Aion

It's taken some of my L4D buddies!

They're all on vent flying about in formation, honking like geese.

Quote from 2d-chris

theres nothing hardcore about it I played the demo, it was fun, looked great and so on, however, it's basically WoW with a paintjob.

It is hardcore, and compared to WoW it's VERY hardcore. Maybe not so much in the beginning though. Just to give you a few clear examples:

- You loose XP when you die and it costs alot of money recovering this XP

- Everything costs lots of money, from travel to buying skills to expanding inventory space and so on, and especially GEAR.

- You need good gear or you die. It's not like in WoW where gear doesnt really matter until endgame. And you wont get even nearly enough good gear from quests (most is crap from this source) so you will have to trade with other players constantly just to be able to advance at a sane pace.

- It takes about 4 times longer to level up than in WoW.

- Much of the game content is pvpve where you do pve content but run a constant risk of getting ganked.

- One of the key character differentiation systems in Aion is that you place "Manastones" in your gear with various stats. These manastones cost ALOT of money and yes, the socketing of any manastone can fail, destroying all other manastones previously socketed into that item. High level gear has 6 manastone sockets so you can imagine the risk of failing losing ALOT of spent money. The plusside is that you feel all cheerful and happy whenever you are able to fill an item with good manastones

- There is an enchantment system where you can improve the basic stats of an item. Again, costs alot of money and you can fail which will take the item back to the previous enchantment level instead of advancing to the next.

- Bosses in pve content can drop "nothing"

I'm sure I can think of more, but basically Aion is more of a balance between risk and reward where WoW is basically just reward reward reward. Failure in WoW leads to maybe some lost time, failure in Aion is severely and brutally punished (again, you will be eased in to this and it wont be as noticable at low levels).

So basically, failing at anything in Aion sucks, but succeeding in anything feels genuinely rewarding That's the essence of why anyone would play a hardcore game I'd say.

Hehe I'm no expert on WoW only got to level 45 or something when it was released, I've always been quite hardcore on Everquest 2 though.

Quote from Nurb

All that makes it sound like it is encouraging hours of grinding simply to be able to access some of the most basic content. I don't want to have to farm space-boars for 3 hours just to buy a sword that could randomly break in the middle of an instance.

Also PVPVE is a good description of any MMO that allows questing in PVP zones.

How is the combat in Aion? A friend of mine tried it, hated it, and came back to AoC to swing clubs and fire arrows. So I'm presuming it is much like WoW, where you press buttons and wait for timers to finish, right?

Quote from Rick_D

All that makes it sound like it is encouraging hours of grinding simply to be able to access some of the most basic content. I don't want to have to farm space-boars for 3 hours just to buy a sword that could randomly break in the middle of an instance.

Also PVPVE is a good description of any MMO that allows questing in PVP zones.

It's not for everyone, hence "hardcore" Some people like risk versus reward, other people (probably most) just want the cheap dulled out rewards without the risk (yes I'm biased ).

Quote from Rick_D

How is the combat in Aion? A friend of mine tried it, hated it, and came back to AoC to swing clubs and fire arrows. So I'm presuming it is much like WoW, where you press buttons and wait for timers to finish, right?

It's more like WoW when it comes to using skills (cooldowns etc), but from level 15+ with most classes Aion's skill-system imo have a much better "fun factor". All skills play very nicely into one another and you have sequences of "chain-skills" which all get bound to the same button which increases the amount of different skills you can use without demanding more hotkeys. And there are also many reaction-skills for each class that are dependent on for example a shield block or an evade (yes, this is nothing new). All in all the skill system is nothing too special or unique, but it's very well made and has great visual effects which all in all makes you feel more powerful.

That's vastly overstated. Manastones and enchants do have a chance to fail, but you get manastones every four mobs and an enchant from destroying any piece of unneeded gear. You will get the upgraded manastones for your best gear, of course, but that doesn't matter for basic content.

It's actually fairly difficult to get into enemy territory. A Rift will randomly appear allowing players to teleport through. So you'll get players pouring into an enemy zone in massive groups rather than the occasional ganking git. The neutral area (the Abyss) is different with controllable territory, which I think also gets attacked by mobs for the PvPvE element.

The combat is the same bar of abilities and timers system you see in most MMO's, which I prefer to AoC's system. As an Assassin I'm finding myself using a lot of skills and being quite reactive (especially compared to WoW). Nice little decisions like backstab actually working from the front but doing relatively no damage so you can't just spam it while spinning around (as in Lineage iirc), and evade skills are simply 100% for one ability rather than RNG for a duration.

It sounds like another second job to me.

i postulate that anything that isn't daoc reborn isn't worth playing in the mmo genre. perhaps with the exception of guild wars 2 when it comes out...

Yeah I read that on the local newspaper, appareantly most of the norwegian staff has been fired now, and the rest is moving to canada^^