Whrgrbl.

While I wait for YouTube to upload my video, I guess I’ll write a little bit about my experiences in Aion thus far.  I’ll say this right off the bat:  Taking everything into consideration — Content, Playability, Learning Curve, Graphics, Sound, Combat Mechanics, Community, etc — WoW is superior.  That’s coming from someone who really wants this game to be better, because he would enjoy seeing something take WoW down a notch.  That’s the only WoW vs. The Other MMO that you will read in this post. 

Okay, the video is ready.  Now, this is just a little 30 second sample of what the combat looks like from a Templar’s point of view.  The Templar is one of two branches of the Warrior class — the other being Gladiator.  As you might imagine, the Templar is the tank of the game, while the Gladiator is melee DPS and off-tank.  The thing you will probably notice best of all from this sample is that there are a lot of different abilities to choose from while in combat.  You will see that I always have a button to press, and this makes grinding just a little more tolerable than having to press the same two buttons over and over again.  Mostly everything is cool-down based, though a few of my abilities use mana.  The mana cost is next to nothing, however.  I have never been below 80% mana after fighting, no longer how long it’s been.  Now for the video:

If you’re wondering, the song playing there as I was recording that is “You Can Run, But We’ll Find You” by Matchbox Romance.

I really won’t get into a full-fledged review here, mostly because I’d like to play it a bit longer before I have a final opinion on the matter.  Right now, as with any game, there are things that I really like and there are things that I think need to be fixed.  A quick example of things that I really like:  The combat system, the lore, the gathering system, the graphics (especially in regards to the animations on skills/abilities), and the design (especially on the gear), wings, the ability to customize the look of your gear (from level 30 onwards).  A quick example of things that I really don’t like:  The rift system, the fact there are no dungeons for levels 1–24, the fact that there are no dungeons for level 29, the aether extraction system, the professions leveling system, the fact that my favorite ability was a world drop that I had to spend vast amounts of my in-game currency to buy from the auction house. 

I look forward to playing through a bit more of this game.  The goal right now is to hit level 30, so that I can see what the next level of wings looks like and what the dungeons from that point forward look like.  I’m still confused to hell why you are locked out of the first dungeon in the game after level 28 and can’t enter another one until level 30.  That’s really…stupid.  We’ll see how it goes. 

 

Now playing: Band Of Skulls - Friends