Aion: Into The Fire With You

If skimpy leopard-printed rags are the newbie armor, why level up?

After shelving my Templar on account of oh my god fights take so long kill me now, I ascended an Assassin. On the plus side, hot pants look much better on her and she kills much faster. On the other hand, I'm blowing through absurd amounts of bandages. At least I'm not literally checking my email during combat any more.

Wandering around Pandemonium for a while on the obligatory "hey newb, check out the city by talking to these dudes in every freaking corner of the zone" quest, I realized how brutal Aion is on new players. Not in terms of combat -- though it's harder than WoW, it ain't no EQ by any means -- but in terms of throwing a bunch of obtuse systems at players right away. Right from level one you're probably socketing your equipment with manastones for stat boosts. As soon as you hit level 10 and get to go hang out with the grown-ups, you're expected to get cranking on a craft skill or two, a couple of gathering skills, and possibly get to grips with some consumables depending on your class.

I'm no delicate flower overwhelmed by a tangled weave of arcane game systems, but Aion doesn't pull any punches or hesitate to fling you into the deep end. Even the relatively kind early quests are balanced around using a bunch of consumables from stat-boosting food to potions and once-an-hour abilities to survive so much as a single unexpected add. You've got to scratch and claw for any advantage you can get, and wrapping your brain around how gathering and crafting skills work, which stats are most advantageous for your class, and how to prioritize chain skills and in-combat procs is the way to do it.

The hardcore nerd in me loves the fact that Aion doesn't hold your hand. You barely have to be able to read to level to cap in WoW, and a little punishment goes a long way to rewarding excellence here. It's no exaggeration to say that surviving a single even-level add while solo questing in Aion is about as difficult as (and therefore gives a similar rush to) some dumbass hunter pulling a second trash pack in a moderate-level WoW raid. That's a cool feeling.

Still, how many players are going to be turned off by the fact that they're going to be underpowered if they don't put the time in to master Aion's many facets? I can tell you from firsthand experience that marginal MMO players won't be buying what Aion is selling in any noticeable quantities ­-- and this is just solo grinding, not to mention the cutthroat PvP endgame!

Is that really a bad thing, though? Casual players have plenty of games to choose from. With everyone in the MMO business chasing the WoW dream, it's been some time since a high quality hardcore game came out for bona fide hardcore types. Aion's elder game had better have more legs than the last few PvP-focused triple-A games to come out, or I'm going to be annoyed at yet another waste of good game systems.