The One Who Pulls the Sword Out Will Be Crowned King: An Allegory for My Issues With MMOs and Why I Liked it Anyways

On March 29th of last year, a friend of mine posted a link in our shared discord server. He captioned it, “Alright, new GOTY contender.” The game was called The One Who Pulls the Sword Out Will Be Crowned King and it was free to play on Steam, so I decided to check it out. 

The basic premise of the game is clear in the title: if you pull the sword from the stone, you’re crowned king. The game connects online and every time a different player successfully pulls the sword from the stone it becomes longer, heavier, and harder for the rest of the players to succeed. The gameplay and graphics are simple, but effective. You click on the sword and scroll to pull it upwards. If your hand slips or you loosen your click, the sword falls back down and the task begins again. All the while other players are doing the exact same thing, and if someone beats you to it, they become most recently crowned king and the game gets harder for you. It had a surprisingly massive fanbase in those first days, all vying to be king, coming up with different tricks to succeed, making things more difficult for people not on the ground floor. It was a perfect example of everything that keeps me from playing MMOs. Yet somehow, I loved it. 

I’ve never been able to convince myself to dedicate time to MMOs. It’s not for lack of interest or trying; in fact, I’m genuinely frustrated I can’t bring myself past the MMO aspect to play games I know I’ll enjoy. In January, I saw a clip of a cutscene from Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker. It was cool, it was dramatic, the music and dialogue pulled my heartstrings. I wanted to know more. I thought about making an account.

I spent five hours reading the lore on wiki pages instead.

The thing about Endwalker, which released at the tail end of 2021, is that it’s a conclusion to a story ten years in the making. It takes lore that’s been slowly revealed over the last decade, questions people wanted answers to, the world players saw built right before their own eyes, and says, “Hey. Thank you for sticking with us. This is a gift for you.” That reward isn’t designed for new (or potential new) players like me. It’s for the players who have spent years living in this world and growing along with the story. I could play it now, sure. I could spend hours upon hours playing catch-up and treating it like a single-player rpg. But that isn’t the point of an MMO, and that’s the main problem I have trying to play one. No matter how determined of a player I am, I will always be trying to catch up to people who started before me.

Even if I wanted to get into MMOs, not every game has as rewarding of a conclusion as FFXIV. In fact, most simply keep growing and growing. 

My roommate loves Runescape. He’s been playing for the last fourteen years. He got his first level 99 in a skill this past year and we genuinely celebrated. He’s been trying to get myself and other friends to play with him, and is always more than happy to provide items and help to newer players. In theory, it should be easier for me to make an account and start playing with him. In theory, it should be more accessible to new players since there are always new things being released. In fact, in December 2022 Jagex announced that Runescape will feature a brand new skill in 2023. But I still can’t bring myself to do it. Sure, I can participate in newer releases and start my necromancy skill the same time as anyone else, but that doesn’t remove the element of catch-up. Even with help from my roommate, I’d still have to put in an insane number of hours to get anywhere close to where he is. There are players who have been grinding for nearly two decades. Sure, there are players who hack and mod the game to grind for them. That would be a way to speed up the process. But I shouldn’t have to hack a game in order to enjoy it fully. And unlike FFXIV, there is no end in sight for Runsecape. If I take a break for a week, I’ll fall even further behind players who log in daily. The goal post of getting on my roommate’s level will always keep moving. 

The hesitancy to join an MMO could be described as a reverse sunk-cost fallacy. I know how many hours this game will take from me, and continue to take as it extends its story year after year after year. I’m just not willing to pay that cost. That’s why The One Who Pulls the Sword Out Will Be Crowned King works for me.

It has the same issue as a lot of MMOs in increasing difficulty for new players. But the game is actively designed to stop. Majorariatto, the studio behind the sword, programmed a maximum difficulty level. In an interview with Automaton Media, the studio founder even said that they had no intentions of raising the maximum difficulty, not even when it was reached within the first 24 hours of the game’s launch. The goal post may move for a while, but it is guaranteed to stop. In the same interview, founder Alva Majo expressed concerns that raising the difficulty level would make the game impossible for anyone who didn’t cheat. Players who did hack the game in its early days to avoid the grueling act of clicking and scrolling on their own to pull the sword were actively frowned upon by the rest of the community and quickly shooed away. The grind for this game is simple and applies to everyone: click, drag, and pull that sword for 30-60 minutes.

There is no playing catch-up in the world of The One Who Pulls the Sword Out Will Be Crowned King. There are no skills to grind, no rare or limited items to find, no worries that if you log out for a week you’ll miss something crucial. You won’t fall behind by taking a break, there won’t be old unfinished missions that disappear with updates, there won’t be a layout overhaul that undoes your favorite NPC. No matter when you wander up to the stone, it will always be you, the sword, and the players who came before and are on exactly the same field as you. They won’t get stronger while you’re away and the sword doesn’t get lighter because they were crowned king first. It gets to be what an MMO should be: just a game, and a game you play online with a bunch of other people.

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