Little did Parrhesia know, he had made a big mistake.
Server 72 and the Construction of a Fictional MMO
I was once a humble man, toiling the fields of established Fire Emblem worldbuilding. Long had I plowed the grounds of lords and ladies, pegasus mercenaries, fighters with ripped sleeves, and other such staples. Wherefore did they spring forth? It was not my place to judge, for I saw what the people liked and grew it. However, one day, the eldritch tentacle of Lex Talionis touched me, and, as I became infused with its blighted energies, I began to desire to create something…worse.
Historicity, Meaning “Historical Authenticity”
I want you all to know that I googled whether or not “historicity” was a word. It is. Anyways, there is the perception that people always need to get their horseslayers in a twist about noble and commoner interactions or whatever in regards to the relatively narrow bands of European history that much fantasy fiction lifts its vibes from. The truth is, you don’t have to give a shit if you don’t want to. If you want to write Priscilla/Guy fanfic no one is stopping you. Why, then, should you give a shit? The most applicable reason for any hacker to care about historicity is if a lack thereof would make their players go “bruh why is there a gun”. There are other, nerdier reasons such as cultural erasure or the propagating of misinformation, but we’re hobbyist hackers so those fall under “you don’t have to give a shit”. However, if the player is disconcerted because your worldbuilding vibes are all fucked up, it’s over. You can get around this by leaning hard into it (yeah, uh, I have the fantasy nation of, uh, Guntopia, and they made 1911s using magic), but you can also just be accurate to real life and that more or less solves your issues without further thought.
Fortunately, most FEGBA players did not live centuries ago, so there’s less you have to be accurate about. It’s not like a hack would include a modern concept that most gamers would recognize and be familiar with on sight like-
…What’s with the blank stare? Oh, right, this is probably more your speed:
Anyway, as ironic as it seems, where you really need historicity is when you reference some shit that everyone knows because it exists in the modern day. As I embarked on the creation of Server 72, I had a thought in my mind: “Authors are shit at making fictional MMOs.” And if I was going to be shit too, I was at least going to go down fighting.
Sword Art Online Is Not Bad At This
A brief digression here before I get into MMO gameplay-specific objectionable tropes: SAO is fine. Would a normal MMO require several years to beat its base content? No. But, in SAO:
- There’s permadeath. Even without the “you die in Canada, you die in real life” part, character permadeath would definitely slow people.
- No access to the internet. Strat development is hampered immensely by a lack of omnipresent communication.
- Limited group. No fresh blood means no new talents/brains.
- People look and act like how they would in real life. This is a deterrent to completing anything.
The only ding I’d give SAO is for giving the person with the best reaction time unique access to dual wielding. That’s stupid.
Oh My God This New Guy Just Did A World First That No One Else Could Manage After X Months/Years
I started reading Shangri-La Frontier recently and it really dredged up my distaste for this trope. New strategies for various things are discovered by uninvolved parties with reasonable regularity: see the Boba skip, a Metal Gear Solid speedrun skip that was discovered by someone doing a blind, no-backseating playthrough over 20 years after the game’s initial release.
This is really not the case for base game-intended stuff. The people that intentional world-firsts are almost always the people actually online grinding it out, and for good reason: it’s something the devs intended to be done, and people are not that bad at video games. This holds true especially if the game is hugely popular, as the titular Shangri-La Frontier is. Yet despite there being 30 million active players, Joe Birdface gets on and does a whole bunch of world firsts because he’s good at shit games. Like, come on, people speedrun super mario minus levels, that’s not that unique. Stuff like this will be super apparent to any story consumer that’s played a game with progression of any sort, and is something I had in the back of my mind as I prepared to commit this exact sin.
This Guy Is Just So Much Better Than Anyone Else Holy Shit
This is real too. Like, putting aside the obvious example of real sports, we have shit like Faker in League: people with godly mechanics who, when others catch up, reveal they’re also just good at everything else about a game. However, due to the power fantasy nature prevalent in the genre, you get a lot of “guy picks up the game and turns out to be the dopest in town” (again, I’d just read Shangri-La Frontier recently). Generally speaking the freak of nature who’s better than everyone has also practiced a shitton and is better for a reason.
This extends to pretty much all gaming record subgenres but especially MMOs, where bizarre mechanics unique to certain levels more or less require people to grind hardcore to get world first clears, especially keeping in mind that MMO raids require large, coordinated groups of people who are all good at what they do. There’s not going to be some randos off the street that are just better than the top players with no practice, something I had in the back of my mind as I prepared to commit this exact sin.
Game Balance Is So Bad One Dude Solos
Shoutouts to Overgeared. If a popular MMO got to the point where one person was somehow able to be more jacked than an entire party, like, people would complain lmao. For one thing, that’s not really possible; MMOs don’t tend to have hyper-exclusive resources. Cosmetics, sure, but “only one of a thing that lets you solo bosses” would piss off the playerbase right quick, especially if it was actually used for competitive clears of content. The mystery of how such a game would maintain popularity is something I had in the back of my mind as I prepared to commit this exact sin.
Intended Content That’s Just Fucking Unplayable
Yeah OK real MMOs have done this before too. However, the devs, rightfully, get crapped on over it, and it’s not very common. And, eventually, it does get solved. Apparently the earliest successful Absolute Virtue attempt took 30 hours? Anyway, because an unbeatable MMO raid was the core conceit of Server 72, it was something I had in the back of my mind as I prepared to commit this exact sin.
Server 72 As A Believable MMO Experience: Extremely Humble Beginnings
One of the first things I did when making Server 72 (yeah, that’s right, we’re back on topic) was to make the map for the hardest level of the game. I wanted to do a variation of that “in medias res” shit that’s hip with the kids. Of course, it wasn’t actually that, it was just some party before the player party wiping out. Thus, I had to think about what would go into an endgame raid floor off the bat. This is what I came up with:
OK, yeah, that’s pretty bad, but it does fulfill the basic “MMO arena” vibe in that it’s, well, an arena. It has exactly one tile change, which is this:
This singular shitty tile change accounted for roughly 50% of the design consideration of this map. The other 50% will come later. Why did this tile change take up so much thought? Because it was crucial to implementing the sin of One Guy Doing World First. Going back to the Absolute Virtue fight in FFXI, the devs released a video of the dev team doing an “official clear” of the content at one point. Although it was later revealed that the video was complete bullshit (relying on zero-latency tricks only possible for the literal devs), it did put the idea into my head that one appropriate implementation of unbeatable MMO content would be, well, a really stupid puzzle. The exact width of these water tiles is positioned so that your melee units and tanks will get wiped out by AoEs before you’re able to reach the boss on the middle platform unless you utilize a very specific tactic.
Server 72 As A Believable MMO Experience: Intentionally Shit Balance
The sin of Game Balance So Bad One Dude Solos was not one that I particularly needed to tackle. After all, Fire Emblem is a game about many units, so there was no inherent need for an outlier power fantasy character. However, I had another problem I needed to solve: introducing a manner via which the main character’s hastily assembled party could do a world first. In short, I needed to tackle the sin of Better Than Everyone Else with no game experience.
Luckily, this one was built into the setting due to Server 72 being a sequel work. The universe of the game has magic, even in the “real world”, and that magical capability (as well as general personal capabilities) come into play in Server 72, as it’s a VRMMO. You see, SAO efficiently “made believable” the idea that your viewpoint scrub could be better than everyone else by rooting the game somewhat in the player character’s physical capabilities. Even if it’s still not perfectly reasonable, the idea that game mechanics mirror real life creates justification for one’s real life credentials transferring to a game they haven’t played. Thus, the Server 72 squad has a party consisting partly of people who are proficient at combat in real life, such as a retired assassin. Is this more realistic? Eh. But it’s more justifiable in the context of a game for newbies to be suddenly amazing.
From here, it was easy to have the game balance (in-universe) fall apart: dark magic is rare in-universe, so dark magic users benefit from a lack of kit testing. This led to “non-canon” solutions that the in-universe developers didn’t properly account for in regards to the boss fight puzzle, which is, of course, how I’ve explained away every solution I didn’t properly account for. If it’s related to a dark magic user, well, you know, there just weren’t that many. in real life, so there.
Server 72 As A Believable MMO Experience: Intended Content That’s Fucking Unplayable
Again, devs are not usually going to do this for any sort of “main story” content, at least not for any MMO that’s remotely successful. The believability of the setting would take a dip if Server 72’s raid was the main content of the MMO and no one had managed to crack it, but somehow it was still a big thing. Again, existing MMOs provided the answer: this was going to be optional content meant for tryhard goobers. As such, the raid experience of Server 72 became a small portion of the larger MMO experience that’s never actually interacted with in story, which is just a VRMMO with no stats where you play exactly as yourself. The main MMO is what remained wildly popular, while the Server 72 raid became a novelty with interest sustained largely by the rest of the content.
Now then, having justified it, there was one more step: actually making the level really hard. After all this, the MMO would still not be believable to the player if, well, the level was easy. Imagine being told it took several months for a world first clear of Sacred Stones Hard Mode. You’d laugh. You’d cry. You’d shit the pants of whatever liar told you that. I started to think about what would make a game like this feel difficult. The answer I arrived at was physical exhaustion. Although in the codifying example of SAO, VRMMO fully shuts you down, the characters still look like they’re exerting themselves. Existing VR similarly is still only at the point where you put on a headset; players still make the motions with their physical bodies. I figured that it’d be an easy sell that “the game is hard because it’s just harder to do things with your real body.”
But I could do better. What if I could physically exhaust the player?
This map took me roughly 50 turns in playtesting. I felt exhausted alright. Several players have been gatekept here, which, while I do feel bad about it, does add some narrative weight post-hoc.
Takeaways
If your medieval fantasy is anachronistic, there’s, like, passable odds that your loving playerbase won’t notice, or at least will let it slide. If your game about gamers doesn’t make gamer sense, you’re cooked, ‘cuz guess who’s playin’ that shit? Yeah, gamers.