Aion Open Beta Impressions

I was quite skeptical about this game but I am surprised to say that I am really enjoying this game.

I was scared that Auto-Follow would ruin this game, but it is nothing like Guild Wars Auto-Follow, it is completely non-invasive on your movement. When you either Right Click an enemy(to actvate Auto-Attack) or use an ability, you will turn on Auto-Follow, but ANY movement at all on your part will completely cancel the auto-follow and it is not jittery/buggy at all, just like you were never auto-following in the first place, which means that controlling your character yourself is always the better solution.

You also gain movement bonuses in Aion, which encourages movement while in combat. Moving forward will put a forward arrow icon below your character which means your attack damage is increased. Strafing left to right will put a left/right arrow icon below your character which means your evasion is increased. Backpedaling(lol) will put a down arrow icon below your character which means your block is increased.

The combat in Aion is fluid, fast paced, and fun even at level 5 on a laggy Chinese server, as a scout(Which at level 10 chooses to become a rogue or a hunter), which is about 30minutes of gameplay. So far, I don't get locked into any of my instant attack animations.(Which is what I thought what happened in Aion, maybe with more powerful skills to balance them?) I also don't have access to any advanced skills that chain off of other abilities.

Example of combat at level 5:

-Start fight on an enemy by using Swift Edge(A normal damaging attack like Mortal Strike for Warriors, instant cast 7second cooldown.)

-Use my Focused Evasion(100% chance to dodge 1 attack within 5seconds, instant cast 30second cooldown.)

-My Counterslash icon pops up on my screen showing that it can be chained off of my dodge.(After evading an attack, you can use this ability to do a good amount of damage and it stuns the enemy for a few seconds, instant cast 10 second cooldown.)

-While the enemy is stunned from Counterslash, run behind the enemy and use Surprise Attack(Backstab ability, instant cast 16second cooldown.)

Questing is very easy and not frustrating since they have a built in Carbonite/QuestHelper, with hyperlinks in the quest text where you can click to locate what you are looking for on the mini-map/map.

My major gripe with the game so far is that it looks like you won't be able to turn the camera to look behind you while running(holding left click then pan camera.).EDIT: You can pan the Camera behind you when moving, instead of holding left click, you hold the scroll wheel.

I may record and post up some combat/PvP videos later this week. For anyone interested in finding out more information about Aion, this 23minute presentation basically tells you everything you need to know about Aion:

http://g4tv.com/thepile/videos/37487/GDC-09-Aion-Tower-of-Eternity-Walkthrough.html
Flight Talk starts at 7:00
Combat starts at 13:20
PvP talk starts at 15:40