The Drawbacks of Aion
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Hello everyone!

Here comes the second part of my review. This time, I will try to describe the issues I encountered while playing Aion. If you were hoping to see a lot of gameplay flaws, I must disappoint you; there aren't as many as it seems. All this "I hate RvR" talk is misleading. Aion wouldn't be Aion if it had a different system. I also don't want to dwell on the bot problem - it exists and it's not specific to this game.

Part 2. Drawbacks

Mob attachment to players – I had no issues while playing as a ranger and a mage, but problems arose when I played as a cleric. Poor souls deciding to level up a tank or healer might face the problem of mob attachment to whoever struck first. Currently, the loot system from mobs in Aion is such that it doesn't matter who hit the mob first or last, but who dealt more than 50% of the total damage. Due to the low DPS of tank and healer classes, while these classes are very useful in a group, they might end up with no loot at all if an unscrupulous sorc or assassin shows up on the horizon. This problem is certainly exacerbated by Aion's PvP system. You cannot attack players from your faction in any way, which I really dislike. Sometimes, I really want to give the player next to me a hard time for stealing my mobs. :)

Player names and titles – This might have been just a problem from the first European preview event and it will be fixed, but nevertheless, during the event, it was possible to create names with spaces, punctuation marks, and even using symbols from various rare encodings. A player with a space in their name couldn't receive direct messages, as the chat automatically recognized the space as the start of a new message, not as part of their name. The game titles that you can acquire for completing various quests are attached before your name and visually differ not at all. Reading this is quite inconvenient; however, the display of titles can be turned off in the game settings. In the first EU beta event, guild names were limited to 10 characters, but the developers have already promised to fix this drawback.

Modifiable interface – There are only two layout options for elements on the screen. This is very little, and despite the large number of options in the game settings (disable additional quick access panels, auto-arranging windows, changing the color of chat messages), fundamentally there still remain two programmed interface layouts. In Warhammer, by the way, there is a great interface customizer, and I hope that future versions of Aion will feature something similar.

Channels, Group Search – In low-level locations in Aion, there is a channel system where all players in that location are distributed across several independent local copies of that location (channels). This is undoubtedly useful, but currently, it's inconvenient to use. If you are in a group, you cannot move all group members to one channel with the push of a button; the group search window also does not differentiate between channels, making it problematic to find someone in your channel.

Water – Give me special wings for diving! In Aion, despite the large amount of water, you can't swim at all. Characters can only walk on the bottom, and unfortunately, not for long as they quickly run out of breath. The detailed, realistic world of Aion suffers greatly from the inability to swim, and it would have been possible to expand the world not only upward but also downward. As far as I remember, in Lineage II, we also didn't learn to swim right away, only by Chronicles 2? I really hope that the developers will fix this shortcoming as well.

Hi-end – It seems that high-level content (quests, locations) is not sufficiently developed. Many high-level players have complained about the lack of places to level up and generally about not having anything to do in the game. With the launch of patch 1.3 in Korea, it is said that high levels received what they had been waiting for, such as an increased maximum level to 55 and a range of instances/quests/new gear. From my experience, around level 30 already makes it impossible to level up just by completing quests, you will have to grind a bit, but if you choose the right place and group, this can be done enjoyably and beneficially (like farming a lot of blue gear, for example).

Aion isn’t that bad at all. All the shortcomings I noted are not critical and do not spoil the experience. I really hope that the developers won't slack off and will delight us with further updates to Aion, and I very much hope that you will feel the same way about Aion as I did when I saw it for the first time. It’s really a great game worth playing.

Also, read the first part: The Advantages of Aion.

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