Overly Positive

There’s a small buzz around the ‘Net, and it revolves around NCSoft East’s 9-minute trailer introducing the expansion for Aion, including a ton of new features such as housing, town sieging, mounts, and more. Here be the trailer for said goodness:

Now, I’ve always advertised that optimism is a good thing, and that we should endeavor to manage our own expectations properly upon seeing cinematics and trailers. Still, this is a good strategic step forward for Aion, mostly because it takes advantage of a concept I call “Infornography”, a desire to fulfill one’s own desires through the overload of info that can only come from marketing craziness like the above.

The reason why I call this a smart move for Aion is that it has shown an anticipation for the MMO community’s tendency to be fickle and tourist-y when it comes to titles. While Aion has enjoyed some level of success, the inevitable march from honeymoon to reality (and all the problems that come with it) has led to some players feeling rather hesitant about making the jump to the natively Korean MMO. Some have even stopped subscribing altogether, due to shattered dreams or expectations not met – in other words, the same thing that has happened to almost every MMO release since WoW.

Just as the cusp of this love affair ending, NCSoft East comes out with the above “Visions” trailer, a visual orgy of features, graphics, and full-steam-ahead promises. For the players still subbed to Aion, the trailer provides with it a beacon of hope, a validation that the game isn’t going anywhere, and an exciting hype-buildup to brand new features and content to aspire to. For those who have chosen to stop subbing, “Visions” provides a roadmap, a marker to come check the game out at, and an interesting look into solving some of the game’s core problems. Either way, NCSoft wins.

More companies should work to be this strategic about their marketing. Taking into account the very real and sometimes depressing behavior of today’s MMO players, and then rolling with that, is something that can only really lead to success in the future. Regardless of whether you like or you dislike Aion, you probably took a look at the trailer – and no matter what the reaction, NCSoft has accomplished its mission in doing just that.

Well played, Aion. Well played indeed.

Last night my good friend Kristen and I managed to discover what I find most enjoyable about Aion. It isn’t the graphical detail or the simplistic class system or the flight. It isn’t the marked progression of gear and a very active economy system, either. Hell, it isn’t even leveling.

No, the thing that I enjoy most about Aion is rifting. For those that don’t know, rifting is a form of encouraging incidental, skirmish-based pvp in the normal areas of the game. Aion is divided into two sections with a pvp section in the middle. The two sections each belong to one of the two factions. Normally you can’t go to your opposing faction’s areas – until a rift appears which will take you there. From there, you’re in hostile territory and just about anything goes.

As I’ve written before, Aion is a game that has a “safe” mirror-sheen polish to very tried and true elements – classes, quests, and yes, even the soul-crushing expected grind – are all things that Aion does well to at least a fairly solid degree. This definitely explains some of its popularity since its release. Rifting, and the pvp that comes with it, is one of Aion‘s few innovations, and it’s great for a variety of reasons.

One is the dynamic factor. Sure, you could go to the Abyss, where you actually expect to pvp, but nothing beats a chance encounter in a zone where you don’t expect it. While there’s an occasional zerg, most encounters are small-scale and happen at random. The dynamic of finding targets to kill, or hunting down rifters, breaks up the monotony of “kill things, turn in quest, repeat”.

The other is the thrill. Not being welcome in a zone where you are clearly surrounded and outnumbered means you have to use different tactics to survive. Just ganking everything in sight will end your trip prematurely. No, the tactics involve sneaking around, moving quickly after a kill, and wandering in a manner that seems random, among other things. This, combined with the need to look over your shoulder, creates a potentially exciting experience that could end in 20 minutes or 2 hours.

Surfing the rift is definitely fun. I recommend it to those of you who are having a hard time keeping your eyes open after killing 20,000 mobs.

True to form, my self-proclaimed nemesis strikes again. At Hardcore Casual, Syncaine’s taking what seems to be an almost unhealthy and sadistic delight in the folks that have found recent MMO title Aion not to be their cup of tea and quitting. If you’re not quite sure that’s the right description, here’s the Eminem song line that my fellow blogger refers to when he’s reacting to the end of the Aion love affair:

“BLEED! BITCH BLEED! BLEED!”

Syn, my villainous counterpart, I’m thinking you need a little bit more caffeine in the morning so you don’t get so very grumpy and frumpy in your writings! I hear a morning cup of Joe does wonders for the disposition.

The place I will agree with Syncaine about with regards to folks not seeing Aion (or any other game for that matter) as the game they thought it would be, is that I’m glad for it. Not in the Sith-like Force Chokery way Syncaine does, mind you, but more of a “lessons learned” satisfaction that can only really come from mistakes made. While it’s never fun to go through the practice of MMO heartbreak, where the ideal title you’re with is nothing more than a cyclical love affair, what it does do is make you more mindful of your expectations, what you like, and what you don’t like.

Managing your expectations and keeping yourself realistic about a game’s trials and tribulations is a skill that, especially with MMOs, is difficult to do due to the hype train of marketing, pre-release. The idea of understanding this, and also getting an idea of what you prefer to play, can only be borne in part of going through the painful process of seeing that a particular title doesn’t tickle your fancy like it did in the gameplay trailers and early beta. To keep the relationship analogy going, you basically understand through breakups and multiple dating experiences what to do, what not to do, and what you should expect in the future. Such as it is with MMOs and the folks who somehow end up quitting one or two months out. It’s just not for them, and realizing that early is a good thing, not a bad thing.

Besides I’m not one to speak for what you all, or anyone else who doesn’t read this 100% sunshiny day of a blog, likes with MMOs. I find it a bit silly and wasteful to deride people for their chosen preferences – it’d be like someone who prefers to date blondes making fun of a person like me who has a weakness for redheads, when my latest relationship doesn’t work out. Ultimately, the choices people make are their own, as well as how they deal with them.  It’d be nice if we were all overly cautious and completely pragmatic and made good choices when it comes to MMOs, but that’d really just be uneducational, bland, and boring. Give me overly positive with my MMOs any day.

Ah, nothing like seeing the land run red…with your killers’ names, of course.

PvP in MMOs has mostly been about serious business and competition to the highest degree. Whether it take the form of prepared teams going at it in a sanctioned match or a spontaneous explosion of virtual guts and glory, PvP is equated with a sense of meaningful and definite achievement. Where PvE-focused players get their kicks from defeating the latest and greatest in AI-controlled epicness, a PvP’r defines pleasure in the conflict and battle between human intelligence. The best MMOs feed this need and create situations where PvP folks can prove themselves.

But there’s another side to PvP that is not quite about being the best in combat with other players but simply being the most creative and interesting. The dynamic nature of this kind of PvP has been seen before in the form of creatively stealthed attacks, mechanics that take advantage of unaware players and best of all, simply creating as much havoc as possible to the normal routine of the opposing faction. In many cases, this takes hilarious forms, and I participated in something like that just last night.

My good friend Kristen invited me to a bit of a crazy mission for Aion last night to bust up the grindstone gag-fest. This mission would be to see how far we could get from the opposing players’ level 20-25 base once transported there. As a secondary goal, we would see just how long it would take for people to realize that her gladiator boyfriend was being healed from two hidden places while he smashed people’s faces. The goal was not victory, nor was it bragging rights, nor was it to “pwn faces”. No, this particular insanity was all about causing chaotic behavior in a hostile zone that favored the enemy.

The results, aside from the screenshot above, were hilarious. Most of the enemy players, used to  tunnel-visioning onto completing the next in a long line of excruciating “kill x things” quests, did not know what to make of a single hostile target being healed from hidden places that crushed things on the main road. A couple of them paid for their hesitation with a respawn. Others actually flew past us. But eventually we drew the ire of a legion of players who helplessly beat on our gladiator while he was healed. Eventually, we showed ourselves and killed a few more, including someone who happened to just be resting and afk, before finally being overwhelmed by what seemed to be scores of annoyed enemies.

Instead of being upset, we merely laughed. While fifteen minutes is hardly a massive impact when it comes to PvP in MMOs (especially since we lost, quite handily), it was fifteen minutes where PvP wasn’t simply about victory at all costs and being totally l337, but just about creating something dynamic for everyone to experience. At its heart, PvP in MMOs is just that, no matter how you decide to play it. It’s something that isn’t really scripted, but tests yourself in a situation where intelligent players will react to your actions. In my case, it was just another way to entertain myself by doing something different from the norm. PvP’ing to win certainly has its merits – but it’s not the only way to create PvP in an MMO and enjoy it.