Chapter 57: Ego Search 1992
Chapter 57: Ego Search 1992
As befitting an aspiring game developer, Eric had covered many genres, and he also had quite a bit of interest in turn-based strategy games, so he started playing with considerable expectations.
And those expectations were not wrong.
As expected, it’s fun!
He quickly grew used to the game, conquered the surrounding domains to a suitable extent, increased his vassals, and became Count Eric, building his own history.
The goal isn’t to conquer everything as it comes, but to grow your house and build honor.
Since he had a lot of gaming experience, he understood the system quickly. It was a somewhat hasty conclusion, but one could say he had followed the development team’s intentions to some extent.
Moreover, he had not completely given up on conquest either. He continued stabilizing the surrounding area, increasing his influence, and accumulating wealth through trade. Rather than rushing into war, it was closer to catching his breath for more stable expansion.
It was an interesting game. If he played without thinking, he would endlessly get stabbed in the back, forcing him to understand what a medieval feudal lord was like. And once he adapted to that, the game let him live the life of a noble who protected his honor while growing his house. Gradually growing within that system and becoming a higher-ranking noble was unbearably fun.
The game required him to play by balancing everything and holding firm. It was not incredibly difficult, but the moment he lost focus, he would tumble down, so he had to keep paying attention. That seemed to be a device that maintained immersion while keeping stress relatively low.
Good. I’m going for viscount.
After gathering strength for a long time, he was able to confirm that he had enough power to attack the elf baron next door. This calculation came after he sent spies not only to that elf baron but also to everyone around him and checked the nearby power structure.
Then, just as he was about to gather his vassals’ forces, a system message appeared.
[The Ghoul King Appears]
It was the World Event System, one of the game’s major systems.
Some events occurred randomly, but there were also many conditional events. The Ghoul King’s appearance was an event that had a chance to occur when the total number of deaths across the game exceeded a certain value.
Not only did the condition need to be met, but the probability was also quite low, so world events were difficult to experience early in the game. Eric had broken through that low probability.
“What is this?”
Eric looked around the map, wondering what the unfamiliar message meant, and discovered that a flag labeled Ghoul King had appeared in the domain of a noble about ten tiles away from his territory.
That noble, who had been a baron in his own right, seemed to hold out for a while, but before four turns passed, his flag fell.
With the appearance of a powerful enemy, the nearby AIs stopped their disputes and began forming an alliance.
[A messenger from an external force has arrived.]
Alliance request messages also came flying to Eric.
For now, he needed to join. For whatever reason, once a powerful alliance force formed, any faction excluded from it would have a hard time. Even if the Ghoul King was rampaging on one side and beating them down, if a nearby faction looked weak, they would immediately attack it.
And if he joined, he could receive help in defense, and because he had the backing of the alliance, others would not attack him easily. That also made it easier to attack factions that were hostile to or neutral toward the alliance.
Joining the alliance itself was absolutely beneficial.
The problem was how strong that Ghoul King was. If that thing was nothing special, he could send just enough troops to make a show of helping and use only the alliance’s power to attack the surrounding area. But if the Ghoul King was stronger than expected and swept away the alliance, all of that would be absorbed by the Ghoul King exactly as it was.
On the other hand, if Eric sent a huge number of troops and they were ground down, he might gain some honor points, but the problem would come after the alliance dissolved. This damned AI had no blood or tears, so his former alliance comrades might rush in first to tear him apart.
In the end, Eric judged that he needed to watch the situation for a while, gathered a moderate number of troops, and sent a spy toward the Ghoul King.
And before the spy even arrived, the factions near the Ghoul King began getting wiped out.
“Uh… I think this is doomed?”
Only then did Eric realize that the alliance was his lifeline and his defensive wall. Instead of testing the waters, he began gathering and sending elite troops.
At first, it was reasonably bearable. As befitting the name Ghoul King, most of the enemy forces were ghouls, zombies, skeletons, and the like that stupidly relied only on close-range attacks. There were many of them, but Eric, who had built a proper composition, somehow managed to take them down.
However, the opponent’s power was too strong. He could not drive them back just by winning a few battles, and those few battles drained an enormous amount of troops and resources from Eric.
[You have been destroyed.]
“Ah…”
Eric scratched his head wildly. But in truth, getting this far on his first playthrough was already quite impressive. Usually, players were wiped out by the AI before even seeing such an event.
And after being destroyed once, he felt like he roughly understood what he needed to do.
If he helped the alliance with all his strength from the beginning to prevent the Ghoul King from growing, or prepared counter units and magic, he felt he could handle it without too much trouble.
Since they’re all undead, if I use commanders with holy-attribute magic and units with fire or holy attributes…
Bombarding them with powerful holy-attribute domain magic would also be good, but it had not appeared in his magic tech yet. And even if it existed, such magic would require many resources.
And although he did not know it yet, if he held out for a certain amount of time, a countering world event might appear. A hero or saintess usable as a commander might appear, or an event like the Descent of an Angel might occur and expel the Ghoul King on its own.
However, if too much land had already been handed over to the Ghoul King, they might still be unable to win even if an angel descended to help.
And yet, this Ghoul King was only one of countless events.
Right after Medieval Fantasy Nobility launched, Insu held back for a while, but in the end, he could not resist and began checking the reactions.
But he did not go directly to the stores like he had in Korea. Back then, he had been unable to hold himself back and rushed out, but in truth, what he could see there was only how well the marketing was going and how much it was selling at the start. He could not know the actual reaction to the game.
Drrrrrrr!
[Connecting to CyberCom Online Services...
(C) 1991 CyberCom Systems Inc.
Dialing 1-800-CYBERCOM...
Modem Connected at 2400 bps
(Translator’s Note: Modem — A device used for dial-up internet access over telephone lines. Speeds were far slower than broadband, and many services charged based on connection time.)
Initializing handshake protocol... SUCCESS]
But PC communication was different.
After coming to America, Insu used PC communication quite a lot. Part of it was because he was still too young to wander around alone after work, and he could not drink or smoke either, but also because there were few better ways to obtain trends and information for game development.
Thanks to that, he found the new game board without difficulty and discovered that a Medieval Fantasy Nobility board had already been created.
He immediately entered that board and slowly began reading posts from the top. Naturally, they were in English, but perhaps thanks to how hard he had studied with his mother, their meanings entered his head quickly, even if not as naturally as Korean.
[Seems like a pretty good game?]
Insu unknowingly curled up the corners of his mouth.
Of course, there were not only good comments.
[Why make a strategy simulation instead of just making an RPG? It’s worse than TLF.]
[What’s supposed to be fun about this?]
[Hard as hell. No fun.]
At first, it felt as if his chest were being poked and prodded. But thanks to memories from his previous life of playing games where one match would pour out bucketfuls of insults about his parents, it did not deal a fatal blow.
And since there were more favorable reviews than bad ones, he recovered quickly.
[It feels like becoming a ruler in TLF. I’m having a blast.]
[Doesn’t it feel way more historically grounded than expected? The atmosphere is killer.]
[The art is amazing. It feels like the graphic designer awakened or something.]
[This is what medieval feels like?]
Compared to Insu’s previous life, the community had an incomparably smaller number of users, but the reaction posts were increasing at an incredible speed.
That meant many people had bought the game and had been stimulated enough to want to talk about it.
Insu felt as though he had already achieved the purpose of developing the game.
Since it was still the very beginning after launch, they seemed to have only fragmentary impressions. But what was certain was that the first impression was not bad. Insu was curious what kind of reactions they would show once they reached deeper parts of the game.
Brian Whitman was a student majoring in computer engineering at UCLA. As one could tell from his name, he was white, and although he was relatively tall, he had a thin build, hunched narrow shoulders, and forward head posture.
(Translator’s Note: UCLA — Short for the University of California, Los Angeles, a major American public research university known for its engineering, computer science, and internet research programs.)
He considered the potential of games to be extremely high.
With computers developing rapidly, games could most intuitively show the general public that improvement. Because of that, he believed games would run at the very front of the computer industry. He also thought the public’s demand for better graphics and systems could, in turn, help drive hardware performance.
In truth, this was something he had come up with after receiving an assignment in class to write a report on games and the computer industry. At the time, he had forced it out in a rush, but after writing it, he felt that he had organized the vague thoughts he already held.
And even before organizing his thoughts like that, he had liked games.
So he was thinking of developing games someday. In fact, he had already made several practice works since high school.
At first, he had been full of dreams. He dreamed of releasing a hit game at once, becoming a star game developer and millionaire, building a huge game company, and then creating immortal masterpieces.
But reality was harsh. Even after spending a considerable amount of time, he could not implement even a tiny portion of the system he had imagined. In the end, when he became impatient and drastically revised the plan, the result was a shabby thing that looked like something he had seen somewhere else.
Even that was full of bugs and could not be played properly, and since he could not bring himself to debug it, it was now shoved into his diskette case.
Brian did learn some humility from that experience, but he did not suffer any major frustration. He merely realized that he still had more to learn and understood why development companies made games as teams.
Perhaps because he judged that he needed to look further ahead, his interests also began seeking something slightly more futuristic.
That was networking.
Or perhaps he had simply experienced PC communication and BBSs, learned about the new world of MUD games, and had his interest shift there.
(Translator’s Note: MUD Game — Multi-User Dungeon, a text-based online game genre played through network connections.)
(Translator’s Note: BBS — Bulletin Board System. Early online community and message board system accessed through dial-up networking before widespread internet adoption.)
In any case, he believed games would also come to be enjoyed through this network connection, and further still, that they might even create something like small societies.
Having continued studying networking since high school, he forgot his previous failure and once again began one-man development. One reason was probably that a text-only MUD looked relatively easy to make.
And this time, he managed to succeed to some extent. He released it for free using the school server, secured a small number of users, and also experienced the joy of operating a world he had created.
However, it had nothing particularly special, and the content was not especially abundant either, so people soon grew tired and left. It was still running even now, but it could practically be called neglected.
I want to start making a proper game soon.