In a summary article online at Gamasutra, a few of Aion's South Korean developers offer a "postmortem" assessment of the MMO, originally published in the website's sister publication, Game Developer magazine. The story only provides small excerpts from the original article, but offers an interesting perspective from the MMO's own developers. The team discusses many of the obstacles it faced during Aion's development, and offers a retrospective assessment of "what went right" and "what went wrong" throughout its production, according to Gamasutra. The developers mention the hype surrounding Aion and admit that not all media coverage is necessarily good publicity, specifically when the MMO was branded as a "WoW-killer":

"The pressure on the developers wasn’t just internal. Almost as soon as it was announced, gamer media gave Aion the 'WoW-killer' tag. That inheritance was unwanted but probably inevitable, because there hadn’t been a truly global MMORPG success since World of Warcraft.

"Comparisons with both Western games (Hellgate: London, Warhammer Online) and Eastern games (Prius Online) soon followed. Even before launch -- even before we knew what we were going to launch -- we were in competition with a half-dozen great games.

The online excerpt also includes the team discussing its task of converting a first-person-shooter 3D engine (the CryEngine) to the MMO platform, and offers a bit of insight into its "PvPvE" philosophy. The full story is only available in the magazine, but you can check out Gamasutra's excerpts here.