Hisa's Garden

Hisa's Garden is a trapped-in-virtual-reality character game off the traditions of Sword Art Online, Log Horizon and Overlord. The protagonists are a small after-school gaming activities club trapped by the final server shutdown of Altima, the greatest VRMMO of the previous generation.

Hisa's Garden Character Creation

Background

Released in 2022, Altima was among the first and by far the greatest child of the first generation FullDive virtual reality MMO boom. Though hardly the most mechanically innovative of games, Altima defended its incumbency in the fantasy VRMMO niche through an enormous advantage in existing content. This was bolstered by the release of powerful, separately sold user creation and custom content tools that expanded the game far beyond its origins long after release. For twenty-eight years the game exploded, peaked supreme and then gradually waned. Eventually, as with all good things, it came to an end. With the announcement of its successor, HiSA Online to operate on a revolutionary new engine, it was also quietly announced that the nigh abandoned world of Altima would finally be allowed to end.

Altima Archaeology Club

In a certain school in a certain prefecture of Amahara, there exists a small but unique school club – the Altima Archaeology Club - that has been exploring the world of this once thriving game, rambling through myriad realms filled with the works, monuments and achievements of their forebears. Though it is a world whose existence has been but an eyeblink compared to reality, it is still a place that is older than they are. Now however, that world is coming to an end, and with it, so will the club founded upon its exploration. To celebrate and mourn the end of this reality, the club gathered in their humble guild hall to wait out the very end.

But the end didn't come.

The members of the Altima Archaeology Club who gathered in the modest wooden cottage serving as their virtual "club room" watched what they thought was a pre-planned World End even. The stars in the sky swirled erratically and the earth shook and shattered as if the whole world were tumbling into a void... And then the falling stopped. Looking out the windows they saw the night sky of Altima replaced by an alien astronomy. The unprecedented smell of grass and trees billowed through the windows as the house tilted on its new foundations. From that moment, they found they could no longer log out.

Altima of Old

Senses and Systems

Running on FullDive 1.x, the Altima of old was a member of the first generation of full sensation virtual reality games. Compared to recent games running on FullDive 3+, Altima had significant limitations. While players have full natural articulation of their avatar bodies, the game engine had trouble when the player's avatar differed significantly in size and proportion from the player's real body. This leads to some players reporting minor irregularities like feeling as if they are always wearing stilts, feeling less physically confident than real life, or 'losing track' of their body; for example, being unable to tell what gesture their hand is making when holding it behind their back. Body plan limitations contributed to most players citing a distinct discomfort playing the opposite gender, though this certainly did not stop everyone. Later technical workarounds improved the situation but could not entirely remedy the problem.

There was full integration of vision and hearing but not smell or taste. Touch existed but had noticeable imperfections, especially around fluids, air flow and feelings of humidity or temperature. Overall, the construction of the world was still fundamentally based on polygons and textures with finite resolution, making very close examinations of objects disorienting. By the later patches, most player-usable active skills could be activated with voice or gesture but many critical functions still existed in menus and visual overlays.

Real Estate

In Altima, individuals or guilds could own real estate. These range from single rooms within larger buildings to vast palaces, dungeons or entire cities. Practically any real estate that wasn't for sale could be had if it was forcefully taken, its deed purchased from the game with currency (either personally or jointly with a guild) and then maintained. With sufficient resources and space, a piece of land could be expanded to include practically anything with any amount of functionality. In order to hold it, a maintenance had to be paid or else the deed would be lost. While much real estate passed back into public domain in this way as the game waned, some locations had treasuries so rich compared to their support costs that they would not have fallen out of ownership for years. Even when a location falls into ruin, it remains partially standing and can be explored, cleared of squatting NPCs or even looted.

In cases where the holders had enemies amongst other players or if the natural state of the area was to be occupied by NPC mobs, the territory would need to be held against incursions. This would inform their construction and fortification in order to resist attack. While a fortress might be built solely to withstand regular attacks by, for example, NPC goblins from a nearby cave system, guild sieges were best known for being massive pvp events.