Chapter 109: The Beginning of Virtual Reality
Chapter 109: The Beginning of Virtual Reality
It really feels like a living world.
There were definitely a lot of people, and with everyone constantly moving around, the world felt vividly alive.
Previously, aside from the tutorial quest, there had not really been much story content, so honestly, the game had felt somewhat aimless. But seeing all these other people busily moving around made that feeling disappear. Instead, he started feeling like he also needed to do something.
First comes hunting.
This game did not have fixed hunting grounds.
One of the simulations running on the server concerned monster ecology. Connected to Strategy Mode, these monsters also belonged to factions, and their numbers and territories changed through battles between factions and hunting by gamers.
It sounded complicated, but it was really just a simple turn-based simulation.
Of course, displaying or applying these strategic situations in real time was impossible with the current level of technology and infrastructure, so only the results were applied every three hours.
Simply put, it was like running a Three Kingdoms AI battle on a separate machine and applying the results to the server at set intervals. And even in the simulation, the only thing that changed was the type of monsters spawning, so it did not place much burden on either the server or the client.
In any case, because of this system, gamers had to find hunting grounds spontaneously.
Whoa. There are so many people.
Even so, players’ activity ranges were still narrow, so they ended up gathering in similar places to hunt. Jamie saw gamers fighting monsters all over the place.
Naturally, this stimulated his competitive spirit.
It was not just psychological either. There were actually fewer monsters to hunt, so if he did not hurry, other people would steal his prey.
After that, Jamie hunted as if possessed for quite a while.
This kind of competitive drive was one of the biggest factors that immersed people in games.
And after reaching the so-called base level, Level 5, he went to find his first companion.
If he kept hunting alone, he would gain all the experience himself, so growth could be fast, but because his combat power was low, he could only hunt weak enemies.
Moreover, first-cycle characters had truly terrible stats, which made things even worse. Sometimes, after several playthrough cycles, people rolled a strong character and enjoyed solo play by mowing enemies down alone, but right now, forget mowing enemies down, he could even get beaten to death by snail-like creatures. Finding companions quickly was the correct answer.
“They all suck.”
Still, even if he needed companions, the companions obtainable with early-game stats were predictable.
In the TLF series, charisma stats and fame were fundamentally important when recruiting companions.
Beyond that, there were random required traits. Sometimes it required certain stats to be above a certain level, or possession of specific skills. Occasionally, it even required items or money.
These companions were randomly generated characters and would eventually rotate out after some time, but the interval was inconsistent and rather long, so waiting for a desired character was unrealistic.
Usually, it was more common to travel around looking for places where desired characters appeared.
And naturally, these characters appeared identically for all players. Just because someone else recruited them did not mean they disappeared from another player’s list.
That was admittedly unrealistic, but if these companion characters existed only once each in the world like in reality, then only the people who got the good characters first would benefit, while everyone else would have to fight over leftovers. That would not be fun at all.
In the end, Jamie hired a wandering mercenary at a tavern.
At such a low level, there was no way to know how a character’s stats would turn out after growth anyway, so he simply chose one whose traits were not too bad.
[Fearless] [Overheated Type] [Glutton]
“Fearless” was technically an inferior version of Courage, but it greatly reduced the chance of panicking and lowered combat power reduction from debuffs, making it quite useful.
Overheated Type increased combat power when health dropped low, making it especially strong in unstable early-game compositions.
Glutton was simply a negative trait that increased food consumption, but considering the positive traits above, it was manageable.
For a character obtainable in the early game, this was actually fairly good.
And this was also the judgment of someone who was both a TLF fan and a closed beta tester.
Should I level up some more and then start trading?
The standard growth path was to hunt, level characters, sell obtained items, gather money, and buy equipment, but this game also offered several other options.
The most representative was trading.
If someone gathered money first, they could quickly build a strong team by using wealth to buy expensive equipment and recruit companions who accepted large sums of money instead of other conditions.
Or they could even become bandits.
Attacking random people directly would immediately build up a criminal record and lower fame, but if someone went to the borders of hostile factions and robbed enemy-side characters, they could even gain fame instead of penalties.
There were many things players could do if they learned how to exploit the systems.
[Excuse me.]
[Yeah?]
Someone suddenly spoke to him while he was leveling.
The person’s name was “Wizard of Hell.”
For someone supposedly from hell, they were surprisingly friendly.
Nothing about the interaction felt awkward, and Jamie, who had become so immersed that he forgot, suddenly remembered that party play had definitely been efficient during the closed beta.
[Want to form a party? It’s hard to fill companion slots early on.]
[Sounds good.]
<An invitation has arrived.>
The invitation came immediately.
Jamie accepted it while thinking the other person’s hands were fast.
After that, Jamie enjoyed the game so much that he completely lost track of time. Eventually, his mother came home from work and scolded him before he ate dinner.
Even after that, he kept staring longingly at the computer, desperately wanting to log back in.
Under Insu’s strong insistence, Parallel Soft invested heavily into servers from the very beginning.
“WET is there too, so it’s not like the servers will ever sit idle anyway.”
“That’s true.”
Internet growth had already exploded to the point that WET’s daily visitors had surpassed four million.
That was more than triple the number from just half a year ago.
Moreover, because they had added community boards, chat rooms, email, news, and various other content, the required resources had increased even more explosively.
So these days, they were no longer even trying to predict usage. They were simply expanding servers nonstop. Even if a game that had just launched overestimated demand and left servers unused, it would not become a problem.
“Huh? Huh?! It’s overflowing! Hurry and connect more servers!”
TLF Online’s open beta began even more explosively than anyone imagined.
Servers had been prepared, but some were still on standby because it had not yet been fully decided whether they would be assigned to WET or the game. Setting up servers was not an easy task either.
But as soon as the servers opened, capacity filled up like crazy, forcing the operations team to scramble around like a house was on fire.
“Ten thousand people?!”
Insu was shocked when he heard the number of first-day registrations.
As far as he remembered, in his previous life, even The Kingdom of the Winds only had concurrent users in the hundreds during its early official service period, and it took half a year to reach around five thousand.
And that was despite The Kingdom of the Winds being fairly sensational from open beta onward.
But TLF Online had registrations in the tens of thousands and more than two thousand concurrent users.
Insu once again felt the sheer scale of the American market.
What Insu did not realize, however, was that Parallel Soft’s ability to accommodate those numbers from day one would also leave a mark on gaming history.
Even afterward, the heat did not die down easily, and both registrations and concurrent users exploded day after day.
By the end of the first week, registrations had surpassed thirty thousand, while concurrent users exceeded five thousand.
[The Beginning of a Virtual Reality World!]
The results were shocking enough that some game and computer magazines actually used expressions like that.
Internet articles had already started publishing headlines like this from the very first day.
[GameFront Weekly – January 27, 1996]
TLF Online Surpasses 10,000 Registrations on Opening Day – Shockwaves Across the U.S. Game Market
Insu’s heart had already been racing when the open beta began, but seeing reactions like this made chills run down his spine.
It felt as if the dream he had once made of creating virtual reality had already come true.
Of course, that was just how it felt.
If things keep going like this, we might actually be able to take over the American market first.
Naturally, now that Parallel Soft had achieved such massive success, other developers and studios were surely starting their engines after seeing this.
True success would only come if they crushed those competitors in brutal competition.
While Insu floated around excitedly, the other development team members tirelessly monitored the game and various communities for feedback.
With open beta, tester reports barely came in anymore, so they had to search through indirect methods like this.
Of course, some users still occasionally sent long-form opinions or reports through gaming sites or email, so reports had not disappeared entirely.
Still, no matter how hard they monitored, it was not as hectic as during earlier testing phases.
Just as Insu had repeatedly warned them to treat this like an official launch, they had thoroughly debugged the game, so there were no major bugs standing out.
Because of that, while monitoring, the team members also had enough room to look at player reactions and feel proud.
This is insane!
Clayton, one of the network developers, genuinely felt goosebumps.
He had previously developed and operated a MUD himself, so he understood online games fairly well.
Even Dungeon Creeper, the kind of MUD he had aimed for and one of the most commercially successful MUDs around, had never reached one thousand peak concurrent users.
But this game surpassed two thousand concurrent users on its very first day.
And by the end of the first week, it had surpassed five thousand, with the number continuing to rise in real time.
Even considering how quickly the internet is spreading...
Clayton had always felt enormous attraction and potential in online games, but people naturally judged based on their own experience, so he had assumed online games like MUDs would ultimately remain niche entertainment for enthusiasts.
But now, it looked as if it was drawing in everyone online and swelling into an entirely separate world.
To Clayton, the line between reality and science fiction felt blurry.
Quite a few of Insu’s team members shared similar impressions.
And the thought most of the team shared was simple.
They had succeeded again.
Geniuses really are different, huh?
At first, Lee Suhyeon had actually been somewhat negative about the MMORPG project.
After all, they already had a proven RPG IP, so to him, trying to develop an entirely new genre that still felt vague seemed far too reckless.
He glanced sideways at Insu, his team leader.
The boy he had watched since childhood had grown rapidly and now clearly stood over 160 centimeters tall. He was taller than many adult women now, and even the fuzz on his face had thickened noticeably.
But despite growing older, he had not lost his genius at all. If anything, it still seemed as though he could see things ordinary people like Suhyeon could not.
I should stick with him to the end.
In Suhyeon’s eyes, Insu was not someone who would stop at merely becoming the owner of a moderately successful game company.
That was especially true after creating something like WET.
A magazine he had read previously estimated WET’s value in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
Honestly, Suhyeon still struggled to understand why WET was considered that valuable, but considering AOL’s market capitalization was ten billion dollars, maybe the estimate was not wrong after all.
Ah. If our company had gone public already, I would’ve bought shares immediately.
In truth, Suhyeon was not the only one who highly valued Parallel Soft’s growth potential. Most of the team members felt the same way.
In any case, now that success was visibly right in front of them, morale rose across the team, and that made everyone focus even harder on ensuring the open beta succeeded.