Aion Ready For Platform Expansion

Extremely popular MMORPG Aion is currently in development to be rebooted with a new version of the game which will become available for other gaming platforms, according to developers NCsoft. The Korean-based MMO, which reportedly has a population of around 3.5 million players, may see its debut in the next generation of consoles that are expected to hit the market within the next two years.

Details on what to expect from a console-based version of the game has yet to be released by the Korean developer, but players can expect that it will be very similar to the PC version, with a few tweaks for controller usage. It’s not the first MMO that has recently been declared for multi-platform expansion, but it’s one of the largest, and could see more titles in the genre spreading out on to other forms of gaming hardware.

Mobile platforms tend to be the target for future games, especially within the multiplayer niche – and it will be interesting to see what happens to our current MMOs once they’re on the same devices that offer text and River Belle casino games.

The NCsoft Listing
The news of the port came after NCsoft put out a job listing for programmers, artists, and designers, hoping to put a team together to start development on the next version of Aion, which is being built for next-gen consoles and PC.

Aion, which first debuted in September of 2009, has made a big impact on the MMO world, but its age is starting to show, and like many developers, NCsoft appears to be building a new game from the ground up rather than trying to add more to the existing one. This also means that the next generation Aion will most likely run much more smoothly than the current version would, even after many tweaks to the engine.

Aion At The Moment
Aion received its latest expansion at the beginning of the year in the form of Aion 6.0: Refly, which was met with mostly positive reviews. The game, which will turn ten next year, has managed to maintain a large amount of players, especially in a world where MMO player bleed-out is becoming more and more common.

What We Can Expect
While there have been very few details released, we have learnt that from the job listing that the applicants would have to be able to create monsters, characters, and animations using 3DS Max software. Unreal Engine 4 has also been mentioned, meaning that there will definitely be a large visual upgrade to the next iteration of Aion. As far pricing is concerned, that is another detail that we will have to wait for while the game is under development.

There will undoubtedly be more information released by NCsoft in the coming months on their new project and what it will entail, but at the moment the best we can do is speculate and hope that they build a game worthy of their current and future fan-bases.