I've blogged about store-exclusive content in games before, so apologies if this feels like I'm retreading old ground. I've never much cared for store-exclusive preorder bonuses and the like, but before today they've only ever influenced where I buy my games, not whether I buy them. What happened? I went online earlier today planning to preorder a copy of Star Trek Online.

Now, I'm not against the idea of preorder bonuses at all - I think it's great that customers be rewarded for their loyalty to favorite franchises, developers, or marketing campaigns. I don't think we should be rewarded (or punished) for our loyalty to certain retailers though, and I'm becoming increasingly frustrated by games that offer store-exclusive bonuses not just at one retail chain but at several. The aforementioned MMO is one of the more extreme examples of this that I've encountered, and while I appreciate that none of these bonuses are likely to have a huge impact on my enjoyment of the game, I nonetheless find myself in a situation where I feel compelled to buy from whichever store will reward my Starfleet (or Klingon) captain with the best items.

The official Star Trek Online site lists no fewer than 15 different preorder exclusives and, if you navigate to this page and click on a bunch of "Details" links it lets you know which retailers have which of them available. I'm not going to waste our time listing everything here, but the feeling that I get while looking at this stuff isn't so much "which bonus(es) do I want?" as it is "which game content do I least mind not getting access to?". I'm not sure I'm ready to commit to a lifetime subscription so I can play as a Liberated Borg but I do quite like the idea of having a reclaimed Borg Bridge Officer on my crew, even if she does look a bit dumb. For that to happen, I need to preorder from Amazon.

Problem is, if I take that route (that bonus is one of only a few that seems like it might still be useful after the early stages of the game), I don't get to have a pet Targ or Tribble - the latter of which can be used to heal your character more quickly outside of combat. Those are only available at Best Buy. But if I buy the game there or at Amazon then I don't get to fly a Constitution Class Starship, wear Chromodynamic Armor, shoot enemies with the TR-116 Ground rifle, equip the Multi-Spatial Personal Shield, or do a number of other things that, honestly, aren't even worth mentioning.

The end result of all this is that I feel overwhelmed and, at the time of writing, have opted not to preorder the game anywhere. Perhaps that'll change after I spend some time with the open beta this weekend, or maybe I'll just preorder myself a copy of White Knight Chronicles instead - that'll be much easier.

How do you guys feel about preorder bonuses and, specifically, about those that are store-exclusive?

So, I just got home and my plans to jump right into Aion: Tower of Eternity have been temporarily put on hold while I wait in a queue to get into my chosen server. Right now the wait time is sitting at 22 minutes, but it said something similar about 10 minutes ago, and when the number changes it's not always moving in the right direction. Anyhow, since I can't play just yet I figured I'd post an early impressions-style reviews blog entry about the game. And, since I'm having some trouble accessing the reviews blog right now, it's gonna end up here instead - at least for the moment.

In case you're unfamiliar with Aion, it's a new MMO from NCSoft that's been available in Korea for a while, but which officially goes live here in North America tomorrow. I preordered the game several weeks ago, so I was able to get in on the "headstart" launch that went live at noon yesterday. After seven or eight hours of play I'm still only level 12, but I'm starting to get a good feel for where the game is headed I think, and so far I'm liking it a lot. And here's why, in an easily-digestible bullet point format:

• Character Creation
  Aion's character creation tools are extremely powerful - like, EA Sports powerful. Sure, you can just pick a head, a body, and a hairstyle if you don't really care for this stuff, but if you want to recreate Pygar from the movie Barbarella, you have the option to tinker with just about every facial feature imaginable. The flipside of the character editor is that it gives you the freedom to make unrealistically proportioned characters with, for example, heads that are far too small for their bodies, or with tree-trunk arms and legs bolted onto a puny torso. Save for some presumably PVP-minded players opting for the tiniest character they can come up with, though, most people appear to be opting for something that at least resembles a human being.
• The Launch
  Perhaps it's not surprising given that the game is already out in Korea, but queues aside, Aion's launch has been an incredibly smooth one thus far. I was able to get into the game around 10 minutes after the announced midday start time, and although I was disconnected about 10 minutes later, I've experienced no problems since. With new players descending on the starter areas like a swarm of hungry locusts, content was getting devoured quicker than it could respawn, but getting quests completed was rarely a problem.
• Combat
  So far the assassin that I've spent most of my time playing as is a lot of fun - somewhat similar to a rogue in World of Warcraft, but with less emphasis on stealth. There doesn't appear to be a combo system as such, at least not in the WoW-rogue sense, but you can chain attacks together and, rather than having to map every move to a different button, every move in a chain is mapped to the same button. So, for example, after I perform my "Swift Edge" attack, I then use the same button to perform a "Soul Slash" and, when I reach level 22, I'll be able to press it a third time for a Rune Slash. It's been done before, but after sinking so much time into WoW and into organizing dozens of different buttons, it's a feature that I very much appreciate.
• The Visuals
  Even if I end up posting a dozen of these blogs before I'm ready to write a full review of Aion, I think I'll find it tricky to ever do so without mentioning how great it looks. The aesthetic is somewhat similar to that of Guild Wars, but with superior animation and the CryEngine under the hood. I posted some new screenshots, taken on my relatively modest home PC, to the gamespace today - definitely worth checking out.
• Flying
  Perhaps the most unique thing about Aion is that, from level 10 onwards, your character has angel-like wings that you can use to fly. Initially, you can only sustain flight for one minute, but my understanding is that increases as you level up. Also, you can only fly in certain zones, which seems a little odd, but is necessary so that you don't just bypass enemies and stuff completely.
• Gathering & Crafting
  Although I've trained as a weaponsmith, I've yet to spend much time crafting - there are a lot of materials that need to be purchased in order to work with metals it seems, and I came close to bankrupting myself long before I was able to craft a simple steel dagger. Gathering is interesting in that, rather than having to train in order to learn how to pick things up off the ground, everyone can do it. So, providing you take the time to pick flowers and fruit early on, you'll find that you're able to mine iron and gather other higher-level resources later on. Bag space is an ever-present concern, of course, but these things seemingly stack in massive numbers (I have 110 of one resource right now), you get big bags (known as "cubes" in-game), and there's a bank/warehouse system with both character-specific slots and account slots that can be accessed by all of your characters on the same server. I'm a pack-rat by nature, so bag space is always a "thing" for me, but right now it's not taking up nearly as much of my time in Aion as it always has in WoW.

And, with that it looks like I'm ready to get back into the game. Be sure to go and check out those screenshots, and expect more Aion coverage from me in the near future.

Cheers

I said I wouldn't, but I did. This weekend I started playing World of Warcraft again. Rather than get back into endgame stuff with one of my level 80 characters or push my 70-something death knight to 80, I opted to start a new character. I've never leveled a Horde character past level 30-something, but after just one weekend my new warlock is at 22 and, because Blizzard continues to make the game easier on new characters, he already has a mount.

I'm not writing a blog to bemoan the current state of the game though, nor even to talk about my disappointment that Cataclysm is going to effectively destroy much of the original game's content for anyone who's five or six years late to the party. No, I felt compelled to write here because, while fishing for sagefish in the Hillsbrad Foothills, I was shocked to find that the river is now full of garbage. I'm not sure if it's the residents of Southshore or Tarren Mill that are to blame, but in the time it took me to catch just 6 raw sagefish I also filled my bags with the following:

1x Rumsey Rum Dark
1x Watertight Trunk (containing leather and woollen cloth)
1x Empty Rum Bottle
5x Sickly Fish
9x Weeds
10x Driftwood
10x Tangled Fishing Line
10x Tattered Cloth
0x Other Fish

That's just crazy.

I could sit here and write more, but there are other games that I need to be writing about right now. Please though, next time you're out for a picnic, on a hike, or killing quest-givers in an enemy town, take your trash with you.