As I rifle through the dead player’s inventory, taking whatever is worth taking, I hear a wet, guttural growl behind me that causes my shoulders to tense.
Oh, crap.
I turn around slowly. Many of the monsters in the game react negatively to sudden movement. But all I can see in the darkness are shadows. The moon is struggling to shine through some passing overhead clouds. Its light causes a silver glow to shine on the leaves of an oak tree rooted some twenty meters from me.
I can’t see any mobs, but I know the noise wasn’t my imagination. I check to see if Brian is still in game chat, trying to play a trick on me with some type of invisibility potion.
No… he’s logged off.
The shadowy base of the oak tree seems to flicker as diffused moonlight shines down, when a breeze sends the leaves above dancing. That’s when I see the first flash of eyes shining in the dark. Predator eyes.
Set close together at the base of a snout that begins to edge forward in the moonlight.
There’s no mistaking the gleaming teeth that salivate from that maw. I’ve found the thing that killed whoever I just looted. A greater werewolf—the big guys—and it stalks toward me with malice and murder in its eyes.
I hear the growl again, but the thing doesn’t charge. I can see wet spots dripping down its fur. Looks like the monster hunter got a few good licks in before becoming a midnight snack.
That’s good. The monsters in the game aren’t mindless killing machines. Well, zombies excluded. But these werewolves won’t just continue to attack with 1 HP until someone kills them. They will retreat, heal up somewhere, and then re-engage. Unless of course it feels that it can make a quick kill based on its assessment of the prey.
Say if it sees a level one player… just like me.
The beast howls at the moon as the clouds break up above us. And then it charges. But not the blindingly fast sprint on all four legs. No, it’s moving slowly, hampered by its injuries.
Still, it’s closing ground and I’ll be dead with one swipe of its claws or a single bite from those teeth.
Frantically I cycle through my newly bloated inventory, hoping to get the silver sword and shield equipped in time to at least make an attempt at defending myself.
After pulling up the menu, I click the speed-tab, “Optimize All.” That’s the game’s way of putting on what its algorithms designate as the best equipment available to your level and skillset. Naturally, the game’s impression falls short of what is actually the best gear to use, because it over-relies on base stats that don’t address whatever specific scenario you might find yourself in. Like, if you’re fighting an undead mob and have a perfect-forge broadsword and a 70%-forge broadsword with +1 fire damage, it would equip you with the perfect-forge sword despite the fact that the +1 fire sword would do nearly double damage even with the reduced forge mastery base stats.
But I’m in no position to nitpick. The werewolf is loping toward me, its husky breath going up in vapor clouds into the night air.
My ticker reads off what I’ve just equipped myself with.
•Silver Longsword (79% Forge)
•Silver Shield (81% Forge)
•Padded Leather Armor (5/100 Integrity)
•Graydon’s Sight (∞/∞ Integrity)
Uh oh. I’d forgotten about that. I may have just killed myself a few seconds early, thanks to that random helmet I just equipped. I need to switch it for—
But then something altogether unexpected happens. My screen informs me that two new effects have been applied to my character: “Graydon’s Sight” and “Scaling Power.”
And then the far too infrequent flourish of trumpets sound. The werewolf closes in on me, and suddenly, all in a flash of a moment, my vision is obscured by the explosive celebratory in-game text announcing…
LEVEL 2 ACHIEVED!
What. The. Hell.
Chapter Three
It’s all I can do to dodge and roll away from the charging werewolf that I know is somewhere behind the vision-obscuring level up text flashing before my eyes. There’s supposed to be a patch inbound that fixes that little problem sometime next week. It was introduced during the last update, so it’s still fairly new. A bug caused by another fix. Typical. And now I have to do my best to avoid becoming its latest victim.
And, yes, it’s a problem and not just me whining. Even the King’s League streamers best known for being company shills publicly called that bug total garbage. While I’m probably dead either way, I’d rather not have the extra aggravation of getting one-hit-killed because I had the misfortune of leveling up way sooner that I should have. That’s no way to end a night.
I come out of my roll, kneeling near the blood-soaked remains of this werewolf’s last snack. The monster is lumbering, clearly bothered by the wounds it suffered earlier in the game. I come to my feet, silver sword and shield at the ready in a defensive posture; shield held out, sword held over my head ready to plunge forward at any missed lunges the beast might attempt.
There’s a growl and the werewolf sends clumps of dirt and grass flying in an attempt to shift position and bring those teeth back to bare on me. My acrobatics score isn’t amazing, so this thing must really be slowed down.
I see its health box. Only Five HP left. Yep. Definitely…
Hold on.
You don’t get to see your enemy’s health bar in King’s League. You can toggle your own stats, but the devs wanted realism to win out, so you don’t actually know what level or health your opponents are just from looking at them. Early versions of the game didn’t even show you PCs’ names. You had to ask them over game chat.
But I’m definitely seeing a health box and the werewolf got taken all the way down from 150 HP to five. Poor guy at my feet almost got the job done.
My sword can do four to eight damage per attack, depending on variables like how I swing it, the target’s defense rating, resistances, my strength level… stuff like that. Still, if I play this right and don’t get chomped, I should be able to at least make the monster flee if not kill it outright.
That it was at five HP and still decided to attack me tells you all you need to know about how weak a level one is when caught outside the safe zones. Or, in my case level two. Guess the monster didn’t notice all the celebratory fanfare.
The werewolf doesn’t like the look of what I’m wielding. Unable to help myself, I say, “This is Sting. You’ve seen it before, haven’t you—wolfman!”
The creature growls in response. A nice touch.
It approaches tentatively and as it draws near, I can see its inventory.
•Lycanthrope teeth x 3
•Greater Werewolf Pelt x 1
•Werewolf Claw x 4
That also should not be happening. And the only options I can think of are either a glitch of some sort or this is the mysterious Graydon’s Sight effect that took place once I donned the battle helm.
King’s League is well-crafted. I was part of the beta team and we tested it every way we could think of. As soon as the title was released to the general public, none of the issues we’d found had gone unfixed. As far as we could tell, the game was perfect.
But with any released game and a massive player base, there were always new bugs.
Without any further warning, the werewolf lunges toward me, snapping at my head with hungry jaws. I manage to swing my shield up, catching the beast beneath its muzzle and hearing those teeth scrape and squeal against the silver as the creature tries in vain to bite its way through my defenses.