Sword Art Online

^I saw bow and arrow in one scene...

Episode 1:

Impressed, really impressed. Absolutely adore MMO-ish puns, hope they continue with it. This could be a great show.
 
valondar said:
Kirito's observation about farming (collecting resources in MMOs) and thus the need to immediately find an area to farm other people aren't using is dead on the money... partly. It's true that material in certain areas will be overfarmed, but I've never heard of an MMO without respawning materials, monsters, et cetera. His little monologue at the end almost seemed to make it sound like that resources have a permenent scarity and thus there will never be enough, which... would be bad game design and thus not what I'd expect Sword Art Online's beta would have - so even if the game has permanent scarity right now, it's not something he'd know off-hand. We did briefly see that the boars respawn, so we know that respawning happens.

- I did kind of find it funny that when creatures die they disappear in a shower of sparks. It's ten years into the future, we have functioning Virtual Reality helmets, and that's the death animation a top-tier MMORPG is gonna go with?

- While a fantasy MMO, Kirito comments that it has 'no magic', which I assume means that the so-called Holy Trinity of RPGs (tanks, dps, healers) isn't how this game works. Kirito's talk about how the sword-stance works - and, indeed, the name of the game - suggests that all players are basically melee. Still I wonder if we'll see other weapons used - axes, crossbows, knives, so on.
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I think it's more a case of enemies in that area getting farmed as soon as they spawn, making it INCREDIBLY difficult to get any exp.

Makes sense, otherwise the game would get cluttered with enemy corpses. and they have to get the RAM usage down SOMEHOW, this is set only 10 years in the future after all.

Looks like all players will use medieval weapons. I'm sure unarmed, martial-arts, bows-and-arrows, crossbows, and MANY bladed weapons will be available for use by players. After all, "The skills available in this game are limitless, except Magic".

Also:
onlinegender.jpg
 
This and Tari Tari are gonna be competing for my season fave, aren't they...
SAO's really good stuff, don't know how long it'll take Kirito to complete the game; maybe he'll find level jumps a la Super Mario Bros.
 
randomredneck said:
Episode 1.

Dang...
2000 dead in one month. Harsh. This looks to be a good show.
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Yea, and if I recall, only 10k were able to log on for day one, which means there are 8k left. That's very interesting though. As someone mentioned earlier. In 2 months (the beta's time span) the players were only able to get to Floor 8 and yet, in the live game, 1 month has passed and not a single soul has passed the 1st Floor. I'd say that's pretty substantial. In all honesty, it's like trying to play vanilla WoW, day one, with Diablo's hardcore mode switch turned on.
valondar said:
Episode 1


Just so. This is a very promising start as-is, but a series that's specifically drawing on a lot of MMO stuff is doubly interesting. The acknowledgement by Kirito that he's spent so much time being inside and relating to Sword Art Online well, I've been there.

The way his friendship began with Klein - beta tester helping new player learn the ropes, that player indicating he had friends from a previous game where he'd been a guild leader - that rung true too. It made me wonder whether or not Kirito made any friends during beta testing, or if he had gamer friends generally (he seemed familiar with the VR headpiece, and we know there were games on it before the release of Sword Art Online).

Also ringing true was, of course, the guy with a girl avatar joke - I was wondering if the series would ever acknowledge this omnipresent mmo thing, and they managed to get in a joke about it and then permenently dismiss it as an issue... which means whenever we meet that girl from the ED, I won't get to snarkily speculate that she's really a man.

Actually on the subject of MMOs, I guess I want to just want to make a few rambling observations because why not.

- I'm wondering how this 'progressing floors' stuff will work. Clearly the general idea is something like an MMO's raids, where parties of players kill bosses for loot and progression... but the map seemed to show that there's literal floors to it. So what, will they go up a floor, kill a boss, and find themselves in a new 'world' directly above the existing one? I dunno, I'm sure how this works is something the series will cover at length.

- Kirito's observation about farming (collecting resources in MMOs) and thus the need to immediately find an area to farm other people aren't using is dead on the money... partly. It's true that material in certain areas will be overfarmed, but I've never heard of an MMO without respawning materials, monsters, et cetera. His little monologue at the end almost seemed to make it sound like that resources have a permenent scarity and thus there will never be enough, which... would be bad game design and thus not what I'd expect Sword Art Online's beta would have - so even if the game has permanent scarity right now, it's not something he'd know off-hand. We did briefly see that the boars respawn, so we know that respawning happens.

- I did kind of find it funny that when creatures die they disappear in a shower of sparks. It's ten years into the future, we have functioning Virtual Reality helmets, and that's the death animation a top-tier MMORPG is gonna go with?

- While a fantasy MMO, Kirito comments that it has 'no magic', which I assume means that the so-called Holy Trinity of RPGs (tanks, dps, healers) isn't how this game works. Kirito's talk about how the sword-stance works - and, indeed, the name of the game - suggests that all players are basically melee. Still I wonder if we'll see other weapons used - axes, crossbows, knives, so on.
Click to expand...
Spot on Val, however,
the limited resources would be the amount of mobs there are to kill. I've started on numerous MMOs on day ones since EQ: Kunark, came out and the fierce battle between players just to get a mob sucks. His meaning was to start asap and beat the horde.
TheCoffeeGod said:
It's 2 seasons.
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Totally made my day, it means that I'll have something to watch for the rest of my days in Afghanistan and I'll get to finish the year out with an awesome show. This is the best show by far this season and personally, the way this was introduced beats the snot out of most .hack shows that I've seen. I CAN'T wait to see more of this. So happy I have something to look forward to, to pass time in this shitastic country!
 
Holy Crap wasn't expecting it to be this good.

1
"Link Start," who didn't thin of Accel World right than? Well, besides people who don't watch it. Or I just reference things too much. I like this Klein guy, mostly cuz of his VA is my favorite one. Hope we see more of him later. Laughed my ass off when the mirrors activated and that couple turned out to be 2 guys XD. Just how many guys made a girl avatar in that game I wonder...Oh wow... quite a few have died already... and no progress... this just got more interesting!

Oh yeah... so what was the point of the mirrors?
Definitely one of the best this season. Glad it's gonna have 25 episodes.
 
Two further thoughts on the series.

First, it occurs to me that the show gave us a specific number of betatesters. Since they're the only people to have been able to play and learn this game from trial and error (they've been able to learn from their mistakes including ones that killed them) I wouldn't be surprised if they'll soon make the elite group of this game.

And I'd be sure this series has Free-For-All Player Versus Player, that is, if one set of players wanted to kill the others they probably can. Wouldn't be surprised, combining these two points, if at some point we have some ganking betatest antagonists who spout nonsense about survival of the fittest... we'll see how it goes eh?

Nihatclodra said:
I think it's more a case of enemies in that area getting farmed as soon as they spawn, making it INCREDIBLY difficult to get any exp.
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Quizap said:
Spot on Val, however,
the limited resources would be the amount of mobs there are to kill. I've started on numerous MMOs on day ones since EQ: Kunark, came out and the fierce battle between players just to get a mob sucks. His meaning was to start asap and beat the horde.
Click to expand...

True, but that was my point, such as it was.
Kirito's plan is very sensible given the threat of overfarming, and obviously for the forseeable future people will be camping but the way he phrased his explanation made it sound like the material problem would be a permanent one. Perhaps I just read it as that, but I digress.
 
valondar said:
Two further thoughts on the series.

First, it occurs to me that the show gave us a specific number of betatesters. Since they're the only people to have been able to play and learn this game from trial and error (they've been able to learn from their mistakes including ones that killed them) I wouldn't be surprised if they'll soon make the elite group of this game.

And I'd be sure this series has Free-For-All Player Versus Player, that is, if one set of players wanted to kill the others they probably can. Wouldn't be surprised, combining these two points, if at some point we have some ganking betatest antagonists who spout nonsense about survival of the fittest... we'll see how it goes eh?
Click to expand...
I was actually curious about that myself, they didn't seem to address the possibility of PvP at all.

As for the betatesters forming an elite group, it's possible that some will but our intrepid main character seems like pretty much like an introvert and didn't even try to contact anyone when he got in game leading me to believe that he was pretty much running around solo in the beta. He'll almost certainly have to deal with other beta testers at some point, but considering no one ever got past level 8 out of 100 in the tower, I doubt they'll have that much of a leg up on anyone else.

As a curious side though, maybe the beta was made harder by the game creator so that people couldn't progress as far thus being able to get out easier?
 
After watching ep 1 I am definitly captivated by the story.
The darkness of the actual death of the players is well done.

I was thinking that although the beta players have had previous experience with the game and are therefore advandaged, the new awarness the players now have that if they mess-up they die for real may have caused them to slow their progress (are less reckless & so lvl up more slowly). hence why no-one managed to reach floor 1.

The strong point of this anime i find to be the realisticity of the situation. I find the whole concept of 'dying in the game means dying in real life' in this case the same as that of the Matrix - unplugging means death of the mind, although here they went on about microwaves frying your brain..
 
valondar said:
Two further thoughts on the series.

First, it occurs to me that the show gave us a specific number of betatesters. Since they're the only people to have been able to play and learn this game from trial and error (they've been able to learn from their mistakes including ones that killed them) I wouldn't be surprised if they'll soon make the elite group of this game.

And I'd be sure this series has Free-For-All Player Versus Player, that is, if one set of players wanted to kill the others they probably can. Wouldn't be surprised, combining these two points, if at some point we have some ganking betatest antagonists who spout nonsense about survival of the fittest... we'll see how it goes eh?





True, but that was my point, such as it was.
Kirito's plan is very sensible given the threat of overfarming, and obviously for the forseeable future people will be camping but the way he phrased his explanation made it sound like the material problem would be a permanent one. Perhaps I just read it as that, but I digress.
Click to expand...

Ah yea, not that I've read it a couple more times, I get it now. Reading comprehension FTL!
 
8MangaMan said:
"Link Start," who didn't thin of Accel World right than? Well, besides people who don't watch it. Or I just reference things too much.
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Considering they were both written by the same person ( Reki Kawahara ) I'm sure he pulled concepts from SAO when he wrote AW.
 
First ep. was better than I anticipated. Perhaps the hype I've seen around the web was deserved.
 
Episode 1

I agree that it was better than expected
Just thought that the whole big 'you're not allowed to leave the game or you die' thing was introduced a bit soon, makin it seem like it'll be rushed, but 25 episode kinda reassures me. Also I still don't get the point of the mirrors, besides some philosophical purpose, like not everyone is as they seem kinda thing, there doesn't seem to be any other purpose...?
 
xbeyondbirthday said:
Also I still don't get the point of the mirrors, besides some philosophical purpose, like not everyone is as they seem kinda thing, there doesn't seem to be any other purpose...?
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It was just there so they could realize on their own that their in-game avatars now look just like their real bodies.
 
I think the point of the mirror
was the creators way of starting dissent amongst the game population. I mean, it was glaringly obvious when the one dude was a fatty and the "girlfriend" was actually a 40 year old man...OR it could be the producers way of poking fun at us MMO'ers. It very well could have been for us to relate (I play female toons in MMO's to sponge freebies off of dudes who don't know better..just stay off of ventrillo LMAO).

Otherwise, I like the concept. The story seems like it could retain my interests. However: Not sure if I like the MC yet. Granted he doesn't appear to be a crybaby, but he does seem a little selfish. Beginning areas, you can faceroll as a group especially if the next zone is a level or two above you. Doesn't hurt power levelling, but this guy comes off a little asshole-ish.
 
^If u look carefully during the first episode, u can see they actually connect their five senses into the game which means their sense of touch is working inside the game although they probably put a limit to how much they can feel otherwise a sword stab would be too much pain for these kids to handle.
 
hoffstyle said:
I think the point of the mirror
was the creators way of starting dissent amongst the game population. I mean, it was glaringly obvious when the one dude was a fatty and the "girlfriend" was actually a 40 year old man...OR it could be the producers way of poking fun at us MMO'ers. It very well could have been for us to relate (I play female toons in MMO's to sponge freebies off of dudes who don't know better..just stay off of ventrillo LMAO).

Otherwise, I like the concept. The story seems like it could retain my interests. However: Not sure if I like the MC yet. Granted he doesn't appear to be a crybaby, but he does seem a little selfish. Beginning areas, you can faceroll as a group especially if the next zone is a level or two above you. Doesn't hurt power levelling, but this guy comes off a little asshole-ish.
Click to expand...

Ehhh in most mmos grouping for questing is lucrative in terms of experience, but grinding monsters in large group usually spreads the exp quite thin. He just wants to stay ahead of the pack.
 
hoffstyle said:
I think the point of the mirror
was the creators way of starting dissent amongst the game population. I mean, it was glaringly obvious when the one dude was a fatty and the "girlfriend" was actually a 40 year old man...OR it could be the producers way of poking fun at us MMO'ers. It very well could have been for us to relate (I play female toons in MMO's to sponge freebies off of dudes who don't know better..just stay off of ventrillo LMAO).

Otherwise, I like the concept. The story seems like it could retain my interests. However: Not sure if I like the MC yet. Granted he doesn't appear to be a crybaby, but he does seem a little selfish. Beginning areas, you can faceroll as a group especially if the next zone is a level or two above you. Doesn't hurt power levelling, but this guy comes off a little asshole-ish.
Click to expand...

If you ever play first day an MMO is out (or even when a new expansion is realeased) it's always the smarter thing to skip the first area anyway if you want to level quickly as everything will be farmed to death so you would be waiting for everything, be it quest related or not.
 
All perfectly valid points hence why I would not even stay in the starting zone. I say group up, because there's always that ONE mob that will kill you loldead for not paying attention, not resting, or popping a pot to heal. (How many times in an MMO, for those who play mmo's have you found yourself doing a corpse run and thinking "how the fuck I die?")

Of course the whole "no magic" thing could be a double edged sword. No magic means no healers..going to have to rely on potions, first aid and rest. That equals a lot of down time for our hero.
 
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