Indulge / Gaming / Love Letters / Last Chaos
Last Chaos
"WTS TA 20K EA"
The year was 2007 and I was in 6th grade. I was bumming around my friend's house doing nothing while they were all playing games on their laptops, exclaiming to one another different details about some sort of trading heist they were performing as a group around horses? I was immediately puzzled and proportionately curious, so naturally I sat with my friend and asked him what was happening. He was controlling this avatar in this 3D space. His avatar was a rogue, gender-locked as a female, as he always played as years after. His cousins were in the middle of scamming some one out of paying for a horse but instead getting a pony, poor bastard. That's not what made me smile, however. I loved everything I was seeing, the different icons of skills, how his character looked, his health, the items, levels, the other people in the world and how they filled the chat box with what was on their minds. This was in profound contrast to the windows pinball and VFX demo cd's I'd get from magazines as a kid.
This game was called Last Chaos. It was a MMORPG (massively multiplayer online roleplaying game) developed by Korean studio, Barunson Games; however it was more famously viewed as a title by publisher, Aeria Games. When I started playing was around the golden age for Last Chaos. The HUDs (heads up display) was a simple black, the economy and world systems were simple, the community was colossal and the game immediately surrounded you with an air of homeliness every time you logged in.
My friend allowed me use his laptop and create my own character. I knew this wasn't going to be my main one so I just created the first default: a Titan. The game had 3 male characters and 3 female characters. For the men: Knight, Titan, Sorcerer. The females: Rogue, Mage, Healer. Each one split off into a dual class at level 31 and it filled the game with a vibrant diversity of Archer's, Cleric's, Witch's, Wizard's, Assassin's, Ranger's, Elementalist's, Specialist's, Warmaster's, Highlander's, Royal Knight's, and Templar Knight's; all with fascinating nuances and dynamics.
Of course I had no idea what the fuck I was doing. Back then, the quest system wasn't as refined and useful as it is now. You had to learn the trade and different tricks, and how to network with the right people. This is something I loved about LC (Last Chaos), you had to become part of the community and then you'd meet people who'd want to see you grow.
My friend told me to go out and swing my sword at some wolves (this was actually my first taste at a classic RPG experience: quests, gold, loot, bosses, economies, trading, spells, etc). One dropped a Heaven Stone ( an item upgrade stone ), a rarer item which my friend pointed out and it was all exciting the way it radiated on the ground. Along the way I found some Tool Aids ( used for farming ) which were generally useful but not at the time for me. My friend told me to go to town and type this on my keyboard:
"WTS Toolaid 20k ea"
I had no idea what it meant. People started hitting me up and my friend helped me sell my spare items. He explained that WTS = "Want to sell" as in "I want to sell", then the item, then the value, and ea meaning each. There was an entire functioning universe and for some unexplained reason I really wanted to thrive in it.
When I arrived home from my friends house, I pleaded my dad to let me use his computer to play the game on. I switched it on and listened to the dial up noises fill the silence, and saw the windows XP logo come to life (we're dealing with tech from an ancient civilisation). I was saddened to find that after installing the game it would fail to work because my dad's computer specs couldn't handle it.
So for a month or two I pleaded my parents for a new computer for "school" and they eventually caved and picked me up a desktop PC with Windows Vista. I downloaded and booted the game and I became hooked.
To this day I am a man that prefers to run a Wizard or Mage over most other classes in any game. So I went with a sorcerer. Time went on, I "grinded" through enemies with my friend while he was at his house and I was at mine (a totally foreign experience) and we chatted at length over Skype. We talked about school while we hunted drakes and ents. We sometimes would walk to the town arena, a popular hotspot for the more seasoned players, and watched them wreak havoc on eachother casting skills we had never seen before. This potential power was exciting and provided something to look forward to. He later moved to Guild Wars (a different MMORPG) and argued that it was better that the pvp (player vs player) scaled players down to the same level, which I will always call bullshit on in favour of working hard to earn your place in the world and using that as your power.
The level cap was around 70-80, and there were other maps too; not just Juno. I made some friends and teleported to Dratan, a baron desert map with a whole new set of items, enemies, locations, and I loved it. There, my friend taught me how to hatch a drake of my own and one day I'd be able to mount it. I learned about parties - the kind without hats and streamers - where you could form a sort of coalition to mutually reap the rewards. Sometimes we would get a group together and travel to the strongest map, Egeha (but everyone called it Eggy), to partake in what they called a "Demon Party". A high level player would take down a Boucu Demon to virtually no health then stun it and teleport out of the area so they didn't get experience. All of us would then swarm the demon and try to actively stun and finish it off then all share in its enormous XP (experience). Some times we would decemate it, and other times he would pick us off one by one and everyone would flee.
I then learned about guilds which was a more serious party of permanency (unless you were a dick) with a team of other people who you'd be under the same allegiance with. Being in a guild granted different perks and a neat little purple name of the guild above your head. You'd have access to guild specific locations and treasuries, ranks, abilities and functional perks like XP blocking to farm SP (skill points). Guilds were Last Chaos' end game, with the strongest players unifying in two teams against each other in routine sieges for control over maps and over that map's economy and events. At the time, the strongest guild (not only in my server, Sarissa, but all the other ones too) was "Vendetta" (you can still bear witness to them on Youtube). I was in there briefly, but my guild resting place to this day is with "Affliction"; people I still keep in touch with and who actually reviewed this article before I published.
Day after day I was elated to come home and play more. I finally got to my dual class and was obsessed with becoming a Specialist because of how they could transform into a fire slingin' demon and an etherial suit of armour. I became more involved in the social side with PVP being frantic fun. I can recall one time trying to farm (synonymous with grind) SP in Prokion Temple, Dratan. Some wankers were poaching me any time I left the wall (a glitch in the game that meant you couldn't be targeted). I called up my friend (who for a while was always better than me at the game), his dual class of choice was Assassin. He would come into the temple totally invisible then jump them as they tried to attack me, and eventually scared them off. Those were some of the best times we had together.
I loved upgrading items and watching how it influenced my look too. Getting at least 4 pieces of gear to +4 would give you a little fairy on your shoulder, and getting your weapon to +4 would coat it with an ominous glow. At the time, the max you could get was +15 and every high level had it. They had enormous fairies by their head with lightning and runes hovering around their weapons. Some peoples names were Red which meant they killed other players outside of the arena or seiges, and some players had blue names for hunting down red players. Some days I spent grinding for hours into the night and others I just sat on a hill with my little drake chatting to my friends. I've been scammed and abused in game, banned, disconnected, killed and been killed, earned a lot of money (which at the time anything over 100 mil in gold was no joke, you could buy a fully grown horse or get scammed by my friend's cousins). But it was all worth it. It added a real life risk and immersion to the game.
I spent heaps of time in Merac and Maargadum jail, the place just had a really nice feel that complemented my internal emo phase at the time. I ran scared shitless from randomly spawning bosses like the Grand Red Dragon, or the Grand Devilroad Kamira. 40 was the average level and people struggled a lot back then but we struggled together. My friends would all message eachother when we saw some famous players like Vendetta's StrokeZ, or an in game Game Master. But like most people around highschool, I just had to take a break.
Around University I created a new account and came back on. I found that in the recent past, Sarissa and other servers like Katar were merged together and eventually discarded. I now play on Initus server 5 (or i5). The numbers dropped a lot, like the UK server is totally baron. The game had a few more bugs that didn't seem to be a priority for the new Gamigo team after they purchased it from Aeria. The HUDS were all different and you were given once very rare items like Platinum Blessed Iris' and Platinum Super Skill Pills, right off the bat. There was a originally guardian system that encouraged players to help other players get up to their dual class which would net you a cool little golden weapon at the end, that weapon now was default +15. Hundreds of millions of gold wasn't the rich man's game now, shit, billions was just the baseline for the middle class. The game has become what they call a P2P (Pay to Play), in the sense that if you really want to find any great success in the end game, you have to fork actual money on the game. There's no general PVP happening around the maps anymore. Most people in the arena just trash talk, and if you're not over Lv120, you had no power. Mounted pets are more or less useless now outside of a speed benefit, and most classes are made redundant; with the new class ex-rogue's dominating the pvp meta, and classes like elementalists literally having no leverage outside of providing one useful buff. Once again, a lust for money killed a game.
People are always talking shit on the discord about how the "end is neigh" in Last Chaos and that it's more or less a game on life support. It's upsetting. But I like to log in here and there and get the nostalgia of the sound track. To look at my characters and their gear and all the hard work I put into crafting them, even though they're nothing much compared to the rest of the players. I like walking through the maps and looking at my storage to see all those nostalgic icons of my childhood. Randol (Juno's main city) was changed up when the auction house was introduced, but I still remember in vividly the old topology. Sometimes I swing by Merac and throw some nostalgic spells like Ice Spike, Terra Spear, Divine Shield etc... I swing by Eggy and obliterate the Grand Gold Dragon if I ever come across it. I reminisce by the sasquaches or go through my passive skills (where I learned what Coup De Grace meant).
It's by no means a perfect game and I probably wouldn't recommend getting involved with it now, but it was my first introduction to the potential feelings I could experience through gaming. How diverse and invested I could get into the worlds systems and possibilities. It truly kicked off my adoration of games, specifically online gaming.
I suppose I'll leave you with images of my current characters, immortalised in this article as a testament to my hours and memories for all the experiences and people I've met within the confines of my room growing up.
