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Exclusive Interview with Aion's Lead Designer
For those of you that remember we had you guys propose questions for Yongchan Lee (Aion's Lead Designer) as as exclusive Aionsource.com interview.
Now I'm happy to announce we've received the answers to your questions, happy reading everyone
!
Dear Mr. Jee,
On behalf of the Aion community at AionSource.com, I'd like to thank you for taking the time to answer these questions. We've been following this game as a community since 2006, and we are very excited for the retail launch in September. Aion's future is also very important to us so we would appreciate any answers you can give to the questions below.
Thank you,
-The AionSource.com Community
1) Any chance of adding in the much-requested dual-targeting UI feature? I love this feature in other games as it makes playing a support character that much easier and also paves the way for some very interesting and unique new ability options that require both an enemy and ally target.
-Personally, I enjoy dual targeting and find that feature very useful in other games. We had a quite a few spirited internal discussions about putting that feature in place. To put dual targeting into practice in Aion, a number of specific issues, including the amount of work related to do so at this time, meant that we decided not to implement dual targeting.
2) Currently, Spiritmasters are nearly the most unpopular class for a number of reasons, the first being that the pet mechanics work against the Spiritmaster in PvP, especially in the Abyss. Because pets are unable to fly and are unsummoned at a very short distance from their summoner, the Spiritmaster, unlike every other class, loses a lot of its advantages in terms of DPS and survivability when taking to the air. Are there any plans to increase the utility of the Spiritmaster while flying, especially with the advent of rings that resist fear spells?
-We have released a tech video that shows Spiritmaster pet flight. We are planning to implement that feature on the live servers as soon as it is ready.
3) Aion has been heavily praised for its graphics and artistic style. Might we someday see DirectX 10 (or higher) support to further enhance the look of the game?
-We are working on improving some fundamental technical implementations to allow Aion to display even better graphics. Reviewing support for DirectX 10 is one of our efforts.
4) My only question, will swimming be implemented in Aion? If so, When?
-Based on the current lore, Daevas die when they go into the water. (I am joking, of course.)
Swimming should not be only a mere extension of the character controls and a pretty animation, but a fundamental aspect to the game. Until then, players won't be seeing it in the game anytime soon.
5) Will the Legion system be extended upon? Both in level (so more members) and depth wise (more privileges and the possibility to form alliances between Legions, like in Lineage II)?
-We plan on expanding the Legion system, but our focus is not just increasing the size of Legions, but also adding a variety of content or features for the system. Legion housing will be part of that effort.
6) Will the dye system be expanded on? A lot of suits of armor have multiple colors. As it stands now, we can only dye with one color of dye. The system should allow us to choose which part of the armor to dye over which color for up to four different colors.
-We are always looking for ways to enhance the player's experience with the game. We take player feedback very seriously and consider all options in the development process. We'll review it and discuss the possibilities among the developers.
7) The Balaur race is supposed to be threatening enough to be considered a third faction. Will their AI and aggressiveness be improved? Right now, they seem pretty static. Aside from their usual random fortress raids, they don't really randomly gank other players the way players do when they come through the rift. Will the Balaur start jumping through their own rifts attacking both Elyos and Asmodians? Will they feel more like fighting against players instead of behaving just like a fancy NPC race?
-We are improving the Balaur AI and behavior patterns as part of ongoing efforts to improve the game system. Our intent is to add tactical tricks and AI improvement for the Balaur so that players feel the Balaur is a worthy faction, but we can't make the Balaur as dynamically responsive as real players. Real players are real. They are infinity inventive by definition.
The ability to fly in all major cities/towns would be great. Are there any plans to implement this? Pandemonium takes ages to run around, and I can't really think of any reason that we can't currently do this.
-The beautiful cities have within their layout many challenges with complicated collision checks and other three-dimensional layering complications, such as getting stuck between objects and walls. For the time being, players won't be able to experience free flight that's not gliding inside cities. We are discussing ways to make transportation more convenient in the cities, though.
9) Have you ever considered adding the ability to dye or customize wings?
-We are considering that, but nothing is final yet.
10) I've always been a fan of emotes and little details in games, and Aion, for the most part, does a great job with those things. I would like to see more fluidity to flight and falling, though. Is it a possibility to add more animations to flying and falling? For instance, in early footage of the game we see a Daeva spinning her body as she climbs into the sky, we see barrel rolls during the Ascension quests, and we also see a character dive from the platform instead of falling and flailing its arms. If we run out of flight time, I can see the falling animation as is, but turning off my character's wings or jumping from a ledge should trigger the dive, in my opinion.
-We are working on a variety of animations that reflect a character's status. One of these is a dynamically engaged animation display during gliding and flight.
11) Legion Halls have been talked about. Any chance that the Halls can be attacked like a fortress? And can the Halls give a minor buff to stats?
-We can't really go into the specifics of Legion Halls just yet, but we are planning a variety of features and weighing many possibilities.
12) I know Aion has a stance against UI modifications. Will you be offering a more customizable stock UI that lets a player individually position and size things like health bars, target windows, hot bars, and so on? The UI feels very constricted.
-We are currently reviewing these issues and player requests regarding them.
13) Will there be any stronger/faster or other arrows then the normal arrows?
-The Ranger class is currently a very strong class, so adding upgraded or diverse Ranger items is a lesser priority than addressing other classes' needs-for example, the Spiritmaster's pet flight.
14) Will we be seeing reimplementation of game design features that were initially scrapped during the course of development?
-So many different things got scrapped, from those that were trivial to giant content possibilities, like cross-server trade. We will revisit some of the features that got scrapped based on game need.
15) Is there a possibility in the future for implementing a system where Legions of the same faction can battle each other?
-We are discussing something like that based loosely on a tournament. However, it won't be as simple as a battle between Legions. We are imagining something more connected to gameplay, and it will take some time to implement if we decide it's a good fit for the game and future plans.
16) To expand on the question about expanding Legion options, have you considered anything functional or aesthetic to promote good Legion participation on the server? Is there even a way for you folks to track this stuff in development? Such as temporary Legion titles for participation in the Abyss, aesthetic cloak upgrades for fighting defending rift areas, character decorations for avenging the deaths of lowbies from ganking high-ranks, as examples.
-As I mentioned, we are continuously expanding Legion content. What we implement is likely to be different from exactly what you described, but we are considering some changes that include updated looks or titles.
17) At the moment, a lot of casting spells end with an animation that freezes you in place when in combat. Are there any plans to allow these animations while moving to create a more versatile, fluid, and fast-paced combat and PvP system? The animations are great, but they currently create a very jumpy or hesitant style of combat.
-We will continue our efforts to improve combat by creating a more fluid and dynamic feel. You must understand that there are both animation issues and gameplay issues in the animations shown and the way that they are shown in combat. We must consider whether animations look good in combat while balancing gameplay issues pertaining to monster response with a PC. As an example of our efforts in this area, a moving attack skill for the Ranger class was added to the Stigma tree in version 1.5.
18) Are you going to implement more cities similar to capitals? What about the city built into the mountain that we see at the login screen?
-While we have no immediate plans to add new cities, our current cities will be continually expanded.
19) Is there currently anyone working on-or planning to rework-Aion's texture mapping to improve Aion's overall visual quality and make it more consistent? Several vocal people share my concern about low-quality ground and object textures and poorly done texture mapping hiding in or on every corner or in some whole areas. They are visible even with maximum settings.
-We have no plans to fix or improve the currently implemented textures. However, we are working to improve the overall visual appearance of the game by improving the real-time rendering. Such rendering improvements will produce much broader and more arresting visual game results than just fixing some textures.
20) What is the likelihood of implementing a more user-friendly disconnection system? Could you allow the user to return to the login screen upon disconnecting or a failed login attempt rather than having to relaunch the game.
-If you are talking about cases when the game client suddenly crashes, we are reviewing what can be done on the client programming side, and trying to implement improvements for more graceful relaunches.
Thanks again Yongchan, lots of stuff to come in the colorful future of Aion!
http://www.aionsource.com/
For those of you that remember we had you guys propose questions for Yongchan Lee (Aion's Lead Designer) as as exclusive Aionsource.com interview.
Now I'm happy to announce we've received the answers to your questions, happy reading everyone
!Dear Mr. Jee,
On behalf of the Aion community at AionSource.com, I'd like to thank you for taking the time to answer these questions. We've been following this game as a community since 2006, and we are very excited for the retail launch in September. Aion's future is also very important to us so we would appreciate any answers you can give to the questions below.
Thank you,
-The AionSource.com Community
1) Any chance of adding in the much-requested dual-targeting UI feature? I love this feature in other games as it makes playing a support character that much easier and also paves the way for some very interesting and unique new ability options that require both an enemy and ally target.
-Personally, I enjoy dual targeting and find that feature very useful in other games. We had a quite a few spirited internal discussions about putting that feature in place. To put dual targeting into practice in Aion, a number of specific issues, including the amount of work related to do so at this time, meant that we decided not to implement dual targeting.
2) Currently, Spiritmasters are nearly the most unpopular class for a number of reasons, the first being that the pet mechanics work against the Spiritmaster in PvP, especially in the Abyss. Because pets are unable to fly and are unsummoned at a very short distance from their summoner, the Spiritmaster, unlike every other class, loses a lot of its advantages in terms of DPS and survivability when taking to the air. Are there any plans to increase the utility of the Spiritmaster while flying, especially with the advent of rings that resist fear spells?
-We have released a tech video that shows Spiritmaster pet flight. We are planning to implement that feature on the live servers as soon as it is ready.
3) Aion has been heavily praised for its graphics and artistic style. Might we someday see DirectX 10 (or higher) support to further enhance the look of the game?
-We are working on improving some fundamental technical implementations to allow Aion to display even better graphics. Reviewing support for DirectX 10 is one of our efforts.
4) My only question, will swimming be implemented in Aion? If so, When?
-Based on the current lore, Daevas die when they go into the water. (I am joking, of course.)
Swimming should not be only a mere extension of the character controls and a pretty animation, but a fundamental aspect to the game. Until then, players won't be seeing it in the game anytime soon.
5) Will the Legion system be extended upon? Both in level (so more members) and depth wise (more privileges and the possibility to form alliances between Legions, like in Lineage II)?
-We plan on expanding the Legion system, but our focus is not just increasing the size of Legions, but also adding a variety of content or features for the system. Legion housing will be part of that effort.
6) Will the dye system be expanded on? A lot of suits of armor have multiple colors. As it stands now, we can only dye with one color of dye. The system should allow us to choose which part of the armor to dye over which color for up to four different colors.
-We are always looking for ways to enhance the player's experience with the game. We take player feedback very seriously and consider all options in the development process. We'll review it and discuss the possibilities among the developers.
7) The Balaur race is supposed to be threatening enough to be considered a third faction. Will their AI and aggressiveness be improved? Right now, they seem pretty static. Aside from their usual random fortress raids, they don't really randomly gank other players the way players do when they come through the rift. Will the Balaur start jumping through their own rifts attacking both Elyos and Asmodians? Will they feel more like fighting against players instead of behaving just like a fancy NPC race?
-We are improving the Balaur AI and behavior patterns as part of ongoing efforts to improve the game system. Our intent is to add tactical tricks and AI improvement for the Balaur so that players feel the Balaur is a worthy faction, but we can't make the Balaur as dynamically responsive as real players. Real players are real. They are infinity inventive by definition.
The ability to fly in all major cities/towns would be great. Are there any plans to implement this? Pandemonium takes ages to run around, and I can't really think of any reason that we can't currently do this.-The beautiful cities have within their layout many challenges with complicated collision checks and other three-dimensional layering complications, such as getting stuck between objects and walls. For the time being, players won't be able to experience free flight that's not gliding inside cities. We are discussing ways to make transportation more convenient in the cities, though.
9) Have you ever considered adding the ability to dye or customize wings?
-We are considering that, but nothing is final yet.
10) I've always been a fan of emotes and little details in games, and Aion, for the most part, does a great job with those things. I would like to see more fluidity to flight and falling, though. Is it a possibility to add more animations to flying and falling? For instance, in early footage of the game we see a Daeva spinning her body as she climbs into the sky, we see barrel rolls during the Ascension quests, and we also see a character dive from the platform instead of falling and flailing its arms. If we run out of flight time, I can see the falling animation as is, but turning off my character's wings or jumping from a ledge should trigger the dive, in my opinion.
-We are working on a variety of animations that reflect a character's status. One of these is a dynamically engaged animation display during gliding and flight.
11) Legion Halls have been talked about. Any chance that the Halls can be attacked like a fortress? And can the Halls give a minor buff to stats?
-We can't really go into the specifics of Legion Halls just yet, but we are planning a variety of features and weighing many possibilities.
12) I know Aion has a stance against UI modifications. Will you be offering a more customizable stock UI that lets a player individually position and size things like health bars, target windows, hot bars, and so on? The UI feels very constricted.
-We are currently reviewing these issues and player requests regarding them.
13) Will there be any stronger/faster or other arrows then the normal arrows?
-The Ranger class is currently a very strong class, so adding upgraded or diverse Ranger items is a lesser priority than addressing other classes' needs-for example, the Spiritmaster's pet flight.
14) Will we be seeing reimplementation of game design features that were initially scrapped during the course of development?
-So many different things got scrapped, from those that were trivial to giant content possibilities, like cross-server trade. We will revisit some of the features that got scrapped based on game need.
15) Is there a possibility in the future for implementing a system where Legions of the same faction can battle each other?
-We are discussing something like that based loosely on a tournament. However, it won't be as simple as a battle between Legions. We are imagining something more connected to gameplay, and it will take some time to implement if we decide it's a good fit for the game and future plans.
16) To expand on the question about expanding Legion options, have you considered anything functional or aesthetic to promote good Legion participation on the server? Is there even a way for you folks to track this stuff in development? Such as temporary Legion titles for participation in the Abyss, aesthetic cloak upgrades for fighting defending rift areas, character decorations for avenging the deaths of lowbies from ganking high-ranks, as examples.
-As I mentioned, we are continuously expanding Legion content. What we implement is likely to be different from exactly what you described, but we are considering some changes that include updated looks or titles.
17) At the moment, a lot of casting spells end with an animation that freezes you in place when in combat. Are there any plans to allow these animations while moving to create a more versatile, fluid, and fast-paced combat and PvP system? The animations are great, but they currently create a very jumpy or hesitant style of combat.
-We will continue our efforts to improve combat by creating a more fluid and dynamic feel. You must understand that there are both animation issues and gameplay issues in the animations shown and the way that they are shown in combat. We must consider whether animations look good in combat while balancing gameplay issues pertaining to monster response with a PC. As an example of our efforts in this area, a moving attack skill for the Ranger class was added to the Stigma tree in version 1.5.
18) Are you going to implement more cities similar to capitals? What about the city built into the mountain that we see at the login screen?
-While we have no immediate plans to add new cities, our current cities will be continually expanded.
19) Is there currently anyone working on-or planning to rework-Aion's texture mapping to improve Aion's overall visual quality and make it more consistent? Several vocal people share my concern about low-quality ground and object textures and poorly done texture mapping hiding in or on every corner or in some whole areas. They are visible even with maximum settings.
-We have no plans to fix or improve the currently implemented textures. However, we are working to improve the overall visual appearance of the game by improving the real-time rendering. Such rendering improvements will produce much broader and more arresting visual game results than just fixing some textures.
20) What is the likelihood of implementing a more user-friendly disconnection system? Could you allow the user to return to the login screen upon disconnecting or a failed login attempt rather than having to relaunch the game.
-If you are talking about cases when the game client suddenly crashes, we are reviewing what can be done on the client programming side, and trying to implement improvements for more graceful relaunches.
Thanks again Yongchan, lots of stuff to come in the colorful future of Aion!
http://www.aionsource.com/
