Building a Gaming Empire From Scratch

Chapter 346: 341: A Random City!

However, one major difference from Metropolis is that the main force maintaining order here is not an official power like the Metropolitan Police Department.

In Metropolis, when players cause trouble, the police’s appearance follows a certain pattern, and the distance from the police station even affects the time it takes them to arrive at the scene.

But in Night City, it’s completely different.

The forces maintaining order are the deeply rooted and intertwined gangs.

According to the world view of the “Speed Chase” movie, which is not yet fully explored, the dominant force in the dark world is the High Table. Their power and influence are almost supreme, except for the “Elders” who remain beyond their reach.

The rules are strict and bloody.

But because the movie always unfolds from John Wick’s perspective, even until Lincoln came here, the filmmakers didn’t clearly explain the background, and there certainly was no detailed setting collection.

So, in fact, a large part of the entire Dark Empire is still hidden in the fog.

Fortunately, Lincoln has no moral scruples in this area, and he has done a lot of adaptations and even chaotic acts.

In the case of the “Speed Chase” game, he simply didn’t bother making these forces and characters beforehand.

He didn’t even show Fred the plots of the last two parts.

He just let Fred develop the game freely based on the information he provided from the first movie, giving him free rein.

Lincoln would just follow behind, not interfering as long as it wouldn’t affect the subsequent plot and wouldn’t create logical bugs.

Only in the case of particularly serious plot bugs would Lincoln step in to stop it and take the opportunity to reveal a little information to Fred.

As a result, Fred’s team knew that there would definitely be DLCs in the game “Speed Chase” even before the game was completed.

Under Lincoln’s “free-range” concept, the Night City outside the main storyline of “Speed Chase” has become a diverse, vivid, distinct and astonishingly content-rich city!

Here, if you do something unusual in a public place, you will almost certainly trigger a special event before the police arrive!

During the chase of the reckless young man, Hao encountered all kinds of strange people joining in along the way, such as other enthusiastic young men, street racers, passing gangsters, and even curious gangs.

And with high participation, they excitedly shouted and caused destruction together.

They might randomly assist one side, or not help either side, or even attack both sides at the same time.

Hao suffered a lot from this.

But he was certainly not the only one who did.

In Metropolis, if you pull out a gun in the street, passers-by might scream and run away, keeping a distance from you.

But in Night City, if you pull out a gun, there might be 3, 5, or even 10 people around you pulling out guns as well.

They might just hold their guns and do nothing, watching to see what you’re going to do.

Or they might strike first, fire a couple of shots without warning, and “preemptively stop the crime.”

Even joining you is a possibility.

Everything is possible!

After wandering around Night City for the night, the Closed Beta Test players finally understood what it meant to be a “City of Crime” and what it meant to be “top of the nation in crime rate for ten consecutive years!”

This mechanism was actually an idea that arose from Lincoln discovering that Fred had added various gangs, rogues, killers, criminals, and other messy forces to Night City for the game experience.

Simply put, it was to “add more randomness.”

Different player influence ranges are divided in different locations. Once a player makes an excessive action, “special NPCs” within the range will take action.

Before they take action, the system will roll a multi-faceted plot die to randomly determine their behavior.

The original version of the dice had only six behavior logics: “attack, watch, neutral, help, call people, create chaos.”

But later, the die was expanded by Fred’s team with more mechanisms, becoming more and more complex, with more and more options, even adding more secondary action dice.

The end result was that Night City outside the main storyline was almost entirely built on randomness.

This led to the fact that even if players performed the same behavior at the same location, the NPCs might have completely different reactions, leading to completely different outcomes.

Although players could not see these works and it was quite difficult to summarize them through observation, the increasingly rich and vivid behavior of NPCs was visible.

After losing all his money at the casino, Super Tomato completed several tasks and kept trying various things.

He hoped to summarize the general pattern of this mechanism, but after a whole day, he was completely clueless.

Outside the game, both Fred and Samuel’s teams took the Closed Beta Test very seriously, and almost all members were watching from morning till night.

Even people from other groups would take time to check out player feedback during their breaks from work.

After all, most people who boarded the Yunmeng ship had no hesitation in relying on Virtual Environments for their careers.

And without a doubt, major Virtual Environment games represent the most advanced concepts and technology, so they cannot help but pay attention.

Although, this “most advanced concept and technology” is not entirely serious – Yunmeng is currently the only company making Virtual Environment games.

In other words, no matter what kind of game Lincoln and his team make, the game will naturally become the “most advanced” one.

Being the only competitor is just that joyful.

Of course, not everyone in a company is highly motivated, and there are always exceptions.

In Yunmeng, this person is their boss – Lincoln.

Lincoln only watched a few players at the beginning to see if there were any problems. After that, he asked Mavis to help him keep an eye on them. He then quickly put down his work mentality and became a pure spectator.

And after witnessing Yi’s entire amazing journey, he didn’t even watch the live stream in the afternoon.

After all, it was only the first day, and all the players’ combat skills were at Level 1. Even if Lincoln gave them an extra experience bonus, they wouldn’t be able to unlock gunfighting techniques and combat senses until at least the third day.

They couldn’t rely solely on missions from the Continental Hotel; they also needed to trigger some additional random missions.

In short, Lincoln spent the afternoon going to see Xu Chun and continued practicing boxing and knife.

Now, he spends some time practicing every day.

Sometimes in reality, sometimes in the virtual world.

Ever since he made the decision, he never missed a day of practice. In that regard, Lincoln was quite determined.

However, there was one thing he regretted during the practice process.

His favorite practice environment was, of course, the virtual world.

In the real world, high-intensity boxing for half an hour might leave him panting and sweating, feeling sticky and uncomfortable.

But in the virtual world, not only would he not sweat, he could even remove the fatigue, so no matter how tired he was from practicing, he could recover to full status with just one click.

But even if he could bring the experience from the virtual world into reality through the wireless headband, he couldn’t bring the training marks and muscle memories from reality into the virtual world.

In other words, if he trained in reality, he would make steady progress in muscle strength and body flexibility with every bit of effort.

But if he practiced in the virtual world, only routines, skills, and experience would increase.

This determines that even though he likes the ease of the virtual world, he still has to spend a lot of time training in reality.

After all, the final confrontation would still take place in reality.

So the saying goes: “No pain, no gain.”

As for his specific gains since he started training a week ago…

He became familiar with two basic boxing routines, a few basic knife-wielding moves, and basic actions to practice gun stability.

That’s it.

Lincoln once requested to start some combat training early on.

His goal is not to become an invincible master, and even after knowing that he doesn’t have much talent and that it takes years or even decades of hard work to become a second-rate master, he has given up his martial arts dream in reality.

He plans to experience the joy of being a hero in the game after it’s launched.

His goal is to experience the most authentic combat and enrich Yunmeng’s sensory database.

To make the combat system in the future game more “real” and exciting.

But all eleven experts, including Xu Chun, said that without a solid foundation, combat training would be like playing blindfolded, swinging a stick wildly, and unable to experience the feeling of expert confrontations.

So Lincoln had to be patient, follow the plan they provided, and spend at least two months building a decent foundation, then another month learning combat techniques.

Finally, with the help of various enhancement systems in the virtual world, he could experience some feelings of expert confrontations.

Once he gained some combat experience and familiarity with these experts, he could proceed to the final step: real-life confrontations.

——With the masters taking it easy on him.

Estimated time – 3 and a half months.

Even for the single, cramming-style improvement, this is a very exaggerated speed, thanks to the wholehearted teaching of eleven experts, and the powerful help of the virtual world.

What can Lincoln say about this?

Practice it!

Time quickly passed as he focused on his training, and before he knew it, it was time to go home.

As Lincoln was on his way home, students were getting out of school, and the office workers were going home. Night City was about to welcome a new wave of players.

Compared to the first players who entered the game, their in-game time was shorter, but they had a significant advantage: the information advantage!

During the school and work hours in the daytime, most of them had seen some gameplay from the closed beta test players and already had a rough understanding of Night City.

As soon as they logged in to the game after hastily finishing dinner, they knew what to do right away.

Those who wanted to do missions went for missions, those who wanted to race went racing, those who wanted to go to night clubs went to night clubs, and those who wanted to explore the male escort club went to the male escort club.

Even though the appearance of the “Pretty Boy Shop” caused considerable mental trauma for Yi, this place was still a paradise for some players!

As for racing, there is more to Night City than just the Death Racing. There are about ten underground car races with different locations, tracks, difficulty levels, and prize money – offering a wide variety of options.

And most of them have randomly selected player opponents.

It’s just that Hao didn’t meet any player opponents because it was closed beta testing, and there were too few players who had found the places.

Meanwhile, Shuihua, who rushed back after school, quickly finished her meal and ran back to her bedroom without any ladylike manners, under her mother’s furious gaze.

She already decided what she wanted to play while she was still in school!

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