social.noyu.me

the beauty of sword art online as a franchise is it's an mmo series written by someone who clearly either does not understand or does not care how mmos work. this sounds like an insult but i mean it as praise

https://social.noyu.me/@hikari/statuses/01JDVWSPTR4CXRQY4MS5V2ABYH

‪this was on my mind this week because i've been showing my girlfriend “sword art online alternative: gun gale online” (not the arc of SAO about heterosexual sword boy, but the spinoff series about lesbian pink P90 girl) and i keep thinking about the “bullet line” mechanic‬

‪in GGO (at least as depicted in the spinoff series), whenever a character puts their finger on the trigger of a gun, it immediately causes the appearance of a visible ray of light, like a laser beam going through smoke, between the gun and its target. before pulling the trigger!‬

‪it's a mechanic with all sorts of consequences, including players getting lulled into a false sense of security of always knowing where they're being hit from; a player who's genuinely good at shooting irl can press the trigger immediately and skip auto-aim and the “bullet line”‬

‪and it's also something you just wouldn't do in a series that cares about how video games actually work, because while this is entirely coherent in its setting, in the real world this is impossible to do in a non-VR game, and too easy to cheat in real VR. we don't have nervegear!‬

‪“log horizon” on the other hand is an mmo franchise by someone who clearly deeply understands mmos. however it does a bit of a bait-and-switch with this, so it also ends up fantastical, just in different ways (which i do not wish to spoil).

‪one idea both series like playing with is the notion that real-world skill (knowing how to aim a pistol, cook food, play an instrument) could, in a VR MMO environment, exist in parallel to and perhaps triumph over in-game skill systems (levelling etc). i really like this idea‬