The dorm was empty when I got back. My roommate was gone since it was soccer practice Tuesday. I had the whole place to myself for the evening, so I stripped down to my shorts, stretched out in my comfy chair and booted up ERDE: Online. The familiar logo spun clockwise up onto the screen—a vast green floating island, lush and populated with jungle, overlaid by the words ‘ERDE’ in maroon block letters. Oddly idyllic given the difficulty of the game itself, but like most things worth value, ERDE was complex and layered.
My alt loaded up on the save file select screen. Thorvald the Thurious was a Berserker, a human barbarian-styled fighter class. I clicked on him and waited while the server loaded up. Berserkers used mostly physical attacks, with their specialty moves being predicated on ticks on their Berzerk counter, and they could act as Tank or DPS given the situation. Crafting-wise, Barbarians were very poorly rolled. They were mostly restricted to wood and bronze-type materials, only able to use the axe and hammer type tool subsets. Thankfully, ERDE: Online balanced this on purpose. By yourself, a Barbarian was capable of most one on one encounters that weren’t instances or raids; however, when it came to complex social situations, bartering, or building anything you were pretty much screwed. Most questkeepers would make you embark on long journeys to slay monsters to achieve a certain goal. It wasn’t my favorite class to play, but I was decent at it, and Tony was trying to level up his Engineer.
The general chat window popped up at 50% of the loading screen; Tony’s username popped up, in red, and I got a Group Invite. I clicked accept.
Ardzark (Engineer): Yo
Thorvald the Thurious: Hello again, old friend. How many moons has it been since we have travelled together?
Ardzark (Engineer): Not this rp crap again
Thorvald the Thurious: I take it you need my assistance again, Ardzark?
Ardzark (Engineer): Srsly, quit. Let’s just go already.
Thorvald the Thurious: You are a man of few words, Ardzark. I respect that.
Ardzark (Engineer): JUTS QUEUE INSTANCE ALREADY PLZZZZ KTHNX. Turn on your headset already.
I chuckled, flipping on the microphone and headset, and queued us for the Raid instance. One of the main differences between ERDE: Online and other MMOs like WoW or FFXIV was the wickedly difficult instances. Other MMOs had 8 and 32 person instances—coordinating a group effort to take down a huge beast was a gargantuan feat. Heck, I’d played enough raids like that in ERDE to know what those were all about. You had to live your whole life based on those raids—scheduling, discussions, negotiations. ERDE: Online, however, had puzzle-based instances that allowed one to participate in a particularly tricky challenge. Of course most of these were tied in with progression in the character class.
Engineers are primarily a crafting class. (Any class can, eventually, learn how to craft anything, but the quality will not be high and sometimes the technical skill required was difficult to grind.) Unlike most MMOs, again, ERDE: Online allowed one to do something different than the standard. Your main class can be a crafting class. Of course Engineers could use basic mechanical weapons—catapults, crossbows, ordnance, and battering rams—but their primary focus was on the technical side. For instance, engineers can unlock doors, manipulate machinery, and activate older relics.
Tony was stuck on this particular raid they called the ‘Island of Madness.’ IoM was whispered of in hushed words and fear throughout the entire ERDE community, and Engineer was pretty much considered a dead class if you couldn’t pass it.
IoM took place on the island of Corroborra, a tropical island where the ruins of the Avauntguardian port-town Silside had once been located. Unfortunately, the town was surrounded by a lagoon filled with corpses. IoM was a melee deathmatch mixed with a treasure hunt—without a partner, one must pick the lock on the correct 3 chests out of a total of 64 on the island. The odds were not in your favor, considering that each time you loaded the instance the chests were randomized. Again. The lagoon surrounding the island belched a consistent swarm of undead rotters one by one—a healthy engineer should, ideally, be able to take down the first five or so waves solo, getting on average seventeen chests unlocked by then. However, the sixth wave upwards is, technically speaking, impossible for a solo play due to the level lock on the instance and the sheer technical impossibility of the engineer’s DPS given their skill set. It was technically possible to solo it if you were lucky enough, or if you minmaxed enough Augments to raise your skill or tech stats, but the odds were incremental and the sheer time it took to do the work was mind-boggling. If that wasn’t enough, the location of the chests was randomized throughout the ruins each time the player loads the instance; and of those, 25% of the chests are secretly mimics.
It was just one of the many fiendishly difficult Instances ERDE: Online prided itself on. And if the Engineer was lucky enough, skilled enough, or had a good enough teammate to play bodyguard, they definitely could open the correct 3 chests. Then came part two of the challenge. They had to find the secret cache somewhere else on the island, use the codes hidden in the chests to open it, and grab the hidden loot before they were death-murdered by the Ghost Ship that starts to aggro and begins to lay siege to the island. Dodging cannonballs made of spectral ghostfire wasn’t exactly a walk in the park, especially since they seemed to track you down wherever you moved.
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It was fiendish, to say the least.
“Are you ready?” I asked him, over the microphone.
“I think so,” he said. “I’m not sure I can take losing this one more time.”
“Just a little longer,” I said. “Honest. Sometimes it’s just trial and error.”
“I just get sick of respawning in the Neither,” he said.
Isle of Madness came across the screen, with the familiar ‘whoosh’ noise.
“As soon as we hit the ground, start running,” I said.
“Gotcha, chief,” Tony said.
Our characters fell from the sky like meteors, striking sand and knocking clouds of dust up. Tony took off at a run, the fidgeting mechanic working on the first chest he found. I stared out at the waves, and activated some passive long-term buffs. Berzerker’s Brute Strength washed over me; whenever an ally was attacked with BBS on, my strength would double for thirty seconds. Useful in a pinch, though careful application would be needed.
“First one down,” Tony said. “You see any rotters yet?”
“No,” I said.
The emerald waves seemed to be too calm. I knew it was just a matter of time before they lurched from the deep. The first chest snapped open.
“Any luck?”
“No,” he said. “At least it’s not a mimic. Stay close to me.”
“There’s an approximate 4.6%, or less than 1 in 20 chance, that each chest you open is one of the ones you need,” I said. “But on the other hand, there’s a 25%, or 1 in 4 chance you’ll get attacked. Keep going!”
He ran over to the next outcropping, where a camouflaged chest was hiding in almost plain sight. His avatar bent and began the unlocking animations. I tied my attention between him and the sea outside.
Second chest snapped open. Trumpets blared.
“Already?” I asked.
“Woah—“I heard Tony say.
I looked back at his character. A suspiciously out of place circle of treasure chests had formed all around him. At once, they opened their hinges, then began to savage his avatar.
“That’s… new,” I said.
“Son of a—that’s not even fair!” Tony snarled. “Goddamnit!”
“But… the odds…” I said. I was shocked. In all the times I’d done this instance this had never happened before.
That was when the rotters—or should I say rotter—dragged itself out of the water by the sea. Instead of the normal first wave, there was only one. It walked up to my character, limping slowly, and a dialogue bubble popped up.
“SON OF SCHWARZVALD,” it said. “THE ODDS ARE NOT IN YOUR FAVOR UPON THIS DAY.”
I dragged my cursor over it to analyze it. The name ‘pnutxebra’ showed up, but before I could make heads or tails out of the nonsense, the rotter exploded. My character’s HP drained out of him like a sieve, and soon I had been transported to the snowy, staticky Neither. I sat back and stared at the screen. Me and Tony both dead—two chests into a puzzle instance I’d handily solved on my own ages ago.
“What the hell was that?” I snapped.
“I just crashed to desktop,” Tony said. “I think someone hacked into it.”
“What, into a two-person server?” I asked.
“I said I think,” Tony said.
The screen started to flicker on my PC, and the game started to pixelate.
“Oh no,” I said. “Oh. No.”
“What is i—“ Tony started, but the microphone started droning in static, and then fell silent as my computer crashed. Straight to a blue screen.
“Come on,” I said frantically, pushing the reset button. I tapped a few keys. Nothing. No response. After a few minutes, I said a little prayer under my breath and unplugged the cord from the wall. They say you’re supposed to wait a solid sixty seconds after resetting your computer to start it up again; or at least they said that in my first ever PC class, back when we were working on Apple II’s in grade school. Now, though, I just did what I wanted and rebooted it ASAP.
The normal startup screen. I crossed my fingers that the shell would load… and the logo showed up, the window panes glowing, but then soon enough the VGA chip on the computer’s motherboard blipped and there it sat, at a DOS bluescreen.
“Mother of God!” I screamed.