What Does a Free AION 2 Actually Cost?
Nearly 400,000 people logged in to the same sky on launch day. SteamDB counted a peak of 397,905 concurrent players for AION 2 after NCSOFT's free-to-play MMORPG went global on October 5, and that count leaves out everyone playing through NC's own PURPLE launcher. The game topped Steam's weekly global top sellers for September 29 to October 6, and by the end of last week it was still sixth on Steam's most-played chart.
Then you open the reviews. As of last weekend, 14,346 of 23,998 Steam reviews are positive, about 60 percent, which Steam labels Mixed. The complaints cluster around money, and some players also point to reported generative-AI assets.
Which leaves anyone with a free evening asking whether a free MMO is worth the time when the monetization bites.
What you actually get for nothing
The pitch is altitude. NCSOFT's Steam page bills it as the only MMORPG "where the sky is the battlefield": you pick a faction, ascend as a Daeva and fight a war over a world the studio says is 36 times larger than the original Aion map. It runs on Unreal Engine 5, PC only. The early praise Inven collected from social media lands on two things, the detailed character creator and the aerial combat. Those are the two reasons to install it.
The sky, the creator, the raid
Where it bites
The door is free; the rooms cost extra. Pixeltwelve's roundup of launch reviews describes memberships and separate purchases deciding what you can reach, with one reviewer objecting to paying for auction-house access while the battle pass costs extra on top. Inven names cosmetics and battle passes as the sore spots. That is the real cost, and it is a recurring one.
The AI complaint is harder to weigh. GamingHQ reports criticism over the reported use of generative AI assets, but none of the coverage we read identifies which assets or carries a response from NC. Our view: if it bothers you on principle, that is a fair reason to skip. As a judgment on what you will see on screen, it is still an allegation.
The ten-hour test
One number changed our mind. Inven sorted the Steam reviews by playtime on October 6 and found that players with ten or more hours rated it 80.8 percent positive, against 69 percent overall at the time. Be careful with that: about 85 percent of those reviews were written during early access, so they lean toward players who were committed before launch day. Still, it points one way: reviews written in the first three hours after launch were only 39.6 percent positive. The first evening is the worst part.
What PC players actually chose
The other 400,000-player story on PC this autumn is WARDOGS, Bulkhead's 100-player tactical shooter, which peaked at 428,666 concurrent players in early access and sold three million copies in 18 days, with Very Positive reviews. Those players paid at the door and seem happy. AION 2 players paid nothing and are still arguing about what the game will ask of them later.
Our call
Try it this week, with a budget of zero and a limit of ten hours. Make a character, get your wings, do a group fight. If you are a lapsed Aion player or you have wanted flight combat that matters, you will know by hour ten. If battle passes and a paywalled auction house ruin a game for you, you already know your answer, and WARDOGS is the better use of the money.
