Aion boasts extraordinary visuals and lots of eye-candy, which you'll have plenty of time to appreciate as you slowly plod from one grind quest to another. It's a pretty but ultimately lackluster and formulaic MMORPG that fails to innovate on the genre.
Aion does have one of the more powerful, flexible character creators -- similar in power (but not quite the equal) of the character creators in City of Heroes and Champions On-line. With it you can create nearly any winged hot chick you care to make, which seems to be the focus of the game -- at least judging by most screenshots provided by Aion creators NCSoft. This is the first time I almost felt a subtle pressure to make a winged chick in a game, but I resisted.
The CryEngine, which is arguably one of the most powerful graphics engines available in PC gaming, powers the colorful, vibrant visuals -- definitely makes Aion beautiful to look at.
Beauty is only skin deep
It's good that Aion is nice to look at, because you'll have plenty of time -- particularly in the first ten levels of the game -- to appreciate the visuals while you slowly, slowly plod from one point to the next in a series of tedious, unrewarding grindfest quests. You don't earn those fabulous wings until level 11 -- assuming you have the patience to play that long. My initial reaction to the first ten levels was pretty much "That's it? That's all you've got?"
And therein lies Aion's foremost problem. From the very first mission you're pretty much doing nothing but "Kill ten of X" or "Collect X number of X" quests. And when you're not grinding, you're being the typical MMORPG messenger, trotting through beautiful valleys and colorful landscapes on various fetch and "go talk to X" missions.
Maybe things get better later, but in all honesty I don't have the time or patience to find out. I "hear" from some friends and fellow players -- that the PvP is good -- but I'll never see it because you can't even do PvP until you hit level 25 -- half way to the level cap. I'm not sure as to the wisdom of making players slog through 25 levels to see what is (supposedly) the game's best feature -- or even ten levels just to get to its signature feature (wings). (And come to think of it, you can fly in Champions On-line at level 6 or so...).
Beyond the PvP and the ability to fly, I didn't see anything in the first ten levels of the game to make me want to keep playing. Aion has all the standard MMORPG game elements -- crafting, training, auctions, etc., but ultimately Aion just feels like yet another modest variant on the standard MMORPG formula -- and a ten-year old formula at that.
Pretty graphics, clunky user interface
The user interface in Aion -- while fairly typical in some respects for an MMORPG -- is strangely sloppy in some areas. Why do I have to click through 3-5 dialog boxes to read the background on a quest before I can accept the quest? Why do I have to click 'response text' when there are no actual choices to be made while speaking with a quest-giver? I couldn't tell you. A single dialog box with an 'accept' button would have sufficed.
I appreciate the way Aion 'hyperlinks' character names and places so you can click on them for more information, this ultimately leaves you clicking and opening half a dozen different dialog boxes before getting the information you want. And while I like the 'locate' button to find people and places in the game (on a map), other MMORPG games (World of Warcraft and the aforementioned Champions Online spring to mind) handle quest/objective location far better and with far fewer mouse clicks.
Overall
Despite its cutting edge visuals, Aion just feels like a tired cookie-cuttter grindfest of an MMORPG. It is clearly -- and heavily -- weighted towards 'core' MMORPG players, with nary a bone tossed to more casual players like myself.
Forthcoming games like Star Wars: The Old Republic, and the recently launched Champions On-line, are taking bold steps in new directions for MMORPGs in terms offering casual- and single-player oriented gameplay -- and five years ago City of Heroes and World of Warcraft helped lead the way towards making the MMORPG more accessible to those of us who can't spend hours each day playing.
If you don't mind Aion's relatively old-school formula, or if you just have more time to play the game and actually enjoy grinding out levels, then you might like Aion more than I did. But if you have more casual playing habits, I definitely wouldn't recommend it.
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All screens and graphics for this article were provided by NCSoft.
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Comments
You dont review a MMORPGs in the first 10 levels.
Ill hold the rest of my negative comments to my self.
I played more than 10 levels. My criticism is more towards the fact that the (Arguably) best part of Aion -- the PvP -- is 25 levels into the game. And the mission structure is uncreative (ie Grind) and the UI needs serious streamlining. BUT -- I am partial to less grinding. Some folks like it. I think if they had made the PvP accessible sooner it be a boon to the game in general.
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