Elder Tale

Elder Tale is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) that is the setting of the series Log Horizon. It is described as the world's largest and most popular MMORPG in history that has earned a dedicated following of millions of players over the course of its 20-year history. On the Japanese server alone, there are about 100,000 active players who have created some 1,200,000 unique characters.

Novasphere Pioneers
Since its original release, Elder Tale received numerous updates that vastly improved the game's content and graphic engine, but during the release of its twelfth expansion pack, Novasphere Pioneers, 30,000 Japanese players and several hundred thousand players worldwide who were logged-on at the time of the update became trapped in the game. Players call this event the apocalypse. Nothing is quite known whether the people knew about it.

System
The game operates like most MMORPGs with a level system and eventual skill mastery of character classes and sub-classes.

Virtual Reality Experience
Prior to the apocalypse, players logged onto Elder Tale and played online via PC. However, after the players become trapped inside of the game, they experience the world literally and interact with their surroundings as though they are physically there.

One main difficulties that players encountered was the use of in-game menus during combat -- specifically that accessing these menus is impractical while in the heat of battle. Instead of using the menus, Shiroe realized that he could create voice shortcuts for all of his spells.

In addition, Naotsugu quickly realized that fighting in-person would be quite different from combat as viewed from behind the computer monitor. While it was easy to rotate the camera on the computer screen to quickly scan the entire battlefield, vision during real on-the-ground combat has physical limitations, and blind spots especially when fighting large enemies would be significant.

Environment
The world of Elder Tale is based on Japan's Half GAIA Project (ハーフガイア・プロジェクト), a half-scale model of planet Earth. The differences between the GAIA Project and the world of Elder Tale is the post-apocalyptic setting.

Combat
In Elder Tale, players can use their skills outside safe zones when fighting monsters or PKing victims. All fights are not allowed as the Royal Guard will intervene and kill them with no mercy.