Chapter 66: New Systems

At first, Daniel thought she only looked young, but when he learned she really was a high school student, he was quite surprised. He had not expected there to be another genius like the team leader on the same team.

Since she was said to be an original member who had worked on TLF from the beginning, he had thought she must be impressive. Still, he had not ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠completely overcome the prejudice created by her appearance. But seeing this kind of sense, he could certainly tell she was a skilled graphic designer.

Come to think of it, Chris always praises his team lead.

Chris had a somewhat light way of speaking, so Daniel had not found him especially reliable and had half-dismissed it. Now, he slightly reflected that maybe he had failed to listen seriously enough.

After that, just like in the previous game, once he set only the name, his character appeared.

[They say that person first arrived here with nothing at all.]

The character had been newly drawn. However, since the backgrounds were still being actively drawn, the prototype reused many resources from the previous game. In that sense, it almost felt like playing TLF again.

However, unlike the protagonist of the previous game, who had arrived here as a wanderer, this protagonist seemed to be a descendant. The monologue was memorable, as the character burned with motivation while feeling grateful that, unlike their ancestor, they at least had simple arms and equipment.

Fans of the previous game would probably all feel something similar.

The early gameplay was not much different from the previous game.

Will they be happy because it’s familiar? Or will it feel a little loose?

Daniel did not find it especially loose, but since he was part of the development team and this was a prototype, he was not confident. In any case, he wrote down that question.

As he followed the story and adventured here and there, he welcomed several companions.

“Oh!”

One of them caught Daniel’s interest.

There was nothing especially remarkable about him in combat. He was a half-dwarf, but he carried negative factors like [Short Stature], and he had not gained positive dwarf traits like [Endurance] or [Strength]. His stats themselves were also poor, so honestly, as a combatant, he was close to useless.

However, he had the [Coachman] skill.

It was not magical enchantment. It was literally a skill for driving a carriage, the kind of carriage that attached a cart behind a horse and carried luggage or people.

This was an important skill for using the trade system newly added to TLF2.

After all, the more trade goods one could transport at once, the more profit one could earn. Later, even without a carriage, magic or items could probably take over that role, but there would be a difference in efficiency. Most importantly, such things could not be obtained early on.

Good.

Daniel immediately hired the half-dwarf, then scraped together ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠everything he had to buy a donkey and a shabby carriage.

In any game with an economic concept, having a lot of money was always good. However, in ordinary RPGs, the upper limit of that usefulness was not very high.

After all, money in a game accumulated endlessly as playtime increased, while the value of purchasable items was fixed. In the end, money’s meaning became diluted.

This was one of the weaknesses of RPGs with high freedom.

But in this game, money had far more uses than in other RPGs, and its upper limit was much higher.

First, it introduced systems from MFN and included a strategy mode. Naturally, the scale of funds needed to manage a territory and operate an army was on a completely different level from an individual adventurer party.

It could also be used to buy relics.

Relics were a type of item. They possessed powerful abilities ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠and were relatively easy to access, but their prices were unbelievably high.

They embodied the treasures passed down through generations, which often appeared in fantasy fiction. Since their materials and abilities were widely known, they were not strongly connected to adventure, but they were still an interesting subject.

Of course, treasures like this were not usually traded for money. However, depending on the setting, there were stories of families selling heirlooms because they lacked funds, or treasures entering auction houses through some route. There was also the joke that in a capitalist world, if something could not be bought with money, it only meant the money was insufficient. This system expressed that idea too.

There were reasons for implementing such items. One was that as players’ playtime grew longer in TLF1, people complained that money became meaningless. Another was that some gamers, whether because of bad luck or poor adaptation to the game, could never manage to set themselves up well enough to clear high-level dungeons no matter how much they played.

This was meant to compensate for that.

However, if everything could be solved with money, interest in adventure would decline, so the prices were set astronomically high. The goal was to make players feel that, in most cases, it would be better to just adventure normally.

But Daniel’s goal was not those relics.

What he was aiming for was Great Magic.

This was also one of the systems brought over from MFN. It was a system that transformed Domain Magic into something suitable for an RPG.

It included simple spells with tremendous power, but it also contained all kinds of cheat-level magic that could surpass the system’s limits.

For simple examples, there were spells that could revive dead companions, change a character’s race, randomly add traits, or teleport the player anywhere they wanted. It was full of magic that made possible things that had been impossible in the previous game.

However, the cost was enormous. All sorts of rare materials were required. One could gather them directly through adventure, but another method was to purchase them through black markets or auction houses.

In truth, if one had enough money, that side was more realistic. If players tried to gather every material through adventure before using Great Magic, they would probably only cast a few spells before their character’s lifespan ran out.

I’m definitely going to learn and use [Holy Infusion].

Daniel had played TLF quite deeply before, but in the end, he failed to obtain a companion with a holy bloodline and could not clear the Demon Cavern.

Then he learned that in the second game, Great Magic could directly grant a character a holy bloodline, so he became determined to use it no matter what.

It was not only because of Holy Infusion. He was also interested in Great Magic itself, which contained all kinds of strange possibilities.

Of course, this trade mode had penalties. More precisely, the penalty applied to the carriage. The carriage had an interface like an RPG item bag. If one clicked the carriage inside the inventory, another inventory window opened.

However, possessing this carriage created restrictions on terrain. It could only travel across plains, wastelands, and roads.

Since one could leave the carriage in cities or villages, adventure did not become completely impossible. But cities and villages did not exist everywhere, and dungeons in particular were often located in remote places, so it was quite inconvenient.

Ah! I forgot.

After buying the carriage, he realized he had spent too much money and had none left to buy goods, so he had to take the carriage with him and hunt monsters to save money.

Still, hunting while bringing a carriage was not entirely without advantages. He could carry plenty of food and drinking water, allowing him to stay out longer, and he could also load far more monster byproducts than with a normal inventory, so his hunting duration increased.

However, most good hunting grounds were in rough terrain, so it was a rather subtle advantage.

Afterward, he loaded goods onto the carriage, traveled from place to place, defeated monsters and bandits along the way, and conducted trade.

Daniel played in a somewhat unusual way, while most of the others simply enjoyed ordinary quests and adventure.

Emily was able to obtain a mage companion fairly early.

Judging only from her real-life build, she looked exactly like a warrior type, but surprisingly, she preferred mages. She was drawn to the mysterious power that accomplished things impossible in reality.

“Good.”

However, since both her combat power and reputation were low, there was a limit to the level of companion she could currently obtain. The mage was not particularly talented.

So although she somehow spent all her money to obtain a magic book, learning it would take quite a long time, so it seemed the mage would only be able to use actual magic much later.

Unlike the previous game, TLF2 did not allow magic to be learned immediately. A timer had to pass first. Furthermore, this timer changed depending on the character’s stats, so in the case of a mage without much talent, they could spend their entire lifespan learning a single spell.

This was partly meant to express a mage’s talent, and partly intended to increase realism by applying the effects of stats in a more complex way. In another RPG, players would simply leave the game running and do something else for a while, but because this game included character lifespans, the system had meaning.

And in truth, it was also a system created with MMORPGs in mind.

Everyone seems to be having fun, right?

Insu was playing too, but he cared a lot about the reactions of the other team members. After all, he was the person who planned this game, and with the previous game that formed its foundation, he had developed almost everything except the graphics by himself, so objective evaluation was difficult.

Of course, the team members here were also people who had developed this game together, but even so, watching the reactions of people other than himself, and several people at that, gave him some reassurance.

It definitely feels more proper now that there are more testers.

After that, testing continued for a month, and the team members were able to examine the systems and content in depth.

In truth, TLF was not an easy type of game to test. High freedom meant there were many possible ways to play, which meant there were many things to inspect and many kinds of bugs that could appear.

“Uh…”

Insu was dumbfounded when he summoned a Spirit King, only for it to appear with its level completely reset.

Is this a data storage problem? Or did the target setting go wrong? Or did some kind of reset command get mixed in?

In truth, this summoner system had been added with the Pokémon of his previous life in mind. Since it was such an impressive and massively successful game, he wanted to implement something like it in this world too. But he did not have the time to make a separate game, so as a desperate measure, he created and inserted this kind of system.

Summoners were a common class in fantasy, and the implementation method itself seemed quite interesting, so the team members’ reactions had not been bad.

However, because it was a fairly unfamiliar system with many kinds of data to include, bugs exploded everywhere.

Even though this was still only a prototype and they had made it at a simple functional level, things were already this bad. It made the future frightening.

No, maybe this happened because we put it in too roughly?

In any case, Insu wrote down the bug and issue he discovered on his paper.

A month passed like that, and Insu reviewed the team evaluations Daniel had organized. Though they were “organized,” there were only ten people on the development team for now, so it was almost the same as reading the raw feedback.

As expected, the magic learning time feels a little frustrating?

The feedback pointed out various things quite coldly. First, the system requiring time to learn magic immediately caught his eye, since it had been a concern from the beginning.

Still, it was not written as though it absolutely needed to be removed.

[It seems effective enough as a device for giving realism. However, early on, situations arise where players have to fight without magic, and it can feel boring enough to hurt immersion. It might be better to make the learning time for the first few spells very short, or allow them to be learned immediately.]

Looking at the name, it was Emily’s opinion.

That seems good.

To be more ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠specific, it seemed better to grant a certain number of instantly learnable low-level spells according to stats such as intelligence, which were needed for learning magic. For example, if talent was 20, the character could learn two spells immediately; if it was 30, then three, and so on.