The blog orignally was posted on April 2nd, 2015 by Dawid Kraus on the official website which can be found here:

You can post ANY sort of question that comes to your mind there, and the lead writer will answer!

http://age-of-aincrad.com/blog/black-abyss-blog-post-1/

About Me:

Hi, I’m Dawid, better know as Black Abyss, and I’m the current Lead Writer of Age of Aincrad. I’m the guy who keeps an eye on everything that goes into the game. I usually write big things like mechanics, massive storylines, work on major points on the world maps, locations, bosses and in-game systems. In private life I’m a gamer and writer, I’m also learning and attaining skills in all game development branches so I have a better skill palette in the future.

What I’m going to write about:

What I’m going to do here is bring you the composition of the world you’ll be playing in, the look of it, how the quests will work, details about the lore of the game as well as even show some quests, locations, secrets and what everyone wants to know the most – Floor Bosses. I will also try and answer the most interesting and mostly asked questions you’ll shoot at me below this blog post or on the forums in the coming blog posts. I’ll start the first blog post with a few questions I’m getting quite frequently in the past few days.

What do the floors look like?

What you all probably know right now about the world in AoA is that there are 100 floors planned, although we won’t release all 100 at once of course. Each floor will try as hard as possible to have its own style and be different from the others, but there’s only a set amount of themes we can think of for floors and making 100 floors is a bit too much for the amount of possible themes. Themes might be re-used sometimes, for example two forest floors instead of just one, but we’ll of course try to keep them as far away from each other as possible, so for example floor 7 and floor 69. While picking floors we also won’t look at things like historical chronology, so don’t wonder if you see a floor set in the past when Dinosaurs were still roaming the earth, and then a floor set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland like Fallout.

What’s the story?

Unlike the SAO anime where there was little to none story at all apart from side quests which were rarely shown (and when shown, they were boring), we will have little bits of story involved between the floors as well as the grand main quest – reaching the top floor. AoA will have a set of characters who will show up around the floors and figure as helpers on your journey, might be involved in special events, even help you out in boss fights. We are currently working on those and as soon as they’re done, I’ll make sure to post them in the coming blog posts as well.

Will it be dark?

That’s a question I hear a lot, and I love answering it. We are aiming for a mix between funny, humorous quests which (at least we hope so) won’t make you fall asleep whenever you try to take a quest from an NPC and the usual neutral quests, because we are trying to satisfy everyone, thus apart from funny, complex quests you have to expect some “Pls giv me da applz” quests.

Now for the dark part.

A big inspiration for me when writing my quests is horror works like Stephen King books, as well as three particular game series – Gothic, The Witcher and the Souls Series. All three have a creepy, heavy atmosphere and when I write I usually try to keep the atmosphere similar to those games. Basically if you played through all three, you know what you can expect from some of the biggest AoA quests – a heavy and dark atmosphere.

That’s it for this blog.

In the next blog post I’ll talk about how our quest system works, what there is to do other than accept and complete quests (events!!!) and tell you why there are bosses, the 100 floors and what was in the world of Aincrad before that.

See you all next time!

Dawid / Blacky.