After the Olympics ended, Gamestar Electronic Entertainment reached an unprecedented level of prestige.
They reaped major gains across many fields.
Now that Gamestar was involved in live-action films and TV, animation, game merchandise, and toys, those areas were also bringing in even more money.
Although Gamestar had never publicly said so, many people had already begun to regard it as a comprehensive entertainment and culture company.
And most importantly, the company had almost no negative reviews—it stood out among all enterprises as something truly unique.
According to surveys by certain professional organizations, Gamestar was also the most coveted company among many industry workers. Unfortunately, it had become extremely difficult to get in; you needed real skills and credentials.
Among all of them, the luckiest person might have been the producer of Infinite World.
Ever since joining Gamestar, he was given access to Gamestar's internal engine development toolkit—something on a completely different level from the publicly available commercial Unreal Engine system.
Infinite World originally had all kinds of bugs, big and small—issues he had never foreseen when he first proposed the game's design.
In the past he'd only made simple little games, usually with very single-purpose features. They'd earned a lot of praise among his classmates.
That may have given him an illusion—that game development was always simple, and as long as you worked hard, you'd definitely get a good result.
But once the scale of the project grew exponentially, he finally realized: making games really wasn't that easy.
It wasn't just a matter of adding more people.
The bigger the game, the more complex the problems it had to face.
When he truly got hands-on with Infinite World, he felt that Gamestar being able to make Cyberpunk 2077 was simply monstrous.
No wonder so many veteran developers on forums had said that the release of Cyberpunk 2077 made them feel despair.
That despair wasn't about sheer size.
You could pile on data and content and reach something likeCyberpunk 2077.
But you could never achieve its depth through brute force.
Not to mention how all those complex systems could be fused so perfectly—just the near-realistic "true cable volume collision" in Cyberpunk 2077 was enough to make developers scratch their heads for ages.
There were small mechanics in Cyberpunk 2077.
Most of the time they weren't flashy, and ordinary players might not even notice them. Sometimes, because they were so close to real life, players would even feel as if they were "just supposed to be there."
For example, that true cable volume collision: it described how a wire would interact inside the game environment.
A character could hold the wire and move around with it.
In many games, such thin wires would clip through models because their volume was too small.
To prevent clipping required complicated program calculations—not impossible, but if you truly pulled it off, it would be dazzling.
And the Infinite World producer found that very toolkit inside the internal engine system—experience accumulated during Cyberpunk's development, left behind for future teams to use directly.
If this were made public, it would absolutely become something countless game companies rushed to imitate.
But inside Gamestar, it was merely a technical tool—just one more thing you could use.
And the internal engine had many more treasures like it.
It was like a vault.
And it felt endless.
Only now did he gradually understand why Gamestar had become the best game company in so many people's hearts.
Why so many people were desperate to join.
First, the compensation didn't even need to be mentioned: weekends off, all kinds of bonuses and incentives, and far less pressure than other companies.
Gamestar's game development was fast not only because directions were clear, but also because the freedom given to developers let them imagine boldly, pitch ideas freely, and implement them.
He had been at Gamestar for over half a year now, and what he gained here was far more than in the years he'd spent at Mikfo.
Those gains were the most valuable wealth—more precious than salary and money.
Now, if he were to make another game like Infinite World, he was confident he could complete the development in the same time frame.
Mikfo's development schedule didn't seem so terrifying anymore—if you worked a bit harder, it really did look achievable.
Clearly, he was now in a state of absolute confidence.
"Hey, good morning."
The Infinite World producer arrived at work in the morning. Gamestar employees around him greeted him warmly, and he responded just as warmly one by one.
Another thing that made him feel comfortable here was how harmonious the atmosphere between employees was. There wasn't that messy office rivalry.
Of course competition still existed—different development departments competed to make better games—but it was healthy competition, completely different from the toxic office politics in other companies.
"Hey, hey—how's Infinite World coming along? I heard you've made a lot of progress recently."
Someone suddenly leaned in and asked curiously.
The producer smiled. "Yeah, we've made quite a bit of progress. I've prepared an initial playable demo. Want to try it?"
The other person looked pleased, checked his watch, then nodded. "Yeah. I've got eight hours before my tasks are done. Taking two hours to play a game is fine. Let's go—let's go try your Infinite World."
Infinite World had been roasted to hell before. When he joined Gamestar, he'd been prepared to be looked down on.
But to his surprise, these people were genuinely interested in the game.
In daily life, they would gather with him to study Infinite World's development, occasionally offering strategies and sharing experience from their own departments—speeding up his progress.
You could say a big part of Infinite World's recent gains came from the efforts of many Gamestar employees.
"By the way… why are you all so interested in my game? Honestly, it should be boring and dull, and it wouldn't be hard for you to make something similar."
"Huh? Not hard to make something like yours? You're really underestimating yourself. Just your technical design for Infinite World alone is a great idea—it greatly solves the problem of not being able to guarantee game scale one hundred percent."
"Sure, the mechanism still has imperfections, but that's not a big issue—it can be fixed. The key is: you're the one who came up with the idea. As the originator of the concept, you deserve our respect. Even if the game looks messy right now, we all believe the future will be good."
Respecting individual creativity, not casually stripping others of their ideas.
The Infinite World producer felt moved… and touched.
"Here—this is the two-hour demo our team has finished. Actually, this demo test is already in the late stage. We can move what's inside straight into the main game at any time, and we shouldn't run into any nasty bugs anymore."
"Oh—oh! Let me try!"
The coworker eagerly picked up the controller and began operating the demo character.
Through portals, the character could enter all kinds of different worlds and go adventuring.
Before, every randomly generated world in Infinite World was bizarre and chaotic. The creature systems were messy, with no aesthetic appeal at all.
That was why so many players felt cheated once they played for a while.
Because at Mikfo's original Infinite World presentation, the showcased worlds were rich and beautiful.
Later, after people dug into it, they concluded that Mikfo's presentation had the smell of a scam.
Infinite World's worlds were randomly generated.
But the worlds shown at the presentation had been manually tuned—so they didn't look terrible.
Without tuning, the art style couldn't stay consistent.
But now, that problem was no longer a problem.
Gamestar's internal Unreal Engine system had a more advanced AI computation mechanism, able to help randomly generated planets produce scenes that matched normal human aesthetics.
Of course, that raised hardware requirements for players.
But there were solutions: players could load AI worlds already constructed by other players onto their own PC or console, and adventure inside those aesthetically consistent worlds—so most players wouldn't get stuck with a terrible world.
And as the player base grew and more worlds were generated, more and more worlds would naturally meet normal aesthetic tastes.
"See? This world already looks way better. I told you our AI computation unit really works."
The coworker spoke with some pride as he played.
His job was to handle the AI computation part of the engine—optimization. He used to be a student at the Benedict AI Lab, and after graduating he joined Gamestar directly as a dedicated AI computation designer. If a talent like him were outside, companies would fight like mad to hire him.
But he had no interest.
Those companies didn't have cutting-edge things like Gamestar—nor so many unreleased fun games.
"Oh, right—have you gone to the next department over to try GTA 5? I'm telling you, it's amazing."
GTA 5?
He knew that one very well.
It was one of Gamestar's flagship series.
For a long time, that franchise had dominated the charts.
Especially in the US.
Later, people even asked why Japanese developers could make a game with a GTA vibe—while Americans couldn't.
That was… complicated.
To make GTA 5, Gamestar had poured in enormous effort. The money invested wasn't much less than Cyberpunk 2077.
Other companies couldn't compare.
And in the US, companies that could invest that much into a game were rare as phoenix feathers.
The only company with comparable development strength to Gamestar was Brown Entertainment.
But Brown had no interest in open-world games like this. Huck Brown was obsessed with fast-paced first-person shooters—chasing Titanfall and Counter-Strike—and focusing on online RPGs.
A story-driven open-world single-player game wasn't his dish.
"GTA 5… is it ready to release?" the Infinite World producer asked.
"Not yet. I heard it'll still take at least half a year—headquarters' release schedule. But the main game really is basically done. Internally we can already play it early. That's one of our benefits. Don't you want to try?"
Early access to unreleased internal games was one of Gamestar's benefits—one many developers wanted even more than paid vacation.
"Really? Then I definitely have to try it."
The Infinite World producer was a diehard fan of open-world development games.
Otherwise he couldn't have come up with the wild idea of a truly infinite open world in the first place.
Without passion, even proposing the idea wouldn't have been enough to make him persist in developing it until now.
As the coworker spoke, the producer was already growing absentminded. Even when the playtester asked questions about the demo, his answers became half-hearted.
After about an hour, the coworker reluctantly set down the controller. He had to get back to work. Then he looked at the producer.
"This game is already coming along really well. I think you can tell the boss about your current progress. I bet he'll be happy. Then pick a good day to update these new features into the main game—trust me, players will be shocked when they see a brand-new Infinite World."
Would it really be like that?
The producer himself still wasn't very confident.
He insisted on continuing Infinite World mainly because it was his entire heart and soul—like a child he had raised with effort, something he absolutely didn't want to let sink into ruin.
So many times he had regretted not insisting on continued development instead of rushing it to market.
If he had held on and kept building, the game wouldn't have been cursed with so much infamy when it first appeared.
Now, hearing that this "terrible" game might suddenly be reborn, even he found it hard to believe.
"I'll go talk to the boss… but before that, I want to go see GTA 5."
At this moment, his identity as a player defeated his identity as a developer.
He only wanted to play the latest internal build of GTA 5—and see what unexpected breakthroughs this top-tier open-world sequel had in store.