During the reign of the king of MMO’s, Aion released to middling appeal. It sure had its die hard fans that continue to admire the game, but there comes a point where MMOs just die out. Due to the circumstances of Aion’s past, I never thought we would ever get a sequel. Yet, here I am, staring at a character select screen that makes me ponder the acceptance of sexuality within games and what it means to be uncomfortable. It’s an article for a different day, but nonetheless, Aion 2 is quite the interesting experience, and I would love nothing more than to tell you about the first ten hours of me constantly looking over my shoulder to ensure no one is watching me.
Opening Throws
Aion 2 is an MMORPG which are not best known for being quick to run through. Going into this experience, I knew what I was in for on a baseline and conceptual level. It could take anywhere up to 100+ hours to get to a point where I feel satisfied with what I played. After all, an MMO is a type of live-service game that continues to pull you in repeatedly. It doesn’t want to let you go, so developers attempt to pack out the game with various rewards and a means to obtain those rewards by doing time-consuming tasks.
My expectations were set, but they were quite blown out of the water the second I hit the start button. I selected between two factions, the Elyos and the Asmodians, two fantasy names that didn’t mean quite anything to me. Aion 2 already makes an assumption that I know what these two sides are and what their internal politics mean. But, it does say that no matter what side I pick, that I will never interact with anyone from the opposing faction. So, I guess I chose whatever sounded cooler. While Asmodians sounded cooler on paper, I was more interested in Elyos because it sounded kinda like “Eggo” and I was quite hungry.
From there I was thrown immediately into an introductory mission that had me playing as one of the hottest characters in a video game ever made. While this character’s design felt a bit uncanny valley, I was glad to see that by the end of the tutorial mission, I can make my own character and this is where I was met with the most important choice of my entire gaming experience.
I could choose the body most closely associated with the male form. In some games I do like to try to have a way to represent myself. Sometimes, I like to envision myself within the fantasy world that I am playing in. Other times I choose body types that closely resemble the average female because my brain loves class fantasy. But Aion 2 doesn’t make me think along my traditional lines and instead I roll a female character. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out styles and looks that I am happy with. Typically, my male characters are just slapped together with medium length hair, a beard, a goatee, and that’s really it. Aion 2 let me carefully craft the powerful female character that would run into battle, slaying oddly detailed monsters with her giant sword and even more giant breasts.
This is where I must interject with yet a bit of a tangent.
For Lust or Love
I have played a lot of MMORPGs and one thing I often find is how they allow players to engage with character designs to a point where the “hotness” of a character is the core reason to play the game; the “goon factor” if you will. The more aggressively bombastic character you can make used to directly implicate the rest of the game’s design in a balance that often made everything else feel awful. As if having an 8-foot tall dominatrix as your character being the entire selling point of the game.
Aion 2 surprisingly breaks that mold, but I am still left standing, wondering if what I did was right? I begin to wonder what the whole point of this character select screen is when all we are doing as men is making the most over-the-top lustful characters we could literally ever imagine. Some of us do it for the ridiculousness of it while others use it to live through an experience that they couldn’t have in real life. I don’t know who I am or if I am even the right person to speak to this at a much grander scale. More importantly, I don’t know what this says about me and my character as a human being. Sexuality is a huge element of Aion 2 from a character design perspective as well as a social one within the confines of this game’s closed wall garden. Is it sexual deviancy or is it freedom of expression? This seems to be the question that has plagued our online lives for a long time, and while I cannot say what is right and what is wrong, perhaps the answer comes from the deeper nuances that make us who we are. Some folks are fine with it, others feel the need to bring it up within a review so they can assure others that despite the appearance of their character they are in fact good, and others just do what they traditionally do and never question it.
Anyway, this to me is science and like a true scientist I have broken down the barriers in hopes to experience something that I couldn’t recreate elsewhere. Please don’t read the rest of this in front of your kids.
Hack and Slash
Aion 2’s gameplay is quite basic and can sometimes feel a bit boring. At least, that was my immediate impression. Left click to attack with right click acting as a special attack that took up MP. Additional attacks would take up a few number keys while other abilities used various function modifiers. After playing for even just an additional hour or two, I gained several levels and found myself weaving attacks between each other. One slash attack meshed into another attack that had me pierce my enemy with my blade, lifting them up and bashing them on the ground like the Hulk.
Some attacks can be comboed into other attacks as well which delivered devastating effects. For example, hitting one or two attacks might enable an additional ability that could only be executed by hitting the “E” button. As I leveled up, more of these options became more available to me. Weaving attacks felt really good and slowly started to break up the monotony of hacking and slashing. This also made me think about what I should focus on when it came to improving these abilities.
The Stats Must Go Up
Over time, I obtained points that I could use to upgrade these abilities and make them even more powerful. Although there were a few ceilings and limits to how far I could upgrade them. But what is important is understanding the limitations of how many points I had at my disposal. I had to pick and choose what active and passive abilities required the points while leaving some other abilities with much less, or sometimes no upgrades at all.
There is an additional upgrade path that feels reminiscent of Diablo IV’s Paragon system. Every so often you’ll get points that can be spent on a grid. Every point allows you to go a little further from the place you started in. You can get more attack damage, faster cooldown speeds, so on and so forth. I really am a sucker for concepts like this. There are multiple types of grids that slowly unlock as you play more of the game.
I don’t want to say that this gave me pause and forced me to consider my choices. Once one aspect of these abilities became prominent, it was a zero-thought decision. As a beefy character who deals tons of damage, do I want to improve that damage output or do I want to improve something that might not be as important? These become no brainer concepts especially considering how your attacks affect the enemies around you.
Attacks lack a certain weight, something that a lot of games try really hard to nail down. Despite using a mouse and keyboard, I found that the giant broadsword my character was dragging lacked impact. It didn’t feel bad, but it didn’t feel great either. If the sword were to be replaced by a wet CVS receipt then it may have made more sense. Yet here I am, clicking my mouse and pressing buttons as I attempt to kill over 150 units of the same monster so I can ride them as a mount. I’ll dive into that more in a bit.
While combat isn’t as impressive as I was hoping for, movement feels outstanding! It is quite basic but with the ability to sprout wings and fly for a temporary amount of time was a cool return from the previous game. Aion 2’s way of handling this is having your wings available for only a set amount of time. This can be improved, but you can’t have your wings out forever. You can fight in the air which is pretty cool if you ask me, and there are these drafts or wind tunnels that you can fly into which then help you get from one point to another quicker. There are also gusts that can blow you upwards, enabling you to fly from an elevated position or even glide down to your next quest marker.
Regarding quests, there are a bunch of them and they can be quite bland. It is a lot of the typical MMORPG cliche’s that include killing certain amounts of enemies to defend points and collecting stuff. I can’t say that this is necessarily bad because quests in a lot of these types of games tend to circulate around these tropes. It is hard to have an MMORPG that places you into a whole different kind of game and have it make sense.
Exploration
While questing is pretty basic, it kinda felt like some sort of backdrop to what the game really wants you to do and that is explore! Icons begin to appear on the map, and a completion bar appears on the right side of the screen. Your job is to complete that bar by exploring and completing various tasks at your own pace. I really like this concept.
Games like Guild Wars 2 happen to have this element that allows you to explore an area, find things to do, and reward you for it. I found myself becoming more engaged with Aion 2 once the training wheels came off.
Aion 2’s graphical engine, whatever it may be, delivered quite the high-quality visual fidelity that enabled me to become fully immersed within the world. Take that element and mash it with the exploration concept and we have this experience that can really pull you in as it did with me. I’m telling you that the first ten hours or so went by so quickly because of how these elements both worked together. Mix it in with the constant upgrading of various systems, and you’re in for a really good time.
Other Wings
After a few hours of playing as just one character, I decided to give the other classes a shot. There are eight total and they are mixtures of melee fighters, archers, sword and board, wizards and so on. I tried out a ranged character and was sort of upset with how that class played. For me to attack enemies I had to make sure I was pointing at them. I couldn’t dry launch an arrow if I wanted to, instead only firing once I was able to lock onto an enemy. Movement was far more important when it came to these ranged characters, as I was constantly running backwards while releasing an unrelenting storm of arrows upon my enemies. I tend to adore ranged characters in MMOs and this one just didn’t have the right flavor of juice I was looking for.
I also tried a sword and shield character as I always love to tank when given the opportunity and I found that particular playstyle to be a lot of fun. Granted, a core ability lacking from the lineup surprised me. Blocking in games like this tends to be an active ability. Typically, left click is to attack while right click is to block. But in Aion 2, there is no blocking. It is a passive concept that is tied to various stat increases. This is where the entire combat design begins to really fall apart on me. It makes sense for other classes to lack a blocking feature but for the one class that holds a shield, it just didn’t make sense to me in a game that is being held up by the more action-focused design.
This is when I remembered the theory of balance between the goon factor and the gameplay; the needle swinging wildly back and forth depending on your own expectations. At one point, especially with that last character, it did feel more like a game that featured beautiful characters that just so happened to fight monsters and demons rather than something truly engaging. It literally depended on what class I played which is incredibly odd from my standpoint.
Walk the Walk
There is a feature that Aion 2 has that other MMOs have and that is auto-pathing. With the press of two buttons your character can automatically make a run towards a quest marker or quest turn-in spot. At first, I felt like this was eliminating a whole segment of gameplay, dumbing down the entire concept of just walking in a direction. But it was only until I dived back into another MMO where I actually missed this feature. I could have easily set my character to auto-path mode while I refreshed my water or grabbed a snack. Is it lazy? Absolutely! But it felt kinda nice for a bit. The bar for engagement isn’t exactly that high up.
Another concept that I found interesting is the pet/mount system. You can equip a pet that will remain by your side and when you venture away from populated areas, the pet will transform into a mount that gives you various speed bonuses. Almost every enemy that I have seen in this game can become a pet/mount.
The moment I found this out, I spent a good amount of time just killing monsters so I could obtain their mount form. I liked this aspect of gameplay because it also allowed me to make my own fun. If I just wanted to mindlessly attack enemies and maybe practice some combat combinations, I could!
Stop and Shop
Finally, there is a shop. I know, many MMOs have this and when there is a shop there is always a conversation surrounding it. While Aion 2 does have this shop and PvP, people instantly like to draw the line between said shop and “Pay to Win.” This is the concept where players can pay real-life money to receive in-game benefits. Honestly, I didn’t look around for these as I felt that perhaps the developer would sneak them in later down the line. As of right now, the shop is filled with a few boosts, some dedicated currencies, and a few outfits that sort of breaks the fantasy aesthetic that Aion 2 seems to have been aiming for.
There is also a battle pass within the game as well, solidifying the fact that there are an equal amount of ways of systems held within the confines of the game as there are ways to make money. I can’t say if the battle pass is good or bad because all the rewards are currently made up of the various in-game currencies.
While Aion 2 is a free-to-play game and doesn’t have any initial purchase cost or mandatory subscription required to play it, there is a $15 monthly subscription option. This unlocks various endgame economy features, an aspect of the game that I have yet to experience myself. But, if you are looking just to get your feet wet, Aion 2 is free-to-play so you should give it a shot.
Overall, I think the folks over at NC have built something that is graphically impressive, full of depth, but equally depraved and raunchy. While I do find the ladder aspects to be questionable for some, I think it is great for people who enjoy those elements to express themselves in a way that feels free of judgement. Let’s see where NC takes this!
