After yesterdays brief intro to the game and the subsequent bit of gushing, I spent the most part of yesterday playing Aion and getting a better feel for it. Mostly thanks to EU Battle.Net being borked and me not being able to log into WoW. Nice one Blizz.

Anyhoo, Aion is nice. I’m not going to say great. I’m going to say.. nice. It’s quirky and weird in terms of it’s world – this doesn’t really feel like your traditional fantasy MMO even though it clearly is fantasy – perhaps more so than WoW (you won’t find any mechano-hogs for example – no steampunk). The feeling I got was a sort of, Final Fantasy (the single player games) meets WoW. Now, I’ve never played Final Fantasy Online, so I don’t know if Aion bears any resemblance to it.

At any rate, I’m liking the feel. It’s all very pretty. And while I’m loathe to say it’s better than WoW in terms of the looks department – Blizzard still nails texturing and has their own patented stylisation that scrathes a certain itch most of us share – it is deliciously psychedelic. Aion’s developers weren’t afraid to splurge on colour, and as a result one feels like you’re skipping through a magical world of ponies and unicorns while on acid. Except the unicorns are voracious carnivores and there’s likely a legion of Asmodians hiding behind that rainbow waiting for the right moment to jump you and remove your spleen.

I’ll come right out off the bat. This game is not better than WoW. It’s not more polished than WoW. It probably struggles to maintain even the hint of the same ballpark. For an established eastern game (it’s been what, nearly a year now?) this game seems to struggle with it’s netcode (I suffer some rather unpleasant rubberbanding), some text/fonts look broken, and what I’ve seen of the early world thus far looks themeparkish and linear (as opposed to WoW’s Azeroth which has never, ever given me that feeling – as a noob I’d routinely get lost simply exploring the starting areas, not so in Aion). I was also treated to my first queue, a lovely 20 minute wait. Hmmmm.

For it’s foibles, the game gets a lot right. For one, cahracter customization is a blast. I saw some really cool, some really weird looking characters out there. While technically the game sports only 2 races, the degree to which you can customize your avatar means you can create something quite unique. Naturally most people go for the perfect looking prettyboy/girl, but at least the possibility exists for you to play the wildcard. Secondly, animations and movement are top notch. I spoke about ’stickiness’, and I’ll stick to my guns on that (har har). Lastly, everything just seems to work. I didn’t encounter any broken quests, retarded NPC AI(nothing to write home about but at least it’s functional), server instability, major bugs or anything of the sort. The game is Not A Beta(TM). Whether or not I’d called it polished though, that’s another story. 

I’m in a bit of a quandary right now because I can see myself playing Aion quite a bit, it has grabbed me, something Champions Online simply couldn’t do. On the flip side, I’m still highly invested in WoW, and Mythic has been promising so many good things with Warhammer that I’d like to see them deliver. But 3 MMO’s? Simply unsustainable. Something has to give. Right now it looks like WAR might be the one losing out, but I still have a month of time left, which is coincidentally how much free time I got with my Aion purchase. So the next 30 days decides which of the two, Aion or WAR, becomes my ‘mistress’ MMO.