Author - Jerry Paxton

These days any fantasy based MMO is going to be compared to Blizzard’s monolith. It has set the bar to a place few will reach. Now, developers are trying to reach a niche market of WoW subscribers just to make a successful game. AION seems to take it dead on in the eyes. I have a lot of respect for that. The story of AION is a complex one, a necessity to make the player feel as a part of a much larger picture. Playing off of the idea of angels and demons locked in an eternal struggle, this new world we have to play in is certainly an appealing one. A big MMO launch is rife with problems, anything from server outtages to balance-breaking bugs. Because of AION’s time in Korea, NCSoft had only moderate hiccups. Queue times have become expected, and users will allow them for a short period of time. Being only days into their U.S. launch, we can only guess that those problems will be rectified as time goes on. Was their Korean launch and success a way to polish the game for our market? Even if that wasn’t their plan, I believe it worked. I have been a part of no less than twelve MMO launches (joining less than a month after launch) and I can honestly say this was the most smooth I have personally experienced. NCSoft was ready, for the most part.

I have had the chance to play from level 1-10 on both the Asmodians and Elyos (you cannot make different races on the same server). One on the melee side, the other on the casting side. I feel I could give a decent enough review on the starting areas, quests and mechanics of the game. We here at Gaming Shogun believe a real MMO review must be done over time as we experience it. We will continue reviewing the sections of the game as we go on.

Most will immediately go to looking at the graphics. Built from the ground up with the CryEngine, the artists obviously had a lot of toys to play with. I remember thinking the screenshots looked good, but not mind-boggling like the first-person shooters using the same engine. Seeing a game in motion is generally a much better experience of course, and I do believe the graphics are… still good. Although, yes, they are more realistic and complex as other MMO’s on the market I personally feel they were not pushed as far as even an MMO could go using that engine. Having said that, I will now state at how smooth the game runs (not including any server-side lag) on my system with the settings maxed out at 1920×1200 resolution. I have a Core 2 Duo system with a GTX 280 and I experience frame rates in the 60’s in the midst of a city where dozens of players could be running about. The art design is pleasing, and so far I have enjoyed the creatures I have come across. As with all things in AION, it seems like it’s going to get much better as you go.

Sound, for me, is half of the experience. I am an admitted audiophile with high-end surround speakers at my disposal and I tend to let the neighbors know exactly what I’m listening to / watching / playing on a regular day basis. This area AION looses me. The music is boiler-plate fantasy-esque without any real theme or connection. The sounds of combat are repetitive to the point of annoyance. When I say repetitive I mean there is only one sound for a melee strike, for example. Try sitting among some of the many oversized insects or four-legged creatures and let me know if the sound of the footsteps doesn’t drive you nuts. I hope NCSoft works on this aspect of the game over time – I know how difficult it is to pull off. When I hear the game, I feel it was last on the agenda and that makes me sad.

Combat is fun and fast-paced. AION has chain moves that you can build up to more and more powerful combos. You get only a taste of this in the first ten levels, but as I looked through the spells and abilities of my characters I could see just how deep that particular rabbit hole goes. My melee character (a warrior) was a lot of fun, but I experienced downtime unless I consistently used either bandages or potions. That’s fine, however AION has an interesting monetary system – I’ll get to that shortly. My caster (a priest) had significantly less downtime because of the ability to heal and the sheer amount of magic points (MP) I had. A typical fight for my priest had me using very little MP and able to go on for dozens of fights, where the fighter had to rest after every three or four.

The starting areas for both sides are somewhat disappointing. Most of the quests are of the ‘go out and kill x number of y’ or ‘collect x number of y’ variety. I didn’t feel the quest system itself brought anything new to the table. Sure you get cool short cut scenes for the campaign quests (long quest chains or arcs), but I was never enthralled by the story of my character nor the struggle of the people around me. The starting areas will take you direct to level 10 if you do all of the quests. I did not feel any kind of grind to get through the first part of the game, but this is par for course with all MMO’s now. The journey from beginning to ascension takes anywhere from two to three hours of straight through playtime. Although I wasn’t blown away by the first ten levels, they do their job well: teach you the mechanics of the game and your class while introducing this new world to you. I can say, once you have ascended and earned your wings – the game gets much better.

The monetary system of the game is interesting, but it just might work out. There is only one coin which, as far as MMO’s go, makes sense. By the time the end game comes around everyone only trades using the highest denomination due to the inflated currency value. There are a few cool ways to make money. Surprisingly, all the junk you pick up from creatures sells like gangbusters back at the vendors, but the equipment and other player items doesn’t. This helps keep those things in the economy rather than disappearing into the nether. In the first 10 levels, there is no auction house style forum, however once you break out of the starting area you’ll find one nearly right away. If you don’t wish to pay the prices to list your items there, you can always set up shop anywhere you want. It’s very simple to set up your own private shop, when you turn it on your character sits on a chair and beckons people to browse the wares. You can even leave a note so people know what types of things you’re selling. It’s a very cool system, however in high traffic areas it seems you’re tripping over private shops as you go down the road.

Although AION’s opening levels have not enraptured me into a magical world and caused me to lose all non-game relationships and fall into a downward spiral of addiction, I believe it has a lot of things going for it. It’s aiming right for the WoW player that wants a little more complexity and depth out of the game. The levels after 10 are so much better I have high hopes as the games goes on to deliver all of the complexity and group PvPvE gameplay it promises to deliver. I will have another report in approximately a month to let you know how the game is doing.

When we first heard about the hybrid RTS/FPS game called Raven Squad we were, needless to say, stoked. The possibilities of a game combining the two genres could have led to an amazing gameplay experience that we do not normally get to see these days. Unfortunately, Atomic Games has really managed to foul the concept up by releasing a very clunky and unappealing experience.

The game follows the story of a mercenary group getting caught up in a South American civil war. The player controls two squads of three men each, and allows at-will switching not only between the squads but also individuals within each unit. One team focuses on assault and the other team focuses on infiltration and other stealthy aims. Seems good so far? Sure. Let’s continue…

Unfortunately, that is where the goodness ends and the experiment in pain begins. When first dropped into the Amazon jungle we were not impressed with the visuals. They look at least a couple years old save for a few modern-day tricks they added in an attempt to ‘freshen’ them up. These effects include a heavy-use of depth of field blurring as well as grainy lens flares. Truth be told, the graphics would be acceptable enough if the rest of the game were not so bad.

The game’s audio is where it will really stick it to you first. For starters, the voice over work is plain awful. There is no excuse for this part – bad inflections, bad accents, bad all over. This bad work not only can be heard in gameplay but also throughout the cutscenes which attempt to weave this mess together. I have heard better voice work in 70’s exploitation flicks. The music is fair, however, but nothing we haven’t heard before in other action titles.

Gameplay just wreaks of clunk. Even moving your characters around has that bad console port feel to it – sluggish and easily tangled up on invisible obstructions which must be jutting up from the jungle floor. Actually, that is funny because if you just went by this game you would think the Amazon was a series of linear trenches in which you walk about in with a series of strategically-placed logs strewn about to hide behind. The level design in Raven Squad is way too linear and scripted to even think about including the RTS element of the game they are trying so hard to hype up.

The RTS element of which I speak occurs when you hit the space bar. The camera actually does this really cool-looking ‘whoosh’ up from your first-person view to one high overhead, looking down on the map. From here you can switch between you two squads and send them to various points on the linear maps. Unfortunately, the RTS element to Raven Squad is not just clunky, but also completely unnecessary. There are no areas in the game where the system is needed, except where they force you to use it, further encouraging your inner geek rage. The game’s difficulty level just does not warrant it. Successfully navigating about the RTS view is difficult as there are no outer-edge markers to tell you the general direction of a target or landmark. Losing sight of your squad, instead of a visual cue as to where they are off-screen you have to press ‘x’ to re-center the camera on them.

Getting back to the difficulty level of the game for a moment, I must say that in my experience of playing Raven Squad that I did not encounter as many ‘dumb’ enemies as some reviewers have reported. Most had the sense to at least shoot at me and many even tried to take cover and retreat to better positions. There were still a few, however, that would just stand there seemingly blind to my incoming hail of bullets. Perhaps they were frozen with fear of my team’s bad voice acting?

The one bright spot to Raven Squad is that it actually had no crash bugs on any of my play sessions with it. The game seemed bug-fixed enough to be very stable – even with my running it at a very wide 3048×1024 resolution spanned across three LCD screens!

Overall, Raven Squad is not worth your valuable time unless you absolutely have nothing else to play and don’t feel like going to the dentist for a cleaning. I had expected and hoped for more but was really letdown by this title.