Hamburg - With clockwork regularity, there seems to be a new game every season released with hopes of unseating World of Warcraft (WoW) as the premiere online gaming experience. The cycle is predictable. Forums begin to buzz with speculation about all the upgrades to the new game. Magazines only fan the flames. Then the game appears and reality sets in.
This autumn, Aion: The Tower of Eternity is the next to try to take the throne.
WoW has been the game to beat since 2004, when it trumped Everquest, a game released simultaneously. Since then, it has held off Vanguard, which suffered from technical problems; Lord of the Rings Online, which enjoyed some success; and 2008's Age of Conan and Warhammer Online, both of which disappointed.
But Aion's South Korean developers at NCSoft have already seen the game take off back home and have ironed out some of the kinks that have laid past aspirants low. They have also taken pains to make sure the game will appeal to Western tastes.
Thus, the game is less about non-stop carnage and more about quests where characters build up experience, the preferred format for Western players.
Another breakthrough: the characters on Aion can fly, once they reach the tenth level. That gimmick hooked more than 1 million players to the game. Now it's coming to Europe, where it's become a hit and a ray of hope for many gamers bored of World of Warcraft.
But anyone who tests out the European version of the game will quickly see that there's not really anything new there. Aion sticks fairly close to the ground rules of other online role-playing games. There are a lot of possibilities to design individual characters, but that doesn't mean you won't turn a corner and run into other avatars that look suspiciously familiar.
Most quests require players to kill dozens of lower-power rivals - a process drubbed as the "kill ten rats principle" of gaming - before coming up against a truly worthy adversary. At the end of the day, Aion feels very similar in this regard, except for the fact that characters can fly.
It remains to be seen what NCSoft has set up for the endgame, since it will be months or years before players get that far - which is standard with online role-playing. The game could run into problems whereby people have plenty to do at lower levels, but those who rise to the higher levels too quickly will find that there's nothing there for them to do yet. Similar problems have laid other games low.
