Chapter 6 Why Acting is Important

Zhao Haiping felt another ten thousand imaginary horses stampeding through his heart, but the Red Armor Guard had already charged at him again, attempting to capture him.

He had no choice but to go all in, opened the box, took out the ink jade qilin, and after quickly feeling around, he fiercely drew the sword!

Upon holding it, he was stupefied; this so-called sword was barely longer than his hand and was even shorter and narrower than a dagger. Rather than calling it a sword, it seemed more like an oversized awl.

Fortunately, even such a "sword" benefitted from the talent skill "Sword Mastery"; Zhao Haiping exerted the strength of nine bulls and two tigers to kill two men and wound six or seven, and then he was chopped to death in the chaos.

As for Emperor Yanling, Zhao Haiping did consider just throwing the sword over to snag an award, maybe he'd strike lucky and kill him in one hit.

However, he turned around only to discover that the emperor had long since scampered away.

Fucker!

Back to square one.

This time Zhao Haiping did not rush to see his new talent skills, but instead started to seriously contemplate how exactly to clear this game.

Granted, last time he leveraged "Sword Mastery" and its muscle memory infusion to kill two guards, but this only made it clear to him: his progression was still miles away from clearing the instance.

"With Nie Rang's physical abilities plus Sword Mastery, that's the highest combat power I can achieve for now.

"Unless I hit the jackpot and pull a Ren Level golden skill, and it has to be a combat skill related to swordsmanship at that.

"The odds of that are too slim, I'd probably have to die who knows how many times to possibly get it. Moreover, it's still uncertain whether there are any Ren Level golden combat skills in the instance's talent pool.

"I can only consider my current combat power as the maximum power for clearing the game.

"But besides combat power, there are too many other difficult issues to resolve.

"If I am a bucket right now, even having obtained 'Sword Mastery' just barely brings my combat capability to a normal level for the bucket. Everything else is a shortcoming..."

Zhao Haiping summed up the reasons for his failure.

Upon entering the hall, he was unable to control his body and expressions, his excessive fear aroused the suspicious Emperor Yanling's doubts.

Although he managed a quick-witted blunder, Emperor Yanling no longer trusted him, which led the eunuch to fetch the ink jade qilin.

Zhao Haiping wanted to step forward and offer it himself, but his contradictory actions and words were detected by the astute Emperor Yanling, resulting in failure.

"That means, in order to get close, on one hand, I must be completely calm throughout, and just being calm isn't enough, I also have to appear harmless to gain the suspicious Emperor Yanling's preliminary trust; on the other hand, when I propose the idea of stepping forward to present it, I need to choose the best timing, or think of a way to cover my real intentions...

"This is too hard!

"If I could just have the other two talent skills 'Unflappable' and 'Silver Tongue,' and combine all three talents, perhaps I'd stand a chance of success.

"But the game mechanics only allow for one talent skill.

"How am I supposed to do this?

"For a newbie instance, this is practically unresolvable!"

Zhao Haiping furrowed his brows, starting to doubt life itself.

He'd played many action games and suffered through quite a few, but at least in those games, he could find ways to improve after suffering.

Whether it was repeatedly practicing targeted maneuvers, or looking for special items helpful for clearing the game, there was usually a way forward.

But in this game, he had no clue whatsoever.

It seemed virtually an impossible task.

"Could it be... this is why they require players to have excellent acting skills??"

Zhao Haiping suddenly thought of the requirements from the internal test player recruitment announcement.

One point was specifically emphasized: good acting skills, preferably of an award-winning caliber! Or if matching the character, a natural performance would do.

Before, Zhao Haiping wondered why one needed acting skills just to play a game, not make a movie.

Now he understood, the NPCs in this game were not your typical AI!

In other virtual reality games, NPCs stood around like stumps, only offering fixed dialogue options or some simple intelligent responses, many times like artificial idiots.

But what about the NPCs in this game?

Zhao Haiping glanced up and was promptly dragged out and hacked to pieces.

Not only that, every tiny expression and movement of Zhao Haiping's was scrutinized under a magnifying glass by the NPCs, any anomaly immediately raising alarm.

These NPCs, surely they could pass the Turing Test with no pressure, right?

Sure enough, this gaming company had to be quite something, possessing not only a virtual reality technology that achieved 100% realism but also such groundbreaking artificial intelligence technology.

Unbeatable!

Thinking this way, acting was indeed critical in this game.

Because every action the player took had to perfectly match the character they were playing, without any "breaking character" moments.

In movie-making, if an actor's skills are lacking, the audience might just disconnect, attracting some criticism and affecting the box office a bit.

But in this game, all the NPCs are the audience, if the player's acting isn't up to snuff, causing the NPC to disconnect, there's only one way out—death!