Launch day arrived the way most anticipated things did lately, with far less ceremony than Helios expected and far more nerves than he wanted to admit to.
He’d taken the day off work, which in hindsight felt slightly ridiculous for a video game, but POMAX had stopped feeling like an ordinary video game somewhere around the moment it asked him to design his own progression system from scratch.
He made coffee he didn’t drink, checked the countdown on his phone four times in ten minutes, and reread the official launch announcement for what was probably the fifteenth time that week.
His apartment looked exactly the way it had looked every other morning for the past year, the same cluttered desk, the same half-dead plant on the windowsill he kept forgetting to water, and none of it felt like the right backdrop for whatever was about to happen.
Somewhere underneath the mundane, ordinary shape of his Tuesday morning, twelve thousand elves were apparently waiting for him inside a black void, and a kingdom he’d spent three sleepless nights designing was sitting locked and finalized, unable to be touched again until the exact same countdown he kept checking hit zero.
“5,000 Founders. 5 Free Levels. One World, Built By You.”
The marketing team, whoever they were, had clearly enjoyed that tagline.
The community had taken to calling the first wave of players “Founders” almost immediately, half proud of the label and half mocking it, depending on which forum thread you landed in.
[Founders: forum digest, trending now.]
Helios had left the sound on for the launch-day livestream running quietly in the background, a countdown clock ticking in one corner of the screen while two hosts filled dead air with speculation.
“So the big question everyone’s asking,” one host said, “is how many of the five thousand actually went the kingdom route. Devs won’t confirm numbers, but community estimates are putting it somewhere under two hundred people total.”
“Which, if you ask me,” the other host said, “is about a hundred and ninety-nine more than should have.”
Helios laughed at that, alone in his apartment, in a way that felt a little too close to laughing at himself.
His phone buzzed.
Darryn, checking in.
“You watching the stream,” the message read.
“Unfortunately,” Helios typed back.
“They’re roasting the kingdom builders again.”
“I noticed.”
“You good,” Darryn asked, and for once the joking tone had dropped out of it.
“We’ll see in about twenty minutes,” Helios sent.
“For what it’s worth,” Darryn wrote back after a moment, “I still think you’re insane. But I also kind of want to see what happens.”
“That makes two of us,” Helios replied.
He set the phone face-down on the desk, not quite ready to keep reading the chat scroll on the livestream, and pulled up the official Founders board instead, a running leaderboard-style list the developers had published showing build categories without revealing individual names.
Solo Adventurer builds made up the overwhelming majority, well over four thousand of the five thousand slots.
Guild and Faction builds took most of the rest.
Kingdom-scale builds, his category, sat at the very bottom of the list with a number that made his stomach do something uncomfortable.
[Kingdom-scale Founder builds: 187]
One hundred and eighty-seven people, out of five thousand, had looked at the exact same warnings he had and made the exact same choice anyway.
He wondered how many of them were watching this same countdown right now, having this same conversation with themselves.
‘At least I’m not alone in this,’ he thought.
‘That’s something.’
The countdown ticked past the ten-minute mark, and the stream chat exploded into the kind of chaotic scrolling text that made actual words impossible to read.
Somewhere in that scroll, Helios was fairly sure, at least a few of the other kingdom-builders were watching the same countdown, having the same argument with themselves about whether they’d made a colossal mistake.
He put the headset on with eight minutes left on the clock, just to make sure the calibration wouldn’t eat into his launch time.
The familiar black void greeted him, quieter now, almost expectant.
He realized, oddly, that some part of him had missed it in the two days since he’d finalized his build.
[Server launch in: 00:07:58]
[All Founder builds have been locked and archived.]
[No further modifications are possible prior to launch.]
That last line landed harder than he expected.
No more second-guessing.
No more quietly wondering if he should have picked a simpler lineage, a smaller kingdom, a progression system with actual balancing guarantees behind it.
Whatever he’d built over the last three days was what he was walking into this with, for better or worse.
[Server launch in: 00:03:00]
The livestream hosts had started a genuine countdown of their own, chat scrolling faster, viewer count climbing into numbers Helios didn’t bother trying to read.
Somewhere out there, four thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine other people were sitting in rooms just like his, staring at void screens just like his, about to find out exactly how their own choices were going to play out.
[Server launch in: 00:00:30]
‘This is either going to be the best decision I’ve ever made,’ Helios thought, ‘or the dumbest.’
[Server launch in: 00:00:10]
[9]
[8]
[7]
Somewhere on the livestream, one of the hosts said something about final server checks completing across every region simultaneously, a number scrolling past that Helios didn’t catch, too focused on the countdown in his own vision to pay the background noise much attention anymore.
He closed his eyes, which did absolutely nothing inside a full-immersion headset, and found himself grinning anyway.
[6]
[5]
[4]
[3]
[2]
[1]
[Server launch: initiated.]
[Applying Founder bonus: 5 Free Levels.]
[Calculating domain experience redirection…]
[Calculating character classification…]
The void didn’t answer immediately.
For one long, suspended second, nothing happened at all, and Helios had just enough time to wonder if something had gone wrong, whether he’d get some polite error message telling him to restart his headset at the worst possible moment, before the entire world around him lit up at once.