Aion. I don’t think one can over-emphasize how grindy it is. I pre-ordered the game after an ex-WoW guildie ranted and raved about it. Most of my friends in WoW, at that point, decided to quit WoW and migrate to Aion. I decided to join them and see if it lived up to the hype.

I played a bit of the beta, but didn’t have time to play much. When the game came out, I had zero time to play for the first couple weeks. When I finally started up, most of my friends were much further along. WoW had trained me to think, “Oh. Ok. I’ll just work a bit and catch up in no time.” I never caught up. I never even came close to catching up. I don’t think i ever even SAW one of my guildies in the game, let alone was able to play with them. But fair enough. Some games just play like that.

Aion compounded things by making every. Single. Thing feel like an arduous grind. And the class I chose (ranger) didn’t seem to get any skills that could kill things with any speed, thus making the endless low-end monsters I’d have to kill into some of the most boring gameplay I’d seen in quite some time. Admittedly, I may have simply picked the wrong class or not learned enough of the right tricks to playing. But my first impressions soured me greatly to the game.

The final problem that helped make me never want to see my winged pretty-boy character again was that my computer was woefully underpowered. I could barely run the game, and after lowering the settings to a point where the game didn’t look like garbage but didn’t run like a slideshow, I still constantly crashed. And it usually seemed to happen while flying or gliding (Thus adding whole new meaning to the term ‘crashed.’) Which meant when I logged back in, I was dead on the ground and owed the spirit healer another chunk of my dwindling money supply to get my experience points back. So I could go out and crash and die again.

It didn’t take long for me to give up on the game. Had I actually had time to play the game on release day, I’d have probably saved myself a month of game time. Aion just felt slow, grindy and lackluster on release. It was a WoW clone that only had a couple places in which it innovated over WoW (The combo system was neat. I liked the character creator and the possible customization. Flying was fun… For the whole minute you got to do it at a time.) It felt more like several free-to-play grinders I’d tried out and rapidly quit some years prior than a subscription-based, more modern MMO.

I haven’t played it since a month or two after release, so I don’t know if anything changed. I know I was only just barely ahead of the curve of quitting because my guildies all eventually left Aion for greener pastures. I’ve thought about trying it out again with my newer computer now that it’s free-to-play and a couple people I know have returned. But I’m not currently in the mood for a new, hotkey-based MMO right now, free or not. And this video pretty much reinforced my guess that not much had fundamentally changed.