Deep in the cold, silent vacuum of space, within the heavily fortified structure of an Accord Hyperspace Charter Control Station, Lockley was on duty.
The technician sat in his worn, squeaky command chair, completely surrounded by the suffocatingly dull grey metal bulkheads of the control room. His primary console was currently monitoring the seamless flow of heavy freighter traffic entering the Sector-9 hyperlanes. But his secondary, private terminal was currently displaying the full, massive text transcription of VGN's deep-dive interview with Round Table Studio.
Lockley leaned closer to the screen, his tired eyes scanning a specific segment dedicated to the Head of Design.
[VGN INTERVIEW - Design Department]
VGN:So, Galahad. As the Head of Design, you are largely responsible for the mechanical structure of these massive, intricately detailed worlds. The parkour routing in Assassin's Creed alone looks staggering. How do you handle that immense technical pressure without entirely burning out?
Galahad:"Truthfully? I just take a walk."
VGN:"A walk?"
Galahad:"Yes. Whenever the code starts blending together, or when push comes to shove during a stressful bug triage, Arthur enforces a mandatory screen break. I simply step away from my workstation, walk out into the central atrium of the HQ, and just... relax in the greenery. We have these massive trees growing directly through the floorboards. The air is filtered naturally. The scent of damp earth and actual, living foliage completely resets my fatigue."
VGN:"That sounds incredibly idyllic. Was your previous development experience in the industry similar to this?"
Galahad:"Not even close. My previous workplace was... well, it was essentially a gloomy, windowless grey room buried deep within a massive bureaucratic facility. Everything was compact. The air tasted like recycled ozone and failure. The sheer concept of a 'creative space' didn't exist. Looking back, I honestly didn't realize how numb I had become until I joined Round Table Studio. They completely reignited a passion for coding and tinkering that I thought had died many years ago."
Lockley couldn't help but smile, a soft, amused chuckle escaping his lips.
"Huh. What kind of place is this?" Lockley muttered, scrolling down to look at the jaw-dropping, high-definition photos of the RTS Headquarters. The lush, sunlit atrium looked like a paradise compared to the brutalist reality of modern Accord architecture.
He slowly looked away from the screen, his gaze sweeping across his own control room. It was literally a gloomy, windowless grey room buried deep within a massive bureaucratic facility. The air tasted exactly like recycled ozone.
Lockley sighed, a dry, incredulous smile touching his face. "I can't believe I even entertained the thought of comparing."
He was an Accord Hyperspace Charter, after all. He was essentially a glorified traffic warden for deep space. He certainly couldn't expect the military-grade budget of the Stellar Accord to suddenly grant him a localized rainforest inside a space station.
He leaned forward, his eyes landing on a small, empty patch of grey metal at the far corner of his desk.
'Though...' Lockley mused thoughtfully. 'A little pop of green wouldn't hurt. Maybe I can find a small pot of flower at the commissary.'
The heavy, pressurized blast doors to the control room suddenly hissed open. Lockley spun his chair around, surprised to see his shift partner, a younger Neman technician, walking in.
"You're early today," Lockley noted, checking the digital chrono on the wall.
His partner let out a long, exhausted sigh, dropping a heavy plastic shopping bag onto the adjacent console. "You don't say. I have been awake since four in the morning."
Lockley raised an eyebrow. "Is the hyperlane traffic backed up at the checkpoint?"
"No," the Neman replied, a sudden, giddy smile breaking across his scarred face. "Actually... it's because I just bought the brand new set of Pokémon booster packs! Hehe."
Lockley stared at his partner in absolute disbelief. "I can't believe you woke up three hours early, sacrificing precious sleep before a ten-hour shift, purely because you needed to buy pieces of cardboard."
"Hey! It was a massively long line at the orbital store, old man!" his partner defended, pulling a stack of brightly colored foil packs from the plastic bag. "After all the crazy corporate lawsuits going on, everyone can finally buy them! I was incredibly lucky to get a spot in the early row too."
The young Neman looked at the shiny packs, then looked back at Lockley with a hopeful, boyish grin. "So... you want to help me open some?"
Lockley looked at his chrono. They still had a good twenty minutes before the official shift changeover protocol initiated.
"Sure," Lockley chuckled, rolling his chair over. "Why not."
…
"Okay... if I just wedge Ezio directly between this chimney and the terracotta slanting... maybe I can trigger an out-of-bounds clip and skip the entire sequence."
FramePerfect frantically mashed his controller buttons, jamming his digital character aggressively into the corner of a Florentine rooftop. The screen shook slightly, but Ezio simply hopped off the chimney and gracefully landed back on the tiles, completely unharmed and entirely within the boundaries of the playable map.
FramePerfect let out a long, frustrated groan, dropping his head onto his desk.
It was supposed to be his time. This was his moment to finally show the internet exactly why he held multiple undefeated speedrunning records.
Assassin's Creed was Round Table Studio's very first fully 3D game. Historically, newly launched 3D games, especially massive, open-world ones with complex vertical traversal were notoriously buggy.
They were usually absolute goldmines for clipping errors, broken geometry, and exploitable physics. Because it was still the first week of release, it was supposed to be FramePerfect's turn to completely shatter the engine and set some ridiculous world records.
Yet, Assassin's Creed was terrifyingly polished.
Worse than that, FramePerfect found his precious speedrunning time constantly getting fully hijacked by the sheer enjoyment of the combat and parkour systems. Each completed sequence gave him a profound sense of progression. With every new mission, he could physically feel Ezio becoming more nimble, more dangerous, and more refined in his movements.
It wasn't that FramePerfect wasn't actively searching for bugs or exploits. It was just that the game was too damn fun to break.
[GamerGuy22]:Are we really looking at live FramePerfect footage right now? He has been wandering around this roof for ten minutes.
[Void_Watcher]:Bro, just delete the timer in the corner of your screen at this point. LMAO.
[TryHard_88]:FramePerfect once again completely defeated by RTS.
[SpeedDemon]:RIP to the King. The game design claims another victim.
FramePerfect sat back up, pointing an accusatory finger at his webcam.
"Listen to me, chat," FramePerfect defended, adjusting his gaming headset. "This game is just entirely too polished. I have literally been reading the deep-dive technical breakdowns on the backend developer forums in Avalon trying to find a weak point."
[CodeMiner77]:You went to that confusing page? I can't believe you are still sane. It's nothing but raw math and rendering algorithms.
[LoreNerd99]:Honestly, it's not that confusing, guys. It's just a lost language.
"Exactly," FramePerfect nodded. "And what the community discovered is that this game engine only actively renders things that are currently within the player's direct camera frame. One of the RTS developers actually confirmed it in a post there, calling the technique 'Culling'. So..."
FramePerfect paused, a manic, hyper-fixated gleam returning to his eyes.
"My working theory is that this 'Culling' system can be forcefully breached with enough forward movement velocity," FramePerfect explained rapidly. "If I can make Ezio move faster than the engine can physically render the next street, I can clip straight through a despawned building! So what I'm actively searching for right now is a way to break the physics of the movement set to generate infinite momentum!"
[StrategyKing]:Actually... that is not a bad theory.
[Astro_Architect]:Yeahhh, but the level design of the city and the environment has clearly accounted for that, I think. The streets are intentionally winding to block long lines of sight and slow your momentum.
[CasualGamer99]:Go FramePerfect! I will donate 1000 credits right now if you can actually pull it off... in my dreams, lol.
FramePerfect huffed, staring at the incredibly detailed, flawless architecture of Florence.
He felt a sudden, familiar sense of defeat washing over him. It seemed it was time for him to do another completely bug-free, pure-skill speedrun, exactly like he had been forced to do with Hades.
He wondered, briefly, if Arthur specifically had him and the rest of the speedrunning community in mind when creating these airtight games. Even now, looking at the city layout, FramePerfect could already see the optimal routing paths and the perfect ways to complete each mission faster.
He picked his controller back up, a stubborn grin forming on his face.
'Well,' FramePerfect thought, cracking his knuckles. 'A challenge is still a challenge. It's completely fine if RTS makes games without any obvious exploits. Because I, FramePerfect, can complete games the absolute fastest even without breaking them.'
…
Back on the capital planet of Ardota Prime, deep within the silent, hallowed halls of the Grand Library, a completely different kind of deep dive was taking place.
Inside the highly restricted Preservers section, Yna, known as LoreSeeker_Yna in Avalon forum, stood entirely surrounded by towering shelves of linguistic data. This specific wing of the archives housed the structural rules, dictionaries, and phonetic recordings of countless languages.
Many of these tongues were completely dead, having no living speakers for thousands of years. Yet, inside this room, every single one was meticulously compiled and neatly organized by its origin solar system.
Currently, Yna was standing in the middle of the 'Vorcia' aisle.
She had her heliopad floating beside her, endlessly looping audio files captured directly from her playthrough of Assassin's Creed. She listened intently to the sharp, authoritative syllables of the Templar guards and the rhythmic, rolling dialect of Ezio Auditore.
Based on her extensive research and the incredibly popular theories circulating on the Avalon Forums, the general consensus was that the game's setting was heavily inspired by Planet Vorcia. Yna herself could hardly deny the striking visual similarities. The terracotta roofs, the stone waterways, and the domed cathedrals of Renaissance Florence perfectly mirrored the highly preserved historical sectors of the Vorcian homeworld.
The language, however, was a complete mystery.
Yna tapped her screen, cross-referencing the audio with the Grand Library's database. By all accounts, Vorcia had several distinct languages recorded when they first entered the interstellar era. She had systematically combed through every single one of them. Absolutely none of them matched the game's dialogue. The words Ezio spoke lacked the harsh, clicking consonants of ancient Vorcian, possessing a beautifully melodic, vowel-heavy structure instead.
Did Round Table Studio base the in-game dialogue on a completely different planet's historical tongue? She looked down at the dimly lit archives. The rows of linguistic data were practically endless.
Or maybe, Yna thought with a sudden chill, Arthur Pendragon had simply invented a brand new, fully functional language from absolute scratch just for this game. It was a terrifying testament to his genius if true.
Historically, Yna's approach to her job was fairly relaxed. She was a curator, usually content to simply read whatever interesting lore she passed by while walking around the archives. However, Assassin's Creed had completely ignited a fierce new passion within her. The game felt far beyond a simple fantasy story. It felt deeply grounded, heavy, and profound.
She wanted to tackle this systematically. As a sworn Keeper of the Preservers, she had the entirety of the Accord's collected history at her absolute disposal, and she desperately wanted to know more.
If the digital linguistic files held no answers, she needed to check the physical artifacts.
Yna grabbed her heliopad, shutting off the holographic language projector. With a renewed sense of sheer determination, she began walking out of the aisle. She passed several other Preservers along the quiet, towering corridors, offering them polite nods as she made her way directly toward the massive Vorcia Relic Section.
…
Back at the Round Table Studio headquarters, the atmosphere inside the Design Department wing was absolutely electric.
With Assassin's Creed completely dominating the galactic charts and shattering player counts every single hour, the team was already aggressively pivoting to their next revolutionary project.
Bem Lendu had recently gathered his designers and dropped a bombshell on them: Arthur was secretly building their very own proprietary VR machine, completely independent of the Stellar Accord and other AAA monopolies. He affectionately referred to it as their "Animus."
Because of this, the design team was currently in overdrive, readying themselves to officially crack the VR market.
Inside their conference room, Bem stood before a massive, wrap-around holographic whiteboard. He was currently surrounded by complex wireframes and physical motion-capture schematics for Sky: Children of the Light.
"Alright, let's review the traversal physics," Bem commanded, his deep voice echoing in the room. He tapped the board, bringing up a 3D model of a small, cloaked figure. "As we all know, this game is about ethereal weightlessness. When the player leaps into the clouds, the VR engine needs to simulate total aerodynamic freedom without inducing vestibular motion sickness."
A senior designer nodded, adjusting her glasses. "We can isolate the inner-ear mismatch problem. If we artificially widen the field of view and use soft, volumetric clouds as a stable horizon reference, the player's brain won't panic when they're in motion."
"Good idea," Bem noted, swiping the screen to a new layout. "Now, onto the social systems. The core mechanic of Sky is connection. They will use musical chimes and physical gestures. Specifically, holding hands."
Bem looked around the table, his face intensely serious. "In a VR space, how do we make holding another player's hand feel emotionally impactful?"
"Haptic feedback scaling," another designer chimed in excitedly, projecting a code sequence. "When Player A offers a candle to Player B, and they link hands. We send a gentle, pulsating thermal feedback loop directly to the haptic gloves of the VR rig. It will simulate a literal feeling of warmth. Furthermore, the leading player completely controls the flight trajectory, meaning the following player has to completely surrender their trust to a stranger."
"Alright," Bem murmured, a proud smile touching his lips. "It builds organic empathy. It's exactly what we want."
Just as the team was finalizing the cloud-rendering pipeline, the heavy glass doors to the Design wing hissed open.
Arthur strolled into the room, holding a steaming mug of brewka. He offered an easy, relaxed smile. "Hey guys. Everything good here?"
The design team immediately looked up, their faces lighting up at the sight of their CEO.
"Everything is flawless in writing, Arty," Bem said, crossing his arms and leaning back against the holographic board. "The narrative beats are set, the wind-shear physics are calculated, and the empathy mechanics are fully mapped out. But..."
Bem raised an eyebrow, a rare, teasing smirk forming on his face. "We're currently hitting a massive bottleneck."
Arthur blinked, taking a sip of his coffee. "A bottleneck? What is it? Do we need to rent more server space for the multiplayer lobbies?"
"No," the senior designer laughed, spinning around in her chair. "We need the hardware, Arthur! You told Bem you were building us an 'Animus' to bypass the AAA publishers. We have this beautiful, fully immersive VR game ready to be coded, but we have absolutely nothing to test it on!"
"Yeah, Arty!" another developer teased from the back of the room. "Have you finished soldering the cortex-links yet? Or are you still trying to figure out how to render volumetric clouds without accidentally frying our brainstems?"
"Come on, genius," Bem chuckled, gesturing to the complex VR schematics on the board. "The entire department is basically waiting on you. When do we get to see this top-secret VR machine of yours?"
Arthur froze, the mug of coffee hovering inches from his lips.
A tiny bead of sweat formed on the back of his neck. Unbeknownst to his team, Arthur was not secretly soldering a revolutionary piece of VR hardware in a hidden underground laboratory. He had absolutely zero clue how to construct a neural-link machine from scratch.
What Arthur was actually doing was desperately waiting for the Assassin's Creed player progression to hit a high enough completion percentage so he could finally dump thousands of Resonance points into the gacha banner, praying to the System that he would pull for Rebecca Crane's Animus 2.0.
"Ah... right. The Animus," Arthur cleared his throat, improvising wildly to protect his reputation. "It's, uh... currently in its final calibration phase! I'm just running some thermal diagnostics. You know how it is. Can't rush hardware development. Give me... a week. Maybe two."
"Take your time, Art," Bem laughed, completely supporting the excuse. "Just make sure it doesn't give us a headache when we finally plug in."
"I guarantee it will blow your minds," Arthur replied with a confident grin, already mentally begging the gamers of the galaxy to speedrun Ezio's story faster.
The room erupted into lighthearted laughter, the design team happily returning to their magical, cloud-filled blueprints, completely unaware that the future of the galactic VR industry was currently resting entirely on the luck of a digital gacha roll.