Chapter 101: A World Still Empty
Chapter 101: A World Still Empty
“Oh. It’s all finished.”
Yoonsu double-clicked the file. TLF Online had been developed based on Astra-G, so installation was extremely simple. Since it used a graphical interface similar to Windows, even gamers in 2025 probably wouldn’t find it too unfamiliar. Astra-G was the operating system of this world, similar to Windows 3.1.
(Translator’s Note: Windows 3.1 — Real-world Microsoft graphical operating environment released in 1992. It preceded Windows 95 and had more limited multitasking and system capabilities.)
The reason they had chosen Astra-G as the development environment was because it showed superior support capabilities for developing online games, and fundamentally speaking, Astra-G was more advantageous for game development. In truth, the current version of Astra-G still had many shortcomings, but the decision had been made while considering the future versions that would come later.
However, even knowing these advantages, they had deliberately avoided choosing it until TLF2 because Astra-G was still in the early stages of distribution, meaning the number of gamers using it was still small. It had been a strategic decision to target a broader potential user base.
But in the case of TLF Online, by the time it launched, Astra-G’s adoption rate would have risen significantly, and if things followed the course of Insu’s previous life, something like Windows 95 would appear and completely replace everything with the Astra-G side.
Once the installation finished, he entered the game. The title screen itself was not very different from the prototype he had played before. However, this time there was a login menu.
Yoonsu entered the ID and password distributed by the team leader and logged in.
The membership management system was not complete yet, so functions like registration had not been implemented.
[Alpha Server]
There was also only a single test server.
Apparently, the official service servers had already been contracted for through newly developed machines that would be brought in this time.
In truth, reliability was important for server machines like these, so using unverified new models was a gamble. However, current computers had far too many shortcomings to be used as MMORPG servers, so they had no choice.
[Connecting to the world.]
At first, it didn’t really feel like he had connected online.
That made sense. The rendered field looked similar to the prototype, and it didn’t seem particularly different from the fields in the previous TLF series.
This was due to differences in experience brought about by the era.
Since online games themselves were still unfamiliar, even after going through the process of logging in and connecting, people didn’t particularly feel or associate it with truly being online.
Moreover, there were still extremely few users, and the chat systems were primitive, so there was nothing like the world chat or global chat systems that later became familiar in MMORPGs. Most likely, he would only truly feel it later once he directly met another user — in other words, one of the coworkers currently testing together in this development room.
The early gameplay also simply felt like playing the TLF series.
No, rather, because there was no story outside the tutorial, it felt even more plain.
Still, since it was an alpha test, bugs constantly popped up, so recording them kept him from getting bored.
This feels different from what I imagined.
Yoonsu had originally planned to gear up more before enjoying party play with others. But something about it felt lacking.
Then he suddenly looked away from the monitor and turned toward the other coworkers.
But the other team members were already hammering away at their keyboards with sparkling eyes. They were chatting with other coworkers and playing in teams.
In truth, there was no need to finish preparations and search for companions the way Yoonsu had.
And there was also no reason to only find those companions inside the game.
After all, when the game officially released later, people could simply start together with their friends nearby.
Still, shouldn’t the standard be based on people playing alone at home?
Yoonsu realized he had been overly rigid, but since it felt wasteful to abandon everything he had done so far, instead of asking the coworker beside him to play together, he headed toward a nearby city.
The cities in TLF Online were far larger than those in existing packaged games.
Since there was the possibility of many people gathering and carrying out activities there, they had to account for that.
It feels empty.
The structures, buildings, and roads were all convincingly built, but because it was a test version and there were no players to fill the place, it felt like a city during a holiday season after everyone had gone back to the countryside.
“Oh!”
While wandering around for a while, he discovered another person moving around alone among the structures and NPCs.
He immediately approached and spoke.
[Hi! I’m Yoonsu. Who are you?]
[Huh? I’m Ryan. Want to travel together?]
[Yeah. Sure.]
Ryan was the quiet and indifferent type, but despite working together for years, he wasn’t such a stone Buddha that he never spoke at all. It seemed he too had found wandering around alone in this game frustrating, because once he met Yoonsu, he was the one who first requested to team up.
Afterward, the two relaxed the atmosphere by talking about their levels and how many bugs they had found.
It wasn’t that they were awkward with each other. Rather, it was awkward speaking through characters inside a game instead of face-to-face.
His character feels slightly different.
In reality, Ryan was rather taciturn, but in chat he felt fairly active.
Not dramatically talkative, but around average. More than the amount he spoke, it was his tone and confidence that gave off an energetic feeling.
Thinking Ryan was probably feeling the same way about him, Yoonsu found encounters through this MMORPG fascinating.
[What do you think? Want to form a party?]
The party system was identical to the multiplayer mode in TLF2.
Insu and the developers had thought deeply about how to implement team play.
The first idea that came up was that when entering combat, an additional allied grid field would appear for each player, with everyone sharing the timeline while attacking enemies through their own parties.
But the problem was that this consumed too many resources and was extremely vulnerable to delay.
Since it was originally a deck game, there were already many characters appearing in battle, so a large amount of data was constantly being exchanged. This system instantly doubled that.
Moreover, limiting MMORPG parties to only two members would have been ridiculous, so the load would increase proportionally with the number of party members.
Perhaps something could have been done if the network environment were extremely stable, but the moment conditions worsened even slightly, delays would constantly occur, and if things went wrong, turn orders could become tangled and bugs could explode.
Even though it was turn-based, it wasn’t a single-player game, so time limits had to be added, which made such problems even more likely.
Another proposal involved each player fighting separately, then calculating the damage dealt to enemies afterward once the enemy died or after a certain number of turns had passed.
But this immediately conflicted with the game’s unique system where characters could die permanently.
On top of that, whichever side finished battle first would have to wait endlessly, creating boredom. Combined with how difficult it would be to implement compared to how crude the result might end up looking, the idea was rejected.
In the end, they decided to slightly improve and reuse the already-proven system familiar to the TLF fandom.
That said, they had not lazily copied the resources from TLF2 directly.
Since it was being built as an MMORPG system rather than a single-player game from the start, there was still an enormous amount of work.
Rewards and item drops needed to be distributed properly. If a party member suddenly went AFK during combat or network issues occurred, they couldn’t simply invalidate the battle like in TLF2. They had to create solutions such as allowing parties to split apart and flee or temporarily enabling automatic combat progression.
There had truly been a lot to do.
<Victory>
After the battle ended, items were distributed randomly.
Originally, there had also been opinions suggesting systems where contribution would be calculated, granting item acquisition priority so people could claim items first according to their contribution.
However, concerns were raised that if the value of individual items within the total rewards became too high, the strongest party member would monopolize all the benefits. Not only would this cause dissatisfaction, but it could also intensify polarization between veterans and newbies.
In the end, the adopted systems were random distribution and the voting system.
The party leader selected the option when creating the party, and it could not be changed midway.
The voting system utilized one of the defining features of MMORPGs: chat.
Without chat, whenever a good item dropped, people would naturally select themselves every time. Of course, they could simply make it impossible to vote for oneself, but if people had to select others without communicating, it would not be much different from a random system.
So the goal was to encourage players to distribute items voluntarily through discussion — calculating contributions together or dividing up items according to who needed them.
Of course, people could agree beforehand and still lie, so they made it visible who voted for whom.
After hunting for quite a while, the two returned to the city and sold the monster byproducts to an NPC shop.
Normally, people would not sell such things immediately and would instead investigate their value first, but this game had a decay system, making that difficult.
Of course, the items did not rot instantly, so there was enough time to think about it, but the problem was that since this was only a test and there were very few players, it was difficult to determine proper market value.
[Oh. Look at this. The price dropped.]
[Huh? Seriously?]
The amount they had brought was extremely small, but there happened to be many “Giant Centipede” monsters around, so they had gathered quite a lot of the byproduct item “Centipede Venom Stingers.”
There were around thirty of them, and apparently that was enough to influence the price, even if only slightly.
Afterward, the two gradually learned more about the game while continuing testing and uncovering countless bugs.
“Ugh.”
After returning home, Insu spent some time mindlessly tearing apart the demons of hell.
The recently released Slayer 2 was currently his favorite game.
Normally, he did not play games from this era very much because they left much to be desired, but stress had built up to the point where he truly wanted to smash something. After trying various action games he had collected, this was the one that stuck.
Doom really was a masterpiece.
The graphics were still unsatisfying, but moving around at high speed while obliterating grotesque monsters appearing from all directions with explosively destructive weapons felt as if someone had opened the top of his skull and poured dopamine directly into his brain.
This alpha test for TLF Online truly had not been easy.
Of course, testing previous games had never been easy either. But they had gradually grown accustomed to it, and by the time of TLF2, they could handle things fairly calmly.
But now they were testing the unfamiliar and experimental MMORPG genre, and all kinds of bizarre bugs were erupting and tormenting Insu and his team members.
If the problems came purely from game logic, they were already used to dealing with those through developing single-player games, so most could be handled somehow.
And if the issues came purely from the network side, while unfamiliar, there were team members specializing in that area who could still deal with it.
The real problem was bugs produced by both factors combining together.
For example, during testing, Suhyeon suddenly had massive overlapping debuffs stack on a boss and instantly killed it. They spent ages searching for a logic problem, only to discover that state synchronization had fallen out of alignment, causing the debuffs to stack continuously.
Then there were phantom player phenomena where someone logged out but their character continued appearing on other players’ clients, or delays causing commands sent from the client to pile up until attack orders became completely tangled.
All kinds of bugs emerged endlessly.
These were difficult even to identify the causes of, and even after tracking them down, many were not caused by simple mistakes but by problems inherent to the online environment itself. That meant it was not enough to merely fix an error; they had to creatively develop entirely new supplementary solutions.
He and the team members had no choice but to keep wracking their brains.
Still, what was remarkable was that somehow, bit by bit, they always managed to find solutions.
But the suffering that accumulated along the way was no joke.