“At rest in the temple of its body, Desire, who would be darkly amused to hear itself described as an angel, floats in an eyeball larger than a cathedral, and remembers its lost brother in its own way. Desire’s thoughts are private. It holds a small red flower, very tightly.” ~ Neil Gaiman, Sandman #49: “Brief Lives:9″

I have been listless and bored lately in an online sense. Summer doldrums, I suppose. This past week, however, I knew I had to scoot my priest bottom into Azeroth to get the Midsummer achievements on my main. While in the process of a lot of useless running around (although stealing the flames from the four opposing faction cities is always a *little* fun), fire juggling, and Ahune-slaying, I casually mentioned to a friend that I honestly don’t understand why I keep my WOW account active these days. At which point he *may* have mentioned that he was in the Aion Online beta following which I *may* have pressured him mercilessly into letting me sneak in on his account for a test drive. If you’re a developer I would like to state for the record none of that actually happened.

…anyway…

After downloading and installing the NCSoft launcher (they made me install the .net framework — I feel dirty) I had two days (less, actually) to run around and play.

I. So. Likey.

It’s hard to say if Aion will be a contender. They get a lot right. At first blush the geek girl gamer in me is all tingly. But, I didn’t get my hands dirty with any endgame or PVP content, so that leaves a gaping chasm of gray area.

I can tell you that from what I’ve seen, Aion has the potential to kick Everquest2, Conan, and Warhammer off the map (and in my opinion deliver long-overdue fatal blows to all three). Whether or not it will bite into WOW depends on many elements yet to be seen. They are clearly targeting EQ2 players and, it must be said, the girl gamer market — which I will get into more detail by delving into the mouth watering character generation options that compose the focus of the rest of this entry.

Aion Character Generation - Overview

Finally, a game developer has grasped the notion that people like to customize their avatars beyond a handful of stock options. While this might seem like a useless vanity feature that players roll their eyes at on message boards, the proof is in the playing. As SLers all know, the majority of in-world business is based on pixel vanity. Sure, SL is a social platform and not a gaming platform, but the theory is still the same: avatar customization invests the real person into the image of their avatar. What this means for gaming is that the player will be better able to identify with their character and, thus feel connected to it enough to endure the growing pains of the interface meet and greet stages. If I spend 2 minutes creating a character, I’m not invested; I don’t care about it and I might get easily frustrated and walk away. If, however, I spend 20 minutes (or more) generating a virtual being, this increases my motivation to stay interested through the bumpy ride that is the learning curve phase.

A focus on character generation and customization is also, in my opinion, crucial in capturing the girl gamer market. We want pretty. We like pretty. And, not for nuthin’ but the guys want and like pretty, too. One of my ex-guildies who was in all other ways annoyingly macho frequented gender-bent with his avatars. He blamed Lara Croft and explained in his oh-so-charming way: “if I have to look at an ass running around down imaginary forests all day, it might as well be a nice ass.” Okay, so he wasn’t Shakespeare, but the lesson is no less true for its lack of poetry.

The Aion beta promises top of the line avatar customization that is leaps and bounds above any gaming standard.

Let’s begin with one of the default samples you see when you enter the character generation phase:

Aion Character Generation - A Default Option Sample

Yeah, I know. I nearly wet my panties, too. But it gets so much better. In the facial customization alone there are seven basic custom fields and twenty-five advanced slider options.

Aion - Character Generation - Lotsa Facial Options

Of the basic options, you get to tailor your look from a list of thirty hairstyles, twenty faces, a half-dozen “decoration” options, and ten tattoos. Those numbers are approximate as I didn’t count. I should have been more diligent, but I was too busy squeeing over real hair styles that include long styles, braids, flips, and even piggy buns.

Aion Character Generation - Full Rotatation Previews

Aion Character Generation: Facial Customization Options

Basic

As mentioned above, you start your facial customization in basic mode where you choose your hairstyle and color. The styles are varied, ranging from classic to modern, conservative to sassy, childish to sexy, simple to elaborate (you get the idea). The hair color can be selected from eighteen default palette options, or from the spectrum palette below those. Lip color and skin color can also be selected from presets or adjusted in the provided palettes. Eye color and brow options are selected from the somewhat oddly named “Face Shape” presets. The “Decoration” field allows you to choose the placement/selection of beauty marks, freckles, or scars, and the “Tattoo” field cycles through facial art that ranges from edgy “runny mascara” tattoos to candy-colored cheek hearts.

Aion - Character Generation - Basic Facial Options

Advanced

The advanced facial customization tab is a series of sliders that allows for the tweaking of twenty-five (yes! twenty-frickin’-five!) facial aspects, shapes and sizes. The defaults are set to realistic appearances (and most of the beta testers I encountered chose more realistic avatars), but there is also the possibility for highly distorted cartoon-type forms.

Aion - Character Generation - Advanced Facial Options

Aion Character Generation: Body Customization Options

By relative comparison, there isn’t as much customization for character body type, although it should be noted that having *any* body customization at all is relatively rare in gaming. Even though there are only thirteen body sliders (only thirteen — I’m already spoiled), the combination of options quickly begins to add up. You can move the sliders toward muscular amazon woman:

Aion - Character Generation Body Options (Amazon)

Or drag them back toward elfin waif:

Aion - Character Generation - Body Options (The Waif)

…and pretty much everything in between.

Aion Character Generation: My Girls

As I tend toward pale, elfin waifs, the characters I settled on were pretty predictable.

Elyos:

Aion - Salome's Elyos

Asmodian:

Aion - Salome's Asmodian

I’ll address actual game play in future entries, but I think it’s sufficient to say if you’re a gamer girl with pixel vanity, you should have Aion on your radar. I’m hoping the developers take a page from Spore and put their customization tools on the web for free for people to play with — once girls get a taste of how nummy you can make your pew-pew they’ll be as hungry for it as I was.

You’ll want to note, all the options I’ve shown you here are only a scattering of a scattering. These are all female priests. There are also boys and other classes, some of which have their own custom selections.

So. Much. Squee.

“If we could sell our experiences for what they cost us, we’d all be millionaires.” ~Abigail Van Buren

Next Up Research has released a new report that sets the value of Linden Labs (which, let’s face it, translates as the value of SL) in the $700 million ballpark. Tech Crunch argues it’s more likely around $300 million.

The comments on the article are, as ever, entertaining.

“Anything that has the Disney name to it is something we feel responsible for.” ~ Walt Disney

***UPDATE*** The article I linked to (and other reports) have updated their information to explain this wasn’t a head-on monorail collision, but that one of the trains was parked at the TTC when the other plowed into it. While I still find this accident to be shocking, that explanation of events makes far more sense than the early reports I read. I’m going to leave the entry as I originally wrote it, but I just thought I’d clear up the facts here for anyone reading. This is still a very bizarre accident for anyone familiar with how seriously WDW takes the monorail system.

I woke up today to three emails from friends informing me about THIS incident at WDW. I read the details but hadn’t seen the photo until this point.

Anyone who knows me well knows I’m a Disneyphile of the WDW variety. In the years (and they are many) that I’ve been intimately acquainted with the (park, then parks, then campus, then…) Florida branch of the mighty empire, I’ve never seen anything like this.

Please understand, accidents and deaths are not that unusual. You can find sites and even a snopes special category that deals with tragedy rumors and facts on Disney property. I’ve both witnessed and read about oodles of accidents and malfunctions. I’ve had friends who worked at parks tell me horror stories and point out places where one incident or another occurred. I’ve witnessed broken bones, heat-stroke, and heart-attacks by other guests. I witnessed one attempted suicide that was, thankfully, unsuccessful. I’ve seen boat crashes and when I was a kid I even saw someone nearly topple over the side of the track stairs inside Space Mountain while they were evacuating us from our seats due to a lights-on-everybody-out breakdown. Hell, when I was five years old I got it into my head that I wanted to look down between the wells of the monorail tracks at the station and lost my balance. But for a very quick-thinking cast member, I would likely have broken my neck while my grammy was still fishing Tic-Taks out of her handbag.

It’s a lot of land and it hosts a lot of people and there are a lot of machines doing lots of things. Suicides, plane crashes, equipment malfunction, etc — it all happens. And maybe I’m wrong, but I have to say, I have *never* seen anything like this photo. The monorail is an icon of the Disney theme park universe and the Mark IV, to the best of my knowledge has never had more than the most cursory type of malfunction. The system is automated with cascading safety measures and the pilots are there backing those up. This kind of incident — two trains heading in opposite directions on the same track — it just doesn’t happen. Knowing what I know about how carefully this particular aspect of WDW is managed, I just don’t understand how it’s possible. If there weren’t photos, I’d have a hard time believing it.

This isn’t a door that wouldn’t seal. It’s not some idiot standing up in his seat on a roller coaster. It isn’t a stall and tow-in. It’s not even lightening hitting at an inopportune moment. This is two trains heading straight for one another. It’s simply unfathomable. There is failsafe upon failsafe built into the system for this.

From Wiki:
Attempting to drive the train too quickly in a given speed zone will result in an “overspeed stop”, often subjecting the driver to good-natured ridicule by his co-workers. Train spacing is maintained by the Moving Blocklight System (MBS), also known as the MAPO (for “Mary Poppins”) system, which establishes a number of “holdpoints” throughout the system(http://www.monorailyellow.com/monorails.asp). At any given time, there must be at least two holdpoints between a given train and the train ahead of it. When the train detects that there are fewer than two holdpoints between itself and the preceding train, the emergency brakes are immediately applied and cannot be released until sufficient spacing becomes available or the operator explicitly overrides the system. Failure to maintain adequate spacing is known as an “overrun”, and is treated as an extremely serious offense.

Maybe it’s just a very tragic and unlikely-to-the-point-of-near-impossibility accident, but a failing of this magnitude may also be an undeniable indicator of the serious toll that the current state of the economy is taking on all consumer-based businesses. If that’s the case, I’d really hate to have been the one on watch because corporate Disney is a shark-invested hell on good days and given the investigation that’s about to hit, they’re gonna need a fall guy in short order.