SAO: Beginings. The birth of VRMMOs

Greetings noble readers! If you have yet to figure it out, I’m a little bit of a fan boy and whilst I promised my editors a review of the survival genre in gaming, I could not help myself in writing this piece. SAO, Sword Art Online, the light novels series by Reki Kawahara, popular anime and sire of no less than three Playstation games is being made into a VRMMO. Now a VRMMO is a virtual reality massively multiplayer online-game. That being said what can we expect? Is this the birth of VRMMO’s?

There’s frightfully little to go on, we know the IBM is developing it, that there are 208 insanely lucky players taking part in the closed alpha, wearing occulus rift and HTC Vive headsets set up to look like the nerve gear from the show. The game will be playable on the occulus rift and htc vive.

It seems in trying to keep with authenticity player avatars aren’t designed  by the player but are scanned and put into the game, just like in the anime your avatar will closely resemble yourself in the real world, from the photos and the game footage available through out social media and the IBM SAO home page, the faces are fairly realistic but the bodies seem almost kind of broken, like when you glitch through a piece of wall in a game, the textures are off I suppose. The appearance of combat seems relatively lack luster compared to what we have seen in the show, almost reminiscent of the boxing way back when the wii was a glorious thing to behold. That being said, what little footage we can hope to find does show a glorious game world, giving of a bit of a Skyrim vibe but still the colourful lighting we’d expect from an anime adaption game, that isn’t to say when we first make that jump into a VRMMO that it won’t be mindbogglingly awesome, if any of you have played VR with the head sets, please leave a comment on whether or not the tech is worth the investment. The boss monsters revealed in the videos are glorious and let’s face it face to face with a towering chimaera wielding a big freaking sword is going to be a whole new experience as compared to sitting and judging the visuals from pictures or second hand footage, that being said Gleam-eyes, a floor boss from both novel and series, looks perfect, so do the buildings, the avatars, as I’ve already said, not so much. That being said, your hand looks very good if the bending and flexing does look incredibly artificial, there has been a lot of time put into this so I shouldn’t nay say it so soon, admittedly when this game makes the jump to the wider market, I’ll gladly sell my grandmother and dog for  a copy of this.  While I love MMOs, especially World of Warcraft, I’m not in that world. I’m looking at it but I’m not there. I think this is probably the appeal for this game, reading the books, watching the anime I have wished to be in that world as well as many of the game worlds I frequent when not working on writing these slabs of nonsense for you all to casually glance at an disregard.

In true SAO style, your body will be your controller, how you swing your weapon is directly  interpreted by the gaming gizmos, from the footage released to the public,a player dual wielding is madly flailing his arms, the system appears to struggle and the avatar lamely spins the swords, well jerks and twitches them, in small circles. The rest of the players just looked like they were playing a fishing game.

So, they’re using some fancy tech for this wonderful creation. Soft layer, which is, I think a cloud configuring company? Seems to be handling the influx of the data, they’ve labelled Big Data, after all there’s sensory input (more than just sight and sound supposedly) and the 3D modelling data required for a players avatar. On top of that they’re using a cognitive system. What in the Hell is that? I hear you ask. I’m not so sure, reading has been mind bogglingly complicated but from what I can understand, is a system that allows humans and machines to interface smoothly, a machine that understand common speak and can adapt? Okay, screw it, we’re going to the IBM page for this and quote: “cognitive systems–a category of technologies that uses natural language processing and machine learning to enable people and machines to interact more naturally to extend and magnify human expertise and cognition. These systems will learn and interact to provide expert assistance to scientists, engineers, lawyers, and other professionals in a fraction of the time it now takes.”

Yup, confused? Same. Anyhow, basically a system that thinks, so not far from the cardinal system in the series.

Finally we can get onto the part most us anime nerds are freaking out about and waiting for: a release date! The game is scheduled for release some time in 2022, my expectation of this will be November 6th, 2022. The same day SAO went live in the stories. That being said, I wouldn’t get too excited, they’re likely to hold onto this for themselves for a long while after ward.

Things that aren’t happening. While I’ve seen this on the internet, various Facebook posts of teenage fans loosing their sh*t all together, there is literally no other way to say that, sorry. The NerveGear is NOT real. I repeat NOT real. The devs had a bit of fun jazzing up different VR head sets into looking like the nerve gear even sporting the NVG Nerve gear prototype on the side, this is NOT a thing. Neuroscience being what it is and tech being what it is right now, a full dive game, full dive being something akin to a lucid dream where the dreamer is actually in a game world, their brain being fed false signals by some sort of gizmo or another, is so far off we have a better chance of inter planetary and interstellar travel being achieved.

Anyway, thank you for reading my most noble of readers.