Ayaseâs Realm
DreamHack Winter 2008
The previous weekend signified both the start and end of DreamHack Winter this year, boasting a total of about 13,000 visitors going in and out the exhibition doors during. It meant another chance for me to get up close and personal with the people behind the nicks of Aion Online Sverige (that’s our beloved Swedish Aion fansite).
One of the exhibition halls.
I forgot the battery charger for my own camera at home and had to spend the preceding few days looking to buy a new one at a decent price. Unfortunately I didn’t find any, and I managed to lose the battery somewhere while at it. In other words, check out some pictures AoS grabbed from the event over in their event section instead.
Aion Online Sverige group picture. Are you doing something similar with your legion or fansite? Send me the pics!
As a total surprise I brought a laptop with Aion playable for those who weren’t able to make it to Leipzig this year. Needless to say, the affection was immediate.
The Aion-effect in action, manifested by “sejml”.
After getting rid of the initial Aion-twitches, we headed outside the exhibition area to grab a bite, courtesy of NCsoft.
You will be surprised to find that DreamHack takes place far out in the suburban concrete woods of Jönköping, Sweden, and as such is located painfully far away from anywhere with great food. We ended up taking up all the chairs and tables of a fast food place where paper plates and plastic cutlery had been put out to celebrate the occasion.
To sum it up, I had great fun hanging out with everyone, grabbing the group picture and trying to write AION with human bodies in front of the camera. Definitely looking forward to meeting everyone again next year!
Stay smooth and remain jacked in to the Aion matrix.
That is all!
Seagulls, fansites and Korean OB
Good morning guys and girls,
It’s morning in UK-land and the blasted seagulls have once again taken it onto themselves to patrol the perimeters of our office. With one eye on the screen and one eye constantly leering towards their seemingly innocent presence (but I know better), I thought it was about time to make a sweep through our Fansite listing page. I am glad to announce that for now, only two inactive fansites bit the dust, but it still makes for a great 24 non-German, non-French fansites out there. I think it’s amazing that we have so many ambitious individuals prepared to stay up to date on the game. 
Speaking of fansites, I would like to welcome a newcomer for today – AionIRC – home of the previously mentioned IRC channel of Aion (#Aion @ Quakenet). Check it out. You may also want to pay a visit to “Legions Of Aion”, a beautiful Dutch fansite that was added the other week. Find it here!
In other news I’m sure you haven’t missed the fact that Aion has broken records when it comes to beta testing in Korea. After a meagre two minutes, concurrency numbers (people playing at the same time) reached 11.000, to later ramp up to 170.000, then 200.000, and from there – well let’s just say that the trend doesn’t seem to be changing. The beta ends in a little bit less than a week and full services are announced to go live in Korea the 25th of November. On our side of the sphere we’re still on for a 2009 launch!
That’s all for today.
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The last Friday of October
Yes, yes. I know that today is Thursday, but let’s not get too buried down in details shall we?
Burr. It was mid-summer two weeks ago with t-shirt weather and a sun that would forcefully drag your mouth out in the shape of a smile. And now we’re down to almost 280 Kelvin (go for it people—convert to Kelvinism). It’s getting colder. The times they are a-changin’ as Bob Dylan so well puts it in lyrics.
Something else that’s changing is the state of the game. That’s right, folks. Aion is rapidly approaching Open Beta status in Korea, which I think reminds us all that our release here in Europe and North America grows closer by the day as well. An interesting feature that was launched in conjunction with the Open Beta announcement was the ability for players to select servers and create their characters in advance. There are a lot of really nice characters there and I think it’s an excellent example of the even more increased freedom in character creation between the phases (pay extra attention to the beards – my personal favourite). I know that I’ll probably be bombarded with questions about whether we will launch the same here in the EU and US at some point. For that question I don’t have an answer right now, but I’m not the one to rule anything out.
I’m assuming that if you read this, you also read this which should have brought you over to our Wallpaper and Video sections. The content in those galleries is of course rather self-explanatory. There are 18 new character render wallpapers and two new videos uploaded to go with them. One of the videos is a CGI rendered clip that is meant more to look nice and set the atmosphere of the game rather than to directly show gameplay (goes with without saying, doesn’t it?). The other video however shows in-game footage. I wouldn’t go as far as to say ‘gameplay footage’, but it’s definitely in-game and a good insight into the world of Aion. The user
Take it easy over the weekend now, guys and girls. I know that it’s Halloween and everything for some of you, but that’s not a valid reason to stay out-of-the-loop on Aion.
/Ayase
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Clockwork’s Pendulum
Another weekend draws closer and I’ll soon be riding towards the sunset once again, just like Clint Eastwood probably did in his old Wild West movies. I have to admit, I’m not that well-read on Clint Eastwood, but I did find his more recent directing efforts à la Flags of our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima to be fairly entertaining. The later especially—most likely affected by the fact that I’m a big fan of Japanese cinema, especially the independent kind. But I digress, quite badly I might add.
Aion-town’s nightlife got a major upswing yesterday when Aion’s Official Soundtrack was announced for release later this month in Korea. If you live in the EU/NA and are impatiently looking to import it, YesAsia apparently has it up for Pre-Order, and while I wouldn’t want to officially endorse anyone to buy it from there, I have myself never had any bad experiences with them. For discussion, I humbly suggest you pay a visit to this thread over at Aionsource. Check either of the links for a track list.
In other news, Gamereactor finally put online their video recording of one of my interviews from Leipzig, and Amboss took a picture of an Iron.
Why would he do that? And more importantly—for what reason was I chugging around big spotlights between office buildings? I’m also considering buying clips, model large and sturdy with a spring. Stay tuned for the exciting resolution.
Have a nice weekend, everyone.
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Status Report
Hello guys and girls,
As the weekend is approaching more rapidly than sir Lancelot from Monty Python, I thought I would stop by and give you a little status “update”.
This is what’s going down in Aion-town:
The development team in Seoul is still munching through feedback and preparing for the arrival of Korean Open Beta, making sure that the game is just where they want it.
On our own part (Community Team in Brighton) we are working on a few community-oriented items that in some time will surface more unexpectedly than you might imagine. All in all, things are still progressing very nicely and the time will eventually come for you to see the fruit of our efforts.
That is all. Have a nice weekend, folks.
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Competition over at AionSource
This is just a very short post to mention the ‘Grand Contest’ currently held over at AionSource.com, and I may be a few days late posting this - but that’s beside the point.
The point is that this is a pretty big competition where participants from both the EU and the US can compete in several areas (art/video/sound/writing/etc) in order to pick up some nice Aion swag prizes. You can find it right over here.
As always, if you have news or cool stuff going on that you think deserves some extra attention - give me a tell.
That is all.
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A few words on a Wednesday
Hey folks,
I just wanted to humbly step in with a Wednesday intermission, checking in with two noteworthy things:
First, for those of you who haven’t read it already there’s a great Aion hands-on article over at mmorpg.com. Looks alright to me and definitely follows the same trend we’re saying everywhere after people have had hands-on experience with the game - it’s showing the Aion effect. You know, that moment when you find yourself just blankly staring at the Aion screen, more or less subliminally blocking out everything else. Oh yeah, we’ve had that happen.
Secondly, I’d like to welcome a new Italian fansite to the round-table. Welcome Mvaion! I’m absolutely hoping to see your community flourish and grow in the future. We’ll be updating the fansite kit shortly, having it include a few new asset to ease the initial process of new fansites.
Now everybody, go back to playing with sharp things or whatever it was you were doing.
That is all.
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Best Stand of Show
It’s been a few weeks now, but I thought I’d quickly mention the award we received after Games Convention from the German portal Onlinewelten - “Beste Stand-Show”, of course translated in to Best Booth Show of Games Convention 2008.
“Once you have entered the visitor halls of the Leipzig exhibition grounds, your attention was drawn to the winged game of NCsoft. Every third visitor you saw carried one of these prettily printed Aion bags. The apparently inexhaustible source of these carrier bags was the NCsoft booth in hall 3. The fans not only got the opportunity to play their favourite game by themselves; they also got heated up with numerous Give-Away actions. The professionally staged plays that dealt with topics from the Aion universe were the distinctive feature on the stand show. We therefore think that this clearly needs to be awarded with the prize for the best booth show of this year’s Games Convention!”
I don’t know about you, but I think that’s pretty nice.
That’s all.
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Live Questing
As you probably read in my blog posting last week, we put some guys through what we call a ‘Live Quest’ at the Games Convention.
Live Quest, you ask. What is that?
Let me show you.
Mark, Szabi, Fleiva and Cori looked so energetic when we met them, that they were given a Leipzig map with some marked out co-ordinates. A bit like geocaching, just with a not so hidden treasure. The pen writing was not provided by us.
What happened next?
A great hunt entailed, indeed. The guys actually set out to locate these positions, all 34 (either that or 49, memory of a gold fish) of them. These were the positions of Aion advertisement banners from a campaign run for the duration of GC. The challenge was to take a picture of themselves in front of each one of them. And boy did they do it? In a journey that would exhaust most species of smaller dogs, over the course of two days, they went to find each and every banner* scattered throughout Leipzig.
They were all so optimistic and happy in the beginning.
One of my favourites. It just looks brilliantly casual. Spotlight’s on Mark.
You can find the entire collection over here, in Mark’s own flickr stream.
So, what do I want to say with this blog post?
Well, two things:
1) These guys were really cool for going through with this and I thought it would be a nice feature to highlight.
2) If you have other cool things like this happening in the community, feel free to send a mail to ayase ¤ ncsoft.com. Basically, anything that could be really interesting to other Aion fans out there, I may write about. Disclaimer: It will be done on my own discretion, so don’t expect too much. I’m quite picky.
Once again - kudos to Mark, Szabi, Fleiva and Cori for completing our Live Quest. They were of course rewarded (with the grande treasure of a 60 day game time card, Guild Wars Platinum Edition and the latest Lineage II chronicle each). We hope to get more possibilities of doing stuff like this in the future. But until then.
That is all.
* In fact, not all of the advertisements were there, which certainly came as a surprise to both them and us.
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Post-GC. Post-Insanity. Pre-Recovery.
Waiting for me at my desk when today arriving for my first day of proper work following the great adventure that was GC 2008, was a big DVD box-set of Robotech: The Complete Saga. I will enjoy that at some point when there is more time, but I digress.
Warning: The content of this article may upset non-GC visitors.
You’re bound to have sprung across our flickr-page which should help you imagine what a big and purely mind-blowing event this was. It was like being carefully enclosed in a little bubble fantasy world. And to now leave everything, returning to real life, is like slamming rock-hard into a solid door (like the most expensive ones in Dungeon Keeper).
It was a great event and it was great fun meeting everyone from the community. Mark from Aionsource, Cori and Szabi from Aionhun.hu and Fleiva from Reign were present for almost the entire event. They even had time to visit all of our ~50 advertisement banners scattered around the City of Leipzig (that translates into a lot of walking). Kudos to them for that!
From Left: Szabi, Mark, Fleiva, Cori
There was also a solid and strong representation from our good friends over at AionOnline.se, running Scandinavia’s only fansite. From the sound of it, they managed to get time both to play Aion on the show floor (I was challenged to a 1vs1 duel), as well as to have talks with me and the other guys tied up in the Business Centre. Worth pointing out is that Caineth (in the picture) recently became the official Aion correspondent over at mmorpg.com. You can find his introductory article here.
From Left: Prekkan, Klingsan, SpliNT, Ayase (me), Christian-Peter Heimbach (NCsoft, Aion Product Manager), Caineth, SebMcCayen
Between the demo runs I had some time to participate in various activities down at the show floor, although of course not as often as I would have wanted to. As you may have heard, we had paper bags with a Shugo and Aion artwork on them. I set out to refill our supply at the front of our booth a few times, but let me tell you this: I never got the chance to. People would literally flock up around me as I arrived with the new bags. Hands would fly towards me from everywhere, eagerly grasping for a bag. At the end, they ran out before I got the chance to refill any of the hangers at all! :(
Thanks everyone who came and made GC what it was. I love this Aion community that we’re all building, and hope that you feel the same way. If we all keep contributing and doing our best to make it a cool place to be at - there’s nothing that’s going to be able to stop us.
That is all.
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A few notes from GC!
Imagine a bus stop. You know, the really crowded type. Maybe a Monday morning around 7 or 8 just as everyone are on their way to work. That’s not quite enough. Scratch that.
Imagine a train station. You know, like on the first day of vacation when everyone is rushing around, desperately trying to find the track number corresponding to the one hastily scribbled down on a ripped piece of throw-away paper. Imagine that crowd. That enormous crowd. And I’m still not done with analogies. It’s not quite enough.
Imagine an airport. You know, the larger type. Not like the one here in Leipzig. At least not like the one we went to where the baggage claim, pass control, waiting area and probably a whole bunch of other undercover businesses were all in the same small 50 sqm room. Yes, an airport. A really large airport. That’s probably as close as you get to imagining the Games Convention here in Leipzig. And it just barely started.
I am myself mostly stowed away in the Press Centre, giving Aion demos to journalists and other (hopefully) important people. I’m certainly not complaining though, it’s quite nice here. We get free sandwiches. I am also privileged to be working with really good people and it just reassures me every time. It reassures me that Aion is going to be very awesome indeed.
Almost surprisingly prevalent is the fact that so many carry around our Aion bags. They’re spawned from the depths of the NCsoft/Aion booth of course and then trickle their way throughout the convention area. The booth itself is filled with people waiting to get their hands on Aion, and it really thrills me. The feedback is good, but not surprisingly so. I’ve been convinced since day one that Aion is a slumbering giant. A giant that, once awakened, will take the world by storm.
The hotel we are staying at has good food and I’m probably eating way too much. In other words: I should probably make a few laps around the booth. I imagine that it’s good exercise to push yourself through the crowds of rabid much loved fans!
I’ll see if there’s more time later down the road for another update. Until then - be sure to follow any other coverage made by us or those of you attending the show.
That is all.
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Quest for GC - Episode 11: Boot Camp
*dum* *dum da-dum* *dum du duuuuuuu*..... goes the epic movie theme which infested and deployed a permanent nest in the minds of most people growing up in the 70/80’s. If you can guess which one I’m referring to even before watching the below video, I congratulate you for your excellent abilities in interpreting written representation of non-vocal music.
With every big event comes a lot of preparation (not kidding you there, I actually had to carry around boxes), on both physical and mental levels. GC 2008 is definitely not an exception.
What they didn’t show you in this video, because it was sadly cut out, were my superb karateesque skills. I guess it would require a rating, which would simply be too much work. Rated A for Awesome, if you know what I mean.
Linger no longer, friends, but watch the attached movie. It’s the last one for now. See you in Leipzig!
Alternative mirror:
http://blip.tv/file/1181306
If you use iTunes, don’t forget that you can subscribe to the blip.tv video stream with itpc://ncsofteurope.blip.tv/rss/itunes/.
Did you miss Episode 10? I didn’t post about it, but you can still find it here.
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Quest for GC - Episode 9: One More Thing …
*crosses fingers*
Alternative mirror:
http://blip.tv/file/1175105/
If you use iTunes, don’t forget that you can subscribe to the blip.tv video stream with itpc://ncsofteurope.blip.tv/rss/itunes/.
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Quest for GC - Episode 8: The Quest System Explained
As we mentioned in one of our elder GC 2008 announcements, there will be a ‘Questing System’ for visitors to partake in at the Games Convention in Leipzig this year. It’s quite simple and we could probably summarize it in one sentence. Well, it would be a pretty long sentence. Amboss tried with moderate success.
So, instead of giving you the summary in one sentence we dug out an instructional video from the NCsoft attic (sharing space with some furniture, a box of PC spare parts and a bear)*. It’s a bit longer than the other ones but hopefully you will find it highly informative and the viewing worthwhile.
* Okay, the attic is a metaphor. But you get the point!
Alternative mirror:
http://blip.tv/file/1172435
If you use iTunes, don’t forget that you can subscribe to the blip.tv video stream with itpc://ncsofteurope.blip.tv/rss/itunes/.
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Aion a capella
I just love it when people do cool Aion things, like the following one for an example:
Via: Aionsource
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Two little things
Allakhazam just put online a little interview/Q&A with the good sir Charles Dane (kieron) who also happens to be my colleague over in the US. Head over here to read it in case you haven’t already!
On an entirely different note, I just gained Operator status in the #Aion IRC chat channel on QuakeNet. For those of you who aren’t familiar with IRC already, it’s a form of real-time Internet chat much like MSN or AIM - just primarily constructed for larger conversion, for chat channels. Obviously my new-found Operator-status made me eager to lure more of you in there, to expand my dominion (evil laughter). If you feel like joining in with some fellow Aion-fans already in there, this seems like a good place to start. There’s a web applet in there and links for suitable IRC clients. #Aion is of course not an ‘official’ chat channel per se, but you will most likely find me idling in there whenever I can remember to do so!
That is all.
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Leipzig drawing closer
Ladies and gentlemen,
I just wanted to make a quick post to remind you all that the awesome Games Convention is drawing closer and I’m myself preparing and testing the tools necessary to perform blogging on-location. I’ll be trying my best to get the things I see and hear written down and published from the convention itself, even if I’m personally going to be locked inside dark dungeons giving demonstrations in the Press Centre most of the time. Be that as it may, I still hope that you’ll follow my blog during the days in Leipzig and that the ones of you who can’t make it get atleast some amount of joy from it.
For any fellow geeks out there, the PC I’ll be bringing is an Advent 4211 subnotebook/netbook which I expect will be very convenient to carry around due to its modest weight. The keyboard’s size is alright though, unlike many other netbooks’ keyboards, which should make it excellent for blogging.
Until next time,
Ayase
EOF
Edit: Oops, I accidently posted this as a regular news item at first. Hopefully not too many RSS-feeds caught it! I obviously need to get more used to these new tools/toys.
EOF for real
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Ayase solves: The Mystery of the Preview Events
There’s been a lot of talk about the Exclusive Preview Event announcement we made yesterday, such as here, here, over here (oops, that was something else) and here. Plenty of questions have arisen and I’ll try to pin down a few of the more common ones in my craftily composed Q&A.
Q: Will we be able to try and play the game before launch?
A: Yes! That’s what the Preview Events are all about. They will help us prepare for launch and offer you the chance of giving Aion a first spin, to get a sneak-peak and warm up!
Q: Do I have to go to an exhibition to do so?
A: No! We have a number of different activities planned in relation to these events, but you will not need to go to one of the conventions we visit in order to secure a slot, nor to participate. There will be opportunities to sign up and also to play from home.
Q: When was this again?
A: We’re looking at launching them in 2009. Remember that we’ll still be visiting live events and exhibitions where you may have a chance to try the game out before the Preview Events kick off. Upcoming is Games Convention 2008 in Leipzig where Aion will be playable for visitors!
Now, I know that you probably have tons of questions about the details around these events and more details will be going out closer to the Preview Events’ start. Make sure that you stay connected to the hive by frequenting this site and signing up for this newsletter in order to be among the first to know.
Fly safe, everyone.
(Today’s guest greeting, as used by Aion Online Sverige - “Flyg lugnt")
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