recolle | [ closed ] And on the wings of a dream, so far beyond reality

WHO: David and Yoon-sung
WHERE: CubENIX HQ
WHEN: One weekend where they're not working on bingo prompts
WHAT: What should've been just a simple beta test for a boss fight gets stupid real quick. aka David starts getting memories of being not exactly human.
WARNINGS: Mentions of and perceived body horror, otherwise pretty innocuous.

One of the oddly satisfying perks of being the bodyguard and personal assistant to the CEO of a video game company was that if necessary, he could fill in as a beta tester. Granted, it wasn't very often and he was hardly trained for QA, but let's just say it was an alpha-beta before getting shipped over to the QA team.

Or something like that.

From what Yoon-sung said to him earlier, there was a glitch in the boss fight that they're looking at today that kept potential raiders from being able to finish it and claim the rewards. Something about there being a glitched loop in the animation making the fight impossible to finish.

In the meantime, he's stocked up on coffee and snacks while waiting for his boss to finish programming in the builds they were going to be using to test out the fight. He doesn't know how long this is gonna take, but he does know that they need to be on their toes. It's been a while since he's played. His eyes are closed as he rolls his neck around a little, mostly to give him something to do while waiting.

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They needed a specific type of build to go through this boss fight. Both him and David had their avatars and their player characters, but to fight Bahamut they needed something more. Not the avatars - those were used for expanding on plots and maybe engaging players in mini-quests. At least he knew what was needed from the start so he wasn't going to make a mistake in the build.

With Alice chirping away as he finished the coding and let the two characters load, he reached over for one of the cans of coffee and waited. Two of the screens in front of him were lines of code while the main one showed the full animation with the small 'loading' circle flickering off and on while the server finished the build. They were going to run through this on a closed system to keep from any other outside problems making themselves known mainly because several beta tests had it crashed no matter where it was being worked from. That meant it was the source code having the issue and not the connections or the outside servers. Which meant that they needed to see it happen on their end.

"I hope you don't mind I'm loading up a couple straight fighters for this."

"That's fine, probably would blast through it too easily if it were our normal builds." David shrugs, a bit disappointed, but he understands why it was necessary. Dummy builds to make sure the average player could get through it with no problems. "AI on healing, then?" If he remembered correctly, this was a squad that was supposed to go through the boss fight, so they'd need it to keep them both alive.

"And the goal is to get the dragon's animation glitch, which wouldn't happen if we used our normal builds."

Because they had ridiculous builds being that they both were testers and had the advantage of being part of this from the beginning. It was one of the perks of being a part of the game design groups, even if it was a very unfair advantage if they ever played against other people.

"Of course. AI is also going to sit on the debuffs so we can concentrate on hitting the boss and triggering the animation."

"Right." He pops a piece of jerky into his mouth before wiping a hand on his pants and picking up the controller with his clean hand - if his past self knew he'd be working on helping test video games as part of his duties, he wouldn't have believed it. But here they were.

There was very good reason why they only used their regular builds to give out quests and stick strictly to NPC status for the most part. But that was neither here or there. "Take it that it triggers after a set amount of HP is gone. Alright, shouldn't be too bad. Both of us usually play more DPS builds anyway."

Yoon-sung double-checked that the code was scrolling past smoothly - the mainframe highlighting the codes that will need some scrubbing out later on - and then opened his can of coffee. Taking a sip, he picked up his own controller and turned to the game screen.

"Yup. We're looking at it first triggering at a third of the HP gone and then it should start cycling through it after it reaches half."

A couple taps on the keyboard, and the game started up with the two armored dragon hunters as they climb the last few feet of the rocky scrub land and the animation for the dragon's appearance starts. It was a nice piece of work, the scales glittering in the half-light, the way the flanks moved with the voice, and shake of each spine and the subtle flexing of the four wings. Yoon-sung was very proud of the people who worked on it.

"Got it."

David lets out a huff of air while waiting for the cutscene to finish, readjusting his grip on the controller while he watches. It's definitely a nice visual to see, and it's something he knows that Yoon-sung was proud of the concept artists for putting together. An experimental flex of his fingers, and he immediately settles into a more focused mindset, leaning forward and watching intently for the cutscene to end and the fight to begin properly.

They had some nice concept artists and the MMO was one of the few games that they could strut their stuff on. It was a fantastical place and anything worked, even that one joke level which had the boss who had a slight resemblance to a fast food mascot if it wasn't for the fact it was twenty feet tall and hit people with a giant haddock.

Once the cutscene was over, he double tapped the attack button and set off one of the first swings against the dragon. At first it was going to be claw-bite-tail in no particular order. With the size of their two warriors, the dragon went with the claw slash before the tail smack and bite. Sometimes it would do a double swipe, other times it would bring its claws down to knock them off balance.

David's immediately focused on the fight once the cutscene ends, moving to dodge the first round of attacks and try to get on the beast's side - no small feat considering the sheer size of the thing. It was beautiful, he'll give it that, but now wasn't the time to be gawking.

Once he ends up with the closest attempt at flanking the beast as he can muster at this point, he quickly activates one of his attack buffs before the tail whips around to try and hit the both of them. It was going to be a slow process, dodging and coming back in to attack, but it was something they needed to do in order to see of they could activate the apparent glitch. No point using their own characters if they'd just breeze through it.

[ closed ] And on the wings of a dream, so far beyond reality

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