Clay floated once more around to the front of his potential avatar. It was starting to look real good.
He had spent the better part of a half hour on this ‘character creation’, while he waited for the game to start proper.
‘Infinitum online’
That was the name of the game. And ‘game’ might be selling it a bit short. It was the main promotional title that was developed for the brand spanking new, state of the art, ‘Deep dive’.
Clay looked over his avatar once more, the visual acuity still astounded him, he had never experienced anything like this before.
The ‘Deep dive’ was the newest generation of ‘Incepted reality’ hardware, boasting a fidelity entire generations ahead of anything that had come before it. It literally promised a true-to-life experience. And thus far, even though in this holding room, Clay was just a disembodied soul floating about and dealing with his character creation, with his only available sense being that of sight. Just that one sense alone so far, was perfect! He could not possibly tell the difference between it and his own sight IRL.
‘Incepted reality’ was not something new, it had been around for many years now, with many different headsets and related equipment. But they all fell in the realm of offering something more akin to a dream-like experience when you used them. Senses were dulled, concepts vague and fuzzy, and a little bit of difficulty remembering in any great detail, what you had experienced while under.
‘Incepted reality’ despite its shortcomings, became very popular, very quickly. Rather than the previous technology of ‘virtual reality’, which could only really fake out to some degree, sight and sound with simulated computer graphics, ‘Incepted reality’, or ‘IR’, scanned and transmitted signals straight into your brain.
Instead of trying to properly simulate the information that would come from all your senses, it shortcuts all that and communicates with the deeper parts of your brain directly, instead of trying to simulate anything like graphics or sound, it instead negotiated with your brain directly using concepts, ideas and understanding.
So rather than: here is a cat, this is what it looks like, this is where every strand of its fur is located, this is the individual sequence of vibrations made by its vocal cords, etc. Instead, we have: here is a cat, you understand what a cat is like right, good, yes, then it’s like that one cat you saw that time, except maybe a little fatter here and there, oh and it sounds like that other one you saw when you were a kid.
In this sense, the tech is very similar to how our brains themselves work. All the sensory data ultimately gets shaped into ideas and concepts and those ideas and concepts get interacted with other ideas and concepts. And when we encounter something unknown, the ‘Deep dive’ reacts to it the same way our brains would, making sense of it by drawing on existing ideas and concepts.
So even though the only sense available to Clay right now was sight, he was completely mind-blown by just that one alone at the moment.
As a disembodied soul stuck in this holding area all he could do was float about and customize the avatar he would be using in game. There was about five minutes left until the game officially launched.
‘Infinitum online’. Touted as a ground-breaking MMORPG with an extreme focus on realism, at least for a fantasy RPG at any rate. The game made many claims, very few of which could be tested by the public or showcased, since it was difficult to show what was going on inside someone's mind, so most promotions were surrounding the tech and artists depictions of the word, etc. There were of course a number of live demos at shopping malls, tech conventions, etc. and that was probably how word spread so widely about how incredible the ‘Deep dive’ was.
Clay made one final adjustment to his avatar, changing the shape of the eyebrows with just a light thought. One of the coolest things about the ‘Deep dive’ in an RPG context, was the ability to interact with the game using your mind. The deep dive was after all built to understand your thoughts, so it is a matter of course that you should be able to interact with menus, options and other traditionally ‘UI’ interactions, with rather using your thoughts instead and simply ‘willing’ things to happen. Clay was quite excited about its applications further into the game, especially in combat. No more, press ‘3’ for ability or skill ‘X’, now just activate it with a thought!
Still two minutes left until the game starts. Interestingly enough, even though there was a visual countdown in the room, thanks to the ‘Deep dive’, Clay could instinctively tell how much time remained without even looking at it.
Clay made one final adjustment to the shape of his avatar’s eyebrows. Perfect! He had modelled the avatar’s face to look as similar to his own as possible, while still handsoming it up of course. A slightly sharpened chin of a ‘U’ shaped face. Slightly over large ears, with the rest of his features being on the finer side, even the beard and mustache was of a fine stubble, carefully carved into an attractive shape. His eyebrows also fine and arching upwards while ending in a slight bend on the farsides of each. They also protruded a bit more than normal, giving him a deep and mysterious look. Overall the face was on the mid range side of age (as far as RPG characters went), probably late twenties and adorned with short and slightly tousled hair. All body hair being a deep dark brown.
As for the rest of the body, it was average on all accounts, shape, size, build, etc. Clay did not like things that were over the top in appearance. He was quite proud of his appearance, if it were real, it would have no trouble at all getting chics IRL.
As far as he could tell and with what little information that was available to the public and from those who were lucky enough to try it out beforehand, the game did not feature any classes per se. So the only part left to character creation was starting equipment and skills. You were given no armour, but allowed to choose two weapons and skills each.
Clay had chosen a spear as his primary weapon. In realistic or semi-realistic fighting games, Clay had always found that he favoured weapons with more reach. Given the choice, he would have preferred something like a bardiche or some such, but this was what was available to him. For his secondary weapon, a dagger. The extreme counterpart to his spear, in the hopes of having a backup weapon that could cover the spears weaknesses.
Sure, most people would have argued a shield for the secondary, but Clay was planning on going with an agility type build, or whatever this games equivalent of that is and would rather (A) not have a shield slowing him down / getting in the way, and (B) have a surprise attack weapon, with the usual critical hit advantage typically associated with daggers. Or poison attacks or whatever else you could do with it. Depends on what the game offers, but there should be something powerful that makes up for the daggers ‘smallness’, there usually is.
For skills, it had been quite difficult. There were many seemingly good choices, although he could not have been certain if they were actually any good. Not having seen the game yet, meant he was severely lacking in information and context. So he decided to stick with ‘safer’ more broad ranging skills. He was also a bit of a solo player, not one for socialising, so in the end the skills that stood out to him were those that fit that role.
He chose two passives, one for health regeneration and one for faster stamina regeneration. To be fair, none of the available starting choices were overly fancy or ‘class’ specific, they were all quite miscellaneous stuff or very basic weapon skills, etc. Makes sense for a general purpose starting character choices I guess.
For character name, Clay couldn’t come up with anything good that wasn’t already taken, so he settled upon ‘Veil Piercer’. As for stats, well there weren’t any adjustments that could be made. It seemed everybody was going to be starting with the exact same base stats.
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Status: Name: Aaron Title: Freshie Level: 0 Next lvl: 0% Char pts: 0 Skill pts: 0 Attributes: Strength: 10 Poise: 10 Vitality: 10 Constitution: 10 Dexterity: 10 Agility: 10 Perception: 10 Charisma: 10 Spirit: 10 Will: 10 Condition: HP: 100 / 100 / 100 Stamina: 100 / 100 / 100 Skills: Basic HP regen: lvl 1 Basic Stamina regen: lvl 1 Status effects: None
The things that stood out the most to him, were three-fold: One the lack of a mana stat. Even though they claim the game doesn’t have much in the way of magic, it still has skills. So what then will the skills use if not mana? It’s possible they are all just on cooldown timers and don’t require anything but time to use. Another possibility is that maybe they’ll also just use stamina. Will have to wait and see.
The second strange thing is the fact that both ‘HP’ and ‘Stamina’ have three numbers. If the first is your current, then the second would normally be your max, but there are three numbers? Clay wasn’t sure what to make of it.
Checking in on some of the character trait descriptions yielded the following:
Strength:
Ability to carry or move heavy objects without significant stamina drain. Also allows you to hit harder with all manner of physical attacks.
Poise:
Makes your defenses sturdier. Less chance to lose your balance while defending. Defensive actions like blocking require less stamina.
Vitality:
Increases maximum HP. Increases resistance to status effects.
Constitution:
Increases maximum Stamina and regen. Reduces effects of hunger, thirst and crippling injuries.
Dexterity:
Cat like movements: Balance while in motion, quite movement, acceleration of movement and flexibility.
Agility:
Improves maximum movement speeds and running speeds. Reduces stamina usage of all fast movements.
Perception:
Improves all of your senses and understanding. See things, others can’t.
Charisma:
Increases your likability and trustworthiness to both NPC’s and players.
Spirit:
Improves the effects of all non-physical skills. Improves resistance to non-physical effects.
Will:
Reduces the effect of fatigue on your max stamina and HP. Reduces the debilitation level of things that affect your faculties, like loud sounds / sights or blood loss / pain.
A few things had stood out to Clay when he first reviewed those explanations. One was the description of ‘Will’ that mentioned the effect on max stamina and HP. Perhaps the three numbers of each were along the lines of current / currentMax / max, based on this ‘fatigue’, whatever that was. He would have to test this in game or something.
The second thing that greatly concerned him was the need to reduce the debilitating effects of pain. There wasn’t supposed to be any pain! Or at least not anything beyond the level of mildly uncomfortable. The headset does have safeguards in place after all to protect your mind. Perhaps it's just some simulated supposed effect of the pain that you won’t actually be feeling, like making you all groggy or something.
The third thing was the effect of charisma on both NPC’s and other players! That was mind-blowing. Nothing like that had ever effectively been done in a game before. It was easy to apply it with computer controlled NPC characters, how much they liked you, etc. But obviously such a thing has never really applied to other human players before. After all, a game can’t change a human’s mind on its own. But I guess with the ‘Deep dive’ it can change a persons mind? Not at all a totally alarming thought! Will have to try and pay close attention to how this works in game, just in case.
All in all, ten separate stats and for a game that doesn’t really even have magic, that’s a lot!
A ten second countdown, finally began. All right! Getting started!
Clay had spent long enough lounging around the character creation room. Even though the headsets had all been purchased quite some time ago, It’s first proper application: ‘Infinitum online’ was only released some time after. For the most part people just used their existing IR headsets applications on the ‘Deep dive’, since while those applications were not designed to make use of the more advanced hardware, the ‘Deep dive’ was still able to improve the experiences they offered quite a bit.
Of course ‘Infinitum online’ came along soon after the headsets release and we all snapped up copies of it immediately. It was after all the first title that would make full use of the Deep dive’s capabilities. But the game was setup to have one massive launch, so the game itself was locked until thirty minutes ago, where everyone was allowed to do their character creation before the world wide official start of the game. So no spoilers, we’re all going into this as noobs together.
...3 ...2 ...1
“Aaaaarrrgggh!” A voiceless scream was ripped from Clay as his ‘vision’ was blanketed in white. Panic filled him as an intense searing pain ripped through his mind, it felt like it was being torn apart. The pain was so intense that he could not even gather his thoughts together enough to even will a logout.
The pain and noise subsided as a massive influx of sensations suddenly bombarded him. The pain all but forgotten, for the smells of old wood, the feeling of soft bedding, the sight of a dim orange morning light and the sounds of chickens going about their business.
Clay didn’t even realise he was holding his breath, so subdued was he by the experience that was filling his being. They were right, it really was like real life! No, it was somehow all sharper, clearer. It somehow seemed ‘better’ than real life. Incredible!
As Clay sat up in his bed, and before he even had a chance to process his surroundings properly, a message flooded his thoughts:
Admin Warning! Infinitum online is not what it seems. This is a permadeath game with your life on the line. Time in-game has been accelerated 120,000 times faster than the real world. The ability to logout has been disabled. Pain reduction and other safeguards have all been disabled. If you die in the game, your mind will be lost. This is as real as it gets for a fantasy life experience! Good luck on your adventures.
“What?”
Clay’s immediate feeling was to simply dismiss the message as either a prank or a publicity stunt of some kind. Or maybe a part of the games flavour text? I mean, just the 120,000 times thing alone was not possible. Even if the hardware was certainly capable of processing at those speeds and most computers nowadays, still our brains can only run at normal speed, so that was completely impossible. And if that’s bullshit, then the chances are, so is the rest of that message.
Still, the thought of 120,000 times was terrifying and he would not likely soon forget that intense pain, what was that even? No matter how unlikely, the situation seemed quite threatening. Enough for Clay to immediately will a logout.
But nothing happened.
A sick feeling was welling up within his gut. This was impossible! The logout was an immutable law of every IR headset ever made. The amount of failsafes and government, NGO, community and company oversight that goes into ensuring it works no matter what is mind boggling. If there was ever the slightest whiff of a problem with it, someone, somewhere would raise alarm bells. Such was the severe nature and severity of messing with someone's mind with a consumer product.
There is just no way that it’s possible to disable the logout.
Panic was now blooming in full glorious swing and erupting out of his very being. Clay quickly mentally reviewed the message he had received. If the disabling of the logout had been true, something that should not be possible, then the other parts of that message no matter how improbable could also be true. All the ‘rules’ come into question.
Mass time acceleration.
Permadeath.
LIfe on the line.
What had he gotten himself into?