This is an article about the VRMMORPG by the same name as the entire series.

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Summary

Sword Art Online is the first-ever virtual-reality massive-multiplayer online role-playing game developed by Kayaba Akihiko and produced by Argus along with the FullDive compatible NerveGear. The game is set on a skyborne hundred-floor castle called Aincrad, and is designed to be beatable.

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Status Effects

The status effects like poisoning or setting on fire were an important side of a combat. Many attacks could randomly apply status effects. In general, the effects were not curable unless the player used a Crystal. Most status effects are time-limited.

Monster Battle Mechanics

As mentioned above, SAO had no magic in it, apart from the expendable crystals used for instant effects. Instead, the powerful Sword Skills were used, categorized into Thrusts, Slashes, Pierces, and Blunts. The only projectile weapons available were Throwing Picks, darts, boomerangs, and chakrams.

Using the Sword Skills was much more effective than the standard attacks the players would be using by default. Panicking and forgetting to use the Sword Skills in a monster fight was a much-discouraged beginner's mistake that could cost a player their life.

After the battle, a congratulatory pop-up would appear displaying the EXP gained, Cor gained and items looted. All of this was distributed among the party members automatically, and the items were placed in the players' inventories directly. SAO did not provide any explanation as to who received what loot, potentially leading to awkwardness. This led many guilds to develop loot distribution policies.

The player that finished a boss would receive a rare drop, which could be exploited for kill stealing.

As a rule, monsters could not enter the towns or cities that had safe zones.

Party Battle Mechanics

Party-based dungeon clearing was more effective in comparison to solo clearing. Although in SAO, monsters could only be engaged one-on-one, and the classes were less defined, multiple players had the ability to Switch.

Switching allowed taking turns at the monster at any time, helping negate the player attack cooldown time. By cleverly exploiting the short stun time between the monsters' attacks and the monster scripting performance lowering during a change of attack style, players would use Switching to deliver one more good blow and leave the monster stunned for another split-second. Cardinal did not register that as a bug, but Kirito mentioned the players came up with the tactic without any system assist, unlike the Sword Skills.

A party could have a maximum of six members in SAO. With eight parties or groups, a Raid Group would convene, capable of beating the big bosses.

Player versus Player Combat

In SAO, a player could fight another player. The PvP battles were categorized as authorized and unauthorized.

The authorized battles would occur via the Duel system.

The unauthorized battles could begin in the field when a player attacked another. The attacker's cursor would then turn orange for several hours, and repeated offenses would eventually turn an aggressive player's cursor orange for good. Trying to attack someone in a safe zone would not change the cursor color, or deal any HP damage.

Player Killing (PKing) was worse than the common MMO griefing, and was essentially murder in SAO, as a player's death in-game also resulted to their very real death in the real world. That had not been the case during the beta test, of course, and the defeated players would simply respawn on Floor 1 in the Room of Resurrection.

Trivia

• When SAO was sold, it had been rated 14+. That did not stop much younger people from playing, too, like Silica or the children at the church in the Town of Beginnings.
• The SAO servers were used by RCT to develop ALO during the incident.
• Although developed in Japan, SAO only accepted Latin characters for names.
• In the first few episodes of the anime, the "Congratulation!!" panel would pop up on boss's defeat, before it was replaced by the correct "Congratulations!!" for the remainder of the series.

References

Sword Art Online - Fan Wiki