Not everything needs to be bad news for European Aion players, right? Sit tight, because you guys have something to look forward to: Aion 4.0 in August.
The period of (mostly) silence on the patch’s localization has ended with an announcement on the official Aion EU Twitter account, which states:
Update 4.0 will hit the European servers in August 2013. More news this and next week. Stay around for more details. ~PD
This is convenient timing considering the North American release is coming in a mere five days. Knowing the approximate release time should at least some solace to European players debating whether to switch to the North American servers upon their earlier 4.0 release.
Some further information was tweeted over the hours following initial announcement. Compiled and compressed here with links:
- The launch patch will be 4.0.2, which includes 6 instances alongside Katalam and both the Songweaver and Gunslinger classes.
- The public test server will be going up before the end of June and will initially only be available in German. (More information on the Aion 4.0 PTS on the official forums.)
Overall this isn’t a great deal of information, but it is better than nothing. A vague time frame for release is preferable to guessing and being disappointed. Kudos to GameForge not being a year behind this time around.
Aion 4.0 and North America – Collision Imminent
So let’s buckle our seatbelts here.
We have five days until the big patch that is going to completely upset the current endgame and breathe new life into the servers. Five days. If you’re trying to do something in particular, do it now before everyone either rerolls or makes the mad dash for 65.
The version we will be receiving in North America is 4.0.3, which packs in 11 instances and both of the new classes into a single 3GB to 4GB patch. The official website has been updated over the past two weeks to include information on the new classes, skills, zones, and instances coming with the patch. The following instances are listed to be packed in with the initial release:
- Steel Rose
- Danuar Mysticarium
- Idgel Research Center
- Void Cube
- Danuar Reliquary
- Infinity Shard
- Sauro Supply Base
- Ophidan Bridge
- Danuar Sanctuary
- Eternal Bastion
- Kamar Battlefield
If you’ve been keeping up with news from the Korean server, you can see some name changes have taken place. This official zone trailer below shows some of the new areas coming to the game and provides their names for the NA servers.
Speaking of localization, the reasoning for Europe’s release being a patch behind is likely due to the amount of effort and time it takes to localize games in the region. The EU client must have multiple language support as opposed to the North American English-only client.
Don’t get settled just yet. We have five days left until we see Aion 4.0 in NA. Just five more long, torturous days.
