Infinity – Chapter 1

It’s a hard concept to imagine, the idea of dying… But yet, I am staring into a giant black hole whilst floating in space. You would expect that a virtual reality game would just spit you out back at the graveyard, but no… Not for me, not anymore. Here I now float endlessly, staring into the void of this huge expanse of darkness feeling moderately sorry for myself, but mainly gutted that I had failed to complete my mission.

Infinity had started out like any other Virtual Reality MMORPG game. It had the standard leveling functionality, fantasy based weapons, classes and skills, monsters of varying shape and size and as much competition as you could imagine. But what started out as a game turned into something so much more.

It wasn’t until the game launched that people realised the difference. You’d play whilst you slept, which was normal, but time moved by much slower, your standard 8 hour sleep went on for 48 hours inside the game. Two complete days inside a game, whilst you slept for one night was unheard of before and it wasn’t long before powerful companies realised that you could effectively double a person’s life span with this technology. As such, the game exploded. Kingdoms and Empires were built by monster corporations and with the currency exchange system, there was real money to be made in this game. You could do a lot in 48 hours, mine and gather rare ores and herbs, develop your skills to become a proficient Forger, Enchanter or Alchemist. Let alone the main profession of Infinity, becoming a Combat Expert and slaying monsters for their loot.

Throughout the 20 years that Infinity had been running, nearly every person with the means to do so, devoted their nights to this game, there were various expansion and updates, keeping content fresh and exciting, the Systems AI taking all of the fantasy and fictional data the worlds visionaries had produced to create an ever evolving and growing virtual reality world.

However, as with anything that evolves and changes, it was never perfect. The biggest flaw came in the latter few years where players could take schematics and designs for various items in the game and concoct new designs.