Huxley and Aion, two games that could have been revolutionary (but aren’t)

Every year, without fail, since their meteoric rise in popularity, another MMO is announced that is slated to “revolutionize the genre” as we fans know it. To this date, few new MMOs since WoW have strayed far from the beaten path and survived to tell the tale. Often these idealistic projects don’t  manage to escape the clutches of development hell, and if they do they’ve most likely lost the amazing features or unique style that might have set them apart from the crowd. Sometimes release timing or corporate politics plays a part in the undoing of these promising new games, but that’s not always the case. More often it’s budget and deadline woes that cause a new MMO to fall short of it’s intended target, to be released in “paid beta” condition, as a free-to-play game, or worse: not at all. Today we’re going to reflect upon two games that managed to survive their extremely long development cycles and launch as commercially-viable products, but lost their unique identities in the process: Huxley, an MMOFPS originally developed by Webzen, and Aion, a fantasy MMORPG produced by NCsoft Korea. Both promised the moon, but only succeeded in blowing it up.*

Let’s begin with Huxley, the exotic lovechild of South Korea’s Webzen and America’s Epic Games. Huxley is powered by Epic’s Unreal Engine 3, one of the most popular, powerful, and versatile current-generation graphics engines available. Webzen bought the rights to use the engine back in early 2005 (see note below) and announced their plans for the game soon after. Judging by subsequent press releases, it seems Webzen expected to release the game rather soon, first estimating 2006. Huxley even got featured in prominent videogame magazines, such as now-defunct Computer Gaming World (now Games for Windows, also defunct). The game, of course, got pushed back year after year due to unforeseen and ultimately unexplained circumstances, and has finally been localized and made available to Americans and Europeans this year, in 2009.

To the untrained eye, Huxley is one of the most polished F2P MMOs available right now, other than Exteel and various cookie-cutter fantasy jaunts (Runes of Magic, etc.). Most of its apparent shine, however, is provided by Epic Games’ amazing engine, not Webzen’s gameplay design. Bugs in bot AI and terrain collision/clipping abound and the difficulty of some bosses is extremely lopsided (try killing a Romeo bot solo without purposefully getting it stuck on geometry; it’s nearly impossible). Horribly-designed underwater levels also hurt the game’s PvE experience (especially if you’re an Enforcer; at least Phantoms and Avengers natively have long-range weapons). Lag affects every aspect of the game, making most PvP matches unplayable or tilted in favor of whoever managed to become the room’s host (especially if you forget to turn off ijji’s background downloader, PurpleBean).

Thankfully, Webzen didn’t drop all the balls it was thrown. The actual design of environments, especially the main cities, although a little repetitive and mundane at points, is a breath of relatively fresh air. Enemies get a little repetitive after a while (same models, different textures, etc.), but are still fun to blow into giblets. Unfortunately, these virtues don’t erase the mistakes mentioned above, and also fail to make longtime fans of the game forget the broken promises made back in 2006 and 2007. Huxley has no large, truly persistent zones (unlike PlanetSide, which is still most gamers’ definition of MMOFPS) and completely dropped its support for the Xbox 360 as soon as it became apparent they were behind schedule. Huxley is more of an itemshop-enabled, stats and equipment-driven Unreal Tournament 3, with tacked-on PvE, than a true MMOFPS.

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