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Looked like UT levels
*sigh*...I left the Immaturity of Wow hoping to find another game I liked. I tried LOTRO which was very beautiful, but I HATED the crowded chat box with no local bubbles.
I just watched the trailer for Aion, which had my hopes up for a nice mmo, when I realized how "small" or "closed in the areas looked. It was like they placed a carefully modeled object into a small area, then put up planes with textures on them to simulate background and distance. I didn't get a feel of vastness what-so-ever.
Is this going to be the way the game looks? I really hate to go back to Wow and the 3rd graders because what I was waiting for isn't what I expected. 
See you soon.
Piiv.
Played:SWG,WoW,AoC,Aion,FE,CoH,CoV,TabRas,LoTR,L2,Ryzom,Eve
Looking for: an mmo home.
Comments
What are you talking about? The only Background texture is the Tower that goes from the bottom to top half of the planet.
Its not closed in or zoned at all, remember you can fly in it...wouldn't make sense to have a flying game with closed off zones. The abyss (the middle of the broken tower between the 2 halfs of the planet) is just 1 giant zone full of floating islands and fragments that you have to fly to get across.
Aion has a linear progression just like all of the other MMOs out there. You start on an island that is open to exploration even though it is rather small. Once you move on you are boxed into "tiers" that are much larger and more to the scale of the larger WoW zones. If you are thinking that the game is restricted as much as AoC, you have nothing to worry about.
When I get home I will take a couple of screenshots of the world map and each of the zones just to show what the scope is like.
Nevermind, someone already did all of the work for me.
Don't let the size of the maps fool you on the actual size of the zones, they are quite large.
http://aion.mmosite.com/guide/map.shtml
_______
|___
\_______/
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|X| \*........*/ |X|
|X|_________|X|
You wouldn't understand
If your looking for like an eq1 or vanguard type thing where you can run for 3 or so hours and not get to the end of the world (from one side to the other) i doubt you will find that here, but i have seen the zones roughly the same size of that of WoW (using that game since you said you have experience with it). From the small peek i got at it during korean open it was pretty big not omg huge, but large.
Aion in no way was meant to be a 'sandbox' game in which, like the poster before me said, you can do everything and run on and on to no ends. With that said, the game is huge...Majority of the time I spend whining about no having a suitable place to glide or no sprint timer because it is so immense.
The abyss is also like WHOA huge...It's a good fifteen minute flight to some things depending on how much cash ya wanna spend.
If you're scared of not having vastness, I wouldn't worry about it. It's not open like WoW where you can glitch yourself into any mountain but trust me, you have plenty of space to move around.