nycdaug Chapter 71 William
Chapter 71 William
Let's go back to before the Chinese New Year.
Seattle, USA.
In the dimly lit room, the only light source came from the three 27-inch high refresh rate monitors arranged in an arc.
The cold, bluish light from the screen shone on William's slightly pale face, which was covered with heavy dark circles under his eyes.
William, a 26-year-old independent reviewer with some renown in the North American hardcore gaming community, was currently biting his thumb nail in frustration, while his other hand was absentmindedly typing on the greasy mechanical keyboard.
The table was littered with empty Monster cans, a half-eaten and hardened pizza, and several messy charging cables.
He just finished reviewing a game that was touted as a "next-generation AAA masterpiece that cost hundreds of millions to develop," and gave it a glaringly low score in his column.
"It's all a beautifully packaged pile of dog shit. Nowadays, game developers are like a bunch of stupid pigs who only know how to do assembly line work. Besides piling up meaningless ray-traced textures and question marks all over the map, they've even crammed the most basic gameplay into the mud. This kind of utterly boring industrial waste is disgusting to even look at."
William leaned back wearily in the ergonomic gaming chair, tilted his head back, and let out a long sigh.
He felt a deep emptiness and weariness, a despair for the stagnant gaming industry.
In search of something new to stimulate his numb brain, he habitually opened an extremely hardcore and exclusive niche gaming forum on Reddit.
In this section, known as the "Last Sanctuary," only the most demanding players usually post. However, today, the moment the page refreshed, William's gaze was immediately drawn to a highly popular post at the top.
The post's title was filled with a kind of fanatical inflammatory rhetoric:
"The ultimate answer to open-world games: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, a miracle from the East."
William sneered and moved the mouse to click on the post.
Have these self-important idiots all taken the wrong medicine today? What kind of bullshit miracle is this? It's just some cheap shill hired by some unknown small studio. They can even come up with such embarrassingly exaggerated headlines.
However, as the mouse wheel slid rapidly downwards, the cold smile on William's lips gradually froze.
The replies in the post weren't the dry, bot-filled posts he'd imagined, but rather a flood of excited, incoherent essays from numerous players. Some were marveling at the game's physics engine, where fire could ignite grass and create updrafts, while others were incoherently describing their absurd experiences of being struck by lightning and killed in a thunderstorm because they were carrying iron weapons.
William frowned, a hint of suspicion flashing in his deep-set eyes.
He quickly extracted the key information from the post. Developer: Tangren Games. Registered location: China.
"Tangren Games?"
William's dry lips parted slightly as he murmured the name to himself. He frantically searched his vast knowledge base of the gaming industry, only to find, to his dismay, that the name was like a blank wasteland, with absolutely no corresponding record.
Chinese game companies? What a joke! Hasn't the market there already been completely dominated by those reskinned gacha games that make players spend money like pigs?
How could they possibly have the technology or the guts to develop a truly original, single-player open-world masterpiece? This is absolutely a meticulously planned marketing scam.
Driven by a destructive urge to expose the scam himself, William followed the instructions in the post and entered the official website link hidden behind layers of discussion into his browser's address bar.
The page loaded extremely quickly the moment I pressed the Enter key.
There were no cumbersome pop-ups, no fancy recharge buttons; the entire webpage was incredibly clean.
Occupying the central screen in front of William was a high-resolution main visual poster.
A young swordsman dressed in a blue hero's robe stands alone on the edge of a towering cliff. His back is to the camera, and a stone-like object emitting an eerie blue light hangs from his waist.
Directly in front of him stretched a vast, wild landscape that seemed to overflow the screen. In the distance, volcanoes spewed smoke and ash, and snow-capped mountains were hidden in the clouds. In the farthest center, a colossal castle shrouded in an eerie, dark red aura of resentment stood silently.
That artistic style, which doesn't pursue extreme realism but is full of a watercolor-like transparency and vitality, is like a sharp knife that unexpectedly cuts through the thick, cynical shell in William's heart.
He instinctively sat up straight, and his previously scattered thoughts began to focus.
This composition... this visual guidance that evokes a strong desire to explore at a single glance... damn, this is definitely not something a third-rate graphic designer could come up with.
William hovered his finger over the left mouse button for two seconds before pressing down hard on the download client button.
Because the game itself was unusually small in size, and with the support of his gigabit broadband, in less than ten minutes, a shortcut with a golden "Z" and an icon of intertwined broken swords quietly appeared on his computer desktop.
The only sound in the room was the hum of the computer case fan. William took a deep breath and double-clicked the icon.
There are no lengthy manufacturer logo displays, and no cumbersome initial setup.
The screen instantly plunged into a deep, pure black. Immediately afterward, a clear, ethereal sound, as if dripping water could fall directly into the depths of one's soul, resonated through William's expensive monitoring headphones.
"Wake up..."
A gentle, mysterious, yet somewhat weary female voice whispered in my ear.
A faint blue light appeared in the center of the screen. William gripped the controller tightly with both hands.
He watched as the blond boy named Link awoke from the resurrection temple filled with mysterious liquid, watched him stumble and put on his tattered clothes, and picked up the item called the Sheikah Tablet.
The entire prologue was concise and to the point, without any unnecessary dialogue or tedious cutscenes that forcibly stripped the player of control. William, controlling Link, pushed open the heavy stone doors of the temple.
light.
A dazzling, warm light, brimming with endless hope, instantly filled the entire screen.
William controlled Link as he ran forward.
When Link reached the highest point of the cliff, the camera suddenly zoomed out.
The magnificent, vast, and vibrant continent of Hyrule unfolded before William's eyes like a grand scroll. A gentle breeze rustled through the green grass, startling birds in the distance, while dappled sunlight pierced through the clouds, illuminating the ruins of the ancient temple. A few clear and expansive piano notes rose at just the right moment, accompanied by the title text appearing in the lower right corner of the screen:
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
"Clatter".
The handle in William's hand slipped instantly due to the weakness in his grip and slammed heavily onto the table.
But he seemed not to hear. His eyes were fixed on the screen, his eye sockets slightly red from being wide open for so long, and his heavy breathing was particularly clear in the quiet room.
William's heart pounded violently in his chest, his frenzied blood surging through his long-dormant nerves. His hands trembled as he gripped the handle again, and without hesitation, he controlled the tiny figure, leaping into the wind filled with the unknown and the miraculous.