Review: Aion: The Tower of Eternity

By Jason Weaver | December 4, 2009 | | Filed under: Features, Reviews | Tags: Aion: The Tower of Eternity, NCSoft, review

One feature that allot of Asian MMOs have is the ability for the player to open a shop pretty much anywhere they are in the world. The game still has an auction house in game for the selling and buying of goods but the player shops add a more personal touch to selling goods and it cuts out the auctioneer fees. While it is an awesome feature, it was widely abused in the live game. Players were setting up shops with goods that had sky-high prices in order to stay logged in while they were away from the computer for the night or day.

This caused the game to suffer huge queues which kept players waiting in line to get in game for long periods of time. NCSoft quickly came up with a solution that saw unattended shops only being able to stay logged in for 30 minutes at a time. This helped greatly reduce wait times and in most cases eliminated the queues all together.

Aion features four tradeskills; weaponsmithing, armorsmithing, tailoring, and handicrafting. Since the others are self explanatory, I’ll explain handicrafting. It uses gems and wood to create powerful jewelry, bows, and staves.

A cool feature in Aion is player titles. When you complete certain quests or perform certain prerequisites you gain titles. These titles add a title over the players head and give a special bonus to the player. There are dozens of titles and can be changed at any time to suit the situation.

A feature most MMO have is the ability to add special effects or abilities to armor and weapons. In Aion there are three different types of effects that can be used to enhance an item. They are manastones, enchantment stones, and godstones. Manastones add attributes to an item, enhancement stones can enhance an attribute on the item, and godstones add abilities to weapons that can affect a target on hit.

Quests

For the most part the quests are the run of the mill quests that all MMOs suffer from, go here and kill X amount of this, take this item to so and so in the next town over, here and there you may find a diamond in the rough.

Some of the best quests are the ones that directly deal with the player character and deal with his loss of memory and his journey to regain it. Another neat feature is the few quests that have short clips that play out to enhance the quest text. On the down side, some are too short and don’t really add any flavor to the quest and can leave you scratching your head wondering why it was included for that particular quest.

Progression

Levels 1 through 14 have a very fluid flow and there are always enough quests to keep you leveling happily. There is a lot of backtracking to towns that you have already moved on from but usually there is a flight NPC that you can jump on to make travel easier, the back tracking is the only detraction from the quest flow.

Players should expect some grinding but in the early levels it is not that bad. You may need to kill a few mobs in order to ding that next level that allows you to pick up more quests. Grinding does get a bit worse in the higher levels. Questing in the PvP zones will net you more experience points than if you stick to the PVE zones.

Sound

The sounds are normal MMO fare with some really annoying character voices. Some of the female battle voices are so annoying they’ll have you reaching for the volume. Fortunately, there is an option to turn off certain player voices as you see fit. Other than this, everything sounds like it should and the music deserves a special mention as it fits the game well and is very pleasant.

Overall

Aion brings an enjoyable experience to the crowded MMO market. From its visuals and gameplay to the ability to fly, it is worth the price of admission. While it does falter in some regards, none of the downsides detract from the overall enjoyment of the game.

Score: 4 out of 5.