Worlds Apart
So in Tuesday’s comic I made a short joke about the disparity between the atmosphere that was pitched to Asmodian players in every corner of the lore and the actuality of what we’re given in game. And in working through the 35 levels that I’ve accumulated thus far I really found myself subscribing to this belief.
That is until this past weekend. But let’s not start there… I’ve got a beginning in here somewhere.
Three weeks ago a little game called Dragon Age came out and a lot of the people I play with regularly took a break from AION to play it. I’m not much of a single player game type and so in lieu of hanging around on my main staring at my empty friend’s list I went and did something crazy. I rolled an Elyos on the Zikel server.
Now, I’d played through the content in Poeta back in Open Beta as a way of avoiding getting burned out on the Asmodian content before release. And it was amazingly lush. Different from Ishalgen, but then, Ishalgen is pretty lush by its own standards. And then beta was over and I didn’t really go back, so my total time spent in Elysea up until these last couple weeks was about six hours.
So as I leveled this new character up, I started noticing a lot of things. It started with little stuff and eventually culminated in an epiphany this weekend. I came to Aion straight out of Warhammer and pretty much anything looks like Disney World after that setting. When I thought that Asmodae would be dark, gritty and frozen I was thinking High Pass, Chaos Wastes, Praag, that sort of thing. Compared to those zones Asmodae looks verdant and lush. Compared to Elysea though? It’s worlds apart. All of a sudden that hype that I’d blown off made sense.
Compared to Elysea the Asmodian landscape is darker, and the lushness is different somehow. It’s still no Warhammer but I appreciate it more for what it is now. And all of this makes me think more on what Atreia was like before the Cataclysm. Lore seems to indicate that Elysea is closer to how it used to be than Asmodae, and if that’s the truth then I can see how the descriptions of Asmodae as a dark and harsh landscape came into being.
The architecture that isn’t repeated on both sides also makes very strong statements about the difference in the two cultures. Looking at Pandaemonium next to Sanctum really made me appreciate how militaristic it is. Where Sanctum has lush detail on almost everything and an interesting mix of baroque and rococo styles Pandaemonium has harsh, angular lines and thick set walls that make it seem more like a fortress than a city.
It took playing an Elyos to really make me appreciate being an Asmodian.
I’ve put together a bit of a photo essay that covers what I’m talking about, because I really don’t think words can do it justice. Some of these differences are striking and some subtle, and I really enjoyed seeing them all for myself. I tried to get the shots taken at the same time of day, but there’s a couple pickups that I had to shoot out of sequence. I marked them where I remembered.
After all that, I still firmly believe that the concept of Asmodae as a dark landscape could do to be kicked up a notch, or several notches. If only by making the ‘daytime’ lighting more along the lines of the dawn and dusk schemes and leaving the nights alone. I’ve included a couple more images to highlight my point. Leave us the night! You can keep the day.
Nice comparison pictures and I agree! Elysea doesn’t feel that much brighter during the Asmodae ‘daytime’..
You’re really making me miss Elysea, man. I’ve noticed that Asmodae during the day is much darker than Elysea, probably because Elysea makes use of more greens and blues whereas Asmodae is more browns and purples.
I think that Atreia pre-Cataclysm was like Elysea, but less bright and lush. It’s mentioned in the quest text in Verteron in particular that as soon as the sun hit the land, there was so much more life than there had been pre-Cataclysm.
Looking over your pictures again I realised what it is… It isn’t physically darker, it’s the sky itself. In Ishalgen, the sky is a brownish colour, while in Poeta it’s bright blue.
But yeah, compared to WAR, it’s still bright and sunny and lively and all that. I still find Asmodae awful dark though.
[...] seriously. Aion uses the CryEngine meaning that the landscapes are rendered with an attention to detail that [...]
Yeah, when I play my Elyos alt it is really striking when I first come back, but then my eyes sort of adjust to the Asmodian landscape again and it doesn’t feel as dark anymore. It’s kinda odd.
And yes, what you mentioned about the base colors is very, very true. Elysea uses a lot of warm colors (Yellows, reds, ‘hot’ greens) while Asmodae uses a lot of cool colors (purple, blue, ‘cold’ greens) and it really makes a difference even in the more lush areas.