October 2009 Archives

I just finished my way through Machinarium, the latest work from the Czech Indie Studio Amanita Design (Samorost series). This short but entertaining adventure brought some freshness to a genre that is, more than ever, struggling to come with new ideas.

Maybe not everyone knows Space Hulk, but probably all of us know what Warhammer 40k is; a wargame about the grim darkness of the far future, where there's only war. Space Hulk is one of Game Workshop's specialist games, based in this universe, where squads of Space Marine Terminators boarded alien spaceships in a turn-based game, fighting their, usually, abominable owners (mostly four-armed Alien ripoffs called "Genestealers", although it was possible to fight other stuff).

Somehow, the board game managed to bring the claustrophobic ambient of the spaceships by hiding everything the players couldn't see, and forcing them into narrow corridors where any step could lead to a more than certain death.

In 1993 EA published the first computer adaptation of the franchise, called Space Hulk (clever marketing there!). You can read the full story about this game on its Wikipedia article.

Years passed, and a small group of Swedish developers, TearDown, wanted to bring back this classic game to our modern computers. A praiseworthy action, if you want to know my opinion. Then the lawyers came in, the "no, you won't get the license", and all that stuff we heard before tons of times. The remake was almost finished, but it wouldn't be able to make it with Space Marines and Genestealers.

The result? Alien Assault. An awesome remake where squads of marines from the space fight hordes of four-armed aliens that may steal your genes, set in claustrophobic spaceships.

Made of 100% awesomesauce. You can get it for free from their webpage (while legal supplies last...), or download it from the mirror at the download section!

Just wanted to point it out ;) If you like roguelikes, or if you never played one of them, you should download this fine piece of art at once! You can do this from the downloads section.

Happy surviving!

Yes, you read it well. A great news for all the indie developers. The well known middleware UNITY has changed their licensing prices. The Indie license, which was previously $200, is now free, while the professional license keeps the original $1499/€1099 cost.

UNITY was the choice for many small studios, or the great Derek Yu himself (Diabolika was created using this engine), and, in words of the company itself: "Unity Technologies has always believed that the best technology and products should be made available to all developers. We want to accelerate the availability of high quality interactive content. [...] With the explosive growth in new platforms and performance improvement in our Unity suite of products, we believe that there are no technical hurdles remaining for high quality interactive content everywhere. Now we are removing financial hurdles as well."

Suddenly one of the most interesting options for indie developers during these past years has become a hell lot more awesome.

I'm glad to announce that the vLog now counts with its own Download section proudly created entirely with content made by other people!

Many times I find some really kickass indie freeware/open source titles while just randomly surfing, and I tell to myself "man, I have to spread this piece of awesomeness". Well, now I can ;) The speed probably isn't going to be great, although most of the stuff won't be more than a couple megabytes. You can find the new section following this link, or by clicking "downloads" in the sidebar. For now it's only about games, although I may add some game related tools later. The possibilities are huge, aren't they?

Right now there's only one game (Alien Assault, which I will give a small review soon), but expect the page to grow in the near future with a couple of titles. Be warned, tho, I do like stuff that looks 15 years old... and by stuff I mean videogames, you dirty minded people!

For those who don't know Charles Cecil, he's the man behind some of the greatest point and click adventures of all time, such as the Broken Sword series or Toonstruck (one of my favourites, at least). Dave Gibbons is just the artist for that almost unknown and non-prizewinner comic called Watchmen. These two guys worked together in the early 90's to bring us the fabled Beneath a Steel Sky (which is now free to download and play, get it here now if you didn't play it yet!), and, from what this short entry from Eurogamer seems to say, they are going to work together, again. For those of you who are too lazy to click on links to external sites, these were Cecil's words:

"All I can say is, I am working with Dave Gibbons and we're working on a new adventure game. We have a number of ideas for premises and we honestly haven't decided which road we're going to go down. But I love writing and playing adventure games and that is what I'm going to stick to."

He didn't underline his own words, mostly because of the physical laws, but I wanted to emphasize that last sentence. After so many years of "meh" adventure games (although there were quite some glorious exceptions), might this be the moment for a new awesomely epic point-and-click adventure? Or maybe we're talking about a totally different approach now (considering the latest Broken Sword titles)? I guess time will have the final word ;)

So, we have an RTS set in space, with some nice graphics (although the ships look a bit too flat) with the classical system conquering mechanic. You arrive, you kill, you claim. What makes it different? The incredibly complex Artificial Intelligence.

We will be always aware of the status of our enemy, and will even know how many ships will be attacking us (and where, most times). Still, we will fail miserably defending ourselves in the medium difficulty levels, at least after the campaign has advanced a tad. Why? Because the AI is goddamn amazing. In the classical RTS approach, the computer will send us waves of enemies, bigger each time, trying to destroy us, but the enemy units will basically run towards our base, destroying our stuff in their way, and then collide against our defenses as a rock thrown against a wall. Sometimes the rock will be big enough, the wall will break, and we will lose, but in the end, most times, it's all about having the correct units (or even, just having more of them than your enemy).

AI War just takes a totally different approach. The computer has resources, and doesn't like to lose them. You will be surrounded by enemy vessels, breaking your different lines of combat, or move your ships towards some tasty looking bait (a small attack force) that will flee as soon as you reach them, just to find that the main enemy attack force is coming from another system from which you're almost not defending the wormhole now. The AI is unpredictable, even if you know what, when and where will it play. Considering this is an indie game, I would say that the work is more than correct. In fact, it's probably the best RTS Artificial Intelligence I've ever met. And that's the best part, you can actually feel there's a mind behind it.

The game features a cooperative multiplayer mode, where up to 8 players can compete against the computer. There's not a player-only mode, so, the AI must be good. The more players, the harder it gets (at the same difficulty level). The more aggressive the players behave towards the AI, the harder it fights back. This is important, as an irate computer might be impossible to hold back if you didn't prepare yourself properly.

Every conquest must be made with caution. Is it better to get that planet there with so many resources, or that one, with almost no crystal (one of the resources ingame) but only two wormholes you can easily defend (because you already have one, or both, of the planets they're linked to).

And, I cannot close this article without mentioning the music. If you liked the 16 bit era of videogames (SNES, Sega Genesis/Mega Drive, etc), you will probably fall in love with it.

Now, considering the price, if you're into this kind of games, I can only tell you, check it out.

In one of the previous entries, I talked about Modern Warfare II, and how apparently Infinity Ward wanted to basically destroy their own game. Today, I've read this kind of explanatory article in Gamasutra.

So, apparently Activision noticed that DLC (Downloadable content) raised the money gotten per product sold by an average of $8.7 (in Xbox360 and PS3) for Call of Duty - World at War, and thought that it was a great idea to, somehow, force the players into a system where the only way to get more game content was to pay. Clever, if you expected players not to notice.

Let's see... If the average spend keeps at the same level ($8.7) and the game is sold at, let's say,  $59.99 in PC, you better make sure that for any player that doesn't buy the game because of this movement, you have, at least, 8 players that buy the game AND the additional content, or you'll be losing money.

I can totally understand that this might work for Xbox360 and PS3 markets, but in PC it's going to fail hard, remember my words. However, it looks like some companies are starting to move towards the game console market with titles that have historically been linked to PC, such as First Person Shooters, while, at the same time, giving more PC games a console-like feeling.

Still, this is a slap in the face of all the PC users, and specially, serious clans. I'll let you guess which game won't be the next awesome e-sport king of the hill.

Character design was one of the main points on yesterday's video, without any doubt. Making the player feel comfortable with the character he's playing, and creating some emotional links with the in-game avatar, will lead the game experience to a higher dimension.

There are many ways to deal with this, apart from creating an amazing background. Technology has improved lots since the days of vector based 3D games, and now characters can move and show emotions in ways we could only dream about some years ago. If you ever played Ico, you probably noticed how the main characters were able to show their feelings without saying a word. How they moved, how they behaved... everything told the player about their personalities and ways to be.

The game designer behind this wonderful game was Fumito Ueda, who later leaded the design of another amazing title, Shadow of the Colossus. This time, it was the turn for these magical giants to "be alive" and behave like anybody could expect from them if they were found in the real world.

Many of you probably don't know yet what The Last Guardian is, but considering the previous two paragraphs, you might be guessing it already. Yes, it's Fumito Ueda's next game, and nothing can explain it better than the following video:

Found this interesting presentation made at the Swansea International Animation Festival 2008 by Matthew Jeffery (Global Head of Employment Brand at Electronic Arts). Not much to say about it. If you're starting, or want to start, learning game design, you'll get something more than some general rules from this video.

I've just read that apparently Call of Duty Modern Warfare II won't have dedicated servers. What does this imply? Basically that the game won't allow any modification, maps or, basically, any content created by the users. Of course, this pissed off many of the players who cancelled their preorders, and, what seems to be worse, ruined the life expectancy of the game.

Developing toolsets for the players takes time. In fact, it takes a hell lot of time. Sometimes, it becomes the basis of the product you're selling, like in Bioware's Neverwinter Nights, where the main game campaign was "meh, not that fun", but the Aurora Toolset made users able to create their own game almost from scratch. Half of the updates made to the game were directly related to the toolset, and in the end, the control players had about the game was at a quite low level, being able to change even the ruleset (Neverwinter Nights was based in the Dungeons&Dragons 3.0 system). Adding content to the game was easy. Modifying textures, creating new zones, scripts and, to put it simple, a new game, was just a matter of time, depending on the results the players wanted. There were some mods that took months, even years, to develop, while others were made in just a matter of weeks.

There was a huge community around the game and some terabytes of player-made content were uploaded to the Neverwinter Nights Vault at IGN during the years that followed the release of the game. It had two expansions (Shadows of Undrentide and Hordes of the Underdark) and various special editions (Neverwinter Nights Gold, and Neverwinter Nights Diamond).

Many of us waited anxiously for Neverwinter Nights 2, hoping that it would be at least as good as it's predecessor, but with more options, and basically, a better graphics engine. Polygonal meshes for exteriors with texture painting... in the toolset itself! Hell, that sounded awesome! And it came out. This time, the team behind the game was Obsidian. Obsidian didn't have as much money as Bioware had, and its investors were kind of forcing the release of the game. It got delayed a bit, and it finally came out.

What did players find? Nothing they expected. The toolset was "good", but not as good as the original Aurora Toolset. It was way more complex and less user-friendly. Sure, it had more options, but the controls were a bit awkward, and it added the "PWC" files; huge files generated after compiling the module that had to be downloaded before playing the game. Suddenly, what could have been an easy update two years before, became a 100MB to various GB download for all the users. Creating models was now a bit more difficult, as the new engine had new features that require, for example, the use of normal maps. Way better looking, but not exactly something a random John Doe could change with the most basic 3D modeling tools.

The official game campaign was worked a bit more (or it looked like that). The story sucked horribly, and the characters will remain in my personal Hall of Shame, but, still, it was easy to see that the developers put a lot of effort. Obviously, considering they probably knew the toolset was not that user-friendly, the game still needed something to catch the players, and, as Hasbro was also in the package, it couldn't be boobies (I'll talk about NwN2 and the boobie censoring in another post, because the story behind it really deserves its own novel).

The game still has launched two expansions, but the community is not even half the size of what the previous title of the series managed to get. In fact, there are still more online servers running NWN than there are for NWN2.

The results are not only that NwN ended up having a way better reputation than NwN2 (as did the companies behind the games), but also a way longer life expectancy.

Modern Warfare II may be a good game, but won't last for long, that's for sure. And, if the game fails, well, Infinity Ward won't count with the help of the community this time.

Related articles by Zemanta

• No dedicated servers for Modern Warfare 2 PC? (mygaming.co.za)
• Nerd Rage: Angry PC gamers start Modern Warfare 2 petition (destructoid.com)

Recently, I've been reading in some places the expression second person camera to refer to those games where the camera is over the shoulder of the main character (such as Gears of War or Mass Effect), in comparison to third person camera, where this is usually hovering some meters behind the player, whether it's higher or lower, it doesn't seem to matter.

Of course, we all understand which one is the first person view, looking through the eyes of our own character. Interestingly, this should force the second person view to be located in...?

If you answered "over our shoulder", then you have a problem with your cenesthesia, or been transplanted the arm of somebody else.

If you answered "the eyes of our enemies", then you followed the rational, logical way ;)

So, is there any game where we have a second person view? Well, two come quickly to my mind. First, Incubation: Time Is Running Out, from the Battle Isle series. Incubation resembles quite a lot to the original UFO/X-Com, for those who don't know it; We control a group of soldiers fighting aliens in a turn based scheme. Interesting graphics for its date, and some nice game mechanics made Incubation a great game to spend the summer playing to.

As I said, it was turn based. When the enemies moved, you saw their actions through their eyes. This turned out to give an awesome atmosphere, as the maps don't look the same from an isometric perspective, and from the the ground level. You knew they were moving, but you didn't know where exactly, until you saw the back of your soldiers. And bam! You were suddenly surrounded!

Anyway, this is somehow in the gray area between second person and first person, mostly because of the turn-based mechanic. You weren't really controlling your characters when the enemies moved, but still what the enemies saw had an impact in the game.

However, the second game I'm thinking about, features an actual second person camera. I'm talking about Forbidden Siren, a Survival Horror that appeared not so long ago, for the PS2. If you were planning to play it, maybe you shouldn't watch the following video, as it includes some spoilers (being a walkthrough, it contains MOSTLY spoilers):

Just read a couple of articles from Gamasutra [1] and [2] (so, yeah, a couple), the second one being the response to the first. Being a game frustration lover I have to comment on them.

So, summarizing, we have Lewis Denby, our not-so-good-at-videogames man with not enough time to get too involved with them, asking for titles players can easily beat, considering them basically narrative virtual experiences. He thinks games shouldn't point to "some elite party to which he's not invited" when it comes to complexity / difficulty.

To this, Leigh Alexander gives a somehow diagonal answer. "Then, maybe it's just that it's not the kind of game you should be playing, if you're not enjoying it". It's not really pointing to the core argument. Lewis mixes being hard with taking lots of time (long grinds) or solving some kind of nonsensical puzzles (his graphical adventure example). Both concepts aren't directly related to being hard, but more with poor game design.

Absurd point&click adventures often get bad reviews, even from old-school adventurers. Ultragrinding MMOs mostly appeal to a very specific market, which commonly isn't formed by, let's say, AOL's Neverwinter Nights' players, and, even if they are time-consuming, tend to be more tedious than hard (if you have to kill 1000 boars, you shouldn't need to spend 10 minutes fighting each one of them).

Games don't need to be competitive, but they certainly need some kind of challenge, or they wouldn't be games at all, but sandboxes, which may also be fun, but instead of playing them, you'd be playing with them. That said, a game can be hard, because it's challenging, and still be aimed towards a more casual public (think of some Flash games out there). Or it may be easy to an absurd level and still require lots of time (World of WarCraft, anyone?).

I'm pretty sure that even Lewis Denby would agree that it was way more fun, and fulfilling, to finish Molten Core when it was released as 40 level 60 man raid than that same dungeon completed with a five level 80 group in half the time.

I took a peek at Cities XL demo a week ago, a couple of days before it ended. Purchased it without hesitation, being a Sim City fan (I always found building virtual societies to be quite amusing). Been thinking a while about it.

Cities XL is the "MMO" version of Sim City, developed by Monte Cristo. Players have different planets to choose a spot to start their city in, and each of these places have different natural resources (E.g: oil, tourism, water...) players can exploit. There's no way a single player can have all of them at the same time without trading, so, economy fills an important role. In fact, it's the most important aspect of the game. Kinda obvious, considering it's a game about building stuff.

Anyway, what basically struck me the most was the leveling system. Of course, there has to be a way to somehow split the players, and their cities, between different groups. It's maybe not that easy to notice when playing normally, but levels are there, in-game. BUT HOW COME!? you might ask.

First, the number of citizens. We need a certain amount of inhabitants to unlock new features for our city, such as higher density building zones, better infrastructures or better services. At the same time, we won't need these features until we have enough population to build them, but, they are expensive. Very expensive, in a way we can only have a very limited amount of these structures, forcing our city to develop slowly. This all makes sense in the context surrounding the game, and somehow reproduces the usual MMO grinding in a city building game environment.

It's quite a smart way to do it, which all the Sim City games follow, just in a much more "open" way. In Cities XL you cannot build a Police Station or Fire Fighters idem from the very beginning, for example. But then again, Sim City was always a single player game.

Then, there's the income rate. It doesn't exactly work as a leveling system, but defines exactly what you can build and what you cannot. All the services you can provide have a flat maintenance rate, as I said, very expensive. Normally you are able to build all the services you need during your "citizen leveling up", but, not at the same time. It works as some sort of levels among levels. Income comes always (or, to be more correct, "mostly") from the three basic building zones (residential, commercial and industrial), but to set those zones, you need money. If you start drowning into negative numbers, because your incomes are x and your expenses x+1, you'll need to disable some of those services to be able to get enough money to increase your population, taxes, and incomes.

So, in the end, we have a very limited range of actual actions, although the game hides that in a very fun way.

I don't know if Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2 will be good or not, but the Japanese marketing campaign surely will help to increase its sales; It points exactly to their playerbase in a way they cannot say no:

I like roguelike games. I spent many hours playing Angband, Tome and Diablo (yeah, that rogue clone with nice graphics made by Blizzard :P). I also played tons of forks, graphical versions (Vulture's eye), online versions (TomeNET) or browser based versions, made in Flash. But, amongst all of them, there's one particular version of the classical dungeon crawling game that stands above the rest in terms of fun: Iter Vehemens ad Necem, also known as IVAN.

This open source project, abandoned since 2005 but still downloadable from SourceForge is the dungeon crawler at its best. Hard as breaking walnuts with your buttocks, featuring our friend permadeath, it ominous Latin name is exactly what you'll find in this game*.

And that's exactly it's biggest point. Dying. Dying ends the game and deletes the savegame. Your character is destroyed (although it may appear as a ghost in a later adventure) and with him, all his possessions and progress, meaning you'll have to start the game from the very beginning, again. And it's awesome. Why? Isn't it frustrating? Exactly, and that's why the life of your character becomes meaningful, and the decisions you take, important. That kobold running scared after you killed his two friends, should you run after him through that narrow and dark corridor, knowing that you only have a couple more minutes of light from your torch? A single step in the wrong direction and you might get trapped in a bear-trap, or blow up because of a hidden mine. Or be killed by a group of evil creatures that were just waiting around the corner.

This makes the players behave in a cautious way most games nowadays simply don't encourage anymore. If you die, don't worry, you'll always have a savegame. It's interesting how the system has changed during the years, and today it's almost impossible to find a game, where your character can die, that doesn't make use of some sort of autosaving feature. In the worst case, you'll have to play again the last 10 minutes, hardly ever re-start the entire level, and never, absolutely never, lose that game "forever". Maybe it's the way to go, but, at least to me, it's paradoxically frustrating not being able to find frustration anymore in videogames.

That's why even if IVAN looks like a 15 years old game, even if it doesn't feature all the awesome mechanics the major roguelikes have (although it does feature awesome mutilations, sickness and hunger, for example), stands up in my game collection. I always end up coming back for more frustration after going through this or that meaningless mass media AAA title which, yeh, was fun, but felt empty.

It's nice to see, however, that each year there are more and more small independent studios formed by people who didn't start playing games with The Sims and World of Warcraft, and point their games to that niche market of players that feel that three lives are more than enough to get to the end of Metal Slug. I'm talking of companies like Starvault, with their upcoming prima opera, Mortal Online, or even CCP with EVE Online, referring strictly to unforgiving mechanics, (E.g: having your Tech 2 fitted awesomesause ship blown up along with your pod and those hundreds of millions in implants).

But for now, I'm afraid we'll have to stay with obscure indie game competitions, underground developers, and old glories.

*Iter vehemens ad necem: The vehement path to Death

Many of you probably know about the Gothic series. If you don't, you should stop reading here and go buy Gothic and Gothic 2 as if your soul was in danger. And then, we all will pretend that Gothic 3 never existed, and that Risen is the actual sequel to Gothic 2.

Been playing for a couple of days to the game, and loving it. Once again we'll impersonate an unnamed hero, jailed in a horrible place for reasons out of his control. Piranha Bytes, a German studio, has made a very German RPG out of this. There's a main quest which isn't really very clear (leaving the island) and lots of sidequests we need to do in order to advance in the game. The best part is that most of the quests aren't really good or evil sided, but in a gray area in between. There are no good or evil factions, so it's up to the player to take decisions, which actually have a big impact in the game, based on his own moral, ends and, in some cases, luck.

For example, there are many ways to enter the Order Monastery. The player can offer himself as voluntary after completing some quests, or he can be send there because he was found stealing or trying to leave the city (which is forbidden for a reason). Or he can be sent there because he lost a fight after joining the opposite faction. How we enter the monastery also has an effect on the possibilities we are giving afterward, as for example, we can only become wizards if we offered ourselves in a voluntary way.

The combat system is a bit confusing at first, especially because it has been a while since I played Gothic 2. The player needs to time his attacks, block, counter-attack, and dodge the enemy blows. As you level up, you also get extra combos and abilities based on the weapon you're carrying (for example, getting charged attacks is easier for axes (level 2) than for swords (level 7)). Most of the characters we'll found in-game, if not everyone of them, is killable and lootable, although often we don't need to kill anybody to achieve our goals. Opening a closed door can be done by either getting the key peacefully (by doing a quest for the key owner, for example), pickpocketing it, fighting the NPC, lockpicking the door or using a spell to open it. The consequences of fighting the NPC are obvious, especially if we decide to finish him off. There's an option to "go back" by using a spell that will make the NPC forget that we almost killed him 5 minutes ago (I guess, meant to be used mostly as a workaround when the game flow is compromised by a bad choice), but real players don't use them =P

NPCs are alive. They have their own goals, means, names and background, and sometimes messing with one of them can change our "faction rate" with people we wouldn't have ever thought about. So, we have to be wise, as the game isn't going to tell us what to do. Awesome, if you ask me.

The world is open, with almost no load screens. It's not really big, but it's plagued of caves, subterranean temples, life and no-life. Exploring is always an option, and many times we can find places nobody will ever tell us to go, but still are worth the adventure, and not only for the loot and experience ;)

Overall, I felt like I was playing some old-school Gothic. And hell, I liked it!

Finally managed to get the header working with Internet Explorer 8 (don't know if it works with a previous version of the browser) and Webkit. It took a while, and finally I had to go the easy way (no CSS background for me). With this, the blog is somewhere near 85% completed. Just have to work a tad on the titles and it will be totally ready!

I tested Fallen Earth yesterday. I had to leave it updating in the morning, as there were more than 4GB of patches, ~40000 files in total. And my connection went nuts in between, so when I arrived home, there were still 600MB to download. Anyway, I finally managed to enter the game, get disconnected after creating my character, corrupting it, so I couldn't finish the tutorial.

I got help in a matter of seconds from a very kind GM (or at least I think he was? Maybe he was a voluntary or something), and I had to create my character again. This time, it worked, and I could play the tutorial almost flawlessly. The game was somehow laggy, but, as I said, my own connection isn't working very well. This resulted in the usual problems, like enemies hitting my character in melee from 10 meters or a somehow random collision detection for my bullets/bolts.

And it was a bit frustrating. I didn't really dive too deeply into the game, which seems to have a very good base that just needs some polishing. The graphics were correct, with some good textures, some decent textures, and some better-not-to-look-at-for-too-long textures. The models also fulfill their part and the character creator is not as astonishing as I expected, but still gives lots of options. Some sliders would have been awesome.

Players have lots of animations, they can walk, sit, crouch, prone... although the way the characters moved felt a bit alien to me. Let me explain that.

The game is a mix of 3rd person and FPS, so that explains why it does need a different control scheme than the usual WASD + mouse cursor. There are two different control modes. "Normal" and "Aim". Normal mode sucks, WASD to move, Q and E to turn your character, and the mouse just to click on things, either with either button. It's some short of "research" mode, where I found no way to move the camera in any axis. And that was the biggest problem for me. The "Aim mode" feels like most action games, your character pointing directly where you move your cursor, turning if necessary, with the camera always behind him (or her). Both mouse buttons work the same here, shooting your weapon or stabbing with it. And hell, I shoot one guy in the foot while looking at him, and punched another one on the nuts just trying to turn the camera. My mouse is a bit over-sensitive ;)

Well, apart from the camera issues that might have just something to do with me, the game brought some actual freshness to the genre. The open maps, Mad Max theme and the general, solid gameplay mechanics makes me think the game will finally overcome the pile of bugs it was released with. I might give it another try tonight and talk a bit more about the crafting (ah... the crafting...).

I've been playing Aion since the European Open Beta. Went through the headstart and up to level 19 (just played a couple of hours per day). That said, I will explain what I've experienced during these past two weeks.

First, and I'll state this clearly from the beginning, there's absolutely nothing new in this overhyped game, not that I expected anything else, anyway. All the mechanics are exactly what a random MMO player could expect in a random EverQuest or World of Warcraft clone.

What a newcomer will firstly encounter (after a queue that can take between 0 and ~200 minutes depending on the server and the time of the day) is a nice character editor. It's quite easy to create horrible monsters, and quite hard to get a nice looking character with correct proportions. The amount of pinheads in-game is amazing. There are, anyway, many options for male characters. Female models are somehow less interesting, and most faces look remarkably similar. They have one useless slider for chest size, by the way, as I have yet to see one girl without a severe case of tricephalia, if you know what I mean.

Character customization seems to be, however, one of the main "shining" points of the game. At least, when talking about appearance. Armors can be dyed, and you can transfer their stats to other pieces, so you get the stats from that überpowered pink corset in your better looking leather armor. This is quite a clever idea, which resembles a bit to Everquest's "stats" and "appearance" armor slots. The difference in this case is that you lose both pieces of armor (getting a new one with the correct appearance/stats mix), and, of course, you'll have to pay money. Everything costs money (Kinah) in this game, I'll get into that later ;)

The idea of "customizing" the armours would be a tad better if there were more design for them. At level 18 I had basically two or three models which only changed in color as I leveled up (light green, pink, copper...). We should remember at this point that the game was released in Asia more than one year ago.

I'd like to talk a bit about character customization, in the sense of character building. I can only talk a bit about it, mostly because of the lack of options. Players begin as Warriors, Rogues, Mages or Priests. At level 10 they have to choose between two "subclasses". None of them is especially interesting, meaning that they offer nothing new in terms of mechanics to those we've been seeing for ages now in MMOs. We have the main tank, the off tank, the melee DD, the ranged DD, the caster, the pet guy, the buffer/support/healer and the main healer. Apart from that, you get different builds for these characters using "stigmas", but the options aren't really that many, because of the lack of skills to choose from the "pool".

The class-skill selection is, also, somewhat limited, and during the first ~10 hours of gameplay you'll spent most of your time autoattacking, as skills cool down.

This makes combat quite boring (and repetitive). There's no bodyblocking, although moving can give you some advantages (and disadvantages) such as extra evasion, parry or damage. The boni are quite high, but in most PvE combats you'll use them hardly ever, especially while grouping. I guess they are more interesting for PvP, but the Abyss is still some levels far.

You can also fly. This was supposed to be one of the most amazing parts of the game, but until now most of what I've done was gliding, as the zones are generally non-flyable. As you level up you get more air time (and, I hope, more fly-enabled zones). When flying, you can get knocked down (or stunned) and drop like a rock to the ground (dying) quite easily.

Also, there's too much CC. While fighting elite mobs I could easily be stunned up to 7 times during one combat (being the tank myself). Stuns last up to 3 seconds, 3 seconds you can do nothing but look at your screen.

The zones, up to this point, feel "closed". There're always mountains around, or the sea (and being god-touched superhumans, they don't know how to swim (not even asking them to dive!) so, once you get to a certain deep, you'll drown in a couple of ticks. It's funny because, as there's a big difference in size amongst the tallest and smallest characters, there's no obvious point on where you're going to start drowning (being short you can walk totally submerged for some meters with no problems). The worst part of the zone design is that most of them feel like railway tracks with areas of service at the sides, made to grind.

The quest design is horrible. 98% of the quests are the same "kill xxx monsters", "bring me yyy materials" and courier stuff. And, of course, those monsters that look exactly the same but have a different name, won't do the job. I have to ask you to kill them later, you know. So Korean.

And now, let's talk about money. Not about the (clever) tactic NCSoft used to bill player subscriptions (you have to pay for one month before receiving the 30 free days), but about the Kinah, the ingame currency. Everything in this game costs money. Lots! It's quite easy to earn it, but it's also quite easy to spend it. Maybe that's why I'm receiving goldseller whispers every 5 minutes? ;D No, seriously:

Dying costs money, more as you level up (to pay the xp debt you gain), painting your armour costs money, transfering your armour stats costs money, getting your hair done costs money, special clothing (such as kimonos and random Asian stuff with no stats) costs money, teleporting costs money, using flight masters costs money... of course, like any other game, you might say. Wrong! It would be the same if the quantities weren't absolutely -insane-. It seems that only kings have their hair done in the world of Aion, as we're talking about 6 digit quantities. That's more than most players will get up to level 15.

Summarizing. The game is "OK", or it would have been, ten years ago. Right now, it could be any random Korean F2P with nice graphics (not that nice, considering they are using CryEngine, tho) and some nice character design. Actual improvements over Lineage2? Sadly, I've seen none.

Hello world. My name is Jon and I'm a videogame enthusiast. I've been playing since I was 3 (and that was almost twenty years ago, now). My passion for this electronic entertainment has guided me through life. My studies, my job, and now my blog.

So, yes, this is a blog about videogames. A personal approach to game design, mechanics, some reviews and of course, sense of humour. If you want to know me a bit better, (for any reason =P) you can read about me on this page (which needs to be updated a bit at the moment I'm writing this post).

I still need to work a bit on the CSS, but most of the structure will keep as it is right now. You might notice a couple of changes specially on how the comments and archives are shown. I'll try not to break anything while doing it :P

So, hoping to have my first post with actual content soon, I bid you all farewell!