Hey there mstnqmusic!
I was an inhabitant of Middle Earth for quite some time as well hehe. I can honestly say that the quick answer to your question is yes.
Here are some recent posts from around the web:
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November 14th 2008:
Kotaku states "http://kotaku.com/5086956/koreans-flock-to-aion-beta-in-record-numbers
Korean gamers love their MMO games, but apparently they're loving on one more than most. That one is Aion: The Tower of Eternity from NCsoft. The open beta test for the game launched earlier this week over in the land of...Korean things, and already they've surpassed 170,000 players - and that's concurrent. 170,000 players all at once, all for Aion. Knowing Korean gamers, they're still playing right now, or at least the survivors are.
April 8th:
So, Aionsource:
http://www.aionsource.com/forum/news-announcements/12819-more-quick-news.htmlstated that "Editor's Note: According to an industry insider, Aion's peak concurrent user (PCU) total reached 250,000 in the first two hours of open beta testing. Aion began open beta testing at 8 am on April 8"
So, by North American release, are they at least going to pass 1 million active subscribers?
UPDATE! April 21st
Aion has well over 1 million subscribers. This game ROCKS!!!!
1 million in China, and growing?
We knew Aion was a hit in Korea (currently the most popular MMO on the market there), but Aion's success in China was something of a wildcard...until now.
Quote:
Shanda's (Nasdaq:SNDA) licensed pay-for-time western fantasy MMORPG AION recorded more than 1 million paying users by April 19 in the five server farms in commercial operation. The game began charging RMB 0.48 per hour with the release of its first commercial operation version 1.0, "Yao Sai Pan Long," on April 16.
Source: JLM Pacific Epoch - Shanda's "AION" Hits 1M Paying Users
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OK... lol hopefully you just skimmed through that. But if you use that info as a bit of an appetite-wetter, then the rest is an easier read
I actually played the korean beta back in November of last year at a friend's home while visiting Washington DC. At the time, they did not have the textures or detail fully implemented, it was a shell of the game while they did some stress tests. Even then, it looked a bit like Guild Wars graphically. If WoW is the least common denominator (ugh.. both graphically and otherwise lol) then I can safely say that it kicked wow's a$$ aesthetically. The server was smoooooothe as well, ping was in the 150 range on a rather normal setup. To reiterate- this was a computer in Washington D.C. playing on a Korean Server. We were impressed with their server performance alone.
North American gamers will have the advantage of having a fully working game brought over- the beta tests that are being run right now are quite fun for us to play through. The game is running very, very smoothly even with packed servers and graphics cranked up- as a LotRO player you probably had the same wonderful experience as I did with the aesthetics of Turbine's take on Middle Earth. I can say that it meets similar standards. Difficult to put it ahead or behind simply because we do not have a final version of the engine yet, so until I have all of the detail sliders in front of me, I'll hold back on that review lol.
A rather large reservation that I had was that it was described by many as a VERY "Korean/Asian" game. Typically many Asian based mmo's are very manga/anime in art style with tons of xp grinding. While there's always room for some grindage here and there, I wasn't too sure if I wanted my pets to look like Pikachu while I'm fighting hehe. I can safely say that the art style is breath-taking. Not the Hello Kitty style that I was expecting, but very polished and unique. Fighting was fluid and armor and gear as well as spell effects seemed to flow with the moment.
As you can probably tell, I'm a gamer lol. I'm a bit older than most gamers at 31 but I've come to realize that it is a hobby that is a bit migrant. You're lucky if you find a game that you can sit and just play for years. I think that I found that in a few mmo's in the past, but right now just about everything feels stagnant. Remixes of old raid bosses and encounters, and pvp that you've already seen or done a million times over.
I'm happy to say that Aion looks and feels fantastic even in Beta, and I can see from the huge, quick, and efficient changes that they've made in the first few beta events that the potential is most certainly there.
Apologies for any typos, I typed this out on a netbook while doing some other things
