it's being developed by Bioware, but it's the post-EA buyout Bioware, the same company who put out Mass Effect, which is one of the games I'm complaining about for its lack of substance.

Don't get me wrong...I loved Mass Effect. It was fun, it was breath-takingly beautiful, and I've played it through 4 times so far, twice on the X-box and twice on the updated PC version. However, the storyline is almost an exact copy of Babylon 5 (ancient race of beings comes back thousands of years later to wipe out everything yet again; a central "space station" where all of the races have their diplomatic meetings; I could go on), and it was too damn short.

I know that things have changed over the years, and I do appreciate the beauty of modern games in high def, but I seriously miss the games that had me spending 2-3 weeks worth of gaming sessions to beat. I haven't been sucked into a game since Baldur's Gate II, or an MMORPG outside of EQ1 and Vanguard, the only two MMORPGs I feel had substance behind them. But that's a topic for another day :)