Aion Screenies

[FunkyJ]

NCsoft's new MMO Aion has a few new screenies and info about character classes.

Damn they look good!



Characters here

Gallery here

[Deadfyre]

That looks fairly interesting.

[Nesa]

Those look really good actually! I bet it would look nothing like that though if I tried to play it hehe. I would imagine that's at max quality settings, and I would probably have to set it at max performance.

[Corpeces]

I don't know if people now days will be happy with just 2 class for their character. Days of EQ, 1 class was enough cause the character had so much depth to them but no one makes characters with that much depth anymore. When they make a game that has branches they are counting on the multiple classes one character can have to supplement for depth. Essentially, the class branches are the character's depth.

As it has been seen, if a character has class branches they just wind up with fewer skills that are different from each other. As opposed to 1 class with multiple skill branches that allow you to specialize. My opinion, the later is better but I have yet to see anyone make a character development system that is great. So far WoW has the better one but I still like to see more options. EQ might be the best out there far as character development but that game got old now.

[Bunni]

I have to say I'm pretty excited about this one. So far it looks like they have held onto a lot of the aspects of L2 that I like and hopefully they have taken in what the last few years have taught them.

As for people wanting more out of their characters I'm not so sure about that really. I think it's both a strength and a weakness in WoW. While it appeals to the more casual players it is often a source of annoyance for others. There are many of us that would rather our tanks be tanks and our healers be healers (and thats said as someone with 2 fully heal speced chars atm). WoW classes started out with more clear definitions but over the last couple years it has sort of become "World of Hybridcraft" as Blizzard strives to allow players to do whatever job they can spec for with equal proficiency compared to main classes instead of their initial "jack of all trades, master of none" approach.

The Asian market games appeal to a slightly different brand of player and you are right that part of the market won't be happy with the setup. Thats ok though, not everyone is totally happy with what WoW offers either. In the cast of the Korean NCSoft games the Euro/US markets won't make or break them, they have so much support on the homefront that we are more of a side market that tags along on the Korean coat tails (for better or worse). I do think that if Aion reflects at least what they have done with L2 since NA release then it's popularity will be much larger than L2 ever was. Even L2 if time could be turned back and the current state of the game be the starting point I think the english market success would have been much higher.

At any rate, omg is it pretty. O.O

[McMuttons]

I'll definitely be checking it out, at least. I really like Lineage 2 and NCSoft's games in general.

[Sente]

Originally Posted by Corpeces

As it has been seen, if a character has class branches they just wind up with fewer skills that are different from each other. As opposed to 1 class with multiple skill branches that allow you to specialize.

That depends on how the skill structure is designed. Even if you have a number of classes with individual specialization paths the different skills for each class could still be quite similar in practice.

The problem with branched class structurs is when the skill design is such that skills in the common paths will be useless or play out quite differently from the final class. That was a problem EQ2 had with its branches, plus that a number of the early skills were not that exciting. Creating 24 classes to select from directly from start was a better option for that game.

I think Tabula Rasa does a bit better job there. Pretty much all skills can be useful at any level and how much skill points you put in each skill/ability available can give significanly different results. Still room for improvements though.

I like it when characters are a bit "fuzzy" in the sense that they do not directly fit into the Holy Trinity model and provide more variety in team set-up models.