AIN SOPH Part 1

Episode 2

Having built some of the fastest and most accurate AI in the game, Andy considered his real art to be sculpting landscape and terrain. He spent many late nights in his office shaping hills and fluffing forests, work that most designers left for the interns. Andy had taken particular care shaping an ocean floor around Grave Island that most players would never see.

Frustrated in the search, Duke relaxed with a swim. Purchasing WATER BREATH potions at a dockside item shop, Duke dove down to inspect how Grave Island had integrated with the existing terrain.

At the north tip, Andy discovered a new wall had been formed in a sheer valley, where a node created three different monsters per turn, or approximately four per hour. Two were twisted sharks that swam off and devoured any PC unlucky enough to come within range. The third was a ScornFish. While always spawning in the water, ScornFish were unable to swim, and could not escape the undersea valley.

The trapped ScornFish spawned at a rate of 1.25 per hour for a long time. Players call this regular phenomena “overpopulation,” where a new geographic abnormality causes monsters to accumulate unreasonably. Depending on how many monsters got stuck in a nook or cranny, a lucky PC was almost certain to level up when he found it. A dwarf from Senesal reached a level cap when a glitched node spawned too close to a river and washed an untold number of goblins to a space of dry land no bigger than single character. No one knew how many goblins the Berserker Dwarf slew with a single sword-thrust, but an email circulated that the offending designer had lost his job due to the error.

ScornFish were like lizardmen, big and ugly creatures that attacked with long, dragging arms, or bite with a shark-like mouth full of pointed teeth. In their natural state, ScornFish ambled toward the nearest beach to attack the first PC, NPC, or monster encountered. Most players looked down on ScornFish. While considerably tough, they were clumsy and easy to avoid, and yielded no items or XP worthy of the time spent in combat. However, if an army of this size were to reach a PC settlement, players would be hard pressed to drive the monsters back into the sea.

Go to Episode 3