In Aion, there's an enormous emphasis on money, i.e: gold. If you have money, you can have everything. It is not like in WoW, where you get different currencies for everything. This encourages two things, that I will suspect we will see more and more in the months to come: grinding and gold selling.

Indeed, grinding is a predominant part of the game, and it is not sugar coated like in other MMOs. Long traveling distances between quest objectives, paired with the inability to fly in some vital regions and clumsy flight controls prevent you from having more fun killing, and force you to travel ( read "auto-walk" ) more.

I suspect this method of gameplay will please Lineage fans as it is closer to their hearts from what I know. In truth, you can see a progress from almost anything you've done in the game, being a piece of armor or a custom title.

Combat reminds me a bit of Vanilla WoW. It is much more slower paced and if you fight with more than one mobs at a time you can get in trouble. Long spell casts and even longer cooldowns force you to wait between battles and time your skills instead of "unleashing your full fury" every time.

The Asmodians and the Elyos are in a constant conflict as expected, but the player versus player system adds a new layer of combat, as you also fight the Balaur. This new system is called PvPvE, and it rewards you with Abyss Points. Abyss ranks can be won or lost depending on your general standing in the server rankings. Only an elite top players will be able to get wicket fancy PvP armor.

Furthermore, PvPvE battles and the Abyss unlocks only at max level, a long way to go for sure. You will be almost unprepared for combat until you reach that zone - no, dueling a lot doesn't help much.

Up to six members can join a party, and attempt to take on harder foes in specially designed dungeons, but instances are only available starting with level 25, so a lot of boredom and grinding till then.

An alliance of 24 members (4 parties) can be formed to face greater challenges, bigger instances and bosses.

A pleasant surprise was the casting system, that manages to free the user from a lot of clutter and tens of bars with tons of abilities. It is called the skill chain system, and it is decently simple to master. If you cast an ability like flame bolt for example, it will do its regular effect on the target the first time. If cast again in short time, it will do damage over time. A third cast could knockback or stun the target. This is only an example, I'm not saying Flame Bolt has all these abilities.

Skill chains can also have a proc rate (20% to be able to cast stun, for example), or they can be like a tree: if you cast damage over time instead of stun in a second stage you will be able to cast a big blast of damage instead of knockback in the third stage, and so on. Again, a great idea, but for me combat is a bit too slow and especially frustrating in the beginning when you start with just a couple of abilities.