Chapter 37: Chapter 37

I had a gallon of water, a pack of Mountain Dew, and a family sized bag of doritos on my desk. It was easy to say that I was ready.

Everyone in the office was. But I put a do not disturb sign on my office door and shut the blinds.

My eyes focused on the computer screen in front of me as I watched the timer slowly count down. There was two minutes remaining before the game servers officially opened and I was excited.

I played the game before, but it was always on a small scale. Me and the employees had our own test server but it wasn't really fun when you could freely change your level. Not to mention items as well.

Having to grind for them to drop was a different feeling than having it handed to you. Which could still be possible with the way we had the market setup.

Not everyone here played the game, some just liked designing costumes, weapons and monsters. Anyone whobdid play it had to keep it a secret that they worked for the company.

As soon as the clock hit zero, I pressed the login icon. A cutscene played but I hit the escape key and clicked on server one.

There were a total of ten servers available right now, but more would open as they were needed. I hoped that we prepared enough so people would not be in long queues in order to log on. That would be a disaster, but a lot of staff was on duty right now. I even told them the launch day would be the most hectic.

My eye floated to my second monitor which had the stats for how many players were currently logged in, accounts created, and characters created. I paid attention to the US tab more than the other regions since this is currently where I was. After a bit, I would check out Koreas, Europe and South Amaerica servers as well.

Currently there were 36,323 people logged on and it kept climbing.

I already knew I was going to play a human, but there were more races available. A lot more would come with expansions.

I could already foretell that the Beastkin race would be popular.

I toyed would with the sliders for a bit but mostly kept the default preset for my toon. Minus the hair and eye color. The sliders were like that of Black Desert Online.

After the quick design I named my character Gin Endor. Three characters were the minimum for a characters first name, while the last name was four. This ensured that there could be multiple players with the same first name, but different last names.

With the family system there could be multiple people with the same last name. However, it wouldn't matter too much at this point in time since it was tied into the marriage system.

The opening scenario played with my character gazing down at a campfire. It looked like it could be a cinematic but it wasn't, this was just how the graphics were.

As he gazed up from the fire I had to move my head right and left. This was to see the four characters sitting around the camp as well.

One woman, and three men. They were important characters but you could only follow one of them.

As you looked at each character an option for dialogue appeared. There were three options for each character, and depending on which you picked changed how they answered.

We decided to take the suggestion from the alpha testers to incorporate your characters background into the game. How you spoke, what you said and the actions you did all effected the ways people would interact with you. Unless they were another player.

This was managed by an alignment system, which kept everyone at neutral at the beginning. But it would shift alignment to good, evil, chaotic, or lawful with minor changes in between two alignments.

The players wouldn't know this at the start of the game, but they would see its effect throughout the tutorial. Eventually at the end they would know what their alignment was.

Since I planned on going for the Dominon faction which bolstered an aggressive fighting style, I talked to the woman. She was middle-aged with dark black hair, leather clothing with war scars over her body. The most interesting part was her missing left eye that had an eyepatch covering it. She was smoking a cigarette and looked at my character when I looked at her.

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All the options for her showed how close the two of you were. I went for the third option. "We're a long ways away from Deliven."

"A long way from deaths embrace as well. You really bringing up that hell hole at a time like this?"

Our dialogue continued on with the other characters making small remarks here and there. Until the bushes started to rustle causing everyone to pick up their weapon.

The woman whose name was Helena wore guantless on her fist. I on the other hand was carrying a sword.

Out of the bushes were five rugged men carrying axes and swords, each one dressed like a bandit.

The fight wasn't difficult for me considering I've already played the game multiple times before. However, it would prove to be a bit more challenging for others. As the bandits attacked without waiting. There were no red indicators to show where they would strike or what skills they would use. Combat did not slow down.

Instead the characters fighting alongside you would shout at you to do specific things. Such as dodge a blow that was coming and if you didn't they would curse you for being stupid or slow. If you failed to counter or follow up they yell.

All of this and my character did not have a single skill, only the basic attack animations.

After the battle things heated up when the characters found a note on the bandits detailing the kidnapping of a dukes daughter.

From there the story moved along until we saved the dukes daughter who either liked you, disliked you, or was dead. Depending on how your group decided to save her.

After that the tutorial essentially ended with everyone splitting off. All of them heading into different directions, each one going to a different kingdom. You had to pick one to follow, which in my case was Helena.

The dukes daughter if alive and liked you offered you a reward, but she was headed towards the Kingdom of Mithos. The last of the three factions that used to be part of the empire. Until the Kingdom of Heaven that focused on defensive movesets, and Dominion that was hyper aggressive, the Kingdom of Mithos was known for its magical applications.

They focused around controlling the opponent and summoning creatures to fight for them.

The reward was a wand but if she died and you followed the other Mithos citizen then you also acquired a wand. The only difference was her wand was aesthetically more appealing.

Besides that you could gain more favor with her but minus it with Julius, the other citizen Mithos. He never said it but they had two different beliefs and disliked one another greatly. So accepting her reward opened up a different questline but closed his. While the opposite happened if she died or you declined.

A lot of the game was like this to give it a better single player feeling. But grouping up with players was also fun.

I glanced over at the number of players and saw that after thirty minutes of playing it jumped up. Now there were 128,672 players logged on. I grinned.

I personally did not care about reaching level 40 first, so I took a break from the game and checked the stats of the other regions.

The Asian servers had the most players by far reaching over 700,000 logged on and playing. South America was similar to North America having a little over 150,000 players logged on.

Europe had over 250,000 and Oceanic had 100,000 players.

I liked what I was seeing so far. I quickly switched to YouTube Live and saw it was the second most streamed game with World of Warcraft being rank one.

We payed a bunch of streamers to play the game on launch to generate more hype and it was working.

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