INTERVAL
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SAMSARA FALL ONLINE
SFO is a popular MMORPG that instead of bringing the generic theme-park adventure gimmick, the developer group responsible to create such a game, Black Killjoy Entertainment, had a different idea for the genre and brought a new concept to the public. Something with such extreme notions, that showed nothing more than ambitiousness and pure madness.
At their first presentation, the Lead Developer came up on the stage and, with all his heart, promised something completely new, something that wouldn’t eat the crumbs of other MMOs to nourish a needing public that is becoming more and more stupid with the same sudo-adventurous games. With his game, everyone would feel the adventure, everyone would be challenged and compelled to explore.
He believed in his own speech, briefly commentating on every idea of his as if it was a precious gem, even if it seemingly had nothing special about it. At every sentence, he appeared to build up a surprise reveal that would blow everyone’s mind but his voice always descended a tone to an “I promise you, it is going to be good”.
At the end of the event, everyone knew he was insane.
Besides the good graphics, the plain storytelling of a broad world, and the watchable trailer, nothing pointed it to be half what was promised. Sure, the fans of the genre were hyped for it even by the presenter being an asshole, but the great majority hated the game.
“Yet another guy who thinks he can change the world with his ideas,” some thought. “Trying to create a new game in an oversaturated genre, just another case of a big developer trying an easy cash grab, only to fail in the end.”
Until its release date, one year after such trailer, the game had grown its reputation, not by making anyone happier, but by increasing everyone’s curiosity. And that’s why in the first week after release, it reached the player count of thirty million.
Being an optimized game and free-to-play helped, anyone could download it to try. So, why not do it?
That’s when questions started to rise.
“Aren’t there any classes?”
“What is the story, after all?”
“I can’t choose a server? How I’m going to play with my friends?”
“Where’s the map?”
“There’s only the human race?”
“What am I supposed to do?”
Nothing-
-was as people expected. There was no choice besides the character’s physical appearance and its name, then only the “start game” button to continue. No servers, no classes, no attributes. At first, everyone thought it was going to be explained afterward, that a single-player tutorial would happen first before the real game starts. And so millions clicked blindly and saw the story to be unfolded.
Fading in, a white text appears on the black screen:
“Only you decide what your story will be in this vast world.”
The loading ends, the chosen character appears younger, and his mother appears to ask for help with small house tasks, like grabbing items from the ground, interacting with other people, and cutting food with a minigame of some sort, then his father comes home and calls you to hunt with him. Nothing but a normal tutorial--
“TilerDizNuts: wait this isnt how my char started”
The message pops up, a girl in front of the screen reads it while moving her character.
“This wasn’t how your char started, chat? What do you mean?” – she says with a friendly smile.
After a few seconds, more messages appeared.
“TilerDizNuts: for me it started in the royal family”
“Oh, is that so? Did you choose a class for that? I forgot that, sorry guys.” – She giggles shyly.
“MariaTX: Yeah it was about a orphan slave working in a rice field, mine was better.”
“LucasFoxy: what you guys talking about”
“safiraboylish: I started in the streets with a poor family, we had to steal and shit”
“MLumberjack: I wanted to see your reaction when the sister die, but you don’t even have one”
“LucasFoxy: it was a guy wanting to be a knight”
The chat turmoiled, the messages going up and up, hundreds of people telling hundreds of different stories.
The confusion only made the game grow even more. People started creating multiple characters only to see what story they would get next, while others spent hours advancing in the lore and leveling up their characters, to explore the world or become the pinnacle of power.
Many communities over the internet joined forces to tell their experiences, searching if anyone matched stories or had them linked somehow, trying to discover if the game had a cluster of premade lore that came out randomly.
But every story was different.
Some cases were indeed very close to each other, but when the player advanced and made decisions, things diverged. Depending on the missions they accepted, on the ones they failed or died into, or if they helped citizens or bandits, everything mattered, not only for each character but their actions also affected other players on how their next missions would be or how new ones would begin.
Great groups of lore exploration determined that there were two types of narrative, the random generated and the big-picture. The first is believed to be advanced AIs building stories for each player, making the lore and small missions according to where the player spawned, considering the local culture and the big-picture events. The second one, on the other hand, was written by the developers, while the AI only changes details to fit each player’s context or by the player’s previous actions, those being constant to all players.
NPCs weren’t different on that matter, all of them are unique and have distinguished backstories, but differently from players, if they did die they wouldn’t respawn. Places, big monuments, and biomes, also are unique in their own way, having different pasts and content.
It was later discovered that changing to a foreign server was possible just by walking to another country in-game. Besides, every server had a unique big-picture lore and places, all having different contents from each other. Once you unlocked a Quick Travel to that place, you would be able to change servers at will, if such border was open to foreigns to pass, that is.
This motivated many parties to play. Some traveled the world to explore its beauties and unlocked countless Quick Travels, while others farmed both casually at low-level missions or bravely at high-stake legendary expeditions. Everything was so insanely vast that updates were released separately for each server, and the player base increased so much that they had to open alternative servers to hold the heavy load, even when each in-game country was already enormous.
Crafting, fighting, exploring, selling items, making new friendships, backstabbing, and creating ultimate guilds, ranging from economics to full-out wars between servers. Anything imaginable could be done within the boundaries of it being a video game.
People made their living from just playing, became addicted, joined forces with thousands of other people, grew famous, found their happiness and sorrows. Countless stories were created.
Indeed, it was a world-changing game. In less than a year, the majority of the real world had played it at least once.
It had such a big impact that… on the fourteenth of July of two thousand and fifty-seven, sixteen months after release, Takumi Montoya, the Lead Developer of Samsara Fall Online, hanged himself to death in his house for undefined reasons.
His mysterious death had only a single clue, a letter left at the foot of his corpse:
“For thoSe who want Salvation
Burn SamSara down.”
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