Hands on with the Aion beta: Your first steps into Elysea

Yesterday, we showed you the character creation process for Aion: Tower of Eternity and today it's time to enter Elysea. The lower portion of the fractured world of Atreia, Elysea is, for the most part, as beautiful as its inhabitants. Poeta is a starter zone (actually more of an island) where the Elyos level from 1 to 9 on their journey to become Daeva and choose a subclass. It is where you learn how to play and are gently introduced to the mechanics which make Aion a very different kind of MMO.

Your avatar is literally dumped in the Akarois Plains. I'm presuming some kind of intro sequence may well be added later to explain what you're doing there. Oddly, one of the first things I noticed - aside from a thousand other EU players clustering around the nearest quest-giving NPCs - were the shouts of 'for the Horde'. The four basic class types meant it was easy to spot whether players were mages, scouts, warriors or priests just by the clothes they were wearing.

The default UI puts everything to your fingertips, but I actually prefer the alternate interface (which is more akin to the one I'm used to in WoW). The comprehensive interface menu you lets you tinker with the information you want displayed and it's worth doing this as soon as you get into the game so everything you need to know is at your fingertips -- or your mouse buttons. Your character comes with a selection of basic spells assigned to the shortcut bar, some basic food/mana rations, a teleport spell (Aion's version of the WoW hearthstone) and the ability to switch weapons. For my mage, this was jumping between using a spellbook and her fists.

Because this is a beta, there are a few things missing. For example, all the sound effects are in Korean and the numerous cutscenes need audio in place of the current silence. Personally I don't mind Korean (indeed they get catchy after a while) but it's a sign that the game still has a little way to go before it's Fall release date.

The quest structure will be familiar to anyone who has ever played an MMO. You have to either find a lost NPC, deliver an item to a person in a specific town or kill/collect x of y. I've not yet found an escort quest and this makes me very, very happy. Your first quests see you killing the beasts which wander the Plains, then you're asked to visit the nearby village of Akarios, the major hub town in the zone. Rewards comprise of money -- the currency of Elysea being Kinah, potions, gear and occasionally class-specific weapons.

You can choose which quests will show up in a tracker format and if you click on the inventory, it is even possible to get coordinates and a path-tracker to help you get where you need to go. Much of this stuff has been seen in the form of WoW addons for years but to have it all built into a game from scratch is really promising. You get definitions of artifacts and little encyclopedic links to locations or biographies of important people. It might only be a paragraph but it's important when it comes to trying to get your wings within the three-day limit.

Quest themselves come in two flavours. The regular stand alone variety sees you acting as FedEx or slaughtering x number of beautifully rendered animals. The second kind are lengthy chain quests -- called campaigns -- which advance your personal story within the game or grand special titles (such as 'Poeta's Protector', 'Animal Lover' and 'Tree-Hugger') as rewards which give you a stat boost. You don't have to equip these titles but it's quite a nice touch. I actually spent a good hour trying to figure out how all these other people had these cool titles and I didn't, but that's beside the point (as well as being part of the fun of beta-ing). Of course the most important of these campaign quests for beta-players is one called 'Ascension' because the reward at the end is the ability to become an arse-kicking, winged Daeva.

I mentioned earlier that Aion has a teleport spell in lieu of a hearthstone and how it works is likely to be perceived as a challenge to gamers or a true annoyance. Settlements have a large Obelisk and a Soul Healer. You pay money and your soul is bound to the Obelisk. This means should you die you can either wait thirty minutes and hope a priest is kind enough to restore you to life or resurrect immediately and find yourself teleported back to whichever Obelisk your soul was bound to.

Now this is where my one issue with the game lies. You have to pay money (usually around 700-1500 Kinah in Poeta or Sanctum) and there are no graveyards anywhere. There are two such Obelisks in Poeta, one in Akarios Village and the other in a camp on the eastern side of the zone, near the Deforested Area on the other side of Daminu Forest, roughly ten minutes run away from each other. To give you some scope, it takes around twenty five minutes to run all the way from Akarios Plains into the depths of the Timolia Mine. So if you've saved your soul in Akarios Village, you have a heck of a way to run, even with half the distance covered in the talons of a bird.

The other issue is the Soul Healer. Once you hit level 6, each time you die you lose XP and you have to give cold, hard Kinah to a Soul Healer in order for it to be restored. This in itself is not so bad, at least not until you die ten minutes later and have to go through the process again. It soon becomes a great incentive to watch your health levels in a fight.

Poeta itself is incredibly beautiful. Admittedly, I had my graphics turned up to the max (and the game still ran like a dream,) but I was quite amazed how nice it looks on lower settings, too. My favourite area is Cliona Lake, the water is filled with gently swimming koi, bison wander the banks and there are flamingo-like bird which wade, ankle-deep, in water. Plus, in the centre is the little island with beautiful glowing plants and ruined buildings, but the water never goes more than ankle deep. Elyos and Daeva can't swim, it seems, as your health metres goes down should you find yourself out of your depths.

The zone itself encompasses grass covered plains, rivers and lakes, a forest, a cavernous mine, a dust-bowl 'strip mine' and a road thick with giant mushrooms towering overhead. As you move from one sub-zone to another the music changes but the weather generally stays consistent. The NPCs of the world are varied, from giant oaks like Lord Daminu (below) to living mushrooms and the cute and fuzzy ferret-like variety. Oh and there are critters to kill too.

Leveling is not hard, regardless of class, but it's not easy either. By level 8 I was grinding for the sake of it as the drop rates seem remarkable favourable and the respawns were lightning fast (which was a very good thing given the number of players camping specific mobs). I confess I'm especially impressed that there were no technical hitches or hissy-fitting servers on Friday night. Players were already forming groups and guilds which did make levels 7-9 quite a bit easier.

But level 9 and that Ascension quest I mentioned is where it gets interesting. Join us tomorrow as we take a look at how an Elyos becomes a Daeva. In the mean time, check out our Aion galleries below. %Gallery-65249% %Gallery-65308%