Massively had an interview with Aion’s web producer Lani Blazier about Aion’s free expansion Assault on Balaurea announced for September 7th.  We made an interview summary and you can find out more on massively.com:

1. Two new areas one Asmodian and one Elyos. When you get into it, there are fortresses and artifacts on ground level that players have to capture, and they’re contested areas.
2. When you capture it, a passage to a canyon will open up, which is the only way you can cross over to the opposing faction’s area. When you cross over, and you successfully capture fortresses and artifacts on that side, it unlocks an amazing boss that’s going to take hundreds of players to take down.
3. We can expect eight new instances, two of which are soloable.
4. When Aion was launched team focused a lot on the player factions, the Asmodian and the Elyos. Now they are focusing on the Balaureans
5. The level curves have been analyzed – are there levels where players are getting stuck: levels 18-23 were kind of sticky, levels 38-41 were sticky
6. They fleshed out the endgame, added more content
7. A free expansion is about 3 or 4 gigs of new content
8. With 2.0 the level cap has been raised from 50 to 55
9. A pet system will be introduced. There are alert pets, that actually alert a player when something is sneaking up behind you.