The Golden Ratio

Seems that Aion has been a pretty successful start. At least if you can measure success in queue length. When I got home from work yesterday I was greeted by the follow message:

Almost 3000 people waiting to log on?! I thought the old World of Warcraft queues where bad when I had to wait an hour. At least the queue times give me plenty of time to get others things done at home.

The times I have managed to log onto Aion I’ve figured out part of the problem with the strange steering while flying. In China and Korea they seem to use mouse-clicking to move, so Aion was coded for that to begin with. When they released it for the Western markets they added the option to have the mouse change the view- and movement-direction similar to how it is done in World of Warcraft and Age of Conan. But there still seems to be some bugs around this. One of them being the awkward steering while flying. The reason for the bug is that you cannot pan the camera when the mouse is hovering over the sky! Once I figured that out it all worked a bit better, since I just kept the mouse focused on my character which solved the problem. It isn’t the best solution, but it makes flying a lot easier until they fix the bug.

It is just over one month left until this year’s big writing adventure begins. I’m thinking about NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month as it is acutally called. I’ve never entered before, but I’ve thought about it a couple of times. First it was too close to my final exams, then work was to busy during November, then some other random excuse was fabricated to justify why I didn’t enter.

This year I’ve decided to give a try. I’ve always loved reading books, and writing has always facinated me. My fiction writing urge used to be filled by planning roleplaying characters or sessions, but even when doing that I’ve always wanted to write a real novel – or at least a short story. The biggest hinderance to me actually writing that novel of mine has been that I never write any fiction, the stories always stays firmly locked in my head. Coming up with other stuff to fill the time has always been too easy. The plan now is that Nanowrimo will give me that extra inspiration I need to get started.

In anticipation of Nanowrimo I’ve already start to write a little bit each day. At least a sentence or two to get used to structuring my story ideas on paper. To begin with it took a lot of energy to sit down and get those sentences down, but lately it has been easier and easier. It has even gotten to the point wher I can’t just write two sentences, once I start writing I can see how the story should continue so I just have to write down the next bit as well.

That feeling of creating a story is amazing. Especially when you don’t really know what twist and turns it will take next, you just know the general direction it is going. Earlier I always found that a bit strange, how could a writer not know what was going to happen in advance? He was writing the story after all! But now that I’ve experience a little bit of it I start to see it, and appriciate the joy that it brings to writing. Giving your characters and setting enough life so that they can actually make descisions on their own. The latest example of that was when the main character in my story was going to visit his uncle. I thought he was going to live in an old appartment building, but once I started to write it felt much better for him to live in an old house just outside of the city center. A minor change, but still something I didn’t anticipate until the words had been written.

My newest interest in computer gaming is Aion. World of Warcraft is still enjoyable, but it has become a little bit stale lately so I decided to try something new.

I only had time to test Aion for a couple of hours during the open beta, so logging into the released version this week was my first proper experience with the game. The first thing that struck me was the graphics and animations of the characters. They have done a great job with the graphics engine. It looks gorgeous, and it runs without any problems – even with a horde of characters on the screen. The animations of the characters is also amazing. When standing still in the rain for a couple of seconds your character will pull out a big leaf to hide under. If she is standing in a hot area she will pull out a little fan and wave it to cool herself down. All of these small little animations that you don’t really think about, but make it all so much more immersive than just having the characters standing around doing nothing.

The character creation does deserve a mention as well. Most other reviews I’ve read mention it as one of the biggest pluses, but I’ve never been that fascinated with character customization. It is great that I can create a good looking character that doesn’t look like 20% of the population, but I can’t bring myself to spend much more than five minutes on character customization. I want to play this character and kill stuff, not fiddle with the size of her right eyelid!

Playing the game is very familiar to World of Warcraft, and most other fantasy MMOs as far as I’ve seen. Bars at the bottom with your various attack options, standard paper doll screens for equipping gear and an inventory that is way too small. Even the general actions you go through to kill a mob are the same. Aion has a bit more timings around attack animations than World of Warcraft has, but that might also be because I’m playing a melee character in Aion instead of a caster as I play in World of Warcraft.

When playing you do notice a couple of things that indicate that this is a new game that haven’t ironed out all of the minor bugs. Compared to the starting week of Age of Conan this game is almost flawless, but when you’re used to playing World of Warcraft that has been fine tuned for many years the little things stand out. The camera controls are a bit awkward, especially when flying. Something you can turn the camera around when holding left mouse button down, sometimes not. I’ve also had some problems with getting quest mobs to count towards quest completion. There have been a couple of other minor things as well, but nothing big enough to remove the enjoyment of the game.