“We live immersed in narrative, recounting and reassessing the meaning of our past actions, anticipating the outcome of our future projects, situating ourselves at the intersection of several stories not yet completed.” ~ Peter Brooks

In writing up entries about Aion, I’ve begun to realize that I didn’t take near enough screen caps to show my work on all the stuff I want to blog. Still, I think I’ve got enough to provide little samples here and there. In this entry I’d like to talk about an aspect of play that has generally underwhelmed me in the MMO genre and that’s game immersion.

One of the things about Aion that impressed me during my brief tour was the relationship your character has with the environment. There are lots of details both subtle and deliberate that I believe will make this an MMO that actually encourages role play for those who seek it. But, even if you’re not looking to RP, NC Soft is doing a lot of things right to immerse you in your character. They seem to have hit a golden ticket combination of SL vanity appeasement, WOW easy mode interface, EQ2 ability sophistication, and FF graphics and detail all merged in with a new, but traditional-style lore. You quickly feel tethered to your character and it helps a player to settle into enjoying play (remember enjoyment — it’s that stuff we used to do before rep grinds and fighting over mats).

One small, but charming example of this immersion is the fact that your character takes cues from the weather.

Aion - Bad Weater Solved By Leaf Umbrella

Above, you’ll notice my girl is holding a little leaf umbrella to keep the rain off her. How. Cute. Is. That.

Another such detail is that fact that I encountered quests that were actually realm time-of-day dependent. In one such quest, a soldier that had fallen hopelessly in love with a wood nymph asked me to steal her dress so that he could have a token of her to keep for himself (boys). He explained that she bathed by the light of the moon in a nearby pond. When I sought her during a day cycle, the nymph wasn’t there, but after returning in night cycle — sure enough she was there and her dress was laying across a rock near the pond. While too many of these style quests could get annoying and prohibitive to leveling, I thought it was a very nice touch.

Of course, the nymph was a ?? level mob who spotted me stealing her dress after I’d snagged it into my inventory and promptly fired a nymph cap into my priestly ass, resulting in the first of my two deaths (both of which took place at level 6).

Aion - Fewer Deaths

This brings me to the next interesting thing about Aion — death is inconvenient and kinda traumatic. One of my biggest meh’s about WOW is the frequency and ease with which your character dies. There really isn’t any value placed on surviving because dying is easy (a little costly at high levels, but still not that bad) and doesn’t really incur much hardship beyond the occasional longish corpse run.

In Aion, death incurs a fairly distressing spirit defeat sequence (as seen above) which I had to shake my head after because I was so immersed in play when it happened. Both times I died were unexpected and they taught me valuable lessons; I didn’t repeat the mistakes that led to me being all dead-like. The first lesson was that fucking with higher level mobs is going to get your butt kicked a lot faster than in WOW, and the second was that you’d better not get into managing multiple mobs unless you know exactly what you’re doing. After taking those two wisdoms to heart, I didn’t die again on my way to 14. I’m pretty sure my first character in WOW died once a level at least, if not multiple times per level.

Additionally, unless you’ve got a rezzer with you, you do not ghost from a graveyard back to your body: you rez at the last place you bound your soul to — and that could be way back in Monkey’s Eyebrow, Kentucky even though you’re currently questing in Alaska. Then you’re going to have to pay a soul healer to restore your XP. It’s a pain in the posterior. However, it does two things right. First, it encourages good play and skill advancement by motivating you not to die. Second, it again encourages the immersion bond between you and your character.

Even though I could go on and on about this, I’ll end with just one more example of the immersion techniques the game uses. This one is simple, but powerful considering the level of character customization offered by the platform. The cinematic sequences and cut scenes mostly feature your character in the action. First in flashbacks and later in ceremonies. On my way to level 14, I encountered about a half-dozen of these, including some that didn’t feature my character, but were merely instructive to show me glimpses of quest areas I would soon be encountering. This frequent use of cut sequences feels like a luxury in itself, but seeing my own character as part of many of them was an unexpected (and very effective) treat.

Just a few yummy samples:

Aion - Cinematic Sample 1

Aion - Cinematic Sample 2

Aion - Cinematic Sample 3

Aion - Cinematic Sample 4

Aion - Cinematic Sample 5