Chapter 110: Spontaneous Emergence

The start of TLF Online’s open beta and its successful response gave the game industry a considerable shock.

Anyone with even some interest in the field had sensed that online functionality had great potential in games. But people usually only thought of it as supplementary content.

Of course, online-only games called MUDs had existed for a long time. But their scale was truly small, so people saw them only as a niche form of consumption for enthusiasts and did not take them seriously.

But now, a game that could only exist online and could only be enjoyed online had appeared, and the response to it was far from ordinary. Naturally, people had no choice but to change their thinking.

However, while most people were amazed, there were also people falling into despair.

“Ah! I’m too late!”

It was Marvin Lowell, creator of the Eden series, one of the representative American RPG franchises.

While developing the Eden series, he had handed his company over to EA because of financial difficulties, but he continued serving as president afterward and kept developing games. In 1994, he came up with the concept of an MMORPG and repeatedly requested funding from EA to develop it. After being rejected again and again, he finally secured funding and began development in 1995.

But right in the middle of development, a game similar to what he had imagined, and in some ways even more advanced, came out into the world first.

“...”

His team members also looked utterly stunned.

They had believed no one but Marvin could create such an intricate concept, and they had thought they would shock the world by creating a game that had never existed before. Yet before they had even made an alpha version, a nearly completed game had suddenly appeared.

“...Why are you all standing there like your souls left your bodies?”

Fortunately, it did not take Marvin long to pull himself together.

“Something similar coming out during development happens all the time. It’s not completely identical either. We just need to make ours even more amazing.”

Marvin said that, but his true feelings were slightly different. What occupied his mind right now were the bold claims he had made to EA and the investment money he had dragged in.

Still, it was not entirely a lie either. If a developer failed just because a similar game came out first, there would barely be any game companies left alive.

Moreover, he already knew there were many geniuses in the world.

To begin with, the reason he had conceived this MMORPG was because he had been inspired by Slayer’s multiplayer function and TLF2’s multiplayer mode.

As he slowly regained his mental balance, he felt his drive returning.

Even when he developed the Eden series before, there had been rival games, but he had never shrunk back from them. If anything, the thought of beating them had made him burn even harder.

And now, he had grown and become even stronger than he was back then.

Marvin was thirty-five this year, an age when a developer could be at their peak. It was a time when technical maturity, creativity, passion, and experience could coexist. Of course, some people declined and disappeared after that, but Marvin had been evaluated as one of the greatest game developers so far, so he was overflowing with confidence.

Whether he could truly create something beyond TLF Online would have to be seen later.

A week had passed since TLF Online’s open beta began, and Jamie’s character reached the end of his lifespan.

The previous series were single-player games, so characters only aged while the player played. But online, time was real-time, so in the case of human characters, their lifespan ended after one week in reality.

Amen.

And because it was still the early stage, everyone only had human characters. Since there were many open beta users, a large number of characters held funerals around the same time.

Of course, there were also many users whose characters died before reaching the end of their lifespan.

When making it into an MMORPG, unlike in the single-player games, dying in combat did not immediately result in a death judgment. Instead, players were given a choice.

They could either survive while losing ten percent of their money and some equipment, or die in battle and move on to a descendant while losing twenty percent of their money and some equipment as a penalty.

One might wonder why anyone would simply die when the penalty for dying in battle was greater. But unlike the player’s own character, companions were very difficult to revive once they died. Also, in the early stages, players had little money anyway, so there was not much difference between ten percent and twenty percent. Because of that, quite a few players chose death with the idea of simply starting over from the beginning.

And if raising a character required a huge amount of time, it might have been different, but the lifespan was only one week anyway. Since the game structure itself was built around dying and continuing through descendants, players did not feel especially strong resistance toward character death.

Simply put, they felt a little regretful, but moved on fairly lightly, thinking they should do better next time.

Ah. As expected, there aren’t any particularly good descendants.

Descendants were characters created through a random combination of the player character’s traits and the traits of characters they encountered while playing.

In reality, the other character would be a spouse, but since balancing gender ratios in a game was not easy, the other character could be designated regardless of gender, resulting in an extremely PC, or rather sci-fi-like, system.

And when it said characters they had met, it did not mean ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠every character they had literally come into contact with. The candidates were companions who had joined the deck, NPCs with whom they had built bonds through quests or affection through gifts, and finally, other players married through the marriage system.

But in the first cycle, ability scores were low, fame was low, and playtime was still short, so the level of NPCs a player could meet was not high. Naturally, the level of descendants also could not be very high.

And Jamie was not particularly interested in the marriage system, so there were no player-to-player descendants among his options, but since all first-cycle players had the same stats anyway, it would not have mattered.

For marriage and descendants between players to become meaningful, enough cycles had to accumulate for individuality and differences between players to appear.

Still, even if there were no particularly good descendants, they were better than the first cycle. More importantly, there was inherited wealth along with game experience.

He naturally had ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠far more room to work with than when he started empty-handed.

However, even if cycles continued increasing, strength did not rise in direct proportion to them. Up to around the third cycle, it definitely felt like characters kept getting stronger, but the descendant system itself had a lot of randomness, and the companion system also had plenty of randomness. Overall, strength rose very gradually while going up and down.

Where should I go?

Jamie thought about where to hunt and what to conquer with his stronger party.

This was the usual play method of the TLF series before it went online.

Players repeated cycles, created new parties, somehow raised their quality within the randomness, conquered dungeons scattered across the continent, gained fame and items, and used those as a foundation to aim even higher.

TLF2 had added the fun of cooperation through one-on-one online parties. Now, parties could combine with more members than just one-on-one, and distribution was possible, so he expected a more complex kind of fun.

He had already confirmed through TLF2 and the party play he enjoyed during the test period that team play was fun.

It was not simply the pleasure of catharsis from overcoming difficulty by joining forces with others to accomplish something impossible alone. There was also fun in communication itself.

And that communication strengthened the feeling that this virtual world was real, which in turn doubled the fun again.

So even though this was growth and conquest he had repeated throughout the previous series, his interest did not fade. If anything, he felt even more anticipation.

But I also want to try trading.

He had already been interested in trading, and after seeing gamers acting as merchants while playing, his interest grew further.

More gamers than expected were interested in trade.

Perhaps because this was a capitalist world, even if only inside a game, the idea that one could make big money through price differences instead of direct labor seemed instinctively attractive.

[Buying Wolf Pelts! Paying 5% higher than shop purchase price.]

[Buying Snail Eyeballs. Only decay level one or lower.]

[Buying Centipede Head Helmets. Paying more than shop purchase price.]

Even now, whenever he entered town, there were rows of people shouting near merchant NPCs.

There were also many people who bought from NPCs and traveled elsewhere, but because they quietly came and went, it was hard to tell whether they were merchants or not. But with these people, he could immediately tell they were merchants.

They were directly buying goods from users to maximize margins by taking advantage of the difference between prices when selling to NPC merchants and prices when buying from them.

If they bought from users, they accepted risks such as items with short decay ticks lasting only an hour, the hassle of buying from users one by one, and the danger that because price information changed in real time, the price at the place they intended to sell might shift while they were gathering items, ruining the deal.

In truth, that method only worked for small-scale trading. Once large-scale trading became possible later, merchants would overwhelm reduced margins through transaction volume, so there were probably many merchants like this only because it was still the early stage of the game.

And if they learned merchant skills, they could reduce the fees taken by NPCs, making that even more true.

However, they would not disappear completely. In this game, characters could not live forever, so even if they learned skills, those skills disappeared when moving on to the next cycle. Since learning skills took time, there would inevitably be periods without those skills.

Because of that, the opportunity cost of learning non-combat skills in this game was fairly high.

(Translator’s Note: Opportunity Cost — Economic term referring to what is given up when choosing one option over another. Here, it means the time spent learning non-combat skills cannot be used for other growth or activities.)

There was no limit to learning skills, but just like in reality, one’s lifetime was fixed, and a considerable portion of it had to be spent on this. In effect, the number of skills a character could learn during their actual lifespan was limited.

This was also why Jamie could not immediately decide to become a merchant. And there were other ways to earn money besides becoming ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠a merchant.

First, there was transportation work.

[Anyone going to Asmo?]

[400 kg left.]

[Express service to Prindern.]

Carriages from TLF2 were implemented here too. In the single-player game, the player used them alone, but here, they could also carry other characters and the cargo those characters held, which gave rise to this occupation.

Fundamentally, carriages had penalties such as difficulty traveling through rough terrain and being unable to enter dungeons, but in exchange, their movement speed was faster than that of ordinary people.

There was no system support specifically telling players to run transportation businesses, but by using Companion Mode in a party, party members automatically boarded the party leader’s carriage. Players took advantage of that by forming parties and receiving money through one-on-one trades.

In this game, not only items but also characters had weight, and carriages naturally had a maximum weight limit, so transportation work could be done fairly realistically.

One might say that if someone had a carriage, they should just become a merchant, but as mentioned earlier, they needed to learn skills. And even after carrying goods somewhere, there might not be any price difference, so merchant work itself carried risks. Transportation work, where one could steadily receive transport fees, had its own differentiated merits.

Another type of work was escorting.

[Second cycle, Level 20. I can shred anything up to wolves.]

[Heading to Pridern. Anyone need an escort?]

This was a world full of monsters, so simply roaming the world came with the risk of being attacked. Merchants had to learn merchant skills and did ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠not fight much, so they were fundamentally weak.

Moreover, player bandits also existed, so merchants needed ways to protect themselves from them. Because of that, people began asking high-level, multi-cycle users traveling elsewhere to accompany them, giving rise to this occupation.