A Really Fun Game
This was the first time an item had ever been destroyed on me.
"I just put two of these in and spin, right?"
"Oh. Handy."
I hit the fusion button on the Badge, and a hole like the door of a transparent front-loading washer opened in front of me. Drop two Badges in, and a fusion button generated itself. I pressed it. The thing rattled and spun, then stopped almost at once.
"You piece of shit."
I tossed another one in, and this time success came up.
A single Level 2 Badge came out.
"Wait. Wouldn't it just be better to buy these as Level 2 Badges?"
I'd already bought three million of them, so it hardly mattered now, but I figured next time I'd start with Level 2 Badges.
There was a reason I'd gone out of my way to buy only Level 1s. Level 2 Badges simply don't have nearly as many listings as Level 1s. The field bosses that drop them are level 40. Players above that roam around farming hard, but a level 40 field boss isn't easy to clear, and showing up doesn't mean you actually clear it. More than half the channels where one spawns still fail, so the efficiency is terrible on its face.
Even so, there are something like two or three hundred thousand listings—but sweep all of those too, and ordinary players would be stuck swallowing brutal prices. Hoarders were already driving the price up. If I jumped into that fight as well, I'd catch curses from people I didn't even need to make into enemies. So I was buying only Level 1s on purpose. Anyone who needed them could buy the Level 2s.
Auto-fusion was there anyway, so I could live with the inconvenience of starting from Level 1 Badges. Unlike unique-option rolls, which spit out one result every five seconds, this one spun faster—a rapid tat-tat-tat. The Badges fused on their own, and messages that looked straight out of some mobile game scrolled past in a stream.
Wait even a single minute and more than a hundred of those messages popped up. I shut auto-fusion off for a moment and fed in three Level 2s.
"If this fusion succeeds, auto goes up through Level 3, right?"
Right now I had one goal. Fuse up to Level 4 as fast as I could and stand up an auto-fusion factory. Then, right about when the materials ran dry, take every Level 4 I'd gathered and have some fun fusing them.
"All right, everyone. Order some chicken."
The fusion factory started up.
Some people say Haven Online is a game that heals you just by logging in. You don't even have to step into a dungeon. Wander the regions monsters have overrun and you get the feeling of exploring an unknown world, and the places that sit on an Earth backdrop without being Earth's own environments let you travel a fantasy realm besides.
Go to the spots dressed up as resorts and you can rest while feeling nature itself—not some garbage heap crammed with nothing but Koreans—so calling Haven a healing game isn't entirely wrong. There are even video channels where people grind for money in real life, convert it into Haven currency, get a travel visa, and tour resorts that exist only in Haven, all over the world. One streamer who started that way has already pulled in more subscribers than real-world travel streamers, enough to film nothing else full-time. That's how popular it is.
Even in reality, traveling remote wilderness and raw nature that most people can never reach stirs a vicarious thrill. So what about Haven? There are people like that, and the users who don't find their healing there find it through dungeons. Hunting in a dungeon all day long is healing in itself.
What is the joy of an RPG? Hunting. Growth. Farming. Haven is the game that blends those three pillars best, and Haven is also what lets you climb, step by careful step, through dungeons that grow more powerful in pace with you, at whatever level you want. Players hooked on the hunt spend more than eighty percent of their logged-in time inside dungeons. They prepare for a clear. They spend days on the clear. When it's over they settle up, rest while gearing again, and head for the next dungeon.
And so everyone finds their fun in Haven in a different place, and yet they all say it with one voice.
Haven is a really fun game.
I think so too. I don't lock onto one fixed kind of fun, but I feel all sorts of it across all sorts of fields. Maybe that's why it feels even better.
Or maybe that wasn't it.
Maybe spending money is simply what's fun, and the dungeon is only the side dish that puts the spending on display. I go on about how the gacha process is boring, and yet spin it once and ten hours a day is the baseline, blankly staring at that screen in a daze. Thinking about that, maybe I really do just find spending money fun.
The thought came to me that I was lucky. This instinct to spend, inside me, had met more than enough money to satisfy it.
"Oh. Finally. Factory complete!"
A ten percent chance doesn't mean it's guaranteed to land within ten tries. Bad luck, and thirteen attempts like mine is nothing strange—it might not stick at twenty, thirty, even fifty. Stacking them one try at a time is bound to grind you down, but with three million Badges piled up like this, I could hit the button without a second thought.
"Chat. Gather five Level 4s for one try. Or burn every Level 1 Badge and fuse however many pile up, all at once. Which do we do?"
With nothing else to do, I was killing time on nonsense like this. I was a little torn on it myself, so it wasn't just talk—I actually took the opinions seriously. I opened a points bet just to see what people thought. Take the bets and then cancel the gamble, and the points go right back anyway.
Plenty of people wanted to crack them all in one go, but a decent take caught my eye.
"Oh. I like that."
Still, the first try ought to set the mood. Doing it once would be fine.
"I'm gonna grab a nap."
The place I was fusing Badges was my house in Haven. I lay down on the bed, watched the auto-fusion running, and closed my eyes.
Sleep in Haven reaches into reality. Log into a VR capsule and your brain stays in use, so the body only slips into a light doze—but sleep while you're connected, and even that brain drops into true sleep, which means you actually get a deep rest out of it.
Of course, fall asleep in virtual reality and wake in the real world, and the disconnect can throw your brain into confusion. So sleep in Haven always comes with an alarm. You set the time you'll get up, and it wakes your brain out of the virtual world. I'd set mine for four hours. Pulling one Level 4 this time had taken about an hour, so if luck settled near the average, that ought to be enough material for a single Level 5 try.
It was a first. Sleeping in Haven.
Brrriiing— brrriiing—
I closed my eyes, and in the instant I thought I'd only lost consciousness for a second, the alarm rang and my eyes snapped open. I felt clear.
"Whoa. Did I actually sleep four hours?"
I'd been asleep. Why were there more viewers than when I'd lain down? And when I checked the Level 4 Badges, there were three.
"Huh. Why's the Badge count like this? I thought five Level 4s would've piled up."
The viewers just laughed. Even at a glance, I could feel that something had gone wrong.
"Don't tell me the fusion stopped while I was asleep?"
That didn't quite fit—now that I was awake, it was still fusing away at full tilt. Maybe it had paused for a bit in the middle of the nap.
"Ah... fuck..."
Not that I minded the money. It was more that I was simply pissed. Call it rage at my own rotten luck.
"Man, this game is a real piece of shit."
The road through Badge content, I could already tell, was not going to be an easy one.