Advanced character class system gives players ultimate control of their destiny in NCsoft's Aion: The Tower of Eternity

NCsoft reveals the detailed character class system behind its eagerly anticipated MMORPG, Aion: The Tower of Eternity.
Wednesday 19th December/... Massively Multiplayer Online RPG fans can look forward to a wealth of career opportunities in NCsoft's forthcoming Aion: The Tower of Eternity next year, with gamers able to literally choose their destiny thanks to the game's two-tiered character class system.

Characters begin their journey by choosing one of four base professions - Warrior, Scout, Mage and Priest. This initial tier of development impacts on everything from a character's strength, to their combat prowess, to their magical abilities, ultimately shaping the players actions throughout the game. However, higher-level players can tailor their character further still, with each profession offering two advanced classes, bringing the total number of character types available in Aion: The Tower of Eternity up to eight.

While the initial choice of character class will largely depend on each player's personal style, the ability to develop a character through the advanced class system ensures that players have all the tools they need to create a character that is unique to them.

The Warrior
Bold, brave and possessing immense physical prowess, Warriors excel in close-quarter combat. Strong performers in a wide range of situations, Warriors are relatively easy to master and when fully realised can unleash a spectacular range of physically devastating skills.

Depending on how players prefer to approach combat, Warriors can specialise as either Gladiators, who concentrate on dealing damage through brute force, or Templars, who combine fierce fighting with defensive chants and techniques.

The Scout
The Scout combines great agility with swift attacks. Scout players require a deft and accurate touch to get the most out of this tricky class, however the rewards are great and offer the greatest variety in play style of all the basic classes.

Scouts that specialise in ranged combat develop naturally into Rangers, an advanced class equally adept in the use of blades and traps. For those Scouts who prefer to stay hidden and strike from the shadows, the Assassin class is the perfect choice of advancement.

The Mage
Mages compensate their weakness in physical combat with the ability to launch devastatingly powerful magic attacks. In addition, Mages must learn to divert and evade the enemy so that they're able to attack from the relative safety of range.

As Mages advance, so their mastery over the elements of water, air, earth and fire increase, their choice of advanced class determining how that mastery is manifest. Spiritmasters can summon and control elemental spirits, while Sorcerers channel elemental power into fearsome magical bolts and missiles.

The Priest
Spiritual warriors, Priests can use healing and self-protection spells to excel in melee combat, and launch powerful ranged magic attacks too. This makes them not only useful support characters in a party of adventurers, but also powerful combatants in their own right.

Priests that specialise in healing and protecting their allies naturally progress to the advanced class of Cleric, the ultimate support class. Alternatively, Priests can become Chanters, pious warriors that boast both healing and ability-boosting powers.

Players will be able to experience all eight character classes for themselves while exploring the incredible world of Atreia when Aion: The Tower of Eternity launches later next year.

Character Battle VI [GameFaqs]

PS. If I stole this link from someone, send me an email. I can't find where I got the link.

FilePlanet subscribers have first dibs on the beta, as they're given priority in the queue, but the ET:QW public beta is open to all.

While the beta should in no way be confused for a proper demo, anyone with an interest should read on for more details. This is the kind of thing that looks great on a résumé. Michael McWhertor

Enemy Territory: QUAKE Wars Public Beta First Details [ETQW Community via 1UP]

Having grown up in the era of the Krofft Brothers and then having worked for The Mouse for a short period of my life, I have a certain fondness for anything involving giant character costumes. (Not in that weird "Furry" sort of way, but more in that nostalgic TV land sort of way.) So, needless to say I love this commercial for Super Smash Brothers on the Nintendo 64 featuring Mario, Yoshi, Donkey Kong and Pikachu. All is well as our four heroes hold hands, skipping through an impossibly cartoony, sunflower covered field to the tune of The Turtles' Happy Together. Then things get ugly...

I realized after watching this that the only thing better than watching people romping about in Nintendo character costumes is watching people in Nintendo character costumes beating the crap out of each other. Flynn De Marco

Last year, Chris Kohler over at Game|Life got a chance to participate in a Sega sponsored Virtua Fighter 5 tournament. Due to his awesome Virtua Fighter skillz, Chris was able to land 5th place and the opportunity to create an custom AI character that would appear in the final game. His character, Kobun Heat, will be making his debut when the game hits the PS3 on Feb. 20th. If you don't have a PS3 you can enjoy Chris' saucy luchador when VF5 comes to the Xbox 360 later this year. Flynn De Marco

Virtua Fighter 5: My Character [Game|Life]

Super Smash Bros Brawl producer Sora Sakurai announced today that they will be showing off new footage from the upcoming Wii game at the Nintendo World 2006 event in Japan.

The video will include new characters, so it's a must see.

Good thing we have Ashcraft going to the event. Make sure to check back for our coverage and the unveiling of the new characters. Come on Master Chief. Brian Crecente

Smash Bros [Thanks Ryan for the heads up and translation]

For the last 8 days, I have been valiantly struggling to help a friend transfer his World of Warcraft character from Shadowfist to Kor'gall on the European servers.

You see, he doesn't have a credit card. So I was more than happy to step up to the plate and put it on mine. I am a millionaire video games blogger, after all.

When the first step was completed, I was told there was approximately a 12 hour queue to transfer his character. Okay, no problem. 12 hours later the estimated wait time was the same. 36 hours later? It shot up to two days. By the time Monday came around, we started figuring out that there was something much more substantially wrong than a long queue.

We checked the forums. Hundred of people were complaining, yet Blizzard didn't deign to answer a single question. When a blue Blizzard rep did show up, he merely cut and pasted a static response that the system was working as intended, and that these were flukes that should be resolved by calling the billing department. Not a single person who called could resolve the issue with a CSR: they suggest canceling the transfer and starting over again. Those who did had no more luck getting their characters transferred. We decided to wait it out.

Finally, yesterday, my friend was told that his character was ready to be transfered. All he needed to do was log in, confirm his credit card details and click transfer. I did this on his behalf: I got an incomprehensible error message. For the next twelve hours, I logged in once per hour, repeating this step. At no time was the character transfer finalized.

But here's the kicker: this morning I check the forums again, and see a message from a user who got a more or less firm statement from Blizzard over the phone that they know there's a serious issue with their character transfer and not to keep on trying to finalize the transfer, as it would always fail but would charge your account 20 euros for each failed attempt.

My heart stopped. I checked my online credit card statement: no charges. I went back to the forums and it turns out that it doesn't appear to happen to those doing the transfer with credit cards, but only guys with debit cards. Dozens of people complain that their entire accounts have been drained by this. They are completely broke; their banks have frozen their accounts.

So what we have here is an error on Blizzard's part that has completely drained the bank accounts of some of their customers. Paid character transfer hasn't worked for the last 8 days, but it was only today Blizzard pulled the page. At no point has Blizzard issued a statement, an ETA or even admitted on their forums that there is an issue. Hearsay is the only word that comforts those people who have been bankrupt trying to transfer their fruity little gnomes.

How can a company be so close-lipped with their customers? What level of callous contempt for the ignorant monkeys who greedily lap up Blizzard's wares can possibly explain such rank incompetence and lack of consideration? What a disgrace.

PCT Info, Payment/Errors/Failure [WoW Europe Forums]

Character movement is one of those things that can make or break a game's realism, even moreso than character design. Good movement will get you through times of bad design more often than good design will get you through bad movement.

I hearken to Grand Theft Auto as an example: despite the oven mitt hands, low-poly bodies and nearly expressionless faces, the combination of well-animated (or captured, I'm not sure) movement and exquisite voice acting makes those characters come alive.

So I was not surprised (but still horrified) to learn that the traditional method of character model construction was from the outside in, that is to say, drawing the outlines first and not worrying much about skeletal or muscular structures. Any freshman figure drawing student can tell you what a massive mistake this is, how truncated and stiff your creations will be if you jump right into the outline before knowing how the skeleton works.

But this is apparently a revelation in game animation.

A more accurate method, Zhang says, is to build a character's muscles first and then add the skin on top of them. It's more natural looking, he says, but it requires detailed knowledge of anatomy, and it's counterintuitive for an artist who has the external appearance of a character in mind. For those reasons, he says, the muscle-based approach has been mostly an academic curiosity.

"Counterintuitive" my ass. How is it counterintuitive to think of a body being moved by its muscles, or supported by its skeleton? If this is truly the mindset of the current generation of game artists, then no wonder the vast majority of titles have such appallingly canned movement.

Let this be a lesson to aspiring game designers, cartoonists, and artists of all stripes: learn to draw. More specifically, learn to draw traditionally, from the anatomy out, like the old mastas used to do it back in the day.

Remember, life drawing class = staring at naked people for a long, long time. And many of them, I can tell you from personal Art School experience, are middling-to-extremely attractive. Eliza "it doesn't matter how bad it sucks as long as the director wears a beret" Gauger

Beefing Up Animation Software [Technology Review, thanks Jason]

Mucking about with monsters!

Shooting lasers!

Honking and bellowing!

These all came out on the 28th over at GameTrailers, and I saw them on Aeropause, who had about as much to say as I do. One thing I will note about these trailers is the sound. The dynamic music is good, if not particularly stand-out, but the sound effects are top-notch. I love the monster croaking. Eliza Gauger

Tim Schafer seems smart. Like, really smart. I am extremely impressed with the very simple, very true little bombs he drops over and over in this recorded lecture from GDC 2004.

Yeah, it's long. But for anyone interested in creating any sort of fictional experience, be it games, movies, books or Crecente/Bashcraft slashfic (we call it Bashfic), this will be a valuable hour and five minutes for you.

A very few of the many points Schafer makes about creating good characters:

• Characters should be wish fulfillment. This doesn't mean they can't be goofy, or nerdy, or losers. There are lots of ways to make characters that are fun to play. Guybrush might not be a badass, but he always has a comeback.
• Create supporting NPCs as you would the ideal road trip buddies. Making them annoying, offputting, needlessly stupid or generally hateful and then sticking the player with them through the whole game is just sadistic.
• Write the PC as you would a character in a movie, a character that a good actor would jump at playing.

More after the jumpasaur.

• Backstory. Making up pasts for every single one of your characters, big ones or not, makes it insanely easy to imbue them with neat little traits by pulling from the past you've created.
• Steal stuff, but steal it right. Steal stuff from life, especially. From your own life, from your friends', from crazy things hobos tell you on the street. And steal stuff from other fiction, but don't steal the surface junk. Steal what makes good things good. So if you're stealing from GTA, stealing the hookers and mobsters and violence is missing the point. Steal the fun, the open-ended gameplay, the facetious attitudes.

I'm taking better notes on this speech than I ever did on anything in the history of my school career, so I'll stop. Just give it a listen; even if you aren't a creator this will give you a whole new way to look at and appreciate games. Eliza Gauger

Listen to the lecture here, and subscribe to the Gamasutra podcast [Gamasutra]

Click the image to see full size, hosted here on Joystiq.

I love this. This is a fantastic new style and I am stoked for this game now. The distinctiveness of the different classes, the anatomy of the characters, the color palette and personality...the art department on this game is a winner. Look at the little touches like the athletic socks on the guy on the right, and the pants bunching under the kneepads of the engineer.

This is attention to detail, and characterization, and just overall excellent design. I can't wait to see them in action. Eliza gauger

First it was on, then off, now it's on again... and live. For the cool sum of twenty five beans, you can finally transfer your World of Warcraft character from one server to another... possibly one without quite so many Korean schoolboys flooding the unofficial dark elf hooker profession.

All the rumored details are true: it costs twenty five bucks a character. You take all your swag with you. You can't be the leader of a guild, you have to be at least level 10, you can only transfer once every six months. And if you're a scummy gold farmer, you will be transferred to the Abu Gharaib servers of World of Warcraft. We refer, of course, to the role-playing servers. Florian Eckhardt

Character Transfer Page [Official Site]

Weve noticed some threads asking about the paid character-transfer info currently circulating on the Web. This feature has been in development for some time now, and while we arent ready to launch the service as yet, were planning on releasing details on it in the near future.

Once the details go live, well be able to answer any questions you have about the service. Until then, please post your questions in this thread so we can better gather your feedback.

Hustle it up, Blizz. I'm eager to renew my account — I'm eager to see how my new rig runs Ironforge. Florian Eckhardt

Blizzard Responds to Paid Character Transfers [WoW Forums]
Previously: $25 WoW Character Transfers A Reality

We were a bit agog at Blizzard's plans to sell character transfers for half the retail price of the game, but Kotakuite Cory wrote us in, putting it all in perspective. This is the character migration fee structure for Everquest 2

For moving characters on the same account from one server to a different server:

1 to 2 Characters = $75 (total charge)

3 to 8 Characters = $150 (total charge)

If you want to transfer 3-8 characters from one account to another on a different server, it can cost you up to $375. Moving one character with no items alone will cost an EQ2 player 50 bucks.

Jeezum Crow. MMORPGers sure are opulent suckers, aren't they? Florian Eckhardt

Previously: $25 WoW Character Transfers A Reality

Yesterday, the Australian Vivendi office tipped atomicmpc.com.au that starting today they'd be accepting character transfers between servers. Then Blizzard boo hooed, forcing atomicmpc to remove the post.

So what the hell's the deal? Is my undead zombie rogue finally going to be able to quit a server largely populated by grinding Russki orods and on to a server with a plausible economy.

Well, we're still not quite sure what the deal is, but we were pointed to this screenshot of what claims to be the official FAQ for character transfers. The main news here is transferring a single character will cost you a whopping twenty five bucks. That's just insane. Will Blizzard ever stop figuring out how to turn their money printing machine up another notch? Florian Eckhardt

WoW Character Transfer F.A.Q. (?)