I'd apprciate it if someone could give me a non-biasd comparison of Aion vs WoW.

Also any word on a free trial? Lame to force users to buy the game to even try it out.

I bought AION yesterday on lunch break and installed it when I got home. Took me about 10 minutes to install and 30 minutes to patch.

Overall the game runs great for me. It has some built in features like Quest Helper for WoW.  I decided to roll a mage, its pretty cool.  At level 10 I got to choose whether to be a Spirit Master (kinda like a Warlock), My other Choice was a Sorcerer.

Most of the Interface while ingame is at the bottom of the screen, which is really nice.  There are moves/abilities that you can chain together as you get more spells.  The chaining is pretty neat.  There are built in flight points that move you around within a region, and then there are teleporters that can move you from region to region.    When you get further in the game you can fly, no paying a shit ton for it.  Some quests are introduced on the standard UI you would expect. Other Quests have a cinematic to them. between 1-10 I had seen atleast 5 cinematics. 

Everyone can gather resources as far as I have seen without any special training.  Skills seem to level as you level, you do buy new skills but I hadn't seen where you would buy rank 4 of a spell however I had rank 4 of one spell.

Death is neat, haven't really figured it all out yet but it supposedly different than wow.

You can enchant your gear with manastones that you find through out your travels as random loot.  These can be applied to your gear, no skill needed.

You can setup private shops/player shops without much stress.  Good for selling your greens when your in noobland if you dont want to just vendor them.

The npc interactions are neat, some of them are sarcastic which is funny.

There is no Free Trial but I find it worth it, the graphics are superb.  The gameplay is some new some old, enough to keep me enthralled till 3am on accident (yawning atm @work)... Even though the game warned me after 2 hours that I had played for that long and I should take a break.

Im upgrading my account today for some limited edition account stuff.  If your thinking about playing give me a holla, when you get to lvl 10 (can't whisper under lvl 10).  Names Perc, I play on Kainsel(or the K server)

Oh another note, at level 10 you get a new stat bar (at lvl 1 you start with HP and MP). at 10 you get DP, which is more or less like a Limit Break(final fantasy reference) kinda thing.

very informative info, thank you. think i'll pick it up in a few weeks, my bro has been telling me a bit about it over the past couple days, so 2/2 sources say it's definetly a game to pick up. i must hit 80/raid/2s&3s on my rogue before i get into another mmorpg. maybe more then a few weeks now that i think about it :P

edit: i hear they passed some law in north korea illegalizing gold farming and limiting the time koreans can play mmorpgs to like 4 hours a day.

aion is growing boring... Its a beautiful game, but sadly just another korean mmo. which with most korean mmo's is a grind fest.  vastly gear dependant .  you do your first dungeon at 25... and the max level for the game is 50.

yah, my bud ended up not even going past his trial time... i saw no point in picking it up.

Last I checked there wasn't a trial, or do you mean the time you get for buying the game?

I like them somewhat but I prefer third person and 2d shooters more. Right now my favorite one is Bioshock. It has more of a story line than most. The last one I played before that was Call of Cthulhu.

I played it for awhile but i lost interest and ended up wasting money :(

[quote author=Michael link=topic=18103.msg184205#msg184205 date=1267138273]
I played it for awhile but i lost interest and ended up wasting money :(
[/quote]
Same exact situation here. The game just isn't that great. I got tired of it in less than a week and a half

It seems like this is the hot topic in Aionsource these days. An ex-WoW player tries Aion, gives his opinion in comparison with WoW because he played WoW? One of the best ways for us to understand something new is to look at it in comparison with something that we already know.

While the actual review in debate had some bias leaning toward WoW, I think it represents the eyes of a big majority that’s going to be hopping from WoW to try out a new MMO. When we’re talking about within Aionsource, it’s probably of little value other than to just create brainless flaming- inducing our beloved community into an ugly Kindergartner shouting match arena. However, when we’re looking at the MMO community as whole, Aion / WoW comparison is ‘important’ for a lot of people. And I’m going to end that argument right now for you guys; you can’t compare Aion and WoW- NOT because WoW had 2 expansions, but because they are two very different games with different gameplay goals in mind.