So Aion is due to hit the shelves in September and by and large it’s slipped under the radar unless you’re a gaming nut in which case you’ll of heard all about the crazy asian MMO seen the pictures and thought ‘another asian grind fest’ and given it a wide berth.
It’s been running for over a year now in Asia and rather successfully too so much so they’re launching it over here now for the western audience, with most of the dreaded asian grind removed, and replete with translations aplenty and a bucket load of content that most western MMO’s can only dream of. The game is launching in the west with the 1.5 patch, less of a patch more of an entire game in itself coming with a ton of PvEvP instances and raid content for the end game dreamers amongst us….that’s mostly all of Precept!
So what have we been testing? Well we’ve been mostly playing the game more than testing, there’s not really a hell of a lot to test other than translations. We’re currently on version 1.0 and it plays like a dream to be honest, slick, bug-free and so far a lot of fun.
Of course we’re still only in newbie land, I got to level 21 before it closed down for another couple of weeks, so we’ve yet to experience end-game. However what we’ve seen so far has impressed. The graphics are absolutley awesome in detail and depth. Whilst they are obviously asian influenced they are just jaw droppingly beautiful and what’s more run like a dream on any moderately decent PC. I was running at 140fps most of the time, and frapsing gave me a healthy 60fps.
The game play itself is a lot of fun too, none of us could put our finger on what made it fun as, to be perfectly honest, it was more of the same, the usual fare of kill quests, more kill quests and the odd run around here and there delivering random packages and picking clams…I kid you not. But interspersed in all of this are some very cool cutscenes, a decent storyline with humour, some pretty epic sights to get you drooling for endgame and all wrapped up in this polished little nugget.
Again I’ll set this off by repeating myself, it’s great so far but we haven’t seen endgame at all!
Classes are mirrored on both sides so no balance issues in terms of RvR/PvP (we hope), the classes are your stock Priest,Tank,Mage,ranged/melee DPS with 2 archetypes to choose from upon hitting level 10. This may seem limiting to begin with but it’s actually a refreshing change and means that the developers will be reasonably comfortable in balancing any issues such as class balance, and hopefully we’ll avoid the usual flavour of the month stuff.
I could go on and on but no doubt you’ve already read a million and on other reviews so I’ll stop here, needless to say so far good stuff I’ll keep you posted on new stuff moving forward!
Some screenshots can be found here
Completely random and no thought other than to show off really. In terms of ‘sides’ you’ve got Elyos (pretty, clean living souls…well probably not but I haven’t read the lore) and Asmodeans (emo purple dudes) I played both and enjoyed Elyos side more, perhaps it’s the clean living dude in me!! 
Anyway that’s all for now, I’ll check back with another post after the next open beta, so far from me it’s a thumbs up.
ghey ! …….. but I’ll still be playing it, bah