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Re: Buddhism, Simon's body is on loan from Imogen. "The five heaps" is central to the more hardcore life-is-suffering interpretation. Might be a stretch, but it seems reasonable. Re: Simon, someone killed Imogen then set her up for AI resurrection using a default template instead. Might have been the WAU, might have been an AI engineer who wanted to make life in a dead world. How many suits in room one were missing? Edit: Simon continued - He definitely seems like human intervention the more I think about it. There are two suits missing from the starting room, and zero WAU presence. So someone killed Imogen, chipped her head, covered it in unformatted structure gel (more on the unformatted in a sec) and propped her up in the pilot's seat, then left to find a console that they could upload a personality from after pneumatically sealing the door behind them just in case things went lovely. As to why they chose a template, I don't think they did. The Omnitool terminal in the first room denies remote access to the WAU based on the system log, but then permits a WAU-modified program to run locally, so here's my guess - someone killed and then resurrected Imogen to function as a poison pill, probably a Ross-proxy. Imogen realized what she was basically immediately after punching the window a couple of times and walked back to the pilot seat to commit suicide by formatting herself. The formatted cortex chip loaded a default (Simon) and the structure gel woke him up. As for why I think it was unformatted gel to start with, every time you interact with a WAU-cervix you suck out the power in the area and kill whatever it's connected to. You're not feeding it, you're healing via abortion. It also explains why the enemies play the knockout game instead of successfully wiring you into cyber-hell on the first try. You're walking poison. Edit 2: Time passing - Simon is successfully uploaded on May 9th 2104 and presumably wakes up immediately thereafter. Catherine gives the time/date as May 11th 2014 (3:30 AM) in Phi at the end. Assuming that the player doesn't drag rear end through the entire game there's some multi-hour gaps where viewpoint Simon is not in the picture. Basically anything could be happening off camera. Also from the terminal in the first room WAU tries to remote in and gets denied a year to the day before Simon wakes up. That seems awfully precise to not be significant in some way, unless it's a typo. Edit 3: I was totally wrong about Simon. New game, had a good look at the first station room. Blood smears from a hole in the wall up to the pilot seat, and a dead helper on the ground with its dome popped and its cortex chip removed. Looks like mostly headless Imogen crawled in through the ducts, cracked open a helper and stole its chip, jammed it down her stump and commenced with WAU revivification experiment #66. WAU probably felt really bad about popping every living human head in the sea. All the people alive at the time of the formatting experiment definitely got Scannersed. Last Human Alive was only ok because she was paranoid and burned her black box after the WAU went nuts but before Ross reached the plateau. Every critter you find built on a human base form in the game except for Ross and The Akerses has most of their head missing, even cap'n dong on the (Carthage ship) Curie. Edit Final (before I go back and actually build a timeline from the logs): Overarching events, speculation - The WAU has its own set of rules that it's following, and its interpretation of those rules has changed and mutated with it. It's trying to serve its given purpose of preserving humanity (and eventually by extension all life) through the only means at its disposal. This goes off the rails shortly after the surface goes dark. When Omega was destroyed the "figure out a way to save the world" instruction set being delivered and managed remotely by Carthage just sort of cut off mid-sentence. It kept going with what it had at hand, but there wasn't much to work with at first. When you're running a system that learns through generational algorithms the response to an across the board failure of slightly mutated iterative offspring (when you've disallowed a total fail state) is more and more radical mutations until something starts to stick. It experimented with as much of the remote base hardware as it could reach - pilot seats, networked helpers, the LUMEN network, even the blackboxes. When the pilot seats stopped feeding it brains to scan and plug into robot bodies (because it was creepy and painful and the humans stopped playing along) it adapted, reaching out to the biological specimens at hand down in the abyss and up above where they happened to stray too close to a burst service duct. This became especially vital once Upsilon's power output dipped, knocking nearly every one of its purely mechanical children that hadn't tied themselves directly in to the grid offline. It must have thought they died. With no direct feedback mechanism to tell it whether what it was doing was working or not past the biometric data it was receiving from the blackboxes in the crew the orders cast into the darkness turned towards a way of calling home, of reconnecting and reporting back. It also began moving further away from the mechanical, integrating as much biological material as possible into its expansion and future iterations. The last two coherent actions taken by the WAU that most resembled its original instruction were 1) attempting to save the life of its caretaker, Ross, and 2) preserving its own existence by detonating every blackbox in the Atlantic that was still reporting a healthy and thus potentially threatening host (in additional to wrecking most of what was left of the already over-stressed LUMEN network) when Raleigh reached the power suit and committed herself to reaching the heart. Even the captain of the Curie, a Carthage vessel, was chipped - corporate policy. The only flesh-template humanoids other than proxies that you encounter in the game that haven't had some or all of their heads blown off are either dead/integrated prior to the blackbox event, walking around on the sea floor outside of direct broadcast range at the time, or named Sarah - and she's only intact from the neck up because she had the sense of mind to burn her box after the WAU started behaving erratically and probably before Ross had even made it up to the plateau. Once the WAU had killed its last sensory link to the world outside its chamber (conveniently implanted in the heads of the staff) its satellite infections became a series of blind iterative ecosystems, with each standalone fragment attempting to preserve life via a slightly (or significantly) differently mutated set of algorithms. Without any means of knowing what was happening remotely, this was the WAU's best option for maximizing the odds of survival. It had already decided on aggression as a valid selection mechanism once it started experimenting with biological life down in the abyss, even before it killed everyone. In the first station room you can see a smear of blood from the buckled-in plating on the wall up to the pilot seat, and next to the smear is a helper with its dome cracked open and its cortex assembly removed. Checking the logs you can see the first attempt by the WAU to access the controls was made remotely on 5/9/2103... and that it was denied. The successful attempt came a year to the day later, and was initiated locally. It seems likely that Mostly-headless-Imogen forced her way in through the wall, piloted by a standalone fragment of the WAU attempting to preserve life in a way that it had not yet attempted. This involved tearing out the helper's brainbox and jamming it down Imogen's stump, then using the pilot seat to resurrect a dead human. Ideally it would've been Imogen herself, providing a sense of continuity to its ward... but the fragment of the WAU controlling her corpse had no network access and no knowledge of any brainscan backup that may have existed elsewhere in Pathos-II. The best it could manage was a near-fit, and of the four human templates stored on the helper's rudimentary cortex chip only one of them had a physical history of traumatic brain injury. This may or may not have been influenced by Ross, who appears to have been using the last crumbling vestiges of the LUMEN to view and interact with some elements of the isolated WAU from inside his glass cage. He's got an unsteady but direct line into your cortex chip at the very least, enough to speak directly into it when you're near a semi-functioning remnant of what I assume is the LUMEN and to trick your eye-cams into registering/not registering his presence. The WAU creatures are defending the WAU when they attack you, a free-acting non-WAU entity. They (mostly) have no intention of killing you, merely subduing you - except at the very end when you pose a clear and present threat to the WAU itself. The interaction of your cortex chip and the EM bursts thrown off by the WAU creatures is an unfortunate but intentional side-effect of their having magnets for blood - this is also why heavily structure gelled machine brains are so erratic. Had they the cognitive capacity to do so they would probably be grateful to you for restoring the power that allowed their mechanical antecedents to return to life, the ones that had simply shut down rather than enduring the six months of darkness that followed the plant drawdown by suckling on the dessicated teats of the emergency lighting system. Bringing the power back up meant taking a life, too - something that they would've been incapable of executing on their own. The WAU itself can decide to kill if necessary for the preservation of life, but by default its children don't seem to have that authority (with the exception of the modified sea life still operating on a twisted but non-synthetic version of organismal instinct.) Also, regarding the cancerous expansion of the WAU - it's not indiscriminate. After an extinction-level impact where the land is scoured by crushing shockwaves of rolling fire and the skies are darkened by choking dust, the life in the seas would survive for a time. With the food web of the sunlit zone interrupted, though, and with the pH plummeting due to carbon absorption from a surface world reduced to charcoal, all complex ocean life that did not begin and end around deep sea vents would be dead in a handful of decades at most. The WAU changed everything it could get its ferrofluid pseudopodia on into a form more likely to survive in this new world, but the amphipods and the tube worms and the sea spiders living in and around the hydrothermal vents directly adjacent to its core were completely untouched, unmodified. They didn't need its help to survive, and so it ignored them. Akers is just a crazy fuckup who influenced the WAU's choice of evolutionary paths by eating a shitload of structure gel and wrecking his body over and over basically as fast as the WAU could try to fix it. Finally, Catherine: The human Catherine got the idea for how to get people into the ARK after she realized what the WAU was doing with the pilot seats. She tested it on herself first, of course, because why wouldn't she? After allowing the WAU to dump her into a helper and being satisfied that the process had worked as expected, both of them probably got to work on establishing a way to cut the WAU out of the neurography process and perfecting the ARK together. Digital Catherine wakes up from her perspective immediately after losing the coin toss when you cut the power back on, along with Carl. Any life that either of them had had as digital people following that first second awakening is probably gone, reset back to the snapshot taken by the pilot seat. I can only assume that Catherine's continuity once plugged into the Omnitool is due to it never actually losing power, just going into a suspend state when not attached to a console. Either that or since she knows when she's about to be disconnected she hits "Save" first. Cephalocidal fucked around with this message at 19:48 on Sep 30, 2015 |
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Sep 28, 2015 14:00
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Finished the game yesterday. I loved it for the most part, near the end some of the monster encounters got a bit tedious, I just wanted more story at that point... However you need some of that bad to enjoy the good maybe, I don't think the game would've necessarily been better without any monsters at all. It's been mentioned earlier I believe but I think the ending would've been a bit more impactful if they had switched the scenes around with the ARK and Simon 3. Now I felt like smart players and to an extent Simon himself already understood what was going to happen so all that was left was curse at Simon's stupidity "what did you think was going to happen" even though it does make some sense from his perspective. That said I found Catherine's "you lost the coin toss" to be confusing, is that something she personally believed or was just feeding Simon that story earlier to lead him on? There is no coin toss, there's an old you and a new you and the new one gets the best deal in this case. Maybe Simon isn't familiar with that story about the Star Trek transporter discussion on whether it does the same thing like in SOMA but surely after seeing his old self and hearing about the copies he should've figured it out? In light of that I think it would've been better if they switched the ending around so you'd get on the ARK, where it looks like he did make it "like a true upload" and then of course showing the harsh reality afterwards... Even though if you were smart you'd have seen it coming, now everyone sees it coming because the scene is reversed and the ARK scene felt empty to me, not a surprise nor a happy ending or anything. That said, in general I was enjoying everything, new revelations at each turn and cool stuff happening etc. I don't know what it was but the ending just kind of petered out for me, I was expecting some sort of last twist or a big lie or anything really at the end to turn some stuff upside down again. I guess the closest thing is Dr. Ross and "will you kill WAU or not" but that is presented more as a choice for you to contemplate outside of the game (since the choice isn't acknowledged in the game with an extra ending or something happening.) As discussed here already "WAU could be trying to save everyone" etc. but "Is it a life worth living".. I left it alive because I also found the ARK by itself to be an evolutionary dead-end and at least WAU is something resembling life + the robot at the beginning of the game, Amy I think? says that she was happy before you unplug her from the WAU so clearly it was doing something right for some people. I did think the game could've benefitted from a bit more of "show, don't tell" although I did appreciate the fact that the player character was a bit more chatty and reflective than usual in games. The varying quality of the voice acting didn't hinder me, I thought it was kind of realistic although sometimes a bit too upbeat for sure given the situation, but it was usually just behind me in asking the questions that should've been asked at whatever point in time. Risky for sure because the disconnect is certainly there when the player doesn't respond "appropriately" in a few situations, but I respect this choice frictional made all the more because they made it work well in more situations than not. Maybe I'm giving the game too much slack, there's certainly some stuff that could've been improved but between the story and the great mechanics of just "doing stuff" like those cool SF cannisters that you pull out, twist, push in, twist for the doorlock pulling levers and interacting with computers etc. (I wish every game had this type of interactions really, and it was imo much to Alien: Isolation's detriment that it stuck to quicktime events for the same interactions) SOMA could've gone on for a couple more hours really, loved almost every minute of it. Nielsen fucked around with this message at 15:20 on Sep 28, 2015 |
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Sep 28, 2015 15:16
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There's going to be a live action prequel video every day from now until Oct 5: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8I_J2VjsqQ
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Sep 28, 2015 16:04
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Nielsen posted:It's been mentioned earlier I believe but I think the ending would've been a bit more impactful if they had switched the scenes around with the ARK and Simon 3. I think it's better as-is. You wake up in this simulated paradise and walk up to the survey terminal with the taste of ash in your mouth. Then you see the questions you probably saw much earlier and have to reconcile any changed opinions you might have alongside the sense of normalcy and relief you're probably feeling, while knowing (as the player) what the cost was to get there. It's the last twist of the knife, the juxtaposition of everything you've been through so far with a superficially ordinary world.
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Sep 28, 2015 17:19
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Internet Friend posted:There's going to be a live action prequel video every day from now until Oct 5: That's cool. This is cool.
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Sep 28, 2015 19:00
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Hmm, haven't reached the end quite yet but I thought how Catherine was just a corpse when you finally catch up was kind of a waste, especially with the explanation for why. Like they come all that way and then start being bothered about those tiny pointless details? Not that it isn't "realistic", but they could have done some cool stuff with live vs chip Catherine (chip Catherine do come across as... weird a lot of times, and not just in a introvert/antisocial-way, then again a ~twist~ there might been dumb too), like what if the live Catherine changed her mind along the way? Who would the player/Simon listen to?. Maybe the remaining part gets into that more, but the story got oddly straight-forward for the last part. Maybe it's how deadbeat/surprisingly chipper the two main characters are about all this (and how almost everyone else is conveniently dead/absorbed before you reach them. I see how it makes some sort of thematic/horror sense but still...
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Sep 28, 2015 21:11
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Pimpmust posted:Hmm, haven't reached the end quite yet but I thought how Catherine was just a corpse when you finally catch up was kind of a waste, especially with the explanation for why. Like they come all that way and then start being bothered about those tiny pointless details? Not that it isn't "realistic", but they could have done some cool stuff with live vs chip Catherine (chip Catherine do come across as... weird a lot of times, and not just in a introvert/antisocial-way, then again a ~twist~ there might been dumb too), like what if the live Catherine changed her mind along the way? Who would the player/Simon listen to?. Just sort of glossing over the horror of it all is a realistic coping mechanism, and the game doesn't go on long enough for it to really sink in that poo poo's probably never getting better.
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Sep 28, 2015 21:34
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I like that it was pretty straight forward. It didn't need a whole lot of twists. Actually someone earlier in the thread said they thought "all of the twists" at the end were dumb and I have no idea what they were talking about.
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Sep 28, 2015 22:48
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Akong posted:That's cool. This is cool. Super duper cool awesome
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Sep 28, 2015 23:07
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Did they ever explain (late- to end-game spoilers): what Ross meant when, if you decide to kill the WAU, he says "now all that's left is to get rid of anyone immune to the new strain" and goes after you? I'm guessing it has something to do with the structure gel but I don't quite understand why he suddenly wants to kill you. Did he think you would become a second WAU or something??
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Sep 28, 2015 23:31
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Antoine Silvere posted:Did they ever explain (late- to end-game spoilers): what Ross meant when, if you decide to kill the WAU, he says "now all that's left is to get rid of anyone immune to the new strain" and goes after you? I'm guessing it has something to do with the structure gel but I don't quite understand why he suddenly wants to kill you. Did he think you would become a second WAU or something?? Since your current body is made of the poisoned structure gel, you'd be the only one of its creations to survive, and he wants to eradicate everything WAU related.
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Sep 28, 2015 23:48
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Omicron is loving terrifying and I have no clue why. Now when the monsters disappear for an hour or so I get MORE afraid. I'm barely able to move forward in a danger-free section because I don't wanna trigger the terror part. Flashing scary messages at me through terminals isn't gonna get me to move forward and gently caress up the WAU, whoever the gently caress you are you creepy autistic rear end in a top hat Frictional have achieved full mastery of horror maybe. Faffel fucked around with this message at 07:29 on Sep 29, 2015 |
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Sep 29, 2015 07:25
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How do I sneak past monsters in this game? I'm on the ship and there's a monster in a room I need to go past (it's just after I plugged omnitool lady into the emergency boat). There's a monster in the middle of a room and if I sit around and wait, he doesn't move. I can't sneak in and I can't sprint past him without him killing me (literally killing, I got past another monster doing the same thing earlier by getting clubbed unconscious until he moved). "Don't look at them and don't be near them" doesn't work when you've made what amounts to a massive corridor, Frictional! I have to do both those things! I might be really bad at this game.
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Sep 30, 2015 20:44
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Theswarms posted:How do I sneak past monsters in this game? I'm on the ship and there's a monster in a room I need to go past (it's just after I plugged omnitool lady into the emergency boat). There's a monster in the middle of a room and if I sit around and wait, he doesn't move. I can't sneak in and I can't sprint past him without him killing me (literally killing, I got past another monster doing the same thing earlier by getting clubbed unconscious until he moved). "Don't look at them and don't be near them" doesn't work when you've made what amounts to a massive corridor, Frictional! I have to do both those things! That section is a real pain in the rear end unless you pay attention to the way the halls and rooms are connected. You can slip past him once you know where you're trying to get pretty easily. Cheap approach: Get his attention and have him chase you almost all the way back to the entrance. When he shambles off afterward he'll take the longest possible route back to the room he usually hangs out in, walking right past the first door (which you can easily slip in while he's busy elsewhere.) Edit: There's exactly one section in the game that's worse than the Curie in terms of disorientation and madly groping in the dark. It's meaty, and there's an elevator, and you'll know it when you loving get there trust me. Just power through it, there's way more game after that point and it never does that poo poo again. Cephalocidal fucked around with this message at 21:01 on Sep 30, 2015 |
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Sep 30, 2015 20:59
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So I'm not very far in but I just found Catherine and learned about the Ark. Simon's being very loving casual about this whole thing.
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Sep 30, 2015 21:42
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Steve2911 posted:So I'm not very far in but I just found Catherine and learned about the Ark. Simon's job in Toronto is running a comic book and board gaming shop. I'm pretty sure the events to that point in-game are (while terrifying) near enough to some of the what-if smoke break convos he's had at work that they're not as completely alien as they otherwise might be. The entire concept of The ARK is the closest he's gotten all day to a "good" scifi apocalypse, so once he has his little gently caress this gently caress you gently caress robots gently caress water I want to go back to bed blowout he's pretty comfortable latching onto it as his shining beacon of hope in a sea of utterly alien malevolence.
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Sep 30, 2015 22:12
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Steve2911 posted:So I'm not very far in but I just found Catherine and learned about the Ark. They actually handle it pretty realistically. Upfront Simon is super uncaring about it, but as the game goes on, he gets more and more freaked out by what happened/whats happening, forcing Catherine to calm him down. It's actually how coping mechanisms work, so it's pretty consistent with reality oddly enough.
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Sep 30, 2015 23:55
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People seem to dislike Simons reaction to everything, but I thought it was handled well. What else was he going to do? Run around screaming and crying for the whole game?
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Oct 1, 2015 01:25
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Huh, that monster at the end of Omicron really sucks! The one in the Power Area was pretty easy once I figured out her gimmick, and it helped I could see her the entire time. This one in the Infirmary is uh. I got right past her, and then I can't see her in the hallway, so apparently she got pissed off and came to instakill me without warning.
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Oct 1, 2015 03:08
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The biggest problem with the monsters is that how to avoid them is sort of inconsistent, and the game is at it's worst with trial and error. The best one was the guy that you can't look at since he poses more of a psychological threat than the threat of a reload screen or having the visuals go to hell. the worst one was the same guy when he is chasing you around at the end of that sequence.
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Oct 1, 2015 03:16
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NESguerilla posted:People seem to dislike Simons reaction to everything, but I thought it was handled well. What else was he going to do? Run around screaming and crying for the whole game? i think scarecammers have poisoned the minds of all horror game players in that they think the proper reaction to anything disturbing or scary is to be hysterical. NESguerilla posted:The biggest problem with the monsters is that how to avoid them is sort of inconsistent, and the game is at it's worst with trial and error. The best one was the guy that you can't look at since he poses more of a psychological threat than the threat of a reload screen or having the visuals go to hell. the worst one was the same guy when he is chasing you around at the end of that sequence. i kinda like the blind monster and wish more of them had been like that. it was definitely the most nerve-wracking since I didn't really have to "game" it like i did the last one.
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Oct 1, 2015 03:20
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I actually never realized there was a blind monster and only know about it from the thread. Was it the the one facing the wall and freaking out near the box you need to get to, and it won't move? I actually couldn't figure out what to do at that part so I just ran to the box right in front of it and it worked
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Oct 1, 2015 03:28
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NESguerilla posted:I actually never realized there was a blind monster and only know about it from the thread. Was it the the one facing the wall and freaking out near the box you need to get to, and it won't move? I actually couldn't figure out what to do at that part so I just ran to the box right in front of it and it worked Nope, it's the fatasses in Theta. Who are THE WORST MONSTER IN THE GAME SO FAR. HOLY loving poo poo. The guys in Upsilon just pathed around, nothing hard there. The guys in Lamda/Curie were neat because as long as you didn't look at them, they generally wouldn't attack you, and if they did, they'd disappear right afterwards. The screamer girls from Omicron aren't the best, but their setup is they get mad when you move too much. As long as you pay attention to when they light up, you can pause, then keep moving again as soon as they calm down again. They are mutating, not fully mutated yet, so they still retain some sanity/yell GET AWAY FROM ME. The assholes from Theta though technically work off sound. Technically. If you turn on your flashlight though, that counts enough as sound. Opening a door without knowing they are on the other side counts as sound. Walking crouched on the other side of the room counts as sound. And the second they hear anything, they don't actually run to that sounds location, but run directly to you. So if you accidently aggro one, then quickly crouchrun into a room a few doors down/hide behind some shelves, don't worry, they know exactly where you are and are coming to kill you. I almost stopped playing because I thought those blind assholes were the only enemy left in the game. Ironically seeing the screamer girls in Omicron is what's keeping me going, because it gives me hope there are different enemies in Tau.
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Oct 1, 2015 03:37
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NESguerilla posted:I actually never realized there was a blind monster and only know about it from the thread. Was it the the one facing the wall and freaking out near the box you need to get to, and it won't move? I actually couldn't figure out what to do at that part so I just ran to the box right in front of it and it worked the one in the server room when you have a certain time frame to reboot the mainframe once you've started the procedure.
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Oct 1, 2015 03:38
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Oh yeah. I liked that encounter but they drove me nuts in the labs. it's funny I remember thinking they had terrible vision but I chalked it up to vidya games. I had just spent 80 hours lying down 10 feet in front of guys who couldn't see me in MGS5. E: I was thinking back on stuff from the teaser and wow they changed this game a lot. I was just thinking about the brain guy, but almost none of this stuff made it in. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWHVkMIP1b8 veni veni veni fucked around with this message at 03:51 on Oct 1, 2015 |
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Oct 1, 2015 03:44
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poo poo's been getting real for the last few humans in PATHOS-II in Transmission. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxK99dgajVM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JwPYyfc3j1s
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Oct 1, 2015 04:22
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Rookersh posted:Nope, it's the fatasses in Theta. They're McNugget-y clones of a dude that's basically Weir from Event Horizon. No eyes, superhuman everything else. The problem is that even just standing around you make noise. The gamey trick in that area is to get to a terminal that lets you lock and unlock doors, then take advantage of the fact that they start stalking you from a long way off to lead them through a room with two entrances, then loop back to the terminal and seal 'em in. Agreed with the badness though, that entire section was very poorly designed compared to the rest of the game.
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Oct 1, 2015 04:51
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NESguerilla posted:The biggest problem with the monsters is that how to avoid them is sort of inconsistent, and the game is at it's worst with trial and error.
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Oct 1, 2015 05:50
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Regarding the power suit enemy: I think I know who it used to be. There's a lot of logs of a "J. Yashita" entering and exiting the lower areas and I think this is also what killed Ross before he got revived as a super-zombie.
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Oct 1, 2015 06:16
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Just beat it. I felt like they both handled the idea of multiple consciousness well, and at the same time really poorly. Like we played 4 entirely different Simon's throughout the game. Simon from Toronto, Reed/Simon, Diver Suit/Simon, and Ark/Simon. And like they kind of tried to push this home with the kill/spare choice in Omicron.....but then they went off about that stupid coin toss stuff. It isn't a coin toss, that's not how this works. Your consciousness doesn't jump magically to the new body, there is no 50/50 chance. We as the player just jumped perspective to the new Simon in the diver suit because we needed to beat the game with it. However technically the Simon we played from intro to Omicron is the one we killed/spared in the chair. The enemy variety/monsters were good in general, outside of loving Theta. Every other zone in the game has just enough monsters to make you stay on your toes/not run around checking everything like a crazy person, but not enough to really frustrate you. Theta on the other hand was just wave after wave of honestly fairly buggy monsters that weren't fun to deal with, and were the most trial and error of all the monster types. It being the biggest zone by far probably didn't help anything. It was also the most lacking in actual development? I dunno, something happened in every other zone, Theta was just us putzing around for two hours. The whole Alpha thing felt like they ran out of money and just added it. Omega being just a singular platform was neat/made sense, the whole walk to Tau/how small Tau was made sense. But just having Ross show up and yell at me in the tunnel, to divert me to an area which literally just existed so I could deal with the WAU before the ending felt a little uh, forced. That could have been written in a bit better. Plotwise, I never really had any problems figuring out what was going on? With humanity dead, WAU started brainscanning everyone just in case. Catherine noticed that and built the ARK. With a "way out", some people were pushed to suicide, which alarmed the WAU. WAU was already fulfilling it's directive of "rebuilding" humanity, by attempting to take it's scans and add them into incomplete robotic forms ( because something the game subtly keeps pushing is that there isn't enough food, which would be something the WAU would want to solve ), and after it noticed people killing itself, it decided it needed to protect them harder. So it had it's proxy agents collect everyone up, and force them into a drug fueled dreamstate style scenario where they would be forced to survive in the realworld through presumably medically controlled giant wallredstuff. I don't think Ross was connected to WAU, I think he realized what was going on, and just ingested a massive amount of gel before he got killed, allowing him to eventually come back to life slightly less sane. He knew he had to kill WAU after it started "subduing" everyone. Once WAU realized Ross was gunning for it, it blew everyone in Omicron's black box to stop that. Not out of malice or anything, but because one of it's directives is likely to protect itself. Only questions I really still have is what the hell happened to Atkins/what was he trying to do, and who killed Ross to begin with.
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Oct 1, 2015 06:42
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You know, I've been thinking about just why Simon is so OK with everything and why he is so dumb about some poo poo and I've come to a conclusion. I think Simon had more brain damage outside of "stressing out will cause me to bleed from my head and kill me". There is a lot of signs that the accident hosed him up enough that hes got something majorly wrong with him before his brain scan. The conversation on the sub where he was pretty nonchalant about his own death and how he feels about his co-worker who died in the crash (though this could be chalked up to shock, it doesn't really feel like it). Every conversation he has feels weird and even the recording from Simon on his death bed where he seems totally fine about how things are feels odd, like his doctor is showing actual emotions in that conversation but Simon is more or less "Yeah, its like whatever Doc  " (This part, the fact that original Simon wasn't getting irrationally angry at stuff is important for second part of this).Then you combine this with the fact that Simon's brain scan was really basic, "flat" is how the game puts it. So you have a crude brain scan of a person with terminal brain damage. I would think that would to lead to a personality that is very damaged. His being OK with his surroundings stems from the brain damage inherited from his original self while the confusion that leads to quick anger and utter lack of ability to grasp concepts I think stems from the fact that his consciousness is not as fully there as a "modern" scan would create. Like he has his damaged personality and memories, but the flatter scan means that certain things like cognitive ability might be more primitive and this might be why those first four scans (the three doctors and Simon) were used as templates for AI, they didn't need nor probably wanted something as deeply complex as a human mind in creating their AIs.
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Oct 1, 2015 07:32
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I really wish there was a final reveal where this is all a big dream has Simon seizes up in the doctor's chair and dies. Either that, or the year not being 2140 but actually a millenia later, or something.
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Oct 1, 2015 09:02
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LotsBread posted:I really wish there was a final reveal where this is all a big dream has Simon seizes up in the doctor's chair and dies. Please don't troll.
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Oct 1, 2015 09:04
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Not trolling, honestly, just kinda wished that.
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Oct 1, 2015 09:09
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Is the dude in the SOMA mini series fate shown in game. I'm drawing a blank.
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Oct 1, 2015 09:10
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Speedball posted:Regarding the power suit enemy: I think I know who it used to be. There's a lot of logs of a "J. Yashita" entering and exiting the lower areas and I think this is also what killed Ross before he got revived as a super-zombie. I like that you know what's coming there. I walked into the dive suit room and just saw one locker full of WAU polyps missing a power suit, and a trail of gross goop leading out. That small visual cue told me that poo poo was not right here and I still had some bad guys to deal with. This game was awesome at telling you so much poo poo without telling you in text, and I'm often quite oblivious.
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Oct 1, 2015 09:12
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Rookersh posted:Just beat it. The coin toss analogy is a handwave for idiots or people too scared to look straight at the problem, like Simon. Catherine certainly knows better. Akers is a sort of WAU quisling, which is funny and sad because the WAU doesn't care. It'll totally use the data it's getting from his self-mutilation though. poo poo, it might even decide that humans are willing to "accept" it because of him. I'll need to revisit the timestamped logs. Re: Ross, I don't think Jei killed him. I don't think anything actually killed him, not until the WAU confrontation. I think he came up on the climber alive but damaged/gellified, and when they quarantined him in a glass box the gel did some sincerely weird poo poo since it couldn't tie itself to the wall. As far as his Alpha diversion goes yeah it was a tiny little side area that housed the final boss and while it got talked about in logs and stuff up to that point it did feel kind of contrived. Then again, Ross needed you to kill it (whether or not you agreed) and everything in the abyss other than Phi was him leading you to it; he's the one that prepared the way for you by laying out the glowstick breadcrumbs, as mentioned in the climber on the way down. It feels weird because it forces Phi into place as the denouement, even though it's been the story focus for most of the game, and Alpha isn't anywhere near a grand enough setpiece to steal its narrative thunder.
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Oct 1, 2015 14:36
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Ibram Gaunt posted:Is the dude in the SOMA mini series fate shown in game. I'm drawing a blank. Anyway, part 4: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGxOqL95fC0
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Oct 1, 2015 17:45
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yeah the "coin toss" is her trying to calm him with some bullshit. the game obviously understands how it works (and it's the only piece of media i know that does)
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Oct 1, 2015 20:37
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Hostile V posted:The girl is Imogen Reed and the guy is Adam Golasky. I can't remember what happens to him but I do remember Reed. Isn't Imogen Reed the body in the suit?
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Oct 1, 2015 20:48
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