By David C. Daoust
The idea was sound, even if Ratchet wasn’t actually able to implement it himself. Since they could not seem to free the Crawler from the Drone that high-jacked it, then maybe they could just take control of the drone—and get the Sandcrawler moving that way. It made sense in his head, but Ratchet was having a hard time explaining it. Ultimately, he wanted to try and play the game on a local server.
Ratchet figured since they had access to the drones and a copy of the game that was used to control them, than the hub was nothing more than a server to unite all the players. Sharing this with Hugo, got him a blank stare and a shrug. Hamlin was fairly receptive, yet the idea didn’t really take root, until Ferguson suddenly woke back up with all the answers to Ratchet’s rather vague plan.
The bulbous Brain-stealer had the whole thing worked out pretty quick. In fact, the girls both had their drones up and running within a matter of hours.
The problem with the drone currently hacked into the Crawler, was that a player had to have a certain level of proficiency with the ‘Splicer’ profession, to be able to achieve control of a vehicle this large. Since they didn’t have access to the Hub, they didn’t have access to Chance’s skill level.
Ferguson explained this meant Ratchet could not even access that drone, without a matching skill level.
Neither Dicey nor Grace were ‘Splicers’. Both girls implied it was a wasted profession, or, at least, that was what they thought when it was just a game. Ultimately, they couldn’t access their old accounts anyway, so it’s moot…
This left Ratchet trying to play through the game- as quickly as possible. It wasn’t a bad game, but it was not what Ratchet had envisioned he’d be doing that day. He did have the girls there with him, the three of them were able to knock most of the challenges out, pretty fast.
(While the girls could access their drones already, Ferguson actually separated their virtual Spidermechs from the Drones, while they played through the game with Ratchet.)
The game itself went quick; it was ultimately a series of scenarios that told the story, and taught how to use the ‘spidermech’.
The problem: the ‘profession’ part of the game, that included the ‘Splicer’ skill, was clearly a time-sink, meant to keep the die-hard players, that tore through the available scenarios too quickly, busy for as long as possible. Usually, to give game developers time to implement more. Turns out players couldn’t even choose a profession until they beat the starting campaign.
Ratchet found himself flying around rocky moons, fighting off virtual Arachnoids, all in an attempt to find varying sizes of ‘creatures’ that he could then splice and control. Every time he achieved this one action, that seemed to take forever, he got one skill point.
One!
He needed eight-hundred fifty!
And that wasn’t even the max, it was the bare minimum to Splice a creature the size of a Crawler!
That Chance guy must have spent hours trying to skill up.
The girls were trying to up their own skills. Neither were happy about having to start from scratch, but they both seemed to think they’d be able to do some neat stuff in the real world if they re-did them.
One chose mining and the other engineering, both were keeping an eye out for the elusive creatures Ratchet needed to find, so he could come and splice them. All for that one more point. It worked out great since some of the creatures could only be found in mines. Grace was more than happy to dig into the ground, again and again.
Ratchet was pretty sure Dicey was purposefully being fairly reckless with how many Arachnoids she’d aggro, all so she would have to repair their ‘Spidermechs’. When he called her on it, she explained engineering went much faster when there were more players to fix.
This led to Hugo joining the game, then Hamlin, then Mr. and Mrs. Lauren. The four of them joined in the game as kind of a second wave, it took them a while to catch up, but none of them were going anywhere until Ratchet hit his mark anyway.
Despite only having access to three Drones, almost everyone in the crawler was now spread throughout the game-world, trying to find these crazy creatures Ratchet needed, all to regain control of the Sandcrawler.
Little by little, his skill bar started to fill. More than once they all started to have fun with it.
But the grind– the grind was awful.
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