E3 06: Soul of the Ultimate Nation Impressions

LOS ANGELES--We got a brief update at E3 on Soul of the Ultimate Nation, one of the massively multiplayer online role-playing games from South Korea's Webzen. The game recently began online beta tests in South Korea and Asia, and the pieces are finally falling in place, according to senior producer Aaron Rigby.

SUN is a fairly unusual online role-playing game, and it's based on the idea of combat rather than exploration. In the game, you'll undertake missions on huge levels, and if you win the mission, you unlock it for future use for hunting missions, competitive hunting missions, and player-versus-player battles. The game has a fantasy theme, and its look is heavily influenced by Asian anime.

Rigby told us that voice chat is now integrated into the game, so you'll be able to talk to your teammates without having to resort to text chat. Meanwhile, the designers continue to add more variety in character customization, and the map of the world is almost filled out with the addition of 15 to 16 new missions, some of which are quite huge. SUN sounds like it'll launch in the United States sometime in 2007.