(30 minutes earlier)
After all the discussions with my friends in Next Life I had become quite excited about the launch of Magia Online, enough so that I had cleared off my schedule for launch day so I could spend the whole day immersed in getting started in the new world.
Getting a head-start seemed particularly important for Magia as it was apparently a player-driven single-server ecosystem. Meaning that all fifty million of the initial player base would be descending all on the same world at the same time.
Fifty million people joining the same world simultaneously seemed rather impossible when I first heard about it, but apparently a big focus of the quests for the beta testers had been building massive "special development zones," which were essentially massive empty cities being built in countries all around the world to house the incoming playerbase.
That was another thing I couldn't get out of my head when I first heard it—in the whole game there would be no instanced zones. In other MMOs it was typical to make things like dungeons or private dwellings instanced, meaning that multiple players or parties could enter the same space but be in separate 'instances' of the space so they wouldn't interfere with one another—essentially like stacking dozens of player houses into one house so that the game's cities don't have to expand endlessly to keep up with the playerbase.
But in Magia Online everything was going to be built-out and separate. You buy a house, and you get a land deed to that house and you can do whatever the hell you want with it as long as the feudal lord doesn't interfere.
But to have the NPCs build massive empty cities for the introduction of players…that stirred the narrative thirst in my blood that was always one of my favorite parts of MMOs—watching grand stories take place through the actions and choices of thousands or even millions of players, always gave me a kind of thrill inside, even if I stayed far away from the main action of it all.
I glanced at my clock, which read 7:55. The release was global, but it so happened that the launch time was 8am my time, and so I'd gotten up early specifically to wait for the moment when it went live. I put on the full-dive gear, and layed back down on my bed, pressing the power button and waiting for the neural network to start taking over my senses.
I had made sure to pre-install and download everything the night before, but I was also aware that there were sometimes last minute patches or things that only went live with the game, so I tried to quell my impatience as I clicked on the title in the holodeck the full-dive had summoned, and patiently waited in a black void as a timer began ticking down to the full-release.
After a few minutes…
[0:05]
[0:04]
[0:03]
[0:02]
[0:01]
[Welcome to Magia Online]
After a brief title scroll with inspirational music and magic going off like crazy, the character creation room opened, thankfully without triggering any last-minute updates.
In front of me stood a blank humanoid doll with its arms out, and the options for character customization quickly came up alongisde.
For race, I chose wood-elf. The only real racial characteristic is the pointed ears, but they have a higher base affinity for spirit and natural sorcery than humans do, as well as longer lifespans, though as a player that didn't really matter much.
Selecting a race also restricted some of your feature selections, though it was a soft-limiter that you could turn off if you wanted something more out of the ordinary. I had initially been thinking to just copy over my black hair, but seeing as it wasn't a suggested option for wood-elves I went with a chestnut brown instead.
Prettier features than in real-life weren't difficult to achieve. I tried to adjust things to match my own features a little, just for familiarity's sake, but the character was definitely far more pleasing to the eyes than anything I could pull off irl. Also grey, almost violet eyes. It'd feel a little lame if everything was something you could find in real life, so a splash of unnatural color looked kind of cool.
Then I made my character shorter. In real life I'm quite tall for a woman, and while it's convenient for some things I get quite self-conscious about it, so we'll fix that here. A bit more in the chest area too, though nothing crazy, and I guess that should about do it, huh.
For class selection I'd researched reasonably thoroughly beforehand, and I knew I wanted to get into runes and rune magic, as that was a big part of the crafting system in the game, but class and affinities were assigned separately, and beside my basic affinity boost from my wood-elf race, I really wasn't sure what other branch of magic I wanted to lean into, so I just left those points unassigned and figured I'd base it off of whatever happened in-game.
Unfortunately the location assignment was completely random, though there was possibly some correlation with what race you picked, for instance if you picked the demon race you probably wouldn't be assigned to a human-supremacist country, but other than that there was no way to ensure you spawned in the same place as your friends except to cross your fingers and hope.
But honestly I wasn't too fussed. I liked playing with Flow and the others, but I was more of a solo-player anyhow, and Magia Online didn't seem like the kind of game where group-play was even all that important. No leveling, no exp system, everything was based on your cultivation, understanding, and use of magic. A true skill game.
And as a crafter at heart, that was all the more exciting for me as it meant there was no mandatory questing that I had to do in order to advance along the crafting tree like sometimes happened in other MMOs. In Magia combat seemed like more of an optional add-on rather than the main pursuit. Though perhaps I was naive in thinking that would mean my life in-game would be carefree.
Anyways that was all for the character creation. And now I hit [Start] and into the game world we go!