This is an excerpt from a wonderful book by Wes Locher called Braving Britannia. To me this is absolutely my favorite explanation of how different regions play games. The difference specifically between Asian, European, and American regions. Highly recommend this read:
Check out the book Braving Britannia for more of these amazing storys! https://amzn.to/3khgNO5
And if you check out volume 2: https://amzn.to/3mpTlRp
You can read a chapter about me! I was interviewed for it.
In the weeks leading up to the expansion’s launch, undead creatures found their way into the city of Trinsic, and on the eve of the release, Minax led a full-scale assault. A call to arms was broadcast through the game’s many town criers, urging players to defend Trinsic from evil.
Unknown to players, Hall had gathered his team at the Origin Systems offices to watch Trinsic fall around the world.
“Being a global game, the main event took place at local server time,” Hall said. “We started in the U.S., and things went roughly the way we planned. The monsters burst onto the scene. The players were ready and waiting.
“Lower-powered players ran like roaches when the lights turned on. The more powerful players waded into the sea of monsters, gleefully slaughtering things in small circles around them. Eventually, the weight of the monsters pulled them down, and Trinsic fell, just like it was supposed to.”
Armed with a pot of coffee, Hall and his team made the event an all-nighter. Within hours, the sun was setting on Japan, and Minax was preparing her siege on the eastern world. The battle Hall witnessed there caught him completely off guard.
“The Americans were all achievement-oriented individualists,” Hall said. “They’re individually extremely powerful, but they didn’t act like a cohesive unit. In Japan, they did.
“The Japanese formed a huge picket line around the city. They had reserves, clustered behind the defensive lines, and generals on horseback, issuing orders, shoring up defenses, filling the gaps. The troops obeyed unquestioningly.”
Behind the reserves, the Japanese had staged healers and crafters, all poised to patch up players, weapons, and armor to combat the undead army. Unable to spawn additional monsters without risking a server crash, Hall and his team couldn’t crack the Japanese defenses.
When the monsters ended their assault, Hall said he was astonished to see that three of the Japanese servers had actually held Trinsic.
Following the planned storyline, Lord British showed up, leading the defeated warriors to the new lands. This presented a problem on the servers that had successfully staved off the invasion. After all, those players hadn’t actually lost and they weren’t too happy with the king’s believing they had.
Hall admits that the team had never written a version of the story where the players came out on top.
Soon, it was time for the European servers to come under attack and once more, Hall watched with bated breath.
“The Europeans weren’t bragging powerhouses like the Americans, or the extremely well-organized machine like Japan,” Hall remembers. “They were roleplayers. They sat in their virtual houses and drank virtual coffee, calmly watching out the windows as the monsters swamped Trinsic in about five minutes.”
For Hall, the experience not only provided hours of entertainment, it gave him the ability to think globally when it came to the game’s future design.
“The entire experience was eye opening in a wonderful way,” he said. “I’ve never seen anything that quite matched it.”
Check out the book Braving Britannia for more of these amazing storys! https://amzn.to/3khgNO5
And if you check out volume 2: https://amzn.to/3mpTlRp
You can read a chapter about me! I was interviewed for it.