Fresh New Start III

[Ryuuketsu]

This Is A Wonderful World

Fresh New Start III

What was it exactly about the trend MMOs had where they usually started the character out in bright, sunny places with plenty of flora and fauna to spare, anyways? They always seemed to start you there before moving you to a more mountainous area. Eventually you’d get to a desert of some sort, or maybe to a graveyard to fight some undead. Typically, though? It was always a meadow or plain of some sort that opened things up for you.

Now, Ryan could give Elder Tale a bit of leeway when it came to typical mapping tropes. After all, it was trying to build a scale replica of the Earth. London wasn’t well known for its deserts, which meant that unless he was going to have Ryuuketsu pack his bags and head to the beach the second that mount systems got unlocked that Ryan wouldn’t have to deal with sand anytime soon.

That was good. He’d always hated desert maps. They were always so bland and uninteresting. It was hard to do anything with, and he hated the thought of going on another raid in another set of pseudo-Egyptian temples. If they wanted to do deserts, they could at least spice things up and start ripping off other sandy countries.

Then again, he supposed that tropes were the lifeblood of narrative, and the fact that even the most basic ones were being used meant that the game thusfar had been at least partially dedicated to storyline. Not that he was paying attention to what the hell it was.

He supposed he was a bit of a hypocrite for not bothering to read through quest descriptions when he was harping on about the importance of storyline not even five minutes ago. Had he even bothered to read through those with his first character? No, probably not. Well, a new line of quests was about to start. It was about as good of a time as any to try and pay attention.

The shift of his main quest-giver came as a bit of a surprise. No longer was he dealing with a tall and sturdy Guardian, but instead he was met with one of the daintier looking female NPCs that he’d ever seen. Her dress was simple, denoting that she was likely the gardener of this area and not exactly a fighter herself.

What was it she wanted him to do, anyways? I mean, the monsters on the way over had all been snakes, so he guessed he would probably be her makeshift exterminator if anything, but was there a reason why the snakes were bothering this specific garden at this specific time? What was the inciting incident to it all? Where were things going with the main storyline that something like this mattered in any context?

Well, the only thing he could do to figure that out was read, he supposed. As much as he didn’t want to, it was probably for the best just to appease his slightly guilty conscience.

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Word Count: 500

[Ryuuketsu]

This Is A Wonderful World

Fresh New Start III

”Are you the adventurer Gaius sent over? Ah, I see. Sorry to say this, but he probably just sent you out here to get you out of his hair. I’m sorry if that’s the case, but as you might have already seen I sort of have my hands full. These Garden Snakes are spreading their poison throughout my garden and ruining my crops. I’ve sent so many letters over to that armored idiot that I was starting to think he wasn’t planning on sending anyone.

It’s a miracle you’re here now, really. I need you to go out and take care of all the Garden Snakes you can – at the very least a dozen of them. Do that, and I’ll give you rewards worthy of your efforts, I promise.

Was that really all there was to it? Well, talk about unimpressive. How dare that guy send him all the way out here just because he was getting bored of Ryuuketsu. Ryan’s character was fully fleshed out with thoughts, feelings, ambitions, and dreams that he’d just come with all of five minutes ago. He was just as human as anyone else out there and deserved some sense of respect.

Did MMOs really go that far out of their way to try and point out how weak players were to start out? What happened to all that old chosen one meant for a great destiny crap? Wasn’t that supposed to be the driving thought behind all these narratives?

Was he supposed to feel like his character was better than such a menial task and then throw Ryuuketsu to the snakes to prove just how tough he really was? Was ‘you suck, do this to stop sucking as much’ really all that passed for motivation in a storyline nowadays?

Maybe Ryan was just being hypercritical of the writing. These were tutorial areas. Years of players ignoring quest text had combined to produce these results, and it was something that the world was just going to have to deal with now. The real storyline would hopefully pick up when his level got to somewhere decent.

That could actually be what they were going for with quest dialogues. They were meant to annoy the player into action and keep them coming back or stop them from abandoning the game altogether. It was interesting to think about what sort of psychological aspect they were going to put into the dialogue in the next round of quests, but at the same time he acknowledged that falling for the tricks that game designers used to keep people hooked on their games probably wasn’t the best option.

Next thing he knew, he’d probably end up as some shut-in who spent all his income on the game out of some deity complex.

This was only about blowing off some steam and getting the only usable character he had at the time to a level where he could actually be of some effectiveness in higher-level combat. He wasn’t just some toy for the game designers to make their money off of, and Ryuuketsu wasn’t just some errand boy for the people to take advantage of. If anything, he was using them.

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Word Count: 531

[Ryuuketsu]

This Is A Wonderful World

Fresh New Start III

The Garden Snake was an interesting creature as far as the intro level creatures went. They were the first type to actively aggress against players who didn’t directly attack them first, and the constant damage from their poison could prove to be overwhelming for people who weren’t good at managing their health. This was especially true of players who tended to stick around the low-level areas forever to grind and get used to taking their opponents out quickly.

So of course, making sure not to draw too much aggro onto Ryuuketsu would be Ryan’s main objective here. As crafty as the little vipers could be, they were still a maximum of level 10, and that was something that Ryuuketsu should be able to handle at this point.

The hissing noises that was more or less a constant presence on this map was only slightly disconcerting. Monsters tended to come with their own sound effects and AIs, giving them some form of limited personalities. It was an interesting concept, but it fell apart when you came to realize that all enemies of the same type behaved in the same way. It made it easier to dehumanize the enemy – though dehumanize really wasn’t the best term for a snake, Ryan supposed.

It seemed the time for introspection was over, however. The snakes had made their move, sending two of their kind out to fight against Ryuuketsu for whatever their reason to kill was.

Autoattacks were flying, and Ryuuketsu was doing a good job of following Ryan’s prompts when it came to getting out of the way of venomous fangs and coiling strangle-holds. The attack patterns were predictable, but that didn’t mean Ryan was a perfect player.

The outer tinges of his screen flashed purple as one of the bites struck home, and the urge to roll his eyes was valiantly suppressed. If he had a potion, he’d pop it right now and just go about his life as the healing fought against the passive damage, but he didn’t have any on hand at the moment. That might make this a little bit more difficult.

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Word Count: 352

[Ryuuketsu]

This Is A Wonderful World

Fresh New Start III

Auto-attacks still flying through the air, Ryuuketsu’s starter katana dug into the flesh of the snakes that had made it their mission to send him back to the sanctuary in Londinium. Of course, they’d have to try a lot harder than they already were in order to get him to go anywhere he didn’t want to. Ryan wasn’t training a weakling.

Well, he technically was, but when it came to the elements of the game that didn’t have anything to do with how high your numbers were – stuff like dodging around attacks or knowing where to position yourself – Ryan knew exactly what to do and exactly when to do it.

One last attack finished off the second reptile, and Ryuuketsu walked out of the first scuffle he’d gotten into in the area without much damage on him. Sure, the poison effect had been an unlucky moment, but it was also a bit of a wake up call. Games where dodging around was a mechanic often threw creatures with abnormally complex attack patterns but relatively low damage levels at players. It was a good idea; it introduced the idea of higher-level play to new players and made creating a new character a somewhat more engaging activity for others who got bored just standing there and smacking something until it died.

So why was he making Ryuuketsu do this again? Besides the fact that it was the quickest way to level up, was he actually just here to run errands for someone who didn’t think he was worth their time? If he rushed through this and proved that he was stronger than that stuffy Guardian from the last area thought, would that mean he’d be cleared to run slightly more challenging errands that technically wouldn’t be challenging because of the levels he was gaining?

He supposed that was as good of a motivation as any. He’d work his way to the top with Ryuuketsu and push his way into a few raids. Low level creatures and quest completion on the day to day were genuinely boring tasks, but he supposed people that played MMOs were supposed to have friends or something. Yeah, like that was a realistic expectation at this point.

Another garden snake fell to auto-attacks. Three down, nine to go.

Was this really his life now? He was getting bored of his hobby. That wasn’t supposed to be allowed.

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Word Count: 399

[Ryuuketsu]

This Is A Wonderful World

Fresh New Start III

He’d more or less abandoned Ryuuketsu for a quick break. Portable food was a gamer’s best friend, and Ryan was no different. The bag of chips and the soda that now sat in familiar locations on his desk would keep him fed until he finished this session of levelling, and then he’d probably be able to get some real food and his stomach.

What was he killing again? Garden Snakes? God, Ryuuketsu was pathetic right now. These things should die just by being around him, his aura either killing them outright or acting as negative aggro and making them flee. Of course, any skill like that which could have existed in the game would be ridiculously overpowered. A player would just have to set it up so their character stood in one place and creatures sufficiently weak enough would spawn and die all in the same instant.

That would mean farming for experience would be the easiest thing in the world unless the ability stopped players from gaining experience from creatures that died because of it. And what would be the point of that, then? To be a jerk and make it harder for people to level up because your presence robbed players who needed experience? Yeah, that would be great for a healthy game environment.

Then again, a healthy environment wasn’t all that easy in an MMO with so many different builds possible. Still, actively trying to make things worse by putting a skill like that into play would just make it look like the creators didn’t care about people on the lower end of the level spectrum.

Yeah, because quest text didn’t give off that kind of a feeling in any way already.

Ryuuketsu was busy cutting his way through legions of snakes while Ryan was busy doing a monologue. While Ryan was good enough to work through the commands required for Ryuuketsu to get out of fights both victoriously and unscathed, he had to wonder if it was fair that the avatar was doing all the work and he was the one who just had to tap buttons and think about game design.

He supposed that total immersion into the world of a game wasn’t really a possibility at this point. Sure, there was some sort of headset out there that gave some semblance of 3D video and sound, but would it really be possible to hook up the other three senses to the world. Even if it was, Ryan was of the opinion that life had some unquantifiable sixth sense to it as well. What would immersion do with that?

Well, that wasn’t really of importance right now. There were still a few snakes left for Ryuuketsu to kill before he could go turn in that quest of his. After that…well, there was really no telling where the designated errand boy would be sent next.

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Word Count: 479

[Ryuuketsu]

This Is A Wonderful World

Fresh New Start III

”Ah, thank you so much for helping me out. I don’t know what Gaius was thinking sending you, though. You were probably a bit overqualified. Still, I’m really quite grateful that you came, even if you weren’t given a choice in the matter. Take these as a sign of that.”

Ryan shook his head as he graciously went about clicking the button that would deposit the rewards into his inventory and open the road for further advancement through this quest line. It wasn’t that he was unappreciative of the work that the game designers put into the quests available for story progression, but he felt that there was a sort of disconnect between the story of the game and the content in it; almost like the story was tacked on at the last minute for the sake of having windows to pop up, and the whole point of the game was to explore the world and fight the stuff.

It was lazy writing, and if there was anything that chapped Ryan’s hide more than lazy storytelling, he’d never encountered it before. He’d rather not have a story involved at all rather than bring someone in to do a half-assed job of it.

Well, there was no such thing as having your cake and eating it, too. Ryan prompted Ryuuketsu back into the garden area to go about farming some more of the enemies that were to be found out there. It was a simple matter, really. All he had to do at this point where guide Ryuuketsu to begin his auto-attacks against a target. The character would follow suit, and then the dance would begin.

Diving left, then right. Jumping high into the air before bringing both blades down as one, catching an enemy at his back just in time to spin Ryuuketsu around and block an attack quickly with a parry. Then the upwards stab that would bring the creature into the air where another swipe would drain its health bar, making it burst into a bundle of dropped gold.

One of the biggest appeals of participating in dungeon raids had to be the amount of coordination that they required those participating to pull off. Coordination, organization, and finesse all had their own beauty about them, and the flexibility that Elder Tale allowed in its attack combinations and mixing of skills was what made the combat system so appealing to people from all over.

Still, the game was repetitive as all hell at most every level. Sure, the mixing of skills updated as the player tried new techniques on for size and learned higher levels of the skills they already had in their position. Numbers were raised through the same handful of tasks that didn’t alter in any sense no matter how far you got.

Still, the payoff for the toil and hassle that came with the game was well worth it. Items, equipment, crafting, and the like. All the customization possibilities that came with the game, and the ability to put that to work in a group – to be a part of something bigger – was where the real appeal of the MMO came from.

That meant that Ryuuketsu was going to have to be taken to the cleaners a few dozen more times. It was for his own good more than anything else. After all, part of Ryan wanted to believe that a piece of him was placed inside Ryuuketsu as well; the desire to find a group of people he could spend this new freedom he’d found together with. Ryuuketsu was a lonely soul; that much was a given. He was a solo character in the middle of the wide and confusing world of Elder Tale.

So that made it Ryan’s responsibility equally together with Ryuuketsu to find that group. It was a team effort for sure, but it was also a little more than that. Ryuuketsu’s desires and Ryan’s desires were one and the same at the moment. That meant that they needed to work together. The world Ryuuketsu came from was a world that Ryan should in all means pay attention to. Quest flavor text may have been boring, but what did Ryan expect from it? He wasn’t talking with a real person.

As of now, though, finding a group would have to take a backseat to actually becoming useful to any potential allies he might make in the future. Both Ryan and Ryuuketsu needed to become just a little stronger.

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Word Count: 747