Aion (PC)

As far as all the comparisons people seem to be making go, this is nothing even remotely like WoW. This is a PvP orientated game, but having said that, it doesn't push that marketing point until you hit level 20. Before that, it's all PvE which is good, it starts gentle. The cap is level 50 so far, so it's a fair sized start before you meet the factor which decides, for a lot of people, whether they will stay or leave. Unlike other MMORPGs that I've played, built solely around massive PvP (by that I mean over 100 people in a single fight), Aion gives plenty of quests and makes the whole leveling experience a lot less of a grind than your average Korean MMO. It's a lovely thing to have, and gives it much more of an appeal to me at least. Being PvP based, you will find that sometimes it's hard to quest because you're being killed by enemy players. But fortunately that doesn't happen too often so far, so your introduction to the higher level community is quite gentle at 20. Without meaning to sound elitist, it does take a little perserverance to keep going through all the ganking and quest distractions and work you way up, until you can be one of those people who can take the fight back to them, or come to the aid of the lower levels that are getting ganked while they're leveling. Personally I prefer the PvP based model, I find it bonds the community better, even if you do still get the stupid squabbling on the main chat channels, but in the heat of it, people will pull together to repel the enemy. But I also know plenty of people who don't like this type of MMO, and that's fine too. If you've never tried a PvP orientated MMORPG, I'd say this would be a good chance to give it a shot, especially seeing as Aion is an absolutely beautiful game, but that's hardly surprising being that it is run on the Crytek engine. One final note is that, it's not solely a PvP game, it's technically PvPvE, and as far as I've seen this means that while you're battling it out with opposing players, it also means you have NPCs to contend with. So while you're fighting off players, you're also fighting mobs at the same time, keep in mind that the mobs will attack both sides, so your enemy is going through the same troubles as you.

This review is just of the first 10 lvls. But I find in the first 10 lvls the game can easily be judged. Well to start off i guess i shall mention the good. - The character creation is amazing and top class as a gamer you could not ask for much more. - The story line is very easy to get interested in as you actually have clips of it in the campaign. - And the graphics themselves are far beyond and mmo i have seen before. These points make it worth playing. The downside is the gameplay, i find it a little tedious and boring. It's plain quest grinding after quest grinding. I find fighting the mobs quite dull with limited attacks you can deal out to begin with. Even once you have reached Lvl 10 you still do not have many array of spells or attacks. You can easily get bored of you character from the plain boring questing which is pretty much very repetitive. It was worth buying to get my own opinion of it and to experience the direction in which mmo's are going but as a whole from what ive played it has not completely sold itself to me.

Being obsessed with MMORPGs since ultima online i have tried most MMOs out there in the market whether its asian made or western made, and few have the quality to keep me hooked for more than 3 months except this game. The graphics is very beautiful for a MMO with a very user-friendly UI and and questing system. I have played this game since launch and i am still playing it! Graphics: 9/10 - if your system is within the recommended specs, the new graphics engine with the recent 2.5 update made this game the best looking MMO. Sound: 8/10 - Beautiful orchestral sound track! The english voice overs in the game however can be a bit lame at times. Gameplay: 8/10 - The core and major part of MMO. Leveling is much easier since patches and updates and there are alot of places to explore! PvP is alot of fun although zerging still happens in mass pvp but then again thats what mass pvp is all about right? ;p The cooldowns for the instances have decreased giving you alot more to do in game. In short summary i'd recommend it to a potential buyer!

well i played some mmo's in the past, my favorite being final fantasy XI so i was used to some level of grinding, all mmo's have that, but this game to me is just plain boring, i bought it cause of the trailers and it felt like it was more than some pretty graphics but i was fooled, you start a charachter, you kill monsters and you do quest after quest after quest, the story is pretty much all introduced to you with text boxes from npcs, very few cutscenes, everything i did was just boring, i got to level 20 something after 2 weeks and i got tired of the game, it sucked having to wait 3 hours just to be able to log on, having no interesting story and quests to atract a player into the game, the flying everyong was so psyched about lasted little more than a few seconds. Anyway maybe the game has intersting stuff to do later on but the 1st impression i got sucked and i'm really not even gonna try to find out.

Aion is a victim of itself. It was hyped up in closed beta on low population servers, and those players bought the backbuzz into World of Warcraft, while waiting for general release. People seemed to be leaving WOW in droves to play Aion. Any preformed guild wanting to all play on one server reading this knows thats impossible at the moment without hours of queuing. I personally gave up and joined a brand new server with a low population which was a high population/full server within 3 days. Regardless, a review of the game! For a start, no one can deny that Aion looks good and sounds good. The far cry engine is obvious for all to see and my mid range pc runs it on ultra high at 30-40 fps, and the music is really good and unobstrusive. What I find strange is it's not especially intuitive. Other MMOs spoon feed you at the start and push you to people like class trainers and vendors. You'll find yourself merrily gaming along and happening upon someone or something that would have been very handy 3-4 levels ago. The quest interface is strange with different tabs for different types of quest and it's easy to loose track of them. You can only track 8 or so at a time on screen as well. Generally chat is full of how do you do this and how do you do that which is a real indication of this lack of intuition in the game. Also gold sellers have infiltrated the game after only a few days and their spam is incessant. I don't think there's a GM ban on spammers in operation at the moment, or at least there doesn't seem to be. (EDIT 06/10/2009 Fair play to Aion for sorting this out. No chatting til level 5 is a genious idea. WOW take note!) The controls are all very WOWish and fairly easy to get the hang of, with the chain skill combat interface a nice touch when they are available appearing on screen. I had to turn off the casting emote noises within 10 minutes of game play as they are just annoying. I can't imagine the racket in an instance, it would give me a headache! There's not really much scope for mixing damage up at least in the mage class that I chose. There's a fairly prescribed sequence for engaging a mob and killing it before it get's to you. God forbid if they do get to you as cloth wearers are incredibly squishy. If you pull more than one mob with less than full mana you're dead meat to be honest, as it's impossible and I mean impossibe to melee any same level mob to death at the lower levels as a caster. If you run out of mana/potions in combat prepare for the corpse run back. There's another issue I have with the playability of the game. No mana drinks or food? Just /rest??!! This just gets plain boring questing as a magic user and having to rest for 30+ seconds after 1-2 mobs gets old real fast. Sure you can chug away on mana potions but at the start of the game they are really expensive in comparison to the amount of money you have. I pushed on til level 20 or so but to be honest I got really bored of it. It just doesn' hold my interest. I know people have been saying it gets good in the higher levels but I really cant be bothered. Other MMOs have held my interest for hours at a time and whole days have dissapeared at times, but with Aion I can't play for more than a few hours without a break. I really wanted to love Aion, as it was full of promise but any game where you stop playing after and hour or 2 thinking I can't be bothered to do that right now, is not for me. Don't get me wrong I'm not a hardcore gamer and I only wanted to play casually, but I won't be renewing my initial subscription. Also just as a foot note, Amazon/Royal Mail special delivery were useless yet again! Honestly how hard is it to deliver something to me next day :D

Really good game and diferente from the others but its free now, still a great game if you like a little automatic combates.

Like most good MMOs, this game ruins lives. :)

For people that have never played mmo games before aion is a very easy and straight forward game to get into, there is alot of things to keep the player busy and the flying and graphics in the game have been done very well, the mini videos for some quests add more uniquenes to aion than any other mmo game about just now. Aion is a good game to play if u have the hours and time to level up through grinding, but there are some faults, the quests do get a bit like playing any other mmo, quests feel like your doing a quest handing in the quest then going bk to the same area to collect and this can go on for 3 or 4 times till u complete the npc quests, there is lack of dungeons and the monsters and other characters in the game could possibly have been a lot harder to defeat, leveling up is pretty easy in this game aswell and there is not much PVP, through my time in aion it took me up to level 30 till i thought the game started to even get to the stage where my character was struggling through quests and the monsters where been a challange. Overall Rating: 8/10 Graphics: 9/10 Gameplay: 7/10 Worth the money: 50/50

find ich nicht si toll hab mir mehr versporchen ist ein geiles spiel find ich sehr gut man muß sich rein finden es ist schon ein unterschied zu andern aber das kann kein guten spieler stören

Aion ist ein interessantes Spiel, und vor allem die neue Klasse "Äthertech" hat mich zum Kauf hier bewogen. Allerdings sind die DvDs und der in der Box enthaltene Code inzwischen vollkommen wertlos. Zum einen kann man von einer DvD Installation nicht ohne weiteres einfach updaten, also muss man das Spiel so oder so komplett neu herunter laden. Zum anderen kann man den Code inzwischen auch nicht mehr nutzen, versucht man diesen einzugeben, bekommt man nur zu lesen, das dieser abgelaufen ist. Das dieses Produkt hier überhaupt noch zum Verkauf angeboten wird, und es keinen klaren Hinweis darauf gibt, das es sich hierbei praktisch nur um wertlose "Austellungsstücke" handelt ... das ist schon Betrug.