@@ppsarrakis I'm well aware how terrible they can be, I've played most. And btw, "sub 60 fps" could easily mean 50+, which isn't bad at all for a crappy Korean grinder.
"For being released in 2008 it's perfectly servicable" This...This is NOT the Aion that was released in 2008. This is some other game wearing a shirt it stole off the corpse of the original Aion which it brutally murdered in a back alley.
This game used to be a subscription fee MMORPG published by ncsoft. I pre-ordered it and bought a computer for it back in the day, it used to be called the Tower of Eternity. It was actually an incredible game for its time. I'm so sad to see how far this game has fallen.
I remember getting the demo-code back in the day and playing it for HOURS. Its really a shame to see either how far this game has fallen, or how much my nostalgia has covered up the flaws.
I recall seeing 5.0 Korean version with some high-end dungeon. It looked cool, just not my cup of tea. If it's still thriving in Korea, good for them I guess.
It's just sad how they ripped out all the good parts of it. - It HAD english voiceacting. - It HAD no auto-combat grind macro. - It HAD a better starting story (a bit like FF14 with being a freshman in a small village that finds out during the tutorial questline that he's a chosen one with wings). - It HAD varied locales with interesting open world PvP (you could temporarily and limited invade the other faction's regions that were usually inaccessible and there was a pure PvP region with the abyss.) - It HAD less stupid stacking grinding power mechanics. It just seems like all the good things were optimized away with patches, expansions and, of course, gameforge.
I used to play the original Aion: Tower of Eternity. This looks like a completely different game. It was completely localized in English and had high production values with a somewhat good story. It was a combination of WoW and Lineage 2. It was a fun MMO. It almost no original concept, but it worked well, the combat was cool, exploration was neat and it was actually pretty hard. The character creator was great back then and we had a lot of fun in the game playing as a holy trinity.
I played the original too, if you don't do certain steps it screws you up forever later, which I was able to fix because someone told me at the last minute.
Yep. Original Aion was much much better than the trainwreck that is current Aion. Josh even picked a weird new class and not one of the original 8. Funnily enough, Aion classic released a few months ago but NCwest handled it fucking horribly (surprise surprise) and its already dying. That’s a flaw in this series though, it looks only at the modern iteration of each game. It’s like judging WoW only based on your Retail experience, it just doesn’t tell the whole story of the game, it doesn’t paint a good enough picture.
Honestly if the video was titled “Worst MMO ever? - RETAIL Aion”, I would have no issue. Retail and Classic (including other older patches that private servers play on) are completely different games and should be treated as such. Again, same as WoW Classic vs Retail. Different games.
@@SentinelFury Not even that . The comparison with WoW and Retail WoW doesn't work here, because Aion is (well imo) technically not still a running game, it has been on maintenance mode for years...or should I say dead game for years. So I dont think that even the current running version can be considered "retail" or at least not comparable to current WoW (or similar type of MMO). So this video is comparing the ghost of dead game more like.
For some reason I feel compelled to leave a comment. Aion was such an incredible game, my best MMO experience, never played PvP remotely deep and well designed as it was. Lived in it for years until the pay to win took over, and I'm still nostalgic for it. Hurts to see what they turned this game into.
You can play EuroAion if you wanna relive the experience, I've been playing with my gf for a few weeks and it's been great. It's on 4.6 version so it still has Katalam
I am honestly destroyed to see what this game turned into. This was my childhood. I met a lot of my friends here. The most painful thing is, Josh you would have love the old Aion I remember. The lore was deep, the characters were authentic to the game’s world. The leveling and gearing was hard, but rewarding. The combat was still boring to begin with, but built up nicely through leveling. Oh. And there was english voice-acting. I don't know... maybe the shop needed space so the voice-files were sacrificed. Who knows... They butchered the world, literally and made it into a shop-game. There are no words how evil this is.
I remember the original aion. played it with the girl I liked in college back in '09 or so. this looks completely different. like they were trying to be every other mmo all at once instead of the unique mmo they started as.
@@darkdogzstudioz The moment they started just erasing complete zones from existence was the moment i never went back. Sarpan, Tiamaranta, Katalam, Danaria… i had great memories of my guild doing dungeons there. Guess what, none of these exist anymore… 😥
@@Jacob-sb3su Evil ain't a dick measuring contest. The erosion of gaming's history is a huge problem, especially when it comes to these live service online games.
For the first few minutes of the video I thought I was in some kind of weird fugue state, because years ago I played a Korean MMO called Aion with two factions called Asmodians and Eilyos, but literally nothing else about this game Josh played sounded familiar. Turns out, no, I didn't have some kind of mental break, they just ripped all the guts and heart out of the game I remember and turned it into... whatever the hell this is supposed to be. It's really sad, honestly. I might have quit Aion when I got to level 25 or so and hit the point where my only choices for advancement were pvp or grinding mobs for months, but up until that point I actually quite liked it.
If you watch the series this is the case with many of the MMOs, a lot of them started out decent games carving out a small niche under World of Warcraft and then they slowly descended into this hellscape that you see
This is literally what happened with me watching this video too. I was between 10-14 years old (i cant remember what year it was but definitely that range) when I played it and i'm now 24, so thought it was just nostalgia, but maybe it really was just better back then. Edit: I must have been at least 12 when I started, because I didn't understand English too well before then as I only started to learn it when I was 10, and honestly I doubt they would've launched the game in my native language since no other MMO has done that so far.
I remember playing this with my wife many years back. It was fully voiced ... IN GERMAN!! We still quote some of the lines because we had so much fun with it. RIP Aion.
It was translated into a lot of European languages. As a kid I loved this game because this was only one mmorpg game with full polish translation and dubbing
As a German: THIS!! IT HAD GERMAN FUCKING VOICE ACTING!! Did they Just... throw away all the lines they recorded? Why would they do that?! Aions Liebe und Azphels Führung, mein Freund... und einen Toast auf die gute alte Zeit.
I actually bought this game as a kid. Installed the whole thing but then it hit me with "enter credit card information to enter your free trial." That was the end of my Aion experience. Still wonder where I'd be today if I got into this game.
Indeed. To demonstrate how low it has fallen, I would have to rate the version I played back on lev 55 (Ver 3.7?) as a 100, so this new version would be a 3/100. I threw thousands of hours to this game. It hurts seeing it like this. Just how Stupid do they have to be to destroy their income like this.
@@joshanonline True, even with some issues Aion could have survived and maybe still be a relevant mmo today. It is really sad to see what it has become, at some point instead of getting better it just turned into one of the worse mmos. It had so much potential with the rifting pvp, it was so much fun whenever a rift appeared and people poured in to the enemy land. I remember going alone once late at night and exploring the Asmo side lol I was so scared of being caught by other players or getting killed by guard eheh was really exciting. There were even quests to do on the enemy side...so much potential for a nice pvp game all wasted!
Aion I have a history with, and...what the hell? I never remembered it being like this, this is 100% completely different from my experience when this was owned by NCSoft and was voiced in English at character creation and gameplay, the class selection is different, the character creation is different, everything about the game is different from the Aion I remember playing before this...what the hell? This is a far cry from what I remember the game being like. Even the opening is different.
@@antediluvian14 Yep. I went back to retail Aion since quitting soon after Echoes of Eternity dropped. It was…disheartening to say the least. Brusthonin, gone. Theobomos, gone. Freaking Altgard, gone too. Mostly all the big pvp maps are gone…or replaced. Really disappointing
DAMN, so different from how it used to be. I remember rescuing Munin in the opening Asmodian area. God damn those first few hours leading up to getting your wings was, frankly, incredible. The writing was fairly tight, and yes it had shit quest design, but most games back then did. Sad to see that they've gutted it to this degree. The starting zones were some of the best content the game had.
later you even get to know why he got locked up. Imagine my surprise when i saw him freed in later patches and not a single word why. Man can only guess he got released but directly under Marchutan's supervision
Yeah I got the feeling that they put heaps of effort into the starting zones to suck people in and cheaped out on the later ones (I'm talking release Aion, I didn't stay for the major patches). The starting areas were beautiful and all the ones past the second area were bland and barren. The game was predatory before it was free to play - it had a typical Korean grind system to keep you paying for a sub without putting in the investment required to actually keep putting out fun content. And then plop free to play on top of that and well... No thank you!! My first mmorpg was free to play, and I didn't play it long enough to spend money on it. I'm never playing another free to play again. It's just a total waste of time because the only way you can even hope to keep up with other people is to sink an unreasonably huge amount of money into it for what you're actually getting. I'd much rather a simple $15-20 fee per month - much cheaper and you usually get a better game too.
They retconed most of the inner planet, just the starting zones and the original lvl 40+ zones, Abyss is non existent, many dungeons were removed and many pay to win and mobile esque features were added.
@@soulsearcher9620which means it was average in quest design of it's era. Quest design that hasn't really evolved even today. It's still the same "go to that NPC" and "kill x amount of that monster" and "go bring me x amount of that item" in a large part of the majority of MMORPGs. But there aren't a lot of options for how to improve that.
Maybe the gameplay was never really good, but i still enjoyed the ambience and especially the soundtrack. now the gameplay is too bad to even download the game again.
I feel like a lot of these comments of through the lens of nostalgia. As in not much has probably changed but what your seeing isn't how you remember it because you had fun and liked it. There's a lot of movies I remember liking and now realize they're terrible. They haven't been altered.
When I saw Aion pop up I thought “I remember playing this game”. I still have the disks and the metal case they came in. I remember when I first got my wings, and being scared the first time I had to quest in the rift, risking my newfound wings in pvp. This game I saw here is nothing like what I remember. The story of the world spine being shattered, each side blaming the other, brother against brother and those who live on the side in shadow slowly changing into demons while the ‘white-wings” got all sunshine. There was actually a storyline when it was a monthly subscription. One I still remember. I’m glad I moved on when I did and missed this games fall from grace. Thank you for this information, keep up the good work!
@@millenniumearl9849 Me too, it's kind of sad. They had so much plans for this game. ... Also the sound when you run out of aether and are about to fall from the skies, still gives me the creeps.
@@zidahya Please don't remind me... the quest where you had to fly to the center of the PvP zone was to terrifying x) But it was also one of the best community moments I experienced. I had a stranger help me by giving me potions and showing me where I had to go. Being able to fly anywhere in certain maps was so amazing, I loved the game just for that. I left and when i returned, the open PvP space with floating islands got replaced by weird ground maps with air streams where you were barely able to fly. I didn't know why anyone thought this was more fun, so I left again. The game really went downhill
I remember it that way as well was so much fun up until 4.3 I think was the update it started going down hill. I loved the abyss and fighting over the towers and core of the abyss. When that went out is the downfall. I didn't have the subscription, I only started playing just after the game went free to play. Invading the apposing faction's area to do a few quests and PvP was great. Had a good Legion that really helped out when you needed it as well to with the community you were talking about.
I played Aion back when NCSoft still published it in the west and it was still subscription-based. It was an incredible game back then. Amazing world pvp, great dungeons and raids, fun quests, the flying was really fun, no cash shop and it was more visually coherent... It really hurts to see me what the game has become. But hey, what can you expect once Gameforge takes over.
The weird thing is the english voice acting is gone. But thats probably GameForge, I remember playing Tera from Gameforge as publisher and my friend who played in the US who which was managed by Bluehole Studios had a WAY better experience, feature list and so on. Im pretty sure theres a fee mmo publishers have to pay to korean developers, and Im 100% certain gameforge is paying the lowest.
I love what this game has become and the fans deserve to watch it suffer lol. Yall abandoned an amazing game of Warhammer Online for this shitshow. Still will never understand it. Didn't look good when it first launched and it still looks like trash.
I have some very fond memories of this game from back in the day in the NCsoft era. This was my first mmo, I grew fond of the genre and the dark aesthetic of the Asmodians. Sadly that was one of the first things that was taken out after 4.0. I'm grateful for those moments I had with my Legion but those days are over now and everyone moved on onto other games. I'm glad that I got into GW2 and then Destiny after this, I got to enjoy other aspects I liked about Aion in other places.
it is still the NCSoft era. contrary to what people seem to think, gameforge didn't push monetization, ncsoft did. the practices were in play well before the company ever made a deal with gameforge to publish elsewhere welcome to korean and asian games, where eventual heavy monetization is the norm due to heavier working hours and it being considered a good rather than bad practice to have it in game. games like GW2 have only avoided the same fate from companies like NCSoft because it's not an eastern game ported to the west instead they released Blade and Soul, a game that will make your eyes bleed out of sorrow for your wallet with GW2 never releasing there due to potential competition in the companies own market, and no monetization in the west because people in the west don't like it
Aion was my favorite MMO. This is one where when people say it used to be good, it's actually true. When it released in 2009 it was one of the best MMOs ever. In Korea today, Aion Classic is the #1 most played MMO, and the original Aion before it was ruined was the #1 MMO for years. There used to be a joke in Korea that everyone knew someone who played Aion, because it had 5 million players in Korea when the total national population was 50 million. It's a shame what NCsoft did to the game over the years, and how they squandered the Classic release. There will never be a MMO with PvP like Aion. There was only a short period of time where you could have experienced that, and if you did, count yourself lucky.
Were things going downhill before or after they added auto battle in the game? Because I'm convinced Asain gamers don't actually like actual engagements in their games, or gameplay in general, and are only attracted to lots of flashing colors on screen, big tits and generally more effort put into the cash shop then litterally anything else with how popular Idle games and borderline P2W games are over in Asain countries.
Aion was like the WoW of Korea. It was insanely popular there, and having played it back on launch, it was a legitimately fun game. I didn't go beyond the first 3-4 months, but I had a hell of a time with it. It's so sad to log back in now and see what became of it. It's just...bad.
whoa, I knew it was big( I also played it A LOT back in the day as a kid) but I didnt realize it had literally 10% of all koreans play the game. thats insane.
"Games that sell immersion breaking Mounts tell you they dont care about their lore!" Or you are Final Fantasy and spend the last 30 years to make sure your lore is so crazy, that no mount you could ever come up with is immersion breaking xD
that why i can't play TESO. the world of elder scroll is a world that you need to be immerse in to really enjoy it to the fullest. but each time i logged into teso, i would see crazy armor with glowing sphere, halloween mask, ice skin etc and always with crazy mount that really only belong to some Korean mmo but not an elder scroll game. i really enjoy plaing teso :morrowind with a small group but everytime i go to a town, i would see all these immersion-breaking feature. also : seing ad for the cash shop and some limited 40 euro mount each time i log really pissed me off.
@@champ6436 Let's not forget that you loading your savegame in Morrowind is canon and Vivec won't fight you because he knows you can go back and try it again in a different timeline. Or that different events all happen at the same time despite being contradictory because there are dragon breaks which means different "realities" happen at the same time. And that the hero of Kvatch did became Sheogorath. So in Skyrim you can meet your Oblivion character who is now basically a god. Oh and Hermaeus Mora has a library of everything. Even stuff that got cut when the world was created. So cut content is a real thing in universe. Not to mention that the dwarves built a giant mech as their new god. oh, and then there is the gay cyborg from the future who was literally to angry to die and fought a demigod in single combat. Elder Scrolls lore is pretty wild at times.
I bought this game hardcover from target in 2009 I was 10 years old and my first moments in this game and continuing to play it proved to be the most magical experience I've had with any video game - even to this day I still daydream about what this game was and what it could have been. I am now 22, and it's so heartbreaking seeing how far my boy has fallen and how none of their plans ever came to fruition :( RIP Aion - you will never be forgotten.
You voiced my thoughts exactly! I bought it soon after it came out way back. I abandoned the game a bit before it went free to play and didn't play it for quite a while. When I reinstalled it a few months ago, I simply could not get back into it: it became too 'simplistic' for want of a better word and too 'babyish'. How I miss those days!
"Ah a piece of the relic" wow incredible storytelling this is probably the best cutscene ever made and perfectly explains the plot while not giving me an epileptic fit. How can anyone not like this, it's a masterpiece. I mean I can't believe that dude actually got a piece of 'THE RELIC' that's huge.
What's with mmo games having magical macguffin's that are poorly explained? For Elsword, it's the el crystal, for Aion is the relic, for Aura Kingdom, it was the cube of Gaia, in Eden Eternal it was a blue crystal that gave birth to us.
Same here, same here! ; a ; That’s why my friends and me get on a really good populated private server for the last years, with still an old version running (4.6). But it even got new content for me personally, as I never went beyond 3.8 before X"D
right?? so many memories were made on aion and i remember it being so good when i was playing this at like 9 years old LOL its just sad that its gotten so bad and literally no on eplays it anymore
As someone who has been a top rank Aion player, Aion is probably the most fun I had doing PvP in an MMO. Sadly devs have turned turning the game from bad to worst into an art form. Died laughing at the intro cinematic, great vid, fuck this game.
I was never top rank because I didn't like grinding for the rank currency but I was one of the top DPS on my server. IIRC highest rank I reached was... 4 star? 3 star? Whatever gets a tier 2 transformation. I had so much fun playing this back in the day. It was so much fun.
I had fun doing pvp with my group of friends in Aion but in the end all it really was was who was the higher level, had the better gear, got the first jump, etc. In my opinion PvP is more fun when there's two even teams with clear objectives. In Aion it was so one sided and basically relied on ruining someone else's day. The adrenaline you got when rifting was fun but ultimately it was a shitty PvP system. These days I prefer PvE anyway - one thing that drew me to MMOs in the first place was the whole concept of working with people to take down content you can't do alone.
@@Kateyangyuqing I disagree. Gear did play a big part in PvP but so did skill. I played for many years and had every class at max level. I was an Asmodian and before I got my end-game pvp gear I used to duel people who did have it and beat them. I also made an Elyos account and when I was a brand new max-level sorc I used to almost beat people who were already geared. I had already played long enough to understand every class and every skill and every pattern each class usually followed.
So glad you finally cover Aion, this was my #1 game back then!! The game used to be soooo damn good, I was so addicted to it, even after it got worse and worse, I still loved it The day they lost me was after they've cut half of the main city and shops, no way to enter the other side anymore, it felt like 80% of the content just vanished Now my account got officially deleted/banned due to inactivity and even after they said "log-in to reactive it" I simply can't, says the account doesn't exist anymore... so RIP Aion, you were a good game, but you became the worse
I loved the Game as well, normally i didnt bother with things like crafting, but i liked Aion old professions for crafting. Making Armors or even furniture for your apartment or house. The Times of old Katalam.
I modtly liked it because of aesthatic. Aesthetic? Purposes. Like of course would a templar make his own armor. But nowadays... crafting is a lod of sorthless junk
Spent 4-5 years in the game playing daily, loved the endgame, loved even the leveling process. Had 8 max level characters each geared at a minimum with PVE Kahrun and PVP Blood mark sets, a bunch of cool skins and additions that took me forever to buy as a free player. Then, at around 4.8, took a few months break to recharge a bit and when I came back NCSoft told me they deleted my account and nothing can be done, ce est la vie. I've been a bitter, bitter man ever since. I hope an elephant fucks NCSoft in their collective asses, will never touch anything of theirs again
Imagine my absolute horror when I Came back to play this game after few years. When I was like 12 or so, I absolutely loved this game. The fun, pvp, pve, crafting, gathering. It was beautiful. The story that played at the beginning was awesome, explaining why the dark and the light ones fight and how the entire planet got ripped apart. Chefs kiss😚👌. I have a lot of really good memories from this game. And when I came back.. It was really sad.. Because I remember this game to be so good I was excited to play it as a adult but I was really heartbroken after few minutes..
Never played any MMO for very long back then, but Aion was definitely one of my favourites. Stopped playing for a while and tried to get back into it. It was like I was playing a different game. I distinctly remember the "elite" mobs suddenly being very easy to kill solo. That alone made me almost stop playing immediately. I loved the idea of the elite mobs, even if I sucked at finding others to play with, so I mostly just avoided them.
That was my experience too. My partner and I returned to playing, saw it was pay to do anything and we never played it again. It deserves to be on this list.
@Captain Conrad For some games that how I try them. I just set up a single player Pserver, and make up my own rules more or less. Never have to feel I have to pay for fun, and can fudge with the numbers. I do sometimes wish my friends were into it, think would be much cooler then a minecraft server.
I played this when it was still in beta in Korea and subscription-based, and I must say back then it was a phenomenally good MMO. Beautiful graphics, the combat system was fast, good-looking and well thought-out, mass-PvP action between both player factions and the NPC faction "Balaur" and challenging PvE dungeons. But then Gameforge happened and NCsoft also discovered microtransactions, so the overall development changed to make it a game filled with spend-money-to-win events, overpowered cash shop gear, the dungeons and overall game difficulty was drastially reduced to attract the super-casual players and thus it lost a lot of appeal to me, tons of lore-providing quests and dungeons were removed. EDIT 1 : WTF how did they screw up the game intro that badly? Back when I played it it was a completely different intro that explained the overall world and the origin of the Asmodeans, the Elyos, it was epic and actually made sense. EDIT 2 : WTF^2 they actually put in an auto-bot into this game? EDIT 3 : Seeing all these flashy daily-reward-upgrade-systems-garbage is making me sad now... EDIT 4 : HOLY FCK, and i thought the cash shop back then was insulting. This is a travesty... I'm at 9 minutes in the video and i'm getting depressed by how they destroyed this once awesome game.
i also played the game from 2010-2013 or something like that when i was younger and WTF. it was accualy a good MMO back then, it was even syncronyzed fully in english and partly german too. How did it change that much Holy
I like how he said that he likes the assention quests cutscene when that is the only thing that somewhat stayed from the original game ;( edit: All i can say that all the complaints/problems after the cutscene wasnt there when the game launched. this is a horible shitshow of the game i once knew ;( :@
I still remember the first time I played Aion and the feeling of being blown away by the graphics, music, and rifting still lingers in my mind cant believe it was more than 10 years ago....
@@Valeria-th3ms I’m searching like a crazed man for this feeling again. Nothing has got me so misty eyed in awe since stepping into Elwynn forest as an 11 year old boy. New world next on the menu, but I’m not confident it’ll scratch the itch that I’ve been trying to scratch for years
@@Valeria-th3ms It's difficult to be hyped for an MMORPG nowadays, every MMO that has been released has ended up as a failure or just with a small population, and if you are an MMORPG player which focuses on the story or lore inside the game and not just graphics it is worse...
AION was so epic back when it was a Pay-to-Play game, I remember the HUGE hype around this game since it really was beautiful and promising as some sort of next-gen Lineage-like MMO with flying features. Truely an awesome MMO at its beginning that slowly went downhill over the course of the years.
You mean pay to play sub games are better than free to play? You mean you cannot make a good free to play mmo? Dang, I would’ve never guessed. Cough WoW ffxiv cough
@@AFpaleoCon Could be obvious to some and not to others. WoW is P2W nowadays and isn't as clean as it was a decade ago despite the everlasting presence of RMTs.
aion actually used to be decent after they softened the xp grind and when it was still a subscription game, but once they went f2p it became p2w crap like most other eastern f2p games. i can barely recognize the game shown in this video. it's almost like they just took the name and made a completely different game with barely any similarities. also did they remove the character customization in favour of random? or did josh just miss it? it was hillarious how weird you could make you character, tiny body with long arms and giant head.
I was thinking the same, I played this game at launch in the U.S. and while it lost me with the grind, it was a far better starting experience than I see here.
At 2:11 if you look to the right you can see the "buttons" and when you open them you get the sliders and all the options. It's so small and low-key, it's bad design tbh. The outfit the character is wearing is a store outfit, and there's a few you can try on during the character creation process (because the game tells you "oh look you can buy this outfit, just build your character around this and immediately buy it as soon as you've entered the world") I think Josh missed the character creation buttons because the ridiculous outfit weirded him out.
I was reminded of the same things during his life is feudal video, on how to bring up the claims and the level grid. Then i remembered...I only started playing that game whenever my friends had it somewhat figured out. The game was not intuitive at all, and it required WAAAY to much time to get anything done, which is why i eventually left it. Dont get me wrong, i put in like 4k hours into it, i really liked the game and the concept behind it, but the game didnt ever really improve. Bad crafting mechanics were added which made it lose about 25% of the player base, maps were shut down to move everyone to one gigantic map that was never going to be fully populated, that lost half that current population. Systems changed so often it was hard to know in the active hardcore playerbase what exactly needed to be done to destroy an enemy claim. Claims rules changed completely, it was a mess. It's the elongated story of the game i think that is truly the interesting part of it, and how i watched a game that i played constantly fall further and further, and become more and more toxic. And then realized it just isnt worth it. And then you stop hardcore PvP sandbox games because they are impossible to balance, unless you make it so that a very small area can never be destroyed. But that still means griefing can make them all quit anyways.
Believe it or not this game was actually hard and unforgiving at one point... Grinding in the open world used to have you one mistake away from death by player or monster alike, it was a tense game.
You reminded me of 2012 again. This is EXACTLY why i left the game. As petty n sore loser as that sounds, i didnt know it was open pvp and It wasnt my cup of tea
Yeah I remember when I was a newbie Ely, collecting something in Eltnen to level my essencetaping, when someone said "Lady, I wouldn't stay here if I were you...". I thanked for the advice and went ahead. When I collecting my stuff, wearing my essencetaping hat, suddently I was attacked by a tiny "demonic" creature with bright red eyes and what I believed to be a "tail" 🤣 I was shocked lmao. And it was FAST! 🤣🤣🤣 I told on guild chat and they said it as "an asmo" lol
As a veteran Aion player, I can say the game was infinitely better. You didn't have the weird Gameforge shop front, you were rewarded monthly for subbing (before ot went Free to Play), you had a massive PVP gimmick in certain areas and a giant area specifically for PVP, you could craft items and armour, you could gather things for said craft, and the voice acting was also in English! Of course, this was when the game was under the NCSoft banner. It's fallen so far from grace that even the classic server they added last year couldn't draw the crowd back.
not a gameforge shop front. was literally there before gameforge and NCSoft came to a deal. and it is STILL under their banner, they still make the game and publish it in korea, where the monetization is even higher. NCSoft like all korean companies monetizes their games heavily, sometimes at launch, sometimes later (in this case it was after launch) the only reason GW was/is spared the same treatment is because it's not meant for korean audiences and has never been taken over there. gameforge is a terrible company, but 9/10 it's not them that's monetizing the games so heavily, when they do it's usually to push it from buy a sword for X to buy a chance at a sword for X they suck, but they're not to blame for the monetization issue, they just don't stop it and get to take their cut
I still own the Collector's Edition AION, including Avia figure. She's still there, standing amongst my FFXIV figures. Yeah man, once upon a time, AION was good.
Yeah I played this when it first released and quit when they put the cash shop in the game. A couple things, from a historical standpoint: 1. When I played it was fully in English. In particular I remember they got Dante Basco to do the 'youth' voice. Not sure what's up with the mix of korean and english in this "international" version though. 2. The game was originally b2p and didn't go f2p/cash shop until 2012. So the foundation of the game and at least the original upgrade systems, potions, etc. weren't designed with exploiting players in mind. The leveling/progression also USED to only give one skill at a time, so that whole skill bloat thing seems to be new. The game's aesthetic was very high fantasy up until the cash shop. Also no mounts pre-cash shop. It's pretty sad to see what they've turned it all into now. 3. The best parts of the game weren't covered in this video. First, flying, which was a really cool addition compared to the competitor MMOs at the time. Second (and while it's gonna be hard to get a grasp of this with only 100 people playing), the PvP WAS really great. Especially the rifts/portals you could take into the other factions zones, setup a return obelisk, then see how long you could play hide-and-go-gank before the other faction was able to send you back home. 4. Gunner was added just before the cash shop, and I think aethertech came after, so I can't speak much to either. Assassin, sorcerer, and gladiator were pretty fun and flashy though. 5. Soundtrack was actually really fantastic. 6. EDIT: Oh yeah, that awful opening is new too. So tl;dr, this is less of a story of a game intentionally designed to be bad, but rather a genuinely good game (for its time) that was ruined after being pumped full of cash shop steroids. RIP, Aion.
I agree with eveything you said, but I distinctly remember the cash shop existing for quite a while before they announced the gunner, or any of the new classes
I wouldn't go as far as saying it was a good game (at best decent imho), as they lured in alot of PvE players at launch with the promise of PvE content, only admit later that they practically had nothing PvE content wise for the second half of the leveling experience. That being said, was kinda shocked how much the game has fallen since. I mean what happened to the flying stuff? That was practically core the sales pitch and being a daeva..?
that "friend" Cheska person you met, saying "I have never met this person" - they are the same person you said "Talk to an npc who i'll never see again". - I found that funny
Based on the comments, it seems like it would be a good idea to do a followup video looking at archive footage of the pre-Gameforge version so you can compare. About the literal paperwork... Sounds about right for Southeast Asian cosmology.
Idk where all the comments came from, maybe nostalgia hit them hard but when I bought Aion back in 2009 it was already bad. Not as bad as what we see in the video, but still...
@@NetSraC1306 The game had a mediocre world, it was a grind, lame dailys, but the pvp was unmatched by any mmo ive ever played. It had a high skill gap and engaging mechanics, like slide shotting (you could do this will spells too) and weaving auto attacks kept it engaging, the pace, there were a lot of skills for keybinding. For me nothing has hit the sweet spot of aion pvp since. I maxed 3 characters. I played an assassin, then a sorcerer and a ranger. im kinda sad its super dead and im playing HC classic wow now, but the novelty of HC is wearing off.
I was so confused when I saw the title of this video because Aion used to be amazingly popular and considered a high-standard game. I remember sucking up all lore and assets I could find on it because it seemed so cool but I couldn't afford a pay2play MMO yet. But seeing what it has become now explains how it ended up on this series...😔
Man, i would love to see Josh talking about Nostale, which is another game that Gameforge host and had a big place in my heart before going to the void that is P2W.
This is like a weird fever dream and absolutely not the game I recall playing upon the release over a decade ago. Wow. The pvp was pretty rad when you only had 30-60 seconds of flight or whatever in the dual zone area. It added a pretty fun lair of dodging, hiding, escaping enemies if you were crafty with the cooldown.
Aion used to be, without a doubt, one of the best MMORPGs ever made. The graphics were outstanding for its time. Story and lore were epic. Maps, towns, cities were so awesome. A lot of PvPvE chaos everywhere made gameplay really fun. The raids were top-notch and way ahead of its time. In Korea, the classic version of Aion is still running strong, and always in the top 3 of the most-played MMORPGs. Still so popular after 14 years of release is a true testament to the legacy of Aion. Honestly, if I had a wish to experience a MMORPG for the first time again, it would be the old Aion.
@@Brian-qn7fn why you got to go to all the comments and say this? did the game hurt you or something? seems like you are on a vendetta, and btw your opinion does not make it a fact, it depends on trhe individual, for me at the time, it was an amazing game, easily up there with the top dogs. So it was one of the best.
the "old" aion was destined to die. it was a korean game for a korean market ported to the west. things like P2W, grinding and making grinding easier are staples of the industry there. NCSoft alone should've told you it was going to be heavily monetized given they do it with everything that's released in korea
@@Brian-qn7fn Considering how many bad and mediocre MMORPGs have come and gone, it certainly was. What else is there? Meridian 59, DAoC, WoW, Everquest, Ultima Online, Ragnarok?
Aion’s last hurrah was in the mid 2010s, when 4.0 was released. As someone who played since 3.8, I was right there with friends who ranted and raved that Katalam and Danaria were getting replaced by Levinshor and the Elyos version. I remember staying up all night just to kill Hyperion and many other endgame bosses for gear and the sieges were phenominal, when it was equally balanced. Back then, being promoted to 1 star general or commander on your server was a big thing- meaning if yoy showed up to sieges you better be skilled at commanding. Everyone says it started to go downhill when gunner was released, but in my opinion, Aion starting to become a bit “whimsical” on its own terms is never a bad thing for an mmo. Things got bad once Echoes of Eternity released. 60-75 leveling was a slog, nothing really stimulating story or gameplay wise, the grudge of destroying the before-named-areas, plumes, the introduction of that weird currency (Luna) that you only got by playing the very useless shop minigames….I quit. And when I came back to play Aion classic 2 months ago, it was a blast to the past- but only temporarily. Classic has some of the same problems that retail Aion has, and as a self-proclaimed critic, I hope that they choose to fix these problems instead of capitalizing. Then again, half of NC’s games (except Gw 1&2 and Lineage 1&2 ) are failing. Edit after watching: 100% agreed with everything said in the last 31 mins. Though it triggered me that Josh didnt try jumping around while in combat- it’s a childish way of sprucing up the boring gameplay. But yeah it’s fallen so far that I didnt eben recognize a lot of the areas…sad. Emotional rant over :)
I loved my gunner I tanked with him. I left when they sunk half the map including areas I liked. They also took away other things I enjoyed an update that takes more away than it added. I could never get my morale up again.
Guild Wars isn't doing bad but at the same time, and this is coming from a player since before the expansions for GW1, the quality has kinda fallen off, the cutscenes aren't as smooth in PoF as they were for HOTs or IBS and severely buggy, the later on grind is absolutely soul crushing while you're doing it especially for the Skyscale. It isn't exactly falling apart but it has gone down a step or two in terms of quality in some areas
The biggest difference, and why Guild Wars (1 and 2) is much more successful, is ArenaNet. Guild Wars didn't sell out to Gameforge and become a gatcha whaling enterprise like Aion and a lot of other NCSoft titles.
@@ichputzhiernur4376 I quit this game the second they sent me on a quest to kill fucking rabbits! I was like OK I hate this, its stupid and I don't care to look more into it than this. I wanted to do serious things and it was... Dumb
Yeah. This vid makes me sad. Before Gameforge took it over and it went free to play, it was actually one of the best of the genre. Balance was perfect - you couldn't just take the piss and expect to stay alive and you had to actually communicate in parties and play to your role to sucessfully finish dungeons. I guess because people had to co-operate, it had an amazing player base for the most part and it's the only MMO I made RL friends in. I can't believe how much gameforge have messed it up... it's depressing.
Best combat? I played this twice, once solo and once with friends. Felt very meh. Just kinda standing there and pressing the 1 2 3 keys ad nauseum. It's like FF14, except just as bad and not popular.
I used to play this game when it was glorious, from 2.X to 4.0. It really went down from 4.0 to 4.8. Right after reading the patch note for the 5.0 version I uninstalled the game. This game had so much going on, amazing combat, great pvp, good story, nice graphics, everything went down the hill and thinking about it make me so nostalgic. I'm glad I was able to be a part of this adventure, I learned a lot thanks to this game and I don't regret for a second the years I spent there
Amazaed this was still going. I was amazed when it was realeased, because it looked amazing, and "MMO may you fly = Cool" was the perfect selling point back in the day
Fun thing is this game has a flying mechanic, and since josh never really mentions that you can fly in some very specif zones i can quess that the feature has been killed and ignored. such a shame what happend to this game :(. Great video 👍
I’m probably one of the few here who’s played the game pretty recently and I can say almost a 100% that the flying mechanic is still there. You have to reach level 32 and go to a certain ice town to get it though I believe.
That's gameforge for you. They don't only make games p2w but they actively work on removing features and making the game worse. No I'm not bullshitting, seriously. Same happened on 4story, they remove whole maps, change the starting area from an amazing city to a completely empty place. Like it's just.. I do not understand this. They have killed 4-5 games at this point. What the f is this business strategy? I'm starting to think the guy who owns gameforge doesn't care about money and is just trying to kill as many games as possible. They literally buy games, and then downgrade them. Like just making them p2w is ok, alright whatever but why would you downgrade videogames? Aion used to advertise flying like crazy from the start.
@@nogitsune4452 Yeah they had purplish skin (due to something about not bathing in the same rays as Elyos and such) and had reddish eyes and such. Sometimes black or very bright hair. Seems like that's not a thing anymore.
@@demispectra9783 As an Asmodian, I was absolutely FUMING when they introduced that patch. Stripped away nearly everything that made Asmodians unique - no claws, changed the mane (TWICE - once in 3.0 and again in 5.0), added Elyos skin tones and even the option to remove the mane entirely. And with all the new wing models that could be used by both factions, there was barely anything left to differentiate the two. Original lore and artistic integrity be damned. It was tragic. I am a true Asmodian for life, and Aion as it once was will live on in my heart.
It was one of the best games ever made. It had lots of maps, great story, great sieges, pvp, pve, crafting, gathering. It was beautiful. The devs considered a good idea to remove all the features excepting pvp and pve and almost all the maps, quests and story. Now you will get to max level in a few hours. The pvp is shitty, the sieges are a joke. No more abyss... it's all gone...
You can literally speed run Aion to the End Game. But then you will have to pay to win if you want to get End Game equipments faster (or else you will have to spend months or years to get something decent).
@@XvicvicX I know how you feel. Last weak I download Aion again feeling nostalgic. After less than an hour of playing both Aion Live and Classic servers I quit and unistaled it. It is dead, there is people playing, but the game does not have the same light as it had before :(
I remember having a great time in the NCSoft release of Aion back in the day. This, this looks unrecognizable. And I didn't see you touch on what I felt was the one thing Aion did that other MMOs should do. There was a UI that allowed you to configure skill chains. The first 3 buttons would be replaced with any skill you configured in a chain. It was great because if there is one thing I loathe from the older MMOs is the skill button overload. Here's 3 whole bars, 12 buttons each, of skills you have by max level. And that's not all the skills you have. Aion's chain UI drastically reduced the need for ALL THE BUTTONZ!!!! without also requiring players to delve into the wonderful world of writing macros. I wonder if they ripped that out when it changed hands? Also, no gliding? I recall there was gliding all over the place in Aion.
it is still an NCSoft game, quite literally. all that monetization and various changes are on them. NCSoft are a korean company, and aion was made for a korean market, part of that is an inevitable heavy cash shop as much as people like to blame gameforge for taking over and "ruining it", it started before gameforge took over (albeit only in the korean side) and most of NCSoft's games that aren't explictly designed for the west (like GW2) are extremely heavily monetized and P2W it's sorta like getting a CoD game anymore and not expecting a battlepass to exist..eventually if it's not there on launch
For any old aion players wanting to go back casually for nostalgia's sake: play on an unofficial server. There's so much removed (entire regions even) that the official server is useless even for a short nostalgia trip. Idk how any of the unofficial ones are endgame or pvp wise but yeah at least the regions and quests are still there lol.
Absolutely this. I played Aion in 1.0 and the betas, then again in 3.x and 4.x, then ame back for 7.x and they just totally ruined the game between 4 and 7, and played again on EuroAion for a while which is IMO the peak version. I think EuroAion and now Aion America are the top recommendations these days, and both run version 4.6
I just host a 3.9 server locally and play with family. Honestly, it's a really nice way to play the game, even though you can't really get the magic of playing with others again.
Ah, the Guild Wars "/aion" emote that gives you temporary wings, I remember that! Game was full of RMT trade spam on launch and no GMs around to ban them, and bots farming needed quest items so players couldn't get a look in. Quit after about a month, not really thought about it since, will be good to see what you've got to say about the state of it now.
I'll be the one to admit. I even botted. It was impossible to play the game without botting once you hit lvl like 25-30. The EXP to lvl became INSANE and everywhere was just bots.
@@LordSadCat insane at level 30? Lmao u could hit max level in 3-4months chilling. Most ppl wouldnt even hit max level in Lineage2 until Interlude/kamael expansions( which came out 3-4years after first patch). Needing bot at 30+ in aion original is just being lazy.
Aion was one of the most amazing games I've ever played, it was leagues ahead of anything we ever seen even nowadays, but unfortunately it got left to rot by NCsoft since they moved priority to other projects, but it had the most amazing combat and possibilities that rewarded player skill and being able to manage 6, different hotbars. Its a shame what happened to it.
@randomguy8196 i mean... wow had 5, and it was always the top dog of mmorpgs for more than a decade. But yeah, I agree, a million abilities don't make combat good.
Casual players could do it with 1 toolbar for regular stuff, 2 for raiding, but there was a lot of items and different kinds of cooldown to manage, there were people playing with 12 bars that were just situational bar, a 3 set for doing max DPS, one 3 set to play more with CC, one set for using expensive items to survive stuff and tracking a rotation based on the modfiers but a lot similar from each other. It wasen't mandatory by any means, but as people keep playing, people get better and the celling for player skill was quite high, so dedication usually payed out. The game deies because they didn't had where to go and how to expand, the game was well-rounded and put NC on top of the game, so they gravited to going for new IPs to make things that it wouldn't work on Aion, but at that point, they really didn't cared about the game anymore, they already made one of the greatest MMOs and that meant that they could make A LOT OF MONEY making new projects that players wouldn't play if they kept Aion alive. Eventually it would died from a thousand cuts anyway, no MMO is so great that reaches Magnum Opus status that couldn't be killed by future updates. Its just a shame that no other MMO could reach the same feellings. FFXIV is close in a lot of stuff, but its a different game and the Joypad-centered design narrows a lot what the game could be in player skill for K&M, but it is quite a feat how amazing the controller plays. But it has a lot of the Aion feel into it, just not how it plays and the atmosphere is different. The point is that Aion was golden and no one else can experience that anymore and the world would be a lot better with more copies of Aion that WoW.
I remember the fun playing this game long time ago. The environment is awesome, very huge maps, the skills, the battle, controls, items, and more. And what makes this game great at that time was when you get nervous every time you meet a character from another race and you'll get surprised as you get ambushed. Also, clashing is very fun. You'll find an area on a map where a race dominates it and you'll need to fight them and earn abyss points. Those were the great days of MMO. I played it last year and got sad on how empty all of the server was.
Watching this hurt so much. I played this game way back and made a lot of friends there I still have contact to everyday. It was such a good mmo with really cool pvp memories. How far it has fallen. It's barely recognizable :(
Yes! Exactly this. I met my friends here, who stayed with me through long years of gaming. I still remember the dungeons and the arguments and the complaining about enemy players xD As i see a lot of people have similar feelings around here in the comment-section😥
BTW, regarding in-game paperwork: the first thing you have to do after creating your character in Eve Online is to decide what kind of insurance you want to buy for your ship.
Thing is, Eve Online is advertised as an intense, hardcore MMO. Plus it's reputation as essentially it's own universe. I don't think people want to play a fantasy mmo, not advertised as super in-depth and hardcore with paperwork and shit, and have to do said paperwork.
EVE is old and well established to the point that most new players probably go in understanding that's it's a spreadsheet simulator with some space stuff sprinkled in.
While you're not wrong, insurance is an actual part of the game, much like repairing your gear. You'll never forget the first time you lose a ship and realize you forgot insurance. :)
I remember this game differently, it must be the classic. The way they have desecrated for monetization is horrific. Great video. Keep up the good work.
I just found your channel and i was SO happy to see this video. I played Aion for many years, up until fairly recently actually. I was drawn to it because of the great character creation options, class options, the huge maps and the lore…all of which the game eventually managed to fuck up. The lore actually used to be pretty cool - on the Elyos (Angel) side you’re supposedly a revered general with amnesia, and you had to work your way back to your former glory by talking to people who knew you in your former life. On the Asmodian (demon) side, you were a petty thief who somehow gets elevated to daeva and everyone doubts your abilities. It was fun - but then they kept adding new lore that was completely boring, and then they NUKED THE GAME (like they literally deleted entire gorgeous maps & also some of the best plot quests and instances!!) and changed the plot entirely so that you now have this childhood friend(?) who follows you everywhere and then dies in battle, which is played out like it’s supposed to be sad but there’s no way to really build any sort of emotional connection to the character. The game just starts and is like “this is Cheska, your best friend & point person for all your quests!” There were obviously tons of other problems - they advertise heavily that the game is “Truly Free” when it’s absolutely pay to win; eventually you can get a house in the game that has its own address on an actual, physical open map, but you have to pay RENT on it & there is almost no way to buy furniture; some quests require you to team up with others but there are no players anymore; and some classes are ridiculously OP while you can’t get anywhere with others (the newer Vandal class was so overpowered it was hilarious). There’s nostalgia there for me but the game just continues to shoot itself in the foot. Thank you for making this video though!
This video really hurt something in me, like an old love from high school you find again years later and you sadden to see what's become of them, bitter.. I played this game from 2011 till 2018 , a good 7 years I put in this game, it was pretty much all I had.. so many good memories, mostly bad in the end... I held to it as long as I could, till the end of 5.8, it was already awful way before that, but you dont wanna give up on something you think you still love. This game was it. There wasn't and I don't think there will ever be a better open world pvp mmo , better designed, so dynamic, this I will always believe. It could have been one of the best mmos even today, but they killed it.. I tried classic and it was the last thing I needed to finally move on.. I'll always hold aion dearly in my heart, cause there I met my husband and a handful of good friends.. you dont miss the game, you miss how you felt when you played it
Jesus that was deep, I actually feel bad and I’m a cynical Jew who thinks people who feel that way about bad mmos need to lighten up. Glad you got a happy ending
Damn I remember the og days when you needed a group even for basic quests later on. This makes me really sad cause I was thinking about making a nostalgia trip into Aion. Completely different game now. Thanks for playing it so I wouldn’t need to Josh hehe.
Sameee.. I ultimately settled on FFXIV and I'm glad I did cuz it is quite fun... But damn I do miss those good old Aion days.. I noticed the Aether attuning noise in FFXIVsounds extremely similar to the noise I remember gathering Aether in Aion... Wonder if anybody else has noticed or had that nostalgia boost from the sound effect
Wow, this game has changed so much since release. I preordered this game, and I loved it for a while. Until I hit the grindy spot and realized PvP was more of a focus than I had expected. It was really fun besides that. I'm sad this is where its at now. NCSoft originally published this if I'm not mistaken
I played Aion Classic when it came out - it was definitely nostalgic. Remembered the maps, monsters, and the quests. The grindy quests. The kill X creature to collect Y item then having to go BACK to the quest giver for a reward. Having to use potions/scrolls to speed up/get combat boosts. The fact that you have to sit down to heal OR use potions. Gathering that levels up - and it time consuming. Then there's the group quest around lv 16. I play solo and never found a group doing that zone so I ignored it. I also ignored crafting this time around and just sold everything off. Then the weapon manastone socketing - that lovely system. Look, green weapon, 2 slots. I'll put in a nice Attack stone - yay! Now I'll add a Crit stone - oh no it failed and took the attack stone with it. Oh and since I had a "free" account I could play 1 hour a day before losing ability to gather/use trading post plus XP dropped. So I gave it up and I'll just stick with Guild Wars 2.
@@SentinelFury The leveling is so slow, drops are terrible, gathering a pain, and honestly combat sucks. I haven't logged on in a month and might just uninstall the game to free up drive space.
@@StArFuRyZz yeah it’s an old school Korean grinder bro, we all knew that. It’s not for everyone. As I said though, you’re not missing out on much because NCwest is incompetent.
@@sirlezard670 I won't leave GW2 I still enjoy playing. Aion Classic was a "lets see if it's as fun as it used to be" and it wasn't. I've pre-purchased the GW2 expansion and I'm looking forward to going fishing next year.
I actually really liked Aion and found it quite unique and... well... The gameplay didn't appeal to me enough and I don't even remember the story, but I really liked the game otherwise! Was kinda sad to leave it. But I guess it didn't have anything that really kept me attached. It was so beautiful though. And flying is fun. Edit: But maybe it's changed drastically, I mean... It's 14 years ago. Geez I'm old. Edit 2: Geez... I don't recognize this at all... It's hideous and ridiculous. The Aion I started playing was serene, stylish and beautiful, at least in its first impression.
I remember my dad downloading a private server version of this game when I was a kid where unlimited flight was enabled and I was absolutely entranced by the giant flying whale thing in one of the big earlier towns, like I would sit there for hours watching it and flying up to it, still no idea what significance the creature had to the game but I really love when games have mystical extra details like that. I remember nothing else about the game though 😅
I think I read somewhere in the In-game lore that these flying whales essentially are an incarnation of the god Aion (or his personal watchers) watching over all his creations. (which was.... Kinda odd when they introduced mounts in the game with 3.0 and the first mount you got literally was a miniature flying whale...)
The days of partying up with friends and guild mates, traversing the terrain, and entering rifts to do some large scale PvP or to even just sneak around and assassinate other people. Waiting underneath a lava waterfall to find a group for Kromedes Trial. All out war during sieges. Having the ability to sit out front the auction house, open up your personal store, AFK, and come back a few hours later to see that someone had bought all your enchantment stones and now you could afford some Greater Running Scrolls for PvP. Ahhhh those were the days. It’s heartbreaking to see this game fall to where it is now. This game will forever be my first MMO love.
As a Aion Player ages ago my heart crumbles in darkness. The meleefighting cancel fight with extendable weapons (maybe even in the air) was just too juicy (back in the day).
Josh, you're telling me that you didn't understand that intro? It's about a dragon with a huge rooster (you know what I am talking about) who wants to conquer the world.
@@ppsarrakis Nah, even some of the ones you can get at lower levels are pretty good. The Adamantoise, Death Claw and Magitek Amor variants are all easily accessible in early game and pretty great
The Fenris is controversial for good reason, though. It actually gives an in-game bonus for real world money. It's only an increased mount speed bonus, but it's still something you can't otherwise get in-game.
The fact that I got an advert during that intro cutscene and it didn’t change how much I understood about what was going on tells me a lot about this game.
Wow... I used to play this game until shortly after it went F2P. Looks like they changed the intro completely. The Asmo starting story is supposed to be about you having a vision about how you die fighting a very powerful general from the Elyos. Not great, sure, but at least it made sense... When the game went F2P it took a sharp nose-dive and it looks like it took an even sharper dive when NCSoft sold it. I remember the combat getting much better around Lv 30+ and at the time it released it looked amazing but I'm sure it didn't age that well.
I remember playing this at LAUNCH and being very impressed by the aesthetics and some elements of the gameplay...namely the flight mechanics. Then at some point the game dropped off a cliff where it just felt unfinished. Looks completely different now, and there are dozens of games just like it who have clearly done it better.
I remember fondly playing Aion when it originally came out and was published by NCSoft. It had so many good ideas and concepts, it was beautiful and innovative albeit a bit grindy. To see what has become of it today is a brutal mirror of modern gaming landscape. A single tear is rolling down my cheek while typing this.
Aion was an amazing game when it first came out in 2012. Its concept with 2 large player factions who are eachothers archenemy introducing random pvp encounters like early days of WoW was an absolute nostalgia trip. Add the fact the player character was a specially powered angel with wings made Aions premise unique. With zones that you could freely fly, and the ability to glide down from high places as long as you had flight time made pvp even more fun. I remember once i was questing alone and someone who had similar gear and level of the opposite faction stumbled upon me. The most EPIC battle ensued, we were dishing out blows towards eachother, disabling, stunning, and chucking potions to keep on going. We fought for a solid ten minutes and moved from one side of the map to the other while fighting. Glided down a huge mountain into a canyon where we continued our battle untill i finally gained the upper hand with my stunlock stigma (customizable skills you can equip like an item in this game) and vanguished my foe. There is and still isnt a single game that couldve given such an intense and awesome experience. But then they just went completely south with the game direction, changing from their one time buy in to play, to free to play with subscription and the worst thing in any game: ingame shop with boosters and other p2w elements. After that they lost most of their player base already as most people felt betrayed, Aion was supposed to be the one time buy in type of deal. And the large amount of equipment in the game that each had their benefits and drawbacks made every player different in strenght, but now you had “daevanion sets” you could buy in the shops that beat everything else. They quickly scrapped that and introduced general equipment that you had to earn with coins gained from questing. But once again COMPLETELY missed the point of what made the game great. This coin equipment was better than anything else you could craft or find in the wild, meaning every player would hunt for that same equipment and everybody basically strived to become a clone of what “the best” equipped character was supposed to be. This made pvp suck because there was nothing to set someone apart. You get the best coin equipment? You can only be equal to someone else unless they dont have that top tier coin equipment yet. You dont have that? You lose every pvp encounter. While before you wore whatever you could find from momster drops and quests. Which meant the strenght of every player varied greatly. Add in the option to customize extra skills through stigma’s where you chose whatever skills suited your playstyle the best. When you found someone from the opposite faction a fight was much more thrilling. Neither would ever be strong enough to kill the other in 2 hits because there was no equipment that could give such a large power advantage. And everything came down to a player’s mastery of their class, choice of stigma’s and luck on what kind of armor they have acquired. And i wont even talk about the sht they pulled after that because i quit well before that myself.
Sorry maybe there's two different Aions? Aion actually came out in 2009 and was not buy2play game but buy the game + pay monthly subscription and was handled by NCSoft West. I remember it being laggy mess back in the day in terms of mass battles , which led to huge disappointment from large guilds (mainly those who expected next Lineage 2) and quickly lost player numbers. Not only that, but endgame PVE content was also bad, with a lot of unfinished or unbalanced endgame bosses and dungeons with abysmal rewards and item drop rates - I remember spending weeks grinding some dungeon to get extendable sword, receiving some garbage rewards every time instead. Probably the only redeemable thing for that game was gank\partisan pve or exploration in opposing faction areas, but that also got old pretty fast.
I LOVED this game when I played it with friends years ago. We had role play, contests and raid nights. It was fun. Out of curiosity, I downloaded and launched the game a month or so ago and it was just a shell of its former self. The million upgrades and the horrible grind that it takes make it a full time job. Worst even is that some upgrades aren't even guaranteed. It may fail and you can start all over again.
"The Wiki for this game is basically abandoned" Like so many other MMO wiki's, they have just enough info to be good enough for the earlier versions but no one cared or cares to update or add what is needed so there becomes an information rift that only people who have played these MMO's for a long time can answer and most of the time your lucky to get an answer at all.
0:55 For everyone of those you're going to get 10 "Look how they massacred my boy" comment. Aion is one of those games people used to love but got driven into the ground with stupid change after stupid change. Be thankful for Guild Wars 2 Josh because what happened to Aion could have happened to Guild Wars 1 if Anet didn't have the newer game to distract NCSoft.
I remember playing this back in the day when it was subscriptions and made by NCSoft. At the time it was incredible and there was nothing else out there quite like it. The original intro explained the lore of the world really well and it was a world where everyone lived on the inside rather than the outside, but then one day there was a huge cataclysm that shattered the world in two, and you could even look up into the sky and see the other continent. I mean, how EPIC is that? And the flying and the PvP middle zone between the continents was amazing. Its so sad to see how far it has fallen, because it had so much potential.
I remember buying the steelbook edition of Aion when it first released. I was so excited for it, I had my class picked out (Scout), I even wrote a short fanfic for English class (I was in high school at the time IIRC). Then it released, and it was nothing but rubber band lag to the point I literally couldn't leave the spot you spawn in for the first time. The 'joys' of dial up... Though my friend with decent DSL service also had the same issue at the time, so probably it was just the servers dying slowly under the rush of new players.
I played this game in beta and kept playing it when it was released as a pay to play.There was a lot going for it such as the character customization and the combat. The chain based combat was quite interesting and provided some real complexity in situational adaptability. The world pvp via rifts (whatever they were called) was quite interesting and provided opportunities for interactions with other players. The main problems with the game was the korean grind, lopsided faction "balance", the lack of content, and the rampant bot population, . I failed multiple hot hearts which were ridiculously expensive things that you needed to craft to get end game gear and while some people had 100% success others would fail multiple times before getting one. I failed at least 5x which was a massive amount of time and money invested into the game for absolutely nothing. You could run the same dungeon +20x and not even see the drop you needed for leveling. God I can still draw out fire temple from memory because of all the fcking runs in a vain attempt to get a weapon. Faction balance while fairly good at first quickly slid into a lopsided mess. This is a problem for every single dual faction based PVP game I've ever played so I wasn't really surprised. The game client wasn't quite up to handling the massive PVP sieges which was unfortunate because they were freaking awesome. There were limited options for dungeons and pve related activity in the game outside of mindless mob grinding. There were a few dungeons you could run once a day at "end game" and not much else. Compared to games like WoW there wasn't much to do dungeon wise at all. Now what they had was sometimes innovative and fun. Unfortunately since there were so few dungeons the innovative and charming experience became another slog as you tried for the 10th time that day to get a drop. I was banned for a vague reason which I think was connected to my fiancee and I leveling a cleric on my account to change servers to be with friends who still played. NCsoft had a short time thing where if you had a character of a certain level on another server you could apply for a transfer to that server. So my fiancee and I teamed up to level my cleric because she was already setup on her account to transfer. We lived in the same house and had shared bank accounts etc. I never actually told her the password so I didn't break any TOS. The ban notice implied I was possibly using a third party program or something. My lineage 2 accounts and other Ncsoft accounts were untouched by the ban. I did find it suspicious that the Aion account ban occurred after I had started posting long posts on the official forums pointing out the problems of the game while begging for at least some basic easy fixes. I have no real evidence that the ban is related just circumstantial. Meanwhile the bots that were just outside of towns were still there for weeks on end moving to the next area after they out leveled their spot. You could watch the bots as they moved from spot to spot due to leveling up. The high level bots would be in the same spot outside of town for months on end at all hours. I know this because after I was banned my fiancee went to check on the bots on her account. She logged in on the last day before her account expired and the same bots were in the same spots.. Everyone quit the game when I was banned because we were tired of the above mentioned problems already.. The game died because NcSoft couldn't be bothered to put any real effort into it. Which is sad because it sold in the millions and was in a position to be a real "wow killer". This is a pattern for NCSoft though as they will release a game neglect it while releasing some awesome looking trailers while the playerbase gets bored and the bots over run everything. They'll use game guard or something to pretend to do something about the bots and then pat themselves on the back.... Aion was the game that made me give up on anything published or developed by NcSoft.
Damn what the hell did they do to this game, I remember playing this like 8 years ago and it had barely any of that bullshit it throws at you at level 1.. wasn't my favourite game or anything but it felt like a proper fantasy game.
Had also to double check if this was the game I thought it was, this mess is barely recognizable. I did enjoy Aion for a while, especially the wing and flying mechanics and I loved the summoner summons. But the game Josh is showing in this video certainly isn't that game anymore.
Aion's korean in every aspect. Pretty on the outside, a hollow shell on the inside. I played it during original release. Admittedly, it had some of the best pvp I had ever experienced in an MMO. Fast paced and cut throat. However, in order to really enjoy it, you needed gear which could be very difficult and time consuming to obtain and it certainly helped to have a good group to run with. Animation lock was the game's form of a "gcd" and could be bypassed by performing "jump shots" which was basically jumping at a certain time during the cast or animation to essentially cancel it and was essential to pvp. (No one liked getting locked into place and pummeled to death.) I played it a little past 2.5 but after so many years I just got tired of the constant grind for gear and to maintain pvp rank. Oh, and all the trash talkers on BOTH sides. If there was any story, I didn't notice much of it. It was a fun game for me at the time but I don't ever wish to go back. One thing I do miss, however, are some of the armor skins from there. They had some of the nicest armor skins I had seen in any game even until now. I don't know what this reboot is, but it doesn't look anything like the game I used to play.
Aion WAS amazing, definitely the best mmo back in the day when it was published by NCsoft themselves. and I believe it's still the biggest mmo in Korea if it wasn't surpassed by Lost Ark.
I played aion for almost 10 years, and man, this game was so good, amazing pvp system, amazing classes, amazing pve, it was fully voiced in english, last week i downloaded it again, and it is just not Aion anymore, it became a p2w generic game with so many useless stuff you dont even know what to do, it is like a frankstein with Black Desert + Metin+ wow features mixed ,until 4.0 the game was still pretty good, it was so sad to see the game i spent most of my life playing was ruined to this level
I'm reminded of a review of _The Davinci Code_ --- the film --- which said it achieved the remarkable accomplishment of making an albino flagellant assassin monk boring. This game has the same feel to it.
"The combat is lag free". Of course it is, there's no one else around.
you will be surprised how terrible unoptimized are those trash mmo, Tera had me sub 60fps on the STARTING area!
@@ppsarrakis I'm well aware how terrible they can be, I've played most. And btw, "sub 60 fps" could easily mean 50+, which isn't bad at all for a crappy Korean grinder.
50+ is already perfect imo. I played with 15-20 FPS cuz my computer at the time was low-end
@@johnnymartinjohansen if it's 50 on starting area it will be 30 on a PvP situation
Game never had graphic or lag problem in the past for me (when i was still a wee teenager playing on pretty old computer, even in 50+ player RvR)
"For being released in 2008 it's perfectly servicable"
This...This is NOT the Aion that was released in 2008. This is some other game wearing a shirt it stole off the corpse of the original Aion which it brutally murdered in a back alley.
Agreed, I don't know what they did to Aion, but this game is not that original game.
Yeah, I genuinly don't recognise anything in this video. It's crazy. I'm also 100% sure there was English voice acting before.
i like how everything he likes about the game is from the original aion.
@@SoundBubble There was.
Nice.
This game used to be a subscription fee MMORPG published by ncsoft. I pre-ordered it and bought a computer for it back in the day, it used to be called the Tower of Eternity. It was actually an incredible game for its time. I'm so sad to see how far this game has fallen.
I remember getting the demo-code back in the day and playing it for HOURS. Its really a shame to see either how far this game has fallen, or how much my nostalgia has covered up the flaws.
@Rias Gremory It still belongs to NCSoft as they are developers, Gameforge is merely a publisher in west.
I recall seeing 5.0 Korean version with some high-end dungeon. It looked cool, just not my cup of tea. If it's still thriving in Korea, good for them I guess.
Same, looks like a completely different game.
It went down,a few month before 3.0,when gameforge took over and made it free to play,but added instance cooldown and the item shop
The old Aion from 2009 was one of the best MMORPGs ever and they managed to turn it into one of the worst. That's a real achievement.
it really was, and it really is >.
I used to be so highly ranked in AP in this. I wonder how much I could have sold my account for since I had a top 5 guardian deity transformation.
It was NEVER one of the best MMORPGs ever.
@@Brian-qn7fn That's your opinion. For me it was even better than the imo highly overrated WoW: Wrath of the Lich King.
Apparently not if it failed and lost its sub-based model
It's just sad how they ripped out all the good parts of it.
- It HAD english voiceacting.
- It HAD no auto-combat grind macro.
- It HAD a better starting story (a bit like FF14 with being a freshman in a small village that finds out during the tutorial questline that he's a chosen one with wings).
- It HAD varied locales with interesting open world PvP (you could temporarily and limited invade the other faction's regions that were usually inaccessible and there was a pure PvP region with the abyss.)
- It HAD less stupid stacking grinding power mechanics.
It just seems like all the good things were optimized away with patches, expansions and, of course, gameforge.
As someone who played Aion years ago, I can confirm this happened. Aion is a husk...no longer a game
@@Reseng This is so sad...probably even worse then to see an MMO you love die...
RIP WildStar
I think Aian was playable until 5.0 comes out... After this the game wasnt the same ;)
It was also absolutely a grind-fest and lost me within a couple days after months of pre-release hype. But yeah, this looks so much worse.
Is it just me or is the Korean voice acting is trying to be Japanese? As in Aion is now trying to be an anime game?
To all the Daevas out there who played the game in its golden age, may the Aethereal Lords bless you and Atreia be always in your heart....
May the shadows never find you.
@@leansune7341 As a former assassin, I chose to walk the shadow path.
Its been so many years now sad
It was so damn good... i don't know what this is, but definitely not Aion.
faith and arms
I used to play the original Aion: Tower of Eternity. This looks like a completely different game. It was completely localized in English and had high production values with a somewhat good story. It was a combination of WoW and Lineage 2. It was a fun MMO. It almost no original concept, but it worked well, the combat was cool, exploration was neat and it was actually pretty hard. The character creator was great back then and we had a lot of fun in the game playing as a holy trinity.
I played the original too, if you don't do certain steps it screws you up forever later, which I was able to fix because someone told me at the last minute.
Yep. Original Aion was much much better than the trainwreck that is current Aion. Josh even picked a weird new class and not one of the original 8.
Funnily enough, Aion classic released a few months ago but NCwest handled it fucking horribly (surprise surprise) and its already dying.
That’s a flaw in this series though, it looks only at the modern iteration of each game. It’s like judging WoW only based on your Retail experience, it just doesn’t tell the whole story of the game, it doesn’t paint a good enough picture.
Honestly if the video was titled “Worst MMO ever? - RETAIL Aion”, I would have no issue. Retail and Classic (including other older patches that private servers play on) are completely different games and should be treated as such. Again, same as WoW Classic vs Retail. Different games.
I know right?! I watched the intro and what I saw numerous times when I played it was definitely NOT THAT!
@@SentinelFury Not even that . The comparison with WoW and Retail WoW doesn't work here, because Aion is (well imo) technically not still a running game, it has been on maintenance mode for years...or should I say dead game for years. So I dont think that even the current running version can be considered "retail" or at least not comparable to current WoW (or similar type of MMO).
So this video is comparing the ghost of dead game more like.
For some reason I feel compelled to leave a comment. Aion was such an incredible game, my best MMO experience, never played PvP remotely deep and well designed as it was. Lived in it for years until the pay to win took over, and I'm still nostalgic for it. Hurts to see what they turned this game into.
You can play EuroAion if you wanna relive the experience, I've been playing with my gf for a few weeks and it's been great. It's on 4.6 version so it still has Katalam
@@Flamenc0 Thanks for the tip, gonna take a look!
@@allyourgardeningneeds np ^^ if you decide to play I can drop you some kinah for the start
I am honestly destroyed to see what this game turned into.
This was my childhood. I met a lot of my friends here.
The most painful thing is, Josh you would have love the old Aion I remember. The lore was deep, the characters were authentic to the game’s world. The leveling and gearing was hard, but rewarding. The combat was still boring to begin with, but built up nicely through leveling.
Oh. And there was english voice-acting. I don't know... maybe the shop needed space so the voice-files were sacrificed. Who knows...
They butchered the world, literally and made it into a shop-game. There are no words how evil this is.
I remember the original aion. played it with the girl I liked in college back in '09 or so. this looks completely different. like they were trying to be every other mmo all at once instead of the unique mmo they started as.
@@darkdogzstudioz The moment they started just erasing complete zones from existence was the moment i never went back. Sarpan, Tiamaranta, Katalam, Danaria… i had great memories of my guild doing dungeons there. Guess what, none of these exist anymore… 😥
Recommendation to play
on your new channel:
Teamtanks from Gamevial.
"No words how evil this is" Relax dude, its a videogame. People like Mao existed.
@@Jacob-sb3su Evil ain't a dick measuring contest. The erosion of gaming's history is a huge problem, especially when it comes to these live service online games.
Jesus, even when it went F2P it wasn't as bad as this. This is like a completely different game.
For the first few minutes of the video I thought I was in some kind of weird fugue state, because years ago I played a Korean MMO called Aion with two factions called Asmodians and Eilyos, but literally nothing else about this game Josh played sounded familiar. Turns out, no, I didn't have some kind of mental break, they just ripped all the guts and heart out of the game I remember and turned it into... whatever the hell this is supposed to be. It's really sad, honestly. I might have quit Aion when I got to level 25 or so and hit the point where my only choices for advancement were pvp or grinding mobs for months, but up until that point I actually quite liked it.
Yeah, this... thing is not Aion.
God I remember this game from when I was a kid it looks so different and I tried to find it again but couldn’t remember it’s name for the life of me
If you watch the series this is the case with many of the MMOs, a lot of them started out decent games carving out a small niche under World of Warcraft and then they slowly descended into this hellscape that you see
This is literally what happened with me watching this video too. I was between 10-14 years old (i cant remember what year it was but definitely that range) when I played it and i'm now 24, so thought it was just nostalgia, but maybe it really was just better back then.
Edit: I must have been at least 12 when I started, because I didn't understand English too well before then as I only started to learn it when I was 10, and honestly I doubt they would've launched the game in my native language since no other MMO has done that so far.
I remember playing this with my wife many years back. It was fully voiced ... IN GERMAN!! We still quote some of the lines because we had so much fun with it. RIP Aion.
It was translated into a lot of European languages. As a kid I loved this game because this was only one mmorpg game with full polish translation and dubbing
As a German: THIS!! IT HAD GERMAN FUCKING VOICE ACTING!! Did they Just... throw away all the lines they recorded? Why would they do that?!
Aions Liebe und Azphels Führung, mein Freund... und einen Toast auf die gute alte Zeit.
I actually bought this game as a kid. Installed the whole thing but then it hit me with "enter credit card information to enter your free trial."
That was the end of my Aion experience. Still wonder where I'd be today if I got into this game.
Damn, I was thinking he wouldn't give it a fair chance. But now, 4 minutes in I can see how far has this game fallen.
Indeed. To demonstrate how low it has fallen, I would have to rate the version I played back on lev 55 (Ver 3.7?) as a 100, so this new version would be a 3/100. I threw thousands of hours to this game. It hurts seeing it like this.
Just how Stupid do they have to be to destroy their income like this.
@@joshanonline True, even with some issues Aion could have survived and maybe still be a relevant mmo today. It is really sad to see what it has become, at some point instead of getting better it just turned into one of the worse mmos. It had so much potential with the rifting pvp, it was so much fun whenever a rift appeared and people poured in to the enemy land. I remember going alone once late at night and exploring the Asmo side lol I was so scared of being caught by other players or getting killed by guard eheh was really exciting. There were even quests to do on the enemy side...so much potential for a nice pvp game all wasted!
"He'd wouldn't", this makes no sense
It's like they're not even the same game at this point.
@@joshanonline Aion was never a 100/100 lol
Maybe 70 or 80 out of 100 but never a 100 out of 100^^
Aion I have a history with, and...what the hell? I never remembered it being like this, this is 100% completely different from my experience when this was owned by NCSoft and was voiced in English at character creation and gameplay, the class selection is different, the character creation is different, everything about the game is different from the Aion I remember playing before this...what the hell? This is a far cry from what I remember the game being like. Even the opening is different.
The only thing I recognised from this video was the rift fight. Rest of it didn't look anything like I remember. Very odd.
I'm glad I'm not the only one watching this thinking 'I don't remember it like this at all'
Thank you! I'm like I swore the game had English voice acting when I tried it.
@@antediluvian14 Yep. I went back to retail Aion since quitting soon after Echoes of Eternity dropped. It was…disheartening to say the least.
Brusthonin, gone. Theobomos, gone. Freaking Altgard, gone too. Mostly all the big pvp maps are gone…or replaced. Really disappointing
Yeah it looks like they really bastardized it lol
DAMN, so different from how it used to be. I remember rescuing Munin in the opening Asmodian area. God damn those first few hours leading up to getting your wings was, frankly, incredible. The writing was fairly tight, and yes it had shit quest design, but most games back then did. Sad to see that they've gutted it to this degree. The starting zones were some of the best content the game had.
later you even get to know why he got locked up. Imagine my surprise when i saw him freed in later patches and not a single word why. Man can only guess he got released but directly under Marchutan's supervision
Yeah I got the feeling that they put heaps of effort into the starting zones to suck people in and cheaped out on the later ones (I'm talking release Aion, I didn't stay for the major patches). The starting areas were beautiful and all the ones past the second area were bland and barren.
The game was predatory before it was free to play - it had a typical Korean grind system to keep you paying for a sub without putting in the investment required to actually keep putting out fun content. And then plop free to play on top of that and well... No thank you!! My first mmorpg was free to play, and I didn't play it long enough to spend money on it. I'm never playing another free to play again. It's just a total waste of time because the only way you can even hope to keep up with other people is to sink an unreasonably huge amount of money into it for what you're actually getting. I'd much rather a simple $15-20 fee per month - much cheaper and you usually get a better game too.
They retconed most of the inner planet, just the starting zones and the original lvl 40+ zones, Abyss is non existent, many dungeons were removed and many pay to win and mobile esque features were added.
Most games having poor quest design doesn't excuse poor quest design.
@@soulsearcher9620which means it was average in quest design of it's era. Quest design that hasn't really evolved even today. It's still the same "go to that NPC" and "kill x amount of that monster" and "go bring me x amount of that item" in a large part of the majority of MMORPGs. But there aren't a lot of options for how to improve that.
I can't believe the original Aion by NCsoft turned into... this. This is a crime
This game used to be so good, absolutely heartbreaking to see what it has become. Doesnt even look like the same game anymore
This game was never good to begin with.
I'd say it was passable in the earlier versions, on par with Tera.
Maybe the gameplay was never really good, but i still enjoyed the ambience and especially the soundtrack. now the gameplay is too bad to even download the game again.
its not. this is a new game using the carcass of the old game as the bones.
I feel like a lot of these comments of through the lens of nostalgia. As in not much has probably changed but what your seeing isn't how you remember it because you had fun and liked it. There's a lot of movies I remember liking and now realize they're terrible. They haven't been altered.
When I saw Aion pop up I thought “I remember playing this game”. I still have the disks and the metal case they came in. I remember when I first got my wings, and being scared the first time I had to quest in the rift, risking my newfound wings in pvp. This game I saw here is nothing like what I remember. The story of the world spine being shattered, each side blaming the other, brother against brother and those who live on the side in shadow slowly changing into demons while the ‘white-wings” got all sunshine. There was actually a storyline when it was a monthly subscription. One I still remember. I’m glad I moved on when I did and missed this games fall from grace. Thank you for this information, keep up the good work!
this is the Aion I remember.
@@millenniumearl9849 Me too, it's kind of sad. They had so much plans for this game. ... Also the sound when you run out of aether and are about to fall from the skies, still gives me the creeps.
@@zidahya Please don't remind me... the quest where you had to fly to the center of the PvP zone was to terrifying x)
But it was also one of the best community moments I experienced. I had a stranger help me by giving me potions and showing me where I had to go. Being able to fly anywhere in certain maps was so amazing, I loved the game just for that.
I left and when i returned, the open PvP space with floating islands got replaced by weird ground maps with air streams where you were barely able to fly. I didn't know why anyone thought this was more fun, so I left again.
The game really went downhill
I remember it that way as well was so much fun up until 4.3 I think was the update it started going down hill. I loved the abyss and fighting over the towers and core of the abyss. When that went out is the downfall. I didn't have the subscription, I only started playing just after the game went free to play. Invading the apposing faction's area to do a few quests and PvP was great. Had a good Legion that really helped out when you needed it as well to with the community you were talking about.
I know.. I am so confused!
I played Aion back when NCSoft still published it in the west and it was still subscription-based. It was an incredible game back then. Amazing world pvp, great dungeons and raids, fun quests, the flying was really fun, no cash shop and it was more visually coherent...
It really hurts to see me what the game has become.
But hey, what can you expect once Gameforge takes over.
yes! it so sad to see it at this current state. they should just shut it down, its just an empty shell now and obviously there to squeeze some money.
I was watching this vid and was confused lol. this looks nothing like the Aion I remembered.
The weird thing is the english voice acting is gone.
But thats probably GameForge, I remember playing Tera from Gameforge as publisher and my friend who played in the US who which was managed by Bluehole Studios had a WAY better experience, feature list and so on.
Im pretty sure theres a fee mmo publishers have to pay to korean developers, and Im 100% certain gameforge is paying the lowest.
True it pains me...
I love what this game has become and the fans deserve to watch it suffer lol. Yall abandoned an amazing game of Warhammer Online for this shitshow. Still will never understand it. Didn't look good when it first launched and it still looks like trash.
I have some very fond memories of this game from back in the day in the NCsoft era. This was my first mmo, I grew fond of the genre and the dark aesthetic of the Asmodians. Sadly that was one of the first things that was taken out after 4.0. I'm grateful for those moments I had with my Legion but those days are over now and everyone moved on onto other games. I'm glad that I got into GW2 and then Destiny after this, I got to enjoy other aspects I liked about Aion in other places.
wow i bet you did a lot of internet dating in your time
yeah. fuck 4.0. ruined the game on public. i only played private server after that but it just wasnt the same
it is still the NCSoft era. contrary to what people seem to think, gameforge didn't push monetization, ncsoft did. the practices were in play well before the company ever made a deal with gameforge to publish elsewhere
welcome to korean and asian games, where eventual heavy monetization is the norm due to heavier working hours and it being considered a good rather than bad practice to have it in game.
games like GW2 have only avoided the same fate from companies like NCSoft because it's not an eastern game ported to the west
instead they released Blade and Soul, a game that will make your eyes bleed out of sorrow for your wallet with GW2 never releasing there due to potential competition in the companies own market, and no monetization in the west because people in the west don't like it
Aion was my favorite MMO. This is one where when people say it used to be good, it's actually true. When it released in 2009 it was one of the best MMOs ever. In Korea today, Aion Classic is the #1 most played MMO, and the original Aion before it was ruined was the #1 MMO for years.
There used to be a joke in Korea that everyone knew someone who played Aion, because it had 5 million players in Korea when the total national population was 50 million.
It's a shame what NCsoft did to the game over the years, and how they squandered the Classic release. There will never be a MMO with PvP like Aion. There was only a short period of time where you could have experienced that, and if you did, count yourself lucky.
tbf if you see an old mmo published by gameforge then that statement is probably always true
Were things going downhill before or after they added auto battle in the game? Because I'm convinced Asain gamers don't actually like actual engagements in their games, or gameplay in general, and are only attracted to lots of flashing colors on screen, big tits and generally more effort put into the cash shop then litterally anything else with how popular Idle games and borderline P2W games are over in Asain countries.
Aion was like the WoW of Korea. It was insanely popular there, and having played it back on launch, it was a legitimately fun game. I didn't go beyond the first 3-4 months, but I had a hell of a time with it. It's so sad to log back in now and see what became of it. It's just...bad.
whoa, I knew it was big( I also played it A LOT back in the day as a kid) but I didnt realize it had literally 10% of all koreans play the game. thats insane.
lost ark is the most played mmo lol
"Games that sell immersion breaking Mounts tell you they dont care about their lore!"
Or you are Final Fantasy and spend the last 30 years to make sure your lore is so crazy, that no mount you could ever come up with is immersion breaking xD
The truth has been spoken :D
that why i can't play TESO. the world of elder scroll is a world that you need to be immerse in to really enjoy it to the fullest. but each time i logged into teso, i would see crazy armor with glowing sphere, halloween mask, ice skin etc and always with crazy mount that really only belong to some Korean mmo but not an elder scroll game. i really enjoy plaing teso :morrowind with a small group but everytime i go to a town, i would see all these immersion-breaking feature.
also : seing ad for the cash shop and some limited 40 euro mount each time i log really pissed me off.
@@champ6436 Let's not forget that you loading your savegame in Morrowind is canon and Vivec won't fight you because he knows you can go back and try it again in a different timeline.
Or that different events all happen at the same time despite being contradictory because there are dragon breaks which means different "realities" happen at the same time.
And that the hero of Kvatch did became Sheogorath. So in Skyrim you can meet your Oblivion character who is now basically a god.
Oh and Hermaeus Mora has a library of everything. Even stuff that got cut when the world was created. So cut content is a real thing in universe.
Not to mention that the dwarves built a giant mech as their new god.
oh, and then there is the gay cyborg from the future who was literally to angry to die and fought a demigod in single combat.
Elder Scrolls lore is pretty wild at times.
Yeah, the car mount in FFXIV doesn't really break immersion with all the magiteck already flying around.
@@keiichimorisato98 The crescent moon with a Loporrit on it, though...
I bought this game hardcover from target in 2009 I was 10 years old and my first moments in this game and continuing to play it proved to be the most magical experience I've had with any video game - even to this day I still daydream about what this game was and what it could have been. I am now 22, and it's so heartbreaking seeing how far my boy has fallen and how none of their plans ever came to fruition :( RIP Aion - you will never be forgotten.
Rot in hell I say. Was always garbage I'm sure. It's a Korean MMO for Christ's sake.
You voiced my thoughts exactly! I bought it soon after it came out way back. I abandoned the game a bit before it went free to play and didn't play it for quite a while. When I reinstalled it a few months ago, I simply could not get back into it: it became too 'simplistic' for want of a better word and too 'babyish'. How I miss those days!
@@Aaron-kq7rd I can't be more mistaken.
After playing it for years myself, If I could take anything from thing game elsewhere it would be the Shugos. I miss them so nyerking much.
It was actually amazing in the first release, after the second expansion it went downhill a bit and has faceplanted since.
"Ah a piece of the relic" wow incredible storytelling this is probably the best cutscene ever made and perfectly explains the plot while not giving me an epileptic fit. How can anyone not like this, it's a masterpiece. I mean I can't believe that dude actually got a piece of 'THE RELIC' that's huge.
What's with mmo games having magical macguffin's that are poorly explained? For Elsword, it's the el crystal, for Aion is the relic, for Aura Kingdom, it was the cube of Gaia, in Eden Eternal it was a blue crystal that gave birth to us.
Try harder.
4:05
@@CrazyAlienLady051 You still have to introduce the thing before you can expect anyone to give a shit about it
Seeing AION being in this state just makes me want to cry ;w; what have they done to youuuu
Same here, same here! ; a ; That’s why my friends and me get on a really good populated private server for the last years, with still an old version running (4.6). But it even got new content for me personally, as I never went beyond 3.8 before X"D
right?? so many memories were made on aion and i remember it being so good when i was playing this at like 9 years old LOL its just sad that its gotten so bad and literally no on eplays it anymore
As someone who has been a top rank Aion player, Aion is probably the most fun I had doing PvP in an MMO.
Sadly devs have turned turning the game from bad to worst into an art form.
Died laughing at the intro cinematic, great vid, fuck this game.
Then you should check Warhammer: Return to Reckoning - a good pvp-focused MMORPG, run literaly by a bunch of fans!
They'll never be another game that hits that PvP sweet spot for me like Aion did. Especially the group PvP
I was never top rank because I didn't like grinding for the rank currency but I was one of the top DPS on my server. IIRC highest rank I reached was... 4 star? 3 star? Whatever gets a tier 2 transformation. I had so much fun playing this back in the day. It was so much fun.
I had fun doing pvp with my group of friends in Aion but in the end all it really was was who was the higher level, had the better gear, got the first jump, etc. In my opinion PvP is more fun when there's two even teams with clear objectives. In Aion it was so one sided and basically relied on ruining someone else's day. The adrenaline you got when rifting was fun but ultimately it was a shitty PvP system. These days I prefer PvE anyway - one thing that drew me to MMOs in the first place was the whole concept of working with people to take down content you can't do alone.
@@Kateyangyuqing I disagree. Gear did play a big part in PvP but so did skill. I played for many years and had every class at max level.
I was an Asmodian and before I got my end-game pvp gear I used to duel people who did have it and beat them. I also made an Elyos account and when I was a brand new max-level sorc I used to almost beat people who were already geared. I had already played long enough to understand every class and every skill and every pattern each class usually followed.
So glad you finally cover Aion, this was my #1 game back then!!
The game used to be soooo damn good, I was so addicted to it, even after it got worse and worse, I still loved it
The day they lost me was after they've cut half of the main city and shops, no way to enter the other side anymore, it felt like 80% of the content just vanished
Now my account got officially deleted/banned due to inactivity and even after they said "log-in to reactive it" I simply can't, says the account doesn't exist anymore... so RIP Aion, you were a good game, but you became the worse
I loved the Game as well, normally i didnt bother with things like crafting, but i liked Aion old professions for crafting. Making Armors or even furniture for your apartment or house. The Times of old Katalam.
@@Sancturios omg crafting was a pain it took ages same with aethertapping, but i made gazillions selling running scrolls i was so rich lol
I modtly liked it because of aesthatic. Aesthetic? Purposes. Like of course would a templar make his own armor. But nowadays... crafting is a lod of sorthless junk
Spent 4-5 years in the game playing daily, loved the endgame, loved even the leveling process. Had 8 max level characters each geared at a minimum with PVE Kahrun and PVP Blood mark sets, a bunch of cool skins and additions that took me forever to buy as a free player. Then, at around 4.8, took a few months break to recharge a bit and when I came back NCSoft told me they deleted my account and nothing can be done, ce est la vie. I've been a bitter, bitter man ever since. I hope an elephant fucks NCSoft in their collective asses, will never touch anything of theirs again
btw game died alongside Kahrun. Content after that was a slow spiral into the drain.
Imagine my absolute horror when I Came back to play this game after few years.
When I was like 12 or so, I absolutely loved this game. The fun, pvp, pve, crafting, gathering. It was beautiful. The story that played at the beginning was awesome, explaining why the dark and the light ones fight and how the entire planet got ripped apart. Chefs kiss😚👌. I have a lot of really good memories from this game. And when I came back.. It was really sad.. Because I remember this game to be so good I was excited to play it as a adult but I was really heartbroken after few minutes..
Never played any MMO for very long back then, but Aion was definitely one of my favourites.
Stopped playing for a while and tried to get back into it. It was like I was playing a different game.
I distinctly remember the "elite" mobs suddenly being very easy to kill solo. That alone made me almost stop playing immediately. I loved the idea of the elite mobs, even if I sucked at finding others to play with, so I mostly just avoided them.
That was my experience too. My partner and I returned to playing, saw it was pay to do anything and we never played it again. It deserves to be on this list.
So much this, i remember when i played years ago, Elite zone were dreaded and going solo was pure suicide
Same here
christ is coming soon follow the commandments
@Captain Conrad For some games that how I try them. I just set up a single player Pserver, and make up my own rules more or less. Never have to feel I have to pay for fun, and can fudge with the numbers. I do sometimes wish my friends were into it, think would be much cooler then a minecraft server.
I played this when it was still in beta in Korea and subscription-based, and I must say back then it was a phenomenally good MMO. Beautiful graphics, the combat system was fast, good-looking and well thought-out, mass-PvP action between both player factions and the NPC faction "Balaur" and challenging PvE dungeons. But then Gameforge happened and NCsoft also discovered microtransactions, so the overall development changed to make it a game filled with spend-money-to-win events, overpowered cash shop gear, the dungeons and overall game difficulty was drastially reduced to attract the super-casual players and thus it lost a lot of appeal to me, tons of lore-providing quests and dungeons were removed.
EDIT 1 : WTF how did they screw up the game intro that badly? Back when I played it it was a completely different intro that explained the overall world and the origin of the Asmodeans, the Elyos, it was epic and actually made sense.
EDIT 2 : WTF^2 they actually put in an auto-bot into this game?
EDIT 3 : Seeing all these flashy daily-reward-upgrade-systems-garbage is making me sad now...
EDIT 4 : HOLY FCK, and i thought the cash shop back then was insulting. This is a travesty...
I'm at 9 minutes in the video and i'm getting depressed by how they destroyed this once awesome game.
i also played the game from 2010-2013 or something like that when i was younger and WTF. it was accualy a good MMO back then, it was even syncronyzed fully in english and partly german too. How did it change that much Holy
They butchered our boy
I like how he said that he likes the assention quests cutscene when that is the only thing that somewhat stayed from the original game ;(
edit: All i can say that all the complaints/problems after the cutscene wasnt there when the game launched. this is a horible shitshow of the game i once knew ;( :@
Just a reminder this game was realy good and fun
ua-cam.com/video/QuiohqAae0M/v-deo.html
ua-cam.com/video/VnW3zXVe3yw/v-deo.html
When micro transactions are like the black death for mmo's
I still remember the first time I played Aion and the feeling of being blown away by the graphics, music, and rifting still lingers in my mind cant believe it was more than 10 years ago....
I miss that feeling of being blown away and excited for the game
@@Valeria-th3ms I’m searching like a crazed man for this feeling again. Nothing has got me so misty eyed in awe since stepping into Elwynn forest as an 11 year old boy.
New world next on the menu, but I’m not confident it’ll scratch the itch that I’ve been trying to scratch for years
@@williambutterworth6693 if you're over like 20, I've got some bad news for ya
@@williambutterworth6693 yeah, same - I am planning to try New World, but to be honest, I am not hyped for it
@@Valeria-th3ms It's difficult to be hyped for an MMORPG nowadays, every MMO that has been released has ended up as a failure or just with a small population, and if you are an MMORPG player which focuses on the story or lore inside the game and not just graphics it is worse...
Soon, MMOs will be three flashing bars of colored light with coin sounds.
They kinda already are, you just forgot the cash shop.
AION was so epic back when it was a Pay-to-Play game, I remember the HUGE hype around this game since it really was beautiful and promising as some sort of next-gen Lineage-like MMO with flying features. Truely an awesome MMO at its beginning that slowly went downhill over the course of the years.
Not to mention the awesome character creator that people begged to be released separate of the game because it was so customizable.
A pal of mined used to invest thousands of hours in it, so much that he got burned out and never touched it again eventually.
You mean pay to play sub games are better than free to play? You mean you cannot make a good free to play mmo? Dang, I would’ve never guessed. Cough WoW ffxiv cough
@@AFpaleoCon Could be obvious to some and not to others. WoW is P2W nowadays and isn't as clean as it was a decade ago despite the everlasting presence of RMTs.
It actually had a good chance being a WoW killer since it was around the time of Cata where most people quit. But they fucked it all up
aion actually used to be decent after they softened the xp grind and when it was still a subscription game, but once they went f2p it became p2w crap like most other eastern f2p games. i can barely recognize the game shown in this video. it's almost like they just took the name and made a completely different game with barely any similarities.
also did they remove the character customization in favour of random? or did josh just miss it? it was hillarious how weird you could make you character, tiny body with long arms and giant head.
I was thinking the same, I played this game at launch in the U.S. and while it lost me with the grind, it was a far better starting experience than I see here.
At 2:11 if you look to the right you can see the "buttons" and when you open them you get the sliders and all the options. It's so small and low-key, it's bad design tbh.
The outfit the character is wearing is a store outfit, and there's a few you can try on during the character creation process (because the game tells you "oh look you can buy this outfit, just build your character around this and immediately buy it as soon as you've entered the world")
I think Josh missed the character creation buttons because the ridiculous outfit weirded him out.
I was reminded of the same things during his life is feudal video, on how to bring up the claims and the level grid. Then i remembered...I only started playing that game whenever my friends had it somewhat figured out. The game was not intuitive at all, and it required WAAAY to much time to get anything done, which is why i eventually left it. Dont get me wrong, i put in like 4k hours into it, i really liked the game and the concept behind it, but the game didnt ever really improve. Bad crafting mechanics were added which made it lose about 25% of the player base, maps were shut down to move everyone to one gigantic map that was never going to be fully populated, that lost half that current population. Systems changed so often it was hard to know in the active hardcore playerbase what exactly needed to be done to destroy an enemy claim. Claims rules changed completely, it was a mess. It's the elongated story of the game i think that is truly the interesting part of it, and how i watched a game that i played constantly fall further and further, and become more and more toxic. And then realized it just isnt worth it. And then you stop hardcore PvP sandbox games because they are impossible to balance, unless you make it so that a very small area can never be destroyed. But that still means griefing can make them all quit anyways.
@@glanni how sad. I remember back then when the character customization was so in depth it was years ahead of its time. Oh how the mighty has fallen.
Yes, i was just posting about it, this looks like a completely different game then the 2008 release.
Believe it or not this game was actually hard and unforgiving at one point... Grinding in the open world used to have you one mistake away from death by player or monster alike, it was a tense game.
oh yesss the fear when doing main quest killing mobs while a rift was open somewhere, at any time an assa can jump out of hide and nuke you :'D
You reminded me of 2012 again. This is EXACTLY why i left the game. As petty n sore loser as that sounds, i didnt know it was open pvp and It wasnt my cup of tea
Yeah I remember when I was a newbie Ely, collecting something in Eltnen to level my essencetaping, when someone said "Lady, I wouldn't stay here if I were you...". I thanked for the advice and went ahead. When I collecting my stuff, wearing my essencetaping hat, suddently I was attacked by a tiny "demonic" creature with bright red eyes and what I believed to be a "tail" 🤣 I was shocked lmao. And it was FAST! 🤣🤣🤣 I told on guild chat and they said it as "an asmo" lol
Ooooh yeee. I remember playing an assassin, I was on edge everytime I farmed plants for my potions, watching at every angle being wary of ganks, lol.
worst part was that 1 second lag you got.. and you knew.. a enemy player was in your area now haha
As a veteran Aion player, I can say the game was infinitely better. You didn't have the weird Gameforge shop front, you were rewarded monthly for subbing (before ot went Free to Play), you had a massive PVP gimmick in certain areas and a giant area specifically for PVP, you could craft items and armour, you could gather things for said craft, and the voice acting was also in English! Of course, this was when the game was under the NCSoft banner. It's fallen so far from grace that even the classic server they added last year couldn't draw the crowd back.
not a gameforge shop front. was literally there before gameforge and NCSoft came to a deal.
and it is STILL under their banner, they still make the game and publish it in korea, where the monetization is even higher.
NCSoft like all korean companies monetizes their games heavily, sometimes at launch, sometimes later (in this case it was after launch)
the only reason GW was/is spared the same treatment is because it's not meant for korean audiences and has never been taken over there.
gameforge is a terrible company, but 9/10 it's not them that's monetizing the games so heavily, when they do it's usually to push it from buy a sword for X to buy a chance at a sword for X
they suck, but they're not to blame for the monetization issue, they just don't stop it and get to take their cut
I still own the Collector's Edition AION, including Avia figure. She's still there, standing amongst my FFXIV figures. Yeah man, once upon a time, AION was good.
same same.. watching this I was like "this is not the game I remember playin at launch!"
Really sad to see its corpse like that
Yeah I played this when it first released and quit when they put the cash shop in the game. A couple things, from a historical standpoint:
1. When I played it was fully in English. In particular I remember they got Dante Basco to do the 'youth' voice. Not sure what's up with the mix of korean and english in this "international" version though.
2. The game was originally b2p and didn't go f2p/cash shop until 2012. So the foundation of the game and at least the original upgrade systems, potions, etc. weren't designed with exploiting players in mind. The leveling/progression also USED to only give one skill at a time, so that whole skill bloat thing seems to be new. The game's aesthetic was very high fantasy up until the cash shop. Also no mounts pre-cash shop. It's pretty sad to see what they've turned it all into now.
3. The best parts of the game weren't covered in this video. First, flying, which was a really cool addition compared to the competitor MMOs at the time. Second (and while it's gonna be hard to get a grasp of this with only 100 people playing), the PvP WAS really great. Especially the rifts/portals you could take into the other factions zones, setup a return obelisk, then see how long you could play hide-and-go-gank before the other faction was able to send you back home.
4. Gunner was added just before the cash shop, and I think aethertech came after, so I can't speak much to either. Assassin, sorcerer, and gladiator were pretty fun and flashy though.
5. Soundtrack was actually really fantastic.
6. EDIT: Oh yeah, that awful opening is new too.
So tl;dr, this is less of a story of a game intentionally designed to be bad, but rather a genuinely good game (for its time) that was ruined after being pumped full of cash shop steroids. RIP, Aion.
I agree with eveything you said, but I distinctly remember the cash shop existing for quite a while before they announced the gunner, or any of the new classes
TBF it was funny as hell going into "enemy" territory and sometimes find nice people you could emote with, since you couldn't understand each other xD
I wouldn't go as far as saying it was a good game (at best decent imho), as they lured in alot of PvE players at launch with the promise of PvE content, only admit later that they practically had nothing PvE content wise for the second half of the leveling experience. That being said, was kinda shocked how much the game has fallen since. I mean what happened to the flying stuff? That was practically core the sales pitch and being a daeva..?
@@ignispurgatorius5297 Bullshit, they had a ton of PVE content.
that "friend" Cheska person you met, saying "I have never met this person" - they are the same person you said "Talk to an npc who i'll never see again". - I found that funny
Based on the comments, it seems like it would be a good idea to do a followup video looking at archive footage of the pre-Gameforge version so you can compare.
About the literal paperwork... Sounds about right for Southeast Asian cosmology.
Idk where all the comments came from, maybe nostalgia hit them hard but when I bought Aion back in 2009 it was already bad. Not as bad as what we see in the video, but still...
@@NetSraC1306 The game had a mediocre world, it was a grind, lame dailys, but the pvp was unmatched by any mmo ive ever played. It had a high skill gap and engaging mechanics, like slide shotting (you could do this will spells too) and weaving auto attacks kept it engaging, the pace, there were a lot of skills for keybinding. For me nothing has hit the sweet spot of aion pvp since.
I maxed 3 characters. I played an assassin, then a sorcerer and a ranger. im kinda sad its super dead and im playing HC classic wow now, but the novelty of HC is wearing off.
I was so confused when I saw the title of this video because Aion used to be amazingly popular and considered a high-standard game. I remember sucking up all lore and assets I could find on it because it seemed so cool but I couldn't afford a pay2play MMO yet.
But seeing what it has become now explains how it ended up on this series...😔
Man, i would love to see Josh talking about Nostale, which is another game that Gameforge host and had a big place in my heart before going to the void that is P2W.
Game was very p2w focused from the start, just unlocking the subclass cards was an ordeal, I still have nostalgia for that game though
Nostale... That's a name I haven't heard in awhile... Among flyff, cabal online and requiem bloodymare
Same im so sad about what happened to this game
THIS! I spent so much time on it as a kid
How about he reviews Elsword
This is like a weird fever dream and absolutely not the game I recall playing upon the release over a decade ago. Wow. The pvp was pretty rad when you only had 30-60 seconds of flight or whatever in the dual zone area. It added a pretty fun lair of dodging, hiding, escaping enemies if you were crafty with the cooldown.
Aion used to be, without a doubt, one of the best MMORPGs ever made. The graphics were outstanding for its time. Story and lore were epic. Maps, towns, cities were so awesome. A lot of PvPvE chaos everywhere made gameplay really fun. The raids were top-notch and way ahead of its time.
In Korea, the classic version of Aion is still running strong, and always in the top 3 of the most-played MMORPGs. Still so popular after 14 years of release is a true testament to the legacy of Aion.
Honestly, if I had a wish to experience a MMORPG for the first time again, it would be the old Aion.
This games was, , without a doubt, NEVER one of the best MMORPGs ever made.
@@Brian-qn7fn it was lost ark for its time.
@@Brian-qn7fn why you got to go to all the comments and say this? did the game hurt you or something? seems like you are on a vendetta, and btw your opinion does not make it a fact, it depends on trhe individual, for me at the time, it was an amazing game, easily up there with the top dogs. So it was one of the best.
the "old" aion was destined to die. it was a korean game for a korean market ported to the west.
things like P2W, grinding and making grinding easier are staples of the industry there.
NCSoft alone should've told you it was going to be heavily monetized given they do it with everything that's released in korea
@@Brian-qn7fn Considering how many bad and mediocre MMORPGs have come and gone, it certainly was.
What else is there?
Meridian 59, DAoC, WoW, Everquest, Ultima Online, Ragnarok?
Aion’s last hurrah was in the mid 2010s, when 4.0 was released. As someone who played since 3.8, I was right there with friends who ranted and raved that Katalam and Danaria were getting replaced by Levinshor and the Elyos version. I remember staying up all night just to kill Hyperion and many other endgame bosses for gear and the sieges were phenominal, when it was equally balanced. Back then, being promoted to 1 star general or commander on your server was a big thing- meaning if yoy showed up to sieges you better be skilled at commanding.
Everyone says it started to go downhill when gunner was released, but in my opinion, Aion starting to become a bit “whimsical” on its own terms is never a bad thing for an mmo. Things got bad once Echoes of Eternity released. 60-75 leveling was a slog, nothing really stimulating story or gameplay wise, the grudge of destroying the before-named-areas, plumes, the introduction of that weird currency (Luna) that you only got by playing the very useless shop minigames….I quit.
And when I came back to play Aion classic 2 months ago, it was a blast to the past- but only temporarily. Classic has some of the same problems that retail Aion has, and as a self-proclaimed critic, I hope that they choose to fix these problems instead of capitalizing. Then again, half of NC’s games (except Gw 1&2 and Lineage 1&2 ) are failing.
Edit after watching: 100% agreed with everything said in the last 31 mins. Though it triggered me that Josh didnt try jumping around while in combat- it’s a childish way of sprucing up the boring gameplay. But yeah it’s fallen so far that I didnt eben recognize a lot of the areas…sad.
Emotional rant over :)
LMFAO bruh its been bad since launch. Once people got to lvl 25, they quit or became you.
This game actually had the BEST player retention rate of any game that released in 2008. Being wrong is easy, being EXACTLY wrong is amazing lol.
I loved my gunner I tanked with him. I left when they sunk half the map including areas I liked. They also took away other things I enjoyed an update that takes more away than it added. I could never get my morale up again.
Guild Wars isn't doing bad but at the same time, and this is coming from a player since before the expansions for GW1, the quality has kinda fallen off, the cutscenes aren't as smooth in PoF as they were for HOTs or IBS and severely buggy, the later on grind is absolutely soul crushing while you're doing it especially for the Skyscale. It isn't exactly falling apart but it has gone down a step or two in terms of quality in some areas
The biggest difference, and why Guild Wars (1 and 2) is much more successful, is ArenaNet. Guild Wars didn't sell out to Gameforge and become a gatcha whaling enterprise like Aion and a lot of other NCSoft titles.
This used to be one of the best MMOs. Best combat ever.
sad to see this fall so deep, i spent so much time in this but watching this Video is like whole new and fking bad game
@@ichputzhiernur4376 I quit this game the second they sent me on a quest to kill fucking rabbits!
I was like OK I hate this, its stupid and I don't care to look more into it than this.
I wanted to do serious things and it was... Dumb
Yeah. This vid makes me sad. Before Gameforge took it over and it went free to play, it was actually one of the best of the genre. Balance was perfect - you couldn't just take the piss and expect to stay alive and you had to actually communicate in parties and play to your role to sucessfully finish dungeons. I guess because people had to co-operate, it had an amazing player base for the most part and it's the only MMO I made RL friends in. I can't believe how much gameforge have messed it up... it's depressing.
Yah sure HAHAHA game looks like garbage
Best combat? I played this twice, once solo and once with friends. Felt very meh. Just kinda standing there and pressing the 1 2 3 keys ad nauseum.
It's like FF14, except just as bad and not popular.
I used to play this game when it was glorious, from 2.X to 4.0. It really went down from 4.0 to 4.8. Right after reading the patch note for the 5.0 version I uninstalled the game. This game had so much going on, amazing combat, great pvp, good story, nice graphics, everything went down the hill and thinking about it make me so nostalgic. I'm glad I was able to be a part of this adventure, I learned a lot thanks to this game and I don't regret for a second the years I spent there
4.8 Killed the game. 4.7 was for me the best patch ever.
Amazaed this was still going. I was amazed when it was realeased, because it looked amazing, and "MMO may you fly = Cool" was the perfect selling point back in the day
Fun thing is this game has a flying mechanic, and since josh never really mentions that you can fly in some very specif zones i can quess that the feature has been killed and ignored. such a shame what happend to this game :(. Great video 👍
I haven't played in years, but I would assume that the abyss is still in the game, and if it is, you have to have flying at least there.
I think he rather didn't get to that. I haven't played for a while, but when I last did, flying was very much still a part of the game.
Another thing you might forget but it has a gliding mechanic everywhere and he didn't use it once. so they probably took that out too
I’m probably one of the few here who’s played the game pretty recently and I can say almost a 100% that the flying mechanic is still there. You have to reach level 32 and go to a certain ice town to get it though I believe.
That's gameforge for you. They don't only make games p2w but they actively work on removing features and making the game worse. No I'm not bullshitting, seriously. Same happened on 4story, they remove whole maps, change the starting area from an amazing city to a completely empty place. Like it's just.. I do not understand this. They have killed 4-5 games at this point. What the f is this business strategy? I'm starting to think the guy who owns gameforge doesn't care about money and is just trying to kill as many games as possible.
They literally buy games, and then downgrade them. Like just making them p2w is ok, alright whatever but why would you downgrade videogames? Aion used to advertise flying like crazy from the start.
I played this game back when asmodians actually looked demonic.
Ah, I knew they looked different! Now they just look like Elyos with more back hair.
@@nogitsune4452 Yeah they had purplish skin (due to something about not bathing in the same rays as Elyos and such) and had reddish eyes and such. Sometimes black or very bright hair.
Seems like that's not a thing anymore.
@@DemonicAkumi they still can look like that, but they don't have claws. I think the update was that they got "cleanesed" or something.
@@demispectra9783 As an Asmodian, I was absolutely FUMING when they introduced that patch. Stripped away nearly everything that made Asmodians unique - no claws, changed the mane (TWICE - once in 3.0 and again in 5.0), added Elyos skin tones and even the option to remove the mane entirely. And with all the new wing models that could be used by both factions, there was barely anything left to differentiate the two. Original lore and artistic integrity be damned. It was tragic.
I am a true Asmodian for life, and Aion as it once was will live on in my heart.
It was one of the best games ever made.
It had lots of maps, great story, great sieges, pvp, pve, crafting, gathering. It was beautiful. The devs considered a good idea to remove all the features excepting pvp and pve and almost all the maps, quests and story. Now you will get to max level in a few hours. The pvp is shitty, the sieges are a joke. No more abyss... it's all gone...
You can literally speed run Aion to the End Game. But then you will have to pay to win if you want to get End Game equipments faster (or else you will have to spend months or years to get something decent).
@@KeepCalmCapybara Yes... this is Aion now
i spent weeks griding to lvl 40 back in the day, i was absolutely shocked and sad to reach lvl 75 in about 5 hours :(
@@XvicvicX I know how you feel. Last weak I download Aion again feeling nostalgic. After less than an hour of playing both Aion Live and Classic servers I quit and unistaled it. It is dead, there is people playing, but the game does not have the same light as it had before :(
They killed the abyss?! Wtf that was one of the most unique aspects of the game, just the area concept alone was insane
I remember having a great time in the NCSoft release of Aion back in the day. This, this looks unrecognizable.
And I didn't see you touch on what I felt was the one thing Aion did that other MMOs should do. There was a UI that allowed you to configure skill chains. The first 3 buttons would be replaced with any skill you configured in a chain. It was great because if there is one thing I loathe from the older MMOs is the skill button overload. Here's 3 whole bars, 12 buttons each, of skills you have by max level. And that's not all the skills you have. Aion's chain UI drastically reduced the need for ALL THE BUTTONZ!!!! without also requiring players to delve into the wonderful world of writing macros.
I wonder if they ripped that out when it changed hands? Also, no gliding? I recall there was gliding all over the place in Aion.
it is still an NCSoft game, quite literally. all that monetization and various changes are on them.
NCSoft are a korean company, and aion was made for a korean market, part of that is an inevitable heavy cash shop
as much as people like to blame gameforge for taking over and "ruining it", it started before gameforge took over (albeit only in the korean side) and most of NCSoft's games that aren't explictly designed for the west (like GW2) are extremely heavily monetized and P2W
it's sorta like getting a CoD game anymore and not expecting a battlepass to exist..eventually if it's not there on launch
For any old aion players wanting to go back casually for nostalgia's sake: play on an unofficial server.
There's so much removed (entire regions even) that the official server is useless even for a short nostalgia trip.
Idk how any of the unofficial ones are endgame or pvp wise but yeah at least the regions and quests are still there lol.
Absolutely this. I played Aion in 1.0 and the betas, then again in 3.x and 4.x, then ame back for 7.x and they just totally ruined the game between 4 and 7, and played again on EuroAion for a while which is IMO the peak version.
I think EuroAion and now Aion America are the top recommendations these days, and both run version 4.6
Do this the same for Runes of Magic if you can find one.
I just host a 3.9 server locally and play with family. Honestly, it's a really nice way to play the game, even though you can't really get the magic of playing with others again.
@@Zephyrsw0rd is it difficult to do? I would love to have Aion available just to go explore the old maps or even just to get the complete soundtrack.
@@pelisinho ua-cam.com/video/I3V5eDyRpsA/v-deo.html ? Or did you mean walking through the maps with the music?
Ah, the Guild Wars "/aion" emote that gives you temporary wings, I remember that! Game was full of RMT trade spam on launch and no GMs around to ban them, and bots farming needed quest items so players couldn't get a look in. Quit after about a month, not really thought about it since, will be good to see what you've got to say about the state of it now.
I'll be the one to admit. I even botted. It was impossible to play the game without botting once you hit lvl like 25-30. The EXP to lvl became INSANE and everywhere was just bots.
@@LordSadCat I legit got to max level... but I did that too in Lineage 2. I used to like the grind.
@@LordSadCat insane at level 30? Lmao u could hit max level in 3-4months chilling. Most ppl wouldnt even hit max level in Lineage2 until Interlude/kamael expansions( which came out 3-4years after first patch). Needing bot at 30+ in aion original is just being lazy.
@@LordSadCat Yeah. I got to around 25 and stopped. Just couldn't handle the grind. Haven't played the game since about a month or two after release.
and i literally spent 1 hour making my character !! it had so many sliders ... it was completely new to me... but was a chill game
Aion was one of the most amazing games I've ever played, it was leagues ahead of anything we ever seen even nowadays, but unfortunately it got left to rot by NCsoft since they moved priority to other projects, but it had the most amazing combat and possibilities that rewarded player skill and being able to manage 6, different hotbars. Its a shame what happened to it.
NCsoft had a real talent when it comes to turning gold into shit.
@randomguy8196 i mean... wow had 5, and it was always the top dog of mmorpgs for more than a decade. But yeah, I agree, a million abilities don't make combat good.
@randomguy8196 abiltiies yeah, but macros to do different things with said abilities is a different thing too
Casual players could do it with 1 toolbar for regular stuff, 2 for raiding, but there was a lot of items and different kinds of cooldown to manage, there were people playing with 12 bars that were just situational bar, a 3 set for doing max DPS, one 3 set to play more with CC, one set for using expensive items to survive stuff and tracking a rotation based on the modfiers but a lot similar from each other.
It wasen't mandatory by any means, but as people keep playing, people get better and the celling for player skill was quite high, so dedication usually payed out. The game deies because they didn't had where to go and how to expand, the game was well-rounded and put NC on top of the game, so they gravited to going for new IPs to make things that it wouldn't work on Aion, but at that point, they really didn't cared about the game anymore, they already made one of the greatest MMOs and that meant that they could make A LOT OF MONEY making new projects that players wouldn't play if they kept Aion alive. Eventually it would died from a thousand cuts anyway, no MMO is so great that reaches Magnum Opus status that couldn't be killed by future updates.
Its just a shame that no other MMO could reach the same feellings. FFXIV is close in a lot of stuff, but its a different game and the Joypad-centered design narrows a lot what the game could be in player skill for K&M, but it is quite a feat how amazing the controller plays. But it has a lot of the Aion feel into it, just not how it plays and the atmosphere is different.
The point is that Aion was golden and no one else can experience that anymore and the world would be a lot better with more copies of Aion that WoW.
This game is and always was just a korean wow clone.
I remember the fun playing this game long time ago. The environment is awesome, very huge maps, the skills, the battle, controls, items, and more. And what makes this game great at that time was when you get nervous every time you meet a character from another race and you'll get surprised as you get ambushed. Also, clashing is very fun. You'll find an area on a map where a race dominates it and you'll need to fight them and earn abyss points. Those were the great days of MMO. I played it last year and got sad on how empty all of the server was.
Watching this hurt so much.
I played this game way back and made a lot of friends there I still have contact to everyday.
It was such a good mmo with really cool pvp memories.
How far it has fallen. It's barely recognizable :(
Yes! Exactly this.
I met my friends here, who stayed with me through long years of gaming.
I still remember the dungeons and the arguments and the complaining about enemy players xD
As i see a lot of people have similar feelings around here in the comment-section😥
BTW, regarding in-game paperwork: the first thing you have to do after creating your character in Eve Online is to decide what kind of insurance you want to buy for your ship.
Thing is, Eve Online is advertised as an intense, hardcore MMO. Plus it's reputation as essentially it's own universe. I don't think people want to play a fantasy mmo, not advertised as super in-depth and hardcore with paperwork and shit, and have to do said paperwork.
EVE is old and well established to the point that most new players probably go in understanding that's it's a spreadsheet simulator with some space stuff sprinkled in.
While you're not wrong, insurance is an actual part of the game, much like repairing your gear. You'll never forget the first time you lose a ship and realize you forgot insurance. :)
I remember this game differently, it must be the classic. The way they have desecrated for monetization is horrific. Great video. Keep up the good work.
You likely remembered correctly. Sadly.
I just found your channel and i was SO happy to see this video. I played Aion for many years, up until fairly recently actually. I was drawn to it because of the great character creation options, class options, the huge maps and the lore…all of which the game eventually managed to fuck up.
The lore actually used to be pretty cool - on the Elyos (Angel) side you’re supposedly a revered general with amnesia, and you had to work your way back to your former glory by talking to people who knew you in your former life. On the Asmodian (demon) side, you were a petty thief who somehow gets elevated to daeva and everyone doubts your abilities. It was fun - but then they kept adding new lore that was completely boring, and then they NUKED THE GAME (like they literally deleted entire gorgeous maps & also some of the best plot quests and instances!!) and changed the plot entirely so that you now have this childhood friend(?) who follows you everywhere and then dies in battle, which is played out like it’s supposed to be sad but there’s no way to really build any sort of emotional connection to the character. The game just starts and is like “this is Cheska, your best friend & point person for all your quests!”
There were obviously tons of other problems - they advertise heavily that the game is “Truly Free” when it’s absolutely pay to win; eventually you can get a house in the game that has its own address on an actual, physical open map, but you have to pay RENT on it & there is almost no way to buy furniture; some quests require you to team up with others but there are no players anymore; and some classes are ridiculously OP while you can’t get anywhere with others (the newer Vandal class was so overpowered it was hilarious). There’s nostalgia there for me but the game just continues to shoot itself in the foot. Thank you for making this video though!
"They would put a literal pile of shit mount..."
Gameforge employee: write that down, WRITE THAT DOWN. Man's spitting gold here.
you joke but I bet that would sell
This video really hurt something in me, like an old love from high school you find again years later and you sadden to see what's become of them, bitter.. I played this game from 2011 till 2018 , a good 7 years I put in this game, it was pretty much all I had.. so many good memories, mostly bad in the end... I held to it as long as I could, till the end of 5.8, it was already awful way before that, but you dont wanna give up on something you think you still love. This game was it. There wasn't and I don't think there will ever be a better open world pvp mmo , better designed, so dynamic, this I will always believe. It could have been one of the best mmos even today, but they killed it.. I tried classic and it was the last thing I needed to finally move on.. I'll always hold aion dearly in my heart, cause there I met my husband and a handful of good friends.. you dont miss the game, you miss how you felt when you played it
Jesus that was deep, I actually feel bad and I’m a cynical Jew who thinks people who feel that way about bad mmos need to lighten up. Glad you got a happy ending
My friend met her boyfriend in Aion too. They are still dating. It was a way different game back then
Damn I remember the og days when you needed a group even for basic quests later on. This makes me really sad cause I was thinking about making a nostalgia trip into Aion. Completely different game now. Thanks for playing it so I wouldn’t need to Josh hehe.
Same here..
Sameee.. I ultimately settled on FFXIV and I'm glad I did cuz it is quite fun... But damn I do miss those good old Aion days.. I noticed the Aether attuning noise in FFXIVsounds extremely similar to the noise I remember gathering Aether in Aion... Wonder if anybody else has noticed or had that nostalgia boost from the sound effect
Gameforge is literally the EA of MMOs
Wow, this game has changed so much since release. I preordered this game, and I loved it for a while. Until I hit the grindy spot and realized PvP was more of a focus than I had expected. It was really fun besides that. I'm sad this is where its at now. NCSoft originally published this if I'm not mistaken
This was my exact experience with it at launch as well. While pvp-centric mmo wasn’t my jam, it’s a shame what the game’s become.
This game was amazing years ago. It died slowly and drastically every patch more... They managed to destroy it so much that is heartbreaking
I played Aion Classic when it came out - it was definitely nostalgic. Remembered the maps, monsters, and the quests. The grindy quests. The kill X creature to collect Y item then having to go BACK to the quest giver for a reward. Having to use potions/scrolls to speed up/get combat boosts. The fact that you have to sit down to heal OR use potions. Gathering that levels up - and it time consuming. Then there's the group quest around lv 16. I play solo and never found a group doing that zone so I ignored it. I also ignored crafting this time around and just sold everything off. Then the weapon manastone socketing - that lovely system. Look, green weapon, 2 slots. I'll put in a nice Attack stone - yay! Now I'll add a Crit stone - oh no it failed and took the attack stone with it. Oh and since I had a "free" account I could play 1 hour a day before losing ability to gather/use trading post plus XP dropped. So I gave it up and I'll just stick with Guild Wars 2.
You should look at the f2p as a trial. Sub is the ‘real’ game.
But yeah you’re not missing out, NCwest already butchered the game lol
@@SentinelFury The leveling is so slow, drops are terrible, gathering a pain, and honestly combat sucks. I haven't logged on in a month and might just uninstall the game to free up drive space.
@@StArFuRyZz yeah it’s an old school Korean grinder bro, we all knew that. It’s not for everyone.
As I said though, you’re not missing out on much because NCwest is incompetent.
Why would you leave GW2 for this trash?
@@sirlezard670 I won't leave GW2 I still enjoy playing. Aion Classic was a "lets see if it's as fun as it used to be" and it wasn't. I've pre-purchased the GW2 expansion and I'm looking forward to going fishing next year.
I actually really liked Aion and found it quite unique and... well... The gameplay didn't appeal to me enough and I don't even remember the story, but I really liked the game otherwise! Was kinda sad to leave it. But I guess it didn't have anything that really kept me attached. It was so beautiful though. And flying is fun.
Edit: But maybe it's changed drastically, I mean... It's 14 years ago. Geez I'm old.
Edit 2: Geez... I don't recognize this at all... It's hideous and ridiculous. The Aion I started playing was serene, stylish and beautiful, at least in its first impression.
I remember my dad downloading a private server version of this game when I was a kid where unlimited flight was enabled and I was absolutely entranced by the giant flying whale thing in one of the big earlier towns, like I would sit there for hours watching it and flying up to it, still no idea what significance the creature had to the game but I really love when games have mystical extra details like that. I remember nothing else about the game though 😅
I think I read somewhere in the In-game lore that these flying whales essentially are an incarnation of the god Aion (or his personal watchers) watching over all his creations. (which was.... Kinda odd when they introduced mounts in the game with 3.0 and the first mount you got literally was a miniature flying whale...)
@@FeuerblutRM Haha, I do remember the mini flying whale mounts XD that is such cool lore behind them though ❤️
The days of partying up with friends and guild mates, traversing the terrain, and entering rifts to do some large scale PvP or to even just sneak around and assassinate other people. Waiting underneath a lava waterfall to find a group for Kromedes Trial. All out war during sieges. Having the ability to sit out front the auction house, open up your personal store, AFK, and come back a few hours later to see that someone had bought all your enchantment stones and now you could afford some Greater Running Scrolls for PvP. Ahhhh those were the days. It’s heartbreaking to see this game fall to where it is now. This game will forever be my first MMO love.
As a Aion Player ages ago my heart crumbles in darkness. The meleefighting cancel fight with extendable weapons (maybe even in the air) was just too juicy (back in the day).
Josh, you're telling me that you didn't understand that intro? It's about a dragon with a huge rooster (you know what I am talking about) who wants to conquer the world.
"Games that sell car mounts...don't actually care."
-cries in my Regalia and on my Fenris.-
tbh Final fantasy mounts kinda suck,specialy the free ones...
@@ppsarrakis Nah, even some of the ones you can get at lower levels are pretty good. The Adamantoise, Death Claw and Magitek Amor variants are all easily accessible in early game and pretty great
The Fenris is controversial for good reason, though. It actually gives an in-game bonus for real world money. It's only an increased mount speed bonus, but it's still something you can't otherwise get in-game.
@@apigeon4192 But you absolutely can. The maps in the GC lobbies.
@@Raykkie meh, maybe i just didnt like em when i played ,i remember i gave in and bought a 18$ squirrel mount just so i can have a "Normal" mount...
I just remember AION queues for several hours every evening after college for a while. Good times.
I remember fondly playing it. It is such a shame that this happened.
The fact that I got an advert during that intro cutscene and it didn’t change how much I understood about what was going on tells me a lot about this game.
Wow... I used to play this game until shortly after it went F2P. Looks like they changed the intro completely. The Asmo starting story is supposed to be about you having a vision about how you die fighting a very powerful general from the Elyos. Not great, sure, but at least it made sense... When the game went F2P it took a sharp nose-dive and it looks like it took an even sharper dive when NCSoft sold it. I remember the combat getting much better around Lv 30+ and at the time it released it looked amazing but I'm sure it didn't age that well.
It's a relic of the past.
It had a good lead but after reforming the game every year it de-railed and fell from grace.
I remember playing this at LAUNCH and being very impressed by the aesthetics and some elements of the gameplay...namely the flight mechanics. Then at some point the game dropped off a cliff where it just felt unfinished. Looks completely different now, and there are dozens of games just like it who have clearly done it better.
Aion Classic just released for EU. Try it to understand why people liked it before it was turned into a money grab without purpose
This was the first MMO I fell in love with. It was the go to game for me and my friends everyday after school. Man, I miss those days
I remember fondly playing Aion when it originally came out and was published by NCSoft. It had so many good ideas and concepts, it was beautiful and innovative albeit a bit grindy.
To see what has become of it today is a brutal mirror of modern gaming landscape. A single tear is rolling down my cheek while typing this.
Aion was an amazing game when it first came out in 2012. Its concept with 2 large player factions who are eachothers archenemy introducing random pvp encounters like early days of WoW was an absolute nostalgia trip. Add the fact the player character was a specially powered angel with wings made Aions premise unique. With zones that you could freely fly, and the ability to glide down from high places as long as you had flight time made pvp even more fun. I remember once i was questing alone and someone who had similar gear and level of the opposite faction stumbled upon me. The most EPIC battle ensued, we were dishing out blows towards eachother, disabling, stunning, and chucking potions to keep on going. We fought for a solid ten minutes and moved from one side of the map to the other while fighting. Glided down a huge mountain into a canyon where we continued our battle untill i finally gained the upper hand with my stunlock stigma (customizable skills you can equip like an item in this game) and vanguished my foe. There is and still isnt a single game that couldve given such an intense and awesome experience. But then they just went completely south with the game direction, changing from their one time buy in to play, to free to play with subscription and the worst thing in any game: ingame shop with boosters and other p2w elements. After that they lost most of their player base already as most people felt betrayed, Aion was supposed to be the one time buy in type of deal. And the large amount of equipment in the game that each had their benefits and drawbacks made every player different in strenght, but now you had “daevanion sets” you could buy in the shops that beat everything else. They quickly scrapped that and introduced general equipment that you had to earn with coins gained from questing. But once again COMPLETELY missed the point of what made the game great. This coin equipment was better than anything else you could craft or find in the wild, meaning every player would hunt for that same equipment and everybody basically strived to become a clone of what “the best” equipped character was supposed to be. This made pvp suck because there was nothing to set someone apart. You get the best coin equipment? You can only be equal to someone else unless they dont have that top tier coin equipment yet. You dont have that? You lose every pvp encounter. While before you wore whatever you could find from momster drops and quests. Which meant the strenght of every player varied greatly. Add in the option to customize extra skills through stigma’s where you chose whatever skills suited your playstyle the best. When you found someone from the opposite faction a fight was much more thrilling. Neither would ever be strong enough to kill the other in 2 hits because there was no equipment that could give such a large power advantage. And everything came down to a player’s mastery of their class, choice of stigma’s and luck on what kind of armor they have acquired. And i wont even talk about the sht they pulled after that because i quit well before that myself.
Sorry maybe there's two different Aions? Aion actually came out in 2009 and was not buy2play game but buy the game + pay monthly subscription and was handled by NCSoft West.
I remember it being laggy mess back in the day in terms of mass battles , which led to huge disappointment from large guilds (mainly those who expected next Lineage 2) and quickly lost player numbers. Not only that, but endgame PVE content was also bad, with a lot of unfinished or unbalanced endgame bosses and dungeons with abysmal rewards and item drop rates - I remember spending weeks grinding some dungeon to get extendable sword, receiving some garbage rewards every time instead.
Probably the only redeemable thing for that game was gank\partisan pve or exploration in opposing faction areas, but that also got old pretty fast.
My fondest memory of this game is using a dash skill the assassin had and hitting a rock that flung me to the skybox ceiling.
I LOVED this game when I played it with friends years ago. We had role play, contests and raid nights. It was fun. Out of curiosity, I downloaded and launched the game a month or so ago and it was just a shell of its former self. The million upgrades and the horrible grind that it takes make it a full time job. Worst even is that some upgrades aren't even guaranteed. It may fail and you can start all over again.
"The Wiki for this game is basically abandoned" Like so many other MMO wiki's, they have just enough info to be good enough for the earlier versions but no one cared or cares to update or add what is needed so there becomes an information rift that only people who have played these MMO's for a long time can answer and most of the time your lucky to get an answer at all.
0:55 For everyone of those you're going to get 10 "Look how they massacred my boy" comment. Aion is one of those games people used to love but got driven into the ground with stupid change after stupid change. Be thankful for Guild Wars 2 Josh because what happened to Aion could have happened to Guild Wars 1 if Anet didn't have the newer game to distract NCSoft.
Sounds awfully similar to a popular western MMORPG I used to play...
It is revolting to see good games being destroyed by greedy companies.
I remember playing this back in the day when it was subscriptions and made by NCSoft. At the time it was incredible and there was nothing else out there quite like it. The original intro explained the lore of the world really well and it was a world where everyone lived on the inside rather than the outside, but then one day there was a huge cataclysm that shattered the world in two, and you could even look up into the sky and see the other continent. I mean, how EPIC is that? And the flying and the PvP middle zone between the continents was amazing. Its so sad to see how far it has fallen, because it had so much potential.
I remember buying the steelbook edition of Aion when it first released. I was so excited for it, I had my class picked out (Scout), I even wrote a short fanfic for English class (I was in high school at the time IIRC). Then it released, and it was nothing but rubber band lag to the point I literally couldn't leave the spot you spawn in for the first time. The 'joys' of dial up... Though my friend with decent DSL service also had the same issue at the time, so probably it was just the servers dying slowly under the rush of new players.
I played this game in beta and kept playing it when it was released as a pay to play.There was a lot going for it such as the character customization and the combat. The chain based combat was quite interesting and provided some real complexity in situational adaptability. The world pvp via rifts (whatever they were called) was quite interesting and provided opportunities for interactions with other players.
The main problems with the game was the korean grind, lopsided faction "balance", the lack of content, and the rampant bot population, . I failed multiple hot hearts which were ridiculously expensive things that you needed to craft to get end game gear and while some people had 100% success others would fail multiple times before getting one. I failed at least 5x which was a massive amount of time and money invested into the game for absolutely nothing. You could run the same dungeon +20x and not even see the drop you needed for leveling. God I can still draw out fire temple from memory because of all the fcking runs in a vain attempt to get a weapon.
Faction balance while fairly good at first quickly slid into a lopsided mess. This is a problem for every single dual faction based PVP game I've ever played so I wasn't really surprised. The game client wasn't quite up to handling the massive PVP sieges which was unfortunate because they were freaking awesome.
There were limited options for dungeons and pve related activity in the game outside of mindless mob grinding. There were a few dungeons you could run once a day at "end game" and not much else. Compared to games like WoW there wasn't much to do dungeon wise at all. Now what they had was sometimes innovative and fun. Unfortunately since there were so few dungeons the innovative and charming experience became another slog as you tried for the 10th time that day to get a drop.
I was banned for a vague reason which I think was connected to my fiancee and I leveling a cleric on my account to change servers to be with friends who still played. NCsoft had a short time thing where if you had a character of a certain level on another server you could apply for a transfer to that server. So my fiancee and I teamed up to level my cleric because she was already setup on her account to transfer. We lived in the same house and had shared bank accounts etc. I never actually told her the password so I didn't break any TOS. The ban notice implied I was possibly using a third party program or something. My lineage 2 accounts and other Ncsoft accounts were untouched by the ban. I did find it suspicious that the Aion account ban occurred after I had started posting long posts on the official forums pointing out the problems of the game while begging for at least some basic easy fixes. I have no real evidence that the ban is related just circumstantial. Meanwhile the bots that were just outside of towns were still there for weeks on end moving to the next area after they out leveled their spot. You could watch the bots as they moved from spot to spot due to leveling up. The high level bots would be in the same spot outside of town for months on end at all hours. I know this because after I was banned my fiancee went to check on the bots on her account. She logged in on the last day before her account expired and the same bots were in the same spots.. Everyone quit the game when I was banned because we were tired of the above mentioned problems already..
The game died because NcSoft couldn't be bothered to put any real effort into it. Which is sad because it sold in the millions and was in a position to be a real "wow killer". This is a pattern for NCSoft though as they will release a game neglect it while releasing some awesome looking trailers while the playerbase gets bored and the bots over run everything. They'll use game guard or something to pretend to do something about the bots and then pat themselves on the back....
Aion was the game that made me give up on anything published or developed by NcSoft.
I can remember enjoying the Old Aion from 2009 quite a bit when it came out.
You got wings and could fly around and that was legit quite cool.
Damn what the hell did they do to this game, I remember playing this like 8 years ago and it had barely any of that bullshit it throws at you at level 1.. wasn't my favourite game or anything but it felt like a proper fantasy game.
Had also to double check if this was the game I thought it was, this mess is barely recognizable. I did enjoy Aion for a while, especially the wing and flying mechanics and I loved the summoner summons. But the game Josh is showing in this video certainly isn't that game anymore.
They deleted many areas :(
Aion's korean in every aspect. Pretty on the outside, a hollow shell on the inside.
I played it during original release. Admittedly, it had some of the best pvp I had ever experienced in an MMO. Fast paced and cut throat. However, in order to really enjoy it, you needed gear which could be very difficult and time consuming to obtain and it certainly helped to have a good group to run with.
Animation lock was the game's form of a "gcd" and could be bypassed by performing "jump shots" which was basically jumping at a certain time during the cast or animation to essentially cancel it and was essential to pvp. (No one liked getting locked into place and pummeled to death.)
I played it a little past 2.5 but after so many years I just got tired of the constant grind for gear and to maintain pvp rank. Oh, and all the trash talkers on BOTH sides.
If there was any story, I didn't notice much of it.
It was a fun game for me at the time but I don't ever wish to go back. One thing I do miss, however, are some of the armor skins from there. They had some of the nicest armor skins I had seen in any game even until now.
I don't know what this reboot is, but it doesn't look anything like the game I used to play.
Aion WAS amazing, definitely the best mmo back in the day when it was published by NCsoft themselves. and I believe it's still the biggest mmo in Korea if it wasn't surpassed by Lost Ark.
This is not the Aion I remember, This is like a completely different game
I played aion for almost 10 years, and man, this game was so good, amazing pvp system, amazing classes, amazing pve, it was fully voiced in english, last week i downloaded it again, and it is just not Aion anymore, it became a p2w generic game with so many useless stuff you dont even know what to do, it is like a frankstein with Black Desert + Metin+ wow features mixed ,until 4.0 the game was still pretty good, it was so sad to see the game i spent most of my life playing was ruined to this level
"Aion is what would happen if you took Tera and changed the name to Aion."
As always, you're not wrong.
Considering Aion is older then Tera he kinda is.
@@NNextremNN Agreed.
Ehh I dont care about any of the two games cause I dont play them, but he's kinda wrong, as Aion is way older than Tera, lol.
I'm reminded of a review of _The Davinci Code_ --- the film --- which said it achieved the remarkable accomplishment of making an albino flagellant assassin monk boring. This game has the same feel to it.
“Sometimes I’ll try to use a skill, but it’s on cooldown, and some Korean lady yells at me.”