color me suprised, i didnt think it was gonna do that well...although, didnt conan do really well at first then people canceled their subscriptions?

I played the beta and realy enjoyed it. I was really impressed with the graphics and the gameplay was fun enough. If I wasn't entrenched in City of Heroes I would have picked this up, but I can't play more than one MMO at a time.

I'll just wait for a trial. It will happen sometime

At level 38, the grind is just too much for me.

@Wedge> Perhaps it's because the consumer considers the value of the subscription to be worth more than the money he spends on it.

Personally speaking, I enjoy the MMO I play. The amount spent every month is a pittance compared to the amount of time invested and enjoyment received. I am well aware of what the product costs yearly, and I am willing to make that investment to enjoy what I play. I hardly feel "duped."

You could look at it from the perspective that it's a far better value than spending $50-60 monthly for the average one-shot game that delivers roughly 10-20 hours of playtime and then either gathers dust on a shelf or gets traded in for two dollars at Gamestop.

Even if you never bought a game, and stuck to renting, most rental places are around eight bucks each per game, and you technically get the privilege of "owning" it for five days.

Back in the old, old days, there were some online text-only MUDs on networks like Compuserve that were six dollars *per hour* to play, and that was at 300 baud speed. Can you even imagine?

@Wedge, hey, is your icon from a game called mischief makers? I've seen your comments a few times and only now does it register with me....

I tried the Beta, and thought it was pretty decent. Granted I didn't play past lvl 10. So I decided that if I'm gonna try this new MMO, I might aswell go big, so I bought the collectors edition.

Big misstake. Now, the game isn't -bad- by any stretch (Unless you count the insane amount of grinding) but if you're going to buy an MMO, but WoW or try any other MMO, since WoW trumphs Aion in almost all aspects except graphics.
I can't say how the end game is though, I didn't play that far since the way there was far too tedious.

So yeah, pretty OK, but there are better MMO's out there.

Poor and clunky controls, terrible camera system, slow gameplay. What's not to love about Aion?

but i thought all PC gamers were filthy filthy pirates?

@Carl Sagan But that can be said of all games. So its better to "waste" some time playing Halo or Fallout. Seems like the same thing to me, but then I like to waste my time with all games.

@article I really liked aion when I tried the open beta. However I don't play a mmo for very long if my friends aren't playing. /shrug

@Kyosji
The reason they compare it to WoW is the simple fact that the supposedly different PvPvE part of the game doesn't come till later on. Most people who have tried it, only tried the Beta and therefore have probably only gotten up to lv25 at best (i myself got 2-3 characters to lv 10+ because i wanted to experiment with the classes). People use beta's and what-not like trail periods but these periods are much too short to get to high levels. Aion feels A LOT like WoW early on... and god knows most players are not gonna want to drop $70 just so they can find out if they enjoy the game at higher level's when they didn't see anything special in the lower levels.

If Aion wanted to escape the label of a WoW clone, they should have introduced those PvPvE elements early on in the game, instead of saving them for the later parts... i mean why make players wait 10 levels to get their wings and another few dozen levels to get to the PvPvE?... by doing otherwise, anyone playing the beta, or anykind of trial period Aion might offer later on would be able to see the difference. As it stands, 2 weeks with Aion just screams WoW clone

@Riegel88
Check my blog for a write up on Aion.

In terms of what MMO doesn't have a grind? WoW. Back when I had a few 70s (before WotLK), I never had to grind: just quest.

Re: grinding.
What Magnalon said.

... so what happened to the deal with NCSoft and Sony? Remember a few E3's ago when they announced that they had an exclusive deal to develop an MMO for the PS3?? (Doesn't anyone but me remember this?)

... still waiting....

I'm waiting for a bit more spit polish before I reactivate the account.

It's already been said before, but the game is quite beautiful. And the soundtrack blows my mind, I mean, Impesetium (I know I'll never spell that right...) has this absolutely crazy Arabic ethnic music coupled with an accordion. It was bizarre, but worked so well. Whoever made the soundtrack needs a raise or a bonus or something, because for once I was actively avoiding ventrilo in order to just listen to the game's soundtrack. (Don't forget to turn off combat speech, though, gets a little old!)

Other than that, it's enough EverQuesty, enough WoWy and enough new stuff (though could be enough L2y, didn't play Lineage 2) to make it interesting for me. Just there were a lot of little things like a slightly sluggish response compared to WoW's more on-the-fly responsiveness and then other inconvenient things, like a broken guild management system. You can't set individual privileges or view logs of who deposited and withdrew stuff.

All in all, it lost most of the people it I went to play it with because things really, really slow down once you hit your 30s. I was fine with that, but I guess they're just not as hardcore as we used to be back in EQ.

My only real gripe is the forced PvP. Once you hit your 20s, there will be gank squads in pretty much every zone you go to except your capital city. It was pretty grieftastic.