Everyone is Looking for a Reason to Quit WoW, But is Aion the Answer?

Everyone that's played this game since day one, or hell, since season one arena usually has one thing in common at this point: They're almost all desperately looking for a reason to stop playing WoW. I can't really think of a single person that participates in high-end arena or end-game raiding at this point that is satisified with existing content or implementation. In fact, I know a large amount of players that simply pre-ordered Aion to get into the beta so they can have something to play besides WoW. And although I used to be in the same crowd of people sure to play Aion at release, after participating in the third beta event this weekend, I'm having second thoughts. I'll try and discuss a few of the concerns I have with Aion at the moment and how they compare to WoW's parallel implementation.

First and foremost: combat. WoW's combat system is far from perfect and there definitely exists a slight melee superiority in WoW, but at least it's generally controllable. In Aion, not only are spell interrupts entirely at the mercy of the RNG system (you have a chance to be fully interrupted anytime you're hit by attacks), but classes can full-on stack resistance against casters to make virtually every spell miss at the loss of almost no offensive power. Although this isn't overly noticeable at the lower levels that players are exposed to in beta, it gets to be a real problem later on. Despite this, however, melee are generally far more disadvantaged then casters in Aion. The mage classes have a myriad of CC options while the healers have incredible longevity that is really difficult for a solo class to take down. The game really isn't balanced for 1v1 in the slightest, as it seems right now that 1v1 (dueling) is basically a food chain of mages defeating melee which are defeated by rangers and good clerics who in turn lose to assassins and such. The one surprising part of this all is that when NCsoft held an official 1v1 tournament in Korea after the live release of Aion there, one of the least likely classes to win emerged victorious: the templar. Templars are basically the tank class that are built to soak damage and can put out some in return but most people were shocked and really expected a sorcerer or cleric to win. I couldn't find the videos of the templar winning the 1v1 portion but here's a really entertaining clip of part of their 3v3 tournament with some really close matches:



Moving on, we have travel. In WoW, it's pretty simple: you have flight points almost everywhere and then really fast flying mounts at higher levels to get you basically anywhere within a minute or two. In Aion, you have limited flight points, no ground mounts, and your flight consists of enabling your wings to fly which have a very limited flight duration (which also takes a while to recharge), and gliding which allows you to effectively glide down from a higher elevation to a lower one moving slightly faster than run speed. This is incredibly agitating when playing as Asmodian and finding out that you have to run literally miles between your starting area quests back and forth ad nauseum. Aside from the annoying fact that you obviously can't fly forever, I've personally found the controls while flying increasingly frustrating to manage at times as character control seems really clunky. As for death and wipe recovery, in WoW you basically appear as a ghost at a graveyard and run back to your body. Simple, right? Well, in Aion when you die, you can either be rezzed before releasing or opt to release to your last bind point (which can be extremely far) and have to traverse all the way back to where you died via running or a long route of flights. I really think NCsoft needs to improve methods of travel if they want to win over a significant playerbase for their North American release.

Next, there's the UI. As anyone playing WoW knows, the UI in Warcraft is incredibly customizable with literally hundreds of thousands of mods out there to make your game look and play exactly how you want it. As for Aion, despite being released in Asia for a while now, there are very few (comparatively) mods available and much more limited UI functions in the game. For example, probably the most annoying thing that I can't figure out is how (if it's even possible) to bind my left click button in order to pan the camera in Aion like I can in WoW with it. The chat functions are also really annoying at times with such quirks as forcing you to type out /legion to talk in guild chat, /group (full words only) to type in party chat, etc etc. The core of the WoW UI is there but there's so much more that NCsoft could have done with it. Perhaps I'm just not informed of a huge UI database for Aion somewhere, but the game loses a lot of points in my book for lack of available customization with the UI and game settings in general.

Although there's much more to talk about, I think the point I'm trying to get across here is that although Aion quite obviously tried to mimic a lot of WoW's best aspects and funnest selling points, NCsoft still has a long way to go if they really want to make any sort of dent in the WoW playerbase. Everyone may be bored to tears with the game right now and begging for a reason to cancel their subscriptions but throwing a half-assed WoW clone with pretty graphics at the market will only grab a temporary audience. Remember what happened to Warhammer and AoC? Now, don't get me wrong, as I still enjoy the game quite a bit and find a lot of aspects of it extremely fun... however, this statement comes with asterisks as the issues mentioned here as well as ones not detailed really hold the game back from being revolutionary. I fully plan to continue playing the beta in future events to hopefully be proven wrong, but the bottom line right now is that if you're looking for a better game in every regard because you hate Blizzard and they nerfed your class, you're better off saving your money at least until Aion gets some much needed polish.