MMO Gamers

Last week it was the North American game press’ turn for a preview event of NCSoft’s new flagship title Aion: The Tower of Eternity, held in San Francisco.  The Aion homepage had some snippets from a couple of the reviewers;
GameCyte said,
“It’s definitely a new way of entering the oversaturated MMORPG market. Frequently, newcomers to the field will try and handle the unstoppable presence of WoW by asserting that their game is different enough that there’s room for both titles. Aion, on the other hand, seems to be taking the opposite route: the game is similar to WoW because WoW is a good game, and its millions of players will be able to quickly and comfortably slip right in to Aion — and once they’re there, they’ll find a number of vast improvements.”

And from Kotaku
“This MMORPG might look like a World of Warcraft copycat, but there’s more going on here than meets the glazed-over eye of a cynic. It’s got PvPvE which kicks your old school PvP/PvE in the butt, incredibly flexible character customization, and - instead of some lousy mount at level 20 - you get freaking wings at level 10.”

I find it interesting that in the first quote, World of Warcraft is mentioned three times while Aion, the game being reviewed, is only mentioned once in the entire paragraph.  In Kotaku’s review, he mentions WoW once but refers to Aion as “This MMORPG”.  Though these are only snippets and I haven’t read the full article so it’s not a good reflection.  But what I find interesting is that these are posted on the official Aion website.  It’ll be a long time before a new MMO isn’t compared to WoW, but NC Soft seems quite happy to have their game transposed with the MMO behemoth.