Log Horizon: New World Symphony

by Arrowkneesan

There were many players trapped in the Catastrophe. Some fell to despair. Some refused to give up. Some went exploring. Others decided to go be heroes. But what's a player to do when thrust into a new world?

1. Prologue

The Launch of Homesteading the Novasphere was well anticipated. Throughout Europe, and the Americas, vacation days were booked. Sitters were arranged for. Children were sent off to school early. Some children faked being sick. Some adult children faked being sick. Some skill professionals called in sick. The Wall Street Journal blithely estimated that the widely anticipated expansion would cost the country at least twenty billion dollars in lost productivity. wrote several really boring list-articles about Elder Tale to celebrate.

Atharva's PR team had hit the global convention circuit hard in the months leading up to the release. The new expansion would come with a complete graphic overhaul, and with powerful new abilities for all classes. Some critics felt that the Elder Tale engine was simply too long in the tooth and should be gracefully set aside so a Next-Gen MMO could take its place. The Escapist, and the JimQuisition, panned the expansion. Waving his enormous purple dildo bat in the stern manner that only a vlogging Englishman can manage, Jim Sterling lambasted Homesteading the Novasphere as simply being more of the same MMO fare. However, pre-sales didn't lie, and the critics were largely ignored/ Atharva Inc & its partner agencies were soon swimming in cash as more than a million players pre-ordered the game. Burger King even ran a promotion where Whopper Tokens could be exchanged for in-game items.

Deep within a specially designed data-center, operated by none other than Amazon Web Services, an absolute behemoth of a system was preparing to handle the anticipated load. The CEO of Atharva was determined to avoid congestion. However it wasn't a singe server per se that ran Elder Tale, but a massive cluster distributed across the world. If Elder Tale was run on a single machine, that machine would have a few Petabytes of RAM. The special distributed server structure, designed by a team of MIT alumni, was the sort of computer architecture that gave YouTube's army of amateur blogger-philosophers the strangest sort of boner. The Simulated-Reality Theory, was definitely in vogue.

The expansion would launch at approximately Midnight, May 3rd. Thanks to some negotiating by Atharva's Korean and Japanese partners, it was decided that it would launch at midnight, May 3rd. While the timing was unpopular with European players, Elder Tale had achieved some degree of popularity in China with the last expansion, and South Korea was home to many, many Elder Tale players. Across Southeast Asia, net cafes were booked solid. Gold was bought and sold. Gear was prepared.

The time was 7:56 AM PST, May 2nd. Game On.