by Ben Ormstad
Orbiting Godmadriguhl’s dark side, hidden from the sun’s exposing orange light, a black gigantic spaceship appeared in the shadows. It was one sixth the size of the entire planet, covered by a barely visible, bluish energy field.
The camera zoomed in on the colossal spaceship. Enormous, blistering balls of red energy burned at the tips of multitudes of spires aimed at the planet. The red energy illuminated the ship’s jagged edges, erratic engravings and the hundreds of meters large creepy-as-fuck-statues of unknown demons that decorated the ship’s outer shell.
An entire fleet of lesser ships seemed to guard the mothership, and a continuous stream of tiny ships flew to and from the planet.
As close-ups of legions of beasts in all shapes and sizes rolled over the screen of my mind, I could almost feel icy shivers spiking all over my physical body where it slept safely in the VR-pod. They walked on two legs, four or even more, some clothed in rugged armor, wielding weapons ranging from guns to sledge hammers – while others, the more beast-like, were naked, merely clothed in ripped, red or brown leather-like skin, thick, black fur waving in the wind, and long, rough horns protruding from their heads, shoulders, knees, elbows – or wherever ‘nature’ had decided they would fit. Evil grimaces bared teeth sharp as daggers. The sense of horror was enhanced by their soulless eyes glowing in shades of intense red, orange and yellow, as if burning hellstorms roared inside each and every one of them. Trampling the ground, crushing all living things, leaving a trail of smashed, dead dirt.
Oh my fucking God, I thought, and couldn’t believe how real it all looked. Every fiber of hair, every drop of spit from their cracked lips, every speck of light reflected in their guns and blades, everything, more real than real.
How did the developers accomplish it? Mere pixels didn’t create this. Not in a million years. They must’ve found a way to fuse computer technology with mental imagery, or something crazy like that. I had no idea. Only thing I knew was that fear, excitement, terror and joy swirled around in me like a whirlwind at the thought of going up against the legions of Daemonorg.
Rapidly changing scenes mixed with action-packed, majestic music showed regular human-looking people fighting and running from daemonorgs, being ripped to bloody shreds by huge claws or slowly devoured alive by the virus, or huddling together in small, hidden villages and underground caves, bases and wherever else they could gather and remain unseen.
No doubt a highly technologically proficient breed of people, considering their weaponry, war machines and computer technology. Being forced to leave the major cities and suffering huge human and material losses, however, had cut them off from most of the resources needed to maintain their level of technological advancement.
Scenes flew by my mind’s eye showing tactical groups of marines infiltrating overtaken bases and research facilities to bring back supplies to their new hideouts. Bloody battles in close quarters and dark, grimy corridors with all types of daemonorgs flashed by, and switched to mountainous landscapes where they fought demons in small groups spread out – some in what resembled car chase scenes, and even snippets of combat in lush jungle-like environments. The various areas and situations changed faster and faster while slowly fading to black.
If I had had a mouth in this bodiless state, I’d be drooling.
8
As the story introduction ended, the game yet again left me hanging in a black nothingness. Still, I was more excited than I’d been for years – not even one thought about my body being locked away in that cocoon-coffin existed. Lily had been right; nothing to worry about.
A spark of blue dawned in the blackness. It expanded in all directions until it filled my entire field of vision. Calm ambient music lay like a soothing ocean of sound in the background.
Text appeared along with the sound of an arrow swishing by:
RACE SELECTION
Below the text two boxes popped up, with the following text above them:
Godmadrigan – Daemonorg
The first box depicted a human face – a man with short-cut beard, long hair, disillusioned and grim-looking, brown eyes, and thin lips forming a somewhat ironic smile.
In the second box, I saw the head of a beast that reminded me of the plastic demon with the talking screen I encountered after the interview. Dark red, rugged skin stretched tightly from the huge snarl of its lips, baring jagged teeth. Fiery, pupilless eyes peered out through the small slits in its dense skull. Two dirty horns, one on each side of its head, poked out and up like a bull’s.
I selected Daemonorg. The colors greyed out and the following text popped up:
Unavailable
Complete at least 6 Godmadrigan quests to unlock Daemonorg.
Oh well, guess I’ll have something to look forward to, then. Still, I didn’t quite understand how that would work. Did they expect the players to simply ditch their previous character and hard-earned game progress after a certain number of quests, in order to start anew with a new race? I was skeptical, but had to accept it and hoped Virtuality Inc. knew what they were doing. As a game company, you should never piss the players off with stupid ideas.
Left choice-less, I selected Godmadrigan. The boxes evaporated and switched out with a new screen.
CHARACTER CREATION
The human head now returned with a naked body, standing on a circular platform. It literally looked like a real dude standing there, breathing slowly and sporadically moving his head, keeping watch. To the right of the character a bunch of different, changeable characteristics were listed. The first one said:
Male – Female
Often, in regular third person games at least, I would play as female, simply because I enjoyed having someone fine to look at while playing. In this game, on other hand, I would not be playing as a woman, because not only was it a first-person game, but it also felt too real to not be playing as my real gender. Nevertheless, I selected female.
The male character changed into a – as expected – beautiful, naked woman. Perfect forms, long, fair hair, eyes to melt any man’s heart. A minute or so, I simply watched the incredibly lifelike woman standing there breathing, looking gorgeous. Rotated her around on the circular platform to view her from all angles.
As if by instinct, I started changing her characteristics bit by bit. Narrowed the chin a tad, a little more protruding cheekbones, increased the size of her waist by a few sizes, shrunk her breasts – leaving one a notch larger than the other – then colored her eyes brown, her hair a dark bronze, and made some other adjustments.
A dizziness came over me as the character resembled my late wife more and more each consecutive tweak. After a few more minutes, there she was. My beautiful Lara. A living, breathing body – ready to host a consciousness. Her consciousness. Or maybe…
Suddenly realizing what I was doing, I cringed at my own twisted, demented inclinations, and swiftly reset the female to the default look and changed back to the guy character.
Zoomed in on his head and changed his characteristics. Personally, I had short, brown hair, but I wanted to look a little more badas
s in-game, and so removed all his hair and chose a closely shaved head with just some barely visible stubble all across.
Next, eyes. Naturally half-closed, as if he never truly believed anything that happened to him. Brown-green irises. A few centimeters long black beard covering the jawline and cheeks. Two adjacent scars going from above the right eye and down the right cheek, as if someone once had cut his face with a twin-blade – or perhaps a daemonorg’s claws he barely got away from.
Yes, that’s it. I continued down his body, modifying everything to suit me as best as possible. Muscular, but not enormous like Schwarzenegger. Chest hair, as I thought all hardcore men should have that – plus, I had it (although the only place where I could be said to be hardcore, was in front of a steaming hot pizza). Multiple scars all over his chest and back, as a witness of his tumultuous past. Maybe he’d even been taken hostage by the daemonorgs and escaped.
Having finished tweaking his body, a new screen appeared.
CLASSES
[ Leveling Up
All classes level up their abilities by gaining Experience Points (XP) through various experiences during the game, e.g. battles, exploration, crafting, communication, and so forth.
Abilities common to all classes:
Strength
Awareness
Speed
Agility
Focus
Stamina
Communication
Charisma
Learnability
Besides these 10 abilities, each class has unique abilities, and each individual character will discover unique personal abilities – Personal Specialties.
All abilities, no matter the type, may be upgraded by using the ability, allocating gained XP, getting help by NPCs, upgrade kits, etc. ]
Seems legit, I thought, ignored reading the descriptions of the different abilities, and kept going.
SELECT CLASS
Battle-Marine – Warrior-Medic – Cyber-Mage
Seeing the classes, I chuckled. Especially ‘Battle-Marine’. The name felt forced – and redundant – but the class itself was probably not bad, though. I selected it to learn more.
[ Class: Battle-Marine
Short Description: Battle-Marines are extremely efficient soldiers, both on ground, water and in the air. They are highly trained in most Godmadrigan weaponry, vehicles, aircraft and technological enhancements.
Whether fighting in groups or alone, a battle-marine is always prepared to sacrifice his life for the greater good. This gives him an edge on the battlefield, as he sees nothing but the completion of his mission as a worthy outcome.
“Battle-Marines are buff, rough and tough. Nuff said.”
- General Jack ‘Kill-Em-All’ Johnson ]
I was certain my body laughed out loud in the VR-pod after reading the quote by this General ‘Kill-Em-All’. I imagined him with a well-chewed cigar between his lips, talking with a raspy voice and spitting black tar splatting on the ground.
Cheezy as fuckin’ doodles, but cool as ice, I thought, enjoying every second of it.
Skipping the long description, I was more curious what could be upgraded, and so paid attention to the next section:
[ Upgradability
Battle-Marines can upgrade:
Weapons – Guns / Grenades / Etc.
Armor – Uniforms / Exoskeletons / Etc.
Transportation – Vehicles / Drones / Etc. ]
Being able to upgrade weapons and armor was as expected, but upgrading vehicles and perhaps airborne transportation like planes would be awesome. My first instinct was to jump right on the soldier-wagon to kick ass the ‘marine way’. However, I had to remind myself to stay open-minded and at the very least consider the other classes before choosing.
Hence, I moved my focus to the next class:
[ Class: Warrior-Medic
Short Description: Warrior-Medics are a synthesis of two ancient Godmadrigan traditions. The first is the royal warrior caste practicing the brutal martial art Zun-Chi-Do. The second is a spiritual tradition focused on developing natural healing abilities through connecting with The Source.
The Warrior-Medics, therefore, are masters of martial arts, including the use of swords, knives, staves and so forth as weapons, while also being able to heal damaged soldiers on the battlefield – either using their own mind’s connection with The Source, or regular medical equipment.
“Fueled by The Source, driven by loyalty to our people, protected by martial mastery. We are Warrior-Medics.”
- Master Brawl ]
[ Upgradability
Warrior-Medics can upgrade:
Weapons – Swords / Martial Arts Techniques / Etc.
Armor – Uniforms / Suits / Etc.
Spiritual Abilities – Healing / Chi / Etc. ]
Okay, so the Warrior-Medics seemed damn awesome. I’d always been a sucker for martial arts, swords and the like. Energy manipulation, which I reckoned would be the ‘Chi’-part of Zun-Chi-Do, would also be interesting to explore.
However, seeing as how I’d spent close to 30k to get here, running around like a fucking life-support system for the Battle-Marines and others doing the real dirty work wasn’t something I’d want to waste my precious time on. Regretfully, I moved on to the last class.
[ Class: Cyber-Mage
Short Description: Cyber-Mages are a mind-bending fusion of technological ingenuity and occult wisdom. The more developed their skills, the more power they have to manipulate (‘hack’) various aspects of reality. Cyber-Mages may alter/disrupt/enhance everything from computer systems to living beings.
They are few and far between, which means in any given Godmadrigan army, there might be one, two or max three cyber-mages – depending on how large the army is.
“No wall can hold us, no king can enslave us. Fundamentally free to lead, follow, create or destroy. We flow, we grow, we Know.”
- Ony Belisse ]
[ Upgradability
Cyber-Mages can upgrade all abilities related to their base class, plus class specific abilities, such as:
Technological Abilities – Hardware / Software / Etc.
Spiritual Abilities – Existential Fluidity / Sub-Systems Travel / Etc.
Occult Abilities – Magic / Possession / Etc. ]
Immediately intrigued by strange abilities such as ‘Existential Fluidity’ and ‘Sub-Systems Travel’, I selected the longer description:
[ Long description: Of all the classes, a Cyber-Mage is the slowest to reach its most powerful state. However, at its peak, the Cyber-Mage has close to total control of both digital and living systems.
The fully developed Cyber-Mage has expanded his self-awareness and the knowledge of Life to such an advanced degree he’s become fully aware of Reality being digital in nature. This makes him capable of freely moving his consciousness into any layer of Existence, enabling him to reorganize the bits (the fundamental building blocks) of everything from computer programs, security systems, living humans, aliens and other creatures alike. The high-level Cyber-Mage may even visit the metaphysical Sub-Systems of the Universe in order to change potential outcomes of various historical events. … ]
Holy mother of shieznit! How is this awesomeness even allowed? As I was basically drooling, I stopped reading. No doubt existed in my mind – for me, Cyber-Mage was the only real option. Fuggeddabout the marines and the medics and whatever else. Who in their right mind would not want to practically be a master of the entire universe?
I went back to the class selection screen and selected Cyber-Mage. The image greyed out, and a message popped up:
Please select a base class
Frustration boiled inside me. Everything I tried selecting got greyed the fuck out! What kind of bullshit is this?
As if the game heard my thoughts, a new message bubbled up:
The Cyber-Mage class requires another class to be built upon.
> Want to know more?
Yes, of course! This game is driving me crazy! I opted to k
now more.
[ Choose either Battle-Marines or Warrior-Medics as your base class. Then, as you progress through the game, you will be guided – sometimes subtly, sometimes explicitly – to someone who may assist you on a path of becoming a Cyber-Mage.
No Cyber-Mages are only Cyber-Mages. They are soldiers or healers who, after having gained enough XP throughout the game, can focus on developing their existential knowledge, hence slowly transitioning into becoming Cyber-Mages.
Tip: Warrior-Medics have the greatest chance of transitioning, as they’re already treading the spiritual path. ]
Why tease the potential of becoming a Cyber-Mage if it wasn’t even possible to play as one right away? Why not instead have it appear as an option after, say, Level 50 or whatever? Well, obviously because the base class I chose would impact how quickly and efficiently I’d be able to become one. Still, I felt mildly cheated.
