“Hello, and welcome to Priority Channel News! I’m your host: Jenny Lucid! Today we have lots of interesting things happening in the world today, but before to get to that, let us instead focus our attention on the world of virtual reality gaming! Specifically the newest hot thing out on the market, Tetra Game’s Dreamscape Online! Despite the fact that this fully immersive virtual reality game has only been out just over 3 days, sales have already broken several hundred millions of copies throughout the world! Today we have a special guest to explain this ground breaking phenomenon and more! Please welcome the lead developer of Dreamscape online Mr. Joshua Conrich!”

“Thank you very much, Miss. Lucid. I am very happy to be here.”

“Oh no! Thank YOU, Mr. Conrich for taking the time to come speak with us today, and please, just call me Jenny. Now Mr. Conrich could you tell me about what you did to bring about such a huge surge of attention to your game?”

“Sure thing, Jenny. You can call me Josh as well. I’m not really used to being referred to by my last name. Well, to start with I would have to go back to the distant past when we first started working on the game. It was right around the time when the virtuo pods were first thrown out into the market. Back then when we first started we were just a small team and never thought we could get this far, but we saw the capabilities of the Virtuo pod and couldn’t help but dream about what else we could do with it. Whenever people were thinking of something fully immersive, though, they only thought small. First person shooters, Media immersion, single player RPG’s, stuff like that. No one wanted to take the risk of dedicated a huge budget to making something big happen, to have more than just a fleeting moment of enjoyment. We started working on this game than because we wanted people to have the best immersive experience of their life. Needless to say, we couldn’t really make it work due to how much money we needed. We didn’t really plan things out all too well and it wasn’t long before we were on the verge of throwing the whole project in the bin.”

“Oh? What happened to change all that? It seems like a lack of funds isn’t the easiest obstacle to overcome!”

“No, you’re absolutely right and we almost didn’t overcome it. Thankfully one of our team made the most outrageous breakthrough during the last month of work we could have afforded before we might have gone bankrupt. One of our developers had been working with one of our core programs and accidentally made a few code changes to it. Those code changes turned out to be a groundbreaking change in how things worked from then onwards. We got in contact with a VERY rich friend of ours and showed him this new code. That convinced him to give us the funding we needed to continue with our work.”

“Can you tell us about this mysterious code? What is so groundbreaking about it that would convince your friend to give you so much money?”

“Unfortunately, I can’t talk about that.”

“That is okay. In that case, would you like to continue your story where you left off?”

“Oh, right! You wanted to know how we got successful. Well to summarize over 5 years of development, we worked our *bleep* off!”

“Careful Josh, this is a family network”

“Oh, yeah. Sorry. Anyways, throughout the years we noticed how people tended to focus too much on how realistic things felt to someone immersed in a Virtuo pod. The best visual feedback, the best auditory feedback, the best touch sensory feedback, hel- uh- heck even the best smelling feedback. What all those other games had in common though, is they never focused on the environment as much as they did with how much the player’s experience was. Of course, there are exceptions to that such as a lot of shooting games. First person shooters tended to be smaller environments which meant it was a lot easier to focus on smaller details such as ballistics impacts from bullets or a building’s structural integrity. RPG’s on the other hand either tended to be heavily scripted events that railroaded a player down a single path so they didn’t have to work so hard on details, or were really really bad. A few times someone would make an MMO and there would be commercials all over the place before release that would make us get a little worried, but for some reason, they usually tended to be knockoffs or were just unlucky and didn’t do as well as they could have. While all this was going on through the years we didn’t just work on sensory feedback for the players, we also did as much as we could to the environment every rock, every tree, and every little detail has had its own personal work done to improve it or change things in some way. Every object in the game got its own little bit of history.”

“Doesn’t this cause a lot of strain on your servers to run? It seems like a lot of detail to keep track of.”

“Normally you might be right, but we found an interesting way of streamlining things and this allowed us to bring even more detail to the forefront of immersion in our game.”

“Was this what was so groundbreaking about your special code?”

“He he, I guess you could say something like that although there is a lot more to it than that which I can’t talk about. Anyways I think that is was really brought people flooding our servers at launch. Dreamscape Online is one of the most immersive experiences out there, and there is a whole world to explore!”

“Well thank you for that wonderful introduction to the history of your game’s development. Now, since we are halfway through our time together, would you like to talk about your special announcement for Dreamscape Online?”

“Absolutely! Players of Dreamscape Online! I want to thank you for being so dedicated to supporting what we love and because of this, we decided to release one of our first patches for the game early! In about a week Tetra Game will be releasing patch 1.1 for Dreamscape Online!”

“Oh wow! That is so amazing! Thank you so much! Can you tell us what this patch entails for everyone?”

“Sure, we can break things down as we go. The first thing on the list, of course, is bug fixes, who doesn’t like those right?”

“Haha! Yea, nobody likes a game crash.”

“Next we have an update to how NPC’s work. We had been working on this for a while but couldn’t get things working right before we started shipping the game for launch, but now things are good to go.”

“What changed with NPC’s? They seemed like pretty good NPC’s to me.”

“Ah but that’s where the problem is, they were only pretty good. We updated the NPC’s with a more realistic behavior. Now every character has its own personality that is governed not just how you interact with them, but by their background, their history, even how they might have been raised as kids! With this patch, each NPC will be a unique and special snowflake.”

“Wow! That sounds amazing! Could you give us an example of how that would work?”

“Sure, before let’s say you were walking through the woods and come across a farm at the edge of a town. You see a farmer tending to his crops. Before you could walk up to them, offer to help them out somehow and he would just smile and wave as you helped him with his problems. Now Jenny, how do you think you would react if a random stranger approached you from the woods and offered to give you a hand with your work.”

“I think I would be a little scared of him. Some big guy coming out of the woods sounds like the beginning of a horror story.”

“Exactly. That is what this update does. Now instead of dumbly waving and smiling at said stranger, our farmer is most likely going to be suspicious and on guard. If I were to walk up to him and say something along the lines of needing money to buy supplies in the nearby town and offering to do a bit of work for money or food, Mr. farmer would be a lot more willing to offer a quest to help out on his farm. On the other hand, if you were to walk up to him and attempt to bully him into giving you a quest, he most likely would tell you to fu- um I mean he would tell you to go away in an appropriately impolite response. At that point, you could probably kiss your quest goodbye. Probably! You could also take your pride and bury it somewhere far away and apologize to him and beg forgiveness for your rude behavior and maybe things might turn out for the better, or not. It depends on his personality! He might be the kind of guy to hold a grudge and refuse to help you at all, or maybe he might be a bit vindictive and make you do the most difficult or dirty job he can think of and reward you with almost nothing for your effort. Maybe he might not want to give you a job but could point you to someone who would. The interactions in just the one event could be almost anything, and this update is applied to every NPC in the game.”

“Wow! I can’t even imagine the amount of time and effort it took to make something like this happen!”

“I know for a fact one of our developers spent many sleepless nights trying to get just this one feature working. It turns out the solution was rather simple and we just got this feature working to satisfaction in the last few hours so we decided to include it in this patch. Which brings me to the biggest piece of this patch. We are introducing a unique faction to Dreamscape online.”

“A unique faction? That sounds amazing but what do you mean by unique? What is the name of the faction?”

“Well, to answer your second question the faction is technically already in the game, it’s just that nobody really thought joining them was really a distinct possibility.”

“But, players haven’t seen an enemy race to fight against so far, yet you talk like we already know all about them.”

“That’s because you do. The enemy faction that all the sentient races fight against is, in fact, the monsters.”

“Whoa! Are you saying that monsters that players fight against every day for money and rewards are a faction all on its own?”

“That is exactly what I am saying. Every monster from goblins and orcs, to nagas and even the undead, have a chance of being a part of this faction. This isn’t always 100% true though. There are always outliers in most kingdoms and civilizations and there is no reason for that not to be true in the monster faction. A player might stumble across a lone village of kobolds that has nothing to do with the war between monsters and sentient races. A player could have some amazingly good luck and stumble across a village such as this in the middle of nowhere. If you played your cards right, they might not immediately kill you on sight and perhaps from there, you could even build a relationship. That, however, won’t affect your reputation with the monster faction at all and even if you were to become friends with every single monster in that village, if you were to come across any other monster it would still attack you as soon as it saw you.”

“Wow, that sounds harsh. How could you go about becoming friends with the monster faction, or even join the faction?”

“Well, in terms of most games, a standing kill on sight order with any enemy faction is fairly common. All your other questions though have the same answer though. You ask if you become friends or join them, but in most cases, you can’t. You can’t even create a new character in this faction under the usual circumstances. As of right now, there is only one official way of joining the monster faction and the answer to that question is what brings me to the third and final part of our patch next week.”

“Oh boy! I’ll bet you saved the best for last! Please give us the juicy details on how you join the monster faction!”

“It would be my pleasure! I am happy to announce that a specialized dimensional dungeon will be available to challenge upon the release of patch 1.1 called ‘The Trial of Shadows!’ this dungeon is entirely unique to any other dungeon in the game and it is doubtful there will be another one like it. The reward for clearing a dungeon is a special token. When used you get to pick 1 of 3 options. The first option is the ability to change factions to the monster faction and start a new character as a monster.”

“Oh my gosh! Do you mean to say we could play as any of the monster races?”

“Well, maybe not all of them, but there will most certainly be a myriad of choices to choose from. There are some races like giants or dragons that wouldn’t work well as a playable race. Could you imagine trying to enjoy a game made for 5-foot tall humanoids when you yourself are 6 or 7 times that size? Sure it would be a bit of a novelty, but it would get old pretty quick when you couldn’t enter most villages or cities due to your size or proportions.

“You said you had three options you could choose from when you used that token, what are the other two?”

“The other two options are pretty similar. You can choose to stay on the sentient faction as mostly human, but with a random monster’s features. This could have a varied assortment of problems associated with this choice. The biggest problem though is that if people notice your monstrous features, you will most likely get a negative response to them. There is racism in the game, but most of that is focused towards the monster faction. It wouldn’t be surprising if someone that hates monsters would hate someone that resembles them in some way. That usually won’t get you attacked right away but most people will be rather unhelpful towards you and it won’t take much to make them openly hostile. If you walk through a city, you can expect to get a lot of glares and I wouldn’t be surprised if a few people were to insult you or spit on your feet. All in all, it would be a rather unpleasant experience, but it is there for people who enjoy that kind of attention. The third and final option takes things in the opposite direction. You can choose to join the monster faction as a mutated humanoid. This option allows you to keep your current character with a random monster’s characteristics mixed in. You won’t get as much open hostility from monsters as you would from sentients, but since they recognize you as previously being involved with the sentients they don't immediately trust you either.”

“There is so much information here and it’s only been a few days since release! I’m so excited about this patch! For those of us wanting to jump right into the monster faction right away could you tell us where the Trial of Shadows can be found?”

“Hahaha sorry, but things won’t be THAT easy. There is a reason why I said this dungeon is so unique. As a dimensional dungeon, it CAN’T be found. It is in a dimension all of its own. The boss of the dungeon is someone we refer to as the Gatekeeper. That is who you have to beat in order to get a soul change token, which is the name of the token that allows you to change your features and faction. The Gatekeeper though is probably going to be the most interesting thing about this patch if you were to ask me. I wasn’t even sure if he would agree to be a faction guardian.”

“Wait, did you say agree? You mean you asked if he wanted to be a boss for a dungeon? Is he an employee that is from your company?”

“Oh, no no no. The boss isn’t a person living in the real world. Actually, it’s the other way around. The boss is a creature living in Dreamscape online. Now before you interrupt me with something like every creature lives in Dreamscape online let me clarify. This creature I’m talking about is actually living. As in being completely self-aware. He knows about you, me, the game, everything. That is why I think the gatekeeper is the most interesting thing about this patch. He is our first and only self-aware dungeon boss. When players come to challenge him he knows exactly what they are. The usual tactics a raiding group might use aren’t likely to be all that effective against him. You can’t just hide your healers in the back line and expect him to only focus on your front line fighters if you give him a chance to strike at the weaker targets.”

“That sounds so amazing yet so scary. Why hasn’t your boss gone crazy or something like that? I know I wouldn’t like to be cooped up in a dungeon for the rest of my life.”

“Hahaha! I love how you keep asking the right questions. Our little gatekeeper didn’t agree right away to be a dungeon boss, he actually had a condition! He wanted the opportunity to explore the world and marvel at its beauty. At the time the person who was talking with him had a brilliant idea. We can fulfill his wishes and grant access to the dungeon at the same time. The way things work now is that when the gatekeeper isn’t actively being challenged by someone he can create a body or vessel to send out of his dimension into the world of dreamscape online. From there, he projects his soul into the vessel and he is able to wander the land freely and explore to his heart’s content. At the same time doing so puts himself at risk. If a player were to find the Gatekeeper's vessel they can try to kill it. If you are successful, the gatekeeper’s soul is torn from the vessel back into his dimension. When the vessel no longer houses a soul, the body collapses and condenses into a rift key. This key will grant you one-time access to the Gatekeeper’s dimensional dungeon. The key is destroyed upon use so make sure you are more than ready before you use it. If you fail at the Trial of Shadows you are ejected from the dimension, corpse and all. There are no revive spells to bring you back to the dungeon. If you want to challenge the trial of shadows again, you must find and defeat the vessel once it has returned to the world of dreamscape online.”

“That sounds amazing, but won’t players be mad about not being able to try out the monster faction?”

“Joining the monster faction isn’t for people wanting to ‘try it out’. Once you join the monster faction, there is no way of going back unless you delete your character and start a new one. Once you decide to incorporate the features of a monster, that character is stuck with them for the rest of its life. Whether it’s only halfway, or fully dedicated, being a monster isn’t for the casual player if they put any value in their gameplay at all. All I can say is if you want to challenge the trial of shadows for the sake of the challenge, that’s fine. If you want to become a monster though, you have to prove that you have the resolve it takes to survive in their world.”

“Wow! That takes some serious dedication! Thank you, Josh, for your time, unfortunately, everyone that’s all the time we have for now! Stay tuned and we’ll talk all about androids and how THEY can help YOU! Thank you, everyone! We’ll be right back after a brief commercial break!”