A game that hasn’t gotten very much attention among North American MMORPG fans but perhaps deserves some is the upcoming game Aion: Tower of Eternity.
A writeup about the game is up on Wikipedia. The game is remarkable in that it has perhaps some of the best graphics and music to exist in an MMORPG so far. It is often referred to as the visual successor to Final Fantasy XI and from the released media so far I would agree with that.
Some high resolution videos released so far:
- General E3 2007 Trailer - Shows off some player models and environment
- E3 2007 Locales Trailer HD - Shows off some great graphics and the city at the end is amazing.
- E3 2007 Combat Trailer HD - Your basic generic combat footage. Some group action shown and I really like the player casted portal way at the end.
- E3 2007 Clothing Trailer HD - Armor and some decent emotes and uhhh… some cheerleading after the final logo…
One problem that North American players often have with Asian produced game is that most games feature forced painful grinding to level, unbalanced unrewarding pvp, and shallow storylines with graphics to match. Lineage 2’s lack of success in the NA market for these reasons is barely worth mentioning.
Blizzard has been quite successful targeting both the North American and Asian markets with World of Warcraft. Squaresoft was less successful with Final Fantasy XI but the game still has enough of a following among the NA market that Squaresoft decided to do a updated port of the game to XBOX 360 for NA players.
NCsoft certainly has shown it gave this game enough of a budget for graphics, music and animation and managed to have an interesting base story. Will it be able to pull off the rest and be able to take a near guaranteed hit in the Asian market and make it successful in the West?