San Diego has been the place to be for the past few days, with developers bringing out all the latest and greatest to show off at Comic-Con 2010. We at Massively have been pretty busy, in part with Aion's web producer Lani Blazier. Aion's free expansion Assault on Balaurea is just over a month away, so Lani had plenty to talk about. She gave us a look at what we can expect with 2.0, and spent a bit of time answering our questions afterward. Follow along after the jump to see what she had to say.

We've also introduced our pet system, and just from reading all the comments from the players on the forums, that's something that they're really looking forward to. Pets won't just be cute and cuddly -- they will be -- but they'll also have functionality. We have an inventory pet, so basically it's your pack mule that carries around all your items for you. We have a production pet, so when you go around the world and find junk loot that you don't want, you can feed it to your pet and it'll produce a better item for you to use. I usually say you feed it and it poops out a prize -- it's a whole new meaning to "world drops." There are also alert pets, that actually alert a player when something is sneaking up behind you. We have multifunction pets that are a combination of the ones that I just mentioned, and that's our pet system.