"The combat is lag free". Of course it is, there's no one else around.

"For being released in 2008 it's perfectly servicable"
This...This is NOT the Aion that was released in 2008. This is some other game wearing a shirt it stole off the corpse of the original Aion which it brutally murdered in a back alley.

Jesus, even when it went F2P it wasn't as bad as this. This is like a completely different game.

I can't believe the original Aion by NCsoft turned into... this. This is a crime

This game used to be a subscription fee MMORPG published by ncsoft. I pre-ordered it and bought a computer for it back in the day, it used to be called the Tower of Eternity. It was actually an incredible game for its time. I'm so sad to see how far this game has fallen.

It's just sad how they ripped out all the good parts of it.
- It HAD english voiceacting.
- It HAD no auto-combat grind macro.
- It HAD a better starting story (a bit like FF14 with being a freshman in a small village that finds out during the tutorial questline that he's a chosen one with wings).
- It HAD varied locales with interesting open world PvP (you could temporarily and limited invade the other faction's regions that were usually inaccessible and there was a pure PvP region with the abyss.)
- It HAD less stupid stacking grinding power mechanics.
It just seems like all the good things were optimized away with patches, expansions and, of course, gameforge.

Damn, I was thinking he wouldn't give it a fair chance. But now, 4 minutes in I can see how far has this game fallen.

For some reason I feel compelled to leave a comment. Aion was such an incredible game, my best MMO experience, never played PvP remotely deep and well designed as it was. Lived in it for years until the pay to win took over, and I'm still nostalgic for it. Hurts to see what they turned this game into.

"Games that sell immersion breaking Mounts tell you they dont care about their lore!"
Or you are Final Fantasy and spend the last 30 years to make sure your lore is so crazy, that no mount you could ever come up with is immersion breaking xD

To all the Daevas out there who played the game in its golden age, may the Aethereal Lords bless you and Atreia be always in your heart....

DAMN, so different from how it used to be. I remember rescuing Munin in the opening Asmodian area. God damn those first few hours leading up to getting your wings was, frankly, incredible. The writing was fairly tight, and yes it had shit quest design, but most games back then did. Sad to see that they've gutted it to this degree. The starting zones were some of the best content the game had.

I remember playing this with my wife many years back. It was fully voiced ... IN GERMAN!! We still quote some of the lines because we had so much fun with it. RIP Aion.

For the first few minutes of the video I thought I was in some kind of weird fugue state, because years ago I played a Korean MMO called Aion with two factions called Asmodians and Eilyos, but literally nothing else about this game Josh played sounded familiar. Turns out, no, I didn't have some kind of mental break, they just ripped all the guts and heart out of the game I remember and turned it into... whatever the hell this is supposed to be. It's really sad, honestly. I might have quit Aion when I got to level 25 or so and hit the point where my only choices for advancement were pvp or grinding mobs for months, but up until that point I actually quite liked it.

that "friend" Cheska person you met, saying "I have never met this person" - they are the same person you said "Talk to an npc who i'll never see again". - I found that funny

Not even 7 minutes into the video and... Just wow what a shock it is. Ever since they added the painter class I have been playing on a third party server of an old AION version and holy s*** this is NOTHING like the old AION.

What you see in the video is literally nothing like it used to be, just starting a game in an old version feels like an entirely different game. They butchered the first 3 REGIONS of the game you go through into whatever this is. That instance you get led to was indeed the first instance you go through, but in late region #2 called Altgard, not what is essentially the tutorial region - Ishalgen.

That moment when you chose your subclass and got a trillion skills? That's the result of the region butchering. In old AION you got max 5 skills when you chose a subclass. But because you no longer go through Ishalgen > Altgard > Morheim > Beluslan you get all of it condensed here.

And speaking of region butchering, the story also suffers. Obviously the world exposition is heavier in the begining since you need to be introduced to the world but even then, in Ishalgen you were a lowly raider, the bosses told you to run around and cause trouble for spriggs, steal their grain, kill the population a bit get that quest with the witch and the kid then rob some graves, stop the pirates and then disrupt Odella production for the Mau, kid runs of again so you go after her at which point you discover an abyss portal the Mau are trying to open and stop that. That is Ishalgen's campaign quest essentially. You get set up with the raider background before you hit level 9 at which point it is discovered you are capable of ascension to Daeva, which isn't any special too there's lots of Daeva around! But then you also learn about the vision of the future with Hellion and so on but it's not something that is touched on again for a long time. Nobody treats you as special, you are just another Daeva in the ranks. You go through ascension, get to Altgard where you go through flight tutorial and then get sent around the region, fight the lepharists, fight the Mau, generally just help around the place and then in Impetusium colleseum (level 18 at this point) you get to the first instance. That's around the end of region 2.

Obviously it's visible I just started at the begining over and over if I know all that but this is cutting several hours of gameplay, in regions that had a lot of color too! Beluslan is very washed out graphically but Altgard had tons of cool regions, the Altgard fortress had more vibrancy then the entire Beluslan field and it was just a circle city in an ice region with lakes and round tall water elephant things with a portal above it. Going out of bounds really showed of those regions, normally people wouldn't even notice the green-pink palm shrubs around the entrence warrior statues to Impetusium.

The part about the combat being... That. Aion did have a problem with it's combat system engagement on certain classes. Playing as Assassin had way more engaging abilities and going against monsters with higher levels than you as that class felt much more rewarding than Aethertechs.

I don't want to imagine what going to this AION feels like for old players man, it's like trying to go for a nostalgia trip of legend of zelda ocarina of time but then booting it up and finding out the cartridge changed to a raid shadow legends when you weren't looking.

This game used to be so good, absolutely heartbreaking to see what it has become. Doesnt even look like the same game anymore

The old Aion from 2009 was one of the best MMORPGs ever and they managed to turn it into one of the worst. That's a real achievement.

I used to play the original Aion: Tower of Eternity. This looks like a completely different game. It was completely localized in English and had high production values with a somewhat good story. It was a combination of WoW and Lineage 2. It was a fun MMO. It almost no original concept, but it worked well, the combat was cool, exploration was neat and it was actually pretty hard. The character creator was great back then and we had a lot of fun in the game playing as a holy trinity.

As a veteran Aion player, I can say the game was infinitely better. You didn't have the weird Gameforge shop front, you were rewarded monthly for subbing (before ot went Free to Play), you had a massive PVP gimmick in certain areas and a giant area specifically for PVP, you could craft items and armour, you could gather things for said craft, and the voice acting was also in English! Of course, this was when the game was under the NCSoft banner. It's fallen so far from grace that even the classic server they added last year couldn't draw the crowd back.

I was so confused when I saw the title of this video because Aion used to be amazingly popular and considered a high-standard game. I remember sucking up all lore and assets I could find on it because it seemed so cool but I couldn't afford a pay2play MMO yet.
But seeing what it has become now explains how it ended up on this series...😔