Aion

It’s been a while since a game has put World of Warcraft’s audience directly in its sights. Aion makes no bones about it: Everything from the interface to the combat and quest design makes WoW players feel right at home. Why reinvent the wheel, though? We spent some quality hands-on time with the closed beta and came away impressed with the game’s sky-high production values and promising endgame design.

The newbie experience takes great pains to avoid the “grindy” label that many gamers reflexively apply to Korean-developed titles. Like WoW or any other successful Western game, players are funneled from quest hub to quest hub, being gradually introduced to the game’s many concepts along the way. It’s a familiar but fun trip through beautiful, Asian folklore-inspired settings and tales.

Beginning at level 25, players can start taking in Aion’s real meat-and-potatoes gameplay: the Abyss. Here, the two player factions clash with the neutral Balaur and each other over control of prime locations. Dozens of minor objectives exist and serve various purposes, but the true prizes are the Fortresses. These sprawling edifices grant powerful faction-wide buffs to their owners, from stat boosts to access to unique vendors and dungeons. They can only be assaulted at certain times, which should help concentrate player activity to critical mass for entertaining battles. Nothing is worse than a so-called PvP objective that turns into a routine NPC stomp because nobody is there to fight over it.

NCsoft recently gave us a guided tour of the Abyss, as well as a high-level PvE dungeon. Being put in control of a max-level character cold is nothing like playing to level cap on your own, of course, but we were pleased with our Templar regardless. The class makes extensive use of chain attacks (as do many of Aion’s heroes), and the UI supports the playstyle well. The button for any chain starter changes to the next main line attack in the sequence, which removes the need to dance across dozens of hotkeys to maintain the assault. Alternative moves, like stat-buffing shouts, branch off of certain attack paths as well.

Assaulting an Abyss objective is much like being in a public PvP dungeon. We worked our way through trash mobs before engaging the boss, much like you would in any setting. The point we were fighting over was minor, easily conquered by a single unopposed group. Major objectives like Fortresses require many more players to conquer, and have correspondingly larger layouts and tougher NPC guardians.

If you’re too much of a carebear for the Abyss, you can stick around safe zones all the way to level cap and even find some dungeons and raids to keep you occupied there. The rewards will be less enticing, though, and the world much less dynamic.

The PvE dungeon we went through was more mundane. Just like in any other game, we crowd-controlled as best we could and focused damage on the most dangerous mob standing. Bosses threw a few curveballs at us, but nothing terribly difficult to adjust to on the fly. It’s only a single dungeon in a game with dozens, but it did little to impress.

Aion is a beautiful, rich game that has as a good chance of succeeding. The gameplay is very familiar -- in a good way -- and the Abyss-focused endgame is promising. NCsoft isn’t revolutionizing the MMORPG, but there’s a lot to look forward to in this amalgamation of many of the genre’s best ideas from the last decade.