So today, the Technical Sales Manager of Autodesk came to my school. For those of you who aren’t in the development side of gaming: Autodesk is the creator of popular 3d software packages like 3D Studio Max, Maya and Mudbox. They also have software for animation and AI. The Autodesk guy gave a presentations about the different assets of 3d use in games. He gave some examples, talked about some game history, etc… and he ended by talking about 2 of the software packages from Autodesk I didn’t know yet, but who seem interesting. The first one was HumanIK. It’s a software that easily integrates your character animation with the game engine. Kynapse was the second program. Though I didn’t knew it yet, according to Autodesk’s site it’s the “leading artificial intelligence (AI) solution for game development and real-time simulations”. It has been used for more than 80 AAA game titles.
Aika Online
The next part of this blog entry is about the beta of a game I have been playing recently. I have already been in a few game beta’s this year. Command and conquer 4 and the Battlefield Bad Company 2 beta for example. I was disappointed by C&C and haven’t played Battlefield enough to judge it (I have bought it and will review it once I have). The beta that I enjoyed the most is Aika Online. It’s a free mmo, with the well known concept of an item shop to fund it. Don’t worry though, they have announced that no items will be sold that can’t be found in game. So there will be no overpowered people with gears you can’t get if you don’t want to pay.
While playing through the 1st and 2nd closed beta fase, I wasn’t impressed by the quests and story of the game. They were not bad, but didn’t do anything innovative, though the dialoges contained quite some humor. There were several quests that advised to use a party, so the players were encouraged to interact with each other.
The leveling is quite fast in this game, but this was on purpose. The gameplay is heavily dependent on PVP. Every player in the game can be the citizen of one of the five nations. Each nation has a leader, which is the guildmaster of the guild who won the last castle siege. Guilds can work together to either help or attack the ruling guild when the next siege begins. Of course there don’t exist 5 nations to have them fight among each other. The ruling leader of a nation gets access to a special chat which allows him to easily contact his entire nation. He is supposed to be the military leader and can assemble his nation to go on a raid. The main reason why raids are done is to steal relics from other nations. The relics can be stolen by breaking through the defenses of the enemy temple and taking the relic to your own nation’s temple. I don’t know yet what kinds of defenses those temples have because I only once joined a raid, but it was unsuccessful. We had been defeated when we almost reached the temple.
That should give you a first impression about Aika Online. I have not discussed all features of the game at all. Dungeons, crafting, enchanting are just some of the other features. I might give a full review later, we’ll see about that. I’m ending this with some screenshots I took during my time in the game. There are some pictures of the raid I did. That was an unprepared raid that was formed in half an hour. The game should be able to handle battles with thousand people. I did not have any lag in that raid.
Links:
- Autodesk in games: http://www.autodesk.co.uk/adsk/servlet/index?siteID=452932&id=12390389
- Aika Online: http://aika.gpotato.com/
(try to grab an Aika beta key for the next beta which will be either closed beta3 or the open beta. My ingame name is massi or massenic)
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