Aion: The Tower of Eternity Interviews

NCsoft's forthcoming "Assault on Balaurea" content update for Aion: The Tower of Eternity has spawned a couple of new interviews, and both of them have lead producer Chris Hager providing the answers.

First up is IGN:
Two of the dungeons included in Assault on Balaur are for single players, and lock out players above a certain level. Their primary purpose is expository, and will lend insights into two of the side-stories players encounter throughout the campaign quest. We asked if it were in any way possible for a high-level player to experience the dungeon. According to Hager: "there's no way, if I'm level 50, to go back and play the level 18 instance unless I make another level 18 character." Bummer.

Is this single-player content something the folks at NCsoft want to focus on in the future? They certainly think there will be more single-player dungeons, but it's never going to be the crux. We asked if it were possible that one class might struggle to solo the dungeon and we were assured that they would be beatable by everyone, although Hager conceded, "if you were playing an assassin it might be more difficult." Not impossible, though. "It's still designed for the 18-24 level range."

And then a bit from Massively:
The notes feature a lot of tweaks to the UI, but no mention of additional hotbars or any kind of UI customization (for example, a player might want to put the radar on the left rather than the right, etc). Any plans to add this functionality for 2.0? If not, any particular reason why not?

1.9 brings in two additional hotbars -- floating hotbars, that allow you to customize them and move them all around. When you count up all the hotbars we have, we have 6 hotbars and 10 different rows. We feel the players are really good as hotbars go.

As far as additional UI customization, such as moving around the other UI elements, we're looking into that as we're always looking to make the UI more user-friendly. We wanted to concentrate on content enhancements, so we can get all of that content in there, and work on the UI in an ongoing process. It just wasn't our primary focus for 2.0.