After a long wait for those who didn't pre-order or get into the beta, Aion has finally been opened up to the Western world.

As Dan pointed out last week, a server has been recommended for Oceanic players, so get in, and start smashing your buddies.

Keep an eye out for a full review in the coming weeks on AusGamers.

Resisting Ticman's "BUY IT" till more have played it, or till someone purchases another game I have that I'm now bored of.

looks horrible

Isn't it only tomorrow at 5am? My understanding was that retail copies wouldn't work until then.

Not bothering until there's a free trial.

same

Resisting Ticman's "BUY IT" till more have played it, or till someone purchases another game I have that I'm now bored of.

Do it already!@

Every new mmo launched claims to be the new WoW killer. First month sees a dip in numbers, then everyone who left comes back because as much as people hate to admit it, WoW is about as good as mmos will ever really get.

lol isn't that great i played the chinese version with english translation. so it was all in english got boring fast :)

Tried playing it. Got to lvl 21, then I realised it's probably even more grindy than WoW. It's a fairly polished game, but yeah - same old, same old. Doesn't offer anything new.

Booooooooooooooring.

Same with alt-f4, it's another time sink, some aspects are great, some are retarded which i have no idea how they made it to release.

But in the end it's another game where you'll have to keep constantly playing if u want to even stay a chance at being competitive cause of the grind gear pvp style similar to vanilla wow.

sf4 + hon will keep me entertained enough without been a huge time sink

At least with Aion it had record breaking pre-order subscriptions so it's starting off with A LOT of members, unlike say WAR which had to cut down its servers almost straight away.
It is a typical grind MMO (though they lowered the amount of grinding from the original game in Korea I was told) but that is what seems to work with MMO players.

I've only played WoW and WAR for my MMO experiences, more of a FPS/RTS player but I started playing Aion in the beta and I'll probably keep playing at it. Helps that I already have a guild established there which makes the game more fun with the social level added but even so I think it's a good game so far.

The reasons I like it;
The ability to fly and fight at the same time adds a nice twist which a lot of new players won't see since PvP doesn't really start till after lvl 20. Plus with abyss points needed for legion upgrades, individual pvp ranks and a chance to be listed on the ingame individual + legion rank charts, people should stay reasonably competitive.

Being able to change channels is just awesome. You can skip into numerous exact copies of the game within your server to avoid mass amount of people questing in the same area. Makes for catching rare spawn mobs and getting quest items so much easier. Not to mention you can change channels to find people to kill :P

Crafting/Professions, you can do all of them to a certain level and master two of them. It's nice cos you can get a feel for which might be more useful to you/your guild, and gain some items/potions/food while testing them out. Not to mention you can collect all the materials you need while you quest then go afk in the city to get food/drinks while your characters trains up.

I'm still just under the 20s in level so I can't really comment on the endgame but I'm happy to grind up to give it a try.

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I think if you aren't much of an MMO gamer than most MMOs are going to seem pointless and boring, but I think this one will appeal to a lot of people. Whether it's better than Wow? No idea. I quit wow ages ago so I couldn't care less how it compares to other games lol But Aion is decent enough at the start that I'll use up my free month and give it a fair go.