AION 2 Goes Free-to-Play Worldwide Today at 21:00 Beijing Time: A 17-Year IP’s F2P Era Milestone#

Zhanlan Yingren | October 5, 2026

Hi everyone, Zhanlan Yingren here. Tonight at nine — 21:00 Beijing time on October 5 (officially 6:00 AM PDT / 13:00 UTC) — the live servers announced on AION 2’s Steam page (AppID 3393110) open on schedule, and the game turns free-to-play worldwide. From that moment, nobody needs to buy a Founder’s Pack; install the client and fly into the skies above the Tower.

I’m writing this piece this morning, before the launch has happened. I spread every piece of information the editorial team could verify on the table and went over the timeline again and again — because for old CN-MMO players like me, this is no ordinary launch brief. At 9:00 AM on April 16, 2009, AION, published by Shanda Games, began commercial operation in mainland China with 80 server groups open on day one — the era veterans collectively remember as “queues that crushed the servers.” Anyone who came up through the dial-up, workshop days of the Stone Age will remember what 2009 meant: the golden summit of China’s client-MMO market, first-tier titles queuing for the CN server, eight of every ten machines in the internet cafe grinding levels. Seventeen years later, this IP’s sequel chose 9:00 tonight, Beijing time, to switch “paid Early Access” into “global free-to-play” — a flagship Korean MMORPG’s business-model turning point, landing on one concrete moment.

This piece runs in the order old players care about most: first the launch timeline and the Founder’s Pack’s wind-down rules, then what the no-wipe rollover of early-access characters means for player assets, then a rundown of the paid early-access period’s data, then what the free-to-play switch signals for the whole genre, and finally a return to that afternoon in 2009 — what this IP weighs in Chinese players’ hearts. The end of the piece carries a launch-timeline section and a player checklist; if you’re in a hurry, scroll straight down.

1. From “September” to “October 5”: A Launch Timeline Cut into Seven Segments#

AION 2’s global release rhythm is the classic Korean-publisher style of squeezing it out segment by segment. NC first put out the Launch Reveal Trailer at Summer Game Fest on June 5, with the global launch window then stated as September 2026 — the Steam page had carried a “September 2026” tag until then. Only at Gamescom Opening Night Live on August 25, when NC released the global date-announcement trailer, did the date settle on October 5. NC never officially explained the change; multiple outlets (Gematsu, for one) treated it as a delay. From late summer to early autumn may not sound big, but for a launch racing to chart on day one, that month was enough for the KR/TW servers to run another stretch of “pilot.”

More noteworthy is the rhythm itself: the Korean and Taiwanese servers launched back on November 19, 2025 — by global launch they had been running for nearly a year. That means global players tonight are entering not a brand-new game but a version the KR/TW servers have “run in” for a year, with enhancement mechanics and the economic model worn through a round. On September 17 and 18, NC also ran the global load scale test (Launch Scale Test), rehearsing the launch-hour flood in advance — a year of long testing at home, then a global stress test, then staged opening: this “long test” playbook and the old client-game model of “worldwide simultaneous launch, live-or-die on day one” are already two entirely different release philosophies.

Laid out as a line, the key milestones look roughly like this:

2. The Founder’s Pack’s Last Night: Off-Sale Timing, Three Tiers, and the Account-Wide Announcement#

For players joining after tonight, the Founder’s Pack is already a historical term. The official rules are blunt: Founder’s Packs are sold only until Early Access ends, and off sale once it does — meaning that the moment the early-access servers closed (October 4, 22:00 PDT, early morning Beijing time), the three Founder’s Pack tiers had already completed their mission. As for whether they return in some other form after going off sale, NC said only “off sale after the EA period ends” and never mentioned any return plan — what the officials haven’t promised, I won’t fill in for them.

Looking back at the three tiers’ pricing structure, it is a textbook case of “buy-to-play shell, service-game core.” The three Steam US tiers are Standard at $24.99, Deluxe at $49.99, and Ultimate at $99.99 (Japan: 3,900 / 7,850 / 15,500 yen), and all three include the same two things: 5-day Early Access and a 30-day Special Quai membership; everything the higher tiers add is cosmetics — armor skins, weapon skins, the black dragon pet, the Wings of the Blazing Sun — with officials explicitly stating cosmetics provide no stat advantage.

The three tiers’ perk differences, laid out in a table:

In other words, the gap between the three tiers lives entirely in art assets, without one point of stats mixed in — which is exactly why NC dares to write “cosmetics provide no stat advantage” into official messaging. For an IP whose art brand stands on flight and wings, this design holds the line; whether those cosmetics are worth the $75 gap is an aesthetic question — the site’s pets and cosmetics page can walk you through the collection value first.

One easily missed but crucial pre-launch announcement: on October 3, NC announced that Founder’s Pack cosmetics would change from “single character” to account-wide, covering titles, armor skins, weapon skins, the black dragon pet, and the Wings of the Blazing Sun — instantly widening veterans’ alt-building freedom; your alts get to wear the same sky wings as your main. Officials cautioned at the same time that this change “may take a few more days” to land, meaning it may not be live on launch day; the 30-day membership and the supply/style boxes remain one-time rewards, unaffected by the account-wide change.

The refund rules deserve a note too: cancel anytime before launch; within 14 days after launch and with under 2 hours played, refunds are still available. On the upgrade path, outlets differ — one says you can buy a lower tier on Steam, refund, and re-purchase a higher one; another says the official upgrade channel is PURPLE-only. The safe reading is “PURPLE official upgrades and Steam refund-and-rebuy run in parallel”; defer to each platform’s page rules.

Seen on a longer scale, the Founder’s Pack actually leaves the whole genre a referenceable template: the sequel to a 17-year-old IP chose neither “free launch, microtransactions from day one” nor the old “buy-to-play entry wall,” but used 5 days of paid Early Access to complete a three-in-one of user segmentation, cash-flow recovery, and load testing — then cleanly pulled down the paywall. The pack’s most valuable part proved to be “5 days of early play” as a time entitlement, not any stat item — set against the old client-game tricks of “pre-creation gift packs” and “launch top-up rebates,” this wind-down feels almost refreshingly back-to-basics.

3. No Wipe, Rolling Over: 5 Days of Early Access Were Not Played in Vain#

The single most reassuring item for early-access players this launch: NC confirmed “no character wipe” — the early-access servers will not shut down and reset, but roll directly into the official launch, characters and all progress retained as-is. Per NC’s official notice, your characters will not be “washed away”; the servers simply close for about 8 hours of maintenance (October 4, 22:00 PDT to October 5, 6:00 AM PDT), then reopen under the official-server banner.

In MMORPG history this is actually not a given. How many games’ “Early Access” or “pre-download tests” ended as de facto wipe tests, vaporizing players’ days of grinding. AION 2’s handling treats the early-access period as the prelude to live service — the levels you ground these days, the Kinah you saved, the gear you enhanced all carry into the official servers untouched. For player assets the meaning is direct: 5 days of Early Access is not “rented time,” but the first stretch of the official journey.

Converted to Beijing time, this maintenance window also sits neatly in the daytime: October 4, 22:00 PDT is 13:00 October 5 Beijing time — early-access players hand in their papers at midday, the servers rest for 8 hours, and at 9 p.m. everyone reopens under the official-server sign. For players in Asian time zones, this “afternoon maintenance, evening launch” schedule is far more considerate than the many Western publishers who park maintenance in Asia’s prime time. The character you logged off mid-grind will be waiting in place tonight at nine.

Server-side expansion ran in parallel. Launch day adds 44 new official servers (22 Elyos-Asmodian pairs), coexisting with the early-access servers. NC has published the full new-server lineup and first faction pairings in pre-launch announcements — checking the server list and deciding on a faction before entering is the best-spent three minutes of tonight. The global servers divide into 5 regions — Europe, US East, US West, Latin America, and Asia — each server hosting a single faction, Elyos and Asmodian servers paired one-to-one, with cross-faction conflict reserved for the Abyss and the rifts — this “separate servers, shared war” design is the original AION’s recipe of Elyos-Asmodian opposition and Abyss fortress sieges carried into the sequel; to brush up on that playbook, see the site’s Abyss and siege guide.

On platform and language, the global version is PC-exclusive, distributed through Steam and NC’s own PURPLE launcher — no console version, no mobile version; official support covers 8 languages (English, Japanese, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Korean, Russian — outlet lists vary slightly; 8 is the consensus figure). Per media-compiled official system requirements, installation needs about 100GB of storage — if you’re entering tonight, clear the disk first.

One detail Chinese players should note specifically: Simplified Chinese is absent from the 8 official languages most outlets list. For a title opening 5 world regions at once, that is no surprise, but the language barrier is a cost to weigh before entry — happily, this IP’s core experience (flight, aerial combat, faction conflict) doesn’t depend on reading every line of story, and if you do enter, following the site’s beginner’s guide once through will make onboarding much easier.

While we’re here, let’s pin the global version’s content volume to a table, so you know what you’re walking into tonight:

4. 170,000 Concurrency Behind a Paywall: How to Read the Early Access Numbers#

The last report card before launch comes from the early-access period that just ended. This report card is worth a careful read because its sample is special — it records the population structure of a “purely paid field,” a sample that will never exist again after the free launch. Day one (September 30) Steam peak concurrency: 171,530 (SteamDB, Steam only, excluding the PURPLE launcher); day-three daily peak 147,878, ranking No. 6 on the global concurrency chart and No. 2 on the revenue chart. Steam’s positive-review rate sits at about 76.2% (about 4,300 reviews), status “Mostly Positive”; layered, it gets more interesting — players over 1 hour rate it 80%, over 10 hours 86%, which by Steam’s bands reaches “Very Positive” territory. The gap itself tells the story: the first impression has friction (interface, pacing, optimization are the sore spots), but the people who actually play through are climbing in both retention and satisfaction.

One metric caveat must be stressed: NC has never announced any sales or revenue figure, so no “sold X copies” claim should appear anywhere in this text. The brief stint atop Steam’s global Top Sellers during Early Access and the day-three revenue No. 2 are third-party chart and Chinese-media relays — those charts rank by revenue, and no official screenshot exists — reference only. Also single-source: the 1.3 million+ wishlists before Early Access opened and the Twitch peak of 250,000+ viewers; keep the “relayed” qualifier when citing.

But even looking only at the most conservative SteamDB concurrency data, this dataset has one anomaly: those 170,000 concurrent players had all paid. The early-access ticket was a Founder’s Pack starting at $24.99 — meaning every account in the day-one peak was a paying user, fundamentally different from post-free-launch “concurrency peaks.” Korea’s Inven Global offers a comparison: NC’s own Throne and Liberty, launched in 2024, saw about 50,000 daily peak during its Founder’s Pack period, then surged to 330,000 after going free-to-play; AION 2’s early-access data is about 3x that. If you extrapolate the same funnel to tonight’s post-launch peak — media have optimistic guesses, but a guess is a guess. What happens after launch waits for launch; I don’t invent numbers.

Two NC client MMOs’ “paid period → free period,” side by side:

Before publishing, here are unified notes on every data metric used in this piece, to stop rumors at the source:

1. Concurrency peaks: 171,530 and 147,878 are both SteamDB figures, Steam only, excluding PURPLE launcher players — true all-platform concurrency is necessarily higher.
2. Positive rate: 76.2% was a snapshot at about 4,300 reviews — a rolling number that will shift after launch.
3. Top Sellers: “briefly No. 1 on Steam’s global Top Sellers during Early Access” is a third-party chart and Chinese-media relay; Steam’s Top Sellers ranks by revenue, with no official archive.
4. NC has announced no sales or revenue figures, and this piece contains — and will not contain — any “copies sold” claim.
5. The 1.3 million wishlists and the 250,000 Twitch peak are both single-source relays; treat them as magnitudes only.
6. Post-launch data: as of writing (October 5 morning, Beijing time) the launch has not happened; tonight’s peaks and positive rates await official and SteamDB actuals.
7. Founder’s Pack future: NC has said nothing about any return after going off sale; neither this piece nor the site’s columns speculate.

5. The Free-to-Play Switch: Three Signals for the MMORPG Business Model#

Pulling the view back from the data, tonight’s “free-to-play switch” carries at least three signals for the entire MMORPG genre.

Signal one: the buy-in pack completed its historical mission and exited with grace. In five days the Founder’s Pack did three things — filtered out the most committed payers (170,000 concurrent behind a paywall), recovered an early wave of cash flow, and gave the servers a real, live-fire load test. Once those three things were done, off sale, and the game went free. This two-stage release of “paid Early Access → free live service” essentially sews the old client-game “subscription-era launch surge” to mobile’s “pre-register → open beta” cadence — and sews it more aggressively than Throne and Liberty’s generation, which still left over a month between paid and free; AION 2 gave it 5 days.

Signal two: the paywall is more restrained than last generation’s, but the dispute remains. The global version’s business model consists of Founder’s Packs, a $15/month Kwayling membership, a cosmetics-led shop, and a pass whose existence is confirmed but whose details are not fully public. The flashpoint remains that monthly membership: $15/month unlocks the Kuna exchange (the Kinah-Kuna conversion channel) and the subscription shop, and Germany’s MeinMMO calls it outright pay-to-win territory. Western reviewers’ other negatives cluster on UI and menu design, mobile-style auto-pathing, low-challenge early bosses, and a thin story — “a Korean client MMO’s skin, mobile-game bones,” as the line goes, is not an unfair criticism for AION 2, but the layered positive rates show it at least retains “the people who actually play.” The site already has a full business-model and membership explainer; I won’t repeat it here.

Set the two faces of sentiment side by side, and it turns out to be the same player emotion from two angles:

Signal three: the KR/TW year of “long testing” let the sequel dodge the old client-game fate of “worldwide simultaneous launch, day-one meltdown.” Enhancement mechanics, economic models, pacing — the things that in the old days depended on players voting with their feet and being patched after collapse — got a full dry run on the KR/TW servers a year in advance. For veterans who lived through countless “CN-server special modifications,” this “polish a year, then go global” caution is itself a footnote to changed times.

6. From Shanda’s 80 Server Groups to 44 New Global Servers: Chinese Players’ 17-Year Memory#

Finally, the line I personally care about most. For many Chinese players, AION is not “a Korean MMO” but the collective memory of the spring of 2009: mainland closed beta on March 26, 2009; open test on April 8; commercial operation opened by Shanda Games at 9:00 AM on April 16 — the filing Shanda’s listed entity submitted to the US SEC (April 13, 2009) confirmed the April 16 commercialization date in black and white, the announcement signed by Shanda Games CEO Diana Li, with 80 server groups open for the first day of testing. That year, the name “AION” was practically a byword for visual quality: the skies above the Tower, flight combat, Elyos versus Asmodians — it pulled a generation of Chinese players, for the first time, into a world where “you could fly in an MMORPG.”

Earlier still: the original’s Korean open test began on November 11, 2008; wider out: from 2009, the IP landed in turn in mainland China, North America, Europe, Japan, Russia, and other markets — one IP’s global rollout is a miniature of the client-MMO globalization era, organized as follows:

On the CN side, the story didn’t stop in 2009: on June 10, 2020, Shengqu brought AION to Tencent’s WeGame platform — it had won WeGame’s earlier vote as “the classic client MMO people most want to see” with 8,223 votes; the same year it also took the Jinling Award’s “Best Foreign Online Game.” A decade-old client MMO still fighting its way onto a new platform by vote — that confidence is precisely the veterans’ installed base and goodwill itself.

So tonight’s milestone carries a peculiar “two ends meeting” flavor. April 16, 2009, 9:00 AM: the CN server opened amid the roar of 80 server groups — the summit of Chinese client MMOs’ golden generation. October 5, 2026, 9:00 PM Beijing time: the sequel turns free across 5 world regions and 44 new servers — an everyday scene of the global free-to-play era. Seventeen years, exactly spanning both ends of two eras. And everything in the sequel that makes veterans smile is present: Unreal Engine 5, a Tower world about 36 times the original, 8 playable classes, 200+ dungeons, 1,100+ achievements, the Elyos-Asmodian opposition intact, cross-faction conflict in the Abyss and the rifts intact — and the return of flight written into swaths of positive reviews. To get those new wings battle-ready, see the site’s flight and wings guide; if you don’t know where to start tonight, the beginner’s guide and the classes overview are both ready.

One thing to state clearly on the editorial team’s behalf: whether mainland Chinese players can register and connect to the global servers smoothly tonight — the officials gave no clear wording on region locking, and we found no authoritative information before publishing; no assertions here, and go by your own channel’s actual experience.

One more detail old players will probably smile at along with me: the pre-registration/wishlist reward claim window was deliberately extended to before December 1, 23:30 PST — pet boxes, potions, and resurrection stone packs, claimable by new and old players alike as long as they log in before the deadline. Back in the CN server’s launch days, missing an event reward meant half a year of regretting it on the forums; publishers have now learned to keep the reward window long enough — perhaps one of the things operators and players taught each other over those 17 years.

7. Today’s Launch Timeline#

Finally, a table of the key moves around today (October 5, Beijing time). All times follow NC’s official Steam-page announcements and reliable relays; Beijing conversions were done by the editorial team — before setting out, double-check the official channels in case of last-minute adjustments:

8. Player Checklist#

If you’re jumping in tonight, run through these before logging on — the list is short, but every item maps to a classic launch-day trap:

1. No character wipe: early-access servers roll straight into the official launch; characters, levels, gear, and currency all retained — there is no “wipe and restart.”
2. Founder’s Packs are off sale: off sale when Early Access ended on October 4; the Standard/Deluxe/Ultimate tiers ($24.99 / $49.99 / $99.99) are now history; officials mentioned no return — trust no “restock channel.”
3. Account-wide cosmetics in progress: the October 3 announcement (titles, armor/weapon skins, black dragon pet, Wings of the Blazing Sun) officially “may take a few more days” — don’t file a ticket if it isn’t live on day one; the 30-day membership and the supply/style boxes remain one-time rewards.
4. Refund window: cancellable before launch; after launch, within 14 days and under 2 hours played. Upgrade wording differs by outlet: PURPLE official upgrades and Steam refund-and-rebuy run in parallel — defer to the platform pages.
5. Platform bounds: PC exclusive (Steam / PURPLE); no console or mobile version for the global build; installation needs about 100GB of storage.
6. Server structure: 5 regions, single-faction servers, 22 Elyos/Asmodian pairs; cross-faction conflict happens in the Abyss and the rifts — decide your faction before picking a server, because on a single-faction server your opponents live on another server.
7. Monthly membership dispute: the $15/month Kwayling membership unlocks the Kuna exchange and the subscription shop; the pay-to-win dispute is unresolved — free and low-spend players should read the business model and membership explainer first.
8. Don’t forget the pre-registration rewards: pet boxes, potions, and resurrection stone packs — log in before December 1, 23:30 PST to claim; new and old players both count.
9. Region locking unclear: registration and connection availability for mainland China has no official wording; no assertions before publication.
10. Don’t over-trust the data: post-launch concurrency peaks and positive rates await actual figures; every number cited here is as of publication (October 5 morning, Beijing time).

Before the Servers Open#

Finishing this piece, the calendar on the editorial desk flips exactly to October 5. Honestly, in my years on this beat I’ve watched too many old IPs invite veterans back under “nostalgia remake” and “classic returns” banners only to harvest them again, and too many client MMOs flip-flopping at the free-to-play threshold until the brand broke. So seeing AION 2 stage its free launch as “Founder’s Pack exits gracefully, characters roll over seamlessly, cosmetic compensation lands” warms an old player’s heart — even with the monthly membership dispute still hanging, even with the post-launch verdict still owed to time.

As an art editor who lives in screenshots and art books, what I privately care about most is another thing: what made the original AION so unforgettable back then was that it turned “flying in an MMORPG” from a slogan into something visible on screen — the skies above the Tower, the frame where the wings spread out, a dimension-strike in 2009. The sequel scales that world 36 times over in Unreal Engine 5, and tonight the answers get written: what resolution will new players’ first flight be, and can the veterans’ nostalgia filter survive 4K scrutiny? Nostalgia never fears being tested; it fears nobody being willing to build it properly once more.

Seventeen years ago, we flew into the skies above the Tower for the first time amid Shanda’s 80 server groups — nobody then imagined “flight” would become an MMORPG’s most luxurious selling point. Seventeen years later, this IP opens those skies to everyone, free. Tonight at nine — see you in the Abyss.

— Zhanlan Yingren, NTGame Editor