NCsoft launches Aion 2.5, announces free trialFollow

So I decided that this time I would take NCSoft up on their offer when they reactivated my account for free.

I originally played Aion for 5 months starting at US launch (after playing in the closed beta before that).

At the time I quit because I realized the following after accomplishing my first goal of obtaining my complete level 30 Daevanion armor set and weapon:

• There was no endgame to look forward to apart from doing Dredgion a hojillion times
• The game was a massive MASSIVE grind. (keep in mind I played FFXI for 4 years, another massive grind, it had nothing on Aion)
• Prices, especially from vendors, were quickly going to balloon far beyond what I was reasonably capable of earning

So that's a short list of the reasons I quit the first time.

I decided to fire it up again and see if 2 years of development and all the wonderful changes with the Empyrean Calling patch were worth giving NCSoft my money again.

After about 5 hours (admittedly a very short period of time) I came to the following conclusions

• There seems to be more of an endgame now, though I base that only on seeing people shouting for 3 things rather than 1 (Essoterrace, Dark Poeta, and Dredgion instead of just Dredgion)
• The game is still a massive grind, though there are clearly more quests than there were before, most of them seem to just be "Ok go kill X of Y and then come back and I'll give you this same quest again Z times"
• Inflation happened in a big damn way, so now vendor prices are more attainable, but AH prices are absurd as kinah has continued to be devalued. Hell I found one quest as I was looking around that flat out told me to fork over 2.4 million kinah as part of the quest (my main had about 1.6 mil on him at the time)
• I have no idea what I'm doing.. No seriously, I can't seem to figure out how to play my own characters after all this time

I couldn't see any graphical improvements despite the promo trailer for this patch clearly demonstrating how marvelous the graphics should be now. The game still looked fine, though it didn't look significantly better than I remember it. I still ran into a lot of the same network lag issues that I remember from two years ago.

Oh and not all my characters received all their freebie stuff they were supposed to get (notably a plastic surgery ticket to alter their appearance). Most did, but not all, and one of the ones that didn't was the one I was most interested in changing the appearance of, so that was disappointing.

All in all, I can see where they've made progress, but it doesn't strike me as a lot of progress over such a long time frame. It looks like the enjoyment I had two years ago was all I was ever going to get out of Aion, which is a shame.

Edited, Jun 6th 2011 12:58pm by Callinon