Aion, the MMO from well known MMO publisher NCsoft, has already enjoyed a successful launch in Korea and China. Now it is set to come to Europe and the USA, and as a fantasy MMO, it can’t help but get compared to World of Warcraft, the all-conquering MMO, but is that fair?

In short, Aion is never going to be as large as World of Warcraft, but NCsoft isn’t expecting it to be, nor does it need to be in order to be considered a success. It needs to generate a reasonable following prepared to stick with it, thus generating a reasonable playing and social environment that’s essential for an MMO, and essential for the revenue to sustain it. And the good news is that Aion has enough gameplay and new ideas to generate that critical mass.

Aion may be high fantasy, and so it will draw comparisons with World of Warcraft, but its setting draws on mythology from around the world, although most heavily from Korea. This makes it very different in feel from World of Warcraft, and the visuals that go along with it are different too.

It’s not just the graphics and story that are a little bit different though, Aion has some new gameplay ideas. The main one that people will focus on is flight: at level 10 your character gains their wings, so the action turns into a 3D experience with some quests requiring you to fly around, and with some options for combat in flight. How fun it is to hover above the target out of their reach and blast them. There is a but, of course, which is that within the main game area, flight time is limited, for the obvious reason of ensuring it doesn’t make you invincible. It does add to the flavour of the game, and the PvP area does allow free flight, so it’s used enough to ensure you’re not frustrated by the lack of flying.

The classes in Aion might look a little slim on first glance – choose between Mage, Fighter, Scout and Priest when you create your character, but again level 10 holds the key. At this level you get to choose a sub-class or specialism. The good thing about this is you’ve had ten levels to hone your style of play before you have to choose what exact skills you will pursue. As an example, a Priest might opt for the buffing route or the out and out healer route.

Additionally, classes can then be tweaked at level 20 with Stigma stones. These allow you to tweak the capabilities of your character in sometimes minor, but powerful ways. Say for example your class can only wear Cloth Armour, but you want to be more upfront in battle – a Stigma Stone can be used to give you the ability to wear metal armour that isn’t normally available to your class. It’s a significant difference from other MMO games – your character can be genuinely different from other characters of the same class.

It’s not just the big gameplay additions that will warm you to Aion either. It’s little touches that let you know this is a well rounded MMO, like the semi-transparent map that makes it easy to navigate, the built-in Locate feature that makes following quests easier, the Private Store option to allow you to set yourself up as a vendor.

Nitpickers will want to know what’s wrong with Aion. Well, although NCsoft has very successfully localised the game, some might feel it retains too much of an Eastern feel – the Talking Weasels can feel strange even in a fantasy setting. Also, you can’t help but wish that Aion had taken a leaf out of World of Warcraft’s book and opened up the UI to third party extensions. These are, however, quibbles of a minor nature with what is clearly a polished MMO.

Due for release in September 2009, Aion is going to be a monthly subscription based MMO available on PC.

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