Aion: Age of Eternity Review on Eurogamer

Eurogamer has a very nice review of Aion: Tower of Eternity. One interesting paragraph was:

Stigmas stones, which drop from monsters or are handed out as quest rewards, are skills from other classes, and can be equipped by any class with very few restrictions. They might allow a Warrior to equip a Mage’s spellbook and cast offensive magic (spellcasting is accompanied with a neat page-flipping animation), or a Mage to wear a Warrior’s plate armour. You can collect any number of Stigma stones, but you can only equip a handful at a time; these can’t be hot-swapped in combat, but can be changed by visiting a trainer and paying a small in-game fee. The most powerful skills will be rare drops, equivalent to a fine weapon or piece of armour; like other loot, some can be traded, and some will bind to the character.

By the sound of it, this device turns skills into loot, and should make character customisation both easy and massively flexible, without getting bogged down in Guild Wars’ technical depth. Stigma completism could easily become as punishing an addiction as improving your gear. The Stigma system is both brilliant and obvious, and that’s the hardest kind of design trick to pull off; hats off to NCsoft’s internal Korean development team.

Very interesting…I am so looking forward to this.

In other news, I cancelled my Age of Conan account this morning. I’m disappointed about that, but I do think that I’ll come back eventually when they’ve added more content to the game, and also when the economic issues have been addressed.

I’m still having fun in EVE, and will probably open an account for that game. Must. Resist. Temptation. For. Second. Account.  The problem is, training takes a very long time…up to 60+ days for some skills. Only one character on an account can be training at any one time, so it’s not as though I can level my current character, and also level one more suited to pvp or even piracy. Must. Resist. Temptation.

In Warcraft, by the weekend we had cleared both BT and MH, which left everyone rather bored. So Hyjal is coming off the raid schedule, and they’ll keep some casual BT raids going for gear. It’s on to Sunwell.  *shivers*

And in other news, I’m working from home. So distressed about what has happened to this project. It’s a heartbreaking failure. But no money means that we all have to look elsewhere, and I am crying inside.