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

This is page 1/4 of the article.

Summary

Sword Art Online (ソードアート・オンライン sōdo āto onrain) 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.

Background

Before its official launch, SAO was in beta test stage from August to September 2022, hosting 1,000 players. The game was unanimously described as an incredible experience, and received critical acclaim despite being unusually difficult. After the closed beta test, the testers were offered pre-orders of the game.

The first batch of the game amounted to 10,000 copies, and the online lots sold out within seconds, while others camped many stores for several days to get their copy first.

SAO servers officially went online at 13:00 on November 6, 2022. The same day, the game shocked the society when its creator managed to trap those 10,000 people in the game until they beat the last floor boss, and implement actual biological perma-death. The player's avatars also were replaced by their actual faces and bodies, possibly as a psychological move. The game kept running for two years, having produced virtual societies of its own, and a lot of grief. The physical bodies of the players had to be moved to hospitals for coma-state care.

In-game, the players' emotions tended to be on the extreme end of despair, insanity, sadness. 3,853 people died SAO, and most of those during the first month, as people committed suicide, murderous outlaws and player killing (PK) guilds ran rampant, and the traps and dungeon bosses got increasingly more lethal.

Among despair, the game's final had been beaten before Floor 100 was ever reached. Kirito had unveiled the Game Master Kayaba Akihiko to be one of the large guilds' immortal leader Heathcliff, and the two ended up having a fair duel which Kirito barely won, saving 6,147 remaining players who were all supposed to have logged out as Aincrad was slowly erased from existence around 14:55 (Aincrad Standard Time) of November 7, 2024.

System

The game mechanics are similar to the most MMORPGs' formula with safe zones, leveling, grinding, defeating bosses to unlock passage and new areas, as well as taking up the support roles of smiths, alchemists, and more. The only thing lacking was the mages. SAO had an auto-balancing, health-monitoring, and self-debugging proprietary framework called the Cardinal System.

Even with the state-of-the-art hardware and software, the game would not render the entirety of the landscape the whole time, but instead only the locations any player would keep in their sight. This technology was called the Digital Focusing System and is also a common performance-improving trick in real-life games of our time. The VR experience often had trouble reproducing the correct sensory experiences for simple things like the bath.

Virtual Reality Experience

SAO emulated many sensory experiences with precision. Players felt the food taste and the difference in how delicious things were; they felt the weather effects, felt their in-game body move, and in general had enough immersion to simply live in SAO like another reality.

There were differences from the real world in it, however. Players did not feel pain, just minor tingling. There was no blood mechanic, and the wounds would simply show as ethereal gaps in players' bodies. The Sword Skills allowed for superhumanly speedy and powerful attacks on activation, based purely on the player's in-game stats. It was also impossible to change clothes the usual way, or to hold two things at once which was a separate and unique Dual Wield skill that Kirito ended up taking based on his measured reaction time as a token of prowess.

The players would feel simulated hunger and tiredness that forced them to eat and rest in-game. At the same time, toilets were not implemented or needed at all.

Death and low-level object deletion were visualised the same way — all objects would dissolve into flickering, fading triangles.

The SAO system would censor adult visuals and extreme tactile sensations such as sexual pleasure by default. However, players could disable the visual censorship via a simple menu option, which would also give a temporary boost to the received tactile data at a time when all equipment is taken off of the player.

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References

Sword Art Online - Fan Wiki