Traditionally, I’ve always been a huge fan of the Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) genre. I played Guild Wars (All 4 volumes) for over 2 years. After that, I played World of Warcraft (WoW) for 2 years. Once I got tired of WoW, I tried many eastern MMORPG games.

Most of the eastern MMORPG games are “free to play” but are limited in what you can do. They make their money through micro-transactions. For example, while you play the game free of charge you might have to pay 50 cents to get a really cool sword or pay $5 to get extra storage slots in your inventory. I didn’t really like any of these free to play games. They were poorly designed, developed, and maintained.

Just when I was about to lose hope, I learned about a game developed and published by NCsoft called Aion. I knew right away this was going to be the best MMORPG I’ve ever played. So, I pre-ordered the game and played in 2 closed betas, one open beta (the only one they had), and finally got some pretty cool names reserved and continued playing on release. I have to say that even up to this point I am still becoming even more impressed with the game as I continue to play. There are many reasons why I love this game, but I’ll provide a few key points below:

• It is the first MMORPG I’ve personally paid any attention to that has a chance at competing with the highly overrated World of Warcraft.
• The NCsoft designers have somehow managed to make even the most seemingly tedious tasks entertaining and fun, such as gathering resources and crafting abilities.
• Everyone can FLY! Yes, I have wings! No need to save up trillions of in-game currency to buy that mediocre mount that does nothing more than increase your velocity. I think they do have mounts in Aion (I haven’t gotten too far into the game to know for sure yet), but they aren’t as much of a key component to the game as they have been historically in other MMORPGs such as WoW (Funny how WoW has become the metric for MMORPG quality these days).
• The game has had a fairly decent launch, relatively speaking. The point here is that NCsoft has learned from past mistakes made by their predecessors. This ensures not only greater stability on a technical level, but game design benefits as well. You can tell right away that the game has a lot of good UI design and features, especially in the social networking aspect. Yes, there is still a LOT of room for improvement, but for the most part they’ve done a good “first pass”.

Right now I have a Level 21 Elyos Ranger named Trap. I’ve posted a few screenshots below: