Virtual Worlds in The Black Desert: Deadly After All...

         My daughter's birthday went very well and she enjoyed herself and made cute excited faces and all that good stuff.  Happy day...

         But back to the issue at hand.  After reading some more from the comments section (you guys know you can comment, right?), A very good point was made: It would take a hard-link, magnetic fields or other invasive techniques to transmit pressure, pain and other touch sensations.  I hadn't really thought it through, but apparantly anything that can make you feel artificially can kill you if it it's overdone.  Not in the "your mind makes it real" way but more in Gibson's Black ICE model from the early eighties.  Go figure huh?

I Can Haz Blak Ize?

 

       That being said, it also occurred to me that if you put a surge protector on your computer to protect against lightning, you sure as heck would have something similar for you ever-loving brain.  Some sort of combat buffer would be available for military hackers to allow them to protect themselves from virtual threats.  Perhaps multiple ones in series, like circuit breakers...

          Anyway, the point of such musings is that, yes, I will admit that you can have your virtual deadly combat in The Back Desert as it is not only popular and protected by the Rule of Cool, but also plausible.   The combat buffers are also treasure-tech, something that PCs will have to adventure to get, so that's pretty good too.  So BD will have multiple virtual worlds that are completely realistic with the exception of physical sensations being less than perfect.  AI, cyborgs and Trans-Humans will naturally be adept operating in the virtual worlds, but mainline Humans can acquire such skill with practice.  Combat will involve all the realistic attacks possible in the real world, as well as direct pain induction and flashy magic-looking attacks (why not? physics only applies in the real world).  There will also be programs that hack virtual systems and remove the pain-threshold fail-safes from otherwise benign applications and buffering hardware that protects a hacker from the same.  That's about all we've got so far.
 
         And it's decent, as far as it goes.  But it irks me a little bit.  Not because there is anything boring or inaccurate about BD's virtual worlds as the idea stands right now, but because it doesn't feel really unique.  None of the ideas above are original;  by using such common tropes and themes my virtual worlds seem rather generic.  I don't know...I think that the best thing to do is maybe to leave the idea on the back burner for now and see if anything else develops.  Besides, I have plenty to keep me occupied in the mean time- I've got a PDF to finish, game stuff to write, and other odds and ends and goodies I will share with you at a later date. 

             As for blog topics, I believe I would like ti begin a discussion on space economics, so that I can start making equipment lists and prices for stuff in the game.  Anyway, that will start tomorrow, and probably continue the rest of the week.  Next Monday, I have some awesome announcements about new and exciting projects coming your way for 2011! For now, have a good evening and (as always) enjoy, RocketFans!