Some Star Trek Online Screen Shots

This is on one of the first missions you get. I am about to rescue a stranded mining ship

This is right after I beamed down to a planet. This has been my favorite mission so far. It had several steps with multiple ground and space missions. It shows me what this game is capable of.

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I am back

I am back!

I got a week off of work and I needed it. I am now refreshed and ready to get to blogging again.

Aion

I have dived head first into this game, I am grinding my heart out and I am really enjoying it. I am enjoying it so much I have started a legion!

I have never run or had a need to run a guild before. I am a casual player and thus I don’t like things that tie me to a game and being a guild leader is one of those things. But I love to have a guild to chat with and quest with.

I have 2 very simple requirements for a guild, no vent and it must be a casual guild. I looked for 2 days in aion trying to find a guild that met these requirements and did not find one. So I decided that I was not the only one that wanted this and created <Casual Crusaders> (I stole the name from a champion’s online guild I was in).

The whole idea is that this guild will be a place to hang out and have fun. With that in mind I have made every member so far an officer with all rights except kick. I hope that this will let the guild grow and establish its self when I am not there. It has 8 members so far and it seems to be a good group of people.

This is kind of an experiment for me and I hope it turns out. I am hoping that having a guild in Aion will help me to stick to it for a longer period of time than I normally do.

I got my spiritmaster from level 15 to 22 this week and so far it has not seemed like too much of a grind. It kind of reminds me of some old school games because it is slow to level but there is plenty of content to keep me entertained. I am enjoying the trip to the top and that is something I have not done in awhile.

So that is a quick update on what has been happening. I plan on posting a predictions post tomorrow. It seems all the cool blogs are doing it!

Buy Aion

Why I am enjoying Aion!

After my last post I started to think about why I was enjoying Aion. It is everything that I should dislike about MMOs, but I was still enjoying it. I have narrowed it down to a few key elements that have mixed to create the “Aion Perfect Storm”.

I believe the main reason is my real life job is currently really stressful with a project that is quickly spinning out of my control and stressing me out. On top of work being stressful I am just finishing building a house. When work/life is really stressful I feel and extra need to get lost in a game.

Aion’s main mode of game play is grinding. This is mindless and totally not stressful so I am drawn to this type of game play. There is really nothing better than getting a go kill 20 of these and return to me for your reward type of quests. I think it is a throwback to some old school camping that I enjoyed in DAoC and EQ and it just pulls my nostalgia strings.

Aion also offers me a completely new and beautiful world for me to explore. Exploration is a huge motivator for me in games. I love visiting new worlds and discovering cool new things. Exploration is why I was first attracted to MMOs, at that time there was no other game that had an open world to explore.

I think all of this coming together at this point in my life is making me like Aion. I do not pretend that this game is anything other than an grind fest. But right now that is what I want in a game. I feel that there are a lot of other people who feel the same way, considering the sales numbers for the game. I know that eventually I will grow tired of this grind and move on to different game. I doubt it will take that long. But until then I will enjoy Aion.

Aion I love it, and don’t know why

I have no idea why. But when I get on my computer I somehow end up logging in to it and playing it for hours. Sometimes you have to stop asking why and just enjoy it. I will probably quit latter, but right now it is very enjoyable for me.

I started a spiritmaster and have gotten her up to level 14 and it is a blast. This character is so much more fun than my original ranger I started. Combat is fast and fun. I actually use almost every spell I have in a fight. I feel that I may be a little overpowered in PVE but I don’t care I am having fun. I am enjoying the quests and the grindy feel of the game. The server feels alive which happens to be my biggest complaint with WAR.

I logged into WAR for a few hours this weekend but T2 scenarios are completely dead. This needs to be fixed. All RVR before T4 needs to be instanced and combined with the other servers so we can have some fun. I am going to be canceling my subscription until something is done about the lower tiers. I like to level so I am not going “Grind” to the end game just to have some fun.

Aion first impressions

Well I have been absent from posting because my wife delivered our second son and it is a little time consuming.  But I am back!

Now, on to the first post.

Something strange happened over the week. Aion, a game that I really did not have any interest in playing caught my attention. I think it was due to the fact that Champions Online has really disappointed me since launch. There is not enough to do. If I run out of quest at all for any reason in the first 20 levels there is something really wrong with the game and it is a game breaker for me.

So I preordered Aion to get into the headstart.  I knew nothing about this game besides the fact that you could get wings. I really did not care to play a game where one of the main selling points was you could fly. But I read something on massively about how the pvp was kind of like DAoC and I was bored enough that I decided to try it.

I am glad that I did. I have not experience this much polish in a just released game in a long time. It is nothing different from what I have experience before but it is very well done.  It has done to WoW what WoW did to EQ, taken some of the best features polished them and tweaked them to make them better.  It has been out in Korea for a year so they have had time to smooth it up.

I have only gotten to level 8 but it has been a fun experience. They have returned to a few of the things I like about older games.  It is not instanced and so far it has been a zone free world,  I like to explore, and this is nice. While the quests do guide you from area to area you don’t feel like you are being guided and it lets you think you are doing the driving.

It is possible to grind mobs to get items and exp. This is a nice change. I like to grind sometimes it is nice mindless play that I enjoy.  The mobs are very tough and sometimes an equal level mob will kill you. While on paper this would seem like a bad design, it gives you a sense of accomplishment for killing something and really works well.

The servers have been very stable and the frame rates are great.  The game looks absolutely stunning.

Those are my preliminary thoughts on Aion. If you have been on the fence about it I would not hesitate to try it.

Champions Online Questing Problem

I have run into a very big problem with Champions Online that needs to be fixed real soon.  I have discovered that there is a little menu that will tell you where you can get quests. So I tried it out in anticipation of more wonderful questing but I had no quests available.

That is right; at level 15 I had ran out of quests. So I grinded to level 16 and now I have lots of quests available but they are all level 19.  I can’t do them. Somewhere along the way I started doing all my level 15 -17 quests and now I have no quests that I can do. Since almost all new games are quest driven grinding for the next level or two will not be fun.

Will I run into this the entire game? Will I do all of my level 19 quest and when I get there not have any quests to do? This could be solved very easily by making a lot of the quest repeatable.  They could also add a random quest generator that you could use any time.

I hope they address this quickly in a patch.  I may start an alt and try it again to see if I missed something.

The first weekend of Champions Online

The first weekend is over and here are my impressions so far.

I got my character up to level 15.  It was fun from level 1-12 then I had problems finding quests that were in my level and I ended up taking quest that were 2 or 3 levels above me. Now that I am level 15 I am having great difficulty finding quests my level.  This does not mean they are not there I just don’t know where they are. The game needs a way to guide me to where I am supposed to be for my level.  Something on the map marking main quest hubs would be nice with a level ranking, would be really easy and would not require new quests.

I am really enjoying the open skill system. I have not moved outside of my ice line but I could if I wanted and I like that. It gives me a sense of freedom. I plan on moving out side of my skill set next time I get a new skill.  I wish that I got to pick skills more often, I felt the same way when I played CoX.  I may be able to pick a perk or some thing but I should get new powers every level at least until level 20 or so.

There is one glaring problem that I have so far with the game. The world does not seem alive. I can’t really put my finger on it but the world seems static and boring.  This is a HUGE problem for me. If the world does not feel like it is real I loose interest. The desert zone does not feel this way but the other ones I have visited do. I do not like the fact that I can not run from one zone to the other. I struggled with this in AoC too for the world to feel real I need to be able to walk between zones. Having a helicopter or teleporter move me around is a big immersion killer for me. This will probably not effect other people but for me this is very important.

Overall I am having fun in the game. I am still not sure about the sticking power for me, but I have 6 months paid for so I am going to give it my all.