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legioN7 posted:There is an Easter Egg involving the Ash Twin Project that grants access to a unique conversation you can't get otherwise, and you are very unlikely to encounter it. Aw, dang, I think it's too late for us. :-\
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Aug 18, 2020 18:29
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pedrovay2003 posted:Aw, dang, I think it's too late for us. :-\ Remember: a new game doesn't reset anything. The only difference between the endgame and the start is knowledge of the player. edit: and the launch code. Can't forget those.
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Aug 18, 2020 18:46
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pedrovay2003 posted:Aw, dang, I think it's too late for us. :-\ I'll just put it in Spoiler quotes, then. The Ash Twin Project sends your memories back in time via wormhole, as you know. (generated while the sun is exploding) You can jump into that wormhole. This will send you to the next loop, as usual. But if you travel back to the Ash Twin Project after you went in... The Easter Egg: You can literally talk to yourself. There is another Easter Egg at the High Energy Lab, when messing with the wormholes and scout probe: There is a brief window when there are two scout probes onscreen via time travel; if you pull one of the cores out when there are two probes, the wormholes shut off with two duplicate probes when there should only be one. The Universe doesn't like that. You could certainly do these in an extras video or something. legioN7 fucked around with this message at 19:18 on Aug 18, 2020 |
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Aug 18, 2020 19:04
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Yeah, we were definitely throwing around the idea of an extras video, just to do some of the alternate stuff. There's a surprising amount of optional content.
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Aug 18, 2020 20:36
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Part 16 is up now, marking the end of our Outer Wilds journey. Amy and I still want to do a bonus video with some of the extra endings, but as for the main story, this is it. This was one of the coolest games that we've played in a while, and I hope you guys enjoyed the playthrough (I get the feeling that we were making a couple of you shout at your screens at us). We're happy to be doing this again, and we hope that we can keep it up.
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Aug 19, 2020 17:05
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So, to answer what you did in the eye; You set off a Big Bang, created a new universe as yours was dying.
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Aug 19, 2020 17:32
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legioN7 posted:So, to answer what you did in the eye; Yeah, that's the conclusion that we ended up coming to, also. That was such a good ending.
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Aug 19, 2020 18:16
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One of these days, I'm going to come to the end of this without tearing up, but that isn't today. The moment Solanum's theme starts up (oh, it's so beautiful)… That part, really, that image of dead Nomai, macabre at first, stacking themselves on each others shoulders to eventually become a spaceship... such a perfect distillation of one of the games major themes (using the discoveries of the past to make your own). One of my top 1o games ever, perhaps even top 5, so very good.
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Aug 19, 2020 19:01
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double post
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Aug 19, 2020 19:08
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eek, double post... good game, tho!
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Aug 19, 2020 19:09
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Ending spoilers i did find it sad that the Hearthians get to go out into space and are immediately wiped out by the end of the universe. Then again, the whole reveal that the Interloper containing some kind of foreign object that exploded and released ghost matter all over the solar system killed off the Nomai that were living there was also sad. But the game’s themes of science, exploration, and building on the past are all good even if it’s kind of bittersweet.
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Aug 19, 2020 19:24
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FlamingLiberal posted:Ending spoilers Yeah, it's definitely not the happiest of stories, but it's so well told that I couldn't help but smile for most of the time. And, most importantly, life goes on.
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Aug 19, 2020 19:27
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Oh, cool, it still tells you what killed the Nomai even if you don't find out by going to the Interloper. They're not so generous with Solanum - if you don't solve the quantum moon, I don't think she shows up at the end. I think you were generally pretty thorough on this game - you only missed a few things that I'd think of as main game. You didn't quite finish the Interloper, and you never went to the Black Hole Foundry but it just has some information that you figured out yourself (I had no idea how to warp to the Ash Twin Project until I got there because of course the Ash Twin teleporter will never line up with Ash Twin). And there were a few conversations with your buddies you could have had - Chert in particular has a character arc over 22 minutes because they, unlike everyone else, are actually paying attention to stars. And there's some Nomai stuff on Timber Hearth that you never saw. There are also some hard to find but cool easter eggs around that legioN7 mentioned. I very much enjoyed this game - it can be difficult to design a game where information is your only persistent resource, but they pulled it off, both with the stuff the main computer tracks and with little things like the shortcuts into the Sunless City and Hanging City.
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Aug 19, 2020 21:19
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pedrovay2003 posted:(I get the feeling that we were making a couple of you shout at your screens at us).  This was an outstanding playthrough of an outstanding game. I look forward to anything you want to put in a bonus video!
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Aug 19, 2020 23:25
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Hirayuki posted:Like the part where you were checking your screenshot while entering the Eye coordinates...with the coordinates, labeled "Eye coordinates," in the lower-left corner of the screen the entire time. ...I mean, yeah, like that. :-P
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Aug 20, 2020 00:38
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Qrr posted:Oh, cool, it still tells you what killed the Nomai even if you don't find out by going to the Interloper. They're not so generous with Solanum - if you don't solve the quantum moon, I don't think she shows up at the end. I think the explanation is there because in the LP they jumped into the centre of the interloper; before they died they got a log update I think. If you don't enter the interloper, the entry instead reads something like "The disappearance of the Nomai remained a mystery". I really enjoyed the LP, thank you for sharing it with us!  Regarding the number of Nomai, consider all the nomai skeletons you find throughout the game, particularly in the two cities. I think you actually find writings from about 40-50 Nomai across the whole game, and there's plenty in the cities who appear to have simply died in their beds or at their tables when the interloper's core ruptured, and presumably not all of them were people whom we found writings for.
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Aug 20, 2020 02:09
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Thanks for the playthrough! I have never played this game, and watching you two stumble through it was hilarious most of the time, and frustrating at times. Especially when you were making up crazy theories based primarily on pointedly ignoring just about all the information the game was not only throwing at you but also organizing neatly for you in a little diagram you basically treated as a checklist. I think you would have understood a lot more of the plot had you actually taken the time to read this info. I had to pause and rewind several times in order to read the helpful summaries you passed so quickly. But hey, the Sammy and Scooby method of solving mysteries by bumbling forward paid off, so who am I to judge. Congratulations. I still have questions about the story, but I think I’ll buy and play the game myself to get the answers unless someone answers them in the thread, since you never even bothered asking them.
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Aug 20, 2020 12:15
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HerStuddMuffin posted:
Some answers if you want: The Nomai really, really wanted to find the Eye of the Universe. But there was just too much space to search. Experimenting with the White Hole they found it was possible to travel backwards in time. Or at least, to send information back in time. But the amount of energy required increases exponentially as the span increases. To travel a useful amount backwards would require a whole looot of energy. Like, a supernova worth of energy. A supernova's worth of energy could send information back a whole 22 minutes. So, the plan: 1) Blast the probe out into space, searching for the Eye of the Universe 2) blank 3) Blow up the sun 4) If the probe finds the Eye of the Universe, send the co-ordinates back to step 2 along with a command to not blow up the sun 5) Rewind, try again If everything works the loop runs and runs and runs and runs until the probe stumbles across the location of the eye of the universe, meaning they got to brute-force search the entire universe with a single probe. And without even blowing up the sun, since they'll tell themselves not to! Step 3 didn't work. They couldn't blow up the sun. Then everyone died due to the Interloper. (many, many years pass) The sun blows up just as part of the perfectly normal stellar sequence progression. This activates the Project. However everythings a bit misconfigured and scattered around by now, so it instead sends your memories 22 minutes into the past. Please, feel free to correct the things I undoubtedly got wrong.
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Aug 20, 2020 12:35
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The Lone Badger posted:Some answers if you want: This is more or less correct, except: They're not searching the whole universe, only the local star system, which they know the Eye is in but at an extremely distant orbit beyond their ability to detect conventionally. The cannon is wired to select a random probe trajectory every time it fires. The decision to not blow up the sun isn't automated, instead the whole loop is continued manually each time, where one Nomai presses one button which causes one probe to fire, its data to be stored, and the Sun Station to fire, and the data sent back in time, and when they found the Eye they would just not press the button. The Ash Twin Project isn't really deteriorated in the game timeline, in fact it's almost perfectly preserved (possibly the Orbital Probe Cannon might have decayed a little over hundreds of thousands of years; maybe it really would have held up back in the day). The reason it's going haywire is because unlike the original plan the Sun going nova isn't happening by design, it just always happens, and the loop repeats indefinitely (or until you turn off the Project). The only other alteration is the Hearthians excavating some statues and bringing them back to Timber Hearth, but given that the statues were meant to be all over anyway (you see them at various locations connected to the Project, in varying states of repair), this isn't really a very big change. I forget exactly where the statue in the museum actually came from. It's basically a giant coincidence that you happened to be the person standing nearest to the statue 22 minutes before the supernova. The game asks that you not question why future loops always begin from the campsite and not the museum. It's also possible that the Nomai originally intended to properly decommission the Project but the Interloper took them all completely by surprise.
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Aug 20, 2020 13:03
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Ok, this makes a lot of sense, and at the same time raises more questions. The diagram of probe searches at the end that I couldn’t make sense of mentions more than a hundred thousand searches. Our intrepid adventurers didn’t lose quite that many lives. How did the other loops happen? Since the project was abandoned hundreds of thousands of years before the events of the game and the probe was supposed to be manned, who is sending back the probe results? With time rolling backwards to the same initial conditions every time, how did the probe not sample the same small chunk of space a hundred thousand times? Who pointed it at something else every time? edit: answered while I was typing. Does this have anything to do with the third active mask? We know our protagonist and hammock meditator are aware of the loop, but who is time traveler number 3? Also, if I’m understanding this correctly, the probe didn’t have to, and couldn’t, sample the entire universe in the time allotted. Just a small sphere around the solar system of radius 22 light minutes, at most. Which is fine anyway since the Nomai knew the eye was very close. HerStuddMuffin fucked around with this message at 13:16 on Aug 20, 2020 |
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Aug 20, 2020 13:14
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HerStuddMuffin posted:Ok, this makes a lot of sense, and at the same time raises more questions. The memory statues were designed to only activate when the project succeeded, or in case of equipment malfunction, so as to not burden peoples' minds with hundreds of thousands of loops. In any event, the project eventually found the eye, which caused the memory statues to finally activate - this is when the game starts. Presumably our protagonist has gone on his "first" voyage into space hundreds of thousands of times, but only remembers the ones that happened after the memory statue activated. Anyway, every time the sun blows up, the Ash Twin project sends back in time not only the data but also the command to fire the probe cannon. The probe itself is unmanned, the Nomai would be in the probe cannon's modules but not the probe itself. The third mask is the probe tracking module's, used to send the probe data back in time.
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Aug 20, 2020 13:27
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HerStuddMuffin posted:The diagram of probe searches at the end that I couldn’t make sense of mentions more than a hundred thousand searches. Our intrepid adventurers didn’t lose quite that many lives. How did the other loops happen? They did lose that many lives, technically. When the sun goes supernova, it activates the ash twin project. The cannon fires 22 minutes in the past, and then reports back to the project at the end of the cycle. The eye isn't found, so the cycle repeats. That happens to the hearthians nine million times until finally on the loop immediately before the game starts, the probe finds the eye. It transmits that back to the project, and on the next loop, the project tries to turn on the statues to alert the nearby nomai. Then they will know not to activate the sun station, as the coordinates are now available. This happens just as you pass the statue. But unknown to you, the previous nine million times the sun went supernova, you just reset without realising it, the same as everyone else in the game except gabbro experiences things. quote:Since the project was abandoned hundreds of thousands of years before the events of the game and the probe was supposed to be manned, who is sending back the probe results? The probe cannon appears to be automated. The tracking module is linked to the project, and stores its data there, it is the third mask. When it gets the signal from the project at the start of the loop, it fires without manual intervention. quote:With time rolling backwards to the same initial conditions every time, how did the probe not sample the same small chunk of space a hundred thousand times? Who pointed it at something else every time? The coordinates for each loop are selected at random. You might wonder if the random result should be the same every time, but this does not appear to be the case. Quantum stuff maybe.
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Aug 20, 2020 13:29
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It's actually possible to catch up to the probe-- it's fast as hell, and you can't lock on, but it's doable. Unfortunately there's no reason to do so; it's just an object, there's nothing to interact with. It looks cool, but that's it. I saw a video a few months back where the probe was fired directly at Timber Hearth. It just clipped right through and kept on going.
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Aug 20, 2020 13:39
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Wasn’t the Nomai Statue on Timber Hearth from Giant’s Deep? Specifically the statue island?
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Aug 20, 2020 13:54
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It was, which is why Gabbro was able to remember the time loops too: they were around the statue at the same time you were, and were processed.HerStuddMuffin posted:The diagram of probe searches at the end that I couldn’t make sense of mentions more than a hundred thousand searches. Our intrepid adventurers didn’t lose quite that many lives. How did the other loops happen? You're not thinking about it in a quantum manner, as the Nomai would. If time is linear as we comprehend it, you would be right to be confused, but if the future is lick quantum particles and thus is uncertain until it is observed… then it doesn't actually matter how many times the probe fires, or how many times you die. As long as the Eye could have been found by the probe, it would have been found, because the cannon would have shot every possible direction in that unobserved timeline- it's just a question of discovering which of the coordinates is right. That was the unifying theory behind Ash Twin, and why they were excited to blow up the sun to do it: because they could get what they wanted, without actually blowing up the sun. It's elegant, really... provided it works as intended, which they were never able to ascertain. Good thing they were turbonerd geniuses, eh? 
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Aug 20, 2020 17:09
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HerStuddMuffin posted:
One quick correction since I don't think anyone mentioned it specifically: the probe wasn't armoured to withstand a nova, the Ash Twin Project itself was. When the Nomai refer to the ATP, they're not talking about the overall plan, they're talking about the memory storage/time travel facility at the centre of Ash Twin, which is shielded by a thick layer of heat-resistant metal (which you can see the outside of once the sand has all drained) so that it will function for a few seconds of supernova while it gathers the power to send all its information to, uh, itself.
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Aug 20, 2020 17:22
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It makes perfect sense that the loops start at the campfire, and not at the mask. You have to reach the mask to pair, but after that you're part of the overall loop they have set up, and the loop definitely begins when you wake up because the probe fires at that time. As for the probe not following the same trajectory every time, the probe launcher is getting information from the future. It could either use that to decide where not to send the probe, or just use it as part of its random number generator seed so that there's a different result each time. And the total number of probes launched will always be probe number that found the eye + number of times you've reset the loop (and been aware of it). It's a little odd that it keeps launching probes after its found its target, but I guess the Nomai didn't automate turning it off, or from a Doylist perspective it's a cool visual to start every loop with that also gives you an obvious thing to investigate.
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Aug 20, 2020 18:07
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Qrr posted:It makes perfect sense that the loops start at the campfire, and not at the mask. You have to reach the mask to pair, but after that you're part of the overall loop they have set up, and the loop definitely begins when you wake up because the probe fires at that time. The logic of the first loop breaks down if you think about it too much, the sun explodes 22 minutes after you reach the statue for the first time, but the probe cannon fires when you wake up, and it shouldn't be possible for both things to be true. You can spend as long as you like in the village, but the sun can't explode until you are paired with the statue.
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Aug 20, 2020 19:36
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Reveilled posted:The logic of the first loop breaks down if you think about it too much, the sun explodes 22 minutes after you reach the statue for the first time, but the probe cannon fires when you wake up, and it shouldn't be possible for both things to be true. You can spend as long as you like in the village, but the sun can't explode until you are paired with the statue. Oh, the first loop is kind of goofy because they really didn't want the gameplay experience of "surprise supernova during the tutorial or like a minute after you start flying". But the timing shenanigans there must not be canon, there just wasn't a great way to handle it without potentially annoying first time players.
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Aug 20, 2020 23:21
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The Nomai power their vessels the same way that the Romulans from Star Trek do, with artificial singularities Although the Nomai's method of space travel is more like space folding tech, because it's instantaneous
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Aug 21, 2020 00:15
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Qrr posted:Oh, the first loop is kind of goofy because they really didn't want the gameplay experience of "surprise supernova during the tutorial or like a minute after you start flying". But the timing shenanigans there must not be canon, there just wasn't a great way to handle it without potentially annoying first time players. Yeah, I can accept that as a storytelling shortcut. It would have been more rigorous to have the loop start from the beginning, but it makes more gameplay sense to not make the player redo the tutorial from scratch until they can get through it in less than 22 minutes. There’s a lot of it and it takes a while apparently, between the hide and seek game to learn to use the transmitter, the drone landing training, and the zero g caverns, talking to everyone... wouldn’t want to end it with “you died” half a dozen times before the player gets frustrated and quits, not understanding why those crazy designers put a hard deadline on the tutorial level like that. Up until the first supernova, the game looks so classic, complete with the starting village where everyone’s purpose in life is to explain game mechanics to you, it would have spoiled things to blow it up early.
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Aug 21, 2020 07:15
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I just want to say that I'm super happy that it seems like everybody enjoyed the playthrough, and I'm really happy that there's such a huge discussion going right now. This was such a great game.
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Aug 21, 2020 14:49
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If you do follow up on your mid-LP thought of watching a speedrun now that you've finished I can highly recommend the ones that beat the game without ever flying the ship.
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Aug 21, 2020 15:03
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HerStuddMuffin posted:Yeah, I can accept that as a storytelling shortcut. It would have been more rigorous to have the loop start from the beginning, but it makes more gameplay sense to not make the player redo the tutorial from scratch until they can get through it in less than 22 minutes. There’s a lot of it and it takes a while apparently, between the hide and seek game to learn to use the transmitter, the drone landing training, and the zero g caverns, talking to everyone... wouldn’t want to end it with “you died” half a dozen times before the player gets frustrated and quits, not understanding why those crazy designers put a hard deadline on the tutorial level like that. I guess they could have had the statue not have reached the museum yet and be sitting on a pallet near your ship, activating when you walk past it on your way to launch?
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Aug 21, 2020 15:36
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NRVNQSR posted:If you do follow up on your mid-LP thought of watching a speedrun now that you've finished I can highly recommend the ones that beat the game without ever flying the ship. Holy crap, what.
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Aug 21, 2020 15:38
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Request: on your last video, could you showcase what happens when you end the loop on the quantum moon around the eye, having taken out the ashtwin core? You did it once but without the core and didn’t get blown up, but your consciousness faded as the ashtwin project triggered, id like to know what ending you get if you let the system get blown up without you. Presumably you could get back to the system after the shockwave has passed and get your ship back even, although there may not be planets for the moon to get back to.
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Aug 21, 2020 16:33
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I believe you basically get stuck there like Solanum was
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Aug 21, 2020 16:53
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HerStuddMuffin posted:Request: on your last video, could you showcase what happens when you end the loop on the quantum moon around the eye, having taken out the ashtwin core? You did it once but without the core and didn’t get blown up, but your consciousness faded as the ashtwin project triggered, id like to know what ending you get if you let the system get blown up without you. Presumably you could get back to the system after the shockwave has passed and get your ship back even, although there may not be planets for the moon to get back to. Oh, that's an interesting idea. We'll look into that one.
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Aug 21, 2020 17:00
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resurgam40 posted:It was, which is why Gabbro was able to remember the time loops too: they were around the statue at the same time you were, and were processed. There's no need to go quantum, each loop starts with a transmission from the prior loop. Assuming the trajectory of the probe is randomly determined, the prior loop can just send the seed it used and the currently loop just advances one, same way a random number generator works. Honestly, a systematic search instead of a random one would have probably reach the Eye "quicker" but since time isn't really a factor when you've got a time loop, it doesn't make a difference. Odd that Outer Wilds got right what Dark got wrong.
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Aug 22, 2020 00:58
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NRVNQSR posted:If you do follow up on your mid-LP thought of watching a speedrun now that you've finished I can highly recommend the ones that beat the game without ever flying the ship.
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Aug 22, 2020 02:01
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