The game has been doing so well in Asia that it got MMORPG of the Year in Korea. NCSoft must have gotten the idea that localizing the game for North America and Europe would be a good idea and decided to start the port to other languages. On the Aion beta forums, I saw subforums for French and German, so it seems they’re going for more than just English at this point. With the game itself doing so well, it seems like the only thing that NCSoft had to change were the strings used to display text, and the voices of the characters. One thing I never really got used to from watching anime for so many years is the constant over-exaggeration that the voice actors make. The same holds true in the beta version I tested. Since the game has the original Asian voices, the characters have that overdone “karateeeeeeeeCHOP!” to their voice which I don’t think will fly in North America.

NCSoft started doing closed beta weekends in North America starting mid-June. Some people were able to get beta codes for specific weekends, but if you preorder the game you get into all the closed betas. I got the beta code for Aion from preordering the collector’s edition from my local Gamestop. I had to tell the (new) guy behind the counter that yes, you should have beta keys in the drawer behind you, and despite his reluctance to listen to someone that didn’t actually work there, he checked and was actually surprised I knew more about his store’s inventory than he did. I missed Closed Beta Event #2 by only a few hours and had to settle on waiting two weeks for CBE#3 July 2-6 to try the game for the first time. A note about this beta is that unlike some previous betas, this is actually a test of the 1.0.2 Aion client which was released in Korea a year ago. What’s really being tested are the translations, and although I couldn’t find anything official on the subject, I’m betting that NCSoft is testing the reaction to the North American and European markets.

It follows the lives of seven gamers, and how MMORPGs have affected their lives.

I have no idea how much of the cut we made, or if we’re in it at all, but I think that if the film is as good as I think it will be, all gamers should watch it.

Get the trailer here.

If you’re reading this, you don’t need a description of what Everquest is. I always thought the game had enough lore and backstory to make a damn good movie. Chances are, it’ll take place in Old World Norrath during the time of Everquest 1, rather than Everquest 2 which has decent lore, but nothing worth making a motion picture out of.

I’m crossing my fingers and toes that Sony/Columbia does this right.

They wanted to kill A’Lar instead of Lady Vashj. Now, killing Lady Vashj gives you half of the Black Temple attunement quest, so why wouldn’t you want to finish it and be done? This is the same guild that took down lots of other bosses, but now they want to be a bunch of pussies (yeah, I said it) and do something cheap and easy. It’s not about the gear or the DPS, the guild has that. It’s about the drive to get the job done. Nobody wants to work for their supper anymore because Blizzard said “EXPANSION!” and the first thought everyone in the guild had was “My gear will be obsolete”. So one by one, people wanted to start taking it easy. No raiding on the weekends, cut an hour off the raid times, and do wussie bosses.

They also wanted to raid on Mondays. Who wants to take a weekend off, go to work, and then raid on Monday night? I suppose I’m in the minority there also. On Monday night I like to sit and veg out. It’s the first day of the week, I don’t want more stress. I want a beer in one hand and football on TV.

So, for the second time, I quit the very same raiding guild I quit before. There was nobody left there who even knew my real name, all the people that did are gone. They either quit the game, sold their characters (shh!), or just haven’t logged in.

Now I can do what I want again. If I choose to join another raiding guild, I can. I thought about it and I think I’m going to try and get some people I played with on Boulderfist to join a different PvP server where there are less as–, errr, boneheads. I’ve also been playing a lot of Halo 3 lately, with friends, of course.

I’ve also toyed with the idea of going back to EQ2. I logged in yesterday for the first time in a while to find a lot has changed. My guild booted all non-raiders which means I can’t buy certain things from the City Merchant anymore (thanks, jerks!) and my house now needs status points for upkeep. I usually don’t wish ill on anyone, but when you boot the very same people that helped get your guild level to FIFTY, you tend to hope they all disband. Logging into EQ2 wasn’t easy because all the “friends” I had were the very same people that voted to boot all the non-raiders from the guild, so I’m getting no help there. It’s like I’m a level 54 noob. We shall see. I don’t want to give up my house, that took a lot of hard work to get to where it was.

In Everquest, the best accomplishment you could make would be making it to the Plane of Time. For those familiar with the questline to get to Hyjal and The Black Temple in WoW, this would be the equivalent. I never made it there because I played EQ so casually that I didn’t care. Also, the grinding in EQ was so slow that you could spend days in there and still never ding one level.

The day before Everquest 2 was released, Lindyen and I had run a few instances of LDoN. That night I had a sinking feeling that it might actually be the last time I spend in EQ1 regularly. I was right. The next day, Everquest 2 showed up at my local Gamestop and despite a few glitches on Day One, I was enthralled by the game. This is what Everquest should have become. Better graphics, better quest logs, better guild support, better everything. Eventually I became disenchanted with the game and quit due to its ridiculous leveling grind and terrible combat support.

So if you quit the sequel to an MMO you played for years, where do you go? Well, needless to say I went to WoW. WoW made MMOs fun again. No hideous grind, a decent combat system, a small but workable quest log, and good lore to read about. That was February of 2005 and I didn’t log into EQ2 again until June when I moved my character to the EQ2 server that allowed you to sell you character through SOE and quit the game.

When I heard a few months later that SOE had fixed a lot of the terrible things about EQ2, I decided to go back to it. I loved the Norrath of EQ2. I think that everyone at least once should romp around Antonica with the music on. It seems silly, but the one thing I missed the most about EQ2 was its night sky. It wasn’t some crap slapped together with MS Paint like in WoW, it was a beatifully rendered night sky, complete with meteors, twinkling stars, and an obliterated moon that turned on its own axis.

Going back to EQ2 with all the problems fixed was a wonderful experience. I took off from WoW for a while and got a character to 50 in less time than it took to get to 33 the first time around. I found a guild of wonderful, smart, hilarious people which I still miss. Looking back at some of the screenshots I took back then, we had some damn good times.

Then one day, people started to leave the game.

“Where’s Tommy?”
“He left for WoW”

Huh.

A few days later:

“Where’s Laura?”
“She left for WoW”

And the guild started to fall apart. I wound up joining another one but the people weren’t AS smart, AS funny, or AS fun to be around. I slowly started losing interest in the game because I lost interest in the people I was with.

Fast forward to a few weeks ago….I log into the game to find that myself and a lot of people were booted from the guild we’ve been in since 2005. The reason? The guild decided to kick everyone that wasn’t a hardcore raider, regardless of how long they’ve been around. Now, in WoW that’s no big deal. In Everquest 2, your guild has a level, just like your characters do. Your guild “dings” when guildies run special quests called “writs” for your city. Every 10 guild levels, the players in your guild can buy better and better items. When you kick those people from the guild, it’s like kicking people that built up a company and saying “FU” to them as their ass lands on the sidewalk. A lot of us made a big stink about it on the guild’s forums. No longer can we buy big houses or titles for our characters, or some of the nice things that we all helped the guild get to. The consolation prize? A guild full of non-raiders that has to start at guild level 1. it was a goddamn insult. Now, I’m in a hardcore raiding guild in WoW and I do a WoW podcast. There’s no way I’m coming back to EQ2 on a regular basis, but there’s absolutely NO reason why you can’t keep the people in the guild that have been there for years.

I logged into EQ1 the next day and the guild I’ve been in there for four years completely disbanded. The leader’s gone, the members are gone, and one person that was on my friends list sold her character. Not that I had any ideas of going through the Plane of Time progression anytime soon, but it was nice to see familiar faces after so many years. These were the same people that all helped each other get our Tier 1 epics. Good times, believe me.

So now both my characters are homeless in games that they spent years in. Is there any real need to stick around anymore? I have nothing to show for my efforts in EQ1 except the title of “Naturewalker” and an epic scimitar. In EQ2, I have a house I can no longer afford (due to getting booted from the guild) and a guild full of people that are more concerned about keeping people because they raid instead of the fact that we’ve known each other for two years.

There’s only one thing keeping me in both games – nostalgia. Being able to wander around North Karana in EQ1, or Antonica in EQ2. My house in EQ2 was such a damn accomplishment, it would be a shame to give it up. Sure, if I cancel my account the house is still there, but I can’t afford it anymore. I was debating on selling my character and just saying goodbye to Norrath once and for all. It’s not an easy thing to do when your monthly fee to keep the characters around is very cheap. If I decide to, I’ll be sure and take a boatload of screenshots and post them here.

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I found that I got the most honor out of Alterac Valley, even though it was bonus honor weekend for Warsong Gulch. Specifically, being on defense in AV is like shooting ducks in a barrel. I think I’m burned out on Arathi Basin, though.

One thing that ticked me off were premade groups in Warsong Gulch – where a bunch of people from a server all group up, get on Teamspeak or Ventrilo, and beat the crap out of the other team. I have yet to see a win against a premade. I’ll attempt to farm honor points, but if at some point I find that even that’s worthless, I stay dead so that they can’t farm HPs off me anymore. Any moron can get tokens for winning, but the HPs are the harder of the two to get.

I geared up better now. With all my stamina gear I found that I’m surviving a LOT longer that I did. I also started putting certain spells on my G15 keys which makes hitting people with Counterspell or Ice Shards that much easier. I’m still fiddling with the placements of certain spells. All my buff spells are G13-G18, damage in G1-G6, with misc. spells in G7-G12. I also started putting other spells on my keypad in case that’s where my hand happens to be. I’m trying to move away from depending on the mouse, but it’s hard when your camera angle has you looking at the sky or the ground.

At one point I got so burned out I decided to run Strat solo to get my Piccolo of Flaming Fire. And I did . At 70, nothing bothers you. I just went in the front door (I don’t have the back door key), ran to where he was, did a /wave, and my pet and I took him out. Trinket on the first shot.

Being level 70 has been fun. Not only can I start doing the Caverns of Time quests seriously, but I get my FLYING MOUNT!

Flying around has been a lot of run. It’s a shame you can’t use a flying mount on Azeroth. I’ve been discovering a lot of places you can only get to with a mount, and scouting for horde has never been easier .

Before I hit 70, though, I was rummaging around Netherstorm and came across this puppy:

It looks impressive, but it turns out it’s also the staff used by the Undead Warlock in the Burning Crusade video:

Saving Thrall was a good run, but The Black Morass was a study in focusing on playing your character. Rift Lords spawn from time portals, trying to prevent Medivh from opening the Dark Portal. 18 waves, with breaks after every 6 for a mini-boss fight.

This one’s in the living room:

This one’s over the TV:

This one I have, but it’s not framed yet:

I also have like 8 or 10 others back from when I was working at the art store in college, so to walk into Nagrand and see a living, breathing zone taken right out of Michael Whelan’s work was just amazing. I probably spent more time just looking around here than any zone in Outlands so far. The floating waterfalls was something new.

The quests themselves were standard fare: kill X of these, Y of those.
I did this one quest to kill 25 of two types of ogres which took a seemingly long time, but there was definitely no lack of ogres. Nobody wanted to group because the XP was so amazing. I made another 1/2 level last night so I’m 64.5 and I’ll be sure to hit 65 tonight. Caverns of Time, I’m looking at you!

Making money in this game is so damn easy. I’ve been making Netherweave Bags (16-slot) and Imbued Netherweave Bags (18-slot) and making sure that I keep their value at the right price, not overinflating them. Last night I made 250g just from BAGS. As someone said in Vent last night, the key to making money in this game is patience.

So after I ding 65 tonight, I plan on hitting some of the instances in Terokkar that I neglected.