LOS ANGELES--One of the more interesting MMO games shown off at E3 2006 was NCsoft's Aion: The Tower Eternity. The game is an entirely new, high-fantasy MMORPG being developed in Korea, but the developers have noted that the game will be designed and aimed at a worldwide market. The game uses its own proprietary "Crytec" engine (not to be confused with the Crytek game engine used in the FPS game Far Cry) to produce some extremely colorful and lush environments, full of fully physics-based elements like water which will slow down characters trying to slog through it. The greenery in the forest and wetlands environments we saw was pretty thick, while player models were adorned in very ornate armor, exhibiting a very Korean- or eastern-sensibility in character design. Weather effects are also available in the game, and these can have a real effect on gameplay--using fire-based attacks in a driving rain, for example, won't be as effective, while using water-based attacks in the same type of weather can make those spells even stronger.