It's been almost a week since I started playing Aion: Tower of Eternity and so, although the full review is probably still a week or two away, I wanted to update you all on how it's going. I'm also going to take this opportunity to call out some of the game's features that, for better or worse, have really made an impression on me. I already posted something similar on my personal blog earlier this week, but while some of what I talk about here will inevitably be similar, I promise not to go anywhere near the cut-and-paste button.

The first thing I should mention is Aion's launch which, at least from my perspective, was an incredibly smooth one. Two days before those of us with preorders were able to get in on the "headstart" early access program, we were afforded even earlier access to the character creations tools so that we could pick out our classes, reserve a couple of character names, and basically be ready to play as soon as the servers went live. I took this opportunity to create an Elyos scout and an Asmodian priest, the former being one of the "good" guys on what ended up being a high-population server, and the latter a "bad" guy on a less popular server. NCSoft was purportedly planning to prevent players from creating certain factions on certain servers if it became necessary to keep the two factions somewhat balanced, but I saw no evidence of this personally.

Not that it's unique amongst MMOs by any means, but creating a character in Aion is more like doing the same thing in an EA Sports game than it is World of Warcraft or any of the other MMOs that I've played personally. After settling on a class and a gender, you're presented with a few dozen preset characters to use as your starting point, and from there you can pretty much do whatever you want. There are dozens of hairstyles to choose from, there are skin tone color spectrums to play around with, and the seven or eight different preset physiques run the gamut from short-and-stout to lanky-and-lean. But that's not even the half of it, because after choosing all of your presets you can enter the advanced customization mode and use sliders to tinker with multiple attributes for facial features, limbs, and the like. The only downside to the character creation is that there are no safeguards in place to prevent people from making freakish looking beings with, for example, tiny heads sitting atop long necks and giant shoulders. Many, presumably PVP-oriented folks are also opting to create the tiniest characters they possibly can, at which point they're dwarfed even by the insects and other small enemies that you encounter in the starting areas.

Questing in those starter areas when the servers went live was, predictably, a little frustrating at times. With so many players trying to complete the same quests, the competition for both enemies to kill and items to collect was fierce. Nothing was taking very long to respawn, but there simply weren't enough enemies and items to go around. Both the headstart and regular launches are out of the way now thankfully, and as players level up at different speeds, so they're getting dispersed. That helps with overcrowding in the various zones that make up Aion's great-looking world, but it doesn't help with the overcrowding on certain servers.

On day one, some players were reporting queue times in excess of two hours, which is clearly unacceptable. I lucked out on that occasion since I was among the first people to log in and I didn't log out until several hours later. I've had to queue on one of my two servers a couple of times since then, though, for around 30 minutes on both occasions. This coming Saturday and Sunday will be the first full weekend since launch, so I'm guessing that once I log in I probably shouldn't log out. Something that's easily accomplished by setting a character up as a "personal store" with at least one item that isn't going to sell in a million years. Do that, and you can step away from your keyboard for as long as you like without any fear of being logged out automatically.

I'll admit that I've done that a couple of times, but for the most part when I've been logged in it's been because I'm busily running around completing the usual assortment of fetch quests, kill quests, and collection quests. So far I haven't had any problems finding enough content in each zone to level me up for the next, but this doesn't appear to be a game where you can afford to pick and choose which quest chains you want to take on since you should really be doing all of them. Not only do these chains earn you plenty of experience, cash, and some useful rewards, but some of them also reward you with titles for your character. One of the early Elyos chains gives you the option to precede your name with the title "Tree-Hugger" for example, and doing so affords you a +4 bonus to accuracy. Similar bonuses appear to be attached to all 50 of the titles that you can unlock, though at level 16 (hey, I have other games to review as well) I only have six or seven right now.

I'm told that PVP content and dungeons don't really kick in until somewhere between level 25 and 30, so I've got a ways to go before I can check out any of that stuff. Level 10 is a big milestone in Aion as well though, because at that point you gain the ability to fly (though only for a minute and in certain zones) and you have to decide which of two paths you're going to take with your chosen class. Having started out as a scout, for example, I had to choose between a ranger specializing in ranged attacks or an up-close-and-personal assassin. I opted for the latter and, without wishing to write too much about how combat works since I already talked a bit about that in my earlier blog (along with a little about gathering and crafting), so far I'm having a lot of fun it--even if the vast majority of my encounters do play out in much the same way. Surprisingly, to me anyway, all eight of the classes appear to be equally well represented right now, though tanks and healers are predictably the ones in demand when the LFG (looking-for-group) and LFM (looking-for-more) messages start flying.

Hopefully those dungeon groups will have room for an assassin when I've leveled up some more, and it'd probably be a good idea for me to get into a guild sometime soon as well. And, with that in mind, I think it's time for me to log in again and get back to stabbing small animals, retrieving stolen items, and running errands for villagers who are too lazy to do anything themselves. Check back next week for another update or two, and in the meantime be sure to check out the new screenshots in the gamespace.