Golden Experience
Chapter 16: “Wayne, Standing in a Prairie”

—First, gotta make a character.

Having returned home from work, he booted up the VR apparatus in his room to let it warm up while he ate, bathed, and took care of other chores. This was the latest VR machine available on the market, so while it may not look the same, it had the same high specs as the machines used in healthcare. It cost many times the amount an average office worker took home each year, but he didn’t have a job that took place in VR, he was required to go on-site to work, and that meant his earnings could easily afford the luxury. In other words, he was very well compensated.

With the propagation of VR technology, people rarely needed to leave their homes, but there were still places that required staff to be there in person. Even though the healthcare industry was integrated with VR, patients still needed to go to healthcare facilities to be hospitalized and for things like surgery, so healthcare workers were needed there as well. He was one of those workers. Due to the nature of this work, compared to a more common occupation like office worker, he had to spend a lot more time commuting. Therefore, the time he could spend on his only hobby, video games, was very limited. Because of that, he spent all his pay on gaming peripherals and premium paid content.

He had purchased this brand new VR apparatus just for the game he was about to log into and play. Since all information about the closed beta test was going to be completely hidden from the public, he had applied to the beta, got in, and spent what little time he had available enjoying the game. He had become so enamored by it that he decided to dip into his savings to pay for this VR apparatus. He was hoping it would arrive before the game’s official launch, and it got delivered just before the open beta was announced. He finished setting it up yesterday, and so it was all ready and waiting for him once he was done with work today.

After creating a character with just about the same build that he had in the closed beta, he named his character [Wayne] and dove into the game world. Having chosen [Handsome] from the new innate characteristic system, he didn’t have enough XP to get everything he wanted, but if he spent a few days grinding he was sure he’d be able to get one or two spells.

—All right, let my otherworld adventure begin.

An hour later, he finally found himself standing in a wide open prairie.

“Why does it take an entire hour to get through the tutorial…? They should have let people who were in the closed beta skip it or something.”

The tutorial support AI kept going on and on about basically the outlook of the world and the game’s ambiance and whatever. Having played hard during the closed beta, he thought this all came way too late. The AI back then was already nearly perfect; he didn’t feel any uneasiness about NPCs acting human. It was pointless for him to now be told that there was no difference between NPCs and PCs.

“Or I guess since the system can’t tell the difference between PCs and NPCs, it has to treat everyone the same from the very start, I guess.”

There was a horror story posted online: During the closed beta, a player inappropriately touched a shopkeeper, thinking they were an NPC when they were actually a crafting-specialized player. After that incident, no player would sell that person any items for the rest of the closed beta.

Switching gears, Wayne looked around at the prairie. He could vaguely make out a townscape far in the distance.

Wayne had chosen one of the human countries, [Hiers], for his starting area. Hiers was a coastal country, but it had mountains and valleys as well. It thrived off its primary industries, farming in particular. It also had three large rivers running through it, which it used for transporting and distributing lumber and minerals. The country’s largest fishing harbor sat on one of these rivers, and it played a crucial role in exporting crops and other products. The abundant riverhead and plentiful firewood also allowed blacksmiths to flourish, so there really wasn’t any industry that the country lacked. There weren’t any particularly wealthy residents, but neither was there extreme poverty. It was a stable country.

Wayne picked this country partially for its stability, which meant it was quite safe, but also just because it was where he began back in the closed beta. It was a country that could easily support whatever activities a new player might want to pursue, making it good for beginners, meaning a lot of players started here.

Wayne promptly took out a beginner’s one-handed sword from his inventory and fastened it to his waist. If he had learned [Shield] then he would have also received some kind of buckler, but in games like this it wasn’t a good idea to start off burdening both hands at once. It was his style to choose only one thing to master at the beginning, anyway.

Wayne had learned [One-Handed Sword], [Parry], and [Quick-Witted] for his starting skills, then put the rest of his points in STR and AGI. A stereotypical speed-based melee build. At some point he would learn some magic and aim to become something like a mage knight. To that end, he chose to be human for the balanced starting XP.

According to the tutorial, until he got to the city, Wayne as he was now should be able to easily defeat any monsters he encountered. As a new character, he would set himself up in that city and just work on earning XP and money for now.

As he got closer to the city, he spotted a forest on the other side of it. Probably monster territory. Due to monster territory being so close, he also saw a sturdy wall separating the two. Wayne wasn’t familiar with this particular city, but a player’s starting location was chosen randomly, so that was just luck of the draw. If the country were poor or politically unstable, then it couldn’t afford a wall, even to protect the city from monster territory. Or, the order to build a city wall wouldn’t have come from the country itself. But Hiers wasn’t like that. It would of course install a wall to defend against threats from monster territory; it would protect its borders as fervently as it did its capital. The forest was probably a good source of both XP and money. It was located in a beginner zone, after all. He didn’t think there’d be any particularly powerful monsters.

“Oops, it’s a Wild Rabbit.”

From its name and appearance, it really was just a wild hare, but he’d take damage if he took it easy. He probably wouldn’t die to it, but that mentality was also a form of hubris. With Wayne’s build and his own skill as a player, he could probably avoid getting hit even if he only had starting equipment. The wild rabbit all of a sudden flattened itself against the ground.

“[Parry]!”

He timed his [Parry] to intercept the wild rabbit that had leaped at him. The skill either defended against an attack and dealt counterattack damage, or repelled the attack and caused the opponent to stumble. If [Parry] were successful, the player repelled, but if it failed, the player only partially blocked. Here, the wild rabbit’s faltered, and it was completely open to an attack from the side.

“Yes! Take this!”

Wayne stabbed his one-handed sword at the wild rabbit over and over, defeating it. A results screen appeared and awarded him a small amount of XP.

“At this rate, I don’t know when I’ll be able to learn some magic. Guess I really should get to town, set myself up, then go check out that forest.”

Earning XP was always a time consuming activity. In all the old MMORPGs, endgame content was just characters at max level farming for newer and better equipment and items, and those games focused all their efforts on extending the game in that manner. However, people began to tire of that gameplay model and complained that it alienated newer, younger gamers.

At that time, VR technology had begun to make huge leaps in advancement, so gaming entered an age of fully immersive VR. There had already been a period where gamers played games by actually moving their bodies, but the industry was looking for something new, in a different style from that. Then came the rise of games where the player wasn’t expected to play for a long time after hitting max level, but instead the very act of hitting max level required an enormously long time. As it so happens sometimes, there was even a period where lots of games had players hit max level extremely quickly, but they died out simply because “character progression was bland and uninteresting.”

With the advent of VR technology, games focusing on the journey of the character itself grew in popularity, and games that focused primarily on endgame content vanished. Influenced by that trend, today’s hardcore gamers enjoyed very slowly taking tiny steps to earn experience points and level up their characters.

“Once I get to the city, the first thing I’ll do is replace an inn and rent out a room. Then I’ll go to the sellsword guild and check if there are any quests in or around the forest…”

After putting the wild rabbit’s carcass in his inventory, Wayne resumed his journey to the city. By the time he arrived, he had hunted several wild rabbits.