76 PCWorld FEBRUARY 2019REVIEWS ATL A S
set a course for.
And wouldn’t you know it? A waterspout
shot up from the water behind us. And then
another in front of us. Then another! Whether
it was the gods, bad luck, or just some bored
dev, someone clearly was toying with us.
“Dammit,” yelled Joseph over Discord. “If
we lose this ship to this storm after all this, I’m
so done.”
The waterspouts crashed against us. I
manned the sails as valiantly as I could in the
madly shifting wind, trying to get us those last few
feet over into the new server. I took damage, the
ship took damage, but at last we crossed over—
the storm vanishing like a bad dream.
And so, alas, did the wind. It was only as
strong as a whisper; we might as well have
been crawling. Worse, we were starving.
We’d burned through all of the wood for
cooking while trying to keep warm in the
storm, and now our vitamin levels were so
low we were dropping turds all over the
deck. We resumed our little suicide cult,this time on account of hunger rather than
thirst. It was 2:30 a.m, at that, and we
wanted to sleep, but we were too terrified
to log out on the open ocean after
everything we’d been through.
Fortunately, Joe’s island at last loomed into
view, its cliffs looking like slabs from
Stonehenge blown up to titan proportions.
And of course every claim was taken, save for a
little pile of rocks where we had no way of
building anything. So we logged off and slept.
And of course Joe logged in the next day
to find our little ship under fire from a
mutagen-green ship of the damned. He was
frantic and texted me to hop on. But
apparently I’d died in the onslaught, and
because the ship was moving, I ended up
respawning in the middle of the water rather
than in the ship’s bed. Joe’s game crashed,
leaving the Vingilot unmanned. From my little
spot in the sea I watched a final cannon shot
take her down.
And just like that, approximately 14 hours
of work were gone. The ship was
gone. Our supplies and gear
were gone. The shipyard we’d
stuffed in the lockbox was gone.
The trip was for nothing. We had
nothing but our skill points, and
someone had even managed to
steal the claim on our desert
home in the interim even though
we’d visited it only a day before. I
Thar she goes. wouldn’t have been surprised if