Unfortunately, the title is not rhetorical; I saw someone post this in the game’s general chat last night and it got me thinking: am I enjoying AION 2?

It’s a bit soon to tell, really, as the game launched into the general public yesterday. Steam says I’ve played for 4.4 hours so far which is certainly not enough to provide an in-depth “review”, but it’s enough for me to provide vibes.

Not my circus

My MMO muscles are a bit atrophied. I haven’t played anything resembling a modern MMO in quite some time, and compounding the issue is that AION 2 is a prototypical Korean game and that’s kind of what stuck with me last night when I was lying in bed thinking about writing this post.

Eastern games provide all manner of artificial reasons to log in that exist outside of “I really enjoy the moment-to-moment gameplay” or “I really want to find out what’s next in the story”. There are daily login rewards. There are achievements thrown about with wild abandon. There’s milestone rewards both free and premium. Apparently these systems work for a wide swath of the intended audience because we see them popping up in game after game as foundational elements. I’m not against incentive systems, of course, but I find that they don’t work for me mainly because the carrots AION 2 are using are kind of crap.

Another aspect of games like AION 2 is that there are so many trinkets and consumables and [makes fiddly motions with fingers] stuff that I find it difficult to really care that these are the things that are granted by the incentive systems. In AION 2, there are several different scrolls, each of which provides a buff for damage, healing, endurance, critical chance, speed, and probably bowel health for all I know; there are too many to count in my estimation, making them just background noise to me. I tend to view consumable buffs as “specialty items” but AION 2 has so many of them — and grants them to players in massive quantities — that I’m wondering why they didn’t just trim the fat and build the buffs into the base stat foundation, or simply consolidate them. If I’m expected to always be using them (and there is an auto-proc system in this game proving my point), why not just make the base stats better and the overall system less complex?

All of this is a preamble to say that AION 2, like other games of it’s kind, has many systems that simply baffle me, causing me to ignore them, which ultimately leads to my peril because the game is designed to assume people do care about these systems, and as a result, are integral to survival and progression.

Now that I’ve probably convinced you that I really dislike this game, let’s talk about why I actually don’t.

Getting Unreal

No one does gorgeous character models like a Korean MMO. No one. I’m not even just perving on how hot they are, but AION 2’s designers have some secret skill in clarity of their graphics. I’m looking at the fabric of the clothing and I can practically feel the textures because the visual language is just so clear. That’s no mean feat, I’ll tell you what.

They’ve done excellent work with the visuals, and I wouldn’t expect anything less, really. I’m not always about “top-tier graphics” but I certainly appreciate them when present not just because it’s easier to look at, but also because good graphics make things easier to see and easier to understand what I’m looking at.

Action-ish

We’re in an age of ARPGs, where mainstream titles start off on the back-foot if they allow players any time for chin-stroking in combat. AION 2 hasn’t embraced Souls-like gameplay, but it is live combat. Dodging is essential because the time between the telegraphed wind-up and the actual pitch seems much shorter than it is in games like WoW; in fact, for me, it’s “punishing-lite” mainly because I can’t get my hands to conform to the esoteric configurations that the game demands. More on that later.

However, I feel that the combat is pretty solid. In keeping with the motif, there’s a lot of pyrotechnics going on with every attack, since no one in these games simply “swings a sword” or “shoots an arrow”. Everyone is unleashing other-dimensional light-shows and ignoring the laws of traditional physics every time they want to take down an enemy. It’s not terrible, but I do find it occasionally too much when I’m trying to figure out which enemies are still standing in the middle of a hailstorm of particle effects.

I do have a major gripe with the hotbar, and the designation of skills. First, there’s no internal help in this game that I could find. Some games don’t let you move an inch without popping tutorial panels the first time you log in; AION 2 just casually pushes players into the pool and walks away with beer in hand. From what I can tell, we unlock new skills as we level, and there’s a cap on how many skills each class has (both active and passive). We can’t just put skills anywhere we want on our hotbar; each one has an allowed placement which, if I’m reading this right, is so skills form chains. We can choose the order in which we want those skills to chain, but that’s about it.

Making matters worse, our main attack uses the left mouse button, a power attack uses the right. We also have keys 1 through 8, Q, and E. Remember that we also have the SHIFT key to dodge, with WASD determining the direction. For some reason, my hands do not recognize this pattern. I have an incredibly difficult time dodging, hitting number keys, Q, E, and remembering that my main attacks are on the mouse buttons. I kid you not when I say I sometimes find myself standing around like an idiot in combat because I’m pressing buttons I think should do one thing, but which are either on cooldown or have no role in my current situation.

Menus galore

There’s a lot to keep track of in AION 2. Probably the most-used advancement screen is for skills. This is where we can allocate points to leveling up the skills we have unlocked. In the screenie above you can see my currently unlocked skills in the upper right corner, with the passives underneath. My hotbar configuration in the center bottom has boxes highlighted where I can legally place the skill I have selected, Snare Shot.

There is another advancement screen, Daevanion (our celestial-selves are called “Daeva”), which allows us to unlock adjacent tiles with another point pool. The direction we choose is up to us, but most of the tiles seem to offer the same kinds of stat improvements leading to another set of skill buffs every few tiles.

For the craft-minded, the harvesting mini-game requires players to sidle up to a limited use node and gather. Each node has three reservoirs which are available to any player who shows up. That means if you’re the only one at a node, you can try for three payouts; if another or other player(s) shows up, then all players share those reservoirs. Once all three are depleted, the node fades. Repop seems pretty quick, though, and there’s a goodly number of nodes in any given area, so while it’s annoying to see a node fade away one or two steps from it, it’s not the end of the world. I’m just sad to see that limited use nodes are still in play in 2026.

I’d talk about crafting, but I think we need crafting tables for it, and I’m nowhere near a town right now.

*sigh* Gear can be leveled as well. This costs basic money to start, and may or may not require additional materials as the levels increase. I started leveling my newbie gear like a noob and then got this Spirit Halloween-brand outfit immediately after, so the flow of gear from missions is pretty generous to start, and I’m not sure it’s totally worthwhile to pay to level it early on.

I don’t even know what this screen does.

For all you transmog fans, once you replace gear you can break down your old stuff and collect the appearance. It seems that combining appearance with gear is free, but dying gear requires yet another currency. I don’t know where the currency comes from; I’m sure it’s available in the cash shop, though.

And last but certainly not least, there’s the pets-slash-mount screen.

OK so, AION 2 wins the entire MMO-dom for the best pet-slash-mount system. You don’t need to tame anything. You don’t need to hunt down anything. All you do to collect a pet-slash-mount is to find them in the wild, kill 10 of them, and collect their “soul parts”. Once you have collected 10 (which drop from every kill), congratulations! You’re the proud owner of a new pet-slash-mount.

And as far as I know, each pet is a mount. Hence the “slash”. There are currently 200 pet-slash-mounts, so go nuts.

Narrative

Seeing as it’s AION 2, there seems to be a cold-open based on whatever happened in AION. If you’ve played the original, then whatever is going on here might mean something to you, but to me, I couldn’t put anything into context I wanted to.

We start out being rescued by a Daeva strike-team who are actually looking for someone else, so hooray for wrong turns. We are ourselves a Daeva, but we have forgotten who we are — of course — and are lacking in Daeva abilities such as flight. As we escape with the raiding party, we learn the game and quickly gain our wings.

After that, it’s pretty much a blur. The best I can say is that in the early game we’re helping the Daeva collect Odylium, a mystical-powered rock which is used for all kinds of things (Eastern games love their technomancy), including the ability to awaken the actual guy the strike team was sent out to find who is in some magical coma. Pretty much all of our actions follow this thread as we bounce from NPC to NPC, all of whom need their back scratched to satisfy their side-quest needs.

That’s literally all I got out of the narrative so far.

Am I enjoying this?

You know, it’s hard to tell. I’m writing this post so I obviously care enough to think about it, take screenshots about it, and work through the question. I have been restless as of late and no game I have installed has really been doing it for me so I am not sure if my continued desire to push on with AION 2 is simply the high of a new experience, or if there’s something I really like about the game. As I said, the game is a real treat to behold and that’s a plus. But the mentality behind the design is a big deterrent, as I don’t like having so many systems which are obviously necessary to survival and progress, yet are so obtuse to my aging brain that I’ve decided it’s easier to simply discount them then to seek information about them. I don’t like the thousands of currencies and buff items that take up inventory space and only affect one stat each. I am also unnerved by the fact that every character is photoshoot-ready for a K-Pop promo video. The mini-map deserves a special “fuck you” because unless I’m right on top of my mission marker, it doesn’t show me which direction I need to travel in order to reach it; no edge-appearance, no arrows, nothing, and that makes me irrationally angry.

But still…I don’t hate AION 2. I like how we don’t have to fight each other for mobs because they are wall-to-wall. There’s a lot of loot in certain areas, and mission rewards have been generous. I don’t need to worry about obtaining those buffs that annoy me because they get thrown at me like beads at Mardi Gras (being an Eastern game, with similar repercussions). While I don’t care about the story, and while I feel like I’m just auto-piloting from mission to mission — there is an auto-run feature to your next required mission spot — I don’t think I mind. It’s something to do at a time when I’m lacking the desire to do anything else and while I know that’s not a glowing review, I don’t think it’s that damning either.