After the first days of early access, Aion 2 will be available for free to all interested parties starting October 5, 2026. But how much fun is the new MMORPG from NCSoft if you don’t pay a cent? MeinMMO editor Karsten Scholz reveals what you need to prepare for.
Players of Aion 2 can spend no money at all or a lot (and everything in between). The MMORPG can be downloaded completely free from platforms like Steam and offers a content experience that is both extensive and complex. But is it fun? The answer is a clear “It depends.” On your ambitions and goals, to be precise.
By investing in the founder’s package, the optional subscription, the two battle passes, or the premium currency Quna as well as the in-game shop, players can purchase noticeable advantages in total. And this can significantly affect your gaming experience. Below, I will give my assessment of when Aion 2 can be fun without spending money and when you should definitely spend (some) money.
– No access to the marketplace
– No access to currency exchange
– Battle pass is not earnable
– Fewer sources for essential resources, equipment, and upgrade materials
– Significantly less energy and tickets for endgame content like dungeons
– No access to special, unearnable skins
– No shortcuts for the grind; everything must be farmed or earned by yourselves
Aion 2 Free2Play for ambitious PvE fans
The MMORPG from NCSoft places a huge focus on grinding through PvE content. You complete quests, visit dungeons in all shapes and sizes, eventually play the raid, and perhaps even have your eyes set on the PvE leaderboards. The majority of the endgame content lies behind item level barriers. Only when your character reaches a certain item quality can they enter.
This item level grind can be significantly shortened and eased with real money investment.
As a Free2Play player, this is theoretically no problem. You have access to the entire grind. Those who invest enough time will eventually reach their goal. Additionally, the difficulty level is not so high that it cannot be trivialized through increasingly stronger equipment eventually. And it’s all about cooperative content. So it’s good if the characters by your side are stronger, right?
The reality: In practice, we are already feeling a gradually widening gap between players with different time and money investments on the servers after just a few days of early launch. If you want to join a fixed group for an endgame activity, you often have to meet absurdly high power requirements, which you can hardly meet without significant financial and/or time investment at the moment.
If you are just barely meeting the item level requirements for a dungeon, you may simply not be taken along and must hope for the random group matchmaking. This will typically worsen over time and could become problematic looking ahead to the next season if the item level spiral shoots up significantly.
You can only really avoid this by finding a guild of like-minded individuals and playing through all the endgame content together. However, it’s really only about completing it and not about achieving competitive leaderboard results in PvE.
Find more Aion 2 on our YouTube channel of MeinMMO. The latest video is about beginner tips:
Aion 2 Free2Play for ambitious PvP fans
Aion 2 places a lower focus on PvP than, for example, Throne and Liberty. However, there are also PvP content in Atreia, and for this, it holds true: when players encounter each other, Pay2Win or Pay2Progress becomes a much bigger issue quickly.
The developers currently offer only one instanced PvP content where the equipment of participants is balanced to the same level: the battlefields, which play a rather small role. In all other, more important areas – namely the Abyss, the PvP arena, and the rifts – you have clear advantages if your equipment is stronger than that of your opponents.
Sure, these advantages can be caught up over time, but that takes a while, and with the start of the next season, the race to catch up starts all over again. Anyone who wants to compete in the PvP of Aion 2 from the start needs a) a lot of time and b) the initial boost from subscription, battle pass, and marketplace investments.
When is it most worthwhile to play Aion 2 completely Free2Play?
Free2Play players have the most fun in Aion 2 without a like-minded guild from my perspective if they give up overly ambitious goals in PvP as well as PvE.
If you just want to level up casually and experience the quests, if you want to earn a few stylish skins and expand your pet/mount collection, and if you perhaps want to occasionally dip into a few dungeons, you can have fun in Aion 2 for a few weeks.
These types of content are finite, however. The world of Atreia is not as vast as one might initially think. The story leads into the endgame within just a few hours, and the quests are relatively quick to complete. After 30 hours, with this objective, you have essentially seen and played most of it.
But hey, that’s perfectly fine for a game that costs nothing, right? Or do you see it differently? And will you spend money in Aion 2? Feel free to tell us in the comments. How important it is to invest money in Aion 2 at certain ambitions is shown in the following report from July 2026: Aion 2 is only free2play on paper, 9 out of 10 active players pay
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