Aion
by BenV on Sep.11, 2009, under Boring, Morons, Software
Lately I’ve heard some rumors about this new mmorhghhghg coming up called “Aion“.
Fileplanet (you know, the cancer popup site you sometimes get when you need to download a game patch and then need to click through 23894723897 registration things etc… which is barred from bugmenot…. *sigh*) handed out open beta keys. So I got one. And so did lotjuh.
Did I mention my machine doesn’t have windows? Makes it… interesting.
First we obviously tried wine. Well, it installs without much hassle, which is a good thing.
However, it doesn’t launch. Some piece of garbage called GameGuard doesn’t work on wine. And because it doesn’t, neither does Aion.
Great going Aion guys! Needless to say they couldn’t be arsed to write a linux binary for it, so they SUCK per default! They couldn’t even be arsed to write a Mac binary for it. Pffrt.
However, to make an interesting attempt to test out Virtualbox’s 3d acceleration support, I decided to install Aion in a virtualboxed windows xp that I “borrowed” from lotjuh.
Virtualbox is at version 3.0.6 these days, so first I installed the latest version.
The installation went fine:
Aion installation on XP in Virtualbox 3.0.6
Not only the installation, but also the updater ran fine:
Aion Updater
Then the gameguard part came, it looked promising:
Aion GameGuard part`
However, to all good things must come an end. So it dies because of hardware acceleration issues. No real surprise, but too bad for Virtualbox. Not there yet.
Aion dies
Maybe it’ll work one day when Virtualbox gets their direct3d working as well as wine has it working.
Anyway, from what I’ve seen of the game (it runs ‘fine’ on lotjuh’s PC with her “Seven” failure install), it’s a World of Warcraft wannabe.
Graphics are a lot better, they put in some cute stuff like when it rains and the character idles it’ll put a leave over their head. The movies are cute, the quests sometimes even show you stuff (like a little ingame movie of the target area) to go along with the text. But all in all it doesn’t look like a wow killer. No linux support (not even with wine), no mac support, and so far I haven’t seen a major reason for people to switch from wow to this game, except for the graphics. Then again, I’ve only looked at it for a short amount of time, maybe it’ll get better 😉
I’m sure they’ll get a decent amount of players though, it’s a good wow clone.
Story wise the game is fail, I could sum it up with “There were gods, and a planet, and now the planet is split in 2 half planets and the ‘people’ on those halves fight eachother”.
It asks for a stellar converter if you ask me. (master of orion 2 reference, can’t find a good image/video on google)
September 12th, 2009 on 06:45
I find it funny that your actually going to knock a windows made game for not working on linux under an emulator written by linux devs. When will other loyal OS peeps ever give in and just accept that their shit isn’t coded right either. GG is something that keeps these kinds of games from being hacked and loosing money… so yeah.. good for Aion.
I’m sorry that Aion chose to prevent hackers, and sorry that linux failed to provide proper “EMULATION” of a windows based program. I’d suggest invest in another operating system… Maybe hmmmm… Windows. You dont see me sitting here complaining about how I can’t fucking run Knode under cygwin cause it ain’t god damn made for it.
September 12th, 2009 on 11:08
Why use cygwin if you can run KNode on windows already? That’s right, you can run KNode on windows, and you know why? Because it’s opensource and the opensource community just make things work.