Aion Classic is Coming!

Aion Classic has officially been confirmed to be coming.. yeah, no joke. I was equally as surprised to hear about it as I bet you guys no doubt are right this very moment.
Back during the early stages of the game, back during version 1 through 2 Aion was generally considered to be one of the best MMORPGs on the market.
It had amazing PvE content and even better PvP content. Meshed together, it had some of the best PvPvE content on the market – but after it proved to be rather unsuccessful as a pay-to-play subscription based game, having to compete with the likes of WoW, they opted to make drastic changes to better support their pay-to-win free-to-play business model.

Last week a Reddit thread surfaced regarding a possible Aion Classic server – but players wrote it off as just a rumor. Fast forward to today, it was announced that South Korea will be receiving the Classic incarnation of the game on the 11th of November – yes, it’s really that soon.
The game will start with version 1.2 and will run through version 2.7 before finishing.. whatever that means. Will the game just.. cease to receive any content at that point? Will they reset the servers after a certain point, having players begin from scratch all over again?
I think they were honestly a little vague with their announcement, but I’m sure as we get closer to the release, or rather, the final version they’ll have more concrete information pertaining to what to expect.
Which is fine. This information just became available to us so I’m sure they’re still uncertain of the exact goal right now, and whether or not this will even be successful.
My thought here is that they’ll use this and get a gauge for how popular the classic server is and then will decide whether they should continue to upgrade the game through version 3 or limit there and reboot everything from scratch all over again.
Who knows, they might even opt to leave that version of the server up for players that achieved max level and for those players that are interested in pushing the content available at the end of 2.7.

Now the most important part of all of this.. is that Aion Classic is going to be a paid game once again, requiring players pay a monthly subscription fee to play the game, much like World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy XIV.
Although in an attempt to not run into the same issues it did the first time round by forcing players to pay to play it, the devs have revealed that you’ll also be able to log in and play the game completely free.. for 1 hour per day.
Which if you’ve played Aion version 1 or 2 you’ll know this will amount to absolutely nothing and is a laughable effort from the developers.
They did note that they’ll hold the occasional free-to-play event every 5 weeks that will allow you to play for 24-hours straight before kicking you again.

Now this was all confirmed for the South Korean version of Aion as opposed to the North American of European incarnations.
It is unconfirmed if North America or Europe will receive Classic servers but considering we eventually catch up to the content the South Korean version pushes out I don’t think it would be totally out of the realm of possibility.
If we were to receive it we’d be looking at late 2021 at the earliest. However if you’re invested in trying this version of the game out, you could always potentially play through the South Korean version of Aion Classic, right? I don’t see why not. You might require a VPN though.

Honestly? I feel like this is a great step in the right direction. Aion was an amazing MMORPG before it went free-to-play and bringing back exactly what players want is a way of completely revitalizing a dead game. Especially since it’ll remove all of the content that players hated after the best stages of its life.
As WoW Classic proved, Classic servers can work incredibly well if done correctly.
Whether or not NCSoft are capable of this is another thing all together, though, as this could very well be a mere attempt on cashing in on the whole “Classic MMO” fad that’s currently going on.
Or it might end up being an amazing addition to the genre – one we didn’t necessarily know we wanted nor needed.

Either way I’m excited, especially if we get it over here in the West.