It wasn’t long now, mere minutes remained until the game officially released. There’d been very few trailers about it. Mostly just a showcase of the movement and combat, and promises of what would be available. Like, actually varied npc dialogue. Procedurally generated, or whatever? I kind of spaced out during those parts of the trailer. There was a hyperlink to a more in depth analysis on the AI, supposedly groundbreaking stuff, but…

Look man, I’m just here to play the game. Anyways, back to my point, while I didn’t know much about the game, that also meant nobody else knew anything about it. Or well, a few people would, but the amount would be negligible in comparison to the general public.

Anyways anyways, that meant that this game which was apparently supposed to be full of secrets, would be ripe for the taking for anybody competent. I watched a few more trailers after getting off of Untitled Battlegrounds, and there were multiple promises of non combat opportunities. So, clearly, there was an emphasis on exploration.

Or, that’s at least what it sounded like to me. Perhaps it was a good idea to chill out on grinding for the first day, and to instead just… explore. It might work out for me in an interesting way. So, here’s my game plan.

Make my character as fast as I can, blitz through the basic customization stuff (because base avatars are LAME!), and wherever I spawn, explore town as quickly as I possibly can. Speed stat is my priority, but enjoying the game itself is secondary to that as well. Most of all, I’m playing this to take a break from achievement hunting. To try something new, so I’m trying to come into this with a fresh perspective.

How well that goes, remains to be seen, but I’m not just gonna lie down and give up on any early “achievements”. After all, another promise was player exclusive rewards. Like, ONE, TIME, unlocks. Single one throughout every single person ingame, only ONE copy. Which was almost unheard of in the modern day, given any game on average could expect to have millions of players at the very least if they did the absolute bare minimum of advertising… but, apparently these devs were built different, putting shit like this in a game which could possibly have bbbbbbillions. With a capital B.

This game was supposed to have so many discoverable secrets, that it apparently wouldn’t matter. With their dev team of… I believe it was twelve hundred thousand strong? I can honestly believe it. The amount of work that’s gone into this game should be frankly ludicrous. So, enough secrets to tide over billions of players? Yeah, sure, I can see it.

I just don’t wanna be left out. No matter how many secrets there are to find, they’ll be knocked out soon enough by a ravenous horde of literally billions.

But hey, that’s enough contemplating. The game drops any second now…

Steady…

Ssssssssteeeeeady…

NOW!

Welcome to Omniscient!

YESSIR! First five seconds!

Please design your character!

Almost immediately, at least a few dozen different options popped up in my field of view. A wide open grassland with the occasional what I assume to be monster running across it. Mostly just what I’d classify as a generic trash mob.

However, that’s not what was important right now! What needed to get done, was my character creation!

First things first, character des-WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOUR CHARACTER DESIGN AFFECTS YOUR STATS!?

I mean, sure it makes sense that bigger and bulkier means more hp, and smaller and thinner means more mobile. And the stat differences aren’t really that crazy… no downside to your stature… Okay, I guess it really isn’t that big of a deal.

Anyways, I can’t be bothered to puzzle this all out right now! If I really need to I can just reset my character later. For now, probably! Uh…. give me my speed!

5’1.

…I’ll ignore that for now! Dropping an entire foot in height doesn’t bother me at all, nope, not a bit! The character model was partially based off of your real life figure, and you couldn’t go a foot shorter or taller than what you actually looked like. It didn’t affect the stat bonuses though, so it wasn’t an issue that I was already fairly tall. I assume that it’s in order to not create too much of a difference between your body in the real and fake world, so that moving still feels normal to you. My legs were shortened much less than my torso after all… actually, couldn’t that lead to some pretty goofy avatars? Like, a four foot tall person takes a foot off, would their torso just be a third of the size of their legs?

…💀💀💀, man I’d wanna see that!

Anyways, after setting my stature to the absolute minimum for the totally necessary 7% total increase to my agility stat, I flicked through the rest of the character customization. There’s no option to pick between different races, so no min maxing there, and I’m perfectly comfortable with my appearance… It’s not like I have any real reason to hide it. Brown hair, a little skinny, green eyes, pretty pale skin…

Well, it’s not like I have much reason to go out during the day. Okay, maybe I’ll tick up the melanation just a smidge. Okay, better. RIGHT! Set my name to Koth, and onto the stats!

There were a total of eight options: vitality, strength, intelligence, agility (my beloved), endurance, luck, mana, and lastly, dexterity. Though, uniquely, those latter four were categorized under a “substat” distinction. With a little question mark on top of the list. Vitality, strength, agility and luck were self explanatory, but I was curious about the distinctions between vitality and endurance, intelligence and mana, and agility and dexterity.

So, I went ahead and tapped on that there question mark.

Sub stats increase naturally regardless of stats invested into them. With three of the four sub stats correlating to an existing core stat. Gaining a boost to their effectiveness based on how high their respective core stat is.

…Well that’s sort of unique. Don’t think I’ve heard of a system like that before. So, I guess now I just check what the heck everything does.

Vitality, obviously, is your max health. Shocker, who could’ve seen that one coming? Rather predictably, it boosts endurance.

Strength affects your physical damage, as well as your critical hit damage modifier. Or at least, it says it makes up… thirty percent of it? Luck probably does the rest, honestly. Apparently this is the stat that doesn’t tie in to any of the sub stats.

Intelligence actually doesn’t increase your max mana, but what it does is lower your skill cooldowns, as well as provide a stacking bonus to the mana cost of your skills. Interesting take on the stat, so I suppose mana is the more traditional “intelligence” you’d find more widespread throughout the rest of gaming as a whole. Speaking of mana, that’s what intelligence boosts.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

Agility, is a boost to your movement and perception speed. Literally the same across every game, I dunno what else I was expecting. That’s about it though, it increases dexterity.

Now, I was already leaning pretty heavily towards agility. I hated to be slow, so I was probably gonna dump a solid chunk of my points into it. But first, I still needed to check out the sub stats.

Endurance, increases by 1 per level.

Increases by 5 per point invested.

Increases max stamina and gives a miniscule amount of overall damage resistance per point.

Boosted by vitality.

So, stamina is an actual thing? I don’t know how I feel about that, given it’s generally not implemented too well in other games… but hopefully it’s not too bad. Looks like it’s not really too much of an issue given you can apparently boost this stat like crazy. Damage resistance must be actually tiny if you can raise it by five in a single point. Could definitely see a damage resist build being nice though. Unless armor piercing is common. Actually, I should probably invest in that. Armor piercing, not the stat.

Luck, increases by 0.1 per level.

Increases by 0.25 per point invested.

Boosts the chances of a positive outcome from all factors influenced by luck.

Rather vague, but honestly sounds like that might be cracked if the scaling is good. Probably good for farming rare drops on a dedicated build.

Mana, increases by 0.2 per level.

Increases by 2 per point invested.

Increases maximum MP.

Boosted by Intelligence.

Yeah that’s straight forward enough. Looks like you’re meant to actually invest in this one, given it doesn’t increase by too much otherwise.

Dexterity, increases by 0.5 per level.

Increases by 3 per point invested.

Increases control over character movement.

Boosted by agility.

…That’s also a little bit vague, but not too big of a deal I suppose. Probably some kind of auto pilot assistance, other games have had similar mechanics. Turning thought to immediate action and stuff like that. Welp, that’s all a complicated bunch of character building that I just can’t be bothered with right now.

Agility, here I co-

Warning!

The current level cap is currently; 150. Please choose your stats carefully! Respecs are difficult to come by!

…Ahem, as I was saying, agility, here I come!

Fifteen agility, and, five vitality I guess. If it increases the effectiveness of endurance, which boosts stamina, and also a little bit of hp, no reason to not take it. Not too much though.

Only five. And with that, that’s all twenty points.

Are you satisfied with your final stats?

Koth-Traveller

Level 1

HP 120/120

MP 50/50

Stamina 103/103

Core stats

Vitality-5

Strength-0

Intelligence-0

Agility-15

Sub stats

Endurance-1

Luck-0.1

Mana-0.2

Dexterity-0.5

Unique stats

Skills

Yeah of course I am, duh.

Character creation complete, please choose a spawn location.

Three options popped up into my field of view, Forseea, a town, by the sea. How original. Firsgalia. A town, in the windy plains? Galia… windy… really? Kind of picking the low hanging fruit here aren’t we?

And finally, Resin Peak. A town in the forest on top of a plateau. At least this one is kind of original. Better than the other two, trying to hide their deficiency. So, I think I’ll go with this one.

And without any further ceremony, I was unceremoniously dropped into town. Birdsong filling my ears and a gentle sunlight piercing through branches above. The name of the location showing just in my peripheral vision.

New location discovered!

Resin Peak.

Location added to map!

Wait, wait, wait. There’s… a map… that you can fill out?

“Eh… heh heh heh…”

I got an odd glance or two from the dozens and dozens of people spawning in all at once around me, but that didn’t matter! Completionist behavior, rewarded! A MAP! TO FILL OUT! No, no… control yourself Koth. Hey, why not just take a look around town for now, right? That couldn’t hurt. Find some secrets, take a chill pill, relaaaaaax.

Kicking at the dirt beneath my feet, I roll my neck, and put the game's mobility to the test.