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limelocked · 2 years ago

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Under this read more is a more or less directly transcribed account of my recent thoughts about sword art online, this post is not meant for you, you my dear followers may read and enjoy it if that is your fancy but i post this bible length ass thing for my own flurishment

Day 1 of my crazed discord ramblings

Thinking about how Sao could’ve been such a good piece of media if it 1 looked at actual game design 2 went for less angst and went more in the vein of actually exploring the trauma that they dust the characters with, like it’s there in the text very obviously but they don’t really punch into it which is a shame

Like it’s a meme at this point that kirito in real life will pull for a sword like he did in game but if the show had taken its time with the themes it’s presenting then the implications of that is actually so interesting

Like you’re locked in a vr mmorpg between like age 14-16 where if you die you die, if you become a soldier in that time it’s not at all unthinkable that you’ll start reaching for a weapon that kept you alive in an active war zone for two years even if the weapon is very much not real

If Sao was made for adults instead of being a very marketable shonen property it could’ve gotten critical acclaim honestly

Make the first half of Sao into at least a full season or double season (12-24 episodes) then do the same with the alfheim arc but focus more on the trauma of the survivors and less on the incest love story

Sao deserved to be good Looks at sao I can fix it

Imagine filler episodes that focus on side characters that are coping by acting like npcs or going Deep into the character they were supposed to play because it is an rpg after all

Oh if only sao and log horizon could combine, log horizon actually doing the game building even tho it’s stupid and contrived if you look under the hood as I did but which has a game and an interesting tech tree idea plus saos high stakes and trauma caused by wizard hubris

Four days later, my brain still has worms, status: sleep deprived

Thinks about sao Imagine if it was good I can fix him

There’s so many interesting ideas you could look into with a “people are trapped in a game where if they die they die irl too” setting and Sao did none of them

Did you know that world of Warcraft has been the subject of epidemiological study? There was a literal plague due to a bug with one of the bosses and a pet became an asymptomatique carrier that spread it to the wider population

How many hackers do you think played sao on launch or entered after the news came out that it was a death game

Do you think players would make a police force to hunt hackers down? Do you think players would see them as gods because they have command access?

Sao the series did not take advantage of the religious opportunity that comes with such a stressful situation as living in sao the game

Rhymes and songs would become common to remember the timing of combos and during two years it might escalate to a belief that you Have to do certain things for shit to work or for a crit to happen

Orphans are canon to sao There are orphanages and its barely brought up How do the children cope? How are the children protected? Are they taught specific things by guilds that look after them?

What is the real class divide between lower and higher floors, how do they see each other, the communities that thrive on the 1-5th floors of people who don’t want to die and thus stick to the towns like it’s the thing to do

Less people will move as more levels are cleared so the 35th levels town must feel like a ghost town except for npcs and what amounts to war veterans

I can fix sao

Is there a cult that venerate kayaba akihiko as the creator of the game because their lives were just That Shit, abuse victims who are conflicted yet thankful that in this world they are free of the abuse, workers so stressed and depressed that their life might’ve been on the line and now they’re in this game

Heres a thing ive heard

I’ve heard, and I can’t remember where from, that if you put an adult in a child avatar thru something like vr there is a decent chance that the adult will (consciously or otherwise) exhibiting child like behaviour

What does that mean for sao as a roleplaying game

I know that there was that whole thing with the mirror that copies how you look irl but that’s fucking bullshit not everyone would’ve done that

So imagine exploring someone who made a loli character Or someone who’s character is of the opposite sex

Someone who was cis but wanted to rp as another gender and thought hey this is fun and the mirror is still in my inventory And transes their gender

Sao had so much fucking potential

i. Can. Fix. Him

Even on a character level if sao just let kirito be emotional at all and explored his mental state we could look at how this nerd was relatively fine until he was the lone survivor of a slaughter and decided that if he was gonna die he was gonna do it alone and not make it anyone else’s problem because forming a party did not end well for him

Like kirito has so much trauma and we are exploring none of it

There must be speedrunners in Sao, it wouldn’t look the same and they’d be found usually on the lower levels but people who either don’t care for their lives or got complacent after over levelling and are now trying to set time records for who can kill which strong mob the fastest

Speedrunners being sought after on the higher levels for certain raids but them rarely being accepted because so much is up to chance on the upper levels in comparison to rigorously studied monsters in the first dungeons

If you think for a second that scientific study would stop in Sao you are wrong

There are people who were therapists irl who might choose to help others, there are people who document and categorise monsters, there are people who look for and document the games shortcomings

AKA

Glitch scientists

No game is without fault and considering the outside response to sao there’s not a huge hope that they could just Roll Out a bug fix update considering half the company is in jail

So there are people who have gone out of bounds There are even people who survived

Thinks about politics in sao Thinks about a strong guild going down to the lower levels

Thinks about how they accidentally invent feudalism because they just want to chill for a bit and they keep their senses sharp by killing monsters on the town periphery thus keeping the town safe and suddenly they’re collecting taxes

Thinks about the game story that we never get to hear about because saos plot doesn’t require sao the game to have a storyline But its an rpg so it must right?

Thinks about lore historians who try to figure out if there’s some better way to beat monsters hidden in the lore, lore historians who accidentally turn into priests after drinking too much and suffering too much trauma

Thinking about the expressions that must spawn because of sao, survivors avoiding worlds like dying or game over, some calling death to be fried because that would’ve been their death irl, “youre fried” being something like its over or youre dead

Depending on circles an in joke might’ve gone outside the group and ended up making it impossible for some people to go back to normal society Because someone accidentally said “you’re fired” instead And it caught on Because it’s more comfortable to say than death or fried or other fatal words, you’re just fired

Expressions around being weaponless, talking about people that won’t wear obvious weapons as if they’re naive or careless, or on the upper floors, dangerously competent

I think there kinda has to be discrimination, the obvious one is player vs npc, but later on people who use poison weapons or people who make poisons being seen in a negative light but still being needed because tick damage is an amazing tool but also poison makers being seen as a shifty lot

There must be “foreign” areas in Sao where people who jumped on the Japanese server/ bought the game even tho they weren’t Japanese live in small communities with more or less contact with people who they might not even share language with Like an english district

A cosmetic item that on certain levels denotes you as a translator, someone with good enough English skill that they can help you translate between guilds or find wonkly translation differences in the game between the japanese and other language versions

What happens to people in Sao who adopt one of the orphans, who for a good amount of time is taking care of this child either out of goodness or want of a child of their own

The parents knowing that this probably won’t last forever, yet what happens when they’re free The child waking up irl and missing their parents, but the irl parents are right there

The parents maybe not even knowing each other’s real life names so they only meet up after individually finding their child because kids are careless with personal info The parents are under 25, the kid helped keep them sane, the real life parents feel conflicted

If Sao as a property of media wasn’t about “what weird mmo will kirito solve problems for this time” and instead just the same time in eizenwald (I think that’s the arcs name (it’s called einklad)) but from different peoples povs as they’re forced to live their lives thatd be cool

Actually on the note of found family, what about players who get into relationships with npcs and survive til the end, widowed because the game brought their family with it

Beloved pets and items that hold value because it’s the only thing they had that made them happy for two hellish years but it’s all bits and when Sao is shut down there’s the bittersweet feeling of being free but your entire life went with the hell that brought it

Sao is a living tragedy not because people die but because they live and they survive and they adapt and then when it’s all over they have to deal with the aftermath

And that is not what the show focused on at all

All the angst was in the “people die when they are killed” not the “all the happiness I’ve achieved here may be gone in a heartbeat if the admins finally lets us out and I don’t know if I will be happy or sad” There is a different untapped potential existentialism of Sao and by god I’m prying the pipe open

Imagine the laws Would the players consider a player killing an npc as murder? Maybe language evolves Player on player murder will always be PK, player on npc is now murder, when the survivors enter the real world again they have to relearn that the victims of murder are real people, not just victims of PK

I can fix him, but only in broad strokes cuz writing actual chapters and not outlines is Hard and drawing comics is even harder (that’s why you make it a light novel ig)

The final day, less than 24 hours ago

thought about another sao thing that wouldve been so interesting if they thought to bring it up

theres this huge deal made about there only being 10k copies of the game, huge lines to get it

ignoring the common argument that that many players is way too few like, not all the people who bought they game wouldve played it at launch, people have shit to do and prior engagements

so the people who narrowly avoided being saod now have a death game copy under their name and thus we need to think about what law enforcement does

once the news come out about the deaths i think law enforcement would force game stores who sold the game to cough up the regestry of who games were sold to for the sake of public safety what with a particularily long blackout being able to kill a Lot of people

before the law comes knocking theres probably people whos thrown the game away, there might be people who bought it for someone else and dont have it anymore, but what were interested in

is people who Sold It

because doubtlessly there are people who for some reason would want to get saod

imagine if you will; you live on floor 10, life has been hell the past month, you have to fight for survival at every turn

and you hear a rumour just a rumour

that someone spawned in on floor one a week ago, fresh avatar, fresh person, spawning in for the first time

w h y

the paranoia caused by someone who willingly would enter the death game, for what fucking reason?? for evil??? because delutions of grandeour??? or imagine someone who disconnected entirely from the internet to avoid spoilers and managed to enter the game after launch but before the cops came, someone who has to learn all the information about sao being a death game from the starter town residents

In my theoretical Sao clone the game is made by an eccentric billionaire who thinks he can get away with death game crimes because he can buy the law and the game is made as a social experiment which means it has more than just combat mechanics as it’s focus

Due to the existence of glitch scientists and large number of players who don’t want to risk death by mobs there’s a relatively large market for farmers

Why did I mention farming and glitches in the same message?

Potato war

In this theoretical clone there’s not an endless amount of skills like in sao because what the fuck But there is a submission system to which you can suggest a new skill and if the ai that runs the suggestion box thinks it fits the perimeters set by the creators to avoid new skills being completely busted, it’ll make the skill or pass it along to the billionaires minions who more or less are living large off unethical money trying to bug fix while players are online

This, theoretically, would benefit combat the most would you not think? But too many options and suddenly your tool belt is cluttered and if you try to fine tune a skill it’ll be spit out as the closest similar skill so you can’t just change a skill by +1 damage and have a new skill so the combat skills are pretty standardised at this point

However comma

If your tool belt is infinitely big and you are getting your kick from something that’s not conventionally dangerous, like picking fruits, then you can start to exploit the faults in the ai and create some absolutely bonkers skills all for that extra seed or faster harvesting time

I want to add the idea of log horizon that game food tastes horrible unless it’s prepared by a player and that’s why there’s such a market for people to make food

harvests dont follow a standard year and the calendar in the game is probably different to reflect this (some plants grow in a week, some in a month or two at most, never the full fucking Thing that our fields take) which would make it fun when people come back and they have to relearn the year

a follower of mine gave me a good idea that im gonna steal for the farmers, instead of aincrads big ass floating layer cake of a castle i want each level to be its own floating island (pov steals from hypixel to avoid making an open world or invisible walls)

now theoretically you could get to one island from the other physically but that is NOT intended, you're intended to teleport at specific places that only start working after the major dungeon is clear

however comma

something not being intended has not stopped anyone before, especially in a game with glitch scientists

for our purposes we wont be talking about the amount of people whove passed away into the void of forever falling or how someone with a flying mount managed to save themself once and in the process figured out that they forgot to put a killing box in the void so you could fall forever (however if you stop falling you get all the built up fall damage and get fucking annihilated)

we will be talking about loading zones

because housing is a must in mmorpgs and yes its possible to own a house in town and yes theres multiple instances of the same house so theoretically you and your crush could not only live in the same apartement complex but the same fucking half mansion

but in a game with farming there also needs to be farmable land and if that was allowed in the monster hunting wilderness itd cause some problems so theres private or guild owned islands that can be bought basically from the games land god and thats where you can farm and set up houses

you can have more than one of these but due to costs the highest number seen is three and thats still fucking outragious to pay for

now

what is an enterprising young gamer supposed to do with little space and much need for produce?

you see the floating islands arent horizontal, theyre a bit all over the place, but the farming islands are smaller and off a bit from one of the main level islands, its obvious that theres nothing on them because you can look down on them and theyre just there for continuity basically, thats where the farm islands are but thats not the instance of the islands where your farm is (re: you can fly to the mining island manually from the main one in hypixel but when you get there its all set dressing because youre not on the right instance of the area)

notice how i said you can look down on them? and notice how i said that flying mounts are a thing earlier?

thru a lot of testing and a very safe clip out of bounds, people start being able to go to those islands and because of a quirk of area classification these arent wilderness or town, these are still a farm, but everyone can use the land that can get there

pov you say you have to go check on the farm by which you mean you have to teleport up to level 17 specifically and clip out of bounds with a specific mount and pet equipped so you dont die of the fall damage as you fall down onto the farm island without touching the invisible walls seperating it from the main island

“now lime” you say “why dont the devs patch this out?“

because its a social experiment and suddenly theres public farm land that doesnt cause the problems of farms in the wilderness area and also has a very select pool of people to study because only certain people have the right things for getting there

So I’m thinking about the level design of this hypothetical Sao clone and thinking about if the climate should make sense or not (higher/lower islands having colder environments vs climate based on other things like themes or game lore) but this ties into farming again I fooled you because if there’s 100 floors like in sao then it might be divided in 3-5 parts or something and I thought hey what if at every new boundary there’s a new farming area because of the different climate (like on the highest farming island is the only place you can grow fields of low gravity fruits used in levitation potions)

1: plains 2: desert 3: mediterranean 4: jungle 5: cold

I’d be tempted to switch desert and mediterranean since desert to greece is a pretty big climate leap in difficulty (going down) but it could be pirate themed so it’s all good

Thinking about the Shonen Protagonist of this hypothetical clone who would with the power of friendship and this gun I found finally beat the game and free everyone inside I want him to wake up with gray hairs from stress

#sao ramblings #id pity my friends for having to deal with me but three of them thought my ideas were good so this is on them

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