The Starfighter Invitation

1 demo 1

No-one wins an MMO. They’re games that are designed around progression: gaining max level, then working with a group to get the very best gear, with countless time fillers to keep you busy until the next game expansion is released, and then you start the grind all over again. Plot optional, and the only real boasting rights in being the first to do something. First to max level. First to down a raid boss. First to unlock gated content, or reach a new zone.

The last is what I like to do—or pretend to do, by avoiding chat after an initial release, keeping my nose out of forums, and exploring the game as if I wasn’t following a thoroughly trampled path.

Because no-one’s really first in an MMO. Any game that deserves the label massively multiplayer takes a cast of thousands to put together. Developers bring it to the in-house alpha testing stage. A horde of lucky volunteers get to hunt bugs for free in the closed beta test. And tens or even hundreds of thousands swarm the open beta, trying before buying as the developers stress test the servers. By the day of release there’ll be entire player-built databases full of maps, discussions, quest solutions, character builds, prime levelling spots, and probably the strats for at least the low-level dungeons.

Frustrating for a discovery gamer like me. I don’t want to know everything there is to know about a game before I play it, and there’s nothing less enjoyable than heading into a new dungeon only to have my party race through it all at break-neck speed, complaining the whole time that I haven’t researched exactly where to stand.

Despite the challenges, I still enjoy the first few months of a new release immensely. From the sheer chaos of the crowded starter area, to vistas stumbled over while dashing through deserted high level zones. I like not knowing about the Easter eggs, let alone the plot developments. Eventually, of course, I’ll run out of new areas, hit max level, and then obligingly raid with my guild, and do time-filler quests until fresh horizons draw me away. My particular addiction is going somewhere I’ve never been before, and looking around. But every MMO I’ve ever played, I completely knew I wouldn’t really be discovering anything.

Except with Dream Speed.

The first surprise was that it existed. GDG—guided dream gaming—had been around for a handful of years, was wildly popular with insomniacs, and otherwise considered more a gimmick than a real game. It definitely didn’t even remotely resemble the kind of experience you’d expect from an MMO. GDGs nudged your dreams toward specific imagery, and I’d enjoyed them for what they were: vaguely experienced mood pieces. A million people could play Crystal Heights every night and they would all dream of a castle of ice, and of lost treasure, and they would find themselves in a gold room, and a green room, and a room of frozen flowers. But everyone’s castle and treasure and rooms would be different, and what passed for gameplay was vague, disjointed and unpredictable. Dreamlike.

No-one had even considered matching GDG with traditional game types, let alone an MMO, until Ryzonart set up a demonstration booth at E3—one of the largest game-related press conventions—touting their upcoming massively multi-player online GDG set in a post-singularity future.

A technological singularity, that is: the moment when artificial intelligence comes into existence, and life as we know it ceases to be. Love us or hate us, AI is expected to change us.

At the time of Dream Speed’s first demo, Ryzonart was known as a tiny independent game developer, with only a couple of addictive little casual apps to its name, and the idea of them releasing any kind of MMO was unlikely enough. The idea of a MMO GDG was just ludicrous, particularly from such a minor developer. When the posters started going up at E3, there was a lot of outright mocking across the gaming sphere. Dial-up Speed, that kind of thing.

Then the demos started.

Big crowded gaming conventions aren’t my thing, so I woke up entirely oblivious one morning in early June and every site I went to was screaming the same thing.

True. Virtual. Reality.

Ryzonart knew what kind of bomb they were exploding. They didn’t have a line for the demo. Instead there were terminals where you could make a session booking time, or sign up for the no-show lottery. A couple of fights broke out. Someone sold a session slot for over $1,000.

It took only one frothing article to send me to all the shaky videos recorded from the booth’s display monitors. The demo was set in a narrow valley zone surrounded by cliffs, with a waterfall plunging to a pool, and just that alone was enough to send players raving. While GDG could produce a spectacular level of detail, it tended to combine with a haziness to everything except the particular focus of the dreamer’s attention. This was crystal-clear, with every blade of grass, every leaf, every rock appearing as individual and separate objects. And, unlike the average MMO, none of it looked like a texture—a painting of rock wrapped across a graphical object—and there was no hint of the repetition that usually creeps into computer-generated landscapes. The only difference from the real world I could see was a level of airbrushed beauty usually reserved for tourist brochures.

But this wasn’t just a pretty-looking place. VR headsets had been around for years, and great graphics weren’t that revolutionary, although the more detail usually meant hideous frame rates as it all loaded. But we’d been able to see and hear virtual worlds for an age. What Dream Speed did was add body to the experience.

Almost every demo video followed the same course: a character avatar standing by fern and moss-decked rocks opened their eyes and gasped, and then spent many minutes staring down at themselves, touching their own faces, moving arms and legs—or tails, ears, fins or wings. The pretty valley around them was almost irrelevant to the experience. Some never even shifted their attention from their selves to the environment. Those that did usually only stared about, took hesitant steps, touching grass and stones and water as if they were the most interesting things in the universe. And then the session would be over, and the player would emerge from the curtained rear of Ryzonart’s booth, and rave.

This repetition was made more entertaining by the huge variety of avatars. The first demo I watched was nothing unusual: a slim, brown-skinned young man with a black mohawk. The only real surprise was, again, the incredible detail. And the way he behaved. But the next video, while still featuring a humanoid, showed an attenuated figure with an olive brown…carapace. Thickened skin formed segmented plates, with spikes jutting from elbows and shoulders. The face above the mouth was two smooth planes, divided vertically. Slits for eyes. The next avatar was a jewellery-bedecked pangolin with a fox-like head. Next, an eight-legged, many-armed robotic thing that spent the entire session working out how to walk. Then a blue woman, who spent her session squeezing her own breasts. Dozens of different avatars—I rarely saw two that even resembled each other.

MMOs average on launch something like five race choices, usually all humanoid: an approach that saves a lot of time and resources. The variety of character avatars in the demo suggested that not only were we looking at the biggest leap forward in gaming technology since, well, Pong, but that Ryzonart had thrown major-league money into development. We could hope for a lot more from Dream Speed than just a pretty waterfall and the experience of truly being not yourself. Chances were good there was a real game, the next level of gaming, due to release in a mere four months.

And no-one knew anything about it.