I was playing in the second Closed Beta event of Aion from Friday through Monday and I didn’t want it to end. There are many games that I play for review that aren’t my cup of tea, but I have to be objctive and try them out anyway. It’s very seldom that there is one that is a complete pleasure to play. Even in Beta. With Aion I want to break it down and describe about what it is that separates a game like this from the rest. I gave it a thumbs up in the Preview and I wanted to look into why. It comes down to the technical details. It isn’t how shiny it is or even how impressive the graphics are. It’s the interface, and ease of use. Navigation in this game is probably number one. If it doesn’t work then it makes the whole thing have a layer of frustration over it. You get through Aion in several different ways. You can use arrow keys or mouse. Or you can point and click. When you want to talk to an NPC, you click on them and your character will automatically walk up to them and open a chat window. Even from a distance, once you can see the character you want you’ll be able to run right past a crowd and get your business done. It is a simple function, and it should be flawless in every game but it isn’t. In other games you would have to get within a specific distance to trigger the NPC, make sure that you are facing them, and then scroll around until the icon changes to a “talk” one, and then finally click through the dialog menus. My character has even been attacked in some games while at a merchant. Those loose ends make a game tedious.

The other problem that you don’t encounter in Aion, are characters that have to be manually turned around when they are getting attacked. Your character will turn to face them, accompanied by a chime alert sound. Then they will engage the attacker with whatever attack you have pre-selected. In some games, you are constantly jumped from behind by creatures that spawn out of nowhere. It’s fine that they pop up on you, but the character should automatically turn around to face them and begin to attack. When you spend hundreds of hours with a character you would expect it to know enough to fight back. You can program macros for things, but they should all be a sensible as Aion’s characters from the start.

Travel in Aion is a blend of elements from the other NCSoft property, Lineage II. Teleporting costs game gold which is a bit harsh. You can run, glide, fly or travel from teleporter stones and pads in a complex but fairly understandable system. Unfortunately my character didn’t know how to fly yet, banged into a building, fell and died. Because I didn’t have enough gold to use a bind point, my character re-spawned back into the newb area. You can also fall into a problem of traveling to an area above your level, and get stranded there. If the enemies in the area are too high level to kill, and you don’t have enough gold to transport back you could be in a dilemma for a while.

The best travel feature in Aion is how it deals with missions. Every character, location and some items, can be Located with a button press. It will give you additional tiny boxes of info for every important word, and you can get the latitude and longitude, and a map pinpoint. By toggling the map to transparent, your character can be “in the map”. That feature alone is a tremendous help. It gives you the ability to actually know where to go! Again very simple, but not many games get it right.

The camera is almost 360 degrees. I had some trouble getting the track-pad to zoom in and out on the netbook, but I got the hang of it. You can see your character from any angle, including the front. It makes it easier to take screen shots of your character facing you. You can watch your character doing emotes while you are waiting for it to restore after damage.

Leveling up in Aion is more like Guild Wars than Lineage II. Which thankfully is a good thing. Lineage II is a great game which I reviewed and enjoyed several times. It’s a hard game though and not for everyone. I’d like to hope that Aion will be the perfect blend of difficulty and accessibility. You level up in a matter of hours rather than days or months. There are games out there which I have reviewed that take hundreds of hours to get from one level to the next.

One of the things that makes it resemble Guild Wars is the Ascension Mission. It is a different game after you reach level 9 in Aion. Then you are taken through levels from 9 through 11 by a series of story driven cut-scenes and tasks. Following that your character has the ability to beautifully fly and glide. The missions become more story intensive and involve the personal history of your character. That makes it all the more immersive. You are given shots of your character participating in these movies, it makes great memorable screens and captures. The game changes and becomes more intense after ascension.

Then of course there are the characters themselves. The female avatars are gorgeous. You can customize a pretty one no problem. Why is that so hard for most games to get right? They have delicate limbs and dainty feet. The boots or shoes are well rendered. When they dance they look fabulous, and sexy. They don’t have blocky blothchy feet, and mitten like hands. While fighting she looks fantastic with animations for each type of attack. When she is bored she pulls out a leaf shaped parasol. When you straif the character half turns and runs to the side with a life-like looking animation that I haven’t seen before. It’s yet another little notch above the rest, a detail that might not have been needed, but by putting it there it shows just how much more thought went into creating it.

The out-there costumes that you see in the advertising, is what your character will actually wear. Instead of only  seeing a hot outfit ‘cut to here and down to there’ in bright colors, wondering how to get it, you are given them. This game doesn’t piss you off  in game by getting frumpy and drab outfits, and not what is on the box,  like some other games do. It’s a fashion show and dance party if you want it to be like Guild Wars. There is plenty of customization for armor, clothing and weapons.

On the whole Aion has a good pedigree to draw from. It has potential. If the final product is as good as what I have played so far, it will be soomething to look forward to. It is a finely crafted game that will attract gamers of all levels. It’s coming out in September.