The trip back was uneventful and as we arrived back at the entrance we were greeted by a large woman wearing a dark purple velvet dress with matching gloves that came up to her elbow.

“Judging by the look of you, you must be the adventurers I spoke with. Did you clear out those nasty goblins?” she asked.

“We killed a bunch of them,” Malthiel replied, “but we were unable to slay their leader. It seems an entire warren has made camp in the caverns below your town. The basement of this building needs to be reinforced or at the very least the entrance needs to be guarded, though at the moment they are unable to cross the gap to re-enter through the basement.”

“While it sounds like you did the bare minimum of what I asked, I suppose you are technically finished with the task I gave you. Thank you. You may go.” She stated with a dismissive wave of her hand.

“What about our reward?” cried someone from the crowd. Several other echoed affirmations.

“I believe I can help with that.” said someone from the back of the room. The group collectively turned towards the entrance to see who had spoken up. In the doorway stood the GM, still wearing his pristine white suit and bow tie. On either side of him stood the two crafters that had loaded in with us but hadn’t joined the raid on the town. They looked worn out but happy so I assumed they had finished their objectives.

“So what did you think?” asked the GM. A roar of noise answered back as everyone in the group started speaking at once, talking about the goblin fight, how this town looked, and their respective experiences. “Hmm, this won’t work” he said. All of a sudden the noise vanished. And so did the town and the rest of the players. “That’s better” he said sitting down behind the desk that appeared as the area I had first appeared in loaded back around us. “Take a seat. I would love to hear your feedback.”

“What happened to everyone else?” I asked

“They have all loaded into their respective rooms and are having similar conversations.” He replied

“Oh, that makes sense. One on one feedback is probably more useful that that babble would have been anyway.” I said “I quite enjoyed playing so far. I think the large group was a bit unwieldy and the game definitely has a high learning curve but it's definitely a game I can see myself putting a lot of time into.”

“A large learning curve?” He asked.

“Well, I got these poisons but I’m not sure how to use them. I assume that a trainer or something would give me more insight but with how we loaded in we never talked to a trainer.” I stated.

“If you open your menu you should be able to apply it to your weapon slot.” he stated.

“Well that's another thing I haven’t seen a menu yet, and the communication system, while intuitive when we got used to it, definitely took some guessing to figure out.” I replied

“What do you mean you haven’t seen a menu?” He asked “If you press the button on your HUD in the top right corner it should open right up.”

“Ummm…” I started “not sure what you mean by HUD, I don’t seem to have one. Maybe I accidentally turned it off?”

“Don’t have a HUD?” he questioned “What do you mean you don’t have a HUD, you see your health and energy in the upper left corner don't you?”

“I don’t see anything” I replied “I can’t imagine how the healers managed to keep everyone alive during the goblin fight.”

“Hold on a second” His eyes seemed to glaze over and his face relaxed to a neutral expression.

About a minute later the word initializing appeared in front of my face, no matter where I looked it stayed right in front of me. When the bar below the word finished filling, red and yellow bars appeared in the upper left of my vision. In the upper right was a circle with three horizontal lines in the center of it. As I reached up to try and press it the GM spoke up again.

“Can you see anything now?” He asked.

“I saw the word initializing and now I have what appear to be health and energy bars as well as a menu button. What did you do?” I responded

“Apparently right before we started today the user interface developers were working on streamlining the HUD as well as some of the menu icons, and they had disabled them in game. I was unaware of this and we sent you all off without the means of proper interfacing with the game!” he said.

“Thankfully the enemies weren’t exactly tough.” I said “I feel like we were a bit OP for new characters, if this is what we should expect it’s going to be a pretty easy game.”

“The enemies you were facing were all level one that you would expect to find in a game's starting area. Your stats however were that of a level 25 character. We couldn’t exactly have our first testers and beta streamers get wiped out at the beginning of the game.” he laughed.

“I see...” I began “while that worked for this first run I feel like we’re going to be seen as given “special streamer treatment” for being boosted. You know, more than we already are, seeing as we’re the first ones able to play.”

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“No fears there, you won’t stay boosted. We wanted to give you a taste of the game and some decent footage for your first entry into the game but next time you log in you’ll be a fresh level one. The only thing you’ll keep is the skills you picked up today, as a little bonus.” He explained.

“I had noticed that I never got any skill levels for those skills. I guess it makes sense why now.” I said.

“Correct. Now I have a few things to explain before we wrap things up but I will try to make them quick. Let me know if you have any questions as we go along.” He said and I nodded in acknowledgement.

“First this room, while currently bare, is your log in space. You can arrange and place anything you need from the menu. Each player will log into an area like this before they enter the game. It's a way for our system to prepare the game before the player enters. Additionally, as this game takes place while you are sleeping, if for some reason you are woken up in the real world your character will be immediately moved to this room to prevent any death or other unfortunate circumstances. When you log out of the game you will also reappear here. With that being said you are unable to manually log out if you are currently in battle or danger. This is to prevent people from running from fights by logging out.”

“That makes sense I guess, otherwise people would just use this room as a free cheat death.” I said

“Correct and if there’s no consequences for people's actions then they won’t hesitate to take risks, and overall the game will be less fun. Which brings up a second point, or maybe more of an addition to the first point. Death in this game has a penalty. When you die, you will be transported to the last safe zone you visited, a town or city usually. Additionally, you will lose 10% of your current level’s experience.” He continued.

“Ouch that seems harsh.” I said.

“And it maybe, along with everything else we will be monitoring this as we move along. We will also be taking feedback from the players. If you are all dying a lot and it’s becoming too difficult to progress, and it's not through a fault of your own obviously, we are not opposed to lowering the amount lost. However, if people are ignoring the penalty and abusing the system by killing themselves to get back to town quickly, or some other nonsense, we are not opposed to raising that amount to a point where it becomes unappealing to do so.” He said.

“Secondly,” he continued “and in regards to the player feedback I just mentioned, if you sit where I’m currently sitting and say aloud “I would like to provide feedback” the room will automatically record what you say next and flag it for developer review. While every player has the ability to do this, we are asking your group as our beta testers to provide a quick update after each session. It could be just your general feeling about your session or something specific you ran into. On top of this, while you are in the game you can open your menu at any time and click provide feedback and the game will capture your statements as well as get a snapshot on what is occurring around you and send it to the devs. There is also a bug report option which does the same thing but adds a bug flag to the report.”

“That makes sense to me.” I say “after all you are providing us with early access for testing purposes we can at least provide some feedback.”

“Precisely. Lastly, and my most favorite thing to be able to reveal, starting when you log in your next time you will begin using our living weapon system.” He says.

“So it's going to talk to me?” I ask “Seems kind of creepy to me.”

“It will not talk to you” he laughs “but it will grow with you. You won’t replace your weapons as you level like in other games. Instead they will change as you level. And they will change based on how you use them. If, as I suspect, you start using that poison as you fight your weapon will respond to that, making it easier to apply poison to the blade, and easier to administer to your enemies. Another example might be your offhand weapon. If you rarely strike with it, but parry attacks often with it, it may morph to have a knuckle guard, or the blade may split allowing you to more easily trap enemy weapons with it. The possibilities are endless and all based on the way you use the weapons.”

“That is awesome!” I shout “It’s definitely an interesting way to avoid us getting gear we are unable to use or that doesn’t fit our play style. Though I am going to miss getting drops, it's exciting to get new stuff every once in a while you know?”

“We do understand that feeling, and you will still get armor drops that you will need to keep updating as you level, but we wanted at least the weapons to feel like items that were personal to you.” he said.

“Awe man does that mean I’m going to look like a noob the next time I log in?” I asked quickly “I like the way I look!”

“This appearance you have made will be your default appearance, while changing gear will change how you look, you can at any time morph your armor to look like this current appearance. Also you can change this appearance in this room by interacting with the mirror over there.” he said while pointing to a mirror hanging on the wall that I swear wasn’t there when we arrived. “While I understand your desire to keep your look, and I understand the idea of keeping your appearance similar throughout your streams, we have an amazing art department that is constantly coming up with new designs for armor so I would advise you to look at gear you get and play around with your looks. That about covers it on my end for this session, did you have any questions for me?”

“A few,” I said “first of all what was up with that creepy laughing kid that spawned in with us?”

“He is a player, just like you.” The GM said “he has his motivations for playing, just as you have yours. His quest was tailored to him. Anything more than that is player confidentiality I’m afraid, next time you see him why don’t you ask?”

“I can understand that I guess, I will try to talk to him if I see him again.” I say “I think for now I am set, just excited to play some more.”

“We have put a lot of time into this game and are all excited to see what you think of it. We will get you the footage from tonight in the next few days. Until then, enjoy the game.” he says with a wave.

“Oh hey last question!” I say trying to catch him before he leaves. “What would have happened if we had hit that tripwire in the mansion?” I ask.

“Nothing.” he says with a wink that clearly meant he was hiding something and with a laugh he blinked out of the room.

After he disappeared a large red digital clock appeared on the wall "TIme til force logoff: 10:00" it read. With that amount of time I wouldn't really enjoy the game so I dove into the settings. Now that I had the HUD and was able to interact I moved things around more to my liking. I found that i was able to attach my health, energy and experience bars to my arm like a smart watch and turned the notifications to only appear outside of battle. It would suck to have notifications popping up in the middle of combat. I also found that after I delayed the notifications I was able to compound like notifications as a single prompt per type, so all experience would be condensed to one message, as well as skill gain and drops. According to the tooltip the only thing that wouldn't condense were unique drops which was understandable.

With that taken care of I exited for the night.