Dawn of the Realms (The Realms of Mordred Book 1) Page 2

  The area was clearly visible, just beyond an impassable gate. I explored the area thoroughly, but there was no apparent means to raise it. During my fruitless search, several passing players laughed at the noob trying to go to an out-of-bound zone.

  One rather more helpful lady, tagged by the system as Josephination, informed me that she thought the entrance to that area was bound to some kind of quest line. She’d seen the gate open for someone, but by the time she made it to the gate, it had closed again. She looked through it, trying to see if someone was exploring, but they were already gone. She’d just assumed it was some kind of warp, perhaps to a dungeon within the town. I thanked her for the advice, and she just told me to message her if I figured it out.

  After that, I next checked out the forest I had fought the giant rats in. That memory was a bit clearer, and it only took me ten minutes to find my way there. The area was a resplendent view of a forest in mid-fall, all the colors of autumn stretched out as far as the eye could see. As with the rest of the game, the textures were good but not amazing, but the animation of the trees was absolutely perfect. Swaying in a gentle wind, the leaves looked incredible, like they might give way and fall to the ground at any moment. It was like a painting come to life, just this small motion of a forest that made the whole thing seem alive.

  That had been a big selling point, the animation engine. I didn’t know much of the technical details, what they had going on under the hood, but the animations were generated moment by moment, not preprogrammed. So the trees swayed in the digital winds, just as my character moved through the forest with a steady gait, and would actually come to a stop slowly, rather than shifting instantly from movement to rest. Similarly, when I began running back to town, the character didn’t just clip through trees, he’d put his hand out if I came too close, steadying himself. And when I fought a wandering goblin that charged me, an attack input was inviolate - you couldn’t do anything else until the attack completed, unless you yourself were hurt and were unable to shrug off the blow. In turn, when the goblin stabbed my character in the shin with a dagger, my character stumbled, and the animations showed him favoring his leg until his health was restored.

  Most of the combat’s complexity was built around the engine. Instead of a large number of special abilities, character had only a few to augment their attacks, and instead had a set of attacks per weapon equipped to use, mostly strikes at different angles. Fights involved avoided blows, and striking the enemy where they were weak, and generally using tactical positioning and timing. Games had been done like it before, but the animation engine involved this time took it to another level.

  That incredible animation engine had got a third of the playerbase into Dawn of the Realms. Another third of course was just looking to get their hit on the latest big name MMO. The rest had bought into the promise of a truly epic story played out not in the usual MMO way of every single player doing the same quests in an endless repetition, but powered by a procedural content engine. The devs didn’t promise a unique quest every time, they’d have been laughed out the room, but they did promise variations on a theme, and content that built upon the works of others, and generally acknowledged change.

  I’d already experienced that. There was a militia in Isperra that was always willing to hire demigods - the game’s term for player characters - which was always sending the players out to different parts of the countryside to clear out pests and encroaching dangers. Each time, if the quest was near an area that had been cleared recently, the guard passing out the missions would worry about the increasing danger in that area. If it was somewhere that had been stable, he’d instead comment on how important it was to preserve that peace. And if the player involved had done missions for the city already, the guard would give a bit more advice when passing out quests, sometimes even giving out more unique missions for those that were trusted.

  Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t perfect. Once you’d done enough of the quests, you still started to see the rules engine involved. You could begin to parse out the rules used to generate the quests, and see the patterns. Still, after years of waiting in line behind ten others so that I too could turn in ten wolf hides and save the village, I at least appreciated the greater degree of realness the system imparted.

  And eventually, still to be found but hidden somewhere within the Realms, we had been promised a grand story to change the world itself.

  We’d assumed that meant the game world. I’m pretty sure even the marketing team didn’t know the truth of it.

  Still, even until then, we had plenty for us to do, and the game was pretty fluid in how it handed out its quests. So the quest with the giant rats wasn’t really outside the realm of possibility for such a system - see, I brought us back around to it!

  The zones weren’t perfectly consistent in which monsters were spawned, and the spawn changes would generally happen before the quests were assigned. These would then be altered again when a quest was completed. Thus the fact that I didn’t find any giant rats even after a few hours of wandering through the woods didn’t really prove much at all.

  I asked a few of the other players I saw in the woods if they’d seen any giant rat spawns in the area.

  “Need them to craft the brigand armor?” asked one, a Mr. Hellakillerboy - the GMs generally cracked down on any name that didn’t seem, well, to be a name, but the occasional person still slipped through. He was wearing black leather armor with fur trim, and had a massive axe gripped in both hands.

  “Yeah, something like that,” I answered.

  “I farmed for them in the sewers of Vailos. Admittedly that’s a long trip to the north, but it’s definitely worth it if you’re interested in the brigand set,” he replied, and as he did so his avatar tapped his hand against the chest piece of his armor. “God, I’m still not used to the animation system.”

  “And voice recognition,” I replied as well, as my avatar actually spread his hands as if making a point. “The system had to know you were talking about your own armor, to insert that movement.”

  “Oh man, you’re right. I wonder how - ah, sorry, just got messaged that the Golden Stag spawned nearby, catch you later!”

  The tech was impressive, even if you remove possible-dream-shenanigans. It was all the more impressive considering the company behind it had started out making tabletop games about seven years ago, and this was their first digital, and by far biggest, project thus far.

  Narrative Solutions started with a staff of five people, putting out about a dozen or so small projects meant to be played around a table by friends. They had been a moderate success, and then five years ago they had put out that they were looking for investors. The info pack, much passed around in the years since, stated that they had designs for a unique gaming experience and were looking for a money backer to vastly increase the size of their company to bring their dream to fulfillment. They were shooting for the stars, and had absolutely no reason to think they’d make it.

  Then a mystery investor had given them a half billion dollars.

  Overnight the company exploded, hiring hundreds of staff. Then two years of silence. Three years ago they’d made a big intro at one of the gaming expos, showing up with a massive booth, boundless enthusiasm, and about a dozen screenshots. They got the usual big attention that comes with a project that seems to have a dream exceeding their grasp, as lots of people began to build up hype that would almost certainly be betrayed.

  Then two more years of near silence. The occasional screenshot or blog post from the team describing grand goals and ambitions, but little more besides. In time Narrative Solutions and their unnamed MMO became yet another entrant in the pantheon of games which never arrived, another running joke.

  For most people, at least. I mean, it was blindingly obvious that the game would never come out, and even if it did it was going to be trash. The entire project had been too ambitious, even coming from a tried and tested team. For a group built by five people with no video g
ame experience at all, let alone anything within the MMO market, it was ludicrous.

  And yet.

  Ok, so, don’t give me a look, I didn’t plan this, even though I know how it looks, but I think most gamers have always been dreamers at heart. Isn’t that what games ultimately sell, the dream? The dream of being someone other than who you are, the dream of exploring a vast realm beyond our own, the dream of being somebody. That’s what games are, just dreams you happen to be able to buy. So gamers are dreamers, which is why we fall for hype time after time. Because we want to believe that dream, we want it to be real, we want those fellow dreamers to succeed in their dreams so that we can visit them too. So as much as people made fun of Narrative Solutions, they also kind of believed.

  Then a year ago the first real trailers hit, with an open beta soon after, and suddenly the dream was real.

  Just like mine.

  I didn’t really do anything else of consequence that evening before bed. A few members of my guild messaged me, but I mostly ignored them. Sara also messaged me several, several times, and I took my life into my own hands and ignored those too. I’d already been ignoring her calls for the past few hours, so it was no time to turn back.

  I didn’t feel like dealing with people at that moment. The excitement, the worry, it was all too much, and I was completely unable to share it. The excitement was that it was getting late, and I was going to discover if this was all nonsense or not. The worry was that it might just be nonsense. What was I going to do if I laid down, fell asleep, and woke up with nothing different in the morning? How do you even move forward after something like that? “Sorry, you thought the coolest thing of all time was happening, but instead you just had a cool dream?” It’d be better to have never even experienced it.

  I couldn’t tell anybody until I’d confirmed it, until I had some way to prove it. I was not going to be that crazy guy. I briefly had thought about telling Sara, and I would tomorrow once I knew for sure. I knew she was gonna be pissed, but the honest truth was I was afraid to tell her without proof. I could take the suspicion or pity or laughter from anyone else, but the thought of disappointing her was really more than I could stomach. Either tonight I’d confirm something amazing enough to make up for skipping class, or tomorrow I would plead sickness and promise another marathon session of her favorite SRPG to make up for it. At least she was easy enough to bribe.

  The last thing I did before falling asleep was teleporting into a new Shard, the name Dawn of the Realms used for servers. That was pricy - not in terms of gold, not for the first time, but each account was only given a single free Shard change pass. To get back to Isperra would take three thousand gold, which was about twenty three hundred more than I currently had. Still, that was a later problem, not a now problem, and so I chose to ignore it. I decided it was worth it because it would be easier in the morning to confirm things. I’d try to visit new places in the dream, and when I woke up I could confirm if the areas from the dream were really there. Since I’d already explored all of Isperra, the only way to do that would be to go somewhere new just before I fell asleep.

  At a whim, I chose to visit Korak, a mountain hold apparently surrounded by fields of ice and snow.

  After arriving in Korak, I picked the first inn I could find, and then I logged off. I ignored the pile of messages I had received over the past few hours, and laid in bed. I expected it to take a while to go to sleep, and I was not disappointed. Still, eventually sleep came, and I was out.

  I distinctly remember the last thing I thought before I fell asleep. It was a sad thought, a resigned thought. I thought for sure that I was going to fall asleep, and I would awaken in the morning to find nothing had happened. I was certain of it. I’d maintained a headlong descent into madness all day, trying desperately to preserve an illusion of something grand, but come morning it would be time to move on.

  When I opened my eyes, and felt the sheets around me, the disappointment was palpable. Then I realized that the sheets weren’t mine – I recognized the feel of silk, even if I’d never actually slept in silk sheets before. I immediately threw the sheets off my body and sat up.

  The room was technically my own, but only because I had just paid two silver to rent it for the night.

  I was in the Stilkun Inn, in the merchant district of Korak. I was in the game.

  3

  I know I have a tendency to ramble, but it’s really hard to present the next hour without doing so. The problem isn’t that the memory is hazy. This time, there was no dreamlike haze, no lack of clarity. Everything was vivid and coherent.

  The problem is it was a really busy hour. There were so many thoughts, so many things to do, and even in my memory I can’t disentangle all of it properly. So here’s a number of things that I discovered back then.

  As I already said, this time I was coherent in a way I hadn’t been previously. I might have chalked it up to just the fact that I was experiencing, rather than remembering, if I hadn’t seen another quest message pop up at the top of my vision.

  Quest Completed: Waking Up. +500 XP, +1 Mythic Point

  That seemed promising, so I immediately opened up my quest log for the details.

  Quest: Waking Up (Complete)

  Quest Line: Demigod of the Realms

  You have gained possession of a Rune of Awakening. You are no longer a mere observer of this Realm, but may now instead awaken within your Avatar. How long will it take you to acclimate to this new power, and where will you go from here?

  Quest Reward: +500 XP, +1 Mythic Point

  Helpful not helpful. It implies a lot without explaining a single useful thing. So, basically a normal quest description.

  This investigation naturally lead into another question. Basically, what the hell is a Mythic Point? The short answer, for the moment, was that I didn’t have a clue. It was present on my status screen, but unlike the other attributes I had there was no menu to open to use it. Nor could I find anything about it in the help files. I resolved to keep it in mind, but for the moment I decided to change over to more pressing concerns.

  I also played around with the menu while I had it out. As it had the night before, my body seemed to instinctively know how to navigate it, turning my every impulse into a physical motion. All of the normal stuff was there, but there was a few options that I didn’t remember being present in the PC version.

  First, there was a minimalist mode for the menus that I tried out. It was… odd. Really odd. When I selected it, the menu before me disappeared. Instead, the information I was formerly being presented visually seemed to just appear in my thoughts. I had a feeling this was more useful - it would be quicker to just have information flow through my mind instead of having to go through physical motions to navigate - but for the moment I couldn’t get over how disconcerting it felt. Having thoughts in my head that I hadn’t actually thought was just not pleasant.

  Another new menu option, which had replaced every other option in the controls menu, was an Autonomous Bodily Reaction slider. Currently it was set to 40%. Playing around with it was another very disconcerting experience. Changing the value to 100% created a kind of out of body experience. I was no longer directly in control of my body, but instead issuing commands that it carried out. I still felt sensations, all the input was coming directly to me, but I had no direct control of the output whatsoever. Setting the value to 0% seemed fine at first, but it took me nearly fifteen minutes to get the menu back to the setting screen to readjust it. It seemed to remove all the “my body knows how to do things, I just need to barely start it” actions that I’d been relying upon so far. Again, I decided to keep the setting at the default for the time being.

  Then there were a couple of menus that were currently greyed out. I had great hopes for those in the future. Some of them were maddeningly beyond comprehension, as if my eyes just wouldn’t focus on them, while the others read Realm Status, Faction, and Mystarum. The last seemed similar to Mythic Point, while being just differ
ent enough to imply it might be a different system.

  Now, I made that whole scene sound pretty thorough and mechanical. In actuality, the order of events was more like this.

  Step one, excited screaming.

  “I’m in the game, woo!”

  Step two, notice something.

  “Oh man, what’s this do? Oh wow.”

  Step three, more nerding out in excitement.

  “I’m actually in the game!”

  Rinse and repeat for like an hour.

  Another thing I noticed during that time was that I was actually cold. I’d briefly noticed the snow banks and ice that covered everything as far as the eye could see when I entered the Shard, but I hadn’t given it any thought. In this state, though, the chill was noticeable. After shivering for a good half hour while going through the menus, at some point I finally noticed the fireplace set into the wall. One body-autopilot later, and a roaring fire had banished the worst of the chill and I was able to carry out some more examinations in relative comfort.

  In the category of sensations, I took some food and drink out of my inventory to see what that would be like. It all tasted vaguely correct, but the flavors were muted. Disappointing, but honestly if that was the least immersive aspect of this I think I could deal.

  I paced the room a bit, trying touch. The silk sheets were my intro, but the stone of the hearth, the grain of the wood on the table and chairs, even the fibers in the rug, all of it was seemingly perfect. Smooth, rough, down to the slightest sensation everything felt like it should.

  And sight – I mean, everything was perfect. This wasn’t just a few simple textures, this was a perfect one for one recreation of reality. Throwing open the window, all of the town was arrayed before me, continuing on until the distant forests swamped it all. No draw distance, and seemingly no use of lower res at a distance, just the normal limits of vision.