Chapter 122: Knight
Chapter 122: Knight
[Anyone going to Arden?]
As Eric passed along the main road packed with players, a carriage went by in front of him. Judging from the chat displayed above it, the player was probably a transporter. Soon, the chat window stirred with people asking about the price, travel time, and other details.
This game really had all kinds of occupations. By occupations, this did not mean RPG classes like swordsman or mage, but player-created roles that naturally emerged among gamers, such as transporters.
What’s even fun about doing that?
But people had different ways of thinking and different aptitudes, so the occupations they chose were all different. Of course, the most common one was simply adventurer.
Since they had logged in knowing this was basically an RPG, there were probably very few people who disliked adventuring. But on the other hand, just as Eric wondered, there were also quite a few occupations that made it difficult for players to understand why others would do them.
I heard it’s fun to travel around and chat with other people, though.
In truth, being a transporter also had its own thrills and fun. Since they had to cross fields, they naturally had to deal with monsters, but more than that, driving off bandit players was apparently no ordinary task.
Moreover, since it was hard to drive them off personally, they had to hire mercenaries. But even these mercenaries were hard to trust, so they had to choose people carefully, worry about costs, and handle all kinds of operational elements. Some people found that kind of thing fun.
But Eric apparently was not that type.
Originally, he had also planned to raise his character to a certain level, save up money, and then try becoming a merchant. And he had actually worked briefly as a traveling merchant. It was not at the level of buying a carriage and hiring a character with the “Coachman” skill. He simply carried as much as his inventory weight limit allowed.
In other words, he was only at the level of a peddler, but anyway, he spent about two days diligently traveling around and trading.
The peddler work was not completely unfun.
Searching the community for good trade routes, directly purchasing goods from players instead of NPCs while risking spoilage, barely defeating powerful monsters encountered while crossing fields to protect his cargo, and other twists and turns were enjoyable. After all that hardship, reaching the destination and selling the cargo for a large sum of money in one go felt quite thrilling.
Considering his level at the time, it was money that would have been difficult to earn through adventuring. Moreover, since it came in as a lump sum, the pleasure was even greater.
He felt like he understood why there were so many players doing business and why all kinds of merchant guilds were fiercely competing.
But he still could not forget the fun of raising his character, recruiting companions, fitting out equipment, and conquering dungeons.
And business was something where it was impossible to earn proper money if one only did it half-heartedly, so it was not something he could split fifty-fifty with adventuring.
In the end, after thinking about it for a long while, Eric quit trading and focused on adventuring. Adventuring was definitely fun. This was an RPG in the first place, and most of the content centered on raising characters, gathering items, and hunting, so in a way, it was only natural.
But once he reached a certain level and gained some breathing room, other thoughts began to arise.
To put it slightly differently, this game had many random elements in the abilities of descendants and recruitment of companions, so strength did not increase in honest proportion to time spent. Because of that, once a player reached a certain level, they would begin to stagnate.
Even so, there was always a chance of becoming stronger, so the standard way to enjoy the game was to keep adventuring, gather equipment, build connections to produce descendants with powerful abilities, search for strong companions, and somehow raise one’s specs.
But since this game basically offered a high degree of freedom and did not force any one direction, many players started thinking about various alternatives once they reached this stagnation stage.
Should I start trading now and save up money?
Saving money was also one method of breaking through the stagnation stage. As with most MMORPGs, having a lot of money allowed one to obtain good equipment and become stronger. In particular, this game had the Relic System, where equipment with special abilities and powerful strength could be rented with money, though at extremely high prices.
Of course, there was also powerful equipment obtained through adventuring, but such items could not always be acquired. In contrast, relics could be obtained with certainty through NPCs, and their abilities were also top-tier.
However, they were extremely expensive, limited in quantity, and automatically returned when the character reached the end of their lifespan and died, so their popularity was somewhat subtle.
Business is definitely the mainstream, though.
Currently, the strongest force in TLF Online was the merchants.
Of course, purely in terms of numbers, adventurers were overwhelmingly more numerous.
But adventurers simply adventured, so they had nothing that could really be called a faction. Merchants, on the other hand, formed organizations and competed fiercely. Because of that, they had considerable armed strength of their own, and actual group-level battles frequently broke out. If one visited the community, it felt like merchants ruled the world of TLF.
But I still don’t think being a merchant is for me.
He wanted to fight more directly. It was not that merchant players never fought at all, but since they spent their time on trade, their combat power was not particularly good.
Eric, however, had diligently raised his character all this time, and he wanted to make use of that to fight in a more exhilarating way.
And it’s not like merchants are the only ones in the world.
TLF Online had another powerful force. They were the “nobles.”
When Insu designed this game, he spent a lot of time thinking about how to make the world feel as if it was not fixed, but alive and moving.
So after developing MFN, he turned that turn-based strategy game into a simulation system, tested it in TLF2, and then properly applied it to TLF Online.
TLF Online focused on interactions between players, but Insu believed one of the reasons MMORPGs failed to last long was that they focused too much on those interactions alone.
In fact, this was not only Insu’s judgment.
Eventually, later MMORPGs also tried to prevent the game itself from becoming rigid due to fixed gamer societies by adding plenty of quests, emphasizing story and characters, or introducing raids, in-game minigames, and all sorts of other systems that players could enjoy independently without relying solely on interaction.
The social system Insu introduced was not exactly the same, but similar attempts had been made before.
However, most of those attempts only added simple systems, so they ultimately tended to rely heavily on interactions between players. Insu, however, increased the influence of artificial intelligence a bit more.
But even then, it was not anything grand enough to be called true artificial intelligence. It was more like computer players outside of the gamers moving according to set patterns, as in Civilization, Daisenryaku, or Romance of the Three Kingdoms.
(Translator’s Notes: Daisenryaku — A Japanese turn-based military strategy game series first released in the 1980s, known for large-scale map-based warfare and computer-controlled factions.)
(Translator’s Notes: Romance of the Three Kingdoms — A historical strategy simulation game series based on China’s Three Kingdoms period.)
These computer players examined the gamers’ database, analyzed their Honor Points, race, affinity, and achievements, then requested “imgwan” from players with a slight degree of randomness.
(Translator’s Notes: imgwan —Appointment to office,” which refers to being formally appointed into service under a ruler or authority. In the game context, it means accepting a noble’s offer to enter their service and receive noble status.)
Accepting that request made the player a noble. From that point on, they could additionally play Strategy Mode.
Anyone who had played MMORPGs somewhat deeply would probably have experience managing a guild, acquiring a base, and operating it. Strategy Mode could be called a slightly more advanced version of that.
Once Strategy Mode became available, the player could organize and move an army.
Of course, the army of a newly appointed low-ranking noble was nothing impressive, but if gathered together, it still had combat power that an ordinary user would find hard to handle.
This army worked by placing army units into the player’s deck instead of characters.
It was a simple system, but the power of numbers was definitely implemented. Because of that, no matter how much money merchants gathered to hire mercenaries, if a noble around the rank of count set them as hostile and blocked the road with an army, they could not handle it.
But becoming a count definitely isn’t easy.
First of all, this social system was very slow compared to ordinary turn-based strategy games. Part of this was because they adjusted the pace so gamers would not struggle to adapt if the environment changed too drastically, but the bigger reason was that setting changes made through this system had to be applied to the server, and if that happened too often, it would burden the server.
Because it was this slow, there were not that many missions given by the AI, and most of those missions involved participating in war. Building achievements there was extremely difficult.
In life, people only received a few real opportunities, so one could call it realistic in its own way.
And in the first place, gathering and maintaining troops for that purpose was extremely difficult. It cost far too much money and resources.
If it works out, it’d definitely be fun, though.
That was only natural. Even playing a strategy game against artificial intelligence was fun, but this was a game where players competed for control over a world filled with real players.
And while most forces were originally AI, players could also become nobles and rise upward, so once the game progressed to a certain point, the proportion of gamers would also increase.
However, surviving as a noble was no ordinary task.
Just like in MFN, AI talents could become independent and start rebellions, and the player also had to carry out subjugations or distribute quests to players in order to reduce the monster ratio within their territory below a certain level. Otherwise, the population would flow out, productivity would decline, and the economy would collapse, so there was no choice.
Nobles handled large amounts of funds, but the structure made it easy for expenses to exceed income, so this was not content meant for earning money like a merchant. Rather, if one wanted to climb higher and seize power, they had to pour money into it.
Also, when the player died, their noble rank automatically dropped by one level. This was a mechanism to prevent vested interests from hardening and making the in-game society rigid. One could also say it reflected the real Middle Ages, where a king’s sons were one rank lower than the king and territories were divided accordingly.
After that, Eric thought it over and eventually began farming Honor Points and achievements near a city called Lonteran, which he considered suitable.
In other words, he diligently completed quests in that region.
This game’s quests were automatically generated in connection with the simulation. Instead, they were not complicated. If a region had many monsters, quests asking players to hunt them would automatically appear. If certain supplies were needed, quests asking players to procure those supplies would be generated.
These supplies were things needed by the local noble to use facilities, equipment, or magic. If a player became a noble, they could simply obtain them through trade, but quests allowed them to set the desired price, so there was an advantage in obtaining supplies more cheaply.
Though I think a lot of people just trade because waiting is annoying.
Aside from quests, there was also raising affinity with the NPCs in that region. The affinity of major NPCs influenced appointment.
Even without doing such things, appointment requests could arrive automatically based on honor and achievements, but Eric was still slightly lacking, and the trigger itself was random. If someone truly wanted to become a noble, they usually had to do this kind of work.
[You have received an appointment request.]
“Ooh!”
After working desperately for about three hours, the message he had been waiting for arrived.
[I have heard of your courage and honor. I, the Count of Lonteran, believe your sword will help protect peace in this land. Will you dedicate that sword to me? Naturally, there will be a reward for your honor.]
“Thank you, my lord!”
Eric spoke to himself in an acting tone and pressed the accept button.
And so, Eric became a “knight” of Lonteran.