With the recent announcements in NCSoft’s financial statement that the NA/EU release of Aion will not be until Q4 2009, there has understandably been a lot of discussion both positive and negative.
I am of such mixed feelings on this, on the one hand I am very much anticipating this game and can’t wait to give it a try so to have it pushed out so far is very disappointing. It is also in general not good for the community a lot of people are losing interest in a game that is so far off and some are even going so far as to claim it is vapor ware in the US.
I am of such mixed feelings on this, on the one hand I am very much anticipating this game and can’t wait to give it a try so to have it pushed out so far is very disappointing. It is also in general not good for the community a lot of people are losing interest in a game that is so far off and some are even going so far as to claim it is vapor ware in the US.
On the other hand, in a recent letter to the fans from Lance Stites (Executive Producer) and comments from Liv the Aion Community Manager.
“The localization effort is enormous, with a vast amount of content. Aion is not simply being translated, a team of dedicated content writers are re-creating the written dialogue and content to provide AAA quality and to ensure that it is culturally relevant for our audience. We are going to do this launch ‘right’ rather than fast.”
This makes sense to me, I have played many games that were developed in and imported from other countries and while the games in general were good it definitely has an “Asian feel” beyond just the graphics and art style, even in Lineage II, which was a game I loved it was still lacking the depth found in most US developed AAA titles and although the text was all translated to English it still often times did not read quite right. In my opinion they have to take this sort of approach to avoid being just another “Asian Import” and all that has come to imply.
So yes I am disappointed that I will have to wait so long to play, but at the same time I do want it to be the best it can be at launch and hope that the localization is thorough enough that it will be able to compete in the US/EU markets. As much as people claim that they want it now and its fine the way it is since it is already launched in Korea and the “I don’t care about quest text” peope are in my opinion the same people that would complain if it felt like an “Asian click fest grind" with bad translation when it released.
