We can has houses plx?
Ncsoft releases trailer for future updates, labeled Aion Vision. Player base, including a lot of the people that left, goes crazy. Love is in the air. The trailer shows graphical updates, a housing system, explosive battles…all that good stuff. Everyone and their mother are suddenly considering a re-sub. After all, the trailer looks awesome. It’s the future, man! It’s the way the game is going to look soon! Wow! It’s all in-game graphics!
Hang on, hang on. Didn’t we forget something? Something important?
Oh yeah, that’s right. Companies lie.
Aion Vision does look great, it does. I don’t really care that much about the graphical updates, as I think Aion looked great already. Housing, if implemented, is always a good thing. Hey, I’m already wasting too much time moving furniture around in my house in Star Wars Galaxies and drooling over Stargrace’s Norrathian Museum-video. Don’t get me wrong.
But Aion Vision, at the same time, is marketing. Successful marketing, at that. A video managed, somehow, to erase the memories of the reasons why a lot of people left the game in the first place. The grind. The end-game bugs. The grind. The incredibly linear gameplay and the lack of an open world. The feeling that we’ve done this all before.
Remember this?
The dramatics in the trailer are all directed, put together by the game’s cinematic team. Cinematic teams, at least good ones, can work wonders.
If the stuff they are showing in Aion Vision all come true, that’s great. But please don’t forget that it’s marketing. Don’t forget that it doesn’t really say anything about how the game will be to play when it comes out. Sure, they are promising to lessen the grind, but don’t forget that Aion is already successful in Korea and they love stuff like that. How much will be changed for the Western audience, I wonder?
When I met the producer of Aion, he mentioned that players in Korea were complaining about that Aion had too many quests. That’s right. Too many. They see quests as a grind, we see the lack of them as a grind. I don’t see anything in Aion Vision that explains how Ncsoft will manage to keep everyone satisfied.
But congratulations to Ncsoft. You guys pulled it off! I really want to love Aion, I adore the design and a good PvP-game would be great, but it takes a lot more than a fancy trailer to convince me to come back.
