A mixed bag of feelings.
The problem in Aion seems that the game is adapted to satisfy the asian audience and not so much on a global scale. Everything in the game is designed towards a very different audience than the western one and feels very awkward sometime. I will try and explain upon this as i progress through the review. There might be more negative points sometime, but if there is stuff i did not mention, it mostly means it's just fine or great.
-Graphics and performance-
1: Graphics
The game is gorgeous, runs fabulously on all kind of different computers from low end to high end. I rarely encountered any performance issues, maybe at the exception of massive scale pvp where plenty of my friends kept crashing to desktop (was unplayable). The game had a very sketchy start with massive waiting queues, server lag and generic mmo launch issues but has been fixed relatively quickly.
2: Artstyle
The artstyle looks great although remaining cheesy and true to asian games. Sounds great, but it's also what is at the origin of
the population inbalance between Elyos and Asmodians. Short version, Asmodian looks badass and Elyos looks straight out from happy land, the result? Lots of Asmodians, lack of Elyos and a very frustrating launch for guilds (including mine) due to the population cap on Asmodian side.
3: Character Customization
The character customization while fabulous is stretching too far, causing people to create mutants (to be funny), midgets (because smaller in pvp = better) and giants (big tanks) breaking the sense of immersion of the world. Usually such a system would be great but there is a point where too much is too much and Aion went over the limit of how far you should be able to move that slider.
4: Collision
Collision is one of the worst aspect of this game, for a game designed with flight in mind, they dropped the ball. Bad collision boxes causing you to stop gliding or flying for no reason, the collision box on objects in Aion is by far the worse i have ever seen in a mmo. Some objects have invisible collision, meaning you cannot jump over it or you will be floating mid-air on some invisible geometry. The inversed case is also present, you can clip inside rocks or various geometry/objects. For a game that looks and feels as polished as Aion, this is an extreme disappointment that makes you wonder what the hell happened here?
Another aspect of collision and a most serious one is the sliding off objects. Sometime you will try to jump upon an object that looks perfectly suited to be walked upon simply to slide down it in a terrible fashion causing the server to go crazy and wonder where the hell you are located within the game, therefore making you ''rubber band'' and glitch backward after a few seconds sometime more than once in unpredictable fashion. Now this doesn't sound too bad but when you incorporate flight, plus flight time, plus flight cooldown it becomes a disaster.
It's hard to describe but i will try in the best of my ability. In good cases, you will survive, in bad ones you will drop off a sliding object, try to glide but rubber band backward into the object causing you to stop gliding and start the cooldown before you can glide or fly again. Meanwhile, you slide off the object and freefall to your death because of the cooldown on your wings.
Dying in this game = losing exp until you buy it back and trust me, it is extremely frustrating and expensive at the higher levels to simply dismiss this issue. I once also got stuck into a tree ''rubber banding'' and glitching like crazy wasting flight time until i dropped off. Happened to plenty of my friends as well, unnecessary deaths are frustrating.
-Controls and interface-
1: Controls
Key mapping is great, the default controls are what you would expect them to be using a WASD setup and mouse support similar to those in World of Warcraft (for those of you who are familiar with the game).
2: Interface
The interface in general seems well done, minimap, plenty of action bars, not a giant clutter of crap like some other games. A relatively interesting feature of the game is to only allow you to see stuff on your minimap based upon the vision field of your character. However a minor grip is that this feature is easily destroyed by simply spinning your camera around like a radar tower.
-Game mechanics-
Oh boy... so much to say, a mixed bag of feelings. It would seem like the crew behind Aion was half professional half incompetent sometime. Some of the design is extremely questionable, not in concept but in execution.
1: Levelling
First off i will start with the most rampant complaint about this game. The grind, the grind and the grind. Expect lots of it once you reach around level 18-19 and for the rest of the game as quest experience drop down and you start lacking quests.
2: Quests
Second, the quests are your average mmo quests, gather this, kill this, deliver this but sometime in an even worse fashion. You will grow sick of playing ping pong between npcs making you run across the map for 15 minutes for the same amount of experience you could have gotten by killing 3 monsters in a minute. You will most definitely get sick of Love quests, you will be annoyed over the gathering quests and you will really rage about the quests that can only be done during daytime or nightime. In the end, you will start grinding like everyone else and do the occasional quest there and there. Everything seems to have been done with one purpose here, waste your time. I heard that Korean payments are hourly and not monthly which would explain a lot of the decisions in the game which seems to simply try to waste as much time as you can.
3: Storyline
The storyline has a good premise, the world being destroyed and splitted in half, Asmodia being the half who got the short end of stick and has little light and a very hostile environment and Elysia who is filled with sunlight and happy stuff. Both linked by the Abyss, a crazy place where war rage between Elyos, Asmodians and the A.I. faction, the Balaur (big evil demon like guys). Other than the setting, and the premise, the storyline is downright awfully generic being either a fated asmodian or an amnesiac elyos.
4: Combat
The combat in the game is very satisfying, extremely fluid and awesome looking as you chain your moves and unload all kind of crazy combos and skill upon your enemies. I would say, it's one of the selling points of this game. It feels really great and i have nothing negative to say about it. Might be over the top for some but downright awesome as you spin, flip and cleave people in half.
5: Flight
Flight is a big disappointment for being the most advertised feature of the game, the cooldown on your wings and the limited flight amount you have is questionable. The flight time once again seem to have one purpose, wasting time as you wait twice as long for it to come back than the amount of time you flew making Aether gathering a gigantic waste of time indirectly. I do enjoy the strategic appeal however of flight time for pvp but after a while it becomes a real chore to manage and wait, wait and wait some more for it to come back.
6: Gliding
Gliding however, unlike flight is awesome and extend the amount of time you can fly, the downside is that you have little control over the Z axis, meaning you cannot really decide to go up, only stir and drop down a bit. Still one of the best points of the game, second to combat.
7: PvP
Now that's probably the part that interests the majority of the more hardcore players. Ground PvP is great, at one exception being the game has bad scaling, meaning your gladiator won't get a snare or any way out of a snare outside lengthy cooldowns while that range caster has multiple snares and escaping moves on low cooldown. Seems like there was zero consideration into balance outside level 50. To be straight to the point, 1v1 is not balanced at all. Group PvP is great however, you will have a blast but once again, you will rarely run into any fair or balanced encounters. If you are a fan of PvP, you will often be rifting off to the enemy zones disrupting and wrecking havok amongst those peaceful questers, thinking they are safe. This can lead to epic moments with your friends.
The Abyss, now that is where the game truly begin, once again a mixed bag. First off, it looks awesome and is the only true free zone where you can fly wherever you want. It is the PvPvE area (separated in 3 layers) where you hope from islands to islands flying around. PvP is rampant, having friends, a guild or a group is most required in this place. However for every good pvp fight you will have in the abyss, you will have twice as much zergs and ganking going on. Ganking (for those who are familliar with the term) in the abyss is massive hence why you need friends to at least fend off the solo gankers roaming around just waiting for an easy kill for abyss points.
The Abyss is also the area where the artefacts and the keeps are. Artefacts are used to ease up the capture of keeps by giving your side some advantages in combat. For those of you familliar with Warhammer online, the system is very similar, you can capture artefacts (objectives) and then keeps, which are handled in the same way, you break the door, kill mobs, players and finnaly the keep's lord to capture it and are rewarded accordingly in abyss points and medals. This feature is awesome, the bad thing is, there is too many people in servers resulting into massive 200vs200 battles where you can barely load people around you, massive lag and crashing occurrences breaks the fun. Hopefully will be better in the future.
Flight PvP now is another thing... good concept, awful execution, ranged classes have massive advantages in flight combat that will make you cry as a melee character. The thing is, as a melee character it is by far too easy to lose track of someone while flying, luckily for them... or not, there is some sort of auto-follow when you press a skill so you can keep chasing your target. This auto follow however has major flaws, when you perform an attack, your character will stop following which mean you will lag behind your target while you are performing your flip attack unlike ground pvp where you can still move. Stopping auto following and trying manually to follow someone will quickly make you lose track of your opponent and wonder, where did he go? before you start the auto following again. Another massively disappointing feature of flight pvp is that some skills become useless and some of those skills are actually crucial to your class pvp meaning you will get the short end of the stick and get beaten. Another disappointing thing about flight combat is that the skirmish will often degenerate into flight chases until someone runs out of flight time or reaches friends of a guarded quest hub.
Now last, you cannot see the enemy level. This is a straight up irritating feature meaning you will attack someone simply to get totally destroyed or totally destroy him due to levels. Another system needs to be found for the sake of pvp as running into a higher level player = assured death as you pitifully deal low damage or get resisted every single spell you throw. Meanwhile getting critted with everything straight in the face for a quick dirt nap makes for a frustrating design decision.
8: PvE
To be fair, i did very little PvE outside my grinding/questing. There is a bunch of world bosses spread across and on different timers to spice up your average zone. The instances are unfortunately very bland and so are the bosses fights i went trough. Tank and spank applies as a general rule with few special abilities there and there, nothing crazy such as tank rotations, or dynamic fights which is a bit disappointing. If you are expecting great loot, you will be disappointed in most cases. I even had some instances where we got absolutely nothing for killing a boss of a world boss (hopefully is a bug).
9: Money, money, more money
I cannot stress it, this mmo is hardcore, you need so many consumables, everything cost money, everything. It's a bit disappointing in this department as it almost seems to force players to buy gold online in some case. If you take no crafting profession, don't buy consumables and don't die you should be ok but otherwise, you will find yourself farming for money often.
10: Crafting
While interesting, crafting is designed to waste as much time as possible, you will find yourself crafting for at least 10 minutes for a single piece of gear, more if you have more gear to craft. An interesting move is that you have a greater output for your items, the problem however is that sometime the normal product is garbage forcing you to rely on pure luck to get something good, sometime wasting both time and money to get absolutely nothing worthwhile. I picked up armorsmith, outside the giant time sink, it was not so bad and pretty straight forward outside the ridiculous amount of materials and time you need to craft something. Weaponsmithing on the other hand is a total failure, often requiring a greater output of a crappy weapon to be able to make a good one which once again can turn out to be average or good based on pure luck.
Levelling crafting however is interesting. Rather than having a bunch of useless crap to sell to the vendor afterward and overpriced low level materials needed to be bought at the broker, the game uses a system of work orders where you receive a quest, simply buy items from the vendor, start crafting stuff and get a random reward, often in the form of materials or patterns for your profession. You also receive a bit of experience for crafting which is always a bonus and can allow you to get further down to the next level or straight up level up sometime. As i said however, it is a giant time sink so be ready to do something else while you craft, unless you enjoy watching a bar going up possibly failing to craft (since the game has also a failure bar) for long extended periods of time. Not so bad at lower levels, downright horrible at higher level where you need 20 crafts to get a single level. Finally the master quests are giant slaps in the face as you are requested to craft greater outputs of very expensive items leading once again to luck and frustration.
-Conclusion-
The community of Aion so far has been... as much as i dislike mentioning world of warcraft, very similar to it. Plenty of nice people, plenty of jackasses and pricks. The only thing i can say is that this game will test your backbone sometime and you should most definitely play with friends or find a guild. Otherwise you will quickly lose interest. Grab friends and a guild and it suddenly becomes a whole new experience. I will be sticking with this game for a while despite its glaring flaws.