I did the beta over the weekend and here is my views.
First, it still has the feel of a Korean... err Asian MMO.
If you have ever played lineage 2, knights online, Rohan, Silk Road Online, or something else similar, there feel of the game will be similar.
However, that being said, the game DOES diviate finally from the standard Korean MMOs out there a bit in an attempt to finally bring in the NA and EU crowd. Because mainly only Asian play Asian MMOs as they are usually terrible in design.
Things you will find in this game that are STILL Korean MMO based. However, a few of what I am about to list below has the more popular NA/EU game functions available as well.
1) Point to Click movement. If you are a fan of point to click movement, then this game still has it. I know in the past it was done initially to reduce lag. Later Asian MMO tried to incorporate WASD key movements but they usually utterly failed. Why? Bad pathing, geometry kept messing up, sluggish response time, and many other problems fouled up normal WASD key movement. So for a long time point to click was the main stay. NA players hate point to click, EU players don't mind it as they seem to love Eve, but asian players almost detest WASD key movement.
AION: However, I seriously do not recommend using point to click as they finaly made WASD key movement as good in AION as any other normal MMO out there. I think it's just there for all the old school Asian players that actually like point to click movement.
2) Player stalls. Seriously one of the more annoying aspects of all Korean MMOs is forcing a player to set up a stall and LEAVE THEIR COMPUTER ON and staying connected to sell off anything. Then if you want to buy anything you have to run around in a sea of character with prices all over the place of people selling junk and you may never find what you want. Absolutely terrible game design for economy. It is still in AION.
AION: However, AION does have an auction house!! Yay!! The interface isn't too bad but not great exactly. Definitely useable and people were using it more than setting up stupid stalls at least. More people used the stalls for announcing their Legion (ie the term for a guild in this game) for people to join.
3) Ridiculous prices for items as you level. White items from a store at level 10 cost 2,000 coins or so, and white items at level 30 cost MILLIONS. Yah, so while money isn't that hard to come by, the strange exponential inflation of higher level items in Asian MMOs is hard to understand. I guess Asians MMO players get their epeen off by having as many zeros as they possibly can in their bank accounts? I duno, it is a bit odd and annoying though.
AION: unfortunately, this is still apart of AION like all other Asian MMOs. The fact a level 10 item is 2000 coins with level 10 monsters dropping 50 coins a kill versus say level 30 items costing 1 million coins with level 30 monsters dropping 10000 coins a kill is very odd. Both the exponential drop rate and price just bugs the shit out of me and most NA players. I mean it's not exactly game breaking, but BAH. I rather have the few coins in my pocket feel like the are worth it.
4) Retarded failure rates on crafting. Just the opposite of the exponential money rate increase in Asian MMOs is the exponential failure rate of crafting in their games. Take for example crafting of a low level item. These numbers are somewhat made up but they are intended to illustrate what I mean. A level 1 crafted item has a success rate of 99%. A level 10 item has a success rate of 75%. A level 20 has a success rate of 25%. A level 30 has a success rate of 5%. A level 40 has a success rate of 0.01%. A level 50 has a success rate of 0.000000001%....
Yah, it's utterly retarded. This is why 99% of the Asian populace playing these games tries to actively find and use crafting bugs and exploits to get around those stupid failure rates.
AION: Well, the failure rates aren't quite as exponential a drop. However, they still aren't pretty. By far worse than your standard failure rates than any popular NA or EU MMO game out there, but not nearly as bad as say something from Silk Road online or *shudders* Rohan.
5) NA and EU servers full of Asian botters and players that like to do nothing more than piss of the NA and EU players. If you ever played any Asian MMO you know this is a harsh fact of the game. It's an annoyance to the point of basically driving away the entire NA/EU population from most Asian MMO games. Which is why games like Lineage 2 have a subscriber base of like 5 million Asian accounts and a few thousand NA accounts. I'm serious.
AION: Unfortunately, I can not comment yet on this. The Beta's thus far have ben VERY REFRESHINGLY clear of annoying ass Asian players. I think I ran into two the entire time I have played thus far. This doesn't mean they won't try to invade and screw us over when live comes, but NCSoft is promising the keep us as segregated as best as they can. Not that I have a problem with GOOD Asian MMO players that actually are playing to have fun with NA/EU friends. It's the other 99% of them that pisses me off along with pretty much every other NA player as the subscriber numbers can attest to. So this is a wait and see.
6) Limited resources at higher levels to level up on. If you have ever played Lineage 2 on release you know what I'm talking about. At one point in the game, once you reached a certain level there were like 20 monsters in the WHOLE FRIKKING GAME that you could gain experience off on. That means you are fighting over the same 20 monsters with however many thousands of others are on your server at the same time. Some times this doesn't even happen at the higher levels as it can happen at points in the lower levels. This is just piss poor game design and pure stupidity. The main reason this is done is because Asians are masochists that like this garbage and because it promote open PVP which is basically what every Asian MMO revolves around. The problem is, one or two big Asian guilds can utterly dominate an area and that means ZERO experience for the NA/EU players. You literally can not level and even trying will mean you get your ASS handed to you.
AION: While ther are a few bottlenecks when leveling and questing for resources, for example the RIBBIT to RAE quest for the Asmodieans, I haven't experienced a resource lack at any of the levels I've tried.
7) Horrendous death/pvp penalties. As I mentioned alreayd, Asian players are masochists. For the most part they LOVE crap like losing level and loot when you die and having a chance to get that from other players. However, NA/EU players don't really like that. We all had enough of that garbage with UO and EQ, and whil e it can sometime be entertaining, paying for a game you have zero possiblity of ever competing in is retarded. Personally, I don't mind a slightly hard death penalty, like lost exps or a chance to drop a single item, but I deplore having a massively harsh penalty and NEVER being able to do anything about. Why? As I said early, with most Asian MMOs the asian players are us versus them. And since we are NA we are them and are ganged up on as liberally as can be done.
AION: It has a death penalty but it is not bad. Tiny bit of exps which can mostly be "healed" er bought back from an NPC. Plus a little bit of downtime after a death that is pretty much what you get in all MMOs.
8) GRIDNFEST!! Again, back to the fact Asian ?MMO players are masochists, they LOVE their grindfests. I'm talking taking 1 million kills to make a level when there is only 20 monsters that spawn that can give you exps in the first place that you compete with thousands of other players on the server to kill who in turn are trying to kill YOU so they don't have to compete to kill a monster for exps and thus make you lose exps and need to kill that monster even MORE times. Oh the JOY of taking literally YEARS to make a single level. If I haven't convinced you that Asian MMO players are seriously fucked up in the head, then this will. They actually LOVE this aspect of a game. I am not joking. They LOVE grindfests. Where all you do 24/7/365 is stay in one spot and kill the same thing over and over and over. And if you actually do manage to stay in that spot 24/7/365 and not die then you might make a level by the end of the year. I'm fucking serious. They actually do and like that crap.
AION: Well, it is "grindy" at the higher levels 35 to 50 (50 is the cap right now) it is not too bad. Basically about the same as your standard NA game at release before years of development has finally had the time to introduce other alternatives to gaining exps besides fighting the same monster over and over and over again. so all in all, AION is light years beyond other Asian MMOs in this department as the grind, while still there, isn't THAT bad. Why? They actually DO have numerous quests you can do all the way to the level cap at 50. Yay!
So those are my things on why AION is similar but not exactly the same as all other Asian MMOs out there. Now, if you aren't turned off yet, here are the things AION HAS done right in an attempt to finally gain a NA/EU subscriber base that can do more than pay the electric bill for a couple of servers.
Here are some of the highlights.
1) Great graphics all around. Not quite as good as AOC, but then again done much better so it looks very good without the retarded drops to my FPS due to bad coding on spots.
2) Very nice sound score. I definitely dig the hard rock to classical music sound score jumps at various, but proper, moments in the game.
3) An awesome character creation system. If you are willing to spend the time you can make your character very unique in the game.
4) A user friendly HUD!!! Oh my god, a somewhat customizable, and eventually modable AKA WoW style, heads up user display. Holy crap, give the AION development team a cookie for finally doing what no Asian MMO has done yet.
5) Intuitive and user friendly control system. Although the game lacks a tutorial, it is not that hard to figure out how to play the game from the get go unlike most Asian MMOs. You don't need a degree on how to play Asian MMOs to get into playing AION.
6) A quest system that can actually get most of the exps needed to reach the level cap. Holy bajeebus! I was actually able to get to level 20 at least with every character I played without actually having to repeatedly grind on the same monster spawn to do so. Sure, some of the quests require killing X amount of this monster but none of the amounts were ridiculous. Usually about 10 or less. After doing about 4 to 8 quests for an area, the quests actually MOVE you to the next area that you need to go to continue questing and leveling. Again, give the AION team a cookie for finally doing this right. I have heard the quests slow down a bit post level 30, so some grinding will be needed. I can't comment yet on how bad it is though. Some people say it's terrible and some say it isn't. Until I get a chance to experience it though, I haven't a clue, because to some people having to kill the same monster more than once is a "terrible grind" it seems like.
7) Balance. In the name of all that is MMO, finally a good balanced game. Sure it is done by keeping things simple and not having 50 races with 100 possible unique class combinations or weird skill setups that makes for min/maxing, cookie cutter templates, or other crap that allows player X utter dominance over player Y that picked something "gimped" for their character. Sure there is a certain amount of rock, paper, scissors to how powerful each character class is in regards to PVP. However, so far from what I saw every class has a chance in PVE and PVP. True, this can and in all games so far does change, but for now it is nicely balanced in my opinion.
8) Engrossing storyline that involves the player as a main character in a story. AoC did this with the first 20 levels of Tortuga and did it very well. Unfortunately, AoC after Tortuga as not very engrossing and sucked in many player's opinions when it came to a story line. AION thus far tries to keep the player on track to the main story at all times with "campaign" quests versus standard quests. The campaign quests have fun little cut scenes and "side adventures for the PC only" somewhat similar to Final Fantasy Online and one of it's few redeeming features. I like an MMO that tries to have an almost single player story line to it to make the PC feel like the hero and not just another PC lost in a sea of PCs all trying to fight over who gets to kill Kobold_shaman_00.
To wrap things up, AION has some interesting things going for it. It definitely will NOT be the next WoW or anywhere close. I do like that they are trying to break the mold of the Asian MMO and try to bring in NA/EU subscribers without alienating the Asian market. There are a few things that could still turn me off from the game come release but if they can deliver on promises such as segregation and stopping botting and chinese gold farmers as best they can, then I might give it a go. If not, then I'll be waiting a bit longer for an MMO that can fulfill the wants I am looking for out for a game.