The New Garage Chronicles

(Crossposted from Tumblr)

Anonymous asked: id be really interested to see you talk about the dynamic btwn Haseo and Ovan + how it changes over time

I had to take a vigorous walk around the block and a shower before I could sit down to write this, lmao.

God, nonny, they are So Much. An unbelievable amount, even.

To step back from the mythical framing for a little bit and to just look at them as people, one of the things that makes me bark like a dog the worst is how all of the Epitaph are all circling and struggling with the similar kinds of of identity issues -- presumably being the reason the Epitaphs attached themselves to them, there's no room in the mind of people who are too secure in who they are to carry the duties of a Phase with them.

Each of the Epitaphs represent the temptation to fall into a variety of self-protective but futile failure modes that let you define yourself on your own terms but ultimately limit growth, and while I have thoughts about all of the Epitaph users and how they interact with each other, I definitely think Haseo and Ovan get the version of it that is the most brutal in its compatibility.

For Haseo, Skeith represents a temptation to do as thou wilst, to eschew a communal and social identity in favour of only exclusively defining himself -- which is, incidentally, how Ovan comes across initially. You could not find a guy who moves through the world with more assurance and less need to explain himself. Ovan appears to have a kind of singularity of identity that nobody else can get a word in edgewise -- and Haseo, who spends a lot of time feeling off and unsure and wordlessly anxious about having lost sight of who he is, that's like the holy grail.

( \*lying on the floor* I feel unwell about them )

(Crossposted from Tumblr)

One of the joys of a dormant fandom is that I can just show up and prop my feet on the table and start talking about divine horror and how sometimes a computer program is an angel and how humans are obsessed with taking the power of the heavens and putting it in a box for themselves to use.

Like.

God exists and she's a nice girl and she worked hard to be born, but she also has a temper and humans keep trying to put her in a box so she got fed up with it and hid from them. From her mother, she inherited eight powerful champions, and as a reward for their service she left them to roam as they pleased, but when humans couldn't trap her, they chose to trap those champions instead, and put them in a box, except now that box was a human, and that human was meant to take the power of the god that the humans couldn't steal, because humans made the divine realm that god and her angels inhabit and want to control it (as humans do).

And now you've got a bunch of humans who don't know they're being given a box with an angel in it and putting that box in their own bodies, and nobody can really figure out why these angel bodies keep going out of control and driving their hosts to madness, and oh, hey, the mother of god made these champions for a purpose and the humans in the driver seat don't know about that, either, even though the humans who gave them the angel bodies do know about that, because they want to use those angel bodies to make another god.

So congratulations! You're a prophet now! You are being called to do battle for your god, because you've been granted a divine body that has an angel in it, that is an angel. You're being called to do as your nature as an angel requires of you! And the entire time you're just a human, and the thing in your head feels too big for your mortal body, it feels too big for your divine body, and you're just watching things spiral out of control, wondering why you feel like you'd bleed mercury if they scratched you too deep.

( Original tags )

(This is a combination of posts on Tumblr, here and here, for archival and conversation purposes)

TBH I think I’ve fallen into the trap of taking the game systems in Last Recode too literally, because Roots pretty directly implies that Haseo’s batshit level before he gets data drained is the result of the PK killing spree he goes on after getting Form 3’d by AI Harald. To me it looks like having cleared Forest of Pain at such a low level, and having access to high level skills and mechanics most people need to grind up to access, gives Haseo an edge over the majority of players, even those he has a significant level gap to, and once he hits level 100 he’s truly in an elite that only people like madmen who grind the arena like Sirius and Taihaku, or else people who camp the level cap due to extensive playtime like Phyllo and Shino, or people who simply cheat like Ovan.

And that does a little bit bear out as far as game!Haseo goes, because the game outright encourages you to keep aiming for battles to be 2-3 levels above your own for optimal level growth, and I’ve found that even 6-7 is perfectly doable as long as you never ever ever get hit. Haseo’s version of Adept Rogue emphasises speed with two of its weapons, and the upgrade seems to have unlocked a lot of his skils outright, and what with how aggro he is, he’s just out-damaging everyone in an instant even at a low level.

This dovetails with the idea that outside of basic attacks and a few skills, most skills and abilities in The World are rewards from beating certain enemies, quests or areas with special conditions. But since that would be tedious for the narrative, the game unrolls some of those systems into just the level-up system, and leaves the rest as implication.

--

I am gonna outright claim that since the dungeon/field generation in The World works a bit like a large languge model, it’s actually pretty easy to get it to blurb out dungeons and fields that have some impossible features like warp pads that are unreachable or geometry you have to noclip through, enemies with ??? level and treasure boxes that give out items with impossibly high levels or max out inventory slots.

Furthermore, this is actually a (semi-)deliberate choice from the developers. (The qualifier of semi-deliberate is that I don't think the devs are capable of forcing the system to reject certain word combinations, since they consistently cannot stop people from entering Lost Grounds once they emerge.) The keyword input is minimally sanitised, and the full keyword list is deliberately obscured to create a dynamic where the players can use knowledge about “good areas” as a resource of trade with other players. The use of “amount of players in this area” indicators per area is also there to further this dynamic, since well-traveled areas could either have good loot or be PK hunting grounds (or both) and low-traveled areas might either have garbage loot or be supremely difficult (or both).

The side-effect of being able to create areas with extremely hostile parameters also lets players at the level cap keep experiencing challenging battles, because The World itself parameterizes everything, and the monsters and loot aren’t limited the way the PCs are.

I also don’t think the “you can’t equip this thing until you’re the same level with it” limitation is a diegetic one. High level weapons, armour, items and skills are a part of the information economy of The World – the knowledge where to find such things and what rate they respawn at and the impossible-to-document size of The World is what keeps it interesting past the developer-curated Main Scenario Quest.