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The “Vision of Aion” trailer ended up posing more questions for players rather than answering them with its release last week.  While the fan base is surely pleased for confirmation that the NCsoft team is working on something, a recent Twitter post by Ayase stating “The vision trailer is not a specific patch/expansion - it's a vision of what we're hoping to get out there in the future.” has planted the fear that these features are more of a long term dream rather than a not too distant reality.

If you haven’t checked out the video trailer yet, here ya go!

While you’re doing that, we are going to break down the features that the video showcased and discuss how likely these things will be included in game and guess a time frame as to when we can see them!  These are educated guesses and while we are poking NCsoft for some sort of official word, it seems they aren't quite ready to speak on the topic just yet.

Updated Graphics – Aion does not currently support Directx 10 with the current gaming engine which hasn’t had a tremendous impact on the quality of graphics that are currently in game, but certainly a support update would do a lot for the game visually.  I believe this to be a long term dream based on the fact that earlier this year, there were no plans to update to DX10 as this was something that CryEngine did not support.  Luckily Aion doesn’t really need a graphics update and this has to be low on the priority list.

New Lands to Explore – You just can’t argue in game footage. While everything in Aion gets developed for the Korean sister version first, it doesn’t take much for the western side of NCsoft to prep for release here. It’s clear by the footage that was shown that new zones are well into development and with all the lack of content gripes going around it would be criminal to not make new content their top concern.  I’d expect to see this going live sooner rather than later.

New Quests – New zones mean new stuff to do!  My only real worry here is that NCsoft is not targeting more than just one tier and not just adding to end game.  I’ll cry if I have to wait to level 40+ to swim into cool new questing hubs!

Seasonal Changes – This is one of those small features that aren’t so small.  While it’s not a game making experience, having seasons would be the icing on the tasty cupcake…after the other game breaking issues are fixed. This would be something I’d expect to see go hand in hand with the graphics update, but you really never know.  Maybe snow is super important?

New Weapons and Skills – I’m certain that I wasn’t the only one that got more than just a little excited at seeing a whip in game.  It just brings out the mistress in me! 

New weapons, which we saw, would be a great addition at any time but if these are specific to new classes then I wouldn’t expect to see them until an expansion releases.  The good news there is NCsoft is good about releasing expansions in a timely manner and we’ll probably see one soon.

New Classes – There is a lot of speculation that new classes are on the horizon and I would say that this could be true, but it is definitely expansion material and no expansion has been announced just yet.

Player Housing – Always a player favorite, it’d be a mistake to not have this time consuming pastime on the current to-do list.  From the video footage, I think we are looking at housing instances and maybe even legion housing.  It seems, by the demonstration of furniture placement, that this is something that is already well into development and probably wouldn’t need much translation for the NA servers.

Mounts – Be still my heart.  My original thought when I started playing Aion was that wings would equal no need for additional travel enhancements.  Unfortunately flight has not been quite as prevalent as we had first hoped making mounts a perfect addition.  Again, in game footage means development is under way and we saw not only single player mounts, but also passenger capabilities, mounted combat, and a taming skill.  They would be fools to not get this novelty in game as soon as possible!

Updated Siege Mechanics – Outside of the issues with lack of content, the next biggest concern is the PvP in Aion.  Right now it is fairly clear that a feature that consumes a large portion of end game content really needs some major attention and my hope is that this show of siege updates means PvP will get that attention. We can hope to see this within the next year but be cautious in wanting too much too soon.  I’d much rather see PvP done right than done quickly.

Being a glass half full kind of gal, I have a bit of faith that this video is portraying the goals of Aion’s development team for the next six months to a year and not some ill-timed tease that may span years.  I believe the amount of gameplay footage versus scripted graphics shows fairly clearly what features are being currently worked on as opposed to those that are those that are on the dev wish list.  I think that we can expect to see a good sized update in the next couple of months with some of these topping the patch notes and others I believe will make great expansion material in several months or even as much as a year away.  Keep in mind though that Lineage II went live in Korea far before it did in North America and they still released their first expansion shortly after the NA launch making it completely feasible to see major content making its way in game very, very soon.