Andrey Krasnikov: Forgotten lands. Curse

Forgotten Lands v2.0

Andrey Krasnikov

Prologue

Everyone plays immersive games.

Complex teenagers trying to assert themselves in real life due to virtual exploits, eternal romantics, tired of everyday life and those thirsting for adventure, law enforcement officers undergoing special training courses...

Virtuality two point zero, as the inventors called it with a light writer’s hand, is multifaceted.

Twelve years after the creation of the first devices for transferring human consciousness into an artificially created computer environment new technology firmly and uncompromisingly entered into everyday life.

It all started, as usual, with the military. It continued in the educational sphere, and then, almost immediately, in the gaming sphere.

Games... for them, virtuality has opened up amazing opportunities. And at the same time I set strict boundaries. Yes, the simplest full-immersion helmet was inexpensive. But it was strictly not recommended to use it for more than one and a half to two hours a day. What's in it for the keen gamer? That's right, zilch - there is no pleasure in constantly monitoring the minutes remaining until the planned shutdown.

Unfortunately, full-fledged life support capsules, which made it possible to spend significantly more time in game reality, already cost the same as a good car. Very good and not accessible to everyone.

At first, the gaming industry giants struggled, trying to create something that would fit within the same hour and a half in terms of completion time. Of course, projects based on fleeting confrontation flourished wildly - the entire gaming world remembered the furore caused by the appearance of Counter-Strike 7. But strategies, RPGs, simulators - their segment has declined significantly, sliding down to practically unplayable stubs.

Players were excited about the future, but sad about the content it offered.

The situation changed dramatically when Robotek, which by that time had taken a leading position in the world of technology virtual reality, acquired controlling stakes in several gaming giants. And, having curtailed almost all of their own developments, he used his combined intellectual power to create several full games full immersion.

The competitors, clicking their beaks a little, rushed along the same path, realizing that something had seriously changed in the world. The entertainment industry suddenly faced a fait accompli - ordinary games suddenly found themselves on the verge of extinction.

And then Robotek presented gamers with the first truly budget capsule - and the turning point was made.

Everyone started playing.

Businessmen taking a break from their tedious work enthusiastically conquered magical universes, fighting there with arrogant schoolboys and spending exorbitant money on all kinds of axes and swords.

Representatives of the younger generation were not going to give up and from time to time brutally punished their offenders, simultaneously inflicting moral injuries on them that were incompatible with their self-esteem.

Intelligent, gray-haired fans of the unforgettable Ender with undying enthusiasm destroyed squadrons of enemy starships, trying to take aim at universal domination.

In combat simulators that simulate global conflicts on a planetary scale, two great forces collided - here tough military men who had been in dozens of real battles confronted skinny nerds who had gone through hundreds of thousands of virtual battles.

The military swore, but lost...

Robotek’s competitors, realizing that they were catastrophically losing ground, almost immediately flooded the market with a heap of all kinds of games, as well as various options capsules and helmets. Unfortunately, they software often did not stand up to any criticism, and hastily designed equipment sometimes broke down, irrevocably erasing the owners’ brains. No wonder a wave has swept across the world lawsuits and bills regulating the new living space.

Against this background, several cases of personality transfer into the gaming world due to hardware errors went almost unnoticed. From time to time, rumors about unfortunate people locked in the middle of virtual landscapes still appeared on the Internet, but then, as if by magic, they disappeared again.

Sometimes - together with the journalists who distributed them.

After a couple of years of confusion, the situation has calmed down somewhat. The industry leaders were finally identified and priority areas were identified further development. There were fewer virtual universes, but now they looked noticeably better than before.

Oddly enough, global simulators have become quite popular existing reality- thanks to them, the office work sector has almost completely moved into the digital world, and online stores have made a colossal leap in development. Side effect This was a significant reduction in traffic congestion and a sharp decline in the value of commercial real estate.

As for the pure entertainment segment, here four or five gaming spaces were dedicated to endless wars - modern type and more futuristic.

A couple more worlds were space simulators. Players were asked to fly, explore new planets, fight from time to time, and also obtain resources to constantly upgrade their equipment.

And, of course, the magical Middle Ages. Businessmen cheerfully swinging axes, mighty dragons, imposing elves...

It is in this sector that a huge breakthrough is being prepared right now. If you believe the pathetic statement of Robotek, then the developers took into account past experience, all the mistakes of their youth and created an ideal that is as close as possible to reality.

“Waiting for you new world sword and magic. An unknown world. A better world the kind you've ever seen."

There were no further descriptions. In rare interviews, managers only said that the new reality will allow every gamer to become an explorer walking through wild, uncharted lands. It was not clear what this actually meant, but no other information was given in principle.

However, just before the release, some rumors still reached the general public.

The information received by insiders boiled down to several things. The game did not have quests in the usual sense, there were no standard character development lines, and the world itself was declared by the creators to be unprecedentedly huge. Complete uncertainty and complete freedom of action awaited the players. Unclear politics, unexplored territories, mysterious enemies, unknown gods...

I must be a loser for wanting to plunge headlong into this universe. But for lately ordinary reality managed to bore me a little more than completely.

A stable income existed and was not going to go anywhere from me, family problems disappeared with the divorce, I didn’t really want a new relationship yet...

Frankly speaking, I simply didn’t know what to do. Whether it was a quietly creeping midlife crisis that had an effect, or whether it was just an ordinary minor depression - I don’t know. But the decision to take a break from boring life this world with the help of virtual reality was accepted by me quite deliberately.

At least, when I ordered the newest gaming capsule complete with the Forgotten Lands client installed on it, I fervently believed this.

Chapter 1

It's finished...

While I was settling down on the soft gel-like plastic and watching the capsule slowly close, my mind suddenly brought up a memory of an old film about big blue aliens - where the hero who arrived on another planet also transferred his consciousness while lying in such things. I don’t remember, however, why he did it. Either he was spying, or he was simply indulging in base passions, trying to seduce some pretty aborigine.

The grass underfoot was covered with a light coating of morning frost and crunched lightly with every step. Golden-brown leaves slowly fell from the tall trees in a rare but constant rain. Here and there, between the trunks, laces of cobwebs covered with the same frost could be seen.

As soon as you froze in place for a minute, a dead silence spread around, interrupted only by the slight rustling of another leaf falling to the ground. Idyll.

From the hillock on which I stood, a most picturesque view of a small valley, slowly covered in morning fog, opened up. The forest in this place parted a little, leaving space for a tiny lake and a clearing next to it. A little further away one could see the dark silhouettes of mountains, crowned with shining snow caps, already reflecting the first rays of the rising sun.

A ringing sound was heard from the clearing next to the lake and, immediately behind it, a strong swearing. I involuntarily winced. No, I’m not a prude, but spoiling the beauty of the morning in this way... It’s even a kind of blasphemy.

Our great raid was located near the lake. To be more precise, what is left of our great raid. To be even more precise - a third of what remains.

No, harsh predators and insidious enemies did not pass through our ranks with a bloody scythe. AND natural disasters, except for the tedious rain that had recently drizzled for three days in a row, they also passed us by. Everything was much more banal and simpler.

People who went to play “Forgotten Lands” for the sake of realism and new sensations suddenly found themselves not quite ready for the fact that realism is prescribed here to such an extent that it causes pain in overworked legs and chills that creep into the bones in the morning. And new sensations in the form of fording a couple of icy rivers added even more pessimism to the brave armchair pioneers.

As a result, in the week that our campaign had already lasted, out of the thirty-six legionnaires who were in the clan and the two hundred and thirty-three ordinary players who accompanied us, only thirty-six legionnaires and a little more than a hundred “civilians” remained. People could be understood - they wanted a game, and not tedious transitions with rare skirmishes in which they did not even really have to participate. So slowly one and then the other merged, canceling the temporary binding to the raid resurrection stone and leaving this world to be reborn in the warm and cozy Catalya.

As for the shortage, everything was simple here too. People flocked to the raid from all over the world, and therefore from a variety of time zones. Someone physically could not be in the game when the next transition was made. Someone was just sleeping at that time.

So a banal strategy was developed - every day at approximately the same time, at dawn by the standards of the game world, everyone active on at the moment the participants rushed forward. And they stomped about half daylight hours. Then an impromptu camp was set up and until the next morning everyone waited for the rest of the players, resting, leveling up some skills, or roaming around the area in search of interesting monsters or structures.

The monsters roamed around quite strong and angry - I myself, walking alone out of habit around the camp, somehow attacked a hefty gray bear and barely survived the brutal hand-to-hand combat. It was lucky that he was only level eighty, so my claws ended up being heavier than his. But now in my inventory, taking up a hell of a lot of space, lay the skin of a gray bear, which in the theoretical future would decorate my new home.

However, everyone already had a lot of skins. They gave skins to each other, forgot them at rest stops, and some were even too lazy to take them off their defeated opponents.

Some excitement happened on the third day of the campaign, when our advance group suddenly stumbled upon a piece of paradise in the middle of a rainy day. autumn forest- a marvelous garden with flowering and fruiting fruit trees, streams with delicious water, meadows of flowers... Alas, we burst into this garden like savages, in a crowd, starting to pick strange fruits and lie on the carpet of flowers. And as a result, the garden died almost instantly - in just ten minutes the flowers withered, the leaves fell from the trees, the fruits fell and rotted... All this happened right before our eyes and made a frightening and painful impression - so we tried to get away from locations as quickly as possible, taking away in your inventory what you managed to collect.

Personally, I still haven’t eaten any of the collected fruits, although people said that everyone adds one to the random resistances. There will still be time.

But the rest of the raid successfully resold the wonderful fruits to each other, ate them as much as they could and rejoiced at the increase in resists.

For me, it was quite funny, considering that these same resistances really began to work somewhere from the second hundred. I myself, mindful of where exactly we were going, endured the cold every night, deliberately lying on the icy ground or, if possible, plunging into the cold water of local reservoirs. Several people, mostly legionnaires, were doing the same thing, the rest looked at us as if we were idiots and wrapped themselves in skins.

Well, idiots are not idiots, but my resistance to cold has already been pumped up to plus thirty-seven percent and I was much less cold than my heat-loving companions.

In general, judging by the information from the forum, you stop feeling discomfort from the elements after reaching three hundred percent resistance. Roughly speaking, you will die, burning in fire, but this will not cause you the slightest inconvenience. The next significant milestone is two thousand percent. And complete resistance to the elements. A small problem was that when resistance to one of the elements increased by more than one and a half thousand percent, a “ceiling” was instantly set for all others. And it was impossible to raise them above a thousand.

So achieving complete invulnerability from all elements was unrealistic. But if you don’t stop there and continue to pump up the chosen resistance, then after three thousand percent treatment with this very element opens. That is, some inquisitors are trying to burn you as a heretic, and you stand in the fire, scratching your belly, laughing at the executioners and uttering pretentious slogans, agitating to join the legions of the Underworld. And you also heal in the process.

Against the backdrop of such benchmarks, the few pitiful points obtained from a handful of fruits really did not cause delight.

After observing the camp for a bit, I slowly went down. It's starting very soon new transition, so it’s worth being on the alert. As a night dweller, it was damn unpleasant for me to stomp somewhere during daylight hours, but what can I do, those walking at night stomped through lands that had already been developed and ravaged by the first wave, where the chance of meeting even the slightest mob lying around was negligible.

Friends and comrades! - Dex began pathetically. - We have been walking through this forest for several days, but only today the first interesting place on our way. Congratulations everyone, today we will have a real deal!

I was annoyed - I wandered around the camp almost all night, and someone else found an interesting location. The people, meanwhile, began to whisper animatedly - the long-awaited adventure was finally beginning. Those players who were thinking about going offline to sleep changed their plans, those who were going to work swore at the top of their lungs and begged them to wait for their return.

As a free bird, I felt good and pleasant.

Little by little, from Dex’s speech, the following situation emerged - a couple of kilometers to the east there were some ruins with dungeons. One of the players who discovered them tried to poke his head inside, but, having fallen into a trap that took away two-thirds of his life, he changed his mind and went to tell the clan about the discovery.

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Andrey Krasnikov

Forgotten lands. Curse

The grass underfoot was covered with a light coating of morning frost and crunched lightly with every step. Golden-brown leaves slowly fell from the tall trees in a rare but constant rain. Here and there, between the trunks, laces of cobwebs covered with the same frost could be seen.

As soon as you froze in place for a minute, a dead silence spread around, interrupted only by the slight rustling of another leaf falling to the ground. Idyll.

From the hillock on which I stood, a most picturesque view of a small valley, slowly covered in morning fog, opened up. The forest in this place parted a little, leaving space for a tiny lake and a clearing next to it. A little further away one could see the dark silhouettes of mountains, crowned with shining snow caps, already reflecting the first rays of the rising sun.

A ringing sound was heard from the clearing next to the lake and, immediately behind it, a strong swearing. I involuntarily winced. No, I’m not a prude, but spoiling the beauty of the morning in this way... It’s even a kind of blasphemy.

Our great raid was located near the lake. To be more precise, what is left of our great raid. To be even more precise - a third of what remains.

No, harsh predators and insidious enemies did not pass through our ranks with a bloody scythe. And natural disasters, with the exception of the tedious rain that recently drizzled for three days in a row, also passed us by. Everything was much more banal and simpler.

People who went to play “Forgotten Lands” for the sake of realism and new sensations suddenly found themselves not quite ready for the fact that realism is prescribed here to such an extent that it causes pain in overworked legs and chills that creep into the bones in the morning. And new sensations in the form of fording a couple of icy rivers added even more pessimism to the brave armchair pioneers.

As a result, in the week that our campaign had already lasted, out of the thirty-six legionnaires who were in the clan and the two hundred and thirty-three ordinary players who accompanied us, only thirty-six legionnaires and a little more than a hundred “civilians” remained. People could be understood - they wanted a game, and not tedious transitions with rare skirmishes in which they did not even really have to participate. So slowly one and then the other merged, canceling the temporary binding to the raid resurrection stone and leaving this world to be reborn in the warm and cozy Catalya.

As for the shortage, everything was simple here too. People flocked to the raid from all over the world, and therefore from a variety of time zones. Someone physically could not be in the game when the next transition was made. Someone was just sleeping at that time.

So a banal strategy was developed - every day at approximately the same time, at dawn by the standards of the game world, all currently active participants rushed forward. And they stomped for about half the daylight hours. Then an impromptu camp was set up and until the next morning everyone waited for the rest of the players, resting, leveling up some skills, or roaming around the area in search of interesting monsters or structures.

The monsters roamed around quite strong and angry - I myself, walking alone out of habit around the camp, somehow attacked a hefty gray bear and barely survived the brutal hand-to-hand combat. It was lucky that he was only level eighty, so my claws ended up being heavier than his. But now in my inventory, taking up a hell of a lot of space, lay the skin of a gray bear, which in the theoretical future would decorate my new home.

However, everyone already had a lot of skins. They gave skins to each other, forgot them at rest stops, and some were even too lazy to take them off their defeated opponents.

Some revival happened on the third day of the hike, when our advanced group suddenly stumbled upon a piece of paradise in the middle of a rainy autumn forest - a marvelous garden with flowering and fruit-bearing fruit trees, streams with delicious water, clearings of flowers... Alas, we broke into this garden like savages, all in a crowd, starting to pick strange fruits and lie on the carpet of flowers. And as a result, the garden died almost instantly - in just ten minutes the flowers withered, the leaves fell from the trees, the fruits fell and rotted... All this happened right before our eyes and made a frightening and painful impression - so we tried to escape from the location as soon as possible. as quickly as possible, taking away in your inventory what you managed to collect.