Hello World

The first thing you probably notice when starting is the very lifelike graphics. Everything looks fine and it's impossible to spot pixelated texture edges or such. This is the antialiasing and texture filtering of the future.

The lighting is also very nice. Shadows, reflections etc. seems just right and light bounces off surfaces too.


The sounds are amazing too. The positional sound system lets you know exactly from what direction the sound is coming from.


The gameplay itself is quite unique. Your character really grows and learns things and choices you do have a real effect. Leveling up, however, takes a long time and as such, cool things such as a drivers license which lets you drive various vehicles will take you 18 years to reach (16 or 17 in some "countries"). Also, your character will actually start to degrade after reaching a certain level, depending on its physical and mental abilities and possible diseases.

The world in RL is huge. The world, called "Earth" is huge and there are hundreds of different "countries" and billions of players in the world. Many countries also have different cultures, languages and other things.

When you start to play, you don't get to choose anything about your character. You're just randomly placed in the world, inside a female characters womb. After a short while, however, your "mother" will give birth to you. At this point your character is very very weak and unable to communicate properly, so it can be somewhat frustrating at first. Better things will follow up later in the game, though.

Another intresting point is that your character is actually "related" to his/her "parent" characters. Your character inherits various properties such as looks from the parent characters, who also inherited things from their parent characters.

At the early stages of the game, your character is highly dependant on the parents, so the parent characters actions or lack of thereof will affect it drastically. This adds a certain unbalance between different characters as one might have spawned to good or wealthy parents, automatically granting them some advantages over those who have spawned to less fortunate ones.

When growing up, the actions you perform affect how the character develops. Also, the actions of other characters may affect him/her depending on the stats. For example if you do a lot of physical training your character will gain strength and agililty, but it will also require more food and drink to maintain itself in good condition.

Your character will gain skills by practice and any particular skill isn't directly linked to a certain level unlike in other games. Of course, a very low level character won't have very good motoric or mental abilities and therefore will have trouble learning advanced skills.

When the character reaches a very high level, it will become "old". This means the character will gradually start to become weaker and will eventually lead to death. No one is very sure what happens to the character after death, but there are many theories of it such as rebirth or going to a new world, often called "heaven" for good characters or "hell" for bad characters.

The developers of the game have gradually been increasing the level when death occurs. The old texts say characters in the early versions died at level 30, while now some even reach levels 90-100.

RL has quite much character interaction, and unlike other games, you can't survive without it. In the early stages you need to be with your parent characters, later you will have to provide for yourself by studying in schools and by going to work. You'll have to buy things from stores which are all staffed by other characters. Your character may even fall in love with a character of opposite (or even same) sex. Some countries also have complex social habits and ranks among people.

There are also very complex moral and ethical issues in the game. For example, you just can't go and kill an another character or even an animal you see. You will get very severe punishment in the game for killing an another human being (except under special circumstances mainly being "war", a fight between two or more countries) and most animals are owned by an another characters too, except in the wild.

Regarding early versions of the game, there is no clear records of the first versions. One theory suggests that the "human" race was the first initial race created in the world by the project leader and the world itself was created in six days, which is quite a feat if true. This theory is mostly documented in the text which is known ingame as The "Bible". Another theory with more scientific backup is that the developers gradually created more advanced and advanced character forms.



There's something for everyone in this game. If you like sim racing you could become a racing driver... if you like first person shooters you could become a soldier. How about Guitar Hero? Sure, become a rock star. The possibilities are endless.