Over a year after its release, however, I heard that steps had been taken via patches and a free expansion to address a lot of these problems. So with little to lose, I decided to dabble in the game for a couple months with some friends while waiting for Rift’s release. One of my companions played for a few months on Aion’s release, and according to him there are many things that are vastly improved. XP gain has been sped up, content has been put in at the levels where people were stuck before, the price of many things has been decreased while increasing the amount of money players earn. Furthermore, dungeons have been added, item drops have been vastly increased, and just this last week the crafting system has been improved. Some small restrictions have been placed on the first ten levels of gameplay which has resulted in deterring the gold spammers (I don’t think I’ve even run into one, which is astonishing).
In a month and a half of casual gameplay, I’ve reached level 30 on my Cleric and it’s been reasonably fun. There’s loads of stuff I haven’t seen yet and won’t be able to see before I stop playing, of course, but even with my limited experience, I’ve had a positive outlook on most of my game playing time. The world is pretty big, so there’s lots to see, which is great as the graphics are pretty nice. The flying mechanic is a nice difference from most other MMOs, though perhaps a little more limited than I would choose (from the areas I’ve been to, I’ve only been able to fly around a few major cities and in the Abyss, a PvPvE area level 25+; you can “glide” everywhere, however). We’ve run through tons of quests, several instanced quests, and a few dungeons which provide a reasonable challenge, but were not too frustratingly difficult. As I’m playing Aion very casually, one of the things I’ve liked best about it is that it’s provided a nice relaxing playing experience - a time to socialize while playing a game together with friends, not terse conversations about how the next pull needs to be addressed.
I’m a firm believer that most games offer something new to the genre, and Aion is no different; for instance, chain skills, stigma skills, and DP skills are all interesting variants to the MMO combat system. It’s also nice to see developers working to improve a game after its release, and I think Aion has definitely done that and is continuing to do so. In less than a month, I won’t be playing Aion anymore, but I’m definitely glad I finally decided to give it a try.