By J.D. Richardson

So here I am again, thrust into another fictional online world with no friends and no clue.

That online world certainly is beautiful, full of lovely green grass, lovely green leaves on the trees and a great big blue sky with pretty twinkling lights in it. Strange, small animals scamper about or flutter through the air. The scene is idyllic.

Idyllic, that is, until a tiny man with a massive head runs by saying “lol” over and over again. I double-take. And then a lady who must be about nine feet tall rushes past, her head the size of a tennis ball, features twisted and grotesque yet mildly amusing. Awakened from the trance the dazzling world had put me in, I look around and start inspecting the other characters more closely. Some look like they just came from a Vogue cover shoot. But some appear to have emerged from the very depths of Picasso’s imagination. The spell is broken.

I wander off to find some adventures, and within no time I’m killing X number of Y with my knife. I spot the dwarf with the massive head over near a stream, still saying “lol” to himself. I try to move away to avoid him but he clocks me and comes over, standing next to me while I kill an odd creature for its claws. “lol,” he says again, “why are you shouting all the time?” He scampers off before I have time to tell him that it’s just the sound my character makes when she hits something. I go back to my killing spree.  A bit later on I see the little fella fall off a cliff. This makes me smile.

//Standing out
The problem with going to all the trouble to make such a fantastically imaginative world is that, when you throw in the ability to abuse that world by allowing players to make characters that look utterly ridiculous, you pretty much ruin the reason you put so much effort into creating the world in the first place. Perhaps people don’t care about immersion in MMOs these days. Perhaps it’s all about the loot. Still, something doesn’t sit right.

I’m not going to go into the finer details here. There’s just too much in this game to cover in a single review. Know that Aion is pretty standard when it comes to MMORPGs. It does try extremely hard to be different from the rest, but it’s often in all the wrong ways.

One of the most prominent gripes with the world of MMOs is the nature of the quests. It’s always “kill X amount of this creature,” or “deliver this package to this person at the other side of the village.” They were boring in Everquest, they were boring in World of Warcraft and they are exceedingly boring here. It got to the point in Aion where I stopped even reading the quest text. I had zero interest in the background of the world or what these characters had to say to me. It’s all just so shallow.

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