Nostalgia

Dear Blog,

As you can see it has, again, been forever since I last wrote. This entry does not stem from the random impulse to once again revive my blog into something it has never really been. (which is, a blog that gets updated once a day, every day)

However, today I remembered there's something I wanted to write down so I wouldn't forget.

It's about Aion, and it's about the initial play time invested by Sepher, Baer, Demo, Fabi, Frenzied, Rakoo and myself. I know it's been a long time since we played Aion, and yeah on further inspection the game might not have been as awesome as we'd hoped, but there's something to be said for those first few months. To start with the character creation interface, which is still the best I've ever seen so far. Don't ask me how, when the options were limitless, I ended up with what probably most resembled an anime character. She was short, red-haired, and big-eyed. Seriously, they don't give you any idea of how short your character is going to look in comparison to the ingame characters. However, when you've spend at least an hour figuring out how your character should look, you have to defend her when other players point out her various faults. I should have just created a new one right there an then, when I was still level one. Alas I was too stubborn, and for the next 49 levels I looked upon Sepher's full-breasted blonde with envy. Rakoo's african-american amazon-chick wasn't bad either, she was, of course, better than mine, but she wasn't "xarvana" either. For as far as I can remember Demo was a blackhaired-dude, kindof skinny, Baer was a big bald-headed dude, not skinny at all, Frenzied was another blond beauty who somehow managed to outshine my redhead (even though I pointedly denied this) and Fabi, well, he played a female but this was perhaps the only one I wasn't particularly envious about. I think she had two braids. Fabi was picky like that, had go have his own thing. And sometimes, when we gave him hell for his char's looks, I suspect he too worked hard at pretending to like his char. Then again he watched anime, so maybe there was some truth to his beliefs. In this aspect Fabi might also have been the only one who liked my char at least kind of, what with the whole anime thing and all.

Anyway enough about the chars. The thing I remember most about Aion is the endless grinding. See, quests usually only got you halway, 3/4 if you were lucky. So the nights spend in the famous grinding area called the Kaiden Headquarters were plentiful. We were there hours on end, all night, evey night. We started playing Aion immediatly after release, so the people in our levelarea were mostly just as nerdy as us. Suffice it to say if you found a group to grind with, even your random member didn't have to leave after maybe 2 hours. No people, this was hardcore. This was a Korean game, and we were finding that out the hard way. I particularly remember one night in the Kaiden Headquarters, we were in a party of 6 as is normal in Aion, Sepher, Demo, Rakoo and I were there, and two randoms whos names I don't remember. What I do remember was that it must've been about 3.30 in the morning, and we were standing around regenerating when we decided to check how long our random mates were up for staying with us. The replies were positive. And then the one guy said something along the lines of "I just have to be afk for 1,5 hours, then I'm good to go". This was met with awkward silence on our part, mostly we were busy imagining what he had to go do in the middle of the night for one and a half hours. (the possibilities were endless) It turned out he had to deliver some newspapers, but would be back to join us in our seemingly neverending quest for xp.

I can positively say that this is among the highlights of the nerdisshness of my life. Not so much because he had to go deliver some papers, but because we'd actually be there waiting for him when he got back. Call it what you will but we sure had some fun with those Kaiden dudes.

Another one such memorable events in Aion happened some time after that. There was an epic quest in Aion, that rewarded the player with a awesome weapon, and in Aion epic REALLY means epic. The quest took forever, had about a million steps, and it was among the final and most difficult steps of this quest that this story takes place. Demo, Rakoo, myself and three randoms were in a party, on our way to the final step of beforementioned epic quest. For this quest, you had to travel through a rift into enemy territory, fight your way through an elite-area to one of their instances and the defeat the boss in said instance. These rifts only spawned once every few hours or so, and you had to have the exact correct one to get to the instance. When we hear the rift was there, we quickly partied up and went on our way. This was a journey of epic proportions. (befitting the quest) Remember folks, this was when Aion was brand new, and elite mobs were ELITE. Needless to say we had some very close calls. When we finally made it to the instance we were pretty happy with ourselves, and pretty tired of the outside snowy-scenery, so inside we went. Which is where the real fun started. Don't remember how often we had to run outside because someone added the whole room instead of a few mobs, but there was some progress. It was, I think, during one of those "oh shit the whole room added let's get out of here"-pulls that one of our randoms (thankfully not the healer) died. Now, dying isn't exactly the end of the world when you have a priest along who can revive the unfortunate player. However, this player wasn't just unfortunate, he was also stupid. He pressed the release button which pretty much brought him back to life on the other side of the rift, with no way for him to get back to us since the rift we used had disappeared. Though not without lack of trying on his part, he found another rift and wandered though enemy territory the rest of the evening. Stayed in ventrilo with us too, I think we all felt kind of bad for him. We did finish the instance without him though. I think we only had respawn once. It was the ultimate hard-work-pays-off moment in aion, we all got an awesome weapon for our trouble, felt kind of invincible afterwards i guess (at least i did). Totally awkward for random guy #2 though, since he went through more trouble than anyone and didn't get any reward. Such is the nature of the game I guess. You snooze you lose.

It's memories like this that make me miss gaming. It's why Rakoo and I are currently looking for a new mmorpg to try out, I mean even if it sucks, in the beginning everything is new, nothing is nerfed, and exploring new stuff with a party of friends is just about the most fun you'll ever get in an mmorpg, because pretty soon nothing's gonna be new anymore, just look at WoW. In the beginning everything was better. Blizzard gets this in a way that they keep adding new content, they just kind of forget that the items you achieve while conquering new stuff are half the fun, and if they keep making your acquirements useless by introducing better stuff that easier to get (basically nullifying your achievement) the game gets old. Fast.

Anyway, I hope there's some moments like the ones I've described in my future, it would have to be my near future because somehow the older I get the more embarrassed about gaming I become. Somehow gaming isn't that cool when you're 35. (says the girl who's dad plays WoW)

On the other hand, it shouldn't matter all that much how old I am, as long as we have fun together and it's something I can look back on years later and smile about. However cheesy that may sound.