The equal class balance and only two race issue is something I welcome. Personally I’m a PvE player and I hate aituations where a class that’s stunningly brilliant in PvE has to go through radical changes because in a player vs player situation it comes out too strong, often losing the class concept and feel in these changes.

The NPC balancing of factions looks to be something that if implimented right would resolve many issues with PvP gaming and the heavy dominance of one faction over another that plagues MMO games.

And finally the Stigma stones is a genius concept, it takes the Glyph system that Warcraft uses to another level and allows for greater customisation of character, so while the game has limited class choices it has many alternative branch outs.

That said, two things raise my eyebrow as already discussed. If this game were to aim to be succesful in the US and Europe it would need a drastic tone down in certain hardcore elements, the XP penalty would have to go right out the window. For new players adapting to a game it’s a nightmare to contend with, for casual players it’s an unnecessary block in the way of game enjoyment. Sure it’s an effective penalty against spawn rushing and reckless zerg play, but there are other ways to impliment this.

The second is the crafting system, now I like the idea that crafting can fail, but if you impliment something like that you must impliment a secondary option (for a greater material cost) that grants a guarenteed success. This gives the player the choice of gamble vs certainty.

I will be keeping an eye on Aion’s development, although should I choose to play it it will almost certainly be at a casual level.

Anyway, so to some of the gameplay aspects. Limited classes puts me off, especially as there doesn’t really seem to be anything new added there. You’re either a healer/remote buffer, or a frontline hack and slasher. I’m seeing this playing WAR at the minute. When I go into the Scenarios with other players, I’m expected to heal others rather than doing any damage myself, and it can be difficult to keep up with that. Eve on the other hand you don’t play a healer/tanker etc, that’s more down to what ship you fly as to what the ship is capable of, and of course Eve has a slightly wider range of roles even if some would recategorise those into the minimalist tanker/dps/healer.

That crafting side of the game, just on the quick review of this, seems not to offer as much reward as it should, with no garauntee of actually making anything at all even given skills and resources invested into a specific crafting attempt? That would annoy me. I’ve not played with crafting too much in WAR yet, but I have played with the industrial side of Eve quite a bit. There if you have the resources and a spare factory slot, you build what you planned to build, as simple as that, although building Capital Class ships does carry a great many risks, given the constant conflict in the areas of space where you’re able to set up your capital shipyards.

The thing about character death though does have parralels with Eve. If you’re killed several times in rapid succession yes you’d expect some kind of loss. Going backwards and losing levels would annoy me, and make it feel like any forward progress had been wasted. WAR just inserts short term debuffs which wear off after a few minutes but do stack up if you get killed often in rapid succession. However, these debuffs can be easily removed by an NPC Healer with a small price in coins being paid. Eve deals with it a different way and if the player isn’t careful you stand to lose a lot of progress. Eve has Clones. Your clone can hold x amount of skillpoints. If you have more skillpoints than your clone can hold and you get podkilled, you will lose some of those over the top skillpoints. Bear in mind the basic clone only holds something like 100,000 SP’s, and most characters carry 10’s of millions of SP’s, there’s the potential for a lot of loss if you die and don’t rebuy a suitable clone upgrade.

I think I fall under that casual gamer group, and probably this is why this doesn’t appeal, aside from the reasons I’ve given here. For something to appeal to me it really needs not to be a WoW clone, which WAR isn’t. It also needs to offer something different, something I’ve not seen before, or something that just plain grabs me. I play Eve because it is MMO Elite, a classic game I’ve always loved playing. WAR is still in the tryout stages for me, although it’s appeal is growing rapidly. I was put off the D&D MMO because there was no PVP, and the reviews of Conan didn’t appeal to me. Also if it doesn’t much appeal to the 12-16 year old immature idiot range, I’ll probably look at it more. Maybe I’m just too picky over what games I want to play.