The gaming publications had been raving about K.O.R.A.L. for years, ever since they put up their first crowdfunding video. The first true VRMMO, Virtual Reality Massively Multiplayer Online game, with dynamic content created and run b Artificial Intelligences. Mike had been immediately interested, as he had been a gamer his whole life. To think that from his childhood in the mid 1980s to now, 2043, they had managed to move from home consoles to full dive VR pods was astounding progress.

Mike Nelson had been a sci-fi and fantasy nerd his whole life. Reading the great books of epic, grimdark, and sword and sorcery he had always wanted to live in a fantasy world. He had reveled in tabletop roleplaying games, playing legendary warriors and irascible mages. Of course, he had played all the big MMOs of the past, but they were pale reflections of reality, catering to players who needed a visual marker over someone’s head to find a quest. K.O.R.A.L. promised to be different.

The developers had promised that once the game launched, they would be hands off, allowing the players to make and mold the world within the rules of the game. It was to be a sandbox game, without traditional class/level system, more of a skill based system with some caveats. Technological breakthroughs had allowed them to design AIs to control the NPCs in the game so that they could have real personalities, and really react to the world around them rather than just following a fancy script. You wouldn’t even be able to tell who was a player or non player character in the game unless you spoke with them and figured it out yourself. You might adventure with someone for months only to find out they were an AI-driven phantom.

And the most interesting feature for someone like Mike, who had retired at 59 due to health issues, was the extreme time compression that took place within the game. For every day you spent in the game, an hour passed in the real world. For every year in the game, a real world week passed. The brain was able to handle a much higher flow of operations than it experienced in the real world, and the VR technology took advantage of that fact.

Living with the constant pains of an aging body, combined with a wide array of medical and genetic issues, this was a chance for Mike to be able to ignore that pain while in the game, and also live a lot more years’ worth of excitement and adventure than he could outside the game. He had immediately cashed in some of his investments to be able to buy the top level of backing for the project before people caught wind of how great this was and the price invariably went up.

He had managed to get a backer’s package with a premium pod, alpha access, a few adventuring supplies and a special plot item for when the game went live. The game used a permadeath system where player characters did not respawn on death, you had to make a whole new character (or be resurrected using rare magic in the game). This led him to try and procure as many advantages for his character as possible.

Alpha was a two week process in which players were loaded into the game in a remote edge of the Agelastan Empire. The pods weren’t ready yet so people were using more traditional VR helmets. The players were given characters to play who had high level skills and magic to test those systems, and the results were a total bloodbath. Mike had never been so exhilarated by a game in his life, it was if every moment could be his last but he couldn’t stop pushing the envelope.

Alpha ended, and the game was left to run, the characters in it responding to the actions of the now absent players. The developers promised, for good or ill, that the results of player actions would be permanent and have a real impact. One unintended side effect of the Alpha was that the characters in the game became extremely paranoid about Travelers, i.e. players, who appeared from nowhere and wreaked havoc. They frequently had medieval-style witch-hunts to try and find Travelers hidden amongst them, and beheaded anyone they suspected. As strong as the Travelers were, if you killed them they stayed dead.

It was two long years of waiting from the time of Alpha to the launch date, and in that time the developers produced some cultural education programs to train players to fit in with their characters culture in the game, to avoid detection. If you didn’t care to hide your status, it was likely you would end up minus a head and making a new character. Finally after all the waiting, it was time for the launch of K.O.R.A.L.