Allow me to link The World’s Shortest Aion Review.

This is pretty much how I feel about the game now. It’s ironic, when I started out I thought to myself, ‘hey this is a pretty game and looks pretty solid.” It’s ironic because Warhammer took most people at least a month or even three to lose hope (hope which is slowly returning…). But Aion? I was over it in 3 days.

Take WoW. Remove the Blizzard Secret Recipe. Add a copypasta’d third party graphics engine, some goofy asian design and reduce the world/zone size and content by 200% and you’d be left with Aion. Toss in some extra doses of lag, weird disconnection issues and avatars that all move the same & chant the same words while casting spells etc, and ladle in tons of goldspam and lousy translation/localisation for extra, ahem, ‘flavour’, and this is what you’re left with. A weird, alien mashup ‘mess’ that completely and disastrously fails to inject you into a world. It’s a pretty fun and attractive game, sure, but as a virtual universe for you to spend your hours developing your character and spending time with friends? I just… don’t know. There’s something missing from this game. WoW has it, WAR almost has it (just a pity about the bugs/balancing/etc issues that persisted for way, way too long), but Aion doesn’t.

Scratch away the shiny veneer and you’re left staring at a gaping, pustulant boil of an experience. Save your money, go outside and wait a couple months for Cataclysm or w/e.