If you looked out from the top of the endless mountains, you would see a vast array of beautifully crafted trees, stones, caves, and cliffs, each hand-coded into the game. But if you were to look directly down, it would tell a different story.
Thousands of NPCs and enough space to support fifty thousand potential players waiting for them to log in.
And if you were to look up, you could barely see a tiny house cozy enough to fit just a couple.
This was the world of what would soon become the most immersive virtual reality, massive multiplayer online role-playing game (VRMMORPG) in history. Yet, over 4 years after its official launch, the surviving players would be walking out not with smiles, but with trauma, pain, and unexplained emotions as they left the world they had lived in for so long. This was the world of