Yesterday the third Korean beta phase of Aion began. Having downloaded the new CBT 3 client which is close to six gigabyte in size, I started the patching process via the new PlayNC launcher, at least ten hours before the beta server went up. Then... When the beta server went up, I was only about ten percent into the patching process. Frustrating, I had been looking forward to playing Aion, my friends had the same problem, -- so we decided to simply play together today instead.

I went to bed and later when I woke up, the patching process was almost done, so I got around one hour to play, I created a male elyos cleric (one of my friends can't start out as asmodian, since it take seven days to delete his elyos characters) and checked out some of the new quests introduced to the newbie area, unfortunately I can't read Korean, so it was like trying to drive a car with closed eyes -- I however finished all quests so far (maybe I would be a great driver even with closed eyes?), two of them were simple "go to the guy over there and deliver this" type of quests. The rest was collecting X amount of things from different monsters that you have to kill. Nothing special, but its what I expect to do in the very beginning. So far so good.

With the sixty minutes to play, I reached level five and managed to get a pair of new boots, a mace and I even (again, with "closed eyes") managed to turn off the combat music, so I could listen to the beautiful normal Aion music while fighting. Aion is a great game, and I hope to be able to post a daily entry of my adventures (barring any difficulties with patching and what not). One of my friends I'll be playing with know Korean fluently, so it will be no problem to progress far.

I've uploaded screenshots from the sixty minutes I played, and I even managed to die once (I was busy reaching for my sandwich and tab targeted too many of the glowing bee's (yes, that's what I've named them) and I got swarmed. I like how the "death scene" is, I've never died in Aion before. Check them out below! No idea of the graphic settings, it got auto detected, I doubt they are at maximum, though.

Check back frequently for more Aion Beta News at www.gmbar.com, and we will keep you update if the start day of Aion Gold service starts here!