Tuesday, November 3, 2009

Farewell Aion

If you have been reading my recent articles about Aion, it should be no surprise that I have canceled my subscription.  Since well before launch I have been cynical towards Aion, but the game at least deserved a try.  Much to my surprise it was not as bad as I thought.  In the end though, it just wasn't the game for me.

Here now are my thoughts about Aion, in bullet form.

  • + Performance.  Aion ran very smooth in normal gameplay.  
  • - Art Style.  I'm not a fan of the anime influenced style. 
  •  + Combat.  The actual combat was very smooth and felt great.  The animations were top notch.
  •  - Crafting.  Way too much of a grind.  Work orders were very boring.  Many of the decent items required a crit of a previous item. This made materials very expensive.
  •  - PvE.  The cut scenes were nice, but this is the same PvE we've been playing for years.
  • + Rifts.  I think rifts were a nice idea.  They spiced up the PvE a bit and invading the other side was fun.  However, it was an infrequent source of PvP.
  • - Abyss.  The Abyss sounded interesting on paper, but in reality it was one big gank fest.  Allowing ranks 25 through 50 to fight in the same space, without a bolster, just was not fun.
  • - Leveling.  It's a long way to the top if you want to PvP.  I am a big fan of PvP leveling and Aion just does support that style of gameplay.
  • - Bots.  Aion is crawling with bots.  I shouldn't have to fight bots over spawns to get a quest done.   It even had me thinking that maybe I was the one in the wrong by not botting.
  • - Gold Spam.  While they have fixed the issue somewhat, it still left me with a bad impression.  In all my years I had never seen so much of it.  The channels were scrolling with ads.
  • + Guild.  There are quite a few CoW's who play Aion and I will miss grouping with them.
  • - Leveling Part 2.  I am a casual player, and I am just not able to keep with with the folks I group with.  Playing the game mostly solo is not very fun.
I think Aion is a good game, but just not for me.  I don't regret buying it and I feel as if I got my monies worth.  It certainly has it's good points, but not enough to justify it keeping a place in my MMO rotation.  That rotation now consists of WAR and Fallen Earth. 





Aion