AION Online Celebrates It’s 4th Birthday!

AION Online Celebrates It’s 4th Birthday!

Four Years Later, Aion Is Still Going Strong And Isn’t Letting Up!

Gameforge are currently celebrating the 4th anniversary since the creation of AION Online, the popular MMO it acquired from NC West and believe me, they have a lot to celebrate. When the game transferred from subscription based to free to play, 4.5 million people joined the game. To put that into context, the game didn’t even have 500,000 members before the switch! Gameforge discovered how beneficial this decision and decided to keep the momentum going by releasing the massive 4.0 update which contained two new classes, the bard and the engineer. Both classes became immensely popular especially the engineer who gets a gun (kind of cheating in a fantasy setting but never mind).

This update brought about 350,000 new players which sounds small in comparison to the change to f2p but considering that’s more or less the size of their player list before the change, its an achievement that few MMO’s could boast. Another recent game improvement was to translate the game into 7 different languages. That may sound simple but consider this, all seven of the Harry Potter books contain 1,090,790 words total. AION in its entirety contains about 4,063,554. Now imagine having to rewrite all of that………….7 times……….yeah.

And the scariest thing is not only that AION isn’t letting up, it isn’t even slowing down! The next big update, version 4.5, is set to release early next year which as well as coming with more content, enhancements and patches, its shipping with yet another playable character. This is genuinely scary as with 5 million + players, they are actually starting to get within striking distance of WoW as far as player count is concerned. Could this signal a change in the balance of power? Well, whatever your opinion is, here’s a link to AION’s site if you want to see what all the fuss is about for yourself.