I've now worked up two characters to the top level (45) and have another three around level 20. I decided to stop at 45 because that's when the monetisation starts to kick in, and by all accounts it's quite egregious. There's still some story left to complete, but it involves doing dungeons and raids, which I really can't be bothered with; learning yet another set of boss dances I'd have no need for a month later didn't appeal. I suppose it might if I were interested in designing boss fights, but I'm not; I shall instead wait until someone else has played a couple of dozen different MMOs into the elder game and writes a book about boss-fight design.
Aion 2 is a fairly simple MMO. It looks gorgeous, but it's meant to be playable from a phone as well as from a PC. This means that combat is mainly mashing two buttons (three if you're a spiritmaster, i.e. a summoner), and movement to the next quest point involves selecting a move-to-next-quest-point button then waiting while your character gets there. Combat gameplay is a move, fight, dialogue loop; crafting is grind materials, assess risk, go for it loop.
There are two factions in the world, separated until the elder game when they come together for consensual PvP. They're the Asmodians (Horde) and Elyos (Alliance). I took one character from each faction up to level 45, as they have different worlds and different stories.
The worlds are indeed different, although the instances you encounter are the same. Elysea is pastoral and pretty; Asmodae is rugged and rough. There are some areas that go against the main theme, but most don't.
The stories are very strongly aligned. A leader who is driven to complete a quest (that if they succeeded would strip the game of all conflict, so that's not going to happen) does some questionable things but you hang out with them anyway. They pass through the same story beats, just with different settings and different characters. There's a big bad to defeat, who is duly defeated, then the main quest object is obtained. However, to succeed in their goal, they have to get another one of these quest objects ("cores") in a part of the world that hasn't been released yet.
The story is very, very linear. There are some side quests that appear as a group at certain levels, but mainly you're doing the same old tired things:
"prove yourself"
"collect my lost bags"
"clear a path"
"collect these objectss"
"examine these objects"
"speak to this character"
"click through this dialogue"
Most of these involve combat on the way to doing the banal thing you need to do.
When the whole fate of the world depends on your collecting leather from specific beasts to ingratiate yourself with someone you're going to dump as soon as they've helped you, you know you're deep in lack-of-imagination-land
There are plot holes, too. You can't enter the poisoned lake until we go through a long process of acquiring the necessary protection magic. Oh, would that be the poisoned lake I just spent twenty minutes swimming in, killing creatures that live in the lake so I can cook them?
What is it with games from the Far East and flying whales?
There are major imbalances between the classes. My chanter (melee DPS and support character) and ranger (ranged physical damage) can cut through swathes of mobs like a strimmer, but my sorcerer (ranged magical damage) takes half as long again and my cleric (heals) takes twice as long.
Crafting is annoying. You level up your gathering skills far, far earlier than your crafting skills. This means you keep collecting high-quality ingredients you can't yet use. In the end, you wind up collecting this stuff called odyle that you can transform into other stuff. That's if the bots don't have the particular node you go for on their route.
There's a whole lot more that opens up when you reach level 45, with multiple lines of progression that get increasingly grindy. I didn't pursue them; I have better things upon which to waste my time and spend my money.
Overall, then, if you want to potter around having easy fights following a strict do-this-to-do-that plot line, it's a nice, inoffensive game until the level cap. After that, I don't know because I stopped playing at that point.
It was quite fun levelling up, but sadly there's one thing that means I won't be taking any more characters up to the level cap: gliding. OK, so this is a game in which you get the ability to fly very early on. You can't keep in the air for very long, but it's very useful; my characters regularly use it, at least once a minute when out of combat. There's also gliding, which involves jumping from a height, pressing the space bar, and pointing where you want to go. It's basically flying, and it uses the same timer; if it gives you more time airborne, I didn't notice. So far, so good.
Unfortunately, you can't fly in dungeons and gliding works differently. This is the problem one for me. There are three party-based dungeons that you have to enter to progress the story, and two of these have gliding. Gliding really does not work the same as it does outside. I don't know how it does work, but on both my characters in both the dungeons I never got past the gliding segment. I always fell short of where I was supposed to land. The other party members went on and completed the dungeons without me. I was given a "spectator" title as a reward (although thankfully, the storyline still progressed).
I'm not the only person who has problems with gliding, either, as there are many complaints in forums and Reddit from people who can't get it to behave. The correct method (hit space then do nothing until you land) didn't work for me. Even if I'd wanted to carry on playing, this would have been a show-stopper for me. It's mandatory for the fourth story dungeon, the level-45 Draupnir, so that's where I stopped.
Anyway, it was a pleasantly spent 90 hours of play. I'll invest my next few evenings trying out some of the longer BAFTA-nomination games on my list (I've tried 48 so far, but there are 140 in total).
Here's a screenshot from Aion 2 in which one of the major Asmodian NPCs admires my character's outstanding qualities.
