My old world was replaced by a new one, and the effect was jarring. BaS was supposed to do a slow fade-in to give your brain time to adjust, but sometimes it went wonky.
I took a moment to let my head settle, and then I looked around.
I found myself in the middle of a vast plain of scutch grass. It seemed to spread endlessly into the distance, this sea of green, and it only relented where it met the swelling of an oak and birch-filled woodland, or the faint, shimmering shape of a lake.
There was a gentle breeze that I felt teasing through my hair. An earthy smell came from all around me, the aroma of mud that had been soaked by rain. It wasn’t raining anymore, but the clouds above me were thick and mean and full of stormy threat.
For a moment, I did nothing but look around and take it in. It made me remember an old VR advertisement for a driving simulator, with the tagline there’s real, and then there’s REAL.
I had been in this game and in this world lots of times, but never like this. Blade and Sheath in full immersion was everything I had wanted it to be. The crispness of the colors. How sharp they were, like reality but improved to a new level of detail. The feeling of the weather being real, of this being a place that existed in reality. I almost forgot I was even wearing a VR set.
Luckily, it wasn’t an overwhelming feeling for me. Although I’d never owned my own full immersion VR set, I’d been to the immersion cinema on Hope Street, where I’d watched the Die Hard 1 full immersion touch-up version. I remember thinking that there was no better feeling than hearing John McClane yell “Welcome to the party, pal!” and feeling like I really was at the party.
I had yet to convince myself to have the courage to go see Alien: Full Immersion cut. Supposedly in its first few screenings, some folks took off their VR sets and just left the VR center, ashen-faced. Full immersion was an example of a tech that was growing too quickly for society to keep up with, and it showed equal amounts of promise and threat. I could only imagine, for instance, the stuff a psycho with a full immersion rig and a coding background could get up to if he kidnapped people.
It was one thing watching a full immersion movie where you were ultimately still playing a passive part in the whole affair, and another being in Blade and Sheath with full immersion settings. I suspected it would take a long time for the novelty to wear off.
I decided the best way to get used to it was to just get on with things. I checked my map. The area of the game world that I was in was called Gobbler’s Creek. Looking around, I saw a giant forest in the distance, maybe ten minutes’ walk away.
In the opposite direction was a mountain range with various caverns dotted along its rock face. There was a steep pathway gouged into the stone, and it led all the way up the mountain and to a cave that was bigger and higher than all the rest. I knew a monster lair when I saw one, and there was a time when I would’ve set a custom map marker and head straight there. There was almost certainly going to be a cave or tunnel that led deeper into the mountain, and it would most likely be guarded by a boss creature.
This brought it home to me how different this playthrough was going to be. There’d be little fighting or looting. No battles with leviathan boss monsters. No crawling around dark, spider-infested dungeons. Lots of people played as non-violent characters, but fighting had always been my thing.
Maybe this would be a nice change of pace.
South of me was a great lake resting peacefully in the afternoon light. There was a rowboat in the middle, and sitting in it was what looked like a guy or a girl with their dog. They had the oars out of the water and resting across the boat. There were figures standing at various parts of the lake bank. Probably fisherman. Most were probably nonplayer characters, NPCs, though full immersion fishing was popular with players in BaS, too. Especially with the cooking mechanic. Full sensory immersion and in-game cooking were a match made in digital heaven.
In the east, way in the distance, was a town. It was too far away to make out in detail, though my game map listed it as Westfell. It was a pretty small town, and I couldn’t remember ever having been there.
If I looked hard enough, I’d probably find a travelers’ road that led to it, and there would be NPCs merchants and caravans traveling across it and most likely willing to give me a ride for 5 silvers.
BaS rewarded manual exploration if a player walked from A to B. Going the long route might let you stumble on hidden ruins, or meet an NPC with a special quest. But the devs weren’t sadists. They also included quicker ways to get to places. You could hire a horse, pay for travel on a carriage, or buy a carriage of your own. There was also, of course, fast travel, where you could use your map and simply click on a place to travel there.
I’d always been of the ‘damn you I’ll walk everywhere’ school. For me, fast travel took away the game’s immersion. It committed the great sin of modern RPGs – it reminded you that you were playing one.
Deciding to focus on my task, which was to build a settlement that earned ‘town’ status,’ I went back to basics.
With a mental command, I opened my character screen.
Josh Boothe
Level: 1
EXP: 0
Power: 1
Agility: 1
Intelligence: 1
Classes:
No classes earned
Skills:
No skills earned
Perks:
No perks earned
Nothing surprising here. Blade and Sheath’s character system was as efficient as they could get it without sacrificing too much of the RPG side. At least, at first. The further along you got in the game the more options became available to you, and the more you could customize your character. At first, however, it was deceptively simple.
Various tooltips popped up as I studied the screen, but I had played the game for years. I dismissed them. All I’d really wanted to know was whether the devs had put anything special on my starting character, which they hadn’t. Likewise, there was nothing in my inventory. This playthrough was very much a blank canvas.
It looked like I better get started building my town. I gave a mental command to partition a tiny corner of my VR screen, and I used it to bring up a web browser. I visited a website called Blade and Sheesh. It was the go-to resource for anything BaS related and had a pretty active community.
There, I navigated the ‘guides’ section, where someone had made a player’s guide to creating a town.
Before you can earn the ‘town’ status, your project must progress through various stages. These being: hamlet, village, settlement, and then town.
After town there is a ‘city’ stage, though no player-built location has ever become a city.
Each stage has five levels, and each level has certain requirements to achieve them.
“Let’s see. Hamlet level one…”
For hamlet level one, I simply needed to construct a group of houses. 'Group' being, for the purposes of BaS, three or more. There were no guides on what the houses should be made of, only that they satisfy the basic requirement of having four walls, a roof, and a door.
That shouldn’t be too difficult, I reckoned, though the requirements for hamlet level two were bound to be a lot tougher. BaS was known for its jumps in difficulty between levels.
I decided not to look at the requirements for a level two hamlet just yet. It’d be overwhelming. If you’re eating an elephant, it’s best to start with one foot.
I gave a mental command:
Create priority list: ‘House Building’
1) Find out what skills are needed to build a house
2) Learn level 1 in each skill
3) Gather house building materials
4) Build house
The priority list that I nicknamed ‘House Building’ was added to the list screen, a menu option that I could recall just by thinking about it. Not everyone utilized the list option in BaS, but I liked it. I’ve always been a list kind of guy. When I was eight years old, I even started a list of ‘Things that Josh Boothe likes’, and for a full year I wrote down every single thing that vaguely pleased me. Unfortunately, I lost it in the fire that burned down our old house on Maple Drive.
Anyway, I had a direction to go in now. I just needed to look up what skills I needed, and then set about earning them.
Before I could do anything, a man appeared in front of me.
He was 6’1” tall, a similar height to me. Like me, he was wearing the noob starter outfit of brown trousers with a hemp belt, shoddy boots, and a beige work shirt made from rough wool. His hair was thick and curly, and its mud-brown color matched his eyes.
Above his head was a green player tag that read ‘Lincoln Garter’.
“Hey,” said Lincoln.
There was no player versus player fighting in BaS, except for in arenas where both parties agreed to it. You could only find arenas in the bigger cities in the game, such as Storm Hollow and Vestefall. I tended to stay away from those places – way I saw it, I lived in a city in real life. I wanted a break from the chaos when I logged onto BaS.
The reason that there were so few opportunities for players to fight other players was that PVP was seen as discouraging for sub-level 20 players. Discouragement was the last thing that the devs needed for noobs. A discouraged player was less likely to let their subscription run on.
This meant that I wasn’t particularly concerned about the guy standing in front of me.
“Uh, how’s it going?” I said.
“You got the look of a guy who didn’t expect to see me.”
“It isn’t the kind of place I expected to bump into someone. And this isn’t a normal starting place for new players, either. So I’m guessing you’re working with Sas,” I said.
“She didn’t tell you?”
“Tell me what?”
“Oh. Well, I better explain.”
Lincoln Garter, I learned, was a BaS employee like me. He was part of Sas’ initiative to create some true player towns, though Lincoln lived fifty miles east of New York, so he’d never met her in person. His interview and induction were conducted by webcam, and Sas had couriered a VR set to him.
“Got the job without needing to get dressed,” said Linc. “One of the few things I like about the modern world.”
“You didn’t get dressed at all?”
“I was wearin’ a shirt. Sure. But I didn’t bother to change outta my jim-jams.”
Linc was a forager, which meant that he spent his time outdoors collecting all kinds of herbs and veggies that anyone could find if they knew where to look. Although foraging was useful in stocking his cupboards, it didn’t pay the bills in and of itself.
So, Lincoln got a tech-savvy friend of his to make a simple website and he started a foraging tour business, where he’d take groups of city folks on hikes around the country, showing them the loot you could pluck from mother nature if only you knew where the loot drops were.
“How was business?” I said.
“Eh…alright. Enough to live on, but not enough to squirrel some dough away. I don’t know what it is. The folks who come on a tour, they love it. Check me on TripAdvisor – the only crummy review I got was from a fella named Reasel, and he was being an ass the entire time. Talking over me, picking up berries even when I told him not to collect anything unless I say so. You know. On account of it being poisonous. Finally, I had to tell him to shut his mouth. Hence the only one star review I ever got.”
“I’d love to do something like that. Weird that you’re not attracting anyone. Maybe you need a USP. You know. You could sell it as a ‘survival tour’ or something like that. Folks like pretending to be tough.”
Linc tapped his chin. “You know what…that might be an idea. When I can actually start giving tours again.”
“What’s a cool thing that I could forage?” I asked.
“There are loads of things! You don’t realize what you got sitting out there, buddy, just waiting for you to find it. Folks will happily go to a grocery store, but they ignore the fact that mother nature’s got her own store set up, and the best thing is that it won’t cost you a dime. Take dandelions, for instance. You can make a salve with the petals. The roots make a good coffee. And you ain't lived unless you’ve tried dandelion and burdock soda.”
“My aunt used to make nettle tea.”
“There ya go. Nettle soup’s a good one, too.”
“You know, you don’t strike me as the kind of guy who’d enjoy working in BaS.”
“Ah. Well. I’m not. This place fucking sucks.”
“So why are you here?”
“Because I’m an idiot. I was guiding a bunch of folks in Poulter’s Ravine, and there was a pretty girl with them. I started showing off. We came to where the river swells fastest, where there’s a stone path across the river and you gotta jump from rock to rock to get across. Only, you can’t do it in winter, and especially not after it's been raining. I know that because I’m a guide. But I’m also a show-off…”
“So you tried impressing this girl, and you hurt yourself.”
“Broke my ankle. While it’s healing, I gotta earn cash. The way I see it if I can’t work outdoors in real life, why not do it in a game? Beats work-at-home customer service for the same pay. I’ve got nothing against those folks, I admire ‘em if anything, but I’ve never been able to do a desk job. What about you?”
I told Lincoln about Baxter and how I needed a job where I could work from home, at least for a little while.
“I love dogs,” said Lincoln. “My sister’s a cat person. She has this horrible little freak of a thing. You know, those hairless ones? It looks like a fuckin’ demon.”
“Cats are just dogs for people who hate affection,” I said.
Lincoln laughed. “Call me Linc.”
“Josh.”
“Yeah. I can see you’re called Josh, buddy. Your name tag’s right there above your head. Only, mine says Lincoln, and I’m saying you can shorten it. Call me Linc. All my friends do.”
“Right. So Sas told you we’re working together?”
“Yup,” said Linc. “Four teams, each with three people. We’re supposed to build a town. I reckon that might take a week. Maybe less?”
I laughed. “You’re in for a surprise, Linc. But at least she mentioned that part to me. I didn’t know I’d be working with anyone else.”
“Loner, are ya?”
“Kinda, but it’ll be cool to work together.”
It didn’t surprise me that Sas had left that part out. I doubted she’d done it on purpose – her day just seemed chaotic, that was all.
Linc looked around. “So, what’ve you found so far? Any resources nearby?”
“I haven’t looked. But to get a level 1 hamlet, we need to build three houses. I was gonna look up the skills you need to build a house, work on earning them, and then gather wood and stuff like that.”
Lincoln put his hands on his hips. “Right, buddy. then how about this. You work on that, And I’ll have a little explore and see what’s worth gathering.”