Aion: Ascension

So the consensus is that the visuals are pretty good and the gameplay is decent. I find the visuals rather bland and unappealing and the gameplay utterly tedious. It's too similar to WoW and there is too much of a grind. The dungeons in Aion are completely stale. In fact, everything related to PVE in Aion is stale. Take your least favorite PVE dungeon in WoW, take away any clever boss mechanics and situations, take away any interesting environments or story, and cut the amount of loot dropped in half. The end result is what you can expect from an Aion dungeon. The questing is worse than vanilla-WoW. The combat is boring and character classes could've really benefited from talents or something like that. The world is clunky and very linear. I'm pretty bummed out, as Jeff would say. Why can't anyone create an MMO apart from WoW that does its own thing? Has Blizzard really killed the genre?

I eventually got really bored of WoW, but that was after about 6 months of play. I stopped playing Aion at level 32, after about a month and a half. I'm sure there is some pretty cool stuff in PVP later on, but I have no interest in getting to that point. I consider myself pretty open-minded. And most MMOs generally suck me in from the start. I found myself immediately bored of this game. I would've stopped much sooner than level 32 if my friends weren't playing with me.

I almost forgot, spam and botting is awful in this game, I felt adding insult to injury. This was a largely unpleasant experience for me. And that's coming from someone that loved Dark Age of Camelot, WoW, and moderately liked City of Heroes, Star Wars Galaxies and Warhammer. If you liked/love WoW, and you just looking for something "else". PASS on this. You will be disappointed.