We had a blast showing off Aion to the enormous crowds of people and potential robots at Comic-Con in San Diego last week. It was a crazy event that spanned five days – but we are now back in the office, getting ready to launch a brand new beta event that is sure to tickle your curiosity. Read on.

Closed Beta event #5 (CB5) is incoming, ladies and gentlemen, and it’s coming with a respectable shipment of fixes, improvements and fine additions which we have worked hard to complete since the previous event. To give you an overview, please find below a pure list of things to expect for this coming weekend:

• New Sound files have been added
• NPCs should now have a greet and farewell voice
• Cutscenes will now have voice
• Race Prologues are now available when you create a new character for Elyos and Asmodian
• Tutorial videos are now available in game via the help menu
• Player voices are now available at character creation
• System voices are now available
• New NPC Dialogue/Quest text for Theobomos and Brusthonin
• Various Localization fixes
• Broken HTMLs have been fixed
• Various grammatical errors have been fixed
• Various Glossary term fixed
• 2 New servers added for each territory

Especially exciting for us is to introduce a first round of English audio, allowing you all to have a small taste of a more completely localized version of Aion. As we have announced before we are committed to releasing Aion with all its content adjusted and culturalized into top-notch English, including character voices and voice-overs. Keep in mind that these are currently implemented as a beta feature and that they will contain minor irregularities and bugs. Bear with us as we work to polish this and extend the volume of content even more in the foreseeable future. You will be able to log in to the game no later than on Friday noon PDT (8 PM BST, 9 PM CEST), marking the exciting dawn for two entirely new game servers for each territory. In order to promote newcomers to join these new servers, character creation will be disabled on all other servers during the beginning of the event.

Meanwhile, the much asked for beta forums will open for responsible posting again on Thursday 30th noon PDT (8 PM BST, 9 PM CEST). Don’t miss it, as constructive feedback means a lot to us and allows us to make even more accurate improvements to the game before launch.

Let us thereupon extend a hopefully helpful recommendation as conclusion to this announcement. The audio-rich patch for CB5 is definitely a big one, and it’s advisable for you to boot up your patcher as soon as possible in order to get the game ready for the weekend. Waiting until the last minute to download all the new content we’re pushing out for this event could mean that you miss out on a good amount of enjoyable playtime!

That’s all for now, see you in Atreia!