Fuligin posted:

Just picked this up from the sale, had a few questions that I didn't see mentioned in the OP. Is Hard the actual "normal" difficulty (in the sense that you will be challenged to use all your abilities and junk), or is it obnoxious bullshit? Any relevant mods to improve the experience or should I go in clean?

Feels Villeneuve posted:

The sound mixing is totally hosed in this game. The biggest thing I notice early is that janitor lady in the hallway in the tutorial level- her voice is so loud it almost sounds like it's overdriving my speakers.

KirbyKhan posted:

I started off as a human mod only run. The way the ammo and resource management in this game really gripped me. I always managed to run REAL close to running out of pistol and shotgun ammo before running into a new fabricator. Yes, I COULD have used all the mineral blocks on neuromods if I used the wrench more often. No, I WON'T because I'm a big ol scaredy baby who needs more bullets than the national guard before I enter the next room filled with coffee cups and phantoms.

Fantastic balance!

ConfusedUs posted:

Yeah I did the personnel tracker thing too. He just doesn't light up for me.

Sardonik posted:

Did anybody else get the impression by the ending that the people who were operators in the ending were active participants in the simulation, rather than just watching simulated versions of themselves? After the fact it felt like a lot of the dialog, particularly from January was written as if they have full knowledge of how things turn out. If so, that's really impressive how consistent they made everything. At any rate, I think it's kind of fascinating that here we have a game that in a sense knows it's a game, and sets up the characters in the game to comment on the game player's actions and search them for meaning in the context of a game/player relationship.

Rinkles posted:

The loading screens make it more painful than it would otherwise have been.

rabidsquid posted:

i had the personal tracker from the security station enabled the entire time and it just shut off when i went into space too, had to look it up online

Vib Rib posted:

So I realized after the fact that I had one fairly big question that either was never answered, or whose answer I never noticed:
How did the typhon actually break containment? When we see Bellamy attacked they've already been loose for a while, spreading, as evidenced by various emails. But I don't know I ever saw exactly why it happened in the first place, or what caused it, especially with all the safeguards in place. In any disaster/containment breach setting that's usually a significant plot point. Obviously it started in Psychotronics, since that's where they were being kept to begin with, but I wasn't clear.

Actually, for that matter, why did Alex lock you in the simulation? You went in willingly and there were certain safeguards, but then he just threw those out the window and never even addresses that ever. It's weird that in all his pleading and pep talks to you he never even mentions taking away your reorientations between tests, or why he felt the need to turn you into a rat in a wheel. I feel like if he'd at least tried to explain that I might've been more ready to listen to him off the bat.

Vib Rib posted:

Oh, awesome. I must have missed the relevant text on that.

Rinkles posted:

That doesn't work (or make much sense).

Unless I was hitting the wrong area, I tried it all over the station to no results.

Rinkles posted:

Do you have a specific location? Pretty sure I tried it in powered areas (like Deep Storage).

Rinkles posted:

That would be a silly requirement, though I did fully upgrade about half way through. I'll check it out.

Schneider Inside Her posted:

If you had any respect at all for the medium of videogames you would keep paying Arkane to make them. I reckon they're at the top of the game at the moment

Bust Rodd posted:

I sort of assumed through different audio logs that the very first breach was likely a psychics ethereal phenomena. One of Calvino's looking glass visions or Morgan's dreams could be a strong enough psychic tether to pull a Typhon into our dimension. We have no concept of how they move through space without propulsion, but in as far as we know they seem to be life forms based off of psionic energy.

Atoramos posted:

The first encounter with the Typhon is shown in-game on a video screen as an astronaut gets mauled by a passing mimic.

Also I'm still pissed that the game spoiled itself for me. Earlier on, maybe in Psychotronics, you see a note that explicitly discusses the possibility of putting human neurons into Typhon and running it through a sim until it interacted correctly with the humans. The note goes on to speculate they would need a volunteer for this, and that Morgan was particularly keen on this experiment. I immediately assumed that's what was happening for the remainder of the game and welp. Also, the game kept going back-and-forth about the status of Earth. Many characters refer to evacuations and crisis Earthside so for the majority of the game I was under the impression Earth was already hosed up and January was just flat-out wrong. Then I hear most people think Morgan went Earthside, I ended up getting the December 'ending', the constant flashes of Alex and being told they're lying to you... I feel like I would have enjoyed the ending if I wasn't expecting it literally from the very start.

quote:

It is important to note that the majority of suspects want to talk. Let them. Provide some prompts, but only to keep the words flowing. Do not attempt to direct them, but just keep them talking. My experience - and case-studies back this - has been that most people will move toward the information you want to know if you just listen to them and reaffirm their assumptions when they need it.

quote:

There's a metaphor here, you know. Typically, the objective of control theory is to monitor the output of a system and compare it with the desired output (the reference signal). The difference between the actual and the desired outputs (the error signal) is applied as feedback to the input of the system, to bring the actual output closer to the reference. Good control systems - and good engineers - learn from the past.

Atoramos posted:

Also I do think the explanation for the initial breech is in-game They do talk a shitload about telepaths mind controlling people and having them release mimics. iirc the guy that caused it is the same one you find locked up that blows up if you open the door for him.

Atoramos posted:

Yea I just don't feel this way having made the same connection you did above. I noticed both books and immediately understood the context but I was hoping for the story to go somewhere else, and that the ending I had figured out was intended to be only what you think is going to happen, because it was so obvious and spelled out. This and this are fairly early in the game, and came off as sloppy writing; not because I have an objection to the "It was all a simulation" ending, but because I only realized in retrospect it was meant to be a twist at all, and a number of friends explicitly hadn't read those notes or figured things out. Add in that the same was true of the status of Earth, and the entire ending really fell flat for me.

Really just remove that email and transcribe from the game and I would have been pretty happy all things considered. Great game but I don't understand why they're necessary.

Arglebargle III posted:

I really hope the new System Shock isn't art deco, because then we'll have had a solid 10 year runs of art deco submarines/spaceships hybrid shooters.

Rinkles posted:

Not that it's absolving, but Alex admits to being a dick during the post credits ending, iirc.

Prav posted:

i rolled my eyes a bit when i first saw the talos lobby, to be honest

or maybe it was at the tape decks before that. either way.

aniviron posted:

Much as I adore some good Brutalism, it comes from béton brut, French for bare concrete; and I'm inclined to agree with the namer that concrete or at least breezeblock is necessary for the look to really work. Would be a bit strange to have a space station made of concrete, given its heavy, porous nature.

Realistically I think they went with deco because it looks nice and isn't that hard to make, and tends to already be associated with retrofuturism thanks to properties like Bioshock, Fallout, etc. I think a different look might have been better suited to the game, but with that said I think the environment was very nicely executed.

Vib Rib posted:

I think there's a lot of possible interpretations to run towards the ending and while it's inevitable some people will see it coming, I don't think that makes it a bad ending.
Me personally, I had a different theory going forward. I too was thinking we might not be the "real" Morgan for a long time, especially with the pre-recorded messages and January being so insistent to remind you to blow the station at every turn. But the direction I was going was that we were a robot experiencing this in the present, not a typhon in a simulation. Early on there were several books about mimicking speech patterns (as January does, and as we do with Sho to get into Deep Storage), and the aforementioned book about feedback systems to correct data and behavior. Like other posters I assumed they'd given the game away early, but I thought it was to a different end. When they mentioned that robot some rich old guy was replacing himself with and giving his power of attorney to, who had his voice and behavior, I thought for sure it was heavy foreshadowing. For a long time you don't even meet with anyone in person who'd be able to recognize you, until around the time you save Rani at the Arboretum greenhouse. That coupled with no working mirrors made me think we were some android to replace Morgan.
I also suspected that the entire "video message to self" in the Looking Glass could have been fabricated -- I don't know the CG effect limitations of this world so how would I know if that was real and not a voice-synthesized "me" going "no yeah totally trust January it's cool"? There were more "hints" to suggest I was on the right track, like with the cover story of Morgan being earthside. The initial and obvious conclusion is that this is just a coverup to excuse Morgan being trapped in the simulation, but what it made me wonder if maybe the twist was that Alex was actually telling the truth, and at some point the real Morgan would come back to the station and confront me. I was pretty excited for that possibility.

I guess my point is that there are a lot of clues to the ending, but there's also a lot of things that people might falsely assume are clues and go off in the wrong direction. Not quite red herrings, but still, it's easy to assume the game spells it all out when the one theory you caught onto was the right one. Now obviously maybe I'm just dumb and unobservant, but I was pretty convinced of my theory right up until I wasn't.

Rinkles posted:

"Eradicator auto turrets. Transtar's last ditch defense against an outbreak. [...] Shouldn't be a problem for you. [ PREGNANT PAUSE ] Since you're not an alien."

Sometimes I got the impression January and some of the people you meet were knowing actors in the simulation.

Vib Rib posted:

I've looked up a bunch of "all endings" videos on youtube and still have never seen this one, despite hearing about it. Weird that everyone making these videos seems to omit it.

HenryEx posted:

I mean the whole game is literally just a game to the player.

Rinkles posted:

People got tunnelvisioned exactly because people do get invested in fiction despite knowing it's not real. (Psychotronics and the bad end make it hard not to figure out it's a simulation)

My problem was mostly with the end choice, not the end twist. It kinda felt like a betrayal of the game's design ethos (simplistic binary choice out of nowhere), but I get that that might be intentional to make the point blunt.

e:Alternatively, the choice illustrates a lot by how it doesn't register as meaningful (contrary to the game proper).

ConfusedUs posted:

GRINDCORE MEGGIDO posted:

Maybe it worked and more Typhon came anyway

SpookyLizard posted:

Hey, i think humanity is doing pretty good for handling it's first Outside Context Problem when they have barely left Terra's gravity well.

Ravenfood posted:

I don't remember seeing anywhere that Typhon eat anything besides people's psyches, but maybe you could use cows to create neuromods for cows. The Typhon are just too connected to neuropsychic stuff to be eating just the meat portions of people.

double nine posted:

I'm confused why people recommended the G.L.U.E. gun to use against cysts (I'm aware of the best two ways to take them out already, thanks). Covering the nest doesn't seem to do anything when the mines spawn and taking all of the moving cysts requires quite a bit of ammo because of their erratic speed. Now granted we get drowned in glue ammo but I still don't see the appeal.

Gadzuko posted:

I find gloo to be easier than any other method against cysts, especially in the GUTS. It usually takes several darts or throws to get all of them and it's a lot faster to just spray a bunch of gloo. Outside the GUTS darts work better on clusters but I still end up spraying gloo if the cysts are spread out.

double nine posted:

Basic Chunnel posted:

The things mind controlled dudes say directly contradicts this

double nine posted:

Happened to me the first time. Not deliberately, but every action i made pushed me in that direction, but the thing didn't unlock. what could have interfered with this is 1. a couple humans got killed by a telepath during combat 2. the dude in psychotronics gets killed by random enemies later in the game and blamed on the player. 3. in my case I dicked around with the couple in the escape pod in shuttle bay. Eventually i went out and did the good ending for that quest but I probably gave them a couple of heart attacks before that happened.

double nine posted:

the guy in the experiment? I saved him in the scripted bit, but during the end game I had to come back to psychotronics for plot related things; I found him running away from a voltaic phantom at 1/3rd health. I assume he got killed by another hostile or an environmental hazard in the level.

Vib Rib posted:

Yeah, at least on PC they were there at almost all times while in zero-G, to the point they got annoying to me. The tutorial prompt that comes up your first time in zero-G also says as much.

Hannibal Rex posted:

With Chris Avellone on board, I honestly thought this was going to be Prey's spin on Planescape: Torment's previous incarnations and the various diaries you can find in that game.