NCsoft preparing Aion for 2008

NCsoft has said it plans to launch promising massively-multiplayer online role-playing game Aion - Tower of Eternity this year.

European boss Geoff Heath aired the news to videogaming247, after releasing a solid and positive set of financial results.

"We've got Aion coming out later this year, which we feel could be our most successful product to date," said Heath.

It certainly looked the part when we played it at the beginning of 2007 which, admittedly, is rather a long time ago. However, given its Lineage-like skew towards hardcore grinding, it might alienate a western audience.

One of the stand-out titles in the financial results was Tabula Rasa, the Richard Garriott-designed online space action game that earned an admirable 8/10 from us and USD 5 million from you, apparently.

"It's always difficult launching an MMO that's different," continued Heath. "We did it with Guild Wars and it worked, although it took a little while, and I think it's the same with Tabula Rasa.

"We try to keep doing different things. With TR, it launched, and it attracted a lot of interest, and it's building very nicely. We'll have regular updates on it throughout the year, and we feel confident that we're going to grow the player base."

Aside from Guild Wars and City of Heroes which, incidentally, will continue to expand for at least two years to come, Heath outlined the first real fruits of the deal with Sony to produce content for PS3.

"We've got an absolute wealth of product in development at the moment," boasted Heath. "We're beginning to really get some traction now on what we're doing on PS3."

Unfortunately he was unable to spill any beans, but said we should see some "stuff" on PS3 later this year. Perhaps at E3, then - a year on from the partnership announcement.

Or at the Game Developers Conference next week. We can but hope.