Log Horizon season 3 is about to start, and if you're like me you do not at all remember everything that happened in seasons 1 and 2. Well, I didn't want to risk getting spoiled from reading wikis, so I binge-rewatched the first two seasons this past weekend and took a ton of notes so I can share with anyone else needing a reminder or ten.
 
This is certified 100% anime-only content meant specifically for anime viewers. I haven't even glanced at the light novels or wiki. Fans who have read the novels, this is NOT the place for you to chime in with "clarifications" and "by the ways". This place is for anime-only viewers, most of whom do not want to know the slightest bit of what happens next so we can experience it ourselves. I and the people in this thread do not give a rat-man's ass about some novel exposition from volume 2 that the anime skipped over in season 1 - go make your own thread if you are compelled to share that information.
 
This post is almost certainly going to hit the character limit, so I'm not going to summarize every major character or every plotline from the first two seasons. I could never hope to outline every major character's arc and development over 50 episodes in that few characters. Instead, I am only going to focus on the rules of the world and the plotlines that were still ongoing/unresolved at the end of season 2 - in other words, what I think you may need to know heading into season 3. Even if you don't remember them well, I'm sure you'll pick up the interdynamics of all these goofballs well enough just from seeing them in action again.

Poster Characters

Basics

• Elder Tale was a MMORPG that a bunch of people played. One day, everyone who was logged on got transported into a world that resembles the game. This event is now known as The Apocalypse.
• Elder Tale's setting was called Theldesia. Geographically, it is the same land/ocean layout as the real Earth, but half as large.
• When it was just a MMORPG, the game had 13 different servers, separated by region. If your character was in Theldesia's equivalent of Japan, you'd be playing on the Japanese server, and in order to travel to Theldesia's equivalent of Australia you'd have to switch to the Australian server. Most players played on the server corresponding to their region.
• A 14th server, called Mare Tranquillitatis, also existed - it was a beta-testing server used for experimentation and testing features before they rolled out. Some players had access to it. Its geographical region is... the Moon.
• The series has so far taken place entirely in the Theldesia equivalent of Japan, which is called Yamato or The Yamato Islands, and particularly in the city of Akiba (aka Akihabira) which is located approximately where Tokyo would be.
• The Elder Tale MMORPG ran for 20 years in real-life before The Apocalypse happened.
• Post-Apocalypse, the history of Theldesia has a ratio of 12:1 for events that happened in Theldesia vs in the real world. An event that happened in the 10th (real-life) year of Elder Tale's run happened 120 years ago in Theldesia history. This means that some Adventurers who had created their accounts and done notable things in earlier years of the Elder Tale game are now characters that are known to be over a 100 years old within the history of Theldesia.
• When people and monsters in Theldisia die, their corpses turn into bubbles/particles after a short time.
• The Apocalypse happened on the same day that the 12th expansion for Elder Tale was launching. This new expansion - called The Novasphere Pioneers - increased the level cap for players from 90 to 100, and was to include many new raid bosses and other content. Because of timezones, only the Japanese server had the expansion applied at the time The Apocalypse occured.
• As of the end of season 2, it has been about 1 year in Theldesia since The Apocalypse.

Populations of Theldesia

Adventurers

• Adventurers is the collective name of player characters in Elder Tale, turned special folks trapped in Theldesia after The Apocalypse.
• Adventurers can be any of a bunch of different races - humans, dwarves, cat-people, fox-people, wolf-people, and more. They have classes, special skills, and all sorts of MMORPG staples, and typically can improve all these things beyond any other population in Theldesia.
• Adventurers have a "friends list" which they can add each other to. They can make long-distance voice calls to anyone on their friends list - they refer to this as Telepathy.
• Adventurers can also talk psychically to other adventurers they have formed a party or a raid team with. Note that this is a separate ability than Telepathy, so effects that block Telepathy from working won't necessarily also prevent party/raid chat.
• When an Adventurer dies, they reappear at a Cathedral or another respawn point nearby (e.g. if in a raid zone they respawn at its entrance) after some time (anywhere from minutes to half a day).
• In-between dying and reappearing, they have surreal experiences based on moments from their life before The Apocalypse, during which they must mentally confront the failures that lead to them dying. Once they've finished that, they appear on a beach on the moon (Mare Tranquillitatis) with the world (presumably Theldesia, though it could be the actual Earth I suppose) hovering overhead. There, the Adventurer must sacrifice a piece of themself (eventually confirmed to be a memory from their life before The Apocalypse) to return. When they wake up, they retain only the vaguest memory of this ritual or none at all. (See S2E6 for an example.)
  
• Adventurers mostly live in Adventurer Cities - cities that have special buildings like guild halls, banks, and Cathedrals, and which are populated mostly by Adventurers but with many supporting People of the Land living there, too. Most or all of the Adventurer Cities in Yamato and many of their surroundings have a post-apocalyptic aesthetic, full of overgrown abandoned modern structures like highways, parking garages, and broken-down cars. There are 5 Adventurer Cities in Yamato:
  
• Akiba (aka Akihabara) - Situated where Tokyo would be in real life. This is the primary setting of the series. Governed relatively liberally by the Round Table, a group of the most influential guilds.
  
• Shibuya - An incomplete Adventurer city with no guild hall very near to Akiba. All the adventurers who were there have gone to Akiba so it is empty.
  
• Susukino - Northern city in the real-life equivalent of Hokkaido. It started out as a violent city run by oppressive guilds. Akiba sent forces up there several times to let anyone who wants to leave it and come to Akiba, so only a couple hundred Adventurers remain there. The Akiba guild Silver Sword ended up moving there and taking it over, which made it less violent and lawless than before.
  
• Minami - Situated to the west, vaguely where real-life Osaka would be. Governed autocratically by the guild Plant Hwyaden.
  
• Nakasu - Even farther to the west. Very little is known about it.
  

Monsters

• Monsters are hostile wild animals - things like angry giant plants, wild felines that attack in forests, etc. They are aggressive, have stats and levels and special skills, but are of similar intelligence to animals. They haunt certain areas, and when they die eventually replacements respawn there.
• After they are killed and their bodies dissipate they "drop" ingredient/crafting items and gold coins.
• Most Adventurer Cities, People of the Land cities, and some People of the Land villages have a "no monster" effect/barrier that prevents monsters from entering into them. Large-scale events like the goblin nation invading Eastal are probably not prevented by this.

Demi-Humans

• Demi-Humans are a special type of monsters that includes species like goblins, giants, fishmen, and other usually-humanoid hostile creatures. Unlike other monsters, they have actual social structures, use weaponary, and seem to be at least semi-sentient.
• Miscellaneous demi-humans can be found in the wild like monsters, but larger populations of them also occupy significant portions of territory - e.g. there is an area of Yamato full of goblin tribes that live in their own society and where People of the Land are not present. These areas can have complex social structures.
• Similar to monsters, demi-humans magically spawn/respawn in their lands. Since they have some intelligence but are difficult to research, it's unclear whether this is new individuals spawning or whether they are actually respawning with intact personalities in a similar manner to Adventurers.

People of the Land

• People of the Land are what were NPCs back when it was a MMORPG. In the game they just had simple NPC patterns, always saying the same things and doing the same basic tasks, but since The Apocalypse they are now fully sentient humanoids with their own lives, backstories, generations, politics, culture, etc. The People of the Land greatly outnumber the Adventurers - for every Adventurer City there are another dozen or more "regular" cities full of People of the Land and a bajillion towns and farms spread across the countryside.
• People die when they are killed.
• Revival spells on a recently-dead Person of the Land slows down how fast their body disperses but doesn't prevent it.
• The People of the Land in eastern Yamato (the area around Akiba) are socially structured as European-style feudal nobility, with each city and its surroundings ruled by a Baron and a patrilineal Duke as overall ruler of the area, or something like that. They have their own knights, armies, academia, etc.
• Named NPCs would have lasted in the game for the whole 20 years that it ran before The Apocalypse, and with the timeline acceleration mentioned earlier that would make some of them a hundred years old or more, but it seems The Apocalypse retconned this and where necessary the names of characters the required continuation became titles passed from teacher to student, and so on. The People of the Land don't seem aware of any incongruities there.
• People of the Land can learn skills, have classes, and other things that Adventurers can do, but they learn them much more slowly and generally have a lower "cap" on their level or abilities than Adventurers.
• While People of the Land are less powerful than Adventurers, in some special cases they can have access to equipment that puts them on par or beyond the abilities of Adventurers. Of particular note, the Royal Guard (aka Defenders) are People of the Land who keep the peace in the no-combat-zones of Adventurer Cities - they have special armour that massively buffs their physical abilities and makes them able to teleport around the city.

Ancients:

• Ancients (aka Progenitors) are a special class of People of the Land that are much more powerful than usual - even more powerful than maxed out Adventurers. In the MMORPG, these were mainly for two roles - legendary NPC characters tied to a particular quest, and the 13 Knight Orders. Only one Knight Order has been named in the anime - the Knights of Izumo that defended Yamato (since there are 13 regional servers, presumably there is one Knight Order per server). The Knights of Izumo suddenly disappeared around the time of The Apocalypse.

The Kunie Clan:

• The Kunie Clan are a special group of People of the Land that manage all the banking and financial systems of Theldesia. They are of some mysterious other humanoid race that look similar but not quite the same as humans or elves, and they seem to all be almost identical (plus many or all of them seem to go by the same name, Kinjō, making them even harder to tell apart).
• They can be found at the guild halls or banks of Adventurer Cities and similar places, but they also have secretive villages where they originate from that Adventurers and most People of the Land do not know about.
• The Kunie Clan are not necessarily the actual cause, but are at least somehow involved with the world's supply of gold and how it gets distributed to monsters/demi-humans when they spawn. This includes access to the giant lake of gold coins that reside deep below the Depths of Palm and which serves as the world's main vault to store coins before they teleport to monsters and demi-humans.
• They are also involved with many other "fundamental" aspects of the world, especially operating and managing ancient magical technology. For example, they can deactivate and reactivate the magic circles beneath Adventurer Cities which power the anti-monster barriers and Guard armour within the cities.

Instincts, Progress, & Innovation

When Elder Tale was a game, players were limited in what they could achieve by the limitations of built-in character animations, feats needing to have been pre-programmed as skills, and the game interface itself. Following The Apocalypse, the Adventurers in Theldesia still have access to the game interface and can still do everything the old way... but they don't have to. A magical leaping sword strike formerly activated by pushing a button can now also be activated by doing the same motions and thinking about using that skill. In fact, the latter option is better - the Adventurer can control and manipulate the skill with greater control and precision than the rote motions that result from doing it through the menu.
Just as this applies to combat skills, so it goes for the rest of the world:

Food and Crafting

Combining ingredient items through the in-game interface according to a pre-programmed recipe makes food that looks correct and does nourish the body, but has no distinct taste or smell. But, if a player with the chef sub-class actually combines and prepares the ingredients by hand, it makes real food. More complex and difficult recipes require finer ingredients and a higher level in the cooking skill or they still end up turning to mush.
Similarly, Adventurers with crafting sub-classes and skills can make superior, more refined, and more varied designs if they go through the process by-hand rather than using the crafting menu.

Innovation

Adventurers with the skill and ingenuity to create and craft things by-hand rather than using the menus are also not bound by the finite list of recipes and inventions that were programmed into Elder Tale. They can combine basics in all sorts of new ways not seen before. Soon after The Apocalypse, clever Adventurers developed basic steam engines and the rate of invention has been rapid ever since - less than a year later, someone has mixed magic and technology together to create a magitech hover train.
These changes have had a far-reaching effect on the societies and economies of Theldesia. Facets of Adventurer culture such as their food and clothing have been swiftly embraced by the People of the Land and Adventurer economies have largely shifted away from quest-like tasks such as raids or guarding a People of the Land caravan to their own Adventurer industries, which has fractured the traditional Adventurer-People of the Land relationship and lead to many unforeseen consequences, such as an attempted goblin invasion.

Teachings

Teachings (aka Overskills) are supposed new skills achieved by some Adventurers that were not possible back when it was a game. They are commonly perceived as being a higher-tier version of commonly known skills or powerful new abilities.
In actuality, Teachings are just (a) unorthodox applications of existing skills, or (b) instincts gained from becoming more in-touch with the world and losing the mentality of it being a game. E.g. Nazuna figured out that she can use the protective barriers she normally cast on other people as airborne platforms she can climb/jump on instead. Adventurers tend to
 

"The Apocalypse is not over yet"

As Shiroe comments, the natural laws of the world post-Apocalypse are altogether a confused mish-mash of Elder Tale game mechanics with real-world logic. Gradually, however, these two separate systems are starting to merge. Some known examples are:

• Initially, an Adventurer needed to have the chef sub-class in order to be able to make any real food - even if a non-chef Adventurer prepared the ingredients perfectly, it would still turn to mush. After some time, though, anyone can now make basic recipes and the chef sub-class (plus leveled up cooking skill) is only needed for intermediate and harder recipes. Likewise for any other sort of crafting.
• Adventurers whose Elder Tale avatar had a different body than their real body got stuck in their avatar's body, but retained their original voice. Over time, their voices are becoming more like what their body's physical vocal cords would naturally sound like.
• The size of the world is slowly increasing, presumably until it becomes the same scale as the real Earth.
• Objects had all sorts of associated flavour text in Elder Tale. They still have this flavour text in Theledisia after The Apocalypse, but it is just that - two objects with the same stats but different flavour text behave identically. After many months, though, the flavour text of some objects started coming true.

 

The Debauchery Tea Party

• The Tea Party was a group of 15~30 Adventurers on the Japan server that frequently partied together in Elder Tale, many years before The Apocalypse. They were known for pulling off a number of incredible feats in the game, and generally had a more loose and fun tone than other groups since they weren't a structured Guild.
• The Tea Party disbanded several years before The Apocalypse and many of its members moved on to other things. Some members joined or started guilds, while conversely many others had not logged in for years by the time of The Apocalypse.
• Almost immediately after The Apocalypse, Shiroe checked his friends list to see who else that he knew was online/trapped in Theledesia, so he should have a pretty good idea of which members are/aren't in the world, but we the audience didn't get an exact list. Currently we know of 9 former Tea Partiers who are in Theledisia...

In Akiba:

• Shiroe, Naotsugu, and Nyanta partied together in Theldesia and eventually formed Log Horizon.
• Back when the Tea Party disbanded, Sōjiro, Kazuna, and Saki created a guild called the West Wind Brigade, with Sōjiro as guild-master. Saki wasn't logged in at the time of The Apocalypse.

In Minami:

• Intix is the #2 seat on the Council of Ten of Plant Hwyaden and therefore 2nd in command of Plant Hwyaden behind only Nureha. She seems like a real big jerk and is part of the faction there that wants war and total dictatorial control of Yamato. Up until the end of season 2, it seems she was emotionally abusing Nureha to get her way within Plant Hwyaden. (I don't think they ever actually specifically said Intix was in the Tea Party, but from the way she's shown with them in the OP and how Kazuhiko/KR talk about her it's 99% certain.)
• Kazuhiko is also on the Council of Ten of Plant Hwyaden. He seems to be fairly disgruntled with the way things have been going over at Plant Hwyaden, but is hoping to change it from within. He's kind of a jerk about it, though. He and Shiroe have been occasionally in contact with each other and have been sharing some info.
• KR is on the Council of Ten of Plant Hwyaden. He's very carefree, but seems like a good guy overall - like Kazuhiko he doesn't necessarily approve of the way Plant Hwyaden is running things or their desire to go to war with Eastal and Akiba. KR is a summoner with a skill to possess creatures over vast distances - at some point he possessed a horse in the China serveregion to scout out what things were like over there and while traveling around in China he encountered Kanami's party. And he can summon a giant fucking dragon that solos raid bosses. He only told Kazuhiko about his journeys in China, not Intix or the rest of the Council.

Elsewhere:

• Kanami was the leader of the Tea Party for most of its run, but she moved to Rome a few years before The Apocalypse and stopped playing the game at that time. During that time she had a daughter. Eventually, she got back into Elder Tale, creating a new account on one of the European servers, and she got trapped by The Apocalypse, too. Since the Novasphere Pioneers expansion pack content had only been loaded on the Japan server and figuring it was related to The Apocalypse, Kanami started journeying from Theldesia's Europe counterpart all the way to Yamato. Also in her party are a teenage mutant ninja frog, a farming bot that may have gained sentience, and an Ancient.

Unresolved Plots & Mysteries

Regan, New Magic and the World Fractions:

• Regan (aka Li Gan) is a mysterious guy who has shown up a few times and gradually become an ally of Shiroe. He was first encountered when Shiroe et al went to a conference with the People of the Land nobles. He seems to be a Person of the Land, but I don't think that was ever actually confirmed. If he is, he's an extraordinarily knowledgeable one, possibly on par with the Kunie Clan. He's a shady guy who may have a hidden agenda.
• He has the title Sage of Miral Lake, a name that was associated with a lot of lore in the game before The Apocalypse but (as far as we/Shiroe know) not a character anyone ever encountered. He says it is a title passed down to him from his teacher, the previous Sage of Miral Lake.
• Regan's main interest of research is magic that is on the scale of altering the entire world, something that he says has only happened 3 times so far in events he calls the World Fractions - the creation of monsters/demi-humans, the arrival of the first Adventurers (240 years ago), and The Apocalypse.
• Since each World Fraction was an unprecedented form of magic, he is intensely interested in the creation of new forms of magic that did not exist prior. Shiroe's Contract Magic which turned Rudy into an Adventurer was one such new magic, and one that Regan thinks could some day be world-altering. Around the same time, Regan says he felt another brand new form of magic with similar potential happin in the west.

Death and Resurrection

• Regan and his predecessors were researching a so-called Spirit Theory about how death and resurrections work. His theory posits that people (Adventurers, People of the Land, and Demi-Humans) are divided into anima (physical attributes, correlated with HP) and psyche (mental attributes, correlated with MP). The psyche and the anima are each required for a person to persist - when people take too great of an injury their anima is too damaged to persist to it dissipates; the healthy psyche stuck inside the body dies when there's no anima to support it.
• Since when people die in Theldesia their bodies turn into bubbles/particles, that is their anima dissipating. If the psyche is intact, revival spells can pull those dissipated bits of anima back to the rest of the body and put them back into place (up until the point where the body has completely dissipated). But if the psyche is also destroyed, there is no mind to reassemble the anima as it once was.
• For Adventurers (and possibly demi-humans), their dissipated anima particles all travel to their respawn point, so their psyche can still reassemble them there. For People of the Land, the dissipated anima just scatters in all directions, so even a healthy psyche can't do reassemble them and dies.
• However, the reassembly can't be perfect... some energy must be expended for the process. And since the anima seems to be reasembled perfectly, Regan and Shiroe theorized that some psyche must be lost - in other words, the person loses some of their memories. (See S1:E14 for the full spiel)
• When Shiroe shared this with the Council, Krusty was able to confirm that this is indeed the case, and further suggested that it seemed like memories of their lives from before The Apocalypse might specifically be targeted. (After a particular death, Krusty could no longer remember the name or appearance of a cat he owned.)
• Regan implied the Ancients had different spirits than ordinary People of the Earth and that this could be significant.
• Shiroe and Akatsuki eventually remembered the experience of being on the moon between death and revival. We don't have a lot of comparison points as no one talks about it much, but it sure seemed like Adventurers always forget that in-between experience once they woke up (Akatsuki herself when she revives seems to remember it for a moment and then quite specifically forget it).
• (Continued in the Navigators section)

Enemies in the West

• To the west of Akiba and Eastal are three People of the Land nations - the Westelande Empire, the Ninetail Dominions, and the Fourland Dukedom - and within those are two Adventurer Cities - Minami and Nakasu.
• Following The Apocalypse, a guild called Plant Hwyaden lead by Nureha took over Minami by conning money out of the People of the Land nobility and buying the Cathedral, then forcing all Adventurers to join Plant Hwyaden through the threat of controlling the respawn building. Plant Hwyaden now rules Minami and its environs autocratically, and is much more integrated with the People of the Land nation, the Westelandian Empire, than Akiba is with Eastal. Their combined government is run by an organization called the Council of Ten Seats - Nureha and her nine advisors/ministers, which includes some people of the land.
• Nureha herself is a somewhat emotionally unstable person and she occasionally runs off on her own private journeys, so the much of the actual policy-making has been driven by Intix and Mizufa, the bloodthirsty Westelandian army general.
• Ever since establishing control, Plant Hwyaden have made efforts to suppress information about the west making it to the east. This isn't outright possible, as plenty of Adventurers in Akiba have friends in Minami, but it has overall made it more difficult for Shiroe and the Round Table to gather detailed information about Plant Hwyaden's capabilities and motives.
• Likewise, the presence of spies from Minami in Akiba has lead to the Round Table waging their own information warfare, trying to keep their own secrets and knowledge of their operations out of the hands of Plant Hwyaden.
• Nureha herself came to Eastal, disguising herself as a People of the Land chronicler named Dariella. She was seen suspiciously visiting various various places in the east, and then eventually met up with Shiroe, who saw through the disguise. Revealing herself as Nureha, she encouraged Shiroe to join Plant Hwyaden so they wouldn't have to be enemies, but Shiroe declined. Apparently she knew Shiroe in the game before The Apocalypse and is somewhat obsessed with him now, but Shiroe doesn't remember her at all, and furthermore it's clear that Nureha lies a lot so who knows how much of this is true.
• Recently, factions within Plant Hwyaden - especially Intix and Mizufa - want to go to war against Eastal and Akiba. They have been power-leveling their People of the Land soldiers (using a disturbing magitech system wherein People of the Land control spirit monsters), built a giant hover train base, and have been making other preparations.
• They sent a small expeditionary force to the border of Eastal which caused a bit of havoc in some towns, but Kazuhiko and Nureha made them withdraw.
• The threat of all-out war or a smaller, more focused attack by a faction within Plant Hwyaden still looms large. Nureha seems to be taking a more active role in government and standing up to Intix now, but that doesn't mean she has full control or even that she wouldn't order an attack herself.

The Disappearance of Krusty Suzumiya

• Krusty is the guild leader of D.D.D., one of the most important guilds in Akiba.
• When flavour texts started becoming real, the scythe (which admittedly had some pretty evil flavour text) of Krusty's lieutent, Takayama Misa, one night suddenly flew up into the sky and show a giant red beam of pain around her. Krusty pushed her out of it and got caught in it himself. Then the beam disappeared, Krusty and Misa's arm vanishing with it.
• For the longest time no one knew what had happened to Krusty. He did not respawn, could not be reached by Telepathy, and Misa's arm couldn't be healed or revived either.
• At the very end of season 2, they discovered that Krusty is in China with Kanami.
• He still has Misa's arm with him. And it is twitching (ew).

Ennui & Social Safety Nets

• Living as an Adventurer is easy. Slaying a couple low-level monsters every few days gives more than enough gold coins to buy food and a bed. Throughout their time since The Apocalypse, the leaders of Akiba have struggled to keep its culture and economy engaging so that its people will have motivation and drive.
• However, the mostly-capitalist system of economy and governance they've established, especially with its focus on guilds within the government structure and trade in its economy, has furthermore left a growing population of Adventurers who do not have social standing, influence, or prized trade skills and who do not wish to leave the safety of the city disenfranchised and despondent.
• The Round Table is aware of the issue but hasn't figured out what to do about it.
• Most recently, Eins and his enormous guild Honesty have been the leading voice for this issue. He's even suggested some extreme socialist/communist economic reform measures, but no one else thought that was a good idea.

Navigators

• During a westward quest, the junior members of Log Horizon encounter Roe2, Shiroe's second account, acting independently from him. She says a bunch of cryptic stuff and also sends a letter to Shiroe via the juniors. Putting it all together (but she could be lying about some or all of this):
• Navigators are artificial lifeforms that come from a society that ran out of empathion and now search different universes for more in order to survive.
• What, exactly, empathion is is not entirely clear. It seems to be a resource necessary for life and which is evidently tied to the psyche.
• The Navigators were brought into this world by a process they call "the Match", something they don't fully understand and which they did not cause. Probably the same thing as The Apocalypse.
• Navigators are divided into two types: Observers, whose role and motives is not yet fully clear; and Harvesters, who are less intelligent than Observers or Adventurers/Humans and who prioritize collecting empathion above all else.
• Adventurers dying is one way that empathion is collected. Given the name and the correlation with the psyche, it's 99.9% certain that this is the same thing as when Adventurers give up a bit of their memories on the moon before they revive.
• Navigators don't have their own bodies in Theldesia - instead, they have taken over the bodies of unused character accounts and monsters. In particular, Roe2 took over Shiroe's alt account on the Mare Tranquillitatis server (and other Observers have likely taken over other accounts there) while Harvesters have taken over Geniuses (see below).
• Roe2 was able to get to Yamato by swapping positions with a summoned creature, but most Observers are still on the moon. She told Shiroe that if he contacted them, they could help him find a way home.

Genius

• Geniuses seem to be a new type of quest/raid boss that were introduced in the Novasphere Pioneers expansion pack. They have a common theme of being disguised as People of the Land (including all the appropriate menu pop-ups), and are only revealed as monsters after certain triggers or once confronted.
• Most, but not all, of them become powerful raid bosses once revealed.
• Easily identified (once unmasked) by them all having a "Genius of " title.
• They have all been taken over by Harvesters, used in Harvester plots to thwart Adventurers and increase the rate of Adventurer death so that more empathions are collected. And this means they can show up anytime as new adversaries rather than only as part of quests or events.
• Their abilities and tactics vary wildly. Some are simple combat adversaries, another was stealthily kidnapping Adventurers through hypnosis.
• One Genius/Harvester referred to Elias, an Ancient, as "a survivor" suggesting that they are related to the disappearance of the Ancients.
• While they aren't as intelligent as Adventurers/Observers, don't think of them as mindless foes. As soon as Akiba started planning to use the Shibuya antenna station, the Geniuses setup an Eternal Moth hive around it blocking the Adventurers' attempts to use it and potentially forcing them to destroy the antenna along with the hive.

The Third/Fourth Party

• Since The Apocalypse, Shiroe was searching for evidence of "the third party" - that is, people or things other than Adventurers and People of the Land, and who presumably caused The Apocalypse. He believes that The Apocalypse must have been caused with some motive, and therefore whoever is responsible should be out there somewhere. However, all his various investigations could not find any evidence that a third party exists until Roe2's letter.
• However, Roe2 says that the Navigators did not cause The Apocalypse, leaving this still an open-ended question.
• Since the Navigators are "artificial" lifeforms, it hasn't been ruled out yet that whoever created the Navigators is also the ones that caused The Apocalypse.

A Way Home

• Of course, the big question always looming over the Adventurers has always been "can we go home?" As they learn more about the world and create even more advanced new magics and technologies, they may find such a way.
• At the end of season 1, Nureha suggests that Shiroe is on the verge of finding a way home. Shiroe says he doesn't know if whatever technique he's cooked up yet really does send someone home, yet, all he knows is that it makes them disappear.
• Following the letter from Roe2, Akiba is now trying to contact the moon where they may be able to learn more about how to get home from the Observers.
• Some Adventurers are truly desperate to return to their old life and feel that Theldesia is their prison, especially those who feel disenfranchised by the current socioeconomic structure of Akiba. At its most extreme are the Odyssey Knights, who intentionally get themselves killed in order to glimpse the old world in the mid-revival dreams.
• On the other hand, many Adventurers have adapted to life in Theldesia. Many enjoy their life here better than their old life and have no wish to return.
• Shiroe was torn on this issue, seeing no good option. Either undo The Apocalypse, separating thousands of happy Adventurers from their friends, their new lives, sending many back to misery... or don't, forcing the other miserable thousands to remain imprisoned in Theldesia. But a well-timed inspiring conversation with Kanami reminded Shiroe of what Log Horizon is all about - achieving the impossible third option. Hence, Shiroe and Log Horizon aren't trying to undo The Apocalypse anymore, they want to find a way to merge the two worlds so people can travel freely between them.

Other Mysteries

• The fast-travel gates between Adventurer Cities have been offline since The Apocalypse. Regan says it has something to do with the moon phases.
• Does old Shiro really drink that much juice in one night, or are those bottles for pissing mid-raid?
• Will Akatsuki ever sit on a chair normally? Does she always sit seiza because of ninja roleplay, or because it makes her taller?
• Goat slimes?

The Crushes

• Shiroe and Kanami almost certainly had a mutual crush back in the Tea Party days. Shiroe wasn't over it for most of the series but he is now.
• Akatsuki has a crush on Shiroe but is shy about admitting it/pushing it and Shiroe is pretty oblivious to it.
• Minori also crushes on Shiroe. She's more upfront about it, but he's even more oblivious to this one, though pretty much everyone else has noticed it. (Shiroe and Akatsuki are both college-aged while Minori is like 14 or something so this isn't much of a love triangle per se, more of a character development for Minori plus a way to pressure Akatsuki into taking more initiative.)
• Nureha is unhealthily obsessesing over Shiroe from afar.
• Serera has a little-girls-first-admiration sort of crush for Nyanta, and absolutely everyone knows it. Nyanta is a perfect gentleman.
• Marielle and Naotsugu started out as just platonic friends that get along well, but this has gradually evolved into something vaguely resembling the start of a relationship. They were even long-distance-calling each other every night to share their day with each other for a bit.
• Shōryū has a crush on Marielle, which Marielle is oblvious about. Shōryū gets jealous when Marielle pays attention to other boys (particularly Naotsugu), which Hien loves to tease him about.
• Henrietta likes dressing up cute girls in cosplay as a hobby/obsession. She has a squad of subjects for her obsession in her guild, but she is especially fond of doing so to Akatsuki.
• Henrietta has had a couple moments of thought about crushing on Shiroe, but has no intention to pursue the idea further.
• Sōjiro is a harem protagonist.
• Nazuna is Sōjiro's one true love, or else the childhood bestfriend character that hangs out in the harem but ultimately only loves him platonically.
• Naotsugu must decide who he loves more, Marielle or panties.
• Krusty and Princess Lenessia have a pretty good thing going. I dunno what it is, but it's good and it was going, until he disappeared.
• Rudy is an eager puppy and Isuzu is his proud owner.

Best

• Best boy: Nyanta
• Best girl: Kurinon
• Best speech: Shiroe (sorry William, yours was good, too)
• Best faces: Akatsuki
• Best smile: Nazuna
• Best hat: The other giraffe girl
• Best pants: Kushiyatama

Afterword

I'm really glad I rewatched all of Log Horizon. In my opinion, it is a series that has gotten even better with age. If you are debating about delaying season 3 to rewatch the first two seasons or not, I say do it.
There was no shortage of isekai series when Log Horizon first aired, and that number has only increased since. But how many isekai series actually want to seriously engage with their premise? Having the protagonist recognize that they've been transported into a video game world only to immediately shrug off all possible ramifications of this is funny, sure, but it's also definitely taking the easy way out. Nowadays, many series don't even bother with the 5-minute isekai-and-forget-it routine and just opt to pitch it as a fantasy tale in a nonsensically video game-themed setting, but even then the characters rarely engage with the consequences of the setting being game-ified.
Not so Log Horizon.
Log Horizon never forgets that its characters are real people and real gamers, worried far more about the existential unknown than yet another goblin king. It's not just that the story dabbles into politics, economics, and social reform, though that's great, too. It's the constant fear of the unknown, the optimism to rally against it, and the heart to learn lessons from it.

You Are The Real MVP - Why Genshin Impact Is The Real Game of the Year in 2020: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLxgyp0pnMQ
Hi all, I see there is a lot of anger and anxiety toward Genshin Impact due to the wide audience it brought to the table, as well as a lot of misconceptions about the gacha gaming industry. I am 40 years old and have been gaming for over 30 years. I have 300+ DAYS /played in World of Warcraft and recently, over 1000 hours in Path of Exile with popular build guides with hundreds of replies. I also have played just about every major hit of every era on every platform. I really want to tell you who Mihoyo really is, how the gacha gaming industry works, and what Genshin Impact's future looks like.
Mihoyo's History
In 2011, three college students from Shanghai Jiao Tong University (comparable to Cornell in America) released their first game, FlyMe2TheMoon. When they graduated in 2013, they used their own money to make the first Honkai game (released as Zombiegal Kawaii overseas). This game allowed players to farm gold coins to buy all weapons and gear, only spend real money to speed up progress and came with glorious two players co-op way ahead of other mobile games at the time. At end of the day, players just didn't pay money for it. When they took it to investors, they were laughed at and ridiculed by everyone. Nobody is going to pay money for this silly anime stuff! You guys don't know how to monetize a game! Both of these games are still available on App Store, feel free to download them to check them out!
In 2014, on the verge of bankruptcy, the team learned monetization model from Puzzles & Dragons, the first-ever mobile game to break a billion dollars, and released Honkai 2 with the same art style and gameplay. The biggest change was moving to the gacha model. The game became a top-10 grossing title in China, released to overseas market as Guns GirlZ - Mirage Cabin and Guns Girl - Honkai Gakuen. Mihoyo the company was born. Today, Mihoyo has over 1000 employees and pays them more money than titans like Tencent and Netease, and runs their office in the ultra-expensive heart of Shanghai business district. Despite Genshin Impact's smashing global success and player's thirst for more content, they gave many of their employees a full 8 days break, standard with the 10/01 Chinese national holiday, for the historic job they did with the global launch. They understand it is a marathon, not a sprint.
For Mihoyo, the most important metric for their title will always be LIFETIME REVENUE, and they do not abandon their titles. All of them are still available. Honkai 2 is still getting content updates six years after release, even if the game itself is nothing more than a piece of history for them at this point. Honkai Impact 3 hit an all-time high revenue month this year, still makes a few hundred million dollars a year in China/Japan, three years after release, and Mihoyo took every dollar they made and spent an unprecedented 100 million dollars on a mobile game we know as Genshin Impact. You can count on Mihoyo to treat its most ambitious title ever with love and care, but you must remember they will always prioritize LIFETIME REVENUE over any other metric, which is what successful companies do because it is the only way to make the product best in class.
Fate Grand Order - Genshin Impact's TRUE inspiration
In 2015, Fate Grand Order was released as a turn-based mobile JRPG, the first six months it scored just $100 million dollars, and was on the verge of sinking into irrelevance. Five years later, the game grossed 4 billion dollars and became the most successful PVE game on any platform since GTA 5. How did it happen?
Many say it is the fate IP, but the truth is fate's IP is nothing special in a sea of big IPs trying to make a splash in mobile and failed miserably, just ask Nintendo how their two Mario games performed, or Square about their countless Final Fantasy mobile games. 80% of the billion-dollar games on mobile are actually brand new IP's.
The biggest challenge for every PVE game-as-a-service is monetization. PVP games like League of Legends and Fortnite do not need huge content updates to stay fresh and can maintain much higher daily active user counts to sell cosmetics, make $5 per player, and still hit a monster year. Monetizing PVE games is much harder. Players simply run out of things to do and quit the game, no matter how quickly you can produce content. Games like Path of Exile and Warframe struggle to break 100 million a year in revenue.
PVP gacha games like Summoners War and AFK Arena can rely on whales dueling each other to force meta changes, and they grew into billion-dollar franchises in their own right. But Fate Grand Order had a different idea in mind, what if you design amazing characters that are truly desirable, and price them at a low gacha rate so it takes thousands of dollars for rich players to max out their box by pulling multiple copies? You are never going to have the player base of a Candy Crush, let's try to maximize our revenue ceiling from whales instead, and make players emotionally attach to their characters because they are so well designed. The rest was history.
While there are indeed many generous gacha games like Granblue Fantasy, Azur Lane, Dragalia Lost, etc, none of them are in Fate Grand Order's tier if you look at their annual numbers, not even in the same ballpark. Other multi-billion dollar franchises like Puzzles and Dragons, Monster Strike also follow the same concept of greatly increasing the limit of what a whale can spend on a PVE game to max out a character. And yes, we are talking about providing strong benefits for getting multiple copies of the same character.
The numbers have proved time and time again, that maximizing whale spending in a PVE game is far more revenue than maximizing the number of monthly card players.
Genshin Impact's Target Audience
Any product that tries to be everything for everyone is doomed to fail. Mihoyo has very clear audiences in mind:

• Players who love anime graphic and ARPG, there is simply no AAA game out there in this genre. Tales series, Xenoblade, etc. are all low budget, low sales games. Granblue Relink is single platform and dead on arrival. There is no dominant franchise at all.
• Players who love Zelda's open-world exploration and environment interaction, but hate the difficult puzzles and survival/weapon durability/ammo aspect, and want constant content updates. Hey, a co-op mode with a real RPG system sounds amazing!
• Mobile players who want more than a simple game like Fate Grand Order. They want to do dailies during commute and don't mind doing harder content on PC/console. The game needs to look good on a big screen at home. They don't want to learn/maintain two different PVE games given how time-consuming these games are.
• Players who retired from MMORPG/ARPG's due to real-life commitments. Many of us who played World of Warcraft have kids now, and the outdated graphics, 20 buttons skill bar, the social requirements for raids . . . it is just too much to keep up. We want a simpler game that looks good and takes far less time to learn and play.

And let's just say they hit it out of the park with the greatest launch in gaming history. Never before a game hit PC/PS4/iOS/Android with cross-play on day one in 100 countries, 13 text language and 4 fully voiced languages, never before a game hit top 5 grossing in China/Japan/US/Korea at the same time, I don't even recall a marketing campaign did so well across so many drastically different regions and cultures. The AAA graphics, sound, incredible polish, you don't need me to tell you why this game is amazing. But from the competition's standpoint, the launch itself was like watching a bronze player climb to grandmaster overnight, and the game's biggest strength. Far bigger companies, franchises, do not dare to even think about launching a game at this scale. Mihoyo released the failed Honkai 1 overseas when the company was on the verge of collapsing, they always punched way above their weight when it comes to global releases.
Make no mistakes about it, this was never meant to be a single-player AAA game or a direct Diablo 3 / Path of Exile / Warframe competitor. It was meant to be a game that converts PC/console players to gacha gamers, by casting a wider net than any mobile game ever. They only need a small percentage of PC and console players to change their behaviors. The rest of them can play for free or leave and it won't hurt them at all. The monthly card is designed as a super good deal (look, WAY cheaper than World of Warcraft $15 per month) to get PC/console players to spend for the first time ever, breaks down their "why pay for a free game" defense. Once they pay once, the pity 5 star is always just a few dozen more pulls away, let me buy another pack! Before you know it, monthly cards are converted to dolphins, dolphins are converted to whales. It is by far the strongest business model for a PVE game today, and people who are new to the genre won't know what hit them.
Genshin Impact has an excellent chance to end Fate Grand Order's reign as the #1 most successful PVE game on any platform since 2016, by the virtue of being on every platform, and the same version across all regions.
LIFETIME REVENUE = Active Player Base * Spend Per Player * Longevity
For every game as a service, balancing these three variables is an incredibly difficult task. Can Mihoyo increase the rate on an event (like Cy Games gala events), put up a Diluc banner, and greatly increase spend per player? Yes, but they will provide less reason for people to pull on other days and lose out on long term revenue.
Likewise, the resin limitation is to prevent even whales from maxing out their characters and moving onto other games, that is why they have a hard limit on resin refill. Player progression is meticulously controlled to ensure content can keep up. A huge part of internal testing is to test how quickly a player of each spending level can go through content. Two-day, three-day, seven-day, and thirty-day player retention are critical metrics to F2P mobile games, you will always lose a huge number of players during these transitional phases. These are tried and true methods in gacha gaming to preserve the maximum number of players over the long haul. It is basically a much more advanced progression control than say, World of Warcraft's weekly raid lock outs. You have to FORCE your players to take breaks, or you will lose them way faster than you can churn out new content.
All four dailies, spend resins, and open-world exploration for crafting/ascension materials, a couple of chests/quest you missed, that is a health 60 minutes of gameplay. Gacha games provide resources for the next pull on every daily, every quest, every event. Getting a five star is a better feeling than getting any item drop in MMORPG/ARPG. Gacha games have a much stronger hold on its players because of this addiction, you are always very close to the next pull! Genshin Impact takes it a step further to actually encourage you to do single pulls over ten pulls. Over time resources will inevitably be loosened up as more contents are released, and daily quests and slowed down progression is there to keep you playing.
Behind the scenes, there is an ultra-complex data model that works tirelessly to balance all three variables. Looking at Mihoyo's track record with Honkai Impact 3, they know what they are doing to maximize LIFETIME REVENUE. With every gacha game like this, the developer has a price point they need to hit on a five star, then based on the competition they usually adjust the price significantly higher than what they consider to be acceptable. Whether it is gacha rate or stamina, once you reduce the price, you can never, ever increase it again. Start high and drop it when you need to is a much better strategy, and players think you listened to their feedback, win-win! If the daily active user doesn't drop while you keep the price high, why lower the price? The developer and player are always in a tug of war, with the developer testing player's limit on what is acceptable. It is just like how Apple kept iPhone with 2GB of memory and tiny screen size for a very long time because they are looking at the overall LIFETIME REVENUE, not because they didn't know their product needed these features.
Genshin Impact is priced at a premium because it has no competition, just like how Apple iPhones were priced at an ultra-premium when it first came out. Over time, prices will drop, resources will come easier, but until there is a real competitor, they do not need to care what lesser gacha games do. Do you think KeQing should be priced the same as a gacha character with PS1 graphics?
Genshin Impact's Future
100 million dollars estimate from Sensor Tower in two weeks does not include PC, PS4 and Chinese Android. Chinese Android revenue has been 1.8 times of China iOS for Honkai 3, many in the Chinese gaming industry speculate the true global revenue number of Genshin Impact is easily double of what Sensor Tower shows. Mihoyo is a private company and it fired one of the employees who bragged about the 09/15 China PC numbers, which was 10 million dollars, so we will never know the exact figures unless they go public. Don't expect Mihoyo to ever share revenue/player base numbers, that is just not how they operate.
There is no way the game can continue the 100 million dollars a week pace, that is 5 billion dollars a year, so for haters out there, you will see a massive decline in the player base between content updates, you will see the game falling out of top 10 grossing, you will get your "I told you so" moments when the weekly revenue drops by 50-70%. It is perfectly normal for gacha games between banners, and what Gensin Impact is doing is completely unsustainable. This is called filtering out users and building a stable player base.
However, even with the inevitable massive decline, this is a game destined to be a multi-billion dollar franchise. I personally give it a very conservative estimate of two billion dollars in three years. It will easily outperform the likes of BOTW, Cyberpunk 2077, etc. by the end of the first year in terms of the player base, hours played, and revenue. It will take money away from all other gacha games and force other developers to step up their game. It will take money away from long-standing multi-billion dollar PC PVE franchises like Dungeon Fighter Online, and to a lesser degree, MMORPG's like FF14. It will encourage companies to play with bigger budgets and provide PC/console releases for bigger mobile releases like Diablo Immortal, instead of relying on emulators. It will even change the monetization model for western F2P games. Iksar, lead designer of Hearthstone has been playing Genshin Impact since release. Imagine if Hearthstone didn't allow you to craft cards, and provided benefits to getting multiple copies of the same card. It is way too late for Hearthstone to change now, maybe there is still time to change Diablo Immortal's monetization model, I believe they will need either gacha or real-money auction house to be competitive.
But will Genshin Impact shake up the AAA industry? My personal opinion is no. Japanese developers do not have the technology to make mobile games at this level, you just need to look at the top 20 grossing Japanse mobile games. Western developers do not have the artwork to make characters so attractive, I mean just look at Baldur's Gate 3 and Cyberpunk 2077 characters, will whales spend $1000 on them? Whales spend enough money in gacha to pick up girls in real life many times over, many of them are ultra-rich and live a lavish lifestyle, just showing anime assets is not enough to win them over.
In all of my years playing Western games I have never been attached to a female character as I did with Artoria aka King Arthur of Fate Grand Order, I played the game for six months even if I don't really like turn-based JRPGs, and always enjoyed listening to her "Excalibur". Mihoyo is coming very close with some of Genshin Impact's character designs. I am not sure if Western culture is capable of creating the type of characters that can connect with players on an emotional level. Lara Croft is definitely not it. I believe Western gaming's general pursuit of realism and grittiness hurts them when it comes to creating an idealistic world and dreamy characters. Top western games tend to expose the harshness of real-world to players, instead of offering an escape. In many ways, Mihoyo's mastery of anime is closer to a Japanese company than Chinese company, it is not something you can just hire a couple of artists for. Likewise, the western market will always be 15-20% of the overall revenue for gacha games at best, it is difficult for western companies to justify making them with a AAA budget.
It is also incredibly hard to make a cross-platform PVE game on PC, Console, and Mobile look this good. It is not something you get from just licensing Unity. There are maybe a handful of companies out there capable of dropping 100 million dollars on a game like this, but until their main cash cow die, which studio dares to take this kind of risk? The tier 2-3 companies are simply not capable of spending 100 million dollars even if they went all in. I don't see a real competitor in two years, not even from Tencent and Netease, the bar is that high.
How You Should Approach It As A Player
If you are not a fan of gacha games, no problem! The best way is to play it like a free AAA game with unlimited free DLC's. With the amount of money this game makes, in a few years it will have more content than any other open-world game, and the developer will also be more generous over time as end game contents become more abundant. As their tools mature, the amount of time it takes to release contents across all platforms at the same time will shrink significantly, there will also be more events they can queue up. Every F2P player can get at least one five star character without rerolling if they complete most of the quests and use up their gifted currencies. I expect 100% F2P players will get at least 4 five-stars per year, 3 from pity, 1 from luck. I believe F2P with limited resources is a lot more fun and only spend money to support the developer. I am still 100% F2P on Genshin Impact as of today, because getting 20 pulls from the monthly card is not that exciting. I will wait for a one-time-only deal later in the game's life cycle.
For players who want to be a bit more involved, you can buy a monthly card, do your dailies, enjoy new content, enjoy the thrills of pulls, and pity 5 stars. Once Mihoyo gets a stable end game loop out there, they will definitely loosen up on resins. Just don't expect to play it like a Path of Exile season start. Save currencies and pity timer for a banner you want. Take it slow! Gacha games are designed to be played over many years, alongside other games. Take your Cyberpunk 2077 break, take your Call of Duty break, but in the end, there is simply no anime ARPG competition on any platform, and if you are into this kind of game, you will be back.

This game had a lot of controversial opinions during it's launch, but have you changed your mind now, when you already finished it? First impressions aside - what do you think of this game as a whole?
I will try to structure my feedback, starting with things i liked the most, and the first would be visual design.
This is probably my favorite ascept of the game. I am not a "city" person, usually i find cities so boring that in my life i am not leaving my home for many years already, cause outside world is a boring concrete jungle. Yet still Night City somehow managed to earn my attention, i was amazed at the amount of details gone into shaping the vision of this futuristic city. I spent many time walking around, and looking how technologies of 2077 changing the way people living their everyday city life. Funny enough - one of the places that impressed me the most were massive junkyard, located right at the exit from the city, and having the size of half of that city - it's just perfectly shows how much people of that age stopped caring about everything but their own lives.
But the city wasn't only beautiful thing in this world - there was also the citizens. To be honest, i do not remember any other game when i stopped to many times just to stalk some random pedestrian because of how good they look - even despite many people having some major injuries, it was still a great pleasure to look at them cause they had pretty faces, nice haircuts, cool augments or incredibly stylish clothing. People from the first district where we start the game have some really good tastes in clothing - cool jackets, colourful t-shirts, and especially cool that women were wearing mostly beautiful shorts, jeans or punky leather clothing instead of fancy dresses, heels or whatever else. In this game crowd finally stopped to be a faceless grey matter for me, and i was impressed about how many colourful individuals i have met during my journey. I wish people irl were that beautiful...
And it does not end on people. All cars have cool and various designs, promoutionals are fun and memorable, as well as all the fun little interior details. I believe that 3d modellers and concept artists have done the flawless job on this game, and exceeded any expectations of mine.
Now let's go over my second favorite thing - the story. Warning - it will be a spoiler territory. If you haven't finished the game yet, better skip this... and why are you even reading the post?
I have rather bittersweet feelings about it, because the potential was clearly there, and it had a lot of very enjoyable moments - yet still there is a lot of room for improvment.
Centering the story around Silverhand was probably the best choice they did, and it was worth starting over. I feel really envious seeing how the company agreed to that just because writer said it would make the story better. As a writer myself, that kind of trust from the boss is an absolute dream. Johny was the perfect companion - never gets in a way because he isn't real, always there to offer advice, mock or comment your actions, and his bitter, cynical personality were exactly what was needed to constantly remind player what Night City truelly is (and surprisingly i find myself thinking the same way he did most of the time). He were certainly a fun guy to have around, and i only wish there could be more of him - he isn't showing in many missions, and even has nothing to say about some key moments, like players' relationships.
Some other characters were memorable as well. I really liked "no polygon prepares you to die for some elevator" Takemura, he is a decent example of a good person who got in bad company and despite being brainwashed really hard, still managed to keep his strong personality. Judy was also nice - not only looking great, but also for having that chill, nerdy personality of someone who learned to not give a fuck about terrible things around her, but managed to keep the heart and creative spark, i can relate to many of her traits. And her reaction to one of the endings were so sincere that it was heartbreaking.
Overall champaign was... good, vibrant, variable, nicely scripted adventure. I especially liked them making 3 totally different patches to the ending - by the way, does anyone noticed that each of those patches represents one of player's starting backstories?
Street kid asks for help his friends from the city, and ends up doing more tasks in the city until the very end. Nomad drives away with the tribe. Corpo relies on the help of Arasaka. I wonder, if those endings were originally tied to the backstories? And what surprised me even more, is that instead of going the route of corpo=evil, Arasaka's ending are quite reasonable.
Also i really liked absence of happy ending, it was a story of big fuck up, and it teaches player that sometimes there is simply no magical solution to everything, and no matter how hard you try - in some situations "winning" are simply out of option. That is a very mature thing, and not many writers have the balls to pull it off..
But here is where positive things end, and come... backstories? Why not start with them. They are uberly short, and feel really meaningless. I played as Nomad, and none of the special replies related to my backgroud was ever useful or even gave interesting information or point of view. It also felt like i remembered about Nomad's life only in those short moments, otherwise being a street kid. My friend reported of even more terrible expirience - he was playing as a Corpo, but despite that his V were constantly swearing, using street slang, trashing corpos, and remember about his background only in those rare moments of additional reply that does nothing. It feels like only part of the game that really reflected your starting patch - was the final mission sequences, but even there you could just pick any.
Overall champaign was also super-short, and... terribly lacked some cool plot twists. Basicly, all that happens is:
V fail the heist. V searches for a way to save her life. The end. There isn't even any cool revelations, except for fact that Arasaka stored engrams of the people to study them... what a surprise! What corporation would refuse to collect such data? But that revelation felt... small. I supose writers were inspired by the Westworld, but even in that show getting know that entire park were built as a cover to copy personalities of the guests was... well, not exactly shoking, but a big news nontheless. Here - i barely noticed and just thought "it was excepted". And that was all, apart from the V searching for the cure with a bit of corporate betrayals in the background there is nothing more to the story...
... Except Johnny. His life's story, his redemption arc is what brings some real emotions and variety to this otherwise pretty straightforward story. But it also creates another problem - moving V to the background. To me this story was a lot more about Silverhand than about some mercenary i played the entire time. It felt like CDPR could not decide if V should had some kind of a personality like Geralt did, or should it be up to player to decide what kind of a person V should be, but... they ended up with not having any role-playing options to make your character unique, and in the same time gave V a very sterile, generic type of personality that simply does not stand out in any possible way - voice, character, actions - everything just screams "default protagonist". She\he does not feel like a person, and more like a tool to interact with the world.
It was especially painful during one of the endings: when V goes to digitalize, leaving body to the Jonny, for some reasons both V and Johny are acting like V is trying to commit suicide. Come on! What is the reason for me to come back to the body that will just die in few months, if i can live forever in the net? Hell, even if i wasn't dying, becoming an immortal being vs living short life in the world where i risk dying every single day? I would take the immortality please! Yet my damn character behaves like she is about to jump from a skyscraper, and so does Johnny. And then Johnny even gets bashed by everyone for the choice i very much wanted to make... what?
Forced emotional attachments were also terrible. Why the hell my V cares about Evelyn even after learning that she is a serial betrayer, who's attempts to double-cross 3 people at once has led to everything going wrong? And instead of facing consequences and helping to solve the mess she created, she chose an easy way out. Yet my V is acting like they were friends or something... Jackie is even worse. Since the prologues are fast-forwarded, you don't get to know him, he is just shoehorned into being your best buddy despite you barely knowing him. Bad writers using that kind of characters to dramaticly die somewhere at the end, giving player motivation to avenge them or something, but here they decided to not wait so long and do it right away. Seriously, when he started telling about his plans for future life i almost laughed at how much of a cliche and predictable was what is going to happen with him after.
There is also a lot of questions to the logic of the story. Oh, Saburo is dead, nobody believes me... Guess what, there is a thing called BRAINDANCE! Just record everything you saw and publish it goddamnit! Yes, they might be some kind of excuse of why that would not work, but none of the characters even suggested such an obvious thing to do. Also, can someone explain me, how such an important person as head of Arasaka, who somehow lived for 150 years (not without help of implants for sure) can be killed just by... choking? He never bothered to install any protection or alarms? It is very hard to believe.
Then, at some point of the story Hanako brags that "If Arasaka wants to find someone, it does just that". Really? Well, they wanted to find me. I wasn't even exactly hiding, constantly making a mess all around town. But it felt like they just forgot about me ever existing.
There is a thing about corporations: they described as an ultimate power in this world, yet you can raid them, you can kill their employees every day, but they do nothing about it. Militech being allied with the government of the country? Well, they are barely present. Arasaka being one of the most powerful corps? Guess what - same dude can come to their hq and trash it over, and over, and over again, and poor bastards cannot even stop the elevator he uses to go up. Why the hell corpos are so toothless in this world? They could at least sent the elite mercs who would hunt V around the world like Assasin's Creed did, but i supose they just enjoy being shit on.
Some moments felt incredibly rushed. Backstories is the first that comes to mind, but also remember the part after stealing the chip - V wakes up on the junkyard, Takemura finds her, calls Arasaka to report, then wakes V and offers a gun to shoot some dudes who attacking them (i didn't even realized it was Arasaka, from red implants i thought they were malestrem gang), then asks V to find the ripper, and next thing... is them having friendly conversation at the dinner. Only later, after re-thinking entire situation i understood that Arasaka sent killers after Takemura when he found V, so he decided to ally with V instead to take revenge, but damn, story could at least have some kind of detailed explanation of all those events instead of letting player assume things. By the way, almost same thing happens with Silverhand - after waking up and having a fight with him i go to the side mission and suddenly he showed up, acting like my friend, and V responded him in same manner. And only then i got to the dinner, spoke with Takemura and then made pece with Silverhand...But at least this is just a misplaced content, when in case of meeting Takemura it feels like part of the game were just cut out.
And, the last, but not the least - is the length of the story. I felt like epilogue or RdR2 was longer than entire Cyberpunk campaign... I know why it was done, but i do not agree with those reasons. You cannot make a good game by relying only on analyst's data instead of feelings of the players. And you cannot possibly please everyone in the world, no matter how hard you try.
Ok, the story mode is done, and it's time to talk about side missions, but before doing that i wanted to mention something else. It was no surprise to me when they changed the genre to action-adventure, when i saw the dialogues in very first demo i already knew this game will have nothing to do with the rpg (and then it also happened that mission shown were the only one where player's choice really changed something), but do you remember how this game were advertized? Let me remind you: http://ipic.su/img/img7/fs/cc2.1608985309.jpg
What have we got instead? Pretty much this: http://ipic.su/img/img7/fs/chip.1608985421.jpg
There is only a few moments in game where your choice can do something. Usually any dialogue is "click to proceed, or click to bitch about it, and then click to proceed". Also even in areas where some choice is given, game simply disregards it: for example in the Clouds my weapon was taken away, so i choce to simply run past all guards because i didn't wanted to bother with stealh if i am fast. And in the end i was assaulted by man, claiming that i murdered every guard to get there... Dude, i just ran past them. Can we stop assuming things?
Now to the side missions. Some were really good, like conspiracy about Peralez family. Others - decent, i enjoyed chasing the serial killer, but still think that anime ID:Invaded did better work on this theme, since i hardly believe that anyone can have such realistic dreams. Mission about messiah was very fitting for such world.
But the absolute majority of them are just gloryfied fetch\kill quests. You go to the location where you need to kill someone or take something, listen to vague explanation of why it must be done, and proceed... if you did one gig - you did almost all of them. It feels like mmorpg, where quality was sacrificed for the quantity. And to make things even worse, missions are incredibly railed - for example, after doctor saved some ganger's life i tried to shoot him to see how she will react, but... game forbid me to use gun there. Also creators tried to fit so many references in, that sometimes they forgot to add an actual story, so the mission were just a big reference. Don't get me wrong, i love references, and i put a ton of them into my own game, but... there have to be limits, a place for your original writing, and not just meme after meme.
Execution of those missions are even worse. If you come to someone and ask them for something - item you need is already on the desk, like they are clairvoyants and prepared it before your arrival. Npc's that you need to escort just teleport everywhere instead of walking, so you can just jump from the roof to the car and your companion will be there. Most of problems in game solved by teleporting things - from infamous police, to the cars in racing - if you look at the radar you will see them constantly spawn behind you, and if you look back - they can even spawn ahead. I laughed really hard at the end of Claire's mission, when her car is just spawned few steps away from the crash side, because script demanded mission to end in her car
Also, what is that weird asset reuse? I had a mission later in the game that was set in very same appartment where we are saving girl in the prologue... and even the bodies of other victims were still there, fresh and in same positions.
I also feel really sorry for the fixers. Poor guys constantly call you to repeat very same thing - "you need to do something here, details is in your mail" in 50+ different ways. Probably the saddest role for voice actor to play.
Some quests had real disconnect between writing and game design. Quest giver is rich and are telling that you are getting incredible reward - yet sum that comes to your wallet is laughable. Viktor saying that you owe him 21k for eye implant, yet same thing but lvl2 costs 3k.
Another thing what bothered me - is that game seem to be undecided what to do with character's morals. You play as the mercenary, and mercs are rarely hired to do good things. Do you remember amazing mission from Shadowrun, where you have to deliver newest weapon, only to find out that it's using Orc's augmented body as part of the chassies and his brain as part of processing unit, while keeping his consciousness hostage inside his own body? And where you have a choice of either deliver him, or release him and let him suicide, losing the trust of your client and future missions with him (actual negative consequence for the player for doing something that is good, but not profitable)? Well, you won't find such missions here. Yes, there are few cases where you, for example, helping to chase away a good cop, or killing weapon's dealer only to find out that she did it because someone kidnapped her family member and forced her to work for him, but that is a rare ocasions. Most of the time you will feel like town's sheriff, saving people, killing really, really bad guys, etc. No moral dillemas, no questionable choices, just pull the trigger. And with all that comes the character's morale problems - it feels weird when in one mission we can do something really bad without second thoughts, and in the other V suddenly starts to complain about hurting civillians.
Then, we have gangs who are supposed to be big part of the game. But they are... not? Yes, you see them slightly more than corpo agents (except for the Vodoo boys), but the only role they play - is role of the punching bags. They do not conflicts with each other, they barely engage in firefights with the police in few scripted scenes, and they certainly give zero fucks about V murdering hundreds of their members (except for few situations from the story). They are almost as toothless and useles as the corpos, and even only real difference between them - is visual, otherwise they are just the type of enemies you will meet in specific district\mission. Idk, maybe it's an overexpectation, but i really wanted them to be something more, play bigger role in the global picture.
And, my final problem would be with notes. There is just too many of them. Seems like designers wanted for them to not only be scattered around the world, but each ganger around every point of interest having some kind of diary piece where some random conversation is written. Sometimes it's fun, like the one we finding on the roof of the church. But most of the time it was what i call a "word bloat" - text that is neither informative or entertaining, it is there just because that note needed to be filled, so it was filled with some generic and boring conversation, tech specifications or some other thing that is irrelevant to the player. As a writer, i have one important rule about in-game documents: if they do not give player valuable information, or if they do not decent entertainment value (a good story or joke to tell) - they should not exist. Cut content is better than shit content. But seems like people responcible for the dozens of documents about nothing that made me not want to pick up and read anything ever again thought differently. Idk, maybe someone loves such approach, maybe it will work to increase immersion. But i personally were really disappointed by the amount of useles text files in game.
At this moment only a huge, Witcher-like expansion will save side content in the game, and only if it will not be bloated by meaningless and boring things as well. I would rather see a lot less quests, but a lot more effort put into making them interesting and variable.
Ok, enough with the story. How about gameplay and world?
The life in game reminds me of some huge tapestry - if you just walk by it looks absolutly glorious, but if you stop just for a second to look at the details, you realize that they often do not exist at all.
https://streamable.com/ey57x3 This is a normal part of character's "living their lives within a full day and night cycle" (not my words, but CDPR's from the trailer). And instead of placing such points somewhere far away from player's eyes, they... put it right in front of his appartment, so it was the first thing i saw when entered the open world. Genius desision. Especially if one of selling points of your game is immersion. In many story scenes, such as meeting Takemura in dinner it's hard to watch looped meaningless actions of npc's on background, dev's could at least edit their behavior in such scenes where player is intended to look at one place for a long time.
Talking about immersion... npc's can do only two actions when shots are fiered or card drives nearby - run or sit with hands above head. And if you look away, they will just despawn. Also, all the cars in game have only two options - "drive" and "stop if something is in the way". This is "The most believable city in any open-word to date".
Characters who perform some kind of a conversation are just standing there after it ends, and characters who are performing animation will most likely loop it forever (i supose the guy who tries to beat his cola out of vending machine is a modern Sisyphus, and RIP the guy who infinitly waits for his ripperdoc).
But from the writing perspective conversations between characters are well done, they often teach player interesting bits of lore (like most of the animals being extinct), and if you do not stay around them for too long they can keep on the immersion of living world.
Also, many animations in game tend to glitch a lot, resulting in such a hilarious things that i am not even mad about that and secretly hope those will not be fixed to produce even more funny content.
Police... now, police systems is a huge disgrace. All they can do is spawn around you if you kill someone (stealing seems not to be a crime here) even in the middle of the desert. If they cannot spawn behind you - they will spawn directly in line of sight. And... that's it. They do not even have cars to chase the player, so all you have to do to escape is simply run or drive away.
Remember this article? http://ipic.su/img/img7/fs/ss.1608991826.jpg
When i read it i imagined us being chased by normal cops with patrool cars, then - with drones that would follow player on tall structures and reduce risk for the officers to get hurt, and, finally - by special forces that we saw landing in prologue mission. Guess what? That will be the only time you will ever see them land. And then, if all means fail to capture V, said "powerful npc's" (other mercs?) would hunt out ass down. But if player wants to stop the chase, he can call the mentioned corrupt cop and bribe him to end the pursuit.
Of course, none of this were in the game. Cops only spawn and attack. Funny enough, game has the chase ai for the cars - you can see it in action if you do the gig with picking up car from the mine field, another car will chase and shoot you for the long time. The ai is rather awful, but it exists. Why it wasn't added for cops so they would at least chase player? No idea.
Combat is... fine. Not something extraordinary, but fun enough. Stealth has a lot of options with all these hackable devices scattered around the levels to distract enemies (making holo on the funeral dance was something). Hacking is good, reminds me of Syndicate a lot, maybe only a bit too slow to activate.
Clothing system looks really cool visually (but for some reason if you wear anything on your head, you will be bald in cutscenes), but it's ballance is quite terrible. You found a good item? Well, few minutes later you will find even better one. You want to keep old one because it looks cool? Sure, there is an upgrade system! Except for it makes no logical sense, since each subsequent upgrade is muhc more expencive, so eventually upgrading your pants from 5 to 9 armor will cost more than upgrading other pants from 80 to 85. Even Assasin's Creed solved that problem, they could just copy that system, but instead they made this, and i see no actual purpose for it.
Weapon customisation is lacking. The only muzzle attachment i could find were various silencers. There is also scopes, and...some mods.
Bullets are weird. Enemies rarely ever drop them. So you must either buy them at the shop (in very limited quantities), or... diassemble loot from the enemies and craft new bullets from scrap, because you obviously having a factory in your pocket. Also sometimes you can find boxes with ammo, always the wrong type) I would rather just pick them up from enemies.
Loot - there is just too many of it. I still have no idea why i should bother picking up junk, but at some point in game i stopped bothering to pick up anything at all - too much stuff to disassemble or sell, too much micromanagement for no good reason.
Implants are fine. There are various builds, one of the option is to fully remove hacking ability in favor of having powerful combat buffs, for example. Only thing i do not understand is why V are not allowed to have any visible modifications, since everyone around have them. My guess is either developers not having enough time to do that properly, or some suit coming and saying that "player cannot associate himself with heavily augmented person". For the refference - this thing were said to me once, so i would not even be surprised if it's the same here.
Jumping implants are deserving special mention - they opening up a lot more ways to complete missions and just traverce the city, doing miracles of parkour (and parkouring in this game are very satisfying, there is just too much possible ways to go trough). Best implant i had in this game, would cut my legs again.
Perks are weird. Some of them are very useful. Others - extremly situational. And i have not a slightest idea what kind of drugs used the guy who designed a perk that not allowing to spot the player under the water, or how it is suposed to be used. Also, entire progression is... idk, maybe i played wrong by using everything a bit, but in the end of the game, after completing all missions i had my max skill level at 13, there was not enough enemies to level it more.
V's appartment are rather useles feature, you do not even getting new emails because you have phone with messages. Didn't saw the reason why i should even visit that place again.
Cars were rather terrible expirience, until i bought an Appolo bike. Seriously, try out this boy: http://ipic.su/img/img7/fs/bike.1608996251.jpg Compared to other bikes it looks ugly, but for some reason it was the only vechicle that had comfortable controls, were not constantly leaning right or left, and with proper use of space capable of making some really cool drifts. Not to mention it being able to easily drive between other cars (that have tendency to become stuck on the road), trough various alleys and even up the stairs. That bike was my second best investment after the leg augmentation.
Character editor... cannot say anything good about it. It's very basic, has absolutly useles features like genital customization (that you will never is in game, not even once). It lacks many basic colours like white (what is named white is actually blue in game), and has a terrible green ligthing that changes existing colours.
Music. I have no problem with music that is in the game, especially background soundrack. Found a funny new band i never heared about thanks to it. But in the same time radio kinda gets very repetitive fast. There could be much more music in game without any expences at all - i am most certain that many not very known or midly popular bands would gladly gave them their music for free just to have such ax exposure. Since one of the main characters are rockerboy, and rock\metal plays huge role in the story - i am very surpried to have very few heavy songs in the list, and most of them are quite traditional (so no sympho, gothic, even electro-metal, that would be very much suiting in this setting). How all the cyber punks are living without cyber punk rock? Also, i remember game producer saying that Japenese are considered as an upper class in this universe, but we only have one Japanese band for an entire game. Why? Just take a moment and listen to this: https://rokugenalice.bandcamp.com/track/this-community I can almost guarantee that nobody here knows this band, yet they are simply amazing, and if you will translate the lyrics - you will also see that it would be quite fitting into this setting. Both game and band would benefit greatly if this would end up being among the soundtrack, and i know a lot more bands like that.
Bugs... a lot of them, mostly cosmetic and hilarious, but sometimes i had to reload my saves, and even more than just once because either i, or my mission progress were stuck. Could not finish cyberpsycho questline because guy with key item just despwaned. Especially liked Arasaka soldier with key from the elevator who blinked in and out of existence, it took a lot of reloads to figure out what to do with this toughest of bosses: https://youtu.be/4rQZ2UQzK2I?t=62
Also, remember the quest line with meditation? The one that involved looking at beautiful landscapes? Well, here is how last of them were looking for me >_< http://ipic.su/img/img7/fs/C8.1608998452.jpg
But bugs are bugs, any big game comes out with them, and they eventually will be fixed. What bothers me more is all that unfinished or half-assed mechanics, some of them (such as police) looks like mere placeholder, while others (like clothing system) are clearly results of a bad design. And most of those elements are not just bad - they are more primitive than features available in games 10 or even 20 years ago. In the end, CDPR wanted too much, but ended up making game with aaa-quality world, and mechanics that are bellow quality of indie games with no budget.
So... what happened? How could the company who had 7 years since the initial announcment, all the money in the world and incredible amount of employees allow such an unprofessional works and unfinished features to be shipped? And especially if it's a company who's reputation were one of the most valuable assets? After thinking a lot about it, bad management and direction is the only thing that comes in mind. Someone were responcible for all the planning, for hiring wrong people for the wrong job and either realizing it too late or not realizing at all, for cutting various corners when initial plans failed, and finally for shipping the game with unfinished features despite promising not to. It felt like there were no real game designer's vision behind the game, and instead lots of ideas were thrown in pretty randomly, and developed as well - various departments working on their own with very little communication or direction. Of course, that is only my assumption, but the fact that on emergency investor call CDPR representative said that "hiring more people would not solve the issue" only proves my theory. It is rather ironic - to see how game about corpos ruining and exploiting everything they touch also being ruined by the corporate leadership...
Overall, i can say that i enjoyed the game despite all the issues. Great visual design and decent story did a good job at distracting me from problematic moments, and i wanted to thank all the talanted workers who made it possible. Your work is breathtaking!
But at the same time the amount of obvious, glaring failures, combined with tons of false promises is inexcusable. I am glad to see that company are working on fixing it, and even delayed online version to do that, but only time will tell how it will go, because this game needs a ton of work to become at least close to it's marketed image.
I hope someone... at least read this far, let alone found some useful information in this review >_< See you, choombas! http://ipic.su/img/img7/fs/End.1609002406.jpg

As much as I am excited to see new games being ported to Switch, Skyforge is not one of them. I've played Skyforge since launch for many years, and I seeing so many people looking forward to play it for the first time on the Switch makes me realize I have a fair bit that I could share.
So lets start by getting this out of the way: Skyforge combat system is really good, not perfect but really close to it as far as MMOs in this genre go. The story is interesting and the visuals are unique, not trying to rely on old cliches. Instead Skyforge delivers its own unique experience, and I have to praise the developers for that. They succeeded in creating a truly unique MMORPG and all praise should go to them for that.
With all that aside what makes me dislike this game so much is both its monetization and its progression system. Specifically how both are connected, and how both are deeply in-beded in the core of the game, that everything else good about it is compromised by these two factors.
To start with, calling Skyforge a "free" game is a fallacy. The game is far from free, and the fact that you can in-fact download the game for free and have some initial resemblance of non-paid gameplay, is nothing more than a well articulated predatory monetization strategy to make you try a free sample of the game, and force you to pay if you want some more.
When you download the game, the first 3 or 4 hours are amazing. The gameplay is fluid, the story is interesting, everything is streamlined and made easy for a new player to get into the game and experience all the promises tat were made about this title. The reality is, this initial hours is everything you can do for free without hitting the multiple progression barriers that are made to force players to pay real money to progress.
In all fairness the rational that if you enjoyed a free sample and you want more entitles the company to ask for it to be paid is correct. But what bothers me is the massive extend of the monetization of this game, that would put even EA to shame.
After the initial hours it is very hard to make any meaningful progress. Your character will be capped needing more might (aka:levels or stats in some sense) to be able to do the next missions. You are presented with three options: grind an enormous amount of hours alone on content that you already unlocked, beg for higher level players to carry you through the next stage of progression, or simply pay and you can instantly buy the best equipment in-game for you character or the class that you need for progression.
Every time you "unlock" one next step in your journey this 3 choices will be there. Grind. Beg. Or pay.
The grind in Skyforge is, to put it mildly, atrocious. Just have in mind that I am an old veteran of MMORPGs, I am used to how grindy and though to progress some games where many years ago. But Skyforge makes grinding as painful and as less rewarding as possible so any player that sets its mind to grind their way to max progression quits long after they are there.
This leads me to begging. Almost all content after the initial hours is designed to me made in groups, that no solo player with the 3 initial classes can effectively do alone. The simple answer would be to group up and do it together, but the sad reality is after you progress into certain stages of the game no new players are doing any content, so there is a huge gap between the content you can do alone, and the content groups are currently doing. So if you dont want to make Skyforge your next daily job and grind dozens of hours alone just to unlock your next grind stage (order and over again) you need to rely on high level players varying you. So expect a lot of begging in hopes anyone can set some of their free time just to help you grind.
If none of the previous two options are particularly enticing then dont worry, you can just pay to progress. Need more currencies that the game dont allow you to gather? Pay to lift the cap on how many you can get every day. Need more gear? Pay to get it. You should expect to every single thing about this game being solved by paying, either by individual purchases or a monty feee ... or both.
This even affects the class system of the game. Unlike a traditional MMO, here you dont pick a class and play it till endgame. Your character can perform multiple classes, and change them on the go. But first you need to unlock them. As you might imagine by now this again falls into the same 3 choices, grind for the resources to unlock a single new class for months, beg players to help you sped this process, or pay.
To agravante this even further your 3 initial classes are as close to useless to end-game as they can possibly be. Paladin is the worst tank option in the game, with minimal options to actual hold more than one enemy, and being close to never used in any en-game group. Cryo is the worst of all DPS classes in terms of actual damage output, and probably one of the bottom picks when it comes to forming actual groups. And Lightbinder is the least versatile of the support classes, still welcome on any group but there are way better options out there.
So you start the game with 3 bellow average picks for classes, and when you need your next class you will inevitably need to pay for it, or grind months until you get enough resources for a single unlock. Its like going to a restaurant and see everyone eating fine meals, but you only get scraps.
I understand companies need to make money, and at the end this game is a business. But the way every single thing about this game is tied to their ridiculous monetization scheme is absurd in my mind. The amount of money any player needs to spend to be group viable in this game is way higher than buying even a couple of AAA games, so calling this game free to me is absurd.
I am writing this so people can at least have a decent idea what they are getting into. I admit that in the past I was hooked to the game for more than I care to admit. But looking back, it was as close to an abusive relationship as you can get in gaming, having to dedicate tremendous amounts of hours for minimal gain, and knowing that the people behind this game purposely want me to get as little funds possible until I end up paying them their next installment.

Hi everyone, this is my first contribution to HobbyDrama, I hope this is an entertaining read and also to the community's standards. Let's go!!
Brief glossary before we begin (and some foreshadowing)
MMORPG: massively multiplayer online role-playing game, MMO for short. A videogame genre that generally invites hundreds, or up to thousands, of players to share a space. Depending on the game, anything from general adventure to large-scale war to economy and politics can be simulated. I find it hard to believe that anyone reading this could possibly not know what this is but it's included anyway.
Electro-convulsive therapy: ECT for short, it is a form of treatment where electrodes are "carefully" hooked up to a person's head and a "precise" level of electric shock is delivered, in order to treat major psychiatric disorders. Developed in 1938 when most psychiatric treatments was in their infancy, it is still used today occasionally for serious cases of depression, mania, or psychoses. In its early days however, there were widespread claims of abuse associated with its use.
Pt1: The Root of all that is bullshit
Zhengtu Online (hereafter referred to as ZT) was an immensely popular MMORPG that was developed in China and primarily served a Chinese playerbase. Released in 2006, at its peak it boasted more 2 million players, which while not particularly impressive relative to World of Warcraft (8mil worldwide at the same time), was a truly insane amount of success in a gaming scene that was very much in its embryonic stage.
The game itself was an unimpressive Diablo-style top down fantasy setting, and its gameplay loop primarily revolved around improving your ability to kill various things, but what made it special was the overarching metagame: every player population (sharing a server) was divided into 10 kingdoms. Kings and generals were all individual players, and they dictated politics to their neighbors--primarily in the form of initiating player-vs-player (or PVP) warfare.
Most contemporary MMOs had an upfront price plus a monthly subscription fee. In China, such pricing models were mostly replaced by paying oney for a set amount of ingame playing time. Unlike all of them, ZT was completely free to play (F2P).
Free to play, however, meant pay-to-win: the best weapons and armor, and even leveling up your character, needed you to pay real money. Since so much of the game was focused on PVP, it also created an eternal arms race between players, each paying for the privilege of not being evaporated by a high level enemy.
The way they did this was unique at the time. While F2P online games had already seen their rise in South Korea, equipment was generally priced explicitly via in-game currency and bought in virtual shops. ZT fused this with the sweet, sweet taste of gambling: gear in the game was primarily obtained in loot boxes, and you had to pay for keys to open them.
It needs to be emphasized that gambling of any kind was illegal in China, but, in an eerie parallel of American CEOS in the future, ZT's developers said it wasn't gambling because, well, you weren't getting your money back.
By combining this with multiple other exploitative practices, such as providing a small amount of premium currency like a casino giving you a free bet on the house, or awarding special items to the player with the highest number of lootboxes opened in a day, ZT was making money like taking candy from a candy-hating baby, and made gaming history.
As far as what this means for gamers, this was Eve giving Adam the apple, Oppenhemier splitting the atom, Prometheus stealing fire, Caesar crossing the Rubicon, and goddamn Helen Keller signing "water".
If you play any kind of videogames today, you've stepped through the long shadow that ZT had cast. Zynga (developers of Farmville) would be founded in 2007 and focused exclusively on free games with real-money integration. Lootboxes made it into Team Fortress 2 in 2010, one of the first major western-developed games to include them.
Similar mechanics (with varying degrees of exploitative practices) came to FIFA in 2010, Mass Effect 3 in 2012, Counter-Strike in 2013, League of Legends in 2016, and NBA 2K in 2017, infecting every genre of gaming under the sun, including the most popular MMO, World of Warcraft. As an aside, corporate defense of lootboxes in Star Wars Battlefront II also led to the most downvoted Reddit comment of all time.
Finally someone speaks out
The System, an article published in the Chinese newspaper Southern Weekly in 2007, was a hard-hitting expose on the exploitive practices of ZT. It chronicled the rise and fall of a gamer who accidentally becomes the monarch of one of these in-game Kingdoms, her addiction to the game, and final disillusionment when she realized that in-game player behaviour was being explicitly manipulated by its designers for the purpose of creating addicts and selling more lootbox keys.
The whole article is worth a read, even if it is sensationalist in a way that immediately tells you the writer was clearly a failed novelist of some kind - describing virtual destruction with the kind of prose most people would consider and then discard for a gang rape, for starters. But it had gotten its point across. It created an explosive backlash against the game in China, and was even translated into English and propagated across gaming forums.
The fallout
In an act of censorship usually reserved for the CCP government, this article--including its English translation--began to be scrubbed from the internet, with speculation pointing to the immensely powerful CEO behind ZT. I mean, who else could it be, right?
This article would light the fire of China's first moral panic regarding videogames. In its wake, swift legislation would be enacted regarding internet gaming addiction as well as online proxy gambling. ZT would heed the new laws and remove its lootbox mechanics in the following years and many other similar games followed suit.
Most tragically, the panic (which, to be fair, was fueled by a very real problem) allowed unscrupulous characters such as Yang Yongxin, vice chairman of a hospital in Shandong province, to create "internet addiction centres". With its legitimacy established by a docuseries ("Fighting the Internet Monster") on the state-run television channel CCTV, these centres charged terrified parents exorbitant prices in order to keep teens by force in, essentially, private hospitals and asylums, subjecting them to inhumane conditions and abusive ECT in order to "cure" them of their disease. It was estimated that Yang earned the equivalent of more than $6million USD from his addiction centre in the short space of 2 years. While his centre was eventually closed by state order, he received no punishment of any kind.
As for ZT, it limped on until 2018. A mobile game reboot was made in 2015. A tie-in fantasy movie was released in 2020. it was not very good.
~~~~~~
Addendum: how we got here: Of Mice and levers
In the 1950s, an American scientist named BF Skinner discovered the following: when mouse is put in a box with a small lever that, when pressed, dispenses a food pellet, they will quickly learn to start pressing on the lever as fast as possible. If you then stop the food from dispensing, the mouse will lose interest quickly after pressing a few times and seeing no food coming out.
If, however, you hooked up the lever to dispense food at random intervals, the mouse will be practically glued to the lever and hammer on it nonstop, sometimes long after they become full, and long after any food has been dispensed.
This discovery, known as variable outcome operant conditioning, formed the foundation of our understanding of addiction and gambling. Skinner would go on to try and fail to make bombs guided by pigeons, but we're not interested in that here. His research tool--the Skinner Box--would become a descriptor you may have come across when discussing exploitive game mechanics.
Summary
Once upon a time, a game combined the random outcome of videogaming with real-money gambling. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.

The Lineage 2 community is fairly small and always has been. This makes it a bit hard to relive nostalgia through communication or strong resources around the game and history.
Some small efforts have been made to detail history of various servers, but I don't really see a ton of personal stories out there.
While this is likely a complete waste of time, let me tell my own story with the game
History
I was introduced to L2 by a friend in the semi-early days of the game in the US. I believe we were in Chronicle 2 when I picked up the game.
I joined him on the 'main' server Bartz, which typically had the highest population load. At the time, I believe there were 7 or so main servers for the US with varying degrees of involvement.
Character
I played a Bladedancer for around 3 years from level 1 to 80. I also second boxed another account. At the time, Gamestop was still selling physical copies of Lineage 2 for 15 bucks.
Clan
I was with several clans over the history of my L2 playing. As a support character, it was pretty easy to move around and find at least some success. I also played way too often (every night and weekend or so, for roughly a year or two). We would often have one of the more minor castles but never part of a clan that owned the likes of Aden and such (albeit, participating in castle sieges to help another clan achieve the taking, at times).
Botting & Gold Buying
This is one of the more interesting areas of L2. Everyone claimed to not bot and to not buy gold, but it was nearly impossible to get the best gear without some sort of assistance.
This game was truly brutal as it came to leveling. I spent hundreds upon hundreds (or thousands) of hours grinding with clanmates over Teamspeak. Most of my individual leveling was done through my own effort.
That being said, I definitely bought Adena at times from the various selling sites.
Later in my playing, I setup my own bot train using the various tools available (L2Walker and such). I believe Lineage 2 source code was leaked, which allowed these companies to create tools that could be leveraged for botting.
Once you saw how unfair the game was and how unfair other players played, it seemed the only natural thing to setup a bot train of my own. I would run them in areas that weren't as popular and didn't give the best rewards for combat, but were likely to still reap good rewards.
One area of the market that wasn't cornered was seeding and harvesting. For some reason, bots didn't spend the time cornering this market in most areas. Even as a 'normal' player, you could beat the bots and other people to selling your crops back for very very high levels of expensive rewards (like bones/bone powder).
At 7PM CST everyday, I would have an atomic clock open on my one screen with a windows L2 window on another screen. I would prep my harvests to sell and click 'sell' at the exact second. 90% of the time I would be able to sell everything. One second later, everything was maxed out and you could sell no more.
This was my main way of revenue generation. It wasn't about building max level characters or getting adena and drops through combat, it was about seeding and harvesting.
Eventually, botting became one of my favorite things about L2. Finding a place that wasn't visited often where you wouldn't be reported. Reaping wealth and timing the market with farming. Waking up and looking through your loot to see what drops your bot train received. Waking up to an alert that your bot train was under attack and reacting at 3am when I should have been sleeping for work. I still have PTSD from the bot attack alert I had (It was the mp3 of Brittany Spears 'Toxic' for some reason). That song still reminds me of this almost 12 years later.
Accounts would be banned here or there, but largely they would be left alone.
Moderation
Moderation was a constant complaint on the forums. Users would complain about bots and how nothing was done about them. I used to be one of these people that would complain constantly.
After six months of initial play, I realized that the majority of paid customers were monthly bot accounts and that it served NCSoft to not ban bots. Of course, they had to put up a token level of resistance to keep people quasi-happy. I would have bot trains banned every now and again, but very infrequently. They knew who paid the bills and the bots also understood that you needed to let NCSoft ban from time to time and buy a new license and start fresh.
It was just part of the give and take of the economics of an extremely grind-heavy game. While some people never botted or thought of botting, a vast majority benefited from buying gold or botting themselves.
It was also interesting to see price inflation as the economy was open and money was infinite.
Over Enchanting
One of the other best and worst parts of the game was the enchantment process. From enchanting 1 to 3, you were safe with 100% chance. At each enchantment after, you had a 66% chance of failure everytime. If you failed, your expensive item would be turned into much less valuable crystals...by millions upon millions of Adena, in most cases.
After many attempts, I was able to get my B level weapons to +12. The gamble of clicking that button and seeing a success or failure was addictive in and of itself. The game did a good job of showing off your items by making them glow based on their enchantment level. An important thing in MMOs is to have skins and differences to make characters stand out.
A lot of modern games like Fortnight understand this. It's all about differentiating yourself from others and having what others want to have. It's basically capitalism and jealousy put into a game format.
Castle Sieges
Castle sieges were probably the most dramatic and exciting part of the game. I think this is where the true beauty of Lineage 2 stood out. Having clans work with each other, betray each other or overcome a much greater power to take over castles and all taxes of the regions associated.
Sieges and the Clan system were very different from other games. You could buy a very expensive clan hall to speed up HP and MP regeneration as well as enhanced status for your clan. The amount of fun and crazy drama from sieges and wars were so much at the crux of the game. I can't overstate how fun it was to take a castle over and enteleave at your leisure and look over the lands you own with all the other characters running around in town.
SoulShots
SoulShots were another interesting idea. They used a finite resource to make your attacks more powerful. This was an important way to have resources spent in the game and then dispersed without additional value.
I believe they didn't exist in C1 and they added in C2 to help the issues with the economy and scale of inflation.
Griefing
L2 was one of the few games that you could truly grief people and have a great amount of risk and reward around it. You could kill anyone you wanted in the world. If you were at war, it wouldn't count against you (and the killed player would lose XP, an extra kick in the balls).
If you weren't at war, you would change to a color that would allow anyone to attack you. They would also change to that color, so someone had to really think they could win if they wanted to fight back.
You could also continue to attack and 'go red' once you killed a player. Going red forced town guards to attack you and to allow other people to attack you at their leisure. If you died, you had a chance of also dropping weapons or armor, which was a huge risk and a huge loss if you did.
Also, in general, if you died fighting monsters, you had a chance of dropping armor or weapons, which could be a catastrophic loss, depending.
Looking Back
Lineage 2 was a very specific type of my life. I was depressed, eating junk, drinking Mountain Dew and working a level 1 HelpDesk job at 25 years old.
It did give me a sense of purpose and community, but I also have to realize that it deteriorated my real life friendships and really kept me isolated from my friends and family.
I do think it helped me get through a dark time in my life but I also think it's part of the reason that dark place existed in general.
It's a perfect reason to not spend thousands of hours on any single game. When I look back at it, no one cares. All the hours I spent playing this game didn't really mean much in the end. The servers may or may not be there, the characters and people have all moved on. The character has no real life value or interest to anyone else other than myself.
The journey certainly had some value, but I think MMORPGs can be just as addictive as anything else. They often provide a distraction from real problems and real life vs helping you live a fulfilling life that 'matters'.
Like most things, addicts come out at the end and look back with some level of regret.
As it goes, I typically play single player games or local games on my PC...I know my taste for addiction and I don't think I'll ever go back.
Some 11 years down the road, I'm engaged, successful and have a good life filled with dogs and travel and enjoyment. Times do change and it was worth getting out of it. Anyway, I hope someone enjoys these thoughts.

My family doesn't know what to do anymore, we have tried everything but nothing else seems to interest him other then online gaming like EVE, WOW, ARCHAGE, ARK vanilla.
All the bigger MMORPGS and alike that take real time to progress and literally suck your time away.
It's been like this for as long as I can remember, I am his sister and am worried as it's been affecting my father and other siblings who also don't know what else to do now.
I feel like this information is important, our backstory.
We come from a broken family of two sons and two daughters, mother was abusive growing up and was a compulsive lier who loved drama, plus a bonus of prescription medication abuser *she literally had a bag the size from your knee to waist full of multiple medicine mostly pain medication but is also a type 1/2 diabetic.
Our father worked away so never really saw the true extent what was going on at home, it got to the point that if we didn't message our father first and explain the true story towards the issue that was happening at the time, he just plain wouldn't believe us. This went in for years, we had an unspoken rule to not wake her up because otherwise she would order us around like slaves and would constantly talk down to us, any little things we did would spike an argument. So I guess we all just stick to ourselves and stayed away from her for that very reason, but even being away from her srill somehow spiked arguments as we where not around and that was an issue. Dammed if you do and dammed if you don't sinario.
Even I am a gamer but nowhere to the extent of my brother, I ran a Minecraft server that become the best in Australia during highschool, all of my siblings enjoy playing games but didnt let it control me as much as what he has, from my first memories of my brother to now has he's turned 30, I remeber him playing games or talking about them constantly.
Yes even I went through a stage where isolated myself and games so I can relate. The online world was my escape and my only friend circle, still have friends in amarica I still talk to today infact, and my gaming experience has given me the skills to build a successful business, build websites and communities #codingsucks (actually understand coding though from java script from hosting a Minecraft server back in the day and an enjin website to boot) gave me the people managing skills I needed to run my own business and understand business structures.
I had to go through a really dark space but I found myself at the end, got fit, went to group activities and made friends outside of the virtual space.
All this would be ok of he too used his experiences to better himself and support himself but he hasn't.
He has since suffered server scoliosis, server obesity I can only guess going on 200kg+, living off welfear as he won't/can't get or hold a job.
The place he was renting was an inclosed unit complex and no outside personal could enter, this wouldn't be an issue if we could contact him to let us in but he doesn't. He doesn't charge his phone so no one can contact him, we can't go to his house either as we can't access the property due to the closed in community. He has gone months without contacting anyone leaving us honestly to think he died in the unit, but his excuse was that he just didn't charge his phone nor leave the unit for that time frame. We
He was barely able to keep paying for that unit and many times went in the red with finances, my father has had to bail him out many times by buying food, paying for his electricity bills or rent. I don't know how but he somehow got a credit card and used that money to buy a new computer. Any finances he's gotten he's used it to buy more games or hardware.
No one had heard from him again in a few months, a few days ago he called my dad to tell him that he had been evicted from his unit..... the reason was due to 2 skip bins worth of rubbish and junk that had been picked up in the unit from the realistate. He just plain has no will to do anything vin his life and it's affecting my whole family. He is 30 years old and my father is still caring for him, he has had to move back in with my dad who had also taken in my other brother, his wife and 2 kids due to covid.
He has lived with my family and others in the past but he does not keep his hygiene up to date doesn't bath in days, wash his cloths and played all night on the computer and is very loud, does not consider the people he is living with and has also been kicked out multiple other times due to this reason.
My father is not going to be around forever nor is it his responsibility anymore to care for a 30 year old child.
We have tried to help him in the past, I have offered him to participate in my group outings, participate in outdoor sports to try and make friends/live a healthier lifestyle. Even suggest outings non sports related, he does not eat to be helped and is conent on quite literally sponging on those around him to satisfy his gaming lifestyle.
If he had the choice to never leave the computer, he would but he needs to eat and sleep, plus go to Centerlink to keep his unemployment payments. He has said this.
I don't know what to do, neither does my father. He will not accept any suggestions of therapy, social outings or healthier eating/lifestyle.
The only thing I think at this point that's going to force him to change is a near death experience, but with his health right now I don't even know if he will survive as he is out of breath just standing up for extended amount of times.
What do we do? Any advice would help.
Edit 1, December 5th 2020
I've spoken to my dad and want to organise a sit down with him to discuss what to do with my brother, out of all my siblings I am the most established living with my partner and running a successful business. Most comments have suggested the rough love approach, intervention or simply kicking him out and letting him do his own thing as my family has been enabling him in a sense.
Am I the idiot if I stratigicly place drops of water on his computer causing it to short out? If he has no physical means of gaming, he will have a safe place to reavaluate his life and hopefully start seeing what's going on. This is one of the topics I want to talk to my father about, the other is the kick out sinario. I honestly don't want my brother turning up on my doorstep, I'm trying to start my own family with IVF and run a business. I don't need the extra stress on-top plus I did just have my own breakdown. Will keep posted and read comments
Edit 2-1, December 6th 2020
I spoke to my dad this morning about having an intervention with my brother, he just said no that there is nothing else that can be done. He still has access to his computer, he still locks himself in his room 24/7. He said he's tried an intervention before but it hasn't worked and just plain refuses to talk about it anymore.
I don't live in the same household so have no say in the matter. I can't do anything, my father has given up. Accepted the face that he has lost his son and is leaving him to his own devices. Any conversation with my brother just gets violent apparently, I'm stuck, I can't do anything if my father won't let me. My father is moving in January to a smaller unit so my whole other family will have to find other living arrangements.
My father said something about renting a place in his own name for my brother but I'm dead against that, I have personally spent time in a woman's shelter and they are not as bad as everyone is making out to be and I feel like it would help my brother. I do feel like other commenters are right in the fact my father is supporting this attitude but he's just lost all hope as his years of effort prior just have not worked.
That major life changing situation is about to happen in January when the lease is up at my dad's place. And by God I'm not letting my father stain his renting name and history on my brother, he has already buried himself, this is the sponge factor a mentioned.
I can't do alot either because I'm not physically there.
Edit 2-2
Something I did not mention before as I did not want it to change the responses of everyone here. My business is personal training and fitness instructor mentoring in an educational facility.
If there is anyone who can help my brother on a healthier lifestyle it's myself and my understudies that I mentor and who work with me to change the lives of those around us. To us it's not just fitness, we don't just train muscle we train the mind too as each one of us has experienced mental anguish. Myself I nearly died from an ex and a bad upbringing in my family home due to my mother, been homeless and all of the above, I lost everything but gained everything from it too.
I have offered for my brother to train with either myself of a close friend of a trainer that I classify as my extended brother now. So even if he didn't feel comfortable with his sister training him, there where other alternatives. I even offer online training especially since covid hit so I wouldn't be Infront of him but through a screen.
This would have been all for free and even I would have picked him up so no travel expenses was needed. We have a private gym facility so all of this would have been private.
I can't reidiate this enough, we have tried, offered more then enough chances and opertunites to change and better himself. Never forced, had interventions, set up great opertunites for him but he just didn't take them up.
I've been on the other side of the fence, I'm not the fucking greedy trainer who has never known what it's like to be suicidal, over weight, homeless and all of the above.putting it simply, I KNOW THE PAIN. I was over 100kg. this is what I'm teaching to my students who will also pass this on. I am a functional strength trainer Master level 1, I now train soldiers to enlist and protect our country.
Again did not say their earlier so there would be no "OMG she's a fit trainer enforcing her views of health onto him" I have never done this nor forced anyone I know. I am a geek too who enjoys playing games but no where near as much, building my website is taking up all my time now but the problem solving I learnt in my younger years in highschool has helped a shit ton.
Edit 10/1/2021
It was my sister's 18th birthday get together yesterday, my family invited me out and there I saw my family for the first time in months. My brother gets long well with my niece and nephew and plays with them for most of the family gatherings. Him and I talk alot about Ark survival evolved as it's the game I play during my down time and he sees me on steam playing it. Inbetween talking he told me that he had a blood clot in his foot and that his foot swelled up 3 times the size because he hasn't been using his legs. He down played it a fair bit but my profession knows the darker truths.
His heart is struggling. The foot is the furthest away from the hearts blood pressure beats, therefore weakest pressure. A clot built up from two factors of cholesterol and a weakened heart not being able to clear it.
He almost lost his foot..... But even that is not a wake up for him... He's even bigger then when I last saw him also.
It broke me after he told me this then started playing with my neice and nephew, I'm watching my brother slowly die infront of me, even a near miss of him loosing a foot wasn't enough of a wake up call.
It's just a matter of time now.... I hate admitting that.