Lethol was a massive structure. The path leading out of the woods, open into a short grassland field. Lethol's front gate was pointed toward the woodland trail, but the city extended to that grassland a couple of miles. It was surrounded by white walls that raised into three tiers of inner city buildings. At the start of the game, lower leveled players were not allowed into the upper parts of the city. These area were unlocked by story quests.
Aecheland used channels to separate players in the same area into populations small enough to manage with its net code. I could always communicate with someone I knew over in-game text chat, or out of game over voice chat. However, to play together I would have to join them on their channel. The game referred to these channels as "planes". Often a player would just message something like "P31", to indicate where they were.
Aecheland's fast travel was generous, as it was entirely costless. Players were able to travel to any location they had touched a "Crys", or crystal, within. These locations were within a menu where they were identified by a label. Teleporting to them was as simple as selecting the crys, and worked even while being attacked or inside of a dungeon. That got abused as often as you might imagine it was.
On launch day, the server infrastructure was unable to handle the number of players. It took them a few days to keep lag and rubberbanding down enough to remain stable. This was a controversial issue that caused some negative reviews for the first week or so. Lethol was completely saturated by players looking for parties to level with. I was not one of those people.
In-game text chat for #Global was unreadable, like trying to read the chat of a popular streamer. While global chat was completely useless, any player could create a chat channel by tagging it. #raids, #farming, #trade, #erp, #guilds, and countless others were set up. I disabled global chat almost immediately because of the sheer number of real money transaction bots. I preferred to communicate with proximity chat anyway when I wanted to talk to someone.
Walking around the city every kind of person was there. High-pitched e-girls, squeakers, dads who took a week off work, college students playing an MMO during finals week, and the previously mentioned RMT bots offering the in-game currency, Ember, for US Dollars. That would be a complete lie with the server opening only a few hours earlier. How much could a sweatshop harvest from the starting area in 150 minutes? I don't imagine it would be much.
As I mentioned before, the server was slammed and lag was an issue. With so many people communicating and planning, there wasn't much playing of the game going on. I was told anyone struggling to fight mobs through the lag was a saint and a scholar. I guess that day, I was a saint and a scholar.
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There was a small group of people finishing out the prologue story quests that introduced players to the city. While not strictly necessary to do, it did give some crafting materials. For other players here for the first time, it would be their introduction to the layout of the city. I was going to hold off on that until midday.
More important to me was customizing the window positions of the heads-up display. Aecheland's HUD wasn't at all complicated compared to many of the other MMOs I got into during my teens. However, there was some information I needed to know at all times. I know other people didn't play this game like me, because they let me know after watching me stream.
I moved my hit point and mana bars to the center of my screen. Directly above and below my reticle. It was good to always know these values, and personally, my eyes would tire looking in the lower left corner all the time. That was my biggest gripe with the virtual reality headset. I'm glad Aecheland gave the object to move windows around. I moved the party's status bars just to the left of that. I would have had my skill cooldowns on the right, but since my build was this auto-targeting prismatic bolt gimmick I didn't need to watch skills I wasn't planning to use.
I dragged just the cooldown for Homing Bolt underneath the reticle and scaled it down. Not below the reticle, but actually overlapped beneath it. The blue Homing Bolt skill icon filling up became my reticle. I would cast the skill every time it flashed. I liked this particular arrangement. It gave Aecheland the feeling of being a shoot-em-up and looter shooter, instead of a game where I hunted large monsters.
The UI was clean except for the minimap and quest objective list. The minimap could be overlaid and made transparent, but this made the screen too cluttered for my taste. It's one of the few things I kept in the corner. I turned the quest objective list off from the HUD entirely. I would, to the disdain of guildmates, stop and open the quest log menu. Opening in-game menus didn't exactly cover the screen, but they might as well have. I've died at least once doing this. Turning menu transparency on didn't help.
I jumped around to get a feel for the gravity. Most of the players did this, as a sort of idling tic. Since many had haptics it would thump the back leg. It was oddly immersive considering I was sitting at a desk in a rolling chair with a controller in my hand. Dashing did the same, but added some vibration and offset the two legs based on what leg was forward. Looking down was convincing enough to sometimes have me jolt in my chair like waking from sleep paralysis. I took comfort in knowing that I was often playing in a room alone. That I never worried anyone.
Everything felt good to me, and reactive. Maybe that brain interface thing was doing something after all. I never really knew. All I had was a sense that the game was snappy, even despite the lag, I would be able to do what I needed to do. That was important.
"What do I need to do anyway?" I asked myself this. I don't know why, as I'd been planning this day for the last couple of weeks. I'd head to meetup location on the outside of town at the northern most gate, as far from the new arrivals as possible.
