A recent development by ATLAS Interactive gave us two wonders of our society. The ATLAS Capsule, a fully immersive VR unit that allows for long-term use, with a neural interface built in and systems in place to take care of the human body and its needs. Anything from muscle stimulation to waste removal, with fluid and nutrient ingestion systems. It boasts of a theoretically almost unlimited time dilation, though this is hidden from the general public, and instead it is known the default dilation is 24:1. I won’t pretend to know how this works.
The second part was the advent of ATLAS Online, an MMO. As the capsule requires a truly next-gen game to actually make use of its functions, the company produced one. Whether it’s any good or not can’t be said yet, as it only launches tomorrow. Even if the story isn’t great, the features it claims to have sure makes up for the lacklustre background and information we’ve been given. Set in an ever-expanding multiverse, we are part of a mercenary hegemony. Each guild within that hegemony is responsible for its own tasks, reputation and rewards. As far as we can understand the guilds will all be player made and run, and it is up to us to interact with the denizens of the realms we visit in order gain reputation and rewards. Not unlike other MMO’s, however everything within can be altered and affected by player actions. You can do anything you want in these realms, although there are always consequences. Also a point of contention is the single world quest that has only been hinted at. Apparently there is an incursion into the first world we get to visit, and though it acts as a tutorial it does so by throwing you into the deep end, and is supposed to take anywhere from a real world month to even years to complete. There is also a risk of failure. Other than that, there’s no real public information available.
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And that’s where I come in. One of my friends is family friends with a developer from ATLAS Interactive and managed to score a free capsule for him and a few other friends, me included. He got a little inside information, including the odd fact that they only started creating the capsules a month before it was announced. He also told me about the time dilation but swore me to secrecy. Not that anyone would believe me. We’ve decided to start a small guild together. As he got us the expensive, though cheap for what it is, capsules he won the right to name the guild. It was something like the ‘Army of Delusion.’ At any rate we can log in an hour earlier to setup the guild and familiarise ourselves with the game, learn a few skills to get us started.