Aion: So far… so awesome!

We covered Aion on Ready Up quite some time ago when we were invited for a sneak peek by the developers. It was looking good then and I secretly started to get my hopes up. I remember going back to play some Guild Wars at the time, perhaps I wanted to get back in the NCsoft ‘zone’. I have always loved Guild Wars as its beauty and level of detail amaze me every time I play it. Granted, it’s not as deep as World of Warcraft but I always found Warcraft a little daunting. Perhaps it’s ‘too deep’ for my tastes but I have a feeling I just joined that party too late and by the time I arrived everyone was drunk on its charms and hanging out in the kitchen deep in a conversation I didn’t dare try to fathom. Alas, I fear my level 40 Hunter will stay that way for some time, bless her soul (and her cat that I named Hadouken).

So Aion is looming, looking even more beautiful than Guild Wars and promising me a first foot in the door to a world I could learn along with my peers. I’ll be in the kitchen at the Aion party!

I have a new laptop, I’ve been reading the forums, I’ve picked out my starting character’s faction and class and last week I got the final piece of the puzzle: my closed beta access key. I’ll admit, for all the gushing praise I am going to present you with over my next few blogs, my journey into Atreia wasn’t a smooth one. On Wednesday I downloaded the client installer and fired it up. Under no illusion that this install would be quick, I left it overnight to download the magical world to my hard drive. There was no hurry, after all Closed Beta Weekend 5 didn’t start till Friday. Alas, I woke on the Thursday to find my download had not progressed well – this was not looking good. There was only one thing to do, I needed ‘fat pipes‘ and I needed them fast. I called in on our friends at ESC Games and left the mighty Shaft with the task of getting this job done. He did not fail me.

After some minor Google-based troubleshooting I found my antivirus software to be not entirely happy with me connecting to Aion but that was soon dealt with and I was in and on my way to a new world and my first challenge. It turns out that my first challenge was to create my hero with whom I would smite… stuff. I’d already decided to go with the Elyos, the ‘goodies’, if you must look at it that way. My class was also decided upon, a scout that I planned to later turn into a Ranger. I’ve got to admit, I’m pretty boring when it comes to choosing classes in MMOs, it’s aways a Hunter/Ranger type. I just like bows, I guess. I quickly decided that I would play as a female, lets face it they are always nice to look at and in Aion even more so than usual. The character customiser in Aion is quite something, you can change everything. Height, shape, hair, ears, lips, tattoos, eyes, arms, legs and boobs are all there for the customising. I really quite liked the default/random starting point that I was given, so I picked a hairstyle, ramped up the slider bar for boobs and named her Blink.

The story of my travels leading up to level 10, with 10 being a very significant level, will be the subject of my next blog. But as a sneak preview, I present to you now Blink at Level 10.