Aion Scheduled for Fall 2009

NCSoft has many great titles under it's belt but Aion looks to be the most ambitious yet. I've been anticipating this title for quite some time now and finally theres a confirmation for this year. The Aion Community Manager Lani "Liv" Blazier presents us with a letter from Lance Stites....

Originally Posted by Liv
Hello everyone,

I'd like to thank you for your patience while I collected feedback, comments and suggestions from various Aion communities' across Europe and North America. I used this information to create a list of questions that I felt needed to be addressed right away by our development team. This list does not cover all of your questions, I realize this, but I wanted to provide what information is available at present. The rest I am still working on.

I have spent the last week discussing the current state of morale within the community and the general excitement for the game with our production team and after reviewing the community report, one member in particular wanted to address you all directly. I would like to introduce you to Lance Stites, Executive Producer of NCsoft West's Game Production Studio.

Greetings to all, As Executive Producer, my responsibilities include preparing and supporting the launch and ongoing operations of product for the "Western" market—including North America and Europe. I've worked with NCsoft since 2001, including 5 years in the Austin office and after a brief time away from the company I returned to spend almost a year in the European office. I've worked to launch or support multiple products or expansions, including the Lineage and City of Heroes franchises.

As you've probably seen, NCsoft West is undergoing restructuring which involves the relocation of certain key staff. We're building a dedicated production studio to support titles like Aion and the Lineage franchise. We've added Lani "Liv" Blazier as our Aion Community Manager recently and she is already taking an extremely active role within the community. Within the MMO community, this role is of vital importance and great to have someone who understands the importance of the player base and will be a tireless advocate of the community needs. Liv has spent the past several days gathering information and answers that are important to the community. We want to continue this open dialogue with the players and look forward to more as we move toward and past our Aion launch.

We really have an exciting time ahead of us in regards to ongoing updates to existing products, new releases on the horizon, and closer cooperation and coordination between the European and North American territories.

Cordially yours,

Lance Stites
Executive
Producer, Game Production Studio
NCsoft West

The Community Team is
committed to listening and responding to your needs. Please find below the answers to 5 questions that I wanted to make you had answers to sooner, rather than later.

1) When will Aion be released in North America/Europe?

We expect to ship Aion in NCsoft West territories in the fall of 2009.

2) Why is localization taking so long?

The localization effort is enormous, with a vast amount of content. Aion is not simply being translated, a team of dedicated content writers are re-creating the written dialogue and content to provide AAA quality and to ensure that it is culturally relevant for our audience. We are going to do this launch "right" rather than fast.

3) Has a date been set for our Preview Event?

While we are not ready to release specific details regarding the Preview Event, we can tell you that participants will include those who signed up at last year at FJV, PAX and Leipzig. We will also be extending invites to long time NCsoft customers and dedicated legions. As we get closer, we will be offering more opportunities for fans to get signed up for this exclusive event.

4) Will there be community support for Europe?

Absolutely. We realize that many in the community were surprised with our announcement regarding the consolidation of the North American and European operations. We are deeply committed to our European community and will have native speaking Community Coordinators for our supported languages (English,German & French).

5) Will there be servers for each region?

We will have servers physically located both in Europe and North America for launch. We know you have more questions and they are being addressed. My goal is to have another update for your within the next few weeks.

Thank you,

Liv
Community Manager, Aion

Aion looks amazing. If you get around to it, check out some of their gameplay videos online. Too much awesomeness for this blog...too much.

-Frank

Killzone 2 Demo Impressions

So I've come to the realization that Killzone has become a flagship franchise for the PS3 and I applaud them for it. Sony has been losing exclusives left and right for quite some time now, and I'm glad they are fighting back. This whole console war between the 360 and PS3 is like watching your kids fight, you want them both to put up a fight, but you don't want either of them to lose. I'm not a fanboy, or a hater as some would love to put it. I don't hate the Wii for that matter. I've always loved games, growing up, and having discovered this ugly underbelly of the video game industry, makes me think sometimes I should have taken the blue pill. It's very depressing, watching these flame wars and people's fake Internet personas clash over stupid shit. When did this even start? Either way, I'm done trying to tell everyone games kickass no matter what but I'll probably be called a fanboy carebear, or whatever word has been coined for the week.

But enough ranting, I'm here to talk about Killzone 2 - The Halo Killer!!! (see what I did there?). I completed Killzone 1 back when it launched not because it was dubbed "The Halo Killer" but because it caught my interest. I actually liked the gameplay and whatever story there was to offer. Which brings me to the K2 demo. Was it awesome? You bet! Is it perfect? Well no.

My only gripe with the Killzone games is the controls. I have to admit it doesn't help when you come off COD and keep meleeing or throwing grenades when all you wanna do is aim. But they have a control style for just such a person! And I found that to be genuine of them, to acknowledge that there are different FPS games out there. But that's not my complaint. I found the sensitivity to need some major tweaking.

Games like COD and Halo or even Gears for that matter, have the controls figured out. You don't get frustrated when you see a guy and couldn't kill him because the controls didn't let you, and that's what Killzone did to me a few times. I feel like maybe an aim-assist wouldn't hurt, but getting the controls right would be better. FPS's suffer from really bad controls. You feel disconnected because your connection to the game is the controller and if that's not working, the game is going to get pretty annoying.

Killzone 2's controls aren't as bad as I thought they were going to be. With some tweaking to the controller sensitivity I was ready to murder some Helghast! I ran through the demo 3 times trying out new tactics and strategies. "Strategies you say?" Indeed, K2 has you taking cover and staying in first person view, which also isn't as bad as I thought it was gonna be. It feels like Time Crisis but way cooler since the setting is darker and more visceral. So I found myself testing out different tactics. Throwing grenades instead of rushing right in. Running around to knife a Helghast while he thought I was still in cover instead of having a fire fight with him. And all these worked out, I couldn't really exploit much from the A.I. so I was happy. After that all I had to do was take in the pretty lighting and amazing gameplay.

The K2 demo rushes you into battle, after you've just crash landed. You find yourself in the middle of a warzone and have no other choice but to fight back. So off you go shooting, and sprinting to cover. You pick up a rocket launcher and blow up some explosives on the bridge. This moment is what practically sold me. The particle effects and animation to this game are insane. They really did come close to that video they showed us a while back. I couldn't get over how pretty this game is. The sky and the ocean look so beautiful and alive. You continue down the path where real-time events are occurring and it's just so seamless. A squad gets dropped off in front of you and it's perfectly executed. You've played FPS's before, you know how this plays out, but K2 does it better. As a matter of fact K2 doesn't really do anything shooters haven't done before, but it does everything a little bit better. I'm not saying it does Halo better than Halo, but it looks, feels, and smells like what a shooter should do.

I didn't want the demo to end. Sadly, it's one of the shortest demos I've ever played but wow, what a great 10 minutes. I have no doubts this game will have trouble selling. If you've already purchases Warhawk, Uncharted, and MGS4, then add one more to the list because Killzone 2 is the shooter for the PS3.

-Frank

Hanbitsoft reads Level Up Blog

It seems just like yeterday I was rambling on about Hellgate shutting down-well fear not! On January 26th Hanbitsoft claimed it will be continuing Hellgate's servers after Namco Bandai's Jan 31st shutdown date. Hanbisoft will be taking over the patching and updates and keep it going on it's FREE subscription model, how do you like that?

With the good news comes the bad of course. Dragon Age: Origins has been delayed to later this year. Expect to see this title in the "last half of 2009." While this is a bit of a pain to take in I think the flood of new titles throughout the year should keep us busy. If you're like me you still haven't picked up every single holiday title and are thinking "SF4, RE 5, Killzone 2, DOW 2, and Demigod are all within a month of releasing. . . .Holy S**T."




Note: My brother and I are cooking up a special feature for our games of 2008. While we are a bit late to the party, it's better late than never! Plus, it's more than just a list! (hopefully)

-Frank