Why the bug I wrote became a core gameplay mechanic?!
Chapter 100 Nitiandang Really Never Lies! (Second Release)

Chapter 100: Chapter 100 Nitiandang Really Never Lies! (Second Release)

Players soon found out that "Prometheus" could be played entirely as a party game, and the more dangerous it was, the better the show!

Was everyone enjoying the tense excitement of dodging monsters and scavenging materials to survive?

No!

They just wanted to see how their teammates could die in fancy ways, or witness the ridiculous and funny scenarios during the adventure.

Besides, the clips of the Lost Ones’ antics were also very popular.

Once players discovered that the Lost Ones could actually be captured to work as slaves for them, the nature of the game suddenly underwent a bit of a marvelous change.

Players no longer feared the Lost Ones; instead, they felt very close to them!

Everyone became the epitome of greedy capitalists, beginning to scheme ways to squeeze every last bit of value out of the Lost Ones.

There were studies on how far apart to place Jesters on a transport line to maximize efficiency;

Some players deliberately captured Lost Ones and arranged them in formations or terracotta armies;

Others grabbed a bunch of Jestes and placed them in their own large theaters, enjoying 360-degree, no dead-angle, brain-melting noise;

There was even one who built a cross-talk theater, and captured two Lost Ones who looked like cross-talk comedians to perform routines...

In the game, the Lost Ones had a unique mechanism: they would be generated based on the player’s image, and would also randomly extract and play back the player’s recorded voice.

Players leveraged this for their antics, deliberately feeding all sorts of setup lines and punch lines from cross-talk into the voice chat, as if feeding data to an AI.

Once fed enough, these two Lost Ones could be thrown into the theater to randomly play back the previously recorded voices.

Don’t laugh, when luck strikes, they really can perform a small cross-talk routine.

After all, punch lines are pretty versatile by nature, and there’s also a viral "Punch Lines Fit Everything" video edit on the internet. Now used in this game, it feels perfectly in place.

There were also players who creatively played hide-and-seek in the game: They’d catch dozens of Lost Ones with the Imitate Skill, everyone wearing the same face. Then, some of the players would blend in with the Lost Ones’ large brick-carrying procession, while the others would stand back with crossbows to shoot those they thought were disguised players posing as Lost Ones.

The disguised players would have to find ways to imitate the Lost Ones’ movements and behavior patterns to survive.

These outrageous videos made viewers exclaim: Can you even play the game like this?

Selling this to you so cheap was a loss!

Moreover, some players even created an "Apathetic Ones’ Bible" out of a spirit of mischief.

"1. The one thing that Divine Realm never runs out of is the Lost Ones; if you won’t do it, there are plenty who will.

"2. The Lost Ones are born to work for the Flame Thieves; if a Lost One cannot be put to work by them, it is worthless and should just be smacked to death with a shovel and tossed into the Divine Realm.

"3. If a Lost One can endure hardship, let them endure more. If the brick-carrying speed is not fast enough, it must be because there aren’t enough Jester Lost Ones around, so arrange for more of them, more densely packed.

"4. The wild Lost Ones are sometimes very powerful and dangerous, and we might not be able to beat them. Even carelessness could lead to infection and transformation into a new Lost One, which would be a loss. However, we can also exploit Heaven’s Guardian to take out those disobedient Lost Ones and then capture the ones that can work.

"5. Lost Ones don’t need good living conditions at all, so there’s no need to build houses for them. Just have them carry bricks non-stop like on an assembly line 24 hours a day.

"6. Lost Ones speak like Flame Thieves and look somewhat similar, and what they can do is also quite similar, but they are clearly two different species now.

"7. Jester Lost Ones mock and imitate the other Lost Ones, and the louder they laugh, the faster the Lost Ones carry bricks. Little do they know, they are just tools captured by the Flame Thieves for manual labor, just a part of the brick-carrying process."

These sayings from the Apathetic Ones’ Bible, on the surface, seem to be talking about game mechanics, but in fact, they are full of satirical implications about reality, bizarrely resonating with many working people and spreading rapidly!

Even after playing "Prometheus," many players have stated that they are unable to enjoy other building games as before.

"Wait, I have to carry the bricks myself?"

It can only be said that once players got used to the concept of capturing slaves, they never wanted to do the bricklaying themselves again, and for other construction games, this was indeed a kind of dimensional strike!

...

Of course, the unique characteristics of this game determine that "Prometheus" is a game with exceptionally high requirements, namely, it needs friends...

If you want to achieve the best gaming experience, it’s best to play with a team; the more people, the better.

Especially when the game is played with a full roster of 15 people, the fun grows exponentially!

Why 15 people and not 16? Well, someone has to drop out to become the number one Apathetic One.

It’s a bit more troublesome for lone wolf players, as many of the game’s bugs are not triggerable.

While the official service does provide an automatic matchmaking feature, it still can’t compare to the joy of playing with friends.

But that’s just the way it is, you can’t have it both ways with games.

To meet the needs of lone wolf players, the game must be playable both solo and in a team, which means the fun of teaming up would be practically non-existent; to make team play entertaining, it inevitably sacrifices the experience of lone wolf players.

But no matter what, "Prometheus", with its unique mechanics, has become extremely popular among streamers and content creators, and the strong social aspect has propelled players to eagerly invite their friends to join, further boosting its popularity!

It has undeniably become a game that’s broken out of its own circle.

And the reviews of this game on various forums have undergone a drastic change.

...

"I finally understand ’Prometheus’! It turns out this game is full of foreshadowing!

"All those unreasonable things at the beginning have explanations now!

"The Supervisor really didn’t lie to us, you can indeed freely build later on in the game, and you can even become a Supervisor, commanding the Apathetic Ones to carry bricks! We just didn’t expect that it would be achieved in such a bizarre way!"

"Indeed, the arrangement of the three jobs’ skills is also very ingenious. At first, I thought these were just three completely useless jobs. But now it looks like they’re all useful and intricately connected.

"Without the Warrior and Jester, you can’t escape; without the Mimic, you can’t make the Lost Ones carry bricks; even the Warrior’s Grappling can trigger a special fusion mechanism with the Heaven’s Guardian, which is also a prerequisite for the player to take over the Heaven’s Guardian...

"These three jobs are indispensable—it’s not about there being useless jobs, but players not knowing how to use them!"

"Thinking about it, could the selection mechanism of adventurers also be a hint?

"This selection mechanism is very unreasonable. The worse a player’s performance, the more likely they are to be selected. This may be precisely hinting to players that in this game, there’s a mechanism that can break the identity restrictions of Manual Laborers and Flame Thieves! Indeed, after the escape, Flame Thieves can become Manual Laborers, and after possessing the Heaven’s Guardian, Manual Laborers can become Flame Thieves!"

"Speaking of which, I have to mention the setting of earthquakes. Players can avoid earthquakes in certain ways, such as by controlling the number of official buildings constructed. However, this game can also be seen as an ’Earthquake Simulator’ to test the load-bearing system in the game.

"Maybe we could even organize a ’Structure Contest’? Everyone builds the most earthquake-resistant structures to see whose building can survive an earthquake! That’s also an interesting way to play!"

"Indeed, I even think that the story in the CGs can be mirrored in the game content.

"The CG at the beginning is all typical game narrative, but the last sentence is quite profound: ’But hey, when the Flame Thieves have experienced countless deaths in the Divine Realm, struggling to transport a single brick or tile, will they realize that the world has changed?’

"This line can be interpreted in two ways.

"First, from the narrative perspective of the game, Humans once established great civilizations, but with the extinguishing of the fire, those civilizations declined, leaving only thoughtless Manual Laborers repeatedly constructing meaningless structures under the Supervisor’s oversight.

"That is to say, Flame Thieves, through countless cyclical experiences and enduring hardships in the Divine Realm, even if they steal materials, the human world is already dead, and the thoughts of the people have vanished.

"Second, from the perspective of the game’s mechanics, if the Flame Thieves can realize that their destiny is to be confined, then they should try more possibilities, just as players in the game do, escaping from the Divine Realm and capturing the Apathetic Ones!

"In this way, the Flame Thieves steal materials for construction and use a multitude of Apathetic Ones to maintain a false prosperity in the world; this too, could be regarded as another concept of ’changing the world’.

"But whether it’s being trapped in the game rules, unable to change the world, or breaking through the game rules with hidden mechanisms, using Apathetic Ones to forge a false prosperity, the underlying tone of this game is desolate. There’s something quite interesting to savor about this worldview!"

"With this in mind, Nitiandang indeed never lies; whatever is promised in the game will always be realized!

"Even if it’s in an utterly inconceivable way!"