Ayase�s Realm

Hey everyone – “CB2” is of course short for the longer “Closed Beta Event Number 2” and I’m crossing my fingers for your discretion regarding my current affinity for acronyms. I decided to stop by here just briefly as we’re tackling excessive summer heat and CB3 ("Closed Beta Event Number 3") preparations both at the exact same time. 

It would seem a lot of the happy bunch of you had a good time in our first beta phase and as we’re quickly approaching the second (this weekend, as a matter of fact) event I thought it could be interesting to share a couple of player pictures. These were all sent to me over the lapse of past week. I asked for ‘group’ pictures primarily, and as it is written - Ask and you shall receive (Disclaimer: Does not always work). 

“The expression or display of glad feeling; festive gaiety.” as per Dictionary.com.
I am sure that few have missed the fact that recent times have been engraved with a flavour of beta testing for everyone here in the Aion team. The past weekend’s event passed more quickly than anyone could have predicted and took us one solid step closer to release this fall.

I’m writing this small blurb just to ask anyone who participated to send over a screenshot or two from their testing. I’m interested in seeing ‘group pictures’ since this truly highlights what MMORPG’s are all about – social gaming. Did you capture any picture of yourself with friends? Players from your legion? Players from your fansite? Players you inexplicitly met and who wouldn’t leave you alone?

My e-mail is and I’ll be accepting your favourite group screenshot (only one, please, and keep it size-conservative) over the coming week and will possibly share a select few of them here in the blog!

Otherwise notable events on the horizon:

• Me being semi-AFK for a couple of days – June 11th
• Announcement on Aion Pre-orders: how and where to get them – June 17th
• Closed Beta Event no. 2 – June 19th

Stay cool.

Football is something that perhaps appeals more commonly to the general public in Europe than North America, but I would hope that in Aion; Spirit Soccer may get universal.

For those of you who are completely confounded by my previous words, let me introduce an in my opinion very innovative activity that recently popped up among Korean players of Aion. To give you the best idea possible of what we’re dealing with here I had a little talk with Cori, quite possibly the first one who brought information of Spirit Soccer to us here in the west. Read on.

Guys and girls,

Uncountable days and nights (they’re beyond the number of fingers on my both hands) have passed since my last blog post decorated this section of Aiononline.com. Many things have happened since, I’ll see if I can perhaps summarise some of it for those of you who don’t roam an Aion fansite regularly.

First of all, TenTonHammer has posted up two class interviews:

The Gladiator
The Templar

... and more to come!

MMORPG.com has put up an article about Aion, Daeva to be specific:

Introduction to the Daeva
And some screenshots to go with.

An Eltnen zone tour video was released just two days ago, and I’ll point you over to Aionsource.com to have a look at it:

Eltnen zone tour video

In other news, we’re still committed to a release this fall, and while there’s not much for me in terms of specifics to communicate right now - it’s looking good.

I went to Seville, Spain the other week for a good vacation of a full week. I’ve completely fallen for the land and am already pondering to go back! I mean, isn’t this picture we grabbed the perfect example of any Studio Ghibli fan’s dream landscape?

The ones of you who follow me on Twitter probably saw that I made a feeble attempt at arranging a little treasure hunt while I was down there. I’m not sure if the turn-up was that great, since I haven’t heard from anyone yet. In other words - the soundtrack treasure I hid may still be in Sevilla (backtrack my Twitter archive to find its location). But it’s probably been picked up by a park caretaker, and hopefully provided great joy to the aforementioned’s late nights and weekends. In other words, I think more Twitter followers are needed (@aion_ayase) before we can try this again *hint hint*!

According to Wikipedia, a “Drake” may refer to one of the following:

* A male duck
* An archaic word for dragon (from Old English draca)
* One of a range of artificial bait used in fly fishing

I mention this since our victim for today’s legion highlight is no other legion than the ‘Drakes’, hailing from the boot-shaped, ball-kicking country of Italy. Let’s see how well they live up to their name - read on.

Good tidings, visitor!

I’m in a good mood today, because my Twitter followers have increased from 540 to 700 since my last blog post. Thanks for the help everyone! I’m incredibly happy that you’re all curious to follow Aion to this extent (there will most likely be some exciting Twitter-specific activities coming up in the future to make things even more interesting).

Now, for the ones of you who turned blind from reading that sentence (I will refer to you as the TACTIPIE, “The Association for Consensus in that Twitter Is Pure Incarnated Evil”), I can assure you that the rest of this blog post will make no further mentions of it. But only *blink* because this is one of the infamous “Eye on ..."-articles featuring interviews with interesting and/or merely existing legions of Aion, today Sol Invictus, a legion bravely led by the amazing Pilgrim (who may or may not be an actual pilgrim).

But before we venture on and forth to the green pastures of interview heaven, I would like to take a moment and welcome a new French fansite to our circle of communion - Aion-Infinity. The main guy behind this operation is incredibly dedicated and has in my opinion pulled of a massive job when producing the site. Make a visit and check it out here, or here (same link, I just enjoy giving options).

Let us now conform to the topic of this blog post and fare down to my deepest interrogation dungeons, where another world co-exists with our own reality; where kingdoms rise and fall by the day; where legends of trolls and faeries pass each man’s ears, and where Pilgrim is tied back to a chair, forced to watch re-runs of Sunset Beach while awaiting the striking inquiries of my interview questionnaire.

Read on.

While my left eye is today stuck on a fresh legion moving to Aion, namely “Symphony of Storms”, my right one keeps twitching in the direction of this Tetris-like game (the creator named it - wait for it - Tetoris) that clearly defies the laws of casual gaming. In a way just like we want Aion to become a great and rewarding experience that doesn’t require the hours on no end (with few rewards) as some last-generation MMO titles did (and Tetoris). The question to this answer is still one of the most common ones I encounter in interviews and Q&A’s, and thankfully one of the easiest to answer. Not only is Aion genuinely designed for a modern audience, but we are right now doing internal tests across our European and NA offices which are meant to map out what aspects of the game we need to have a look at for tweaking for our western audience before the impending Preview Events and release this fall.

Obviously, you can also have some fun with the Tetoris game. I made an open challenge in Aionsource’s shoutbox the other day, and it went something like this:

“Ayase: I think I’ll send a poster to the first one who takes the time to write Aion in huge letters with those tiny blocks.”

Of course, someone did - and this someone turned out to be Iszuldin who will soon be getting a signed Aion-poster to pick up from his post office. Nice.

Now, folks, on to what you have all been waiting for, like little bird children jumping up and down in a tree-built nest of spaghetti-like branches, for mother bird (perhaps a condor) to bring back that delicious, protein-rich worm. I am of course referring to today’s interview, highlighting a new Aion legion - the Asmodian Symphony of Storms.

While I’m pondering various (no pun intended) ways to get my hand on one of those fairly new Tesla cars, the lines of thought keep getting interrupted by my mail program’s popup-boxes in the lower right corner of the screen. That’s how popular this legion highlight series is starting to become - the application mails just keep coming (this is an exaggeration to grab your attention and keep you interested in the rest of my article).

This is, if you missed the first part and are starting to get confused, the second Aion legion to be highlighted and featured in Ayase’s Realm. The purpose of these articles is to help you better learn to know your fellow Aion anticipators and to perhaps locate some of their weaknesses for when in the future facing them on the battlefield. One of the first legions to report their interest in participating after last week’s interview was Estigma, and I’ll soon leave the word to one of their front-men, Noroduil. Read on to find out where their name stems from, what gamers do when stranded on a desert island and to find out what’s normally on the dinner menu for Spanish sheep. Enjoy this inquisition of mine as I lay my eye on (albeit bad, yes, that is an actual pun) the Spanish legion Estigma.

Enjoy!