A huge castle made of stone and steel floating in an endless sky. That was all this world was.
It took a vagarious group of craftsmen one month to survey the place; the diameter of the base floor was about 10 kilometers — large enough to fit the entirety of Setagaya-ku within. Above, there were 100 floors stacking straight upwards; its sheer size was unbelievable. It was impossible to even guess how much data it consisted of.
Inside, there were a couple of large cities along with countless small scale towns and villages, forests and plains, and even lakes. Only one stairway linked each floor to another, and the stairways existed in dungeons where large numbers of monsters roamed; so discovering and getting through was no easy matter. However, once someone made a breakthrough and arrived at a city of the upper floor, the «Teleport Gates» there and of every cities in the lower floors would be connected making it possible for anyone to move freely through these levels.
With these conditions, the huge castle had been steadily conquered for two years. The current front line is the 74th floor. The name of the castle was «Aincrad», a world of battles with swords that continued floating and had engulfed approximately six thousand people. Otherwise known as...
«Sword Art Online»
Sword Art Online (ソードアート・オンライン, Sōdo Āto Onrain?)
is the first ever VRMMORPG produced by Argus for the NerveGear, with Kayaba Akihiko as the development director. The online game takes place on a hundred-floor floating castle called Aincrad.
Prior to official launch, «Sword Art Online» Closed Beta was available to 1,000 beta testers for a one month period from August to September 2022. During that period, «Sword Art Online» was lauded as an incredible experience, and it received extremely positive reviews despite the actual difficulty of the game (over the one month period, the Beta Testers had only reached the 10th Floor). After the Closed Beta Tested ended, the Beta Testers were given the opportunity to pre-order the game. SAO Presale Hardcore gamers waited three days in line to receive the much-anticipated first issue of Sword Art Online game.
Only 10,000 copies were printed in the first batch of the game, and online sales sold out within seconds. Hard-core gamers waited in line for days to purchase the first few hard copies from many stores.
«Sword Art Online» officially started server service on 1 PM of November 6, 2022 and obtained infamy when the creator succeeded in trapping 10,000 people in the game, and making it so that death in-game would mean actual death for the player. During the two-year period the game remained active, «Sword Art Online» evolved into an innovative yet complex society of individuals with mixed feelings about the possibility of clearing the game.
Psychologically, many players experienced extreme despair, grief, insanity and sadness during the course of the death game. Of the total 3,853 deaths, over half occurred in the first month of SAO. Combined with lethal dungeon traps and bosses, Player Killing (PKing), crime, suicides, a slowly dwindling population, and increasing difficulty on the higher floors, the prospects generally looked very bleak.
The game was prematurely ended on the 75th floor (as opposed to the intended 100th floor), after the «Black Swordsman» defeated the final boss, Heathcliff, in a duel.[1] A total of 6,147 survivors were successfully logged out on 2:55 PM (Aincrad Standard Time) of November 7, 2024. SAO serves as the main setting for volumes 1, 2 and 8 of the Sword Art Online series.
After the SAO incident, its servers were used by RECTO Progress Inc. to create ALfheim Online as the current successor of the VRMMORPG online game.
The game operates similar to most MMORPGs with a level system and eventual skill mastery with some limits placed on it. The entire game is monitored and maintained by a system called «Cardinal» which self-corrects any problems.
While the Sword Art Online mainframe is capable of incredible graphical and rendering capacities, it does not actually render the entire environment in full detail unless a certain region is specifically observed by a player. SAO uses a «Digital Focusing System», which brings out the finer details of an object only when a player shows interest and focuses their visual field on it. According to Kirito, this reduces the strain on the SAO mainframe processor, which, despite its high performance power, is uncapable of rendering all marginal details of the environment simultaneously. This effectually produces the illusion that the SAO graphical and VR experience is incredibly detailed.
The SAO mainframe apparently has a difficult time rendering the sensation of water in baths or showers. Sword Art Online runs on NerveGear hardware, a form of FullDive technlogy. It was not made available for other platforms.
Virtual Reality Experience As a complete virtual reality MMORPG, the SAO system is capable of rendering the entire Aincrad environment with incredible realism. By stimulating nerves in the brain, it is possible to taste food, feel the wind and weather, move one's body, and live in SAO as if it were an alternate reality. However, there are several major differences that set the Sword Art Online environment apart from the real-world experience.
First, no pain is actually felt in any situation. As a result, gamers can undergo severe injuries and still only feel a tingling sensation. Second, there is no blood; in its place are orange virtual gashes that are seen in the place of damage. Third, Sword Skills allow actions (such as fighting, cooking, fishing) to be performed with normally impossible speed, dexterity, and power, based on a gamer's stats. Fourth, there are some everyday actions that simply aren't done in the SAO world, such as changing clothes by hand or attempting to wield two items at the same time.
While playing Sword Art Online, gamers still feel fatigue and hunger (even if their real bodies are not hungry). As a result, it is an absolute necessity for all players to eat and sleep within the game. However, there is never a need to defecate or go to the bathroom. The SAO system generally censors mature or unhealthy content (smoking, sexual intercourse, etc.), but it is even possible for players to disable the censor if «Ethics Code Off» is selected on the options menu.
Death or deletion in the game is visualized by fragmentation into thousands of polygon shards. All monsters, items, and players that have their HP or durability reduced to zero, disappear and fragment into polygons in such a fashion.
Sword Art Online takes the form of a giant floating castle called Aincrad, with 100 floors in it. Each floor has a medieval-themed setting and a dungeon with a boss, which has to be defeated before players can advance to the next higher floor. Like most RPGs, it implements a level based system.
