Platinum Void

Day 0

Juan was your average Hardcore no life gamer. He was especially fond of playing MMORPGs. His favourite was CCO meaning Crooked Creek Online. It had seemingly endless possibilities when compared to most other MMORPGs. It had a very complex custom tool system. A vast map so large the landmass was similar in size to Afro Eurasia despite mostly being long and thin from pole to pole in a band around the world.

Juan had spent most of his free time playing the game. He had played the game for 4 years since the release of the open Beta. He had a total playtime of almost 19,000 hours and had spent every minute of that time after completing the main storyline and side quests grinding levels and acquiring all of the new Legendary Items. He had even taken over much of the land on the map having a country in the East Equatorial strip. It had an area roughly the same as Saudi Arabia and had cost him quadrillions of Gold to claim. But despite all of this he wasn't the number one player. He was only number 3. And unsurprisingly the 2 players above him were a Japanese person and a Korean.

Juan was from a small village in the northwest of England called Keswick. It was always cold and wet giving him no reason to ever leave his house. That was his train of thought anyway.

However, today was a tragic day for Juan. Today was the day they were going to discontinue CCO. The balance of power because of players like Juan was too skewed and they weren't going to nerf the players that had spent hours on their game and bought their DLC's etc.

Juan was devastated when he heard this. But he was also looking forward to the newest game by the company. Platinum Void. It was supposed to be revolutionary with the most complex and detailed combat system of any game before it. It was supposed to have a very slow advancement system and small changes between advancements. Meaning somebody who had played the game for 100 hours would level up 20 times and have a 60% stat boost as opposed to in CCO where this would have resulted in 60 levels up and a 1500% stat increase. As well as weapons having their level requirements removed and having the replaced with stat requirements so a lv10 which has invested all of their points in swordsmanship would be able to use all the same swords as a lv100 player which had invested equally between all 10 weapon stats.

What Juan had been expecting was a level cap like most RPGs to level out the playing field for players but no. A player could still level up an unlimited number of times. He was excited as it would be a new game to sweat hardcore at and become a top player.

Today was the release date of PV and Juan was overly excited he had been 2 entire days sleeping not stop and binge eating in order to have as much energy as possible to boost ahead of all the other players. Those 2 days were the days between the closure of the CCO servers and now. It was his moment.

The countdown on the website to join the game was almost up.
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He hovered his mouse over the join server button. He didn't want to have to rush the character creation but still get as much time on the server as possible.
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he pressed the button. Quickly the character creation screen appeared. There were 32 different races to chose from all but 6 were free. The remaining 6 cost £845(1,107$) each. The races in the Holy category included: Angel, Purity elemental, and purgatorian guard. In the mortal category was Dragonborn, Demigod, and Satyr and the last paid race was the only paid unit in the demonic category. The pureblood vampire. Suddenly one of them disappeared. There was no longer an angel. Then the demigod disappeared then Dragonborn. He quickly selected a pureblood vampire just so that nobody else would get it. They must have only had a limited number of uses. He entered his card password and verified. He was £845 poorer. But was glad. It turned out only 1 player could have each of the legendary races and he was one of them. He was well and truly on his way to being an infamous beast of the game. He smirked.

The customisation options were incredible. There were 33 presets and a mode for molding the face however you wanted. But for the most part, it didn't let you make them look stupid. There was only so far you could push the eyes into the head or stretch the chin out to a point. And like that they looked mostly like somebody who could genuinely exist. 'mostly' He decided to go for a female and make her a bit of a loli-like character. After a good couple of hours of editing, he had his character. She was 148cm tall and weighed 46kg. She was fairly slim but had hip curves and small firm looking breasts.

The skin colour couldn't be changed and was stuck on an extremely pasty white tone. She had fairly large deep red eyes and slitted pupils(also no choice) Her hair was jet black and completely straight leading down to her upper waist. Her ears were pointed(no choice) but weren't really long enough to be spotted through the hair unless you were looking for it. Her face was very beautiful and probably halfway between the most beautiful woman you can imagine and the cutest. It was his best work yet.

He selected Haemomancy as his primary attack and Pyromancy as his secondary. Haemomancy was the Pureblood vampire's race-specific skill so he considered it a sin to not use it after spending 800 quid(pounds) on it! I then pressed the confirm button.

At that moment a progress bar appeared at the bottom of the screen. The screen changed to an image of a steep mountain range in a thunderstorm with huge crazy-looking beasts like flying versions of the silt striders from Elder scrolls.

The progress bar then froze halfway and changed colour. It flashed in magenta, blue, green, and cyan. The entire screen then showed strange squares and other symbols in these colours like some kind of graphical error. Then everything I saw went black