《Dead Earth Online》Chapter 6.5

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"Nobody can fault Dead Earth Online for not being ambitious enough. The scale of the thing takes some getting used to; they have truly vast geographical areas to play with, and their heavy reliance on next-gen AI for filling in content between the already immense quest trees leaves you feeling like you’re nearly in a genuine living world. But for a game of this type it’s a strangely human-centric world, as every playable choice is a regular human of various abilities, backgrounds, and allegiances. No catgirls or sexy lizard people are to be found, which might come as a relief to many of us, but it remains to be seen if this more reality-based worldbuilding is something the market will support.

With the exception of the mysterious Nexus (we’ll get to that) the player base is tasked with rebuilding human civilization in a world nearly obliterated by a global disaster. The new player has to choose his goals and his allegiances carefully, as there is a snake’s nest of factions, cults, tribes, minor kingdoms, and secret societies jostling for control of human destiny in the new world. Some want to reboot high-tech society, some want to return to an imagined eco-utopian past, many are just trying to get by, and there are more than a few flat-out insane groups who may or may not be hiding powerful secrets of their own.

It can be bewildering at first as you try to find a place to fit and a goal to work on - but that’s the whole essence of Axiom’s “Your Game, Your Way” marketing for the release. The game doesn’t hold your hand, it just presents you with a world and tells you to have fun. You can dive into medieval politics, try to take over a doomsday cult, or even find a nice plot of land and build yourself a farm (if you can defend it, at least).

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Then there’s The Nexus, the strange force that shrouds the ruins of the old cities. Here we finally enter the realm of the non-humans, as we’re told there are a load of strange and terrible things inside it. Don’t expect to start battling mutant armies right away though, because Axiom has made the barrier of entry to actually investigating the mysteries of the Nexus surprisingly high. We did a few high-speed runs into the place just to see how far we could get, and we didn’t last long at all. Most of the time we were swarmed by the “Desolate Horde”, the game’s notional name for the ragged half-mutant, half-human creatures that have populated apocalyptic cityscapes for decades now. Fighting them alone was an exercise in frustration as they just swarm you in numbers that you can’t overcome. This is clearly intended to be team-based content. One time we managed to die to the claws of a Biomorph - shambling Lovecraftian assemblages of tissue and machinery that can do shocking levels of damage in no time at all. Apparently there are even worse things farther in, but be prepared to spend some serious leveling time before you have a hope of seeing any of that. Guilds have already been organized which are dedicated specifically to braving the perils of the Deep Nexus.

But we’re assured that the rewards are worth it - the Nexus is the source of the overpowered “transcendent technology” items. These rare finds fetch colossal prices and we’re told that just a few such items can shift the balance of power between nations out in the wider world. So Axiom has given the player a decent risk/reward profile for dedicating himself to such punishing activity. All the same, the place of the Nexus in the game world seems weirdly understated given what lies within. We would not be surprised to see content expansions relating to it eventually."

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from “Dead Earth Online - First Impressions”, VRPG Report, November 2027

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