Aion Goes Free to Play
NCSoft‘s Aion is now free to play: all classes, areas, quests, equipment, professions and PvP will be freely available to all players!
European players will be requested to transfer their accounts to Gameforge, the new publisher of Aion.
DC Universe Online – A Very Quick Look
When I first heard about DC Universe Online, and especially the option to play as a hero or villain of your own design, I was rather interested. However, after my experiences with Aion at that game’s launch, and poor customer service by their developer, I was reluctant to splash the cash on this game till it dropped in price, or unless friends got into it and were sticking with it for a while.
A friend bought the game, and played for the first month, but then didn’t carry a subscription on after that.. however, while at ScampLAN he discovered he had been given some free time on the game, and he kindly let me have a bit of a run around 😀
I decided to play a Villain, so here’s Arcady: a crazy dual pistol-wielding loon, with Illusion as her Power and Flying rather than Acrobatics or Super Speed.
The first missions had me escape Braniac’s ship, learning how to move around, interact with objects and fight.. I found the keys a bit odd to start with, and ended up flying around while I was only supposed to be walking 😉
Once in Gotham, I went to help sow disorder and chaos for The Joker.. starting by fighting the cops who attacked me while I was trying to find my way to the first mission.. more fool them 😉
As I had picked Illusion, the first ability I got was Psychic Blades.. which fire three spinning blades to attack enemies in their path.
Combat was rather easy, and I liked the effects.. I did tend to get carried away though, as it was so easy to do, and the cops spawned quickly, often near enough to aggro straight onto me. Completing most of the quests led straight into others, without the need to go running back to a quest giver or even travel too far, which was great.
I didn’t explore as much as I would have liked.. flying certainly made it feel easy to get around without being interfered with. However, there were quests to do and more abilities to pick up.. so I failed on the exploration front this time.
Entering the warehouse for one mission, I encountered Catwoman, who I ended up helping in a fight against The Huntress..
I thought this was rather cool 🙂
Letting players fight alongside known powerful characters rather than simply following orders from them makes you feel like you’re actually quite powerful in your own right, which is rather appealing.
Afterwards, I was let inside the Funhouse, which featured huge rolling balls that, contrary to expectation, didn’t crush and kill me! The Funhouse turned out to be some kind of bonus-level.. there were various presents laying around for me to collect, with either money or costume items inside.. and it did look rather cool although a little disjointed from the rest of the game. I’m used to bonus levels belonging to arcade games! 🙂
I guess it’s more in keeping with The Joker’s crazy mentality to have you go running around through a building full of bouncing balls and bombs to get your rewards, and more interesting than simply being handed it invisibly during dialogue with an NPC.
After this, I think I may still get DCUO if it ends up in a Steam sale.. I think I could play through enough content during the included month’s game time to be satisfied, though long-term I’d be unlikely to play without friends in the game to go with.
Why I canned my Aion sub..
Well.. I tried to get in Aion tonight and there it was.. a 40 minute queue.
Last time I tried to play the thing was so laggy I couldn’t even turn my character on the spot without grinding my teeth..
I’d seen an “open letter” from one of NCSoft’s execs a couple of days back – reported here on Eurogamer, and wasn’t too impressed (but still willing to give the game a go, should it actually work for the rest of the free (included in game purchase) play time.
What their exec, Lance Stites said was pretty much this: there’ll be no waiving of sub fees, even temporarily, for those players who haven’t been able to get on –
Err.. if you’ve paid for a service, and haven’t got it, the least they should do is offer you some free time.. I’d have expected the second month to be free considering the mess…
But no. Their “solution” appears to be that next month, there’ll be an opportunity for a free, one-time character transfer.. pay for another month’s sub despite not getting much service so far, and move your character to another server where hopefully, it won’t be so busy..
Aion looked beautiful, and the tiny taste of flight I had was awesome – but I’m not paying for something I’m not getting. Sub cancelled.. and from the comments I’ve seen elsewhere, I’m not the only one.
Queuing
Aion has been plagued with long queue times since launch.
On Friday night, when I first tried to start on Aion, I was stopped dead in my tracks by queues of one hour and more, for any server. Not too much of a surprise; I’d already seen various complaints on forums and from friends on Twitter, and I had other games as backup – for instance, Trials HD on the 360!
I tried again on Saturday morning, and got in with no problems. So one way to beat long queues is to jump on the game at a quiet time, such as 9am on Saturday morning. 🙂
How else do you beat long queues? Don’t disconnect.
You have to leave and do real-world things eventually though, right? 
Hence the private stores, maintaining active connections for those who wander off variously through the day, but can’t be bothered taking their turn in the queue when they want to come back. Great for them, but bad for those waiting in the queue, as these stores hog all the space on the servers.
So NCsoft applied an update to try and stop people abusing this feature. The update limited people to 30 minutes of store-idling, at which point the user is booted, freeing up space on the server for somebody else. Tweets on Saturday afternoon indicated this hadn’t helped too much though, with queue times still close to an hour.
Two new EU servers were added today. Was it foolish to expect that maybe I’d be able to get in tonight without too much of a wait?
I guess so! I went to join, and – three hours and 18 minutes queue time.
There’s no way of migrating your character yet – so nobody with an established character is going to go on the new servers as it would mean starting over. New people aren’t going to go there if they think they’re going to be empty; most people want to go where other users are.. we’ll see if this gets better over the next few days..
In the meantime, I believe the Left 4 dead DLC hits tomorrow 😀
MMOs
A couple of weeks back, I got into the beta for Aion, a visually impressive MMORPG by NCsoft, set on a divided world with two factions.. oh, and wings!
Getting there took a bit of persuasion and a free key from Eurogamer.. I thought the game would be full of whiny kids and con-artists, and rely on working as part of a team with these.
I used to play another MMO years back, a browser-based real-time strategy game.
To get anywhere in the game, you needed round-the-clock activity and a big alliance, and the bigger the alliance, the more time you had to devote, to the extent that people would phone you to summon you to your computer, literally, at any time of day or night. In a small, friendly alliance, attacks and defense would be shared, but in the bigger alliances, you were told who to attack, who to defend, and what to build.. you defended other members of the alliance when required, and hoped they would defend you in turn.. so long as there was nobody higher up the food chain, of course. 😉
The bigger alliance also had their ‘personalities’, which you were expected to show loyalty to, no matter how obnoxious… That’s another story though 🙂
So – I was assured that I could play Aion alone if I wished, and join groups as and when.. so I figured I’d give it a go. The beta went well, and I was surprised to find that the people I did interact with were almost all nice. Except one.. some twonk followed me down a certain path, letting me take on all the beasties, waiting patiently while I healed between fights.. only to run in and attack the guy I’d fought to get to. >:(
Wasn’t too long to wait for him to re-spawn though.. and I also really liked flying, when I finally levelled up enough, that is 🙂
I was joined by Tim for a while too:
Aion arrived at work in a pretty, shiny tin on Thursday, but I was only able to actually play yesterday, due to horrific queue times – in excess of one hour on Friday night!
Saturday morning was a bit quieter, and once I was in, that was it..
Play? I should get paid for this; I spent 10 hours on it!
Still impressed with the graphics, though I was having some problems with slowdowns in busy areas. I think my computer is nearing time for a reinstall of Windows, too.
So yeah, I left it at level 10, having just gotten my wings. I’ve not yet met the enemy faction and the PvP which I’m really not sure about yet – I can only try and see, though 🙂
Overnight I’ve been hit with a message on Twitter, suggesting I try out Shaiya by Aeria Games, which is a free and has supposedly excellent PvP. I’d view that with some suspicion normally, but I also spotted this on Destructoid. Create an account on Aeria Games with a name starting “Dtoid” and get a character up to level 5 to be in a draw for an Alienware laptop.. so, that’s what I’m doing this evening!