Picking up Aion's free Assault On Balaurea expansion at retail has its benefits, including one of several retailer-exclusive pets, each with a special benefit for players possessing it. Dibs on the odd-looking squirrel thing! Assault On Balaurea, due out on September 7 in North America, adds pets to NCsoft's MMO, but not the useless cosmetic pets you find in other online role-playing games. Aion's pets have a purpose. Pets in Aion are split up into five groups initially. Companions adventure alongside their owners. Signal pets alert their owners to nearby enemies. Pack pets add inventory slots. Fortune pets give their owners presents after being well-fed. And Purebred pets combine multiple functions into one pet. That's important, for while characters will have 100 pet slots, only one can be active at a time.

Assault On Balaurea is a free expansion, but NCsoft is releasing a new retail SKU combining the expansion with the main game, and inside each copy will be a retailer-exclusive pet, along with a speckled Ailu (Panda), a premium Pack pet which increases a player's warehouse by 12 slots. For example, a Warrior can evolve into a Gladiator or a Templar, and Mages can evolve into a Spirit Masters or Sorcerers. Six players can form a group maximum and all share the spoils that come with victory. There are specific areas of the game that are created mainly for group play, and at other times in the game it is a necessity to belong to a group. And for those instances of the game that appear highly challenging, an alliance can be formed for battle, which involves four groups at once. Aion has been developing and improving its design since 2006, with the latest testing haven taken place in May 2009. There will be major changes taking place relatively soon, which is hard to imagine because the game is already way ahead of its time.