The real PvP festivities begin at level 25, when you can enter the Abyss. The Abyss is the RvR section of the game. It’s composed of remnants of the planet’s core after the destruction of the Tower of Eternity and is essentially an archipelago in space. Since you have to hop from floating island to floating island, the entire Abyss is a flyable zone. Although the Abyss is split into three major sections, expect to see many 45-50 players hanging out in the level 25-30 areas waiting to gank unsuspecting lowbies.

Although there are small 6-man group instances in the two home worlds, most of the excitement happens in the Abyss. The region is scattered with fortresses ripe for raids to capture – that is, if the other side doesn’t get there first. There are also artifacts which you can capture that provide special combat bonuses to whichever faction controls them. And just to spice things up a bit, every now and then a Balaur battleship called a Dredgion appears, essentially a floating instance in which you’ll encounter both the Balaur and the opposing faction.

The quests in Aion are no different from your typical “kill ten rats” quests found in many MMORPGs. During the first 20 levels questing is very linear and simplistic. You’re practically led to the next quest hub by hand as an NPC tells you to say, meet someone in the next town over. However at higher levels you’ll find that you often have to actively search for small pockets of quest hubs, not to mention that you’ll have to remember to return to some areas because the NPCs there have new quests to give you.

While you may try to track down and complete every quest you encounter, you quickly realize that there just aren’t enough to get you from one level to the next. This leads to my biggest complaint about the game – the grind. All MMOs have some form of grind; it’s an inescapable feature in the genre. However, to be forced to grind a level because there aren’t enough quests is absurd. This is the part when optimists say to give the game some time to grow; after all, it’s only a month old. Actually, Aion is over a year old since it launched in Korea back in November 2008. You would think that NC Soft could add at least an extra hundred quests in a year’s time, but no. Instead you have these half-assed repeatable quests that give small amounts of XP for killing the same mobs over and over again.

The grind gets particularly horrific when you get to level 40-50, because for some reason the XP provided by mobs doesn’t scale properly with that level range, a problem that will supposedly be fixed in an upcoming patch. While skeptics may blame the game’s Korean origin for the soul-sucking grindfest, the dismal fact remains that a significant portion of your leveling will be accomplished by staying in one area and killing the same mobs repeatedly for several hours, even days.

The good news is that all this grinding leads to money and loot drops, which is great considering that nearly everything in the game is a money sink. You have to pay to learn a crafting profession and you have to pay to move on to the next crafting level. You have to pay to bind yourself from one region to the next (where you revive after you’re killed). When you die you lose a small chunk of XP, and have to pay to get it back. There’s nothing wrong with a death penalty but it sure hurts in the wallet to pay an arm and a leg to get your XP back. Oh, and that level 30 pair of wings you’ve been waiting 20 levels for? Unless you paid an extra $10 for the Collector’s Edition (which come with level 30 wings that are actually better than the ones you purchase in-game), you may have to wait until you’re level 40 to earn enough in-game money to buy them.

If you play MMORPGs for the journey and the storyline, then Aion: the Tower of Eternity is not for you. There aren’t enough quests to engage you in the story, and spending days grinding mobs just to level is not something many people relish doing. The main focus is on PvP, particularly at end cap (let’s face it; from levels 25-40 you’re just a gazelle waiting to be devoured by a pack of level 45-50 lions), but it would be nice if NC Soft made the journey to level 50 not so painfully boring. While there is hope that more quests will be added in the future to lower the amount needed to grind, it remains to be seen whether people will tolerate it long enough to continue playing, or bother to subscribe in the first place.