In the world of Rugereus-
War had destroyed the resolve of humanity and after the Calamity caused the beasts to mutate it was inevitable that humans were fighting a losing war. The surface world was no longer safe to travel freely but the races banded together to try to live a new life. This life was where our adventures began because it was time for their new dawn. The dawn of kingdoms and conquerors. Choices will be made and consequences will be metted out. How will you rise in New Dawn?
As the introduction to the trailer is playing you see grand battles being waged atop snowy mountains, naval battles with cannons and magic, combat from the players view from the back of mighty dragon mounts or mighty airships laying siege to islands. Mighty sky pirates pillage the lands as you see players fighting back.
It then pans to a player just fishing for leisure or crafting items then building his own castle. As the trailer ends the final phrase echoes in the background as you see either the kingdoms aflame or shining like beacons before the monsters.
This was the first trailer for the game New Dawn and was heralded as the sequel to the widely loved and incredibly popular VR game New life that had swept the world before the incident. New life was still widely popular but after the main hero of the game suddenly quit it lost some of it's backing. The number one ranker had beaten the games content and was said to have been living his life inside the game until something occurred. No one talks about it but rumors were something caused the game to glitch and triggered a hidden feature where time dilation was introduced and the number one ranker was rumored to have lived for eons inside the game before one day he just disappeared.
The incident was ten years ago and it was swept under the rug as urban myth. New life went onto to be so widely popular it was jokingly nicknamed Second life because most of the world spent all their time inside of it. Business and life started to be shaped by a game where corporations could spend millions to test products in an artificial world run by multiple AI programs designed to adapt and learn. People realized that with in game currency quickly becoming a stable crypto currency that one could make millions in the game just by living your life.
The watchdogs pointed out that this game had a checkered past and yet they were called trolls and liars then banned from all accounts. Ten years of brand placement and secretive manipulation was all it took to make the world of the future the utopian nightmare warned about for hundreds of years.
Now New Dawn was showing up on the horizon promising a world where every choice mattered. Every person wasn't just a cookie cutter npc but a breathing person. A world where what had happened in New life would carry over into this game. A breathing and fully autonomous world where it wouldn't just be like a second life it would be like mankind left Earth and was living on a new planet.
To promote the game the creators had issued special beta testing to be done by the top players of New life and set up a future reward for the team that could be ranked first by end of the first year. The reward was 1 billion dollars and have their team immortalized in the games Tower of Heroes. The competition would be based on game progression, skill leveling and exploration. Each month the teams would fight it out in special event dungeons but they were told they would understand better when the game launched. This contest would change how the beta testing would be handled since it had been turned into a competition for control of assets in the game launch.
With this announcement our hero had his world changed. A series of phone calls and bad news told him his nightmare wasn't over. A team called the Wolf pack had become sponsored by an old friend from New life and through what could be called bad luck had lost all their big name talent and backing. The friend had called in a favor and brought the hero back from retirement but as Lady luck is fickle and life is shady the hero would watch his friend disappear after entering beta testing. His friends last words were to bring the team to the number one rank and have them unlock the secrets of the game.
With his team being nothing more than a name at this point our hero had exactly one year to recruit players. He searched for all the mavericks and loners. The outliers and misfits and while his team never won any contests it didn't matter because he knew in New Dawn he could change this. He was after all the mysterious and elusive survivor of the New life incident.
He knew he needed to go find someone to help fund them. So he picked up the phone and called his old friends. "It's Aiden and we have a problem. One of the old guild called in a favor to get me out of retirement. I need to have a face to face with you and your brothers. I will see you tomorrow."
After he hung up the phone and got to thinking. He was getting pulled back into the world he escaped. After 365 thousand years of game time, he had finally gotten out only to realize he had lost a year of his life. The problem was he had spent it in isolation at times and had become considered an urban myth. He had fully explored the world he was in and had learned everything there was too learn. He then had used his superior knowledge to help advance the game world but in the process had learned he actually had been put into a real world.
After living the life of an immortal, he had gained freedom but he had changed that world in unforseen ways. By advancing humanity to such a degree he had seen them go to war over jealousy and use his knowledge for evil. He had to live his life free from humans so he built himself a fortress high on top of the highest mountain ranges and used his knowledge to make the island impossible to find by humans. He passed into legend and used his time to cultivate but found that after he came back to the world he retained his knowledge and cultivation.
He had gone into hiding and retirement but secretly still worked for the ones he called and helped develop his own version of the gear and his own AI systems to help in a game environment. It seemed like he would now have to see what ten years worth of change would bring. He knew full well that with each update the game world had advanced by thousands of years.
The game just pushed those things aside so the user didn't think to ask and each update would bring the user up to date with everything that had changed. This is why major updates were only done at certain points around the end of each year. The consequences of every players actions would be kept track of and then the system would alter the world according to the actions.
This way characters that had died could be officially removed and any characters that were born could be born and grow. It was this system of rebirth that made the world considered like real life. You could have your own family inside the game of New Life.