Justin Achilli

Joshua Loomis put up a post recently about his mostly positive experience with Aion, which is an enjoyable read, especially on the level of the player relationships that form. My experiences weren’t the same as his, so as a critical thinking exercise, I considered what I liked and disliked about the month I spent playing it.

Likes

I liked the look of Aion, and the pastels-and-neons palette was refreshing.

• The art direction was a refreshing break from Grimdark Grayscale and His Kingdom of Brown. While the anime designs of the characters didn’t do anything for me, I like that everything attempted to be vibrant instead of muddy and “realistic.”

• Kind of fun combat feedback. Satisfying sounds on whacking things, with occasional “extra hits” that did only one or two points of additional damage, but were exciting and empowering to hear. THREE HITS! Yeah! P-P-POW!
• I liked building the combos in combat. Weirdly, this left me cold in Age of Conan, but worked for me here. I’m not sure why.
• Loved the music. Loved the architecture of the city (but see below).
• Taken in sum, the world is actually pretty small, but they do a good job of making it feel large.
• Good use of cutscenes and engine movies to introduce world lore.
• My wife played this a liked it. She’s never played an MMO before. I don’t think she liked it enough to actually buy a copy or pay a monthly subscription, but she whiled away some time on it. She especially liked character creation, and while doing that, she didn’t use the advanced tools but rather cycled through the pre-sets until she found one she mostly liked. She did use the basic customization tools, though.

Dislikes

• 
  This feels like a place I’d want to explore — especially in a skyship — but the general experience followed the rails too much for true exploration.For me, the game immediately failed the “Why would I play this instead of WoW?” test. Its gameplay is wholly derivative of WoW clone, with nothing significant to distinguish it from its predecessor. I suspect Aion will start to lose subscriptions pretty significantly after the time included with the box expires and level off around 200,000 players in the western market.
• The advancement mechanic is tied to the dated, tiresome, quest-grind and mob-killing model. Killing and looting doesn’t really offer much I haven’t seen before, so again, if that’s the primary avenue of gameplay, why wouldn’t I stick with WoW, where I can potentially play with 10 million other people?
• They didn’t have all of their promised features implemented. In particular, they were supposed to have a community-building help system in which the players who offered good feedback and got good peer reviews earned points that they could use to buy unique in-game items and improvements. This wasn’t present at launch.
• Being able to change your avatar after character creation didn’t actually work, but they left the interface in there.
• Massively Multiplayer Solo Game. I felt neither guided toward multiplayer content, nor especially enthusiastic about sharing the existing content with anyone else. Everything felt safe and contained, so even when I was conducting my illicit activity with the banished Asmodean — the chrysalis point at which the Asmodeans earn their wings — I didn’t have a thrill of commerce with a subversive element. Everyone in the world is turned into a daeva by the same guy stuck in the crystal. This cast into sharp relief that none of the PVE content I ever completed in the game was ever going to have an effect on the world, and that everything would reset or respawn so the next solo player ambling by could have it, too.
• Asmodeans have neck-back-mullets. Not sexy.

The world and creature design was interesting and felt exhilarating, but ultimately became repetitive.

• The voice effects for invoking magic powers (“Ja-ha-fray! Cabrero!”) didn’t feel like an otherworldly language, and eventually, they just grated.

• You can fly! Well, not here. Not here, either. Nope, not there. Here! Well, for a little while at least. Oops, you fell and died.
• Okay, so for creatures who can fly, don’t you think they’d have built their cities where they’d be able to fly? And have flying be a part of their architecture? Nope. The core cities of the daevas were built for two-dimensional navigation.
• I felt punished for exploration. This is a deal-breaker for me. There were certain places I could glide, but once I got there, there was no way to get back. This was especially punishing if I flew into the water, because some water I could walk in, and other water was immediately damaging to me. Some regions were also mountainous, and once I flew or glided into those regions, I was trapped there.
• The experience point death penalty felt retrograde and clumsy. There’s no immediate or “right” solution to the death-penalty issue that’s playstyle-agnostic, so I accept this as a design decision consciously made, it’s just one that I didn’t like.
• Random success/ failure on gathering and crafting had no significance. Let me do it or don’t. Watching a channeling bar while the game rolls invisible dice is no substitute for gameplay, and having the results affected by that invisible die roll I couldn’t affect at all completely takes the player out of the endeavor.
• I have some kind of cube… but I never see it visually represented as a cube, so why is it a cube? Oh, it’s a backpack. Why didn’t you just say “backpack?” And why can only the cat-things make my cube hold more stuff? What the hell is going on here?
• Not enough content existed to give the player a broad base of activities. When you’re level X, you go to the one area where you do stuff geared to level X. If you don’t have much interest in that content, you have no option. Everything else is under you or above your capability.
• The marketing was disingenuous. You can be whatever you want! So long as what you want is one of four classes. And those four classes are classes that exist in every other game. I felt lied to by the marketing, which isn’t a surprise, but what’s wrong with marketing actually talking about what the game is about? One day, somebody’s going to sell and sustain a billion copies of a game by playing straight with their customers.
• Character progression was unsteady. At some levels, I got a bunch of new powers, while at others, I got nothing, which made those levels feel extra-tedious.
• As well, once I earned new powers, I had to buy them from a vendor as items and then double-click them to learn them. I guess this exists so I can sell recipes I find as dropped loot, but it felt like an extraneous layer of interface that offered nothing but frustration. I have Jump-Kick of the Space Devil… no, wait, I haven’t clicked on it in my cubic backpack yet. Okay, now I have it.