Esther de Baronia - Chapter 1.1

VR, Virtual Reality.

It refers to the use of special equipment to simulate experiences that would otherwise be impossible to have.

In the past, the technology was only used for military purposes or small amusements, and required a special enclosure in which you had to lie down in a huge device and put a very sturdy device on your head.

The technology has become so sophisticated that you can now project a virtual reality world onto your brain simply by wearing a headset with a LAN cable connected to it, and it’s finally available as home gaming hardware.

It is still expensive, but if you want to be able to play at home, whenever you want, you’d be tempted to buy it even if you hit a fortune. In fact, many families have bought one.

The arrival of the VR headset for home use was met with a frenzy unparalleled by any other piece of hardware that has come before it.

It’s hard not to understand why so many people have been able to create the appearance they want, become the person they’ve always wanted to be, and experience the fantasy world they’ve always dreamed of with their five senses.

At first there are dangers, such as affecting the brain, but thanks to a number of robust safety programs there have been no accidents and it is now a laughing matter that it was just a silly fantasy.

The idea of sending signals directly to the brain has become a social phenomenon, with grateful and scornful praises spreading everywhere that whoever thought of it must be crazy.

Perhaps the spread of the world, where everyone has infinite possibilities, has denied reality and created an easy escape route.

Many games classified as VR have been released worldwide, 70% of which are massively multiplayer online games. It’s so-called MMOs.

Unlike the real world, we have the technology to enjoy the world by interacting with many people in a beautiful alter ego, but we can’t make full use of the functions of VR in an offline game where you interact with NPCs who can only talk to you in a fixed way. This is the inevitable direction.

There is also a 10% offline version of the game for the general public, which is also a result of demand, but its sales are not as good as the online game.

I hate to say it, but I’m deliberately leaving out the stuff for adults because they sell more than MMOs.

I don’t need to tell you why. And the birth rate continues to fall. It really is an easy way out.

Now, there is one category of MMO that accounts for 70% of the market share. They are called RPGs, or role-playing games.

You can be a hero in a fairy tale, a demon king, a merchant, a farmer, etc. You can choose a wide range of life without any disadvantages unlike the reality. It’s up to you to be the best, the worst or not.

Because of this wide range of options and the ease with which they can be used, the game industry has created a unique world and setting that is offered to the world.

With so much freedom in character creations, so many different professions, so many different events, so many different items to buy, it’s easy to laugh at the online games of the past.

But what is the remaining 30%?

Twenty percent is taken up by FPS. Most of them are gun shooting games. These are games in which you play as a mercenary or a soldier in the army, controlling weapons and fighting wars, and there’s not much difference between them. The only thing you can do is to use original weapons, but if you have too many of them, you’ll be limited to what you can do in an RPG.

In addition to this, the fact that the content is content, and the fact that you get the same feeling as in real life, means that there are strict regulations.

The remaining 10% is others. Card games and board games are in this category.

You might think, “Why don’t you do that in real life?”, but the fact that you can enjoy the graphics of monsters in 3D and see them run rampant, which is impossible in real life, made VR very meaningful.

So what is the least popular?

Among the others, simulation games. This is commonly known as SLG.

This is a game where you create units and expand your territory while fighting for it, which is generally accepted as a kind of territory management system.

In the early days of the genre, there were a lot of games that were released and people went crazy for them, but nowadays the genre has gone downhill.

Why is that?

Let’s take a typical VRMMOSLG [Apocalypse] as an example.

Apocalypse was the first MMO strategy simulation game to be made in VR.

In Apocalypse, a world where humans and demons live, the protagonist becomes the lord of a castle and uses resources to create demons to fight for territory.

When you summoned a demon, you could create a character, and even if you couldn’t change its race, you could create a variety of different looks and shapes.

The demons that could be obtained through paid lotteries and events possessed immense power, and could be made powerful simply by paying in kind.

The game was free per month, which was unusual for a VRMMO in its early days, but the only thing that was a bit old-fashioned was the management system, which made a lot of money out of these charged items and lotteries.

The purpose of the hero is to expand the territory of the country. While invading the hexagonally divided territory, he collects resources and uses them to manage the country.

At the same time, you can increase the population of your country by invading the territory and capturing the demons that live there, build up the city by upgrading the various facilities, and create your own castle by tinkering with the interior design.

You’ll be able to build up your defences and invade while enriching your country, and that’s pretty much it. There’s nothing special about it.

The game is an RTS real time strategy game, which is unusual for a Japanese game, and it gives you a sense of responsibility by letting you control various things from inside the castle.

The war system, which was the most important aspect of the game, has yet to be surpassed by Apocalypse, with a wide area map that shows the ever-changing war situation on a flat surface, and a hex map that gives you a bird’s eye view of the situation.

There are also elements such as diplomacy and warfare that occur through communication with others – although it’s only voice chat – and you can experience the tension of running a nation. It’s a very maniacal game for those who love it.

Now that I’ve given you a general overview of simulation games and a brief description of Apocalypse, I’d like to explain why it didn’t sell.

First of all, the degree of freedom allowed to the player was too low.

The protagonist can move within his own territory, but that’s it.  There are some events, but they are just errands. It’s not a game where the player can move around on their own.

There are no story quests to aim for, just a series of sub-quests and simple jobs to complete. You can’t go outside of the castle, so you can only see the country’s prosperity on the map, and at best you can only look around the capital, which is really tasteless.

The NPCs just say a few sentences and don’t respond to anything else, mechanically going about their daily lives.

Who would enjoy walking through a city like that?

This is the first factor.

Secondly, the treatment of the demons you use is terrible.

You’re supposed to use demons to expand your territory, fight defensive battles, invade and so on, but the demons don’t even have any text. They don’t respond when you talk to them, they’re more like machines than NPCs, and you can only feel the emptiness of talking to them alone.

It’s probably unavoidable given that it’s one of the first VR games, but for a game with such a detailed war system, they’ve cut too many corners.

To be honest, it’s not so much a lack of skill as it is a lack of motivation and data capacity. A little more progress and everyone might live like a human being, but it’s obvious that the developers don’t have that kind of ambition, and it’s hard to see any improvement now.

Last but not least, the inability to create purpose.

Even if you wanted to be the strongest or make the biggest country you could, the two aforementioned factors would chip away at your enthusiasm like a file.

It was also bad enough to have nothing to do but sit in the castle, watching the quest windows and dealing with problems as they arose.

At first, the management tried to do something about it. In the past, the only way to see what your demons looked like was to look at a full body view on the status screen, and at the time of the beta test, the boos were “What’s the point of VR?” There was also an unusual amount of booing during the beta test. This delayed the official launch by two years.

There were also a lot of events and special demon lotteries to try and get people to bite, but the results were disastrous.

I’m going to say this twice, but maybe that’s because I wasn’t motivated.

I don’t know if it’s because I like war so much, or because there was a time when I made a lot of updates that I couldn’t understand who I was flattering, so I’m not sure if I can honestly say that I did my best.

However, even if the management of Apocalypse was ambitious, it was judged that the simulation was not suitable for VR because the purpose was vague and the action was routine.

A city management game also made it to VR, but was heavily criticized as it was very uninteresting to be forced to do the mayor’s job in real time and in a very graphic way, which I didn’t want to do. It was concluded that the genre was not suitable for the field.

In the end, the game was unable to break out of the confines of browser games and offline games, and was deemed unsuitable for VRMMOs, which demand a high degree of freedom.

However, there is one person who continues to play such games.

This is the story of that man.