[BahamutKaiser]

There wasn't a remote lick of difficulty in FFXI outside of the difficulty of waiting endlessly to complete something, even though the levels were very slow and the battles were boring and still rather talentless, characters wouldn't take that long to level if it wasn't for extreme wait times caused by extreme party dependancy, that's not what I'd call "hard", it's just obnoxious.

Guild Wars had far more tactical interaction and difficulty than FFXI ever wanted to have, healers trying to monitor and save any and every player on their team at once, attackers having to gauge their advance and retreat based on opportunity to strike and vulnerability, casters having to time and distance their spells properly, wile the super reactive interrupt units shutdown skills in mid-cast. Is that a special battle situation, no that's how GW is typically played even in PvE, everything FFXI had to offer doesn't even match up to the basic gameplay mechanics in GW.

As for the presumption that Aion is an open world PvP, I'd like to know where you gathered that from. From what the gameplay states, the open PvP is in a designated location, the Abyss, and only random instances of lower level access to certain areas allow an occasional invasion by enemies in any, or likely just some, of the typical PvE areas. I'm pretty sure they made it clear that there would be slower exp casual areas for people to grind and take it easy, and that the abyss would be open PvP and more rewarding, if your trying to couple open PvP with grinding than you've fallen off your horse, PvP and grind only exist in games where lack of tactical function reduce even PvP to a grind, PvP and grind don't even belong in the same paragraph.