Recently I picked up Aion at a Gamestop sale for $19.99. I needed something to pass the time between now and FFXIV's release date so I figured "Why not?" and bought it. I've only played for two days but I can tell you right off the bat why I wouldn't recommend this game...
* Server race restrictions - Say you have a friend that's an Elyos on a specific server... Depending on the ratio on that server (Or at least I'm assuming this is why.) it will not allow you to make a character of a specific race. For example, if I tried to play on Siel it forces me to make an Asmodian. I want to make an Elyos, why must it restrict me to the race I don't want to play as?
* Graphics - Aion has some really beautiful graphics, while not a bad thing in the least there's many glaring flaws I've noticed in my short time of play... I have a male Elyos mage and wearing two different pieces of armor (top and bottom) causes them to overlap, terribly I might add. During character creation your character's face completely flickers in then out when changing hairstyles, what's up with that? I've spotted numerous areas where vegetation just seemingly vanishes into walls poorly.
* Clipping - I've lost count how many times I've gotten stuck in what almost seems like an endless perpetual fall. I've tried hopping over a fence and I get stuck on it suspended in mid-air. I've had issues getting stuck on the ground and in one instance, falling through a railing in the Sanctum city.
* Playerbase - In the starting area I met a few nice people, one person even helped me finish a quest and I didn't even have to ask. But throw that out the window soon as you ascend to a Daeva. A bad pull left me dead outside a city's gates and people just kept on running by. One person even proceeded to tell his friends he had to crap on my dead corpse before they ran off.
I've yet to get to the point where I have to worry about PvP but if it's anything like I've been reading around here I can tell I'll be chucking the game in the garbage within minutes of reaching a high enough level where PvP becomes semi-mandatory. The fact you can fly and the graphics gave me high hopes for this game, even more it was made by NCsoft and I've always enjoyed Guild Wars from time to time. But now I'm finding myself wishing I never wasted 20 bucks for this game. I'm gonna play for awhile longer to see if things improve but this may end up being shelved just like WoW was.
I've expect some of the stuff I listed above from like Guild Wars or some other free-to-play game, but NCSoft wants you to pay $14.99 for this game. For the same price I could play a F2P game and waste the money on game mall stuff to help me out.
Edited, Aug 10th 2010 11:42pm by SamusKnight