I'm enjoying Aion. Mostly. It's the flavor of the month, I know. It will never replace World of Warcraft as my main MMO. But, it's enjoyable.
The character creation is amazing. The graphics are great. It has a definite fantasy feel to it, with giant flying creatures overhead and glowy feelings of coolness. Combat, while fairly simple, isn't boring. It's very streamlined with few confusing features and a solid frame rate. The animations are good and the facial movements are convincing. All in all it's definitely a first rate publish.
So with all of this awesomeness, I can't help but wonder where the fuck did it go wrong?
The feelings of joy I experience upon logging in disappear so quickly. I'm bombarded with dozens of messages/whispers from gold spammers with names like "djdhs" and "asdfg." After scrolling through and blocking them one by one I have to deal with the other jackasses in the chat, and while some of them are actually nice and helpful, most are just plain A grade jackasses. This is by far the worst community I've seen in a P2P MMO. Is it because its new? Because its Eastern based? I have no idea. But it's annoying. Why people pay a monthly fee to a social game to be dicks I'll never understand.
And there are those gold spammers. Ridiculous. Name one other MMO where you log in and are just attacked, on every channel and every zone, by 6 or 7 spammers at a time. This is by far the most embarrassing thing I've ever seen in an online game, and I've played just about all of them.
Where are the GM's? I've never asked this question about an MMO before. I've dealt with glitches, bots, and jackasses before and never questioned the people who run it. But I can't ignore it this time. Logging into a super well done polished game and experiencing such rampant abuse is a slap in the face. You wouldn't know by looking at the sweet case in the store that you're going to play this kind of mess.
Aion has the chance to be a great game. It does! If they would just lower the requirements to fight in the Abyss (the main selling point of the game which you can't get to until 25) and, you know, ENFORCE THEIR RULES, this game would be a contender to Warcraft. But right now it isn't.
People can bitch about WoW, and believe me I do too, but I was riding through Northrend yesterday staring at the amazing zones they put together and thinking "where are these in other games?" It's epic. Where is the epicness?
I beg of you, Ultima Online. Steal new graphics from someone, anyone. Then I can die happy.
Switched up the ending on you there. But seriously, do it. And Aion....why aren't you WoW?
