Van Hemlock

I'm not sure what I was expecting really - a scene from memory mostly, which no longer exists in any real sense, nor is likely to ever again. It was glorious once though; the eastern plaza of Omni 1 Entertainment; the bustling vibrant hub of a busy world.
This was five years ago, I suppose. Anarchy Online had been released long enough for various patching and tweaking to have been done, and even a bit of a rewrite of how textures worked in memory - compression and the like, I think. I forget exactly, but there was a big progress bar and lots of disk-churning one day, before logging in, and it all worked a lot better after that. There were still memory leaks that locked the thing up after two hours or so, and having 512MB of RAM, rather than the recommended 256MB was really recommended, but it worked well enough for the suspension of disbelief to be possible once more.

And then we were there, on that alien world at the edge of the galaxy. The mighty OmniTek Corporation fought the insurgent Clans, and what seemed like thousands of people came and went on a thousand different personally-tailored instanced missions. This was before they started trying to retrofit the thing with Quests and Dungeons, and strange alternate universe expansions. One world, and everyone used it extensively. Half of these people were OmniTek and for them, Omni 1 Entertainment District was the place to be - more specifically, the large open plaza to the eastern edge of the zone. Here were mission terminals, snack food bars, a Grid Terminal, Insurance Terminals, Bank Terminals.

Nearby, in the stark eastern wall of the city, lay two exits to Omni Forest, the first of a series of progressively more dangerous outdoor hunting zones, studded with hundreds of cave entrances and hut doorways, leading to hundreds of possible randomly generated mission areas, along with dozens of villages, outposts, and (for it's time) some truly breathtaking scenery. To the west, the immensity of the city began - huge dark buildings, garishly neon-lit with adverts and signs - shops and bars, even fully functional nightclubs and combat arenas. To the north and south, lowlying, incomplete, slum areas held the doorways to the player apartment areas and newbie starting points.

But here, at the Bronto Burger stand, here, it all meets, and collides - a vortex of people, tooing and froing. Some hurry past, on their way from the terminals to the missions, all geared up for a fight. Dozens of varieties and combinations of weapons and armours - a surprising variety for it's time, and the reason for the big file optimisation - so many types of texture in one place often made the thing slow to a crawl through this spot. But consider...a world where a place can be so busy, so vibrant and crowded that time slows down to make room for all the information! "OMG LAG!!1!" people grumble, but I doubt if they have truly considered the alternative properly.

I stand and watch. Not all are as determined, and many are just here, because here is where it's all happening. Doctors, Traders, Metaphysicists, and more - all respected and complex professions, reduced to the level of street hawkers - selling their skills like market stall holders sold fruit in an earlier age. Bellowing buffs, yelling their wares, scrambling for credits, and behind it all, the regular and distinctive scratchy electrical hum-pulse of the Wompa, teleporting people across the world to remote and exotic locations - Rome, Omni Trade District, 20K, 2HO, 4 Holes. For the plaza is a hub in many ways, and in all these games, travel is the key, and the busiest and most popular place, is always the most well-connected. From this plaza, you can get anywhere - or at least anywhere worth getting to in the OmniTek domain.

I stand and watch, immersing myself in it all, yet speaking to no-one, feeding, like some kind of social vampire, on the energy of the crowd - the merchant types, selling their buffs and loot, the show-offs, wearing their finest, their high-level gear. The socialites are there to, simply because everyone else is. You can spot those - they're the ones in the 'toy' gear - the stat-less t-shirts, suits and dresses, wielding the joke-items - the pillows, hamburgers, wine glasses, and they're in their element too. And around the periphery, others like myself - loners pausing on the way from one place to another, to marvel at the strange life of it's own that an inert computer game playfield can take on, quite spontaneously. Observing, and being changed by the observation. A looping cycle of ambient 'futuristic city noises' lends a subtle extra touch of almost-reality to the scene, and every now and then, a piece of haunting music that evades description fires up. The whole thing sends a shiver down my spine momentarily, and then the moment passes, and I'm just another gamer, heading through the Wompa, to just another mission, once more.

OMG LAG, they used to complain...

I spent some time in Anarchy Online this weekend, on my OmniTek Character. I have one of each on the go, to better go sightseeing without KOS guards ruining my day. Anyway, they have this little line of quests running through the early levels now. Mostly fed-ex stuff, seemingly to take you on a bit of a tour of the world, and give you some decent gear right off the bat, and one of these took me through the above mentioned plaza. I can confidently say that lag is no longer a problem. I saw no-one else at all, in the entire zone, let alone hanging out at the Bronto Burger stand. It certainly ran smoothly enough, but I couldn't help think that lag isn't so bad really, when you think about it a bit.

On the whole, the game seems pretty empty, and the only large concentrations of people I've seen so far (Large being 10 or so) was outside the 'Subway' dungeon, outside Rome, and hanging about outside the nearest general store, inside. It's quite unintentional, obviously, but I'm noticing almost the same sense of mournful loss and 'end times' I saw in the similarly massively-undersubscribed Sci-Fi MMO, Neocron 2, creating a very post-apocalyptic feel to the once busy little world. If these two titles are anything to go by, The Future, is going to be a very desolate place indeed, I think.

I sat for a while on one of the previously very contested stools at the burger bar, ruminating on the nature of Massive, the psychology of Crowds and other such weighty matters for a bit. The actual game is as good as it ever was - solid, working, fun, and interesting in it's sci-fi setting, but turns out having Other People about the place is still quite important, even for habitual soloists like me. I've no idea what a new-person thinks of it all, but I know that for me, playing Anarchy Online is only half done in the present day now. There's a comfortable melancholy to it all, I think, but I would go mad if that were the only onliner I played, that's for sure...