Aion: Tower of Eternity Q&A - Battles, Flight, and Balancing Aion for Western Audiences
Community manager Lani Blazier discusses flying, fighting, and how Aion: Tower of Eternity will cross borders as both a competitive Asian-style massively multiplayer game and a more Western-style quest-based game.
Massively multiplayer games used to be about creating a single character, repeatedly beating up goblins until you gained an experience level, and then going out to beat up slightly larger goblins in a huge, persistent world. They've grown and changed considerably in the past years. NCsoft's Aion will attempt to take massively multiplayer games straight up--to the sky. This unusual fantasy game will let you create a character from one of two races that, at a certain experience level, can sprout wings and fly. And at an even higher experience level, your character will be ready for the game's high-end competitive player-versus-player (PvP) battles. We sat down with community manager Lani Blazier for the details.
GameSpot: Give us an update on the game's development and localization. What's being worked on at present?
LB: Work on the game is progressing very well. Since Aion's gameplay mechanics were originally developed for a global appeal, we've been able to spend a lot of time focusing on significant localization. And by localization, I don't mean just the text--stories, culture, fables, and even inside cultural jokes all need to be considered and rewritten for the Western audience. It's for that reason we have a team of highly skilled published fantasy writers working on Aion's story. Effectively, they are culturalizing the game. We really want to make sure that Aion is relevant and meaningful to Western players, so it's important to us that we launch this game with localization that is on the same exceedingly high level of quality as the game itself.
GS: We understand that the actual combat system in Aion has been designed to be more engaging by letting characters juggle their opponents in the air, and also by including onscreen icons next to your character to initiate chain attacks (rather than requiring players to stop, look down at their keyboards, and hunt down another keyboard shortcut). What are some of the other changes that Aion makes to the kind of standard turn-based combat we expect from games like this? What do you hope the overall combat experience will be like?
LB: Certainly flight adds an entirely new dynamic to our combat system. For one thing, it isn't just a way to travel; it is very much a strategic and integral part of gameplay. You can also fight while flying, keeping in mind that there are a few factors that players will have to be very much aware of: flight time, speed, and the environment around you. There are both PvP and PvE skills that affect flight duration and speed--some skills will even knock you down from the sky.
We also wanted to reward those players that move around during combat, which is why we created the "positional combat system." If players move forward, points are added to their attack stats; backward [movement] adds to [their blocking ability], and moving from side to side adds to players' dodge points.
Flight and our positional combat system are just two examples of the mechanics we have in place to make combat a really fun and exciting part of the game.
GS: To what extent is the game being rebalanced and retuned for a North American launch? The original version of the game was released to an audience that might be more used to a steep experience-level curve where players need to sink many hours into the game to get ahead. How is the game being returned? Are fights shorter? Gentler level curve? Lower level requirements?
LB: The core gameplay itself has not been rebalanced for the Western audience, mainly because there was no need to. From the drawing board, Aion was designed to appeal to a global audience--the development team looked closely at games from all across the world and did extensive research on what worked and what didn't. What they decided to do was combine the epic beauty and intricate details of Asian games with the deep storytelling, quest-based systems familiar to Western MMOs. So to answer your question, the leveling curve is very similar to what Western audiences are familiar with.
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