If you have sex in Eternum it doesn't really count right? I mean your real body is in a bed wasting away while you play. So technically speaking, if a person went into Eternum a virgin, and they have sex there all the time, but not IRL, then they're still a virgin. They have simulated experience. Not ACTUAL experience. If sims counted for real life experience, then dating sim games would mean we all are dating women all the time and have harems in like 6 games. That's just not true. So if Eternum was real, I wouldn't see the appeal of sex in the game. You feel it, but it's not real. It's a simulation with another person playing a VR game. No more real than sex phone calls. Add to that with all the corruption and murder and cruelty, you're better off just sticking to real life.
I do believe that Eternum and the school life stuff is all one game. But from the POV of those in the story who think otherwise, I wouldn't put too much stock in sex in the game. It's like how in .hack//GU where people got depraved and loved killing in the game so much that they formed guilds just to murder newbies and troll people. Now imagine a group of losers IRL get into Eternum and become god tier in the game and everyone respects them for playing the game so well. And they bang whores all day long when they're not in raids. In their mind they pat themselves on the back for all the sex and fame they get but it's not real. It's just you playing a sim.
Unless there's some big reveal that playing Eternum is just teleporting your real body to a real world somewhere in space, it's all fake. So no matter how much fame or sex you have, IRL you're still just some jackass. Sure they say you have to work out to become strong in the game. But that's not how magic works. So if you stick to just mage servers and use magic and never work out you don't even have to work that hard for that.
The main problem with Eternum is what everyone is glossing over in the game. For all the glitz and glamor and depraved sex and war, none of it will fill the voids in their lives. For every Lex Luthor wanna-be trying to rule Eternum, that's still not the world. You're not taking over the world. It's a game. For everyone Isekai-hero-wanna-be, being the strongest in the game still means someone could shoot your real body as you sleep in your bed. None of it matters.
It's smarter to stop Eternum and the people who made it than play around in it and become part of the problem. And it saddens me that even the heroes have drank the Kool-Aid on that front. None of them care about helping people or the very real problems in the game and the society it's ruining. They care about sex, money, and winning. Maybe the whole point of the game is to teach people to stop being apathetic or selfish. The actual game, not the game in lore.
I mean Regarding the whole not helping society etc thats all 100% true yhea.
Regarding sec there is meaningless since its not real
well real life Hooking up with a hooker aint that expensive and its real sex so does that somehow increase your value?
Meanwhile in something like Eternum (Looking at it from the point of it being a Vr MP game not the light novel)
the people you would have sex with would be real people that are Interestet in you
So basicaly There everything surrounding the sex exept for the physical thing itself is real (including the pleasure,feelings etc)
So i would say sex in Eternum (exluding ingame hookers) can be even more "Real" then sex in real life (agein as watching from the perspective of a person inside the Eternum itch game)
As for it being smarter to stop it instead of playing it etc
Might be the better choice in terms of being moralie correct etc but just look at real life People drive cars it would be better to use a bicycle or walk people still order food creating useless packaging or order stuff online (agein packaging etc)
People dont act 100% based on whats best from a Moral standpoint (and it would even be hard to say what a straight up right thing is since moralitie is in and of itself something Humans made up based on individual opinion)
I see what you're saying. But unless the main characters are selfish or shortsighted, they know something is dead wrong about the game. Yet they log on again and again like addicts. They don't think "what am I doing giving money to a company that allows this". They don't think "all this evil and cruelty and I want to be a part of this community". They instead think, "I wanna hang out with my buddies and have sex and win fights and right and wrong are something for cops to deal with".
All someone would have to do is TELL me people get raped in the game ONCE and I would never buy the game. They even made it clear the cops in the game can't be everywhere and sometimes they get killed off. That's useless. That means might makes right. You can do whatever you want as long as you're OP. Even the admins won't stop you. Or someone would have stopped a lot of criminals in the game by now.
Given that, is it worth it? They really just wanna think like horny teens, even Nancy, and just play around and joke and have sex. Say they don't care to be heroes or compassionate or stick their neck out to help people in the game. Say all that. Okay, so why not just get rid of the game and hang out IRL? Why pay the company? Why put money in the pockets of an clearly corrupt company? Why be a part of the problem? It sicken me. I don't want to do it. I want to stop it and shut it down. But they players/characters just keep playing around and not seeing the big picture. It's so obvious. It's like they're on drugs and too addicted to see that they're on drugs. It's like walking into a room with a werewolf but because it doesn't attack you, you're okay with it. No questions asked, no alarm sounded.
Call me naive. Call me crazy. Call me a square or a fool. But given what they have seen in the game and the stuff that has happened to them that has felt real, I don't honestly think any of them should be playing anymore. Trauma and fear and hate for those moments should have taken their toll. And maybe they would want to prevent others from ending up scarred like that. I know I would.
So no, I don't care for sex in Eternum. I don't care how good it feels. I don't care if the characters like it. It feels like they're selling their souls to a company that is just giving them the wild west meets Mad Max and they're willing to pay $2500 for it just to get killed and raped with other players.
That's alarming.
Make a lot of sense, the game is good for me for now, i like the jokes, i like the history until now, but what you said is true, why the hell they continue to play despite knowing all those problems in Eternum? Well maybe this will be answered in another update... it's a major question.
Maybe this has something to do with those visions the MC keep seeing, since some of those visions he see when he is offline.
Maybe this has something to do with that letter he got from the little girl, since that letter mention a demon from Solomon's book.
Damn bro..... so many questions are poping on my head now.
I like the humor in the games too.
But I just wish the heroes were more heroic. More driven by something other than sex and their ego. I have no idea what drives them to ignore the suffering of other in the game. All I can think of is that this is a bleak future where people are so jaded and apathetic they only care about themselves and hedonistically fixate on their fun times when one server over someone dies or gets raped. That's worrisome. And not the kinda characters I wanna play as.
In OIAL things were odd but you were trying to figure things out to stop the cult in case theyre threatened your family or the city you lived in. Or maybe even threaten the world. But ultimately you sleuth your way into a conspiracy and get help from lovers. That's fine. But this time the dynamic doesn't add up.
It's a game. Government ignores the shady stuff in it. Even the death. Even the rape. Even the child porn. Even the trafficking. And with a little money thrown around anyone can be silenced. Morales and integrity be damned. And then enter the hero and he's just a horny young adult who shrugs unless you attack him or her friends. If a rando in Canada is murdered by Thanatos, I don't think Orion will care. I'm not getting a lot of sympathy and compassion from the heroes of the story.
My hope if they are working to that or maybe these characters are anti-heroes who are selfish by design. I've only got an hour into the new chapter because I'm playing so many RPGs right now. But I am still determined to see the game thru. If I only played on game on my laptop, it would be this one (all my JRPGs are on PS4).
The world is a bleak place, indeed, but that is exactly what we avoid every time we turn on the tvtv, or read a book, or turn on the PC to play games or keep up with the current news even if it is biased and totally focused on the misery of other people.
Key word being other people.
Even the worst atrocitys only affect us only to a certain degree, and it becomes a focal point to numb the difficultys that are personal and do have effects in the real world, but which feel so much less under our control, to which we are helpless.. I'll take the Eternum path out of it, any day too, if it existed in real life.
It's not easy to give substance to fictional characters, in any game of any sort. And yet, I feel like some characters have shown more depth then typical.
*Minor Spoiler alert*
For example, the day Alexandra becomes Alex, that felt emotional to me.
To me, Eternum is one of the most fascinating games of the moment. How far the world has come from the times of Pong lol
I'm not saying that it doesn't have heart as a game. But I want to see them do some good. It doesn't feel like they care to change things and make them better. More like they just wanna be famous. But you're right, I love half the cast at least. And some great comedy is in the script. But I'm not gonna pretend that these guys seem like the types to solve problems. More like they just want win the game. Maybe even to fill a void in their lives.
I still have a theory that all this, the whole game, is a game. Eternum is Orion's whole life. And he has to figure that out to escape it. In the reality it would be a big wake up call, that after killing his enemies and having a huge orgy with the ladies, he wakes up and he's a fat balding loser who runs a crappy company that adds problems to the environment or something. Not some cool lady's man. I'm starting to think even Chang isn't real.
I get what you're saying, but there are several things to nuance this.
The initial premise, the discoverys made about the fate of the ones who get their accounts terminated, might lead them to a point where they actually have a very visual enemy, and have something to fight against, as opposed to stumbling around in the dark, seeing vague shapes and hints of this antagonistic force.
Maybe their actions are already causing change, using loopholes in the system to get to a result that the system wasn't prepared for, and is ill equipped to deal with.
Maybe, through the progression of the story, it becomes more clear which are the rest of the forces at play... I personally think there is some parallel world or worlds being exploited through technology, and in the end, the player will have to face the choice of either freeing all those entitys, or continuing on with the enslavement... remember, the game isn't exactly approaching the finish line.
And let's face it, when faced with a world like this, how many people's first thought would be "ahhhhh, awesome, now I have yet another world to save! Who cares about pleasure and fun when I can play this game to be as depressed about the state of the world as possible!"
I, personally, wouldn't exactly enter such a world with that mindset, but I think, through the storyline, it will become an integral part of the game to really become the hero... and who's to say being a hero can't mean getting some action, as well, lol