Aion launches alongside the delayed Fallen Earth come September 22nd, and those of you who have watched sales figures over the past few months will have seen Aion topping the charts for the PC market, both retail and digital through Steam and Direct 2 Drive. Aion preorders have gone so well, that NCSoft has proudly boasted the latest mark of over 300,000 preorders for the upcoming MMORPG. NCsoft is looking to make Aion not just localized, but going forward and culturalising the title for Western markets, changing various mechanics in the game to suit a different play style and expectation.
Tag: NCSoft
Aion: Open Beta, Head Start Announced
Aion releases September 22nd, but that doesn’t mean you have to wait until the end of September to try out this bad boy, nor do you have to import the Asian version to get on distant servers. After many rumors of the sort, the announcement has come that Aion will be holding a week long open beta, starting September 6th, giving access to 30 levels and the full environment to fly around in.
Those who preorder the game will be able to access the head start, and get right into the action on September 20th, a full two days before the full game launches. Players who preorder will also be able to set up their names and servers on the 18th, two days before the early start.
To those of you teetering on the edge: Don’t forget that this is an open beta, the key word being BETA. Although Aion has launched in other parts of the world, that does not mean that there will not be starting glitches in the open beta. That is what the beta is for, to hammer out the final bugs. Also remember: Aion has quite a pull from the community. Expect the patch and client servers to be down for some time, assuming it isn’t hosted on Fileplanet. Champions Online, that recently went into Open Beta, had a good 24 hours of difficulty with servers and clients.
Update: Good news! The Aion client is now available for download!
Get it from
- Fileplanet: http://www.fileplanet.com/201991/200000/fileinfo/Aion-Game-Client
- Gamershell: http://www.gamershell.com/pc/aion_the_tower_of_eternity/
- Bit Torrent:ftp://ftp.ncsoft.com/Aion/Client/Torrent/AionFullInstaller_1.5.0.1.zip.torrent
Champions Online Vs City of Heroes
When Champions Online launches this September, it will be the first in a line of superhero MMO’s looking to dethrone the current, and only, contender for the genre; City of Heroes/City of Villains. As there is no timeline for the Marvel MMO, and DC Universe Online isn’t giving us anything more specific than late 2009, early 2010, Champions Online will no doubt enjoy the leg up on the competition…As it tries to get a leg up on the current competition.
Tabula Rasa: What Happened
Tabula Rasa was an MMORPG that blended role playing with 3rd person shooter tactics, in an open ended and dynamic war waged between the human and bane forces. The game focused on Logos, artifacts that players collect to enable certain powers. While the game focused on PvE play, the introduction of PvP content introduced war games, allowing various game modes to be played between warring clans.
Unlike most other MMO’s that feature a targeting system and auto-attacks with the addition of hotbar attacks, Tabula Rasa features a targeting system for only some weapons, combined with a third person shooter system, and rpg hit/miss and damage calculations. Tabula Rasa focused on the war aspect of the game, and both sides of the war would launch attacks on each other’s bases. It was completely possible to lose a base to the Bane forces, meaning that access to the NPC’s, vendors, spawn points, teleport locations, and anything else located in the base would become inaccessible until the area was retaken.
So where did Tabula Rasa fail? The easiest way to answer that is unfulfilled promises. The game launched with very little, if any, end-game content, and the developers took so long to introduce any inkling of end-game content that many of the players who had reached the level cap had quit long beforehand. Certain promises of player-driven mechs, pvp wargames, and more, weren’t fulfilled until literally a month before the game shut down. Richard Garriot also left the company a few weeks before the announcement of shutdown.
Inevitably, player count went down sharply, resulting in the game getting the axe for subpar subscriber numbers.
OR WAS IT?
Auto Assault: What Happened
On August 31, 2007, Auto Assault was given the final shutdown, after a failed attempt to sell the IP to NCSoft, despite various offers from 3rd parties to buy the rights to the IP and continue running servers based around the game.
Auto Assault is one of the shorter running MMO’s, from April 2006 to August 2007. The title suffered from, as many starter MMO’s do, the lack of subscribers that eventually pulled the project into the ground.
Auto Assault takes place in the distant future, and is a post-apocalyptic MMO. The player takes control of a vehicle that is equipped with weapons, and all of the action is real time, 3rd person perspective. It is only during short intervals in safe cities that the player is able to leave their vehicle and actually walk around. Despite the game’s shortcomings, the concept was very creative, and offered a nice alternative to the usual walking around and bashing stuff with a sword, to driving around and shooting stuff.
The question that is inevitably asked is; “Was Auto Assault doomed from the start?”, and the answer to that question is a defiant “probably.” Auto Assault had the unfortunate timing of being the “Starter MMO” released by Net Devil, who reportedly has a staff of a whopping fourteen people. Without a doubt, Auto Assault is a niche title that didn’t appeal to the massive audience, but even then it didn’t appeal to enough of an audience required to keep an MMO floating on the water. The project was ambitious for such a small development team, and as many risky titles go, this one fizzled out. Wrong time, wrong company.
Net Devil does not currently have any other MMO’s on the market, although the developer is currently working on two titles for release in the 2009-2010 time frame.
MMO Fallout 