In September, Aion will be flying off the shelves as players take to the skies in game - but can this new challenger stand in the face of World of Warcraft or will it crash against the wall like many other recent MMO's?
They're Picking a Good Time to Strike
With WoW stagnating in the eyes of many gamers Aion's release date could not have been planned better. WoW seems to have split itself into casual and hardcore communities who are both losing interest due to the “hard mode” design offering very little extra content and rewards for a lot of extra work.The typical WoW raiders at the moment are either bored off their rockers with regular Ulduar on farm status several weeks after it came out, or banging their heads against the wall with hard modes that no one sees much purpose in completing - the upgrades are marginal and incredibly time consuming to attain in comparison to their normal mode counterparts. But enough about WoW. Suffice it to stay, the MMO landscape is ripe for something new, and Aion may just be that game.
The Game Runs Well on Almost any Machine, with Excellent Graphics
Say what you will about maintaining the status quo – Hey, at least the game works. You won't be running along in crawlspaces of the game unable to be targeted in order to kill bosses that can't fight back a la Age of Conan. You won't get killed in a second or less by a Bright Wizard's PBAOE going off way more times than it should in a single cast. Aion runs smooth as a whistle and is as pretty as a picture. After being burned by games that were widely considered unplayable by today's standards, the MMORPG community will be more than happy to give a game a try that actually, believe it or not, runs.
Bells and Whistles
Being able to spread wings and fly around, or save yourself from otherwise lethal falls by gliding down to safety is just the beginning. Characters also receieve divine power points (DP) from fighting which accumulate and can be used in emergencies to execute much more powerful abilities than normal. This of it as something like a limit break. Basic combat focuses around combo chains, where the player uses several weaker abilities to unlock much stronger skills at the end of the chain. Some of these chains only pop up some of the time, adding a fast paced, surprise, twitch element to combat.