Choose My Adventure: Mulling over the many (many!) playable variants of Aion

This past weekend didn’t see me touch Aion at all for Choose My Adventure – partially because I have had some projects line up in front of me, but mostly because I apparently have a decision to make.

You see, I had pretty much forgotten that there are two versions of this MMORPG to play when it ended up winning in the polls. There’s the standard Aion Retail, and then there’s Aion Classic, and since I haven’t touched this game in probably over a decade now, it seemed like I needed to do a bit of research. And that’s without even mentioning the Korea and Gameforge editions of the games, all of which are in various stages of sync with each other!

For context, the last time I played Aion was sometime after it launched. I think. It’s been literally so long that I cannot recall the last time I was in the game, but I’m reasonably sure it was during the earlier part of its life. I think I played it twice. Both times I was the light-winged faction. Whatever they’re called.

I do vaguely remember the game being… fine. I have distinct memories of being kind of underwhelmed that wings were a glider and not a mode of flight unless I went into the RvR zone. Otherwise it was a serviceable and pretty WoW-like that was… fine. It was fine. Not memorable but inoffensive as well. I think my memories are muddied because I hadn’t really made up my mind about Korean MMOs at the time.

Of course, the years marched on and my interests diverted to other titles, both for this column and in my personal life. But thinking back on it all now, nothing about the original Aion struck me as particularly awful.

So imagine my surprise when my initial digging into Retail Aion suggested that it had devolved into a pay-to-win hellscape – if you assume Reddit is to be believed, anyway.

Nine times out of ten, the term pay-to-win is swung around like a weapon at anything that MMO fans don’t like, as if it were some power word that would seal it from the greater gaming consciousness if it’s repeated by multitudes. And also these opinions were coming from Reddit, which I generally ignore out of hand for the most part anyway. But then again, this accusation was leveraged against Retail really, really frequently.

As I said, it has been a very long time since I played the original MMORPG, so I haven’t really tracked this game’s progress. And sure, I probably could have asked our pro about the game, but something tells me she wants to kind of move on from that game. Or that she wholly has moved on. So all I really had to go on was the grumbling of what looked to be long-suffering fans of the game through the years, and the frequent complaint is that it evolved too much. The game is too busy. The combat is too frantic. The leveling is too fast. The endgame is pay-to-win.

Those same scorned players, for the record, all seemed to suggest that Classic was the right true way.

Once again, my misremembered time in the game sort of twists my assumptions here, along with my nearly immediate distrust of folks presuming that the good old days were the best days and progress is always bad. But yet again, I was faced with a wealth of opinions claiming that Classic was… right. This was not the game necessarily hitting the reset button; it has apparently done just enough to modernize the original experience without upsetting what made the original good. Apparently.

At the same time, I’ve read some impressions that suggested that this is an attempt at apples to oranges. Both games have their strengths and weaknesses. Both have their own distinct gameplay sensations. Both aren’t the same but parallel.

All of this is a long-winded way of saying that I can pretty much see both sides of the arguments here from what I’ve found. Through the lens of someone who hasn’t played this game in about 10 years or so, it’s kind of hard to associate any sort of memories of the way things were, but then I also really can’t wholly ignore the amount of people who are banging the Classic drum. But then, like Billy Joel sang, the good ol’ days weren’t always good and tomorrow ain’t as bad as it seems. Right?

Obviously this has been coming to the point when I have to make a decision. And naturally that means I’m asking you pollsters to help me out. Either way, this is going to be a themepark experience and so my choices are probably a bit limited, but it’s good to sort this out first. Is it time to try out the new or should I head back to the new original? Which version should this month follow through on?

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Polling will wrap up at the usual 1:00 p.m. EST on Friday, February 14th. And this time, I will make sure that I actually play the game that I’ve been assigned to play. It’s just a question of which one, obviously.

Welcome to Choose My Adventure, the column in which you join Chris each week as he journeys through mystical lands on fantastic adventures – and you get to decide his fate. Which is good because he can often be a pretty indecisive person unless he’s ordering a burger.