Launch date and pre-registration

On 12 September 2025, NCSOFT set the date: AION 2 would launch in Korea and Taiwan on 19 November 2025. The announcement also laid out the run-up — pre-registration from 11 September, "early name reservations open October 16", and pre-character creation from 16 November. That last detail is the one experienced players notice: three days to build your character before the servers opened, which is how a launch avoids its first bottleneck.

This is the release that turned AION 2 from an announced game into a dated one. It set 19 November 2025 for Korea and Taiwan, opened pre-registration from 11 September 2025, scheduled name reservations for 16 October and pre-character creation for 16 November. Pre-registration rewards included in-game items, with selected players winning tickets to G-STAR 2025, Korea’s main games exhibition. The whole sequence is worth knowing as a pattern: the Western launch of 30 September 2026 has its own Founder’s Pack arrangement, with founders entering five days before the free launch.

The useful comparison is between the two launches, because the Korean one is the only completed example. Korea got a two-month pre-registration window, name reservation a month ahead and character creation three days ahead. For the West, what NCSOFT has published is different in kind: early access on 30 September 2026, Founders entering five days before the free launch, and a free-to-play service. This site has found no NCSOFT statement about Western name reservation or pre-character creation, so no equivalent can be stated.

The mistake to avoid is assuming the Western launch will follow the Korean pattern step by step. It already does not: the West is free-to-play with a Founder’s Pack and five days of early access, an arrangement Korea did not have. Where a step has not been announced — name reservation, pre-character creation — this page says so rather than filling in from the Korean precedent. What this release is genuinely good for is calibrating how far ahead NCSOFT announces things: roughly two months between the date announcement and the launch itself.