When I created the ability for the Players to fast travel between various locations, the dungeon – a location filled with all sorts of pseudo-mage covens and the results of their experimental magical research – it naturally attracted the Players’ attention.
But, so far, the influx hasn't matched my expectations. Sure, every Player visited the location at least once, but with the vast Floating Islands locations open before them, enticing them with the Story Line quests, the caves, where EXP levels no longer interest a large portion of the Player base, with their unique mobs being the main drawing points, were quickly losing their appeal.
Only those interested in completing their monster compendiums, the lore seekers, alchemists hunting new recipes, new cooks, and all the other new Players who quickly realized ‘dungeon’ pairs excellently with ‘ore for smithing.’ So, along with swords, they started grabbing shiny new pickaxes and shovels.
I, in turn, watching this, just threw in a few metal deposits with stats matching the current equipment levels and blessed them on their way. What skin off my nose was it if they wanted to increase the logistical leg of raw ore delivery and started conflicting over ‘ore deposits’ not only in the sky but underground too?
Did I bemoan the fact that one of the locations I’ve created was less popular than the others?
On the contrary, everything played in my favor! Entertain yourselves, dear Players, here's a new battleground, here are new monsters – rejoice! And since the location was not popular, I didn’t have to focus on it overmuch.
For a stretch of time, the Players rejoiced, as did I, as I assembled Togra piece by piece.
Here's the First Expeditionary Fleet, here's Admiral Blackbeard, and over here we'll place the Seed Vault, a new building for a new profession and a new skill; let the Players take up gardening in between all their other business. And from there, let the cooks invent ways to coax that coveted [+10% HP] out of rye and wheat.
As always, I simultaneously both underestimated and overestimated the Players.
I overestimated their ability to focus on the single plot before them. I should have expected it, really, having had to use one of the False Player identity I’ve created to search for the Child's lost teddy bear during an Apocalypse myself. And equally underestimated their ability to hunt for a black cat in a dark room, never realizing that the cat never existed in the first place.
What attracted the attention span of my Players was as random as it could possibly be.
I’ve handed them a full set of new locations, opportunities for factional brawls, resource struggles, even new PvE content, new Bosses mysteriously blinking over the horizon. Want to collect artifacts? Go ahead! Want to drown the world in demonic blood? Be my guest! Want to strike while the iron is hot? Feel free!
The Ruined City is just brimming with content!
But one Player raised a cry that the dwarves were right, and the future lay underground, and look, magical covens! And if there are magical covens there, and our magic is an Angelic creation, then what does that mean? Correct, the Dungeon is also connected to angels!
From there the sky, or in this instance, the depths, are the limits!
Players started clamoring about the dichotomy of the underground and the heavens! About the genius design of two seemingly disconnected storylines!
Now suddenly I have to create more expansion for the underground locations as well.
It's all just the Players trying to justify their ability to give me a headache out of the blue by sticking their noses where I didn't want to send them.
Inspired by such speeches, at least a group of Players, quite a sizable one I must say, headed into the dungeons. And although new alchemical ingredients and a new battlefield; as instead of endless fields floating in the sky they now have to contend with three-dimensional warfare in the dungeons, attracted the Players’ attention for a time, I hadn't created any special Quests for the Dungeon.
A few fractious factions of former magical covens, a couple of scattered ruins, new monsters; in short, a location that with its entire appearance was meant to create the feeling of ‘my first dungeon’ for the Players, just made on a scale for a gigantic number of players.
But my wonderful work as an admin, as the Game Creator, as GOD, had wrongfully led the Players simply refusing to believe that any locations at all were merely small locations. An unimportant place to grind loot and EXP, then to be left in the dust. Noooo, everything had to be huge and important. For every scrap of random bent metal to actually be an important lore item!
I’ve only shot myself in the foot when I wrote that this place had housed not one, but several magical organizations at once, before abandoning it, leaving only their dregs behind. The Players, having thought about it for a second, and rubbed their only two brain cells together, had come to the conclusion that small locations – which according to the lore I’ve created were once home to a few large magical organizations – could not, not have some equally grand quests!
And while I was distracted putting Togra together, they organized themselves.
True, a quick exploration of the comparatively small underground locations should have led the Players to understand that small locations were, strictly speaking, just that; small locations. Where no grand hidden Quests awaited them.
In this, once again, I have shot myself in the foot. With a giant railgun.
I have already created a precedent for such a belief. After all, isn’t the current Grand Quest with the Angels, one involving Raid Bosses, time travel plots, and oodles of great rewards and content; once ‘discovered’ by the bastard Jabberwocky when he was just starting on the literally named ‘Starting Island’?
So, without having to think twice about it, the group of Players, bolstered in numbers by those uninterested in PvP, grew to the point where the hastily cobbled-together dungeon locations grew cramped.
And then they stumbled upon those Players who until that time had been engaged in the rather futile activity of digging holes downward, toward the center of the virtual earth, and proposed combining their efforts. After all, if they are already in an underground location, and the Quests couldn’t be found within it, where should they go? Obviously, further downwards!
There is no construction machinery that cannot be replaced by a hundred people with shovels, or a long line of people hauling buckets. And if these people also have a desire to dig and explosive potions that serve nicely as a homemade version of dynamite? The masculine dream of digging a hole quickly acquired the status of an excavation pit and began to grow at the speed of my [Titanomachy]’s stock price. Thankfully in the opposite direction, as the stock price quickly climbed upwards, my Players were digging even deeper.
It thus forced me once again to pause between writing the cartographer guild's quest line and determining the cost of apples at Togra's Great Pirate Bazaar.
Of course, one could praise the Players for at least not digging up, as they would quickly realize that there is a ceiling, the ‘surface’ of the game world, empty and barren, the reason why I had to create the Floating Islands in the first place. Well, there’s the giant crater created by the dropped Angel statue, but that would be it.
Why would they even think to dig upwards? Well, I would never discount my Players for their unmatched ability to think outside the box.
Of course, digging down would still be a problem, as there’s nothing down there as well, only more and more earth, extending to infinity. At least to the limit that the [Titanomachy]’s servers could load.
This world is a Flat World, after all; the only world where the Flat Earthers are right.
In any case, the Players would abandon their endless downward pit digging much earlier than [Titanomachy]'s quite literal titanic computational powers would break – and that simply couldn't be allowed.
Even beyond the prime directive of making sure all the Players, well at least a majority of them, would be pleased with the game I’m creating – it’s a literal matter of life and death – I simply couldn't leave the underground locales of my world empty. Even excluding the millions of all possible dungeons just waiting to be plundered by the next hero party, I needed to scatter something besides empty dirt in the bedrock of this world. After all, having introduced a sophisticated crafting system, I needed to introduce an equally sophisticated resource system for this world, with calcite, chalcopyrite, and native silver.
But reading chemistry and physics textbooks took time, time which, unfortunately, right now I already knew exactly where I needed to better spend them on. So I couldn't just hand the Players a hundred almost identical rocks, excuse me, minerals, I'd only read about an hour ago myself; then happily stand back and watch them try to extract manganese from an ore using a mind-numbingly long chemical process.
In other words, I had to act now, before the Players managed to dig a passage to the center of the Earth and discover that this ‘Earth’ had no center.
I could, of course, have arranged an unforeseen ‘try to keep digging or stay afloat when you accidentally hit the groundwater table’ contest for the Players. But, for a groundwater table to exist, I needed an underground cavern and something resembling a source and an outlet, and dealing with the hydrosphere of my imaginary world… Good Lord, I need to figure out the chemistry first, right after the sky pirates.
So rather than think further on it, I’ll fix things as they come along. You want an underground location? You'll get a cave!
So we make the cave as a huge dome, and of course the Players would break through the ceiling; let the first five Players get acquainted with gravity a little more personally than they'd like. More specifically, what happens when squishy heads meet the comparatively un-squishy ground, at terminal speed.
The rest will direct their musings to the idea of ‘how do we get down’. A rope ladder would be a good enough workaround, of course, but well, one couldn’t ask for a better bottleneck, a dangerous one at that; there’s going to be a steady drip of accidental deaths. Going the other way around, and chiseling a passage in the walls, will take them more than a day.
So, in this dome-shaped opening we'll make… An underground lake, a groundwater lake unconnected with any spring or water passage, at least not anything large enough that I wouldn’t need to deal with the full hydrosphere of an imaginary planet.
Speaking of which, what things do I want the Players to ‘discover’? Maybe more magic covens, which had stayed underground for a reason… A Magic Lake. Yep, the Lake would be magical. And since the lake is magical? Magical nasty stuff swims in it, very eager to eat the Players, and there would be a lot of them, enough to eat the whole Player base in seconds!
In other words, just another instant death ground, because otherwise, the Players would probably think of another scheme that would allow them to explore the lake. Something like sacrificial Players? I could easily see Jabberwocky, or Ja-Raja, throwing Players in the lake to distract the magical kill team so that they could explore the Lake.
Well, okay, maybe not as extreme as the Death Clouds of the Sky Islands, but the magical fauna would most definitely be too high-leveled for the Players to be able to explore the Lake any time soon.
The Underground caves were supposed to be a next step up from a starter zone, not a real secret location for max-level Players to grief at… Or at least when I get to creating a Max level for the game, as right now, the placeholder was at the maximum of 9999, and that’s not a level that anyone would be getting to in the next decade.
Though if it ever comes to that point, I’ll probably die from an aneurysm, since I’m already suffering massive headaches balancing what level 100 would look like.
But then, right as I began creating the huge, toothy, serpentine fish I planned to release into the lake, my subconscious grabbed hold of my mind, making me freeze and nod. Right, our players are digging the dungeon with explosive potions, and fishing with dynamite wasn't invented yesterday. So, I can't give Players the opportunity to mercilessly scare away my obstacles on the path to their wonderful secret quest!
I’ll let the fish be able to fight back against players standing on the shore.
A slight modification, and the fish acquired a few more snake-like traits, and was now capable of lunging out of the water about a meter and a half off the edge, capable of dragging the Players who carelessly approached the water's edge into the depths. For those standing further away?
I dismissed my first idea for an Ice Breath attack, too much embarrassment if the fish just accidentally froze itself, or worse parts of its own lake, creating a decent bridge for the Players to explore. But my next idea, a Water Breath attack? What would that even look like?!
Ideally, a magical fish in an underground magical lake should have…
Wait, haven’t I already created the lore that the Underground monsters are magical mutants? So, acid breath! And let's give them acidic blood too, so even after death, the fish poisons the lake… No, actually let's just make the entire lake acidic right away, ensuring that Players definitely can't swim across, even on a raft! And of course, shouldn’t forget to give the Fish acid immunity… That could have been embarrassing.
Yes, the ideas are coming now!
The lake is magical, right? So mana fumes are concentrated on the surface, making passage even more impossible. Don't like the answer? Come up with a better one. I don't want the Players building an iron vessel that can actually withstand the acid lake for a decent amount of time.
But if it's magic, it's magic! Iron wouldn’t stand against magic acid!
With a wave of my hand a huge underground cave, with a magic acidic lake was created and filled with magical acid snake-fish… And now the most important thing – a reason for the Players to bother with this locale instead of moving on to find the next new, maybe better and less hostile, location.
Yes, at the bare minimum, they would be Players that would be interested in the location as it exists right now.
Someone will set a goal to catch a fish, fry it then eat it, acidic blood be damned. Someone will want the unique achievement of ‘Diving in the Center of the Lake, from the Top! And Surviving.’. But the truth about modern-day Players is that, as prone as they are to inventing utterly fantastic activities for themselves, they are equally prone to losing interest a day later if that interest isn't reinforced in new ways.
Therefore, rejoice, Players, I will give you a reason to engage in the futile business of fighting fish that can fight back, and swimming where swimming is absolutely forbidden to any living being.
In the very center of the lake, we'll place an island. Not very big, but enough for a dozen people to stand on it, and it would absolutely be visible from the edge of the lake, and I’ll place a shrine on it. And with just that one addition alone, the Players would go crazy trying to reach it.
They’ll drop down from the ceiling of the cave, like ants trying to reach a cake blocked off by a moat of acid. They’ll swim through the acid, chugging healing potion like a crack addict. They’ll build a bridge of corpses so that they could walk to the island.
All just for a promise of loot… Even if there’s actually nothing there. But of course, as a generous God, I’ll put in the appropriate treasure.
But what would be good, one that would fit the lore and the locale?
A Magic book?
Would that work? When the entire lake surface is blanketed with flesh-eating acid? Yes, Magic would work as an excuse; Magic would work as any excuse… But that seems cheap.
Then a sudden insight pierced my mind, and I slapped my forehead!
A Pirate treasure! Still going to be a Magic book though.
Long, long ago, which is actually not that long ago, I grounded the lore of the Sky Islands on the actions of Pirate. Settling on some kind of treasure that is linked to the awakening of the Angels, a cobbled-up lore tailored in response to Jabberwocky’s insanity. But then, I got sidetracked and completely forgot about the idea.
Fortunately, the Players didn't focus on it either, absorbed by exploring new locations, killing monsters, and then each other, and boss battles.
Now is the time to pull old ideas out of the closet!
Excellent, I wanted to figure out how the two starting locations, pirates, and magic covens were connected. So, here you go, treasure! Mages studied it, pirates searched for it, and the portal between the Sky Islands, the base for the Pirates, and the Underground, the home for the Magic Covens, was built for precisely this reason!
However, in that case, it's unclear how they all ended up in different places. Okay, the magic Covens didn't know what they were looking for, just sat next to the magical anomaly and studied, or even used it, but the Pirates had a map, right?
Right… But the Pirates' maps are incomplete!
Brilliant! Each pirate map points to a specific piece of the Sky Islands where the Pirates needed to go and look around, but only by collecting them all together could the pirates learn that they needed not just to stroll through the islands, but to come to a specific one where the portal is located and go Underground!
The Mages didn't know what they were looking for, and the Pirates didn't know where to look for it!
Excellent, so in the very center of this poisonous lake, we'll have a magical tome necessary for awakening the Angels. And, most likely, it won't be obtained by a Player connected to Jabberwocky, or even one related to the Sky Islands at all.
There, figure out the complex politics of access to quest items and storylines yourselves, dear players.
However, just as I start designing some ancient Magic Tome, naturally one that had lost most of its power; since the Angel awakening quest is triple-digit level, and even the most outstanding Players would need months to crawl to level one hundred, so don't get excited about completing the quest chain yet, Players – I stopped.
And started thinking of ways the Players can ruin my brilliant idea of giving them another quest that would last a couple of in-game months? I know they can.
My brain strained, simulating various situations. How can they retrieve the tome lying on a podium in the center of the island, bypassing all the traps I so painstakingly scattered?
Swim? No, the magical lake took care of that. They can bathe their ships in holy water all they want; it repels curses, not magical anomalies. So they won't circumvent this problem so easily. Enchantments? Sorry, haven't introduced them yet; you'll manage without. What if they decided to swim anyway? That's why I put monsters there. Besides, the acidic water will deal with the Players very quickly.
Try to throw a rope to the tome and drag it over? A Player won't be able to throw anything far enough by any means until they level up to the point where they could swim to the central island anyway. Magic? Try to shoot the podium with magic arrows so that, by the laws of physics, the impact throws the tome forward? Out of the magic arrow range limit. And if they try with fireballs…
A picture suddenly appeared in my head; a valiant mage launching a fireball at the central island, where the magical tome instantly starts burning, and thousands of Players around starting to lose their minds because of one idiot with a brilliant idea. And then that Player would be sent death threats, which would end up in the news…
And then my plug being pulled.
New plan, we're putting a magical barrier around the tome! Neutralizes any magic around it! No shooting at tomes! Plus, here's your justification for why the magic covens didn't recognize the angelic tome: it’s underground, and the barrier hid it and prevented search spells from reaching the tome.
So, the mages wondered what they had found here, not realizing that they had found exactly what they were looking for!
So, anything else? Could they try coming from above with a ship, for instance? No, they can't bring an airship down here even if they wanted to, unless they want to waste another few months widening the underground caves enough for an airship to fly through. Or learn to disassemble and reassemble these airships to transport them through portals, and that would take so much time that I'm quite fine with that option.
If the Players want to waste that much time, I’ll allow them to get the Magic Tome without a hassle. They’ll have earned it by that point.
A memory of my first boss and Sturm's aerial acrobatics, using a swinging ladder to strike my first boss, nearly sending my first serious obstacle for Players into oblivion after only a minute or two. An earlier thought surfaced about a rope ladder descending from a tunnel… Yeah, my Players would be crazy enough to create a rope ladder that would reach the Lake from the roof of the cave.
Of course, they'll waste more than a day assembling one, but those are only days, not the weeks and months I want…
New plan!
We're relocating the entire zone sideways so that Players don't enter the cave right in the center, above the central island, but instead way off to the side. This ensures that even if they swing like Tarzan, they won't reach the island. And if they descend too far, the monsters will take care of them anyway.
And the central island? Bang, we break it!
We're lowering half the island with the tome right down into the water, deeep into the water. The magical Barrier also protects the tome from destruction in water, and actually, being submerged is precisely why the tome radiates magic, causing the lake to become magical and the fish to mutate! So even if you somehow miraculously reach the center of the island, Players, you'll still have to deal with the fish and basically invent bathyscaphes to retrieve your prize!
However, I'll need to ruin this island in a way that makes it clear they need to descend down it to the very bottom, to the terrible monsters, and not just think that there’s actually nothing on the Island… Well, that shouldn’t be too hard.
I’ll write inscriptions on the walls of the ruin stating that before them stands the Holy Tome, which is definitely, absolutely protected from everything and, actually, is exactly what you need, or something similar. I’ll basically be peppering the whole Island with pretty heavy-handed hints of the location of the Tome, only for the trail to end with a plunge into the water, which is where the players will need to go.
Underwater levels – everyone loves underwater levels!
Excellent, here's entertainment for the Players for the next… I don't know; I expect a month until the Players surprise me once again by inventing some incredible way to bypass all my painstakingly placed obstacles.
And while they're entertaining themselves here and entertaining themselves trying to subjugate all the remaining Sky Islands, I'll get busy finishing Togra.
Where was I? Ah yes, Pirate trade guilds…
***
Sturm walked the gangway with a fairly confident gait, ignoring the familiar rocking of the moored airship, before reaching the stern and leaning over the side slightly. He looked down at the swarming groups of Players below, currently gathering themselves either for another fight with the Infernals or for a new expedition to the excavation site.
Sturm wasn't sure exactly where they were headed, but he could discern the preparations for an impending brawl quite clearly.
Of course, the Players were still far from operating as a honed military unit, but compared to other games, where a Player usually gathered their equipment through random quests, looting after battles, and running around various locations with a pickaxe at the ready, in this game, preparing for an expedition looked almost the same as it would in real life.
The Players, lining up in uneven rows, approached one warehouse after another, where they were issued armor and weapons. Perhaps not yet signing their name for them, but even that, Sturm suspected, was a temporary oversight that the gathering steam of Jabberwocky's bureaucratic machine and his loose alliance of Players would eventually correct.
From the height of his current location, Sturm couldn't see the full picture, but strangely, this scene evoked a weird feeling in him, as if he had accidentally ended up in the wrong game genre. That is, regarding the efficiency of Jabberwocky's approach, Sturm couldn't complain. Securing training, equipment, and potions, logistics turned a horde of Players into a legion of professional soldiers.
But for Sturm himself, who decided to stick with Signa's crew and become a soaring sky pirate, such a scene seemed incongruous to him. As if, from the idea of exploration and treasure hunting, from the ‘adventure’ that ordinary Players dreamed of when plugging into their deep-dive capsule; some small but essential detail had been removed.
One that even the Players themselves, including Sturm, hadn't suspected before.
“Grieving for worldly fates?” Double, having appeared behind Sturm, approached him before clapping him on the shoulder and leaning over the ship's rail.
“Something like that.” Sturm brushed away the thoughts, just as he brushed away Double’s hand, before stepping back from the rails, looking over to Double, who had just arrived on board.
“Finished with your work IRL?”
“Wrapped up early and came online as soon as I could,” Double shrugged, reaching for the backpack behind him. Pulling it off, he stuck his hand inside.
“Thank God at least backpacks here act like pocket inventories; no need to pack food properly so it doesn't spill while moving. I get being hardcore and all, but scrubbing spilled potion from inside a backpack – that's beyond hardcore.”
“But realism!” Sturm chuckled and extended his hand, accepting the breakfast Double had pulled out, something cooked by the Players and sold for a whole hundred experience points; or twenty copper coins, which the game seriously lacked, so experience remained the players' main value metric.
“What is it this time?”
“Let's say it's for fire protection, and don't ask me specifically what ingredients went into the dish. Might ruin your appetite.” Double pulled out a second portion for himself before sitting down on a barrel nearby, extracting two fork-like tools from his backpack, and offering one to Sturm.
“Appetite? Ha! We don't taste anything anyway, and words on an item description can't lower the 'hunger' stat.”
Glancing at the ‘hunger’ gauge in his character profile, frozen at sixty percent, an indicator of how much more food a Player needs, gradually decreasing over time, lowering maximum stamina with it. Seeing his gauge close to reaching the halfway point, Sturm began packing away the relatively appetizing-looking meat chunk before him.
“It's metaphysical appetite, Sturm. Death here isn't fatal either; it doesn't mean you'll want to particularly strive for it.” Double shrugged, starting his own meal, until the approaching sound of boot stomps on wood distracted them both from breakfast.
“Breaking your fast, and nobody offered me any? I'll consider you one step closer to mutiny.” Signa's slightly rough voice could be heard, but despite the words, a joking tone could be distinguished, a tone both players earned after raising their reputation in Signa's faction from ‘newbies’ to being actual ‘sailors.’ Part of the crew.
“You wound us, Captain. There's a portion for you too; I just wasn't sure if it was worth offering,” Double chuckled and pulled a third portion from his backpack, upon which rested a moderately appetizing piece of roasted meat.
Signa, stopping for a moment, inspected it before exhaling and reaching out, accepting the offered food. “We have enough supplies, of course, but at least this is fresh. I’ll consider it a local delicacy.”
“You could definitely say that.” Double chuckled under his breath before returning to his breakfast, allowing Sturm, who had already finished his portion and watched the ‘hunger’ bar retreat back to ten percent, to resume the conversation.
“Any news, Captain?”
“Not particularly.” Signa, now occupied with her breakfast, shifted her gaze to Sturm. “The Tempest is still there, and the other Pirate crews know it too, so there wouldn’t be any flying battles anytime soon… There’s an interesting rumor, though, that says that someone's been digging tunnels in the underground caves.”
Sturm almost lit up from the idea that they'd accidentally stumbled upon a quest line involving dwarves for a second. Before remembering that it was old news, the new batch of Players’ starting location. The rumor could still be juicy, though.
“Did someone find something?”
“Well, if they’ve kept on digging, it must mean that they found something, right?” Signa remarked almost philosophically, shrugging before returning to her breakfast. “But it’s not like I can know for sure by staying here.”
“And since you can’t leave the boat…” Double grabbed on to the unspoken thought.
“You’ll need me to go and look, right?”
“How proactive! Are you aiming for first mate?” Signa smirked before shifting her gaze to Sturm, who was listening intently.
“Yes, I need you two to look into it. I don't like not knowing what people around me are doing. Without information, I can't chart a path properly. Especially if I need to chart around another group deciding to practice some magic.”
“Understood, Captain.” Sturm, returning the plate and utensil to Double, saluted, chuckling.
On one hand, he'd just watched other players running around on Jabberwocky's orders, thinking that something about it feels wrong. But, as soon as it concerned him, he immediately saluted the virtual pirate captain as if he had truly been serving under her command for months and seriously perceived her command as something absolutely natural in his life.
Even the usual Player reflex to check if he had accidentally gotten a quest, didn't arise in his head until a couple of seconds had passed after receiving instructions.
The game's ability to force him into the role was truly amazing.
“Excellent!” Finishing her portion, Signa returned the utensils before inspecting the two Players and nodding to them, turning away.
“Better get ready then; you’ll disembark on the Portal island in a few minutes.”
“Aye aye, Captain.” Double, packing everything into his backpack, looked at Sturm with a raised eyebrow.
“Well? Captain's orders, let's go prepare.”
“Let's go then,” Sturm chuckled and shrugged. Maybe he was worrying about this game in vain. After all, the main thing in any game was to have fun.
And the Players had the most fun when spending time with their friends.