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.

Aesthetics

Altima's aesthetics are rooted in the KMMO tradition, featuring tawdry armour for both genders, exaggerated sexual dimorphism across the board, and humanizing many races (or at least the female versions of many races) that would otherwise deviate significantly from human ideals. For example, whereas male dwarves are by default stout, muscular and look quite Tolkienesque, female dwarves look very different - almost like short human girls. Altima's Beholder (marketed as a playable race at launch to illustrate the freedom in customization) is very very different from the original version. Later content additions expanded the available character and item appearances in all directions. While notorious for its fetishistic mods, Altima also added countless sets of perfectly sensible armours and weapons. Altima at shutdown looks incredibly different from the original with arguably a disjointed and disperse ecosystem of different aesthetics replacing the much more tightly designed original game.

Races, Jobs and Levels

The level cap of Altima was 100. A character's level was equal to the sum of her Race levels and Job levels (collectively known as Classes). Since Classes cap at 15 levels or less, a character at level cap had to have at least seven Classes – often more. While the breakpoints for different builds was subject to vigorous debate, taking levels in multiples of five was common at all levels of play. Altogether, the available Races and Jobs added to hundreds of available Classes with an enormous number of combinations.

Human Races

Reasonably human races are usually 5 levels in progression, though some races with both an active ability like dwarves' Stone Sense along with strong passives may have more. A character who chooses a completely generic human will have 0 Race Class levels. For a wide variety of aesthetic and practical reasons, Human races greatly outnumber Liminal Races among players and they were considered the "normal" way to play the game. Most are either characterized as human variants that can mix with humans (even if they have wildly different lifespans) though a few are fundamentally different creatures that simply have no special abilities to set them too far apart from humans. Each had a canon start location in the lore.

Examples

Human

Uruk – Orcs. A race with greater strength but reduced magical ability and resistance.

Uruha – A variety of half-orc gained by taking both Uruk (Eastern) and Human (Ezine) levels. In cases like this, the human levels can mediate the orc qualities somewhat. Most Human races can mix in this way with ordinary humans.

Alfar – Elves. A family of tier 1 race variants 5 levels of progression depending on type.

Ljosalfar – High Elves.

Dokkalfar – Dark Elves. A popular race with darker skin renowned for tawdry costumes.

Svartalfar – Black Elves. Elves that are darker than dark and are more like drow.

Dvergar – Dwarves. Another family of races. They have a passive ability – Stability – that was considered overpowered and had their race progression extended from 5 to 10 levels, after which it was complained they were underpowered.

Kemonomimi – Race including tails and ears of animals. The tails were not prehensile nor sensate. Sense of touch to the animal ears would be mapped to the player's ears but this was buggy. Nevertheless popular due to appeal. They were identical in format: 2 levels of progression each, with modestly improved hearing and affinity to their totem animal. They did not dilute with human blood.

Pallum – A race of small, childlike people. Most varieties had 0 levels of progression but selecting the race activated minor stat biases.

Liminal Races

These are races that are far removed from humanity, at least in essence if not appearance. Most of them are 15 levels and come with abilities that are obviously superhuman. Alternative race levels tend to grant good to fantastic stat gains and powerful abilities at the expense of serious drawbacks (a very few Jobs have this character as well). Racial disadvantages kick in even with no levels taken, so optimized builds rarely dip into alternative races casually.

Examples

Devil – Humanlike beings with curved horns from lower planes.

Doppelganger – A race of shifters that shares or twins with a soul with one other person in existence. They have limited shapeshifting abilities but have an inescapable Dark Fate.

Imp – Minor beings from fiery hells. They have an inhuman appearance.

Lamia – A player created snake girl race accepted into the main game. They tended to be glitchy however and played strangely since the player would still feel their legs. They had improved toughness, stability, could naturally climb trees or many other surfaces and many other abilities according to variant but also had numerous drawbacks, among them being that they are missing the fifth armour slot, denying them set bonuses from armours, slowed or died in cold environments and had major elemental vulnerabilities.

Revenant – An undead race distinguished by being neither skeletal nor decomposing on casual examination. They have severe disadvantages in senses, magic and elemental vulnerabilities. They are also obligate cannibals.

Skeleton

Vampire – A race that can be gained rather than inborn. The class had powerful abilities but was notorious for its crippling drawbacks.

Advanced Races

These are often upgades of Liminal Races though sometimes they can come off basic races as well - if there is a race-specific promotion or job such as Priestess of Liolith for black elves, then those are listed as Advanced Races as well. They may require a minimum overall level or a minimum number of levels taken from the corresponding tier 1 race or both. In some cases, Advanced Race promotions mitigate the problematic traits of the previous tier, making them no brainers. It was common, for example for players to power level through Vampire as quickly as possible to access one of its promotions.

Examples

Blood Lord

Cainite

Dullahan

Nosferatu

Priestess of Liolith