Mebius World Online – Mari’s VRMMO Diary, Embarking on a Laid-back Adventure as a Novice Chapter 60 Discussion

Very standard "The NPCs are actually alive" type VRMMO story. Has the typical theme of "everyone else were power gamers and ab*sed the NPCs but I became OP because I was nice to them/treated them as real" like a bunch of others (Eg Game of the World Tree, Golden Experience, Apotheosis of a Demon etc.). The protagonist's main advantage over everyone else is her lack of game knowledge/pre-existing notions of how games work, so she treats the world like a real place and tries things other people wouldn't think of, being rewarded because the game world is just super realistic. A very similar character setting to Maple from I Don't Want to get Hurt so I'll Max out my Defense... but not quite as utterly game breaking.

She's got the Jester jobclass but doesn't seem to be going down the clown path very much. She's very much playing a Saint character. Totally Holy Mother Maria... except actually she's the Holy Onee-chan, which is funny.

The part where her fanclub is a group of lo*icons is kinda uncomfortable, but they don't ever take it too far, only about the level of the Loli-god requiem music video that went viral? Warning for that content though.

I thought the in-world game design was especially interesting, particularly the big calamity event. It reminds me of the kind of junk Spec Ops: The Line (a real life videogame on the Xbox 360) pulls where it messes with your preconceived expectations of how to play a videogame to trick you into doing horrible and tragic things? Or the way Undertale's bad ending/genocide route is actually just the way you would play an RPG normally, grinding for levels. Our protagonist Mari is that one really unusual player who would play Undertale and get the pacifist ending on the first try without being told/spoiled that you're not supposed to kill the monsters.

I like these kinds of stories, this one is good. It digs for that same goodie two shoes feeling you get when doing all the side quests in a game, where you go around helping all the NPCs and solving everyone's problems.

Tangent:

Spoiler

As for whether the way the game is developed in world is realistic like someone mentioned... as an actual game dev? Actually kinda yeah. I wouldn't be surprised by anything anymore, what with the way AI is going. ChatGPT does utter nonsense I would have told you with every fiber of my little computer scientist heart is supposed to be completely impossible if you asked me in 2019. And the research papers coming out just keep getting more and more ridiculous. Last week Google fed their new AI a dictionary and a book about grammar and got it to speak fluently in a language I've never heard of and that it never trained on after just reading those two books. Calling it now, if we're not all dead or ens*aved by robot overlords in 2040, games are totally gonna work like this and I'll be out of a job.

Heck. There's even crazy talk going around about rendering that *doesn't use triangles* like every computer graphics technique made since like 1960 something. We have "NeRFs" and "SMeRFs" and Gaussian Splatting and Jensen Huang getting up on stage and saying that in the future every frame will be AI generated by stable diffusion 27. I could not have even imagined a machine that would work that way just a few years ago. It never in a million years would have occurred to me, it is already so, so, sooo far away from anything familiar to me. I've spent basically my entire life since I was ten years old fascinated by game programming, so you'd think I know a thing or two by now, but. The rules no longer apply and common sense got yeeted out the window. Videogames ten years from now might as well be alien technology or straight up magic as far as I'm concerned.

I feel like it's 2002 and I just read Alex Rider, laughing at their Sci-fi videogame machine that could "render individual raindrops, millions and millions of them every frame" and saying "yeah right like that'll ever happen" - low and behold. It's 2023, and even dinky little handheld game consoles like the Steam Deck can all push tens of millions of particles without breaking a sweat... The future's gonna be nuts, that's all I know.

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