Aion: The Tower of Eternity Interview

Gamasutra caught up with Aion's Adam Christensen, Scott Hannus, and Sean Orlikowski for a quick interview about the MMORPG's new "Empyrean Calling" update, the challenges involved with making a game appeal to players all across the world, and more.
Having played Aion since the dawn of time, has the shape it's been taking been satisfying?

SO: Yeah. One thing I mentioned in earlier interviews is I just leveled another character recently. I had two characters previously that I had leveled early on, and I just went through and leveled another one. It's literally night and day how much easier it is to level, how much more experience you get for the quests you're doing, how much content there is to help you along toward the next level.

So, it's an unfortunate stigma that's stuck with this game since the beginning when some of that content wasn't there. We've really been trying to communicate that Aion is a very different game than what it was even a year ago with all these player-driven content updates that we've come up with for feedback.

Well, it's really hard to convince people to either come back. I mean, I don't know how hard it is to convince people to hop on a train that's still in motion, but it's definitely hard to get people to come back to it.

SH: Yeah. We have been very successful with our re-activation events, re-activating accounts. Every time our population has seen a significant bump from doing those. I think we are reaching out to that audience. We're hoping to do that with 2.5 as well.

AC: And like you said about getting new people to come in, we actually have a free trial system that we're going to be implementing as well. It's something we haven't really done before. It's a ten-day pretty much unrestricted free trial. You can get as far as you can. The only restrictions are some safeguards.