Aion Vision – Once Bitten, Twice Shy
I have not played Aion since my free month lapsed and to be quite honest, I have not even really thought about playing it either. There is only one end game instance and fort sieges become quite boring after the fiftieth time. The grind is a killer. Out of the people that remained in my guild after the free month, I would venture to guess that 75-90% botted their way from about 35-50. Even then, it took a month of botting to accomplish. What I am hearing from them now is that the level grind cannot even compare to the real grind of the game: the item grind. Most of them are saying that the end-game item grind costs hundreds of millions of kinah and dedication that surpasses the original High Warlord grind in World of Warcraft. No thank you.
But then NCSoft has to try to trick me and I must say that I am falling for their tricks. The released an "Aion Vision" trailer (embedded below) earlier this week and it is quite delicious. Keen and Graev found a translated list of the features within the trailer:
* Swimming added
* New underwater zones, cities, dungeons (and even more zones)
* More Quests (+ Questing revamp)
* New Classes (According to Korean forums and translations)
* New Skills for existing classes
* Revamped Combat (More action oriented)
* Improved graphics and animations (DX10)
* Dynamic weather effects
* Customizable player housing
* Animals you can tame and use as riding mounts (some mounts can carry 2 players)
* Mounted combat
* New weapons (whip & crossbow)
* Revamped Sieges
This is not the Aion I played. This is a whole new game. I wonder how this would be implemented because this appears like a whole new game. Will this get me to resubscribe? Probably. Aion went a long way to try make a Korean MMO successful in the west, but it has a long way left to go before it is accepted by the mainstream. In addition to those changes, it needs to become the standard for MMOs that if you are using a themepark model, you need to be able to quest your way to the level cap. In the post-WoW landscape, I think nothing less will be accepted.