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 2021, Altima was among the first and by far the greatest child of the 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-nine 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. Though their reasons for being here are all different, they have 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 reality whose existence has been but an eyeblink to the real world, it is still a reality that is older than they are. Now, however, the world is ending, 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 it didn't come.

The members of the Altima Archaeology Club gathered in the modest wooden cottage that served as their virtual "club room". They watched the stars swirl and the earth shake is if the whole world were tumbling into the void... and then the stars returned. The unprecedented smell of grass and trees billowed through the windows as the house tilted on its new foundations. And then, they could no longer log out.

Altima as it Was

Senses and Systems

Altima ran on the 1st Generation FullDive engine. The player had full control of their avatar body which, as far as the game engine was concerned, had to essentially conform to the human body plan (though modders found glitch-prone workarounds later on). There was full integration of vision and hearing but not smell or taste. Touch existed but had noticeable imperfections. Overall construction of the world was still fundamentally based on the polygon and the texture, making very close examinations of objects disorienting. Most active skills could eventually be activated with voice or gesture but much of the game 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 is forcefully taken, purchased and then maintained. With sufficient resources and space, a piece of land can 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 title was lost. While much real estate has passed back into public domain in this way, 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 or cleared of squatting NPCs.

In cases where the holders had enemies amongst other players or if the natural state of the area is to be occupied by NPC mobs, the territory might need to be held against incursion and would be designed with view of resisting attack. While a fortress might be built to withstand regular attacks by NPC goblins from a nearby hostile area, guild sieges were best known for being massive pvp events.