Hello from the Spirit World! My days here have been as rewarding as they are troublesome and often dangerous. I have been assembling my notes for some time now, and I was hoping other OTG members might be interested in visiting video games with me as they are being shut down and spending some time, maybe 3-6 weeks learning about the game and meeting the community. From my experience so far, this social and academic pursuit has brought me much joy.
Earlier this year, I was playing FF14 and needed a change. Unfortunately, no new game was speaking to me, and the google machine said Tera was shutting down its official servers in June, and the muse hit me. You may know of a game that is on its way with dust in the wind. My next stop is Forsaken World. Shuts down in Nov, and I learned of a Square Enix game, Babylon, that shuts down next Feb.
For all my years of gaming, I never sat on a server while it was a literary shutdown. Being more fatalistic than morbid, I wanted to be in a gaming universe with its denizens saying fair well as it went silent. Only knowing Tera superficially, I was fairly unbias. Ik it was famous for its action combat. I was more curious about who stays that long in a game. What do they do, when it is gone?
I didn’t see but a few old threads about Tera here, so I went venturing. I looked up the largest guilds on the NA server and started applying. Ended up in a guild called the Bunny Den. It has been around since the game went live 11 years ago or so. Score!
While playing, I met more incredible people than trolls, and my grey beard gave me the wisdom to deal with those.
Also, I learned new vocabulary words like parsing, and one night heard a young man in discord use the word meme as noun, verb, and adj, all in the same sentence. It has been a serendipitous blast so far, and I am looking forward to the next adventure. We start a few weeks. Forsaken World is being shut down in Nov and I want a month. Square Enix is shutting down a game called Babalon next Feb, and I never heard of that title until today. I’ve
What I am after is part of fan fiction, exploration, and game history preservation. I interview people to hear about the game they play in whatever form they choose and their comfort level.
Things like, where was your fav world event or a game change they hated? On Tera, I encountered an overarching opinion the devs checked out on the lore a long time ago. So I made up my own. I told all I encountered I found a video game goddess trapped in Tera, and if I set her free, she would give me the power to move video game magic from World to World. I met a person that only used about three words to communicate, OK, GO, DIE, and send in-game links to important quests to help point me in the right direction. It was so different and fun. I will remember that dude for the rest of my life. Killed a world boss with a handful of people and stuffed my pockets with so much of one of the pernicious currencies that plague pay-to-win games. I heard many people wax and wane about endings and moving-on.
So if you are interested in exploring the fading embers of video game worlds with the doomsday Cult for video gamers, let me know. I have brought gauze and half a dozen flares. A couple of clean jars and strike anywhere. If you’re coming, bring fuel. Map of the stars. Any canned food. Maybe more gauze.