The first thing one notices about Aion is, quite simply, the absolutely gorgeous visuals the game offers through both normal gameplay and the cinematic cut-scenes. Spell effects look astonishing, the sheer amount of customisation available to the player in making their avatar look exactly how they want, and even the little touches like the way the character’s hair moves or the interaction with the environment while standing idle (Synil was marveling at the snow that had begun to fall in one zone when I came back to the keyboard from being afk at one point).

I hesitate to use any comparison to another game, but for a good number of readers WoW may very well be the only experience able to be drawn upon for MMOs in general, so I’m going to use it as the “standard” for comparison for the purposes of these impressions:

• While I do not know enough about the story yet to truly be roped in like I was with WoW, there are many aspects that are pulling me in with a desire to learn more. There appears to be a lot of work placed into crafting the story thus far, setting up the basis for which a number of things will unfold. I hope I’m correct and the story pulls me in further, but it is, as of yet, still too early to make a solid judgement on whether this will be the case or not.
• Gameplay definitely feels quite different, as it does when trying out any other MMO. This is neither good or bad, it simply requires an adjustment to different mechanics and elements of play. To me Aion requires more thought on how to best handle each encounter, with an emphasis on deciding which skills are best suited to surviving a fight and not being obliterated by an additional target pulled accidentally. This is a nice change, and reminds me a lot of the early days of WoW when gear did not make it simple to pull a group of mobs and survive easily.
• Also along the lines of gameplay, many skills require understanding when best to use them right from the start. Aion uses some skills that can only be used when chained with another ability, furthering the need to understand whether it would be best to use the chained ability at that point or save it for later in the fight. The only real drawback to this system is that the chained abilities automatically activate and temporarily replace the first ability on the action bar, making it slightly more difficult to decide not to use the cooldown and instead save it for later. This is both good and bad. It helps cut down on the number of action bar slots needed for skills, but also means one really has to pay attention to change to a different ability if not using the chained one right away. At the early stages this isn’t so much an issue, but when getting into PvP combat I can see this possibly being a problem.
• I am uncertain whether this is intended or a bug, but currently I cannot bind actions to extra mouse buttons. This is quite annoying, and will probably result in my final adoption of truly using my N52te gamepad. While not necessarily a bad thing, it would be very nice to be able to customize those keybindings on the mouse for certain things that are initially keybound in odd places (such as activating flight, which is by default bound to the page up button). I’m accustomed to using an extra mouse button to toggle autorun as well, and not having that capability has led to some minor frustrations. – Update: It seems flight simply cannot be bound to extra mouse keys, I managed to bind autorun without any issue.
• Gathering and crafting is more robust thus far. Although the primary differences are simply the gain of a small amount of experience per successful harvest/craft and the potential for failure, it takes me back to the days of SWG with the feeling of having actually accomplished something instead of it merely being a time-sink. To date, however, no game I have played has been as interesting on the crafting side of things as SWG was, which is one of very few good things I can still say about that particular game.

This is only a (very) short list of initial thoughts, but these are the primary things that have jumped out at me in the early levels. Probably the most appealing aspect of the game so far is simply the pure pleasure of watching the game from a visual/aesthetic perspective. It’s nice to see minor details, such as actually using a spellbook used as a sorcerer when auto-attacking, that make me go “that’s pretty cool.”

Of course, any initial impression post wouldn’t be complete without some eye candy as well, so here are a few screenshots surrounding the ascension quest (where one becomes a daeva and is no longer a mere human):