09:02    Feb 15,2010

Aika Review: Argument

by admin

Frist impression by Tanon

Face it, Aika is great on paper, but the game is FAR from being ready-even for closed beta testing. I played for FIVE minutes. I know that many of you will start criticizing me for only playing for that long, but hey, those that do so are blatantly showing their inability to read everything.

Now, I’ve only played for five minutes and I have already seen way too many fundamental flaws with this game. These are not things like slow leveling, slow killing speeds, typos, or whatnot. These are the things that make or break games.

1. Incredibly easy to bug up the WASD controls. In 5 minutes of playing, I’ve had my character perform a walking animation on the spot on several occasions. Besides that, the rendering of your character’s orientation is off-you will start walking in one direction while facing another. Movement in general is very buggy.

2. Cannot jump off a wall. You may laugh at this, but hey, it’s pretty basic.

3. Wallhacks. Well, not through the walls, but through other doodads. I’m quite used to running through small fences and such; being able to run through entire rocks is a whole other matter. Some rocks let you walk halfway through them then magically teleport you above them.

4. Textures. The camera seems to close in at a fixed rate, causing many texture render bugs.

5. EZ-mode. This is a two-way topic, but the quests pretty much hold your hand through everything. Where’s the adventure?

I’ll say this now: the only good part about this game is the graphics, and even at that, they’re not exactly the best (even compared to only F2Ps). I suppose the lolis are another big plus, but only if you’re into that sort of thing, and face it, 99% of the people playing Aika are playing for the lolis.

So, to sum up my 5-minute-review: Aika Online has some great concepts behind it, but it really is NOT ready for closed beta testing.

Arguement from tsurano

Wrong.

I’m sorry Tanon but your posts backing yourself up have been pretty bad.

1. Yes gPotato has been around for a while but they didn’t make the game. It was made by Hanbitsoft (or JoyImpact) and gPotato is just hosting it for North America. I wouldn’t be surprised if gPotato would fail miserably at creating an MMORPG since they don’t actually make them. They buy licenses and distribute.

2. gPotato is pretty successful so I think they know what they are doing when they buy games to distribute.

3. It’s Closed Beta. Not Open Beta, not Release. It’s Closed Beta. Bugs are to be expected. gPotato’s job was translating the game, not bugfixing. Bugfixes come from the developers who wrote the game unless it is a very small fix, then gPotato can handle it.

4. Yes, in Beta the game is a prototype for the game that will be marketed. Prototype means a model of the product to come. Prototypes usually still have a lot of bugs in them, even in the tech world. If people started releasing prototypes with no problems, they wouldn’t be prototypes they would be finished products.

5. Even though you tried to excuse yourself I’m gonna grill you for it. “5 minute review” you are basing all your assumptions off of that. Well let me tell you how my first 5 minutes went.

* Incredibly easy to bug up the WASD controls. In 5 minutes of playing, I’ve had my character perform a walking animation on the spot on several occasions. Besides that, the rendering of your character’s orientation is off-you will start walking in one direction while facing another. Movement in general is very buggy.
* Wallhacks. Well, not through the walls, but through other doodads. I’m quite used to running through small fences and such; being able to run through entire rocks is a whole other matter. Some rocks let you walk halfway through them then magically teleport you above them.
* EZ-mode. This is a two-way topic, but the quests pretty much hold your hand through everything. Where’s the adventure?

But guess what, after the first few minutes all those problems went away. From what I can remember, AIKA works by caching graphical information so that it can be accessed much faster later on. This causes quite a bit of slow down in the first few minutes of play (sometimes causing graphical glitches) but afterwards speeds up and only needs to load things if a “not seen before” item comes onto the screen. This is why AIKA can have 2000 people battling at once and is also why the longer you are in the game the faster it goes.

About EZ-mode: you did the first maybe three quests. Which are the newbie quests. Newbie quests are designed so that people new to the MMO genre (or to the current game) can get accustomed to NPC locations and how to play. Hell, this wasn’t even as hand-holdy as other newbie quests in games I’ve played. Would you rather be plunked into the game and be told “Kill the Red-Crested Death Eagle” and not be told where said monster appears? Then you have hundreds of noobs getting frustrated and quitting. Of all your arguments this was the worst.

No, you cannot jump off walls (don’t know any MMOs where you can do that)

And for the camera/textures just zoom out a bit. It’s pretty simple. Unless you are talking about things that didn’t happen to me since most of my issues graphically were with entering/intersecting meshes.