*PC Blowout Finale* Aion Ascension

And finally we come to the MMO I am currently playing, Aion Ascension.  I was able to find this one researching MMOs with deep character customization, after some dissapointment found in Dragon Nest.  How will this one fair?

Very well actually.  First off the presentation is a huge change for me and it's really cool to look.  Gone are the old cartoony characters and now I am finally playing with full grown humans.  Each character model has a nice shone to it, and environments are detailed and pretty nice to look at.  My computer unfortunately is unable to handle this, so I had to go to medium quality becuase the lag was too much.  Still, even on medium it retains some shine and overall looks great.  Animations featuring birds flying you across the map to reach a waypoint are beautiful to look at and the worlds in this game are absolutely humongous, with certain scenaries being a feast for the eyes in terms of scope.  In order to aptly judge this game, I will tell you about my experience when first starting.

You start by creating your character based on  2 races.  Ones more human like, while the other is more dark elvish.  Both sides are good, so theres replayability to try out the other class.  You can pick from 4 classes: Warrior, Scout, Sorcerer or Priest.  You are greeeted with a TON of cutsomization features, and it was a breath of fresh air that really got me attached to my character.  You are then sent to a rn down looking field, where you learn the basics of combat and accepting and carrying out quests.  It starts off REALLY slow at first, giving very little skills to play with and very little options to choose from.  But progress through the fields and get you first town, which is...still boring.  Not much to do and quests are much of the same.  Go to a forest, do some quests, go to a mine, do some quests, it gets pretty boring.  Certain cutscenes though take you to your past, and you get to see your former self, who you have long forgetten of due to amnesia, flying through an intense battlefield as air combat surrounds you, warriors cheering as you enter in.  This is great buildup and allows for story progression outside of blocks of text.  Keeping that with you, you do mondane quests, slowly building up your character.  The limited item options are starting to get more apparent and you kind of want to break out of your shell.  Finally, when you hit level 10, you pick your division in your class you wish to follow (ex in the scout class, you can either be a ranger using bows or an assasin using dual blades), and they send you off to the Sanctum.  This is where the fun begins.

Flying around the gorgeous vista

Quests, quests and more quests!  Before you'd have, at max, 5 at a time, but now they're 10 people on the wrold map with multiple quests for each of them!  Holy crap!  I talked to a couple story people but then went off on my own.  I got a pet and learned how to take care of it via the pet quests on the right side, learned how to trade and store items via quests, and saw so many stores and shops filled with items I was nowhere near being able to buy.  It was all astounding and pretty surreal to see such a big place and so many things and activities at my disposal.  There was even one time where I was waiting for an elevator to come, when I went too close to the edge and surprisngly started falling out of the sky!  I quickly tapped a bunch of buttons, and started gliding of all things!  It was a minor event and pretty pathetic considering you can't raise your altitiude while flying, but I didn't even know you could fly in this game!  All this made me truly feel like my character and I was emmensely immersed into the game.  Eventually you finish the sidequests in Sanctum and head to Verteron, your first combat area of the game.  That was my Ascension.

So that was the beginning of the game,  but now that I'm more experienced, how is the game?  Well its still pretty damn good.  Certain areas allow for free flying and its one of the best features in the game.  The environments are gigantic and offer great sceneries and perspectives.  Quests overlap each other so it's not the worst grinding in the world, and the extra things to do make this game.  The amount of side projects you can do with your character is awesome.  There are certain skills you can build up like handicrafting, alchemy, construction and cooking, which allows for creation of useful items and equipments, without the need to buy them from the trade broker.  At lvl 21 you get a free studio apartment, and the cozyness and comfort here is awesome, and if you level up your construction skill you can make your own furniture as well!  You could create your own legion and have your own personal cape and emblem, which is pretty awesome, and there are a variety of costume shops which allow you, if you have the cash, to mix and match with different colours and styles.  This is all so amazing that whenever combat gets to
o over whelming and frustrating, theres always something to do other than combat to cool you down and better prepare you for going out again.

Sanctum in all its glory

The money system in Aion I also love.  It deals with hundreds and thousands intervals, instead of smaller amounts.  This allows for a greater spectrum and better organization when it comes to pricing.  Items are now split up into dirt cheap in the hundreds, just cheap in the thousands, medium in the ten thousands, expensive in the hundred thousands and hugely expensive in the millions.  This may not sounds like much, but coming from Eden and Dragon Nest, where money only really gets up to the thousands, it was hard to differentiate prices and things that were expensive were REALLY expensive and overall it was just very cluttered.  I also have to mention the memopad.  At any time you can pull up a little notepad and write down anything you want.  From items you need to remember, to which monster drops what, to clues for a quest, it can all be written down on the memopad.  This is GENIUS as it allows for daily planning of activities, but also dealing with those items from quests and can make managing some things very easy and intuitive.  Add in aspects like power shards, weapon and item enchantments and the marketplace, and Aion has depth in spades.

But what didn't I like?  Well unfortunately there are some issues.  Mainly some combat areas of the game can be downright AWFUL!  One place in particular forced you to kill a crap ton of extremely hard enemies, whilst they constantly patrol around and join in on the beatdown when they see you fighting.  For me as a Ranger, with weaker armour, if one other enemy joined in I was screwed.  Running away from enemies is hard enough as it is, and yet the make it so easy for enemies to lay the beatdown on you.  Oh did I not mention, THIS GAME IS HARD AS HELL!  For any enemy on your level or even one below, you need to utilize all your skills to take them down.  This makes grinding extremely annoying as you can't just mow down enemies, each one needs to be taken down efficiently and quickly, which would be fine, but when you get quests saying to kill 15 enemies, it can be absolutely dreadful.  The autoroute in this game is also non-existent.  Seriously, why didn't they put an autoroute in this game?  The game has really wide areas, how hard could it be to program your character to move around a couple objects?  Eden did it, this game can too.  There is an auto run option where he walks without you having to hold it down, but it causes more toruble than its worth by leading you into enemies and it should friggin stop when I enter into combat.  Who would need to autorun in combat?  Some quests can be VERY cryptic to the point where I had to look them up online, and the community for this game sucks.  Everyone opens shops selling items for way more than on the marketplace, and the couple times I socialized with people they were rude, snobby, and overall people I don't want to socialize with or make a legion with.  Also costumes can't be put over armour, they REPLACE armour.  This is bad as you lose a TON of defense and a lot of the armour sets in this game look like TRASH!  

So with all that, this game should be terrible, right?  Well no, its actually fantastic.  Whenever any of these issues are bothering me, whether it be me dying cheaply by gang-banging enemies, quests being too cryptic or grindy, or even dying having way too many penalites, I take a step back from combat, prepare and ready myself, buying items, crafting equipment, and I go back in ready and willing.  The game offers so much to do its not even funny, and everything is presented elegantly and you really feel like youre part of a greater community of people.  And there are some good combat areas too.  I actually loved the Odium mines, the Verteron Observatory and others alike.  The story cutscenes in this game help motivate you and tell you what you are fighting for, and right now, for the first time in an MMO, I know what Im friggin fighting for.  Thats amazing.  Pair this with fantastic customization options, replay value, the best hub world Ive seen so far in an MMO, addicitive activities and wondeful graphics and environments, and you got yourself an MMO ill be playing for a LONG time.  Aion Ascension earns a 9/10 with a recommendation of Download It!  This is a great place to start for MMOs and offers a fantatsic free-to-play experience.

Next Post:  WOM: Nintendo for E3 2013

*I also just want to quickly say Ill be adding in another segment to my blog: FIMP, which is my First Impressions and Opinions and a huge game I've just started.  Also all the picture you saw in this review are mine I've taken from the game, and I will be doing this for now for all PC games I review or talk about.*