Yesterday I was telling someone that I didn’t think this rather extended not-really-a-beta period for Aion was ultimately not going to be good for initial subscribers – it’s going on for too long.
The game is polished, even though we’re just seeing English-language voice files now. It’s gorgeous, it’s fun, all the classes play well (at least in the lower levels that I’ve seen). I’m ready to play now, and if I could subscribe today I would.
The higher my characters get, the less I’m going to like having them wiped and starting over again. The starting areas have limited replayability, in that you only have two of them. I’ve tried all the classes, and even I got to the point where I just couldn’t handle seeing the starting area one more time.
It doesn’t need testing, unless they’re testing load-balancing and stability on the servers. It’s done, it’s soup already*. And I think that a percentage of the people who have had the chance to play pretty much over the entire summer are not going to bother actually subscribing at launch – they’ve already played enough for free.
I’m definitely subscribing, and I have the collector’s edition on order. But even I will reach a point where I’m going to be disappointed by having all that work wiped out.
That said, am I playing this weekend? Hell yeah. :)
Didn’t you stop playing the beta specifically for this reason?
Yep. I’m weak, I tell you, weak! :D