You mentioned a while back you disliked a video about how bad SAO's mechanics are. Was it the one by Mother Basement? Im just wondering, but how come you dislike it?

Because everything about it (that I made it through) was wrong? And all of that wrongness could have been solved with a little research? And that on top of that he tried to sound very factual about it?

Like I understand from a modern gaming and MMO standpoint SAO looks like bad game design and marketing, but the series was written in 2001. Maybe you don’t know what online gaming looked like in 2001, but it’s a far cry from what it is today that’s for sure. In 2001 there were only two big MMORPGs on the market, Ultima Online and Everquest Online. Many people played on 56k modems, wifi wasn’t really a thing. Ragnarok online, and World of warcraft were years away. Ultima was the first MMO to be even be able to handle more than a hundred or so simultaneous users.

Reki Kawahara has gone on record several times to saying he played Ultima, and a simple look at it’s initial mechanics makes it pretty obvious. The game had a PvP focus where player killers were known as red players. The game didn’t use the now common holy trinity, it gave players freedom with their classes by giving them a large amount of skills to pick from and level up. Aside from not having magic, this is the basic game structure of SAO. Players are given upwards of ten skill slots and a few thousand skills to pick from to build their character.

As for the financial issues, in 2001 a game launch of 10,000 would have been a success. Ultima was the fastest growing ever MMO and it took six months to reach 50,000 subscribers. And when it reached 100k in a year the servers couldn’t handle it. So 10k for an initial run wouldn’t have been bad if the game was expected to sell much more later.

The nervegear was a successful piece of hardware before SAO, selling hundreds of thousands of units.

A lot of people don’t look at SAO as a product of it’s time, and many others don’t look at the depth of the game design in the novels. Instead just looking at the anime and claim Reki Kawahara never played a game in his life. When in fact SAO resembles late 90’s MMOs to point it’s almost plagarism.

So yeah, that’s why that video makes me so salty.