I finally starting to think that as they’re standing around not playing the game, that Bandit is neither of them. Just an advanced NPC with maybe some strings pulled in her favor.
Bandit and the other “cool kids” are normal player characters, that much has been revealed already. The residual magic of the 5 makes them capable of embedding deeper than other MMORPG players.
Has that actually been revealed? It’s been hypothesised, certainly, and I know we’ve seen some factors that indicate it may be true, but I didn’t think we’d seen anything that settled it.
Nah, we’ve seen the “Four” before (ba-dum). In a previous scene H.R. said “the Five” and then corrected himself to “the Four”, seemingly signifying that Best died “fo’ reals” as Frigg puts it.
What? You don’t expect H.R. to know any better than the rest of them, do you? H.R. probably discounts Best because he’s no longer active in the game, and his avatar is not allocated to the area delimited by the game (not that he’s no longer active somewhere else).
H.R. will be as surprised as the rest of us if/when Best returns from the realm of El-swe’yr.
Yeah and when he’s done kicking ass there he’s gonna bust back into Arkerra with all sorts of cyber-punk gadgets and maybe a guitar that shoots lazors. And he’s gonna be all like “I’ve seen things you losers wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion…bitches”.
i do believe when Best (the character) died, there was some talk about his player still being alive but not necessarily in the game. and then i thought it was pretty obvs he eventually was ‘reincarnated’ as the drummer troll.
Ask yourself this: How often does falling into an interdimensional vortex kill people? In fantasy, that is, not talking about that incident at CERN last year.
Not often? Never? About right.
So, he’s out there. Probably shagging the blue thingies from Avatar, or maybe he’s joined forces with Tyrion and killed off all those damned mouth-breathers in Game of Thrones. It’s just him, the Imp and a continent full of fast women ;D
Of course, then he ain’t coming back…
did he fall into the vortex though, wasn’t Gravy able to sense his fading lifeforce under all that rubble? True, in fiction you aren’t dead until your body is shown, and even that isn’t a guarantee. The other four remember were truly dead until Gravy (who was dead too) brought them all back.
Think back to Bandit’s recollection of what happened to her when we all thought she was dead too. Obviously if it’s an MMORPG, there’s gotta be a respawn point or something when you die, unless they’re playing some sort of high graphics Roguelike where dead is dead, reroll another character please.
I can vouch for that. Epic final confrontation of the final villain, a trickster devil who had a perchant for getting child to do his dirty work by convincing them they had no choice, ruined when the one character who had the most reason to hate him got sucked into a magical mirror and the other characters smashed it to pieces before the fight even started, removing him entirely from the fight.
They don’t coz he didn’t. They showed five tanks with five people.
Not five tanks with four people and a rotting bloated corpse… that one in the middle is supposed to look like that :D
… The five were interviewed at a gaming con. And noted in story that the coverage these two watched wasn’t the only coverage. Plus Best appears to have been at least a minor celebrity in the real world as well.
While in world HR is the greatest threat they’ve ever known, I doubt he wants them dead in his own. For one thing… they are floating in vats in front of him on life support. All he’s gotta do is go find the fuse box or turn off the oxygen if he just wants to off them.
It does beg the minor question of how publicly their avatars are known to the general populace. No one seems to be following them around acting like OOC jerks, like you’d expect with a real celebrity PC. Maybe no one knows who they are, which might also explain the following question:
If Best is a minor celebrity, and he isn’t active in the game right now, why has no one been pressing the company on his whereabouts?
There has been hints that the five modify the code and their surroundings: After all, how many mmos let people get high on ssssssillibusss?
The five would just mod out all the OOC jerks. Turning them into obnoxious children or toothless old men… or soon-to-be-noseless land sharks.
How do Businessmen fight? Do they use merger/acquisition-based attacks?
Why does that make me think of human amoebas, absorbing their enemies into their own bodies?
They’re in an MMO right? How can there possibly not be a player with Alternate Characters? (I haven’t spotted a mule though )
H.R. however did say earlier that he was trying to kill off the characters as a way to extract the players so the player is presumably not dead (even if the fifth isn’t also playing Bandit).
Again, H.R. is not trying to get the players out for their sake. He just wants them to stop messing with his game so he can take their place (and then some). He would go in right now, but he’s afraid that the five would be able to resist/foil his schemes. So he’s trying to kill or extract or otherwise disable them.
Again, if that’s the case, he just has to turn off their oxygen. I imagine he doesn’t want the five flagship people advertised to make the game better dying, looks bad for business. He can stall right now, say they are in their by choice, but it’s harder to sell five corpses and not have a scandal.
He might not be doing it for their sakes, but I honestly believe he wants them alive and out. Maybe an emphasis on the out, but killing them is too easy for it to be that simple. And he strikes me as a guy who wouldn’t just keep them in for a challenge, considering he just tried to program their demise.
Pretty sure Andreas means HR is trying to kill the characters, not the players. “You’re messing up my game, I keel you!” seems a bit of an overreaction.
Obviously killing their bodies will not achieve his goal, or he’d have done it already. Maybe he suspects they’d become even more deeply embedded in Arkerra if their bodies die?
I was under the impression that the magic he used to get them in there is also keeping them alive, so he physically CAN’T kill them. Or did I read that wrong?
I’m not convinced that H.R. really is a villain. What has be done so far? He’s tried to end their game so that he can pull them out of the tubes and back into real life. Is that really villainous?
In the context of the real world, she’s as much a morally ambiguous character as he is too. Both want to pull the players out for their own good. RL is also feeling the power trip a bit and wants them out as an assertion of his power over his creation/discovery, and Carol is an enabler at the very least.
Technically, it would be “family is”, because family is the subject (the thing doing the existing) so the verb conjugation is singular. If you wanted to use “are” you could say “the members of my family are” because members would be the subject. Family would just be a qualifier. However, though “family is all artists” is grammatically correct, the singular/plural mismatch between the subject (family) and objects (state of being artists) still sounds odd. A way around this, while still using “is” could be “my family is made up entirely of artists”.
As for bad reactions, what kind of response would executive producers and music record executives draw?
Okay, here’s something I’m not getting. One of the Four is pretty obese. He’s been in stasis with tubes to just keeping him alive and fed. How is he not losing weight?
Why would he lose weight? It’s not as if he’s exercising and burning fat in there. And as long as they feed him as much energy as his body uses, that fat wouldn’t go anywhere. At least as far as I understand things. But I’m not a physician.
Though all of them should probably lose weight as their muscles atrophy from disuse. And obese people should have more muscles built up by lugging around all their fat. So from that point of view I guess he should get a little thinner.
Well, if you really want to get all technical about it… in game terms, their RL choices are affecting the game and the way it is written. So couldn’t their in-game activity (fighting, lugging things around across the countryside, random or not-so-random sex, being heroic…. and so on) be burning enough calories that they keep the figures they had?
And what, 40 comments and no puns? I’m disappointed. I mean, I know I never contribute to the pun scene, but that’s no reason for other people to not help out!!! C’mon guys, I mean I read every single one of these comments. And it’s not like I do that with every webcomic I read or something…
I guess H.R.’s plan has been arrested because the guards won’t leaf Byron alone. But this shouldn’t be surprising. Human resources never gets things right.
Everyone keeps talking on about Best and the “Four.” I must have missed something. I thought that Best disappeared whenever Bandit showed up and vica versa, thus indicating that they were two sides of the same coin. I.E. The two characters are being “played” by the same person.
They’ve been in scenes together before.* That theory only works if you count the post-death Bandit as a new character, but that Bandit doesn’t show Best’s trademark narcissism (that seems to be a projection of his real world persona).
In all seriousness, great comic so far. I finished archive binging and I like both the art and the story (so many times comics have on or the other). I cannot wait to see what comes next… although it seems I must….
Discussion (85) ¬
Hi Bandit!
I’d rather say it’s Syr’nj’s sister.
Nah, I think HR is playing Bandit! B/cause of the tie.
I finally starting to think that as they’re standing around not playing the game, that Bandit is neither of them. Just an advanced NPC with maybe some strings pulled in her favor.
Bandit and the other “cool kids” are normal player characters, that much has been revealed already. The residual magic of the 5 makes them capable of embedding deeper than other MMORPG players.
Has that actually been revealed? It’s been hypothesised, certainly, and I know we’ve seen some factors that indicate it may be true, but I didn’t think we’d seen anything that settled it.
Yeah. It was a FAQ day question.
Link, please?
“The four”???? What about *”the FIVE”*???? So does that mean whoever is playing Best died in real life, as well?
I think it’s just that he isn’t with them at the moment. He’s not actively involved in the game world. H.R. is concerned with the ones who are.
…I was wondering if that was a typo myself. Hopefully we get elaboration on this!
Nah, we’ve seen the “Four” before (ba-dum). In a previous scene H.R. said “the Five” and then corrected himself to “the Four”, seemingly signifying that Best died “fo’ reals” as Frigg puts it.
What? You don’t expect H.R. to know any better than the rest of them, do you? H.R. probably discounts Best because he’s no longer active in the game, and his avatar is not allocated to the area delimited by the game (not that he’s no longer active somewhere else).
H.R. will be as surprised as the rest of us if/when Best returns from the realm of El-swe’yr.
I’m calling it: best is totally in Escape from Cyberia now.
Yeah and when he’s done kicking ass there he’s gonna bust back into Arkerra with all sorts of cyber-punk gadgets and maybe a guitar that shoots lazors. And he’s gonna be all like “I’ve seen things you losers wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion…bitches”.
“… on fire off the shoulder of Orien… bitches.”
… Because Best and Frigg really are soul mates.
i do believe when Best (the character) died, there was some talk about his player still being alive but not necessarily in the game. and then i thought it was pretty obvs he eventually was ‘reincarnated’ as the drummer troll.
Ask yourself this: How often does falling into an interdimensional vortex kill people? In fantasy, that is, not talking about that incident at CERN last year.
Not often? Never? About right.
So, he’s out there. Probably shagging the blue thingies from Avatar, or maybe he’s joined forces with Tyrion and killed off all those damned mouth-breathers in Game of Thrones. It’s just him, the Imp and a continent full of fast women ;D
Of course, then he ain’t coming back…
did he fall into the vortex though, wasn’t Gravy able to sense his fading lifeforce under all that rubble? True, in fiction you aren’t dead until your body is shown, and even that isn’t a guarantee. The other four remember were truly dead until Gravy (who was dead too) brought them all back.
Think back to Bandit’s recollection of what happened to her when we all thought she was dead too. Obviously if it’s an MMORPG, there’s gotta be a respawn point or something when you die, unless they’re playing some sort of high graphics Roguelike where dead is dead, reroll another character please.
Ba-Da-Bing: http://guildedage.net/webcomic/chapter-12/chapter-12-page-18/
Alive. Kicking.
Probably playing Skyrim. He comes back a corpse-eater.
or perhaps when his character died, he was no longer trapped and got out?
It would explain why H.R. is so sure that killing the characters is the right thing to do.
Look at link above. He still can’t get him out.
Question for Carrol: Was this ‘artist’ tall, burly, ginger, with large, good hands? Did he have a penchant for inconic drawings of arachnids?…or did he tend more towards the *ahem* erotic arts?
I think I speak for many of us when I say:
Dun dun DUUUUUUUUUUUUUN!
Friggbutt!
Full-frontal Gravedust.
My eyes! My inner eyes need brain bleach!
I think things stopped going as you planned a long time ago HR.
Just another reason why H.R. shouldn’t be a D.M.
Since when do things go according to any DM’s plans?
I can vouch for that. Epic final confrontation of the final villain, a trickster devil who had a perchant for getting child to do his dirty work by convincing them they had no choice, ruined when the one character who had the most reason to hate him got sucked into a magical mirror and the other characters smashed it to pieces before the fight even started, removing him entirely from the fight.
Shoot ! How will they explain to his family that “Payet Best” died for real ?
They don’t coz he didn’t. They showed five tanks with five people.
Not five tanks with four people and a rotting bloated corpse… that one in the middle is supposed to look like that :D
…and this was so secret, his family probably wouldn’t know where he was, anyway. We don’t know if it was ever intended that the five get out alive.
… The five were interviewed at a gaming con. And noted in story that the coverage these two watched wasn’t the only coverage. Plus Best appears to have been at least a minor celebrity in the real world as well.
While in world HR is the greatest threat they’ve ever known, I doubt he wants them dead in his own. For one thing… they are floating in vats in front of him on life support. All he’s gotta do is go find the fuse box or turn off the oxygen if he just wants to off them.
He’s the villain because as he continues to play god, he is oblivious to how much he is hurting them in the ‘game’ world
but at the same time, whilst the game goes on, they’re trapped out of the real world.
so by trying to make them loose, he’s trying to free them
anti-villain? he has a good reason for it…
It does beg the minor question of how publicly their avatars are known to the general populace. No one seems to be following them around acting like OOC jerks, like you’d expect with a real celebrity PC. Maybe no one knows who they are, which might also explain the following question:
If Best is a minor celebrity, and he isn’t active in the game right now, why has no one been pressing the company on his whereabouts?
There has been hints that the five modify the code and their surroundings: After all, how many mmos let people get high on ssssssillibusss?
The five would just mod out all the OOC jerks. Turning them into obnoxious children or toothless old men… or soon-to-be-noseless land sharks.
How do Businessmen fight? Do they use merger/acquisition-based attacks?
Why does that make me think of human amoebas, absorbing their enemies into their own bodies?
“The pen is mightier than the sword.”
They’re in an MMO right? How can there possibly not be a player with Alternate Characters? (I haven’t spotted a mule though )
H.R. however did say earlier that he was trying to kill off the characters as a way to extract the players so the player is presumably not dead (even if the fifth isn’t also playing Bandit).
..I’m also waiting for Peter the Blessed to make another appearance. http://guildedage.net/webcomic/chapter-1/chapter-1-page-20/
Again, H.R. is not trying to get the players out for their sake. He just wants them to stop messing with his game so he can take their place (and then some). He would go in right now, but he’s afraid that the five would be able to resist/foil his schemes. So he’s trying to kill or extract or otherwise disable them.
Again, if that’s the case, he just has to turn off their oxygen. I imagine he doesn’t want the five flagship people advertised to make the game better dying, looks bad for business. He can stall right now, say they are in their by choice, but it’s harder to sell five corpses and not have a scandal.
He might not be doing it for their sakes, but I honestly believe he wants them alive and out. Maybe an emphasis on the out, but killing them is too easy for it to be that simple. And he strikes me as a guy who wouldn’t just keep them in for a challenge, considering he just tried to program their demise.
Pretty sure Andreas means HR is trying to kill the characters, not the players. “You’re messing up my game, I keel you!” seems a bit of an overreaction.
Obviously killing their bodies will not achieve his goal, or he’d have done it already. Maybe he suspects they’d become even more deeply embedded in Arkerra if their bodies die?
I was under the impression that the magic he used to get them in there is also keeping them alive, so he physically CAN’T kill them. Or did I read that wrong?
Cheers,
Cote
So H.R. (and his glasses) is annoyed that the players keep taking the blue pill?
Given how out of hand things are, maybe the players have stepped outside the binary solution set – and are taking the green pill.
The green suppository you mean :D
Wait wait wait.
Did they create a character just so he could be rhymed with orange?
Carol is as much of a villain as H. R. :-\
She’s more likely to be the doe-eyed assistant that always loved him then the one that’s secretly harboring thoughts of aiding the good guys.
And she doesn’t exactly have the doe eyes out.
I’m not convinced that H.R. really is a villain. What has be done so far? He’s tried to end their game so that he can pull them out of the tubes and back into real life. Is that really villainous?
In the context of the game world, she is.
In the context of the real world, she’s as much a morally ambiguous character as he is too. Both want to pull the players out for their own good. RL is also feeling the power trip a bit and wants them out as an assertion of his power over his creation/discovery, and Carol is an enabler at the very least.
Every time I start thinking I am understanding what is going on around here you guys pull this stuff on me.
You brought an *artist* home? Well of course he reacted badly! Any father would!
Anything less than rage would be irresponsible when faced with a possible artist son-in-law.
My whole family is (are?) artists. We react badly to possible dates with accounts, lawyers, or the dreaded merger-acquisition Businessman class.
… Actually I’m not joking.
… Man I hate this particular avatar. It just doesn’t suit me at all…
Well, you’re the one from a family of artists.
Make a new one!
Register with Gravatar, then.
Technically, it would be “family is”, because family is the subject (the thing doing the existing) so the verb conjugation is singular. If you wanted to use “are” you could say “the members of my family are” because members would be the subject. Family would just be a qualifier. However, though “family is all artists” is grammatically correct, the singular/plural mismatch between the subject (family) and objects (state of being artists) still sounds odd. A way around this, while still using “is” could be “my family is made up entirely of artists”.
As for bad reactions, what kind of response would executive producers and music record executives draw?
He should really stop being surprised when things don’t go according to plan.
They’re on like plan C or D, by now.
C or D? You’re being generous. I think they’re somewhere around Plan Ø by now.
Wait, *who* sees the Four as competitors?
I’m guessing it’s not simply Naror’Nj.
HR. By his logic, they are the only other people rewriting their fate in the ‘games’ script.
Okay, here’s something I’m not getting. One of the Four is pretty obese. He’s been in stasis with tubes to just keeping him alive and fed. How is he not losing weight?
Why would he lose weight? It’s not as if he’s exercising and burning fat in there. And as long as they feed him as much energy as his body uses, that fat wouldn’t go anywhere. At least as far as I understand things. But I’m not a physician.
Though all of them should probably lose weight as their muscles atrophy from disuse. And obese people should have more muscles built up by lugging around all their fat. So from that point of view I guess he should get a little thinner.
Well, if you really want to get all technical about it… in game terms, their RL choices are affecting the game and the way it is written. So couldn’t their in-game activity (fighting, lugging things around across the countryside, random or not-so-random sex, being heroic…. and so on) be burning enough calories that they keep the figures they had?
… or something.
Wtb wallpaper with Carol going “Wheeeeeee!”.
In the words of the great Latverian patriot.
“I’m seeing Squirrel Girl everywhere now and it’s starting to freak me out.”
-Doom
Byron looks kinda guilty… AHA! So he WAS a lumberjack!
…are you saying he wears woman’s clothing?
If there’s a place where “women’s clothing” is leather, chainmail, and plate, then I want to see it.
@SteelRaven – If he did then that would surely be an ameliorating aspect for the elven community Or so it would seem from the look of it.
And what, 40 comments and no puns? I’m disappointed. I mean, I know I never contribute to the pun scene, but that’s no reason for other people to not help out!!! C’mon guys, I mean I read every single one of these comments. And it’s not like I do that with every webcomic I read or something…
Fine.
I guess H.R.’s plan has been arrested because the guards won’t leaf Byron alone. But this shouldn’t be surprising. Human resources never gets things right.
Everyone keeps talking on about Best and the “Four.” I must have missed something. I thought that Best disappeared whenever Bandit showed up and vica versa, thus indicating that they were two sides of the same coin. I.E. The two characters are being “played” by the same person.
They’ve been in scenes together before.* That theory only works if you count the post-death Bandit as a new character, but that Bandit doesn’t show Best’s trademark narcissism (that seems to be a projection of his real world persona).
* Chapter 2, pp. 7-8. Found using http://guildedage.net/tag/bandit+best/
Pisher potchka, primes plot pitfalls, plans plotz, pissed paternal putz pugnacious, princess’s paramour penned.
Puce-pilus protector’s puckered posterior peeks.
NOOOOOOOOOOOO~
Archives…… completed….. must…. get… new… page…
In all seriousness, great comic so far. I finished archive binging and I like both the art and the story (so many times comics have on or the other). I cannot wait to see what comes next… although it seems I must….
Nerf Businessman! Their political contribution ability is so OP.
H.R looks like William H Macey