Open source

If you've read the about page, you already know the shape of it. Aion Project isn't a snapshot of one patch, and it isn't a watered-down “classic” edition. It's the whole game — every version's content, every map, every dungeon — brought back and rebuilt. Nothing deleted, nothing nerfed, and all the pay-to-win junk that got bolted on over the years stripped back out.

This is my vision of how the game is meant to be played, and it draws on every era where doing so makes it better. The authenticity is real, but so are the changes.

As far as I know, there's nothing else like it. Other servers pick an era and freeze, or keep the cash-shop systems, or quietly cut the content that was too much work to maintain. This is the one place where the game exists the way it was actually meant to be played, all of it, in one server.

Here's the thing that keeps me up: right now, all of that lives in my hands. Years of reverse-engineering the engine, re-parsing every piece of game data, rebuilding dungeons from scratch — if I walk away one day, or something happens, it just goes with me.

I'm not willing to let that be how this ends. Open sourcing it means the work outlives me. It means that no matter what happens to me or to this server, the full restored game is out there, permanent, for anyone who wants to keep it alive. That's the real reason. Not transparency for its own sake — preservation.

There's a nice side effect too. When the code is open, you don't have to take my word for any of it. The data rework, the difficulty tuning, the dungeon redesigns, the fact that the p2w systems are genuinely gone and not just hidden — it's all right there to read. Nothing behind a curtain.

And if you're someone who likes to tinker, that means you can run your own version, learn from it, or send fixes back. The whole ecosystem — the server, the launcher, the engine tooling, this website — all of it eventually opens up.

Fair question. The honest answer is that a lot of it is still being reworked, and I don't want to put out a half-finished version that confuses people about what's real and what's still in progress. I'd rather open it when it's in a state I'm actually proud to hand over, with enough there that someone could genuinely pick it up and run with it.

So I don't have a date, and I'm not going to invent one. What I can promise is the direction: this is going open, and that decision isn't up for debate. It's just a matter of when.

I built this because I refused to let a game I loved be remembered only as the worse thing it got turned into. Open sourcing it is the last piece of that same stubborn idea — making it so this version can't be erased, by anyone, ever.

If that resonates with you, you already get why it matters. More soon.