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So Aion has been out a few weeks now and I'm not even sure how I feel about it at this point. I'm currently 36 and have hit so many tedious road blocks along the way that even at this juncture I've questioned whether or not I want to carry on playing numerous times. The first time came half way through 24 when I completely ran out of quests and had to grind over a million exp to hit the fabled 25 for Abyss access. I was totally dismayed by this. I felt I must've done something really wrong to end up in this position. I understood that there would be some grinding involved but over a million?
Fast forward a week and it's hilarious to think I held that mentality. To put this in perspective, when I hit 36, I used Aion Armory to tell me all the quests that open at that level. After filtering out all the follow ups and phantom quests, the grand total? Six. Yes, six. After doing all of them and their follow ups, I was left four bubbles into 36 with slightly under 16 million to grind. I wondered to myself there and then whether this was a game that I really wanted to be devoting my time to. Even with their mantra of wishing to bring an eastern style MMO rife with concessions to an accepting western audience, it was inevitable there would be a degree of grinding. 16 million exp worth of mindless killing just isn't an acceptable figure to me. Perhaps it would be if I only had to do it once or twice but it's already happened more than that and, given what Luni tells me and seeing NCSoft boosting exp from quests by 300% in a distant patch, I fully expect more of it to come in the future.
The problem with making a lot of these arguments lies in the perceived sense of self entitlement many WoW players supposedly harbor. It isn't that I'm not willing to put the time in to level at all, I just don't want to kill mob x hundreds of times to level up. I want to pick up a quest, go to an area, kill some shit, go back and get rewarded for it. I would imagine in most cases doing that would be slower than constant grinding but that's missing the point. Players need that psychological fragmentation, or at least I do. I suppose we'll see in a few months if others do depending on how well the game is doing because Aion in itself is actually pretty damn fun and that's the great tragedy. It really feels like there's a fantastic game buried underneath all this bullshit that's fighting you every step of the way to keep you from loving it.
As I said to BTB, even if we do keep plugging away, I can't see Aion being a game we're still playing in a years time. Depending on where our lives are at the time, I'd be extremely surprised at this juncture if we don't end up scrubbing along in FFXIV. Our roots are buried in it's predecessor and as long as they learn from their previous mistakes and don't try to be the previous generations generic conventions dying successor again, it should be a fine game.