First.
Mimicking the dungeon's character-development and leveling system was definitely possible.
After all, when everyone first started out, the differences between their character attributes would basically be negligible.
Whether they could tackle more stages later on
would depend on how well they developed their projected avatars.
Of course!
Because of various factors in reality, everyone would still be different.
This would be reflected in certain innate skills, or in the distribution of their natural attribute points.
These minor deviations
would not only fail to affect the fairness of the game.
Instead, they would make it feel even more realistic.
And then!
The Abyss would be a stage where players had to climb the tower and race against time.
Outside the Abyss was the city.
Like the safe zones in Oulalili or Aincrad.
It would make traveling back and forth and communicating convenient.
Especially trading—all of that would be done here...
As for the inside of the Abyss!
There would also be all kinds of weather.
In fact, every floor could be different.
But this kind of weather would not be weather in the general sense.
Nor would it be like the situations in the later stages of Honkai Impact 3rd, Star Rail, or even Genshin Impact... where it brought about special effects.
Although the weather's effects would be more beneficial to certain characters,
in the end, once they developed their avatars to climb the tower, they could not switch characters. So using one character all the way through would be the most natural choice.
That had to be taken into consideration.
Put simply,
it was the most basic damage-over-time mechanism.
If a floor had freezing weather, it would grant a bonus to ice-element damage, but at the same time, ice-element resistance would be needed to withstand it.
The monsters would