[A/N: I'm not sure if I like this chapter. It feels too...something. I don't know. Let me know what you all think but I feel like it's almost a letdown after the last chapter.]
USER: FopperyandWhim
THREAD: Corva, the Maniacal Asshole - and How Everyone Missed Him in Shards of Time
FopperyandWhim (Original Poster)
I wasn’t really planning to post this for a bit. I still need to check my grammar and cut down on my ramblings, and whenever I read it I absolutely hate how my writing sounds. But after everything that just went down in the main Zeke thread, it’s probably best if i just post this now.
Hello. I’m FopperyandWhim and I don’t post much. I’ve mostly just been lurking in the threads and reading the comments. The main reason for that is that this community isn’t the most welcoming to new fans and I’ve always been too intimidated to post much.
There are a ton of in-jokes and shorthand that I don’t fully understand. It can get pretty confusing and, I’m afraid that if I ask people to explain everyone will just jump down my throat. I mean, what even is “bosheet?” Why not just write out the word bullshit? The word looks weird and it makes me feel like I’m on a roblox server or some place that doesn’t allow cursing.
I’ve mostly kept my head down and learned what I could, which brings me to why I’m writing this Field Report. Let me preface this by saying I don’t know how Field Reports are supposed to look. When I asked FarField about the formatting, he basically told me to just wing it. That’s what I’m going to do and I apologize if it’s horrible.
Also, I haven’t written anything like this since college, and even back then I was always the guy doing the research in group projects, not the one presenting or writing things up. Please bear with me if this gets rough in a few places.
Instead of posting this all at once, I’ll leave some gaps in there for everyone to tell me what I can improve upon. Please remember that this is my first time doing this, and be calm about any mistakes I might make.
My Experiences With Corva (Before All This)
You should be able to infer that I’m a relative newcomer to the Fracture-verse. I only recently finished Tech Reign, and that was because a friend basically bullied me into it.
For context, my go-to games are usually FPS stuff. I like the fast pace, the battle royales, and anything where I can just zone out and play. I don’t usually care about story in games because I play to turn my brain off and veg out. But Tech Reign was different. It had a story that got me hooked and characters that felt like they existed beyond whatever mission I was playing.
I finished Tech Reign but didn’t 100% it like a lot of you do. I just sat back and enjoyed the ride without digging for secrets or hidden lore. But when I finished, I found myself craving more and wondering what hidden snippets of content I’d ignored.
That’s what brought me to DeepFracture. I read through the theory threads, devoured the wiki, and eventually stumbled across Zeke’s fanfic. I read the entire thing in a single night and absolutely loved it.
Side note - I don’t really understand everyone’s obsession with hating on fanfics. I absolutely love them. I’ve read a bunch of AO3 and Fanfiction.net. There’s this one crossover fanfic between Game of Thrones and the Witcher where Geralt works for the Starks and it’s absolutely amazing. It takes two pieces of media that I really enjoy and smushes them together to make something amazing.
Anyways, while I was reading Zeke’s story there was something that kept throwing me off. You all go on and on about Corva like he’s this incredibly important NPC, but from my perspective he’s just that guy from the underground fighting circuit.
Corva shows up in the Vale Tudo underground fighting circuit in Tech Reign. He’s a heel in those lucha-style matches and always acts like a loud, arrogant asshole in the ring. I didn’t like him at first until I found out later on that the fights he takes place in are mostly staged and he’s just playing a role. When I talked to him later I found him slightly helpful because he can hand out quests and sell you mercenary services. He’s basically the unofficial leader of the underground fighting circuit.
I think the main reason I wasn’t a fan of Corva is because I absolutely hate when developers try to shoehorn melee or stealth mechanics into FPS games. It always feels so clunky to me, and because of that I tend to avoid those kinds of things. Corva with his melee focused storyline wasn’t really all that interesting, so I mostly put him out of my mind. When I came to the forum and saw people talking him up like he was some kind of godly mentor figure, it threw me for a loop. I didn’t have that kind of connection with him.
I did try to research more about him. I found some videos on Youtube that delve deeper into his character. From what I watched, he shows up in all the games and is a crowd favorite. But you all know this, so why am I rehashing it.
If you’re interested to see the videos I watched to do research on Corva, you can find them here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5mNpX5dHOAk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ
DeadMienWalking
| I mean, what even is “bosheet?” Why not just write out the word bullshit? |
This is just one of the small slang words that grew up on this forum. One of the posters - SINtillating - kept trying to write out bullshit on the forum. The only thing is that he was posting through a smartphone, and his keyboard kept autocorrecting bullshit to bosheet.
It’s the same thing that happened when he tried to write damn and it came out as dayum. Or Jesus and it was Jeezus.
The forum just adopted the slang because a few people found it funny that SINtillating’s phone was treating him like a ten year old and not letting him curse.
Deatstroke
| I don’t really understand everyone’s obsession with hating on fanfics. |
A big part of the fandom is made up of people who dislike fanfics and those are the kind of people most knowledgeable about the setting too.
Silentcrusader
I think the fandom has soured or aged, leaving only a few trickles of new fans and then the old school, absolutely uninterested in RP, or the kind of forum goer that doesn’t usually indulge in RP.
PatchNoteLarry
^ Silent. Considering Zeke’s fanfic is ALL about the RP, that would piss a bunch of people off.
Lorem-Ipsum
| But you all know this, so why am I rehashing it. |
Jeezus. Get to the damn point man. How’d you find Corva in Shards? I don’t need to read your entire life story before you drop the instructions on finding one of the most important NPCs in the game.
ArtooDeetoa
Then don’t read it Lorem. I for one am enjoying the suspense. It’s like one of those crime movies where the music keeps getting louder and louder as the team starts coming together, getting ready to pull off the heist.
FopperyandWhim (Original Poster)
Why I Picked the Worst Possible Game
After I finished Tech Reign I knew that I wanted more of the series. Naturally, I looked into Frontiers because it seemed like the obvious next step, especially with how much Zeke’s story pulls from it. I even checked out a few of the Zeke-run threads that people were posting about.
But instead of playing Frontiers, that same friend conned me into trying Shards of Time. It’s the clunky, half-finished, bastard step-child of the Fracture-verse. It’s also the one game in the series that everyone tells you to skip unless you’re really committed to the lore.
To make the game playable I had to install a bunch of mods, and even then they barely helped in cutting down the motion sickness. Still, I’d already committed to playing Shards. So I soldiered on, but decided that if I was going to play this game I needed a way to make it more interesting. I decided to adopt the philosophy behind the Zeke-run. In short, you’re supposed to play the games like you’ve been isekai’d into them.
If you woke up in Skyrim, are you really going to stroll into a dungeon crawling with draugr? Are you going to try and chase down a dragon, who is a literal flying weapon of mass destruction that routinely wipes out entire cities? Of course not. I am man enough to say that I would piss myself if attacked by a dragon. I’d look at it and then quickly run the other way. If I found myself in Skyrim I would think and act carefully, aware that my actions have consequences and that I’m not the kind of guy to go yeeting people off mountains with the power of my thu’um.
Playing Shards in that way made the whole thing weirdly compelling. I played cautiously and avoided unnecessary risks. AND, I decided to add a few more constraints to my playthrough. The first was that I didn’t pick up a class.
Now, if you’ve played Shards, you’d know how difficult it is to play it without a class. First, the game practically throws classes your way. Every early questline you take tries to foist a class off onto you. And second, there is a hidden tag that really messes with your game if you go classless for too long. It’s the unanchored tag.
What the unanchored tag means is that you’re not properly tied into the world. Even if you haven’t played Shards, you should still recognize the idea of being unanchored from Zeke’s fanfic.
Here’s the thing: the unanchored tag isn’t recognized as canon by a lot of fans. First, Shards is the only game to have the hidden unanchored tag. Even if you do a classless run on any of the other games, you won’t trigger the hidden tag. Second, you can’t really see if you have the hidden tag active or not. It’s not like you can open up your character screen and see big red letters that say UNANCHORED.
Instead, what happens is that if you are classless and you hit specific questlines or travel to certain regions, the game will do a check of your character. If it sees that you haven’t chosen a class yet, then it triggers the unanchored tag. Once that happens, you have 21 in-game days before your character just deletes itself.
There are a lot of lore-theorists who suggest that it’s just a bug in Shards that Severance Systems never cleaned up. Since they went bankrupt shortly after releasing Shards, and Horizons Entertainment didn’t do anything with the IP, that bug was never properly addressed. These lore theorists don’t think that the bug has any bearing on anything canonical.
A few theorists have argued that it’s not a bug. They specifically point to the Veilstrider as a reason that the unanchored tag has to be something in lore. It is one of the places in the game which checks to see if you are unanchored, and why would it make that check if it was a bug? The other three spots confirmed in the wiki are: the Cinder Expanse, the Glass Archives of Lethoras, and the Pilgrim’s Hollow.
Mirin’
Nice call out to the Zeke-run. I’m also part of those threads and I’m glad to see the community growing around them. The more the modders are working on the game, the more people want to play a Zeke-run.
Also, if this Corva stuff that Foppery found is replicable, I can imagine soooo much more people are gonna hop into our threads. The community already grew with the whole House of Seasons stuff. Can you imagine how many more people will join when they find out Zeke was right about Corva too?
We might need to open a whole new section of the forum to talk about everything related to Zeke.
Novalis
I can see it. An entire subsection of this forum overrun with Zeke fanfictions and people larping like they were stuck in the Fracture-verse.
Coledon
|It’s also the one game in the series that everyone tells you to skip unless you’re really committed to the lore.|
Lol, because everyone has been too busy trying not to throw up from the motion blur to realize where Corva’s hidden.
VeneratedWitchHunter
The Glass Archives of Lethoras is THE best dungeon in all the Fracture-verse. Fight me on it.
StoryLeech
| Fight me on it. |
I really want to, especially because it comes from Shards and we all know the game is garbage. But I actually do like the Glass Archives. It’s the one redeemable thing from Shards and is the only reason people should play the game. That and the glyph making system.
FopperyandWhim (Original Poster)
The Broken Causeway (and How I Lost 21 Days of My Life)
The wiki is wrong. There’s actually a fourth trigger for the unanchored tag.
All through my playthrough of Shards I’d been extremely careful. After learning about the unanchored tag, I avoided all the places where it might trigger. I wanted to see how far I could push a classless run, and I figured that if I just stayed away from those known points I could stretch things out. For a while it actually worked, but then I ended up at the Broken Causeway.
The quest that leads you there is from a mid-game side quest called “A Bridge Between Two.” It sees you picking up this NPC who is camped on the side of the road and you have to guide him through the region. He’s super paranoid and is constantly mumbling to himself. Plus, the whole thing is an escort quest which is the worst type of quests in gaming history. But the NPC pays well and when you finish the quest it opens up additional quests you can take, so I thought it was worth dealing with.
The path you have to take the NPC through cuts across the Broken Causeway which is this massive, crumbling bridge. About halfway across the bridge I hit a checkpoint and got that subtle hitch in the game that tells you everything just got autosaved. I didn’t think much of it at the time. I simply finished the quest and turned it in. What I didn’t realize was that the autosave was when the game was checking my class status, and when it noticed I was classless it flagged me as unanchored. That autosave started the timer for my character.
Fast forward 21 in-game days later and I was clearing out this small hideout of scavengers. There were only three of them, but each of the scavengers had better armor and weapons than me, and none of my skills were above Rank 5.
It forced me to get creative to take them all down, so I spent a ridiculous amount of time setting up the battlefield. I had to pull them each into different rooms by throwing rocks and drawing their attention. Finally I’d managed to isolate them and killed all three. After taking down the last one I had this huge feeling of accomplishment wash over me, and then the game froze.
I was shunted out of the game and the main menu popped back up. There wasn’t any crash report or error message. I’d just been kicked off my character and taken back to the start. I tried reloading my last save, thinking maybe it was just a crash or a bug or something. But nope, my save file was corrupted.
But that was fine, because I had backups, right? The cloud always has saves for my games, and surely it must have autosaved no longer than thirty minutes before the crash. But again…nope. ALL of my saves had been corrupted.
There was only one file that would still load when I clicked on it, and that was the save that happened right before I stepped onto the Broken Causeway. Everything after that was completely wiped. All 21 in-game days of progress had been cleared away.
I…did not handle that well. I raged and cursed and had to go outside for a cigarette to try to calm down. When I was sitting outside on my smoking chair, I was wondering if there was anything I could do. I was always trying to figure out if I even wanted to keep playing Shards.
It’s not a great game. I had more fun with Tech Reign, and I’ve heard that Null Protocol is great too. I could have also started Frontiers and tried to do one of those Zeke-runs. So between Shards being shit, losing all my progress, and the fact that the game still makes me feel like I’m going to throw up if I play too long, I was this close to uninstalling the whole thing and being done with it.
Instead of doing anything rash, I took a break and checked the forum. At the time, everything was blowing up around Zeke again. Crush had just become his Primary and somehow convinced him to head into the Under-MIZ to take on the Reclaimer.
Zeke was wandering through the Crushed Skirt with a bunch of people spamming a thread that he’d set up. 7Spirals was trying to guide him to loot spots in the Under-MIZ that might have gear left to take. A few people were spamming him with unsolicited advice. Some were trying to help, some were messing with him, and some were badgering him for info about Corva.
I mostly stayed out of the convo and just read everything, but there was one post that really drew my attention. It was from someone who’d just been tossing stuff at Zeke to try and get a reaction, and the poster’s name was Roderick-Vivar. He was talking about a dream that he had about the game, and he mentioned that the dream was about a corrupted save file.
Now, up until that moment I’d always assumed that saves for games were handled in the cloud. I know, I know, you’ll all probably be on my case about that, but I mostly play online games and that’s what I’m used to. Anyways, I asked about the guy’s dream and he mentioned how he went into his save folder and found the name Corva on one of the saves and tried to upload it. That got me thinking.
If all the save data is in a folder on my computer, then maybe my saves weren’t completely gone. Maybe I could jury rig them back together so that I wouldn’t lose all my progress.
I went digging into my Shards files. My problem is that those save files aren’t all that easy to read. They’re encoded with strings of letters and numbers, some of the uppercase and some lower and all of it completely random. From what I can tell, a save file works a little like this:
Your save file holds a decision string, which is a compressed history of everything that your character has done in the game. You might see a 006 midway through the decision string, and that means your character made a specific choice. You chose Option A for Quest X. The game takes that specific choice you made and then uses it, and thousands of others, to rebuild the world you’ve been playing in.
When I was poking around my saves, I noticed a clear difference between the saves before I stepped on the Causeway, and the saves after. There was a new segment that had been added to the string that was x1g.
At 22:03:34 my game autosaved. When I hit the Broken Causeway, my game autosaved again at 22:04:47 and that was when it triggered the unanchored tag. All subsequent saves after that had the x1g bit in the decision string, and I’m pretty sure that’s the flag for the unanchored status. It tells the computer not to load this game after 21 in-game days.
What’s weird is that I found another save file hidden away from all the others. It was in a random folder, but I noticed that it looked exactly like all the other save files I’d been messing around with except for one key difference. It was timestamped 22:04:48 which meant it came after I walked across the Broken Causeway, but it didn’t have the x1g string attached to it. Which meant it didn’t have the unanchored flag.
That was weird and got me curious, so I moved that file over to my main save folder, booted up the game, and loaded the save. To my surprise, it worked. I was back on the Broken Causeway after getting the unanchored tag, but there wasn’t any corruption. Sure I’d still lost those 21 in-game days, but something weird was going on here so I decided to just roll with it.
OldManKiyote
| I’d always assumed that saves for games were handled in the cloud. |
Ouch. My back suddenly hurts and I feel like my arthritis is flaring up. Hey Foppery, do you know what the save icon is supposed to represent?
BaryBybax
Seriously. I still have my floppy disk tower where I kept all my important stuff. I kind of miss them, actually. It felt good to take a sharpie to a new floppy disk and write out the documents you had on it.
MushroomCleric
You know…Binary has gone awfully quiet lately. Where is this [censored]?*
* I’ve got to censor myself or I’m gonna get banned like Crush.
CrimsonProphecy88
NGL, having Crush banned and not Binary leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
SixtySix
| leaves a bad taste in my mouth. |
I swear I drank pineapple juice all week. It’s not me.
GnomelandSecurity
Jeezus 66. Go back to the lemons side of the forum. I don’t wanna hear your perviness today.
BrightSky18
It’s kind of hypocritical for users like Binary to declare themselves the be-all and end-all judge of what is and isn’t canon lore, when he and most of the other “lore experts” skipped Shards of Time. Even if the game itself sucked, it’s still canon, and was described as being the most ambitious game in the series, so it’s bound to have a lot of lore unknown to the community.
ShivSays
I don’t know if he skipped it, but I agree that the game hasn’t really been dissected like any of the others. People just can’t get past the whole vomiting thing.
I remember playing it for thirty minutes and I turned it off to do something else. For the next 20 minutes it was like my body was out of sync. I kept trying to reach out my hand to pick something up, and I misjudged everything by like…two inches. I tried grabbing a glass and couldn’t even get my hand around it.
That happens EVERY time I’ve tried to play Shards. It’s maddening and I’m way more than willing to have other people play the game for me and tell me what the lore is.
FopperyandWhim
Round Two of the Playthrough (But Faster)
I was back on the Broken Causeway, but this time (hopefully) I didn’t have that unanchored flag. Since I’d already played through that stretch of the game, I knew what I was doing. I knew where the enemies would spawn, which bosses showed up where, and which fights would absolutely wreck me if I wasn’t careful.
I sped through the game. I skipped dialogue, prepped for encounters before they happened, and blazed a path forward. Quests which had seemed so confusing before were now straightforward. Fights that I’d struggled with were now a cakewalk. For a little while, everything was going great.
Then some more bugs started to show up. At first it was a small bug that struck my controls. I tried pulling the trigger and nothing happened, so I’d pull it again and the gun would fire. I tried walking forward but there was a slight delay before my character actually took a step forward. I tried opening my inventory but there was a pause before the input was accepted.
It felt like there was a slight lag between my controller and the game. It wasn’t constant, only showing up from time to time. And it wasn’t game-breaking, but it was still slightly annoying. I figured that it was because Shards was janky and it was just another sign that you were all right in that I should have skipped the game.
But the longer I played, the more noticeable the bugs were getting. The delays got worse and more frequent. And then my controls started to flip. I tried walking forward and my character jumped. I thought for a second that I’d hit the wrong button but that was impossible. I put it out of my mind until it happened again. I tried crouching but then my inventory popped open.
At that point, I was getting more frustrated with the game than when I’d lost my save. My controls felt broken and the game was unplayable. I was about to log onto the forum and write a tirade about how shit the game was. I was about to call my buddy and admit defeat by telling him I was going to pick up Frontiers instead of trying to finish the godawful Shards.
As I powered through and thought about what I needed to burn my copy of Shards and ensure that it never haunted me again, my controls completely quit on me.
I was outside a small town (Corfelta) and was just standing there, going through my inventory, trying to figure out what I could sell and what I should hold onto. I was standing there, minding my own business, when my character took three steps forward all on his own. I wasn’t even touching my controller at the time.
At first I just thought that my controller was broken. I had a switch and was hit by the joy-con drift, so that’s what I thought this was. It was just stick drift, faulty input, or something else physical.
My character walked straight into a tree, and I just sat there swearing under my breath and mentally adding “buy a new controller” to my list of problems. I tried pulling back on the joystick but there was no response.
Then my character just stopped. He stretched which…what the fuck? I wasn’t stretching. My character stretched and this was throwing me off. He looked down at his hands and flexed them slowly, almost like he was testing them. Meanwhile, I was just sitting there staring at the screen, not doing any of that, trying to figure out what the hell I was looking at.
The next thing I knew, I was booted from the game, but not back to the main menu. Instead, I was dumped straight into the Character Creation screen. I wasn’t even mad. Sure, I’d lost my earlier save and now had buggy controls and the game had kicked me out but…I was more confused about everything.
I made a new character which was exactly the same as my previous ones. He had the same eye color, hair, build, and everything else. I recreated him as close as I could. Then I hit confirm and loaded into the game.
I spawned back in the starting village except, it wasn’t at the beginning of the game. Something felt off and I opened up my character screen. All of my quests had failed. My entire inventory was gone. All my skills were empty again. The game had completely wiped me clean.
Then I actually got a good look at everything around me and the starting village wasn’t there anymore. The whole place was ashes. Buildings had blackened and were still smoking. The ground was covered in bodies that were scattered about the place. The entire place was a ruin.
I raced over to the bodies and found that they were all the starting villages, but their throats had been slashed or their heads caved in. They’d bled out in the streets and my first thought was who is going to give me quests now?
As I was standing there, trying to process what the hell had just happened, motion out of the corner of my eye caught my attention. Someone was strolling through the village, starting at the far end of the place and slowly walking towards me.
Motherfucking Corva.
Except this wasn’t the Corva that I remembered from Tech Reign. He was wearing this old, beaten-up duster that was worn at the edges. He wasn’t swaggering his way towards me like I’d come to expect from his ring persona. He didn’t have a smirk on his face like he always had in the game. Instead, he was quiet and staring directly at me.
I managed to snap a few screenshots before control was taken away and a cutscene started. My character spoke to him and asked “why did you burn the village.”
Corva didn’t hesitate. He just looked at me and said, “no witnesses.”
I sprinted out of there. I ran and ran, which was incredibly difficult because my character didn’t have any ranks in athletics. All I could do was run because I didn’t have a melee skill or any weapons. He would have easily dismantled me and there was nothing I could do about it.
Here’s the thing though. I didn’t actually get away from Corva. He’s still chasing me and I was sorta split on what I should do. The first part of me was thinking: holy hell, Corva is in Shards of Time and I know about it and have proof. This is huge. All I wanted to do was save my game, logoff and then jump onto this forum and share my discovery.
But the second part of me was thinking WWZD? How would Zeke handle this situation? The answer to that is pretty simple. He’d pop onto the forum and beg everyone for ways that he could survive, do one or two of the pieces of advice people gave him, and then update everyone about what happened. And that’s what I decided to do.
Except, now that I think about it, I probably shouldn’t ask Binary for help because he would just dick me over and get me killed, all because he’s jealous that others can discover more lore than him. I found out that Corva was hidden in Shards, and yet I’ve only been playing this series for a month or so.
So…anyone (other than Binary) have thoughts?