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aniviron posted:I might be misremembering this but I also seem to recall that someone in the game says the coral in part has the same neural patterns as the people who were eaten to make it. That would mean that in a fairly real sense, they're not dead, but absorbed. I find that fascinating, and between the coral and the evidence for Typhon sapience I think there's at least a choice to be made there rather than just "do you want to be bad." The fact that the Typhon are so enigmatic and hostile means most players will and probably should choose the ending that sides with Alex; I didn't because I find the Typhon quite interesting, and because I am a cranky old misanthrope. That's why phantoms still talk using voices of their "hosts" - they're just bits of neural activity firing off into the void like an octopus's cut off tentacle wiggling around when salt is applied to it. Those visions do seem like a sign of consciousness though, I agree.
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Jul 10, 2017 21:43
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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. Really, just grab whatever nearby objects you can find and throw them at the cytsoids. If you land a good throw you'll get an entire group at once.
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Jul 10, 2017 22:20
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I'm the jerk who ended up with 200HP simply because I needed the full heal the 150 and 200 upgrades offered. Also ended up with leverage 3 just cause. I enjoyed the neuromods and weapon upgrade kits falling from the sky but kinda needing to manage ammo and health kits. I didn't use my typhon abilities to full potential for way too long too Regarding the ending i wanted to use the nullwave AND blow up the station. Ended up priming both and then using the nullwave. Cut January off mid sentence when she said she wouldn't give up control--- bzzzt. I already had the ending spoiled but enjoyed it very much. I also ended up killing Alex by accident when I was trying to save him, I kind of panicked when he went limp and instead of trying to shove him into his closet I tried to take him through a Grav lift which killed him. Whoops ziasquinn fucked around with this message at 23:04 on Jul 10, 2017 |
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Jul 10, 2017 23:02
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turn off the TV posted:Really, just grab whatever nearby objects you can find and throw them at the cytsoids. If you land a good throw you'll get an entire group at once. Gloo skips the step of "find nearby objects" though. I really don't see how it's faster, I get entire groups with a few gloo globs all the time.
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Jul 10, 2017 23:36
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i've been enjoying the lift power. it's cheap to both learn and use and phantoms are completely helpless if you catch them in it. it's also great for moving heavy boxes.
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Jul 10, 2017 23:42
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On the note of the ending, it really stuck with me how fitting that you, the player, are literally an alien presence in the gameworld, potentially as chaotic or empathetic as possible. In tons of games your interaction with the world is played entirely straight against a goofy alien-ish character or the world is totally cartoonish and your character is played straight. Here, the framing device works so well, regardless of how you play, there's very little actual disconnect, which I find extremely refreshing.
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Jul 10, 2017 23:44
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aniviron posted:In regards to my strange moral compass (not gonna argue that point, at least) there are definitely places shown in the game that the Typhon are alive and conscious in some form on a level roughly equivalent to humanity- the best example is when the player Typhon has the visions that break through the simulation ("They're lying to you" etc) which wouldn't be happening if the Typhon were just mindless devourers like lions or what have you. The second is what made me think there was something a deeper going on with the Typhon than what you're given in the game. They are intentionally designed to be inscrutable and alien and unknowable, and all of your interactions with them are as an uncontrollable consuming force that humans have bent to their designs, but you're never given an 'in' as to what exactly their designs are. They are at the least parasites in that they require organic matter to reproduce, but I never got the impression they were feeding off consciousness or anything like that. The coral contains the neural imprints (I think that's the way it was phrased) of the victims, and the coral itself is a neural network, so is the Typhon really just siphoning off consciousness and storing it in some kind of a honey comb that is also an artificial brain, or is it joining those minds to something completely beyond our comprehension to an end that we can't imagine because we're simply unable to even communicate with these beings? I found myself more interested in the unknown possibilities there than the guys who slagged their homeworld then ran off into space to run a human sacrifice gulag in name of progress.
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Jul 11, 2017 00:03
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People who enjoy the theme of impossible communication with an alien race because of how limited human experience and imagination of such an interaction is would probably enjoy sci-fi books from Lem. Solaris is a big recommendation in that regard - it actually shares many themes with this game. It helps that Lem was one of the best and most intelligent sci-fi authors ever.
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Jul 11, 2017 00:11
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I like how way later like 10 hours into the game the tests from the first 10 minutes pay off when you figure out what they were expecting you to do.
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Jul 11, 2017 00:13
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Ghostlight posted:They are intentionally designed to be inscrutable and alien and unknowable, and all of your interactions with them are as an uncontrollable consuming force that humans have bent to their designs, but you're never given an 'in' as to what exactly their designs are. They are at the least parasites in that they require organic matter to reproduce, but I never got the impression they were feeding off consciousness or anything like that. Moreover, I'm pretty sure the game explicitly says at a couple times that the Typhons are predators who eat consciousness and that this is a new food chain that humanity has discovered, one in which we are no longer on top the way we're on top of the organic matter food chain. lus the coral doesn't seem to be made of anything organic - it's ephemeral, you can walk right through it, it seems to go through walls, etc. - but it does have everyone's consciousness in there.
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Jul 11, 2017 00:18
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Right, but they can't be consuming the consciousness because that would imply they're using it up - at which point how does it end up in the coral, even though someone might have been killed by a mimic which has no ability or direct relation to coral production? Coral isn't treated like a waste product of eating people, it's the end-goal of people eating. They definitely take more than just the consciousness because while the body at large sticks around, it's a desiccated husk. There's nothing in game that I remember saying they can't just be fed cows, but cows can't test neuromods and someone might start asking your amoral corporate overlords why they're shipping dozens of cows to the moon every month in a way that might jeopardise your secret alien mind experiments and lower the profitability of your alien juice bottles. The game doesn't ever say that, and 'eating' is the wrong way to phrase it if everyone's consciousness ends up in the coral - you don't poop hamburgers, you eat a hamburger and transform it into sustenance and waste products. The mind is either waste product or it's energy; if it's energy it wouldn't be in the coral, and if the coral is a waste product then they're not eating minds. January says stuff like humanity meeting a shark in the galactic waters and not being ready, but January doesn't have any more of a perspective on these things than anybody else on the station. The structure of the game manipulates you into believing he's an authority on what's going on as he's the one giving the orders (unless you kill him) but that's not actually the case - he's just the imprint of a Morgan that was scared homicidal by a weird dream.
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Jul 11, 2017 01:17
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I think the coral is a stand-in for the Typhon blue-and-orange morality. They are unknowably weird.
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Jul 11, 2017 02:17
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Regardless of the answer, I do very much enjoy that the Typhon are, as someone said, fairly inscrutable. Mass Effect and Star Trek and the like always bug me that aliens are just blue humans or whatever; life adapts to such a wide variety of circumstances the odds of meeting an alien that's pretty much just you except with cat ears are infinitesimally smaller than meeting an alien in the first place. There's just enough there with them in the game that it gives us something interesting to talk about.
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Jul 11, 2017 02:24
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I really liked fighting them and the backstory and "lore" does bring up some interesting questions but functionally the Typhon are 100% cliched movie monsters. You see them, they try to kill you. No more "inscrutable" than the enemies from Doom. A truly inscrutable enemy would do things like sometimes not attack you, or maybe even heal you, or weirder things. I'd love to see that in a videogame someday.
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Jul 11, 2017 02:35
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I think it's strange that White Noise being a physical symptom of latent psychic powers is only brought up a few times in the game, but would have massive implications for the plot and setting if it was true.
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Jul 11, 2017 02:41
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Bought and finished this over the last week. Really enjoyed it. Ending stuff: The revelation that you're a Typhon is really telegraphed and obvious with all the references to Project Cobalt and those flashbacks you constantly get. What did catch me by surprise is the simulation angle of it. I assumed the whole station was a simulation in the way the intro sequence was, where you were actually moving around an elaborate set, Truman Show style. But it turns out you've been strapped to a chair all along, in some sort of VR simulation entirely inside your mind? Is that sort of technological capability ever evidenced at all before that point? Gameplay-wise, maybe it's because I played on Normal, but Combat Focus feels completely broken. The game started out challenging until I got points in Focus and just bullet timed everything to death with the shotgun (or stun gun for mechanicals). Even the Nightmare is a huge chump if you Focus and unload your shotgun on it. I went from "OH GOD RUN" whenever it appeared to "eh, you again?". If feels even more broken than in Dishonored because on top of the stopped time you get a massive damage boost which stacks with the sneak bonus, which also means you're one/two shotting most enemies and thus spending almost no ammo. Psi itself is basically inifnite and free once you do the Psychic Water quest. I ended up not getting any of the Typhon abilities because they felt completely unnecessary, ended the game with like 40 unspent Neuromods.
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Jul 11, 2017 08:32
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Ending stuff - the VR is branded as Looking Glass 3.5 during its brief loading screen, while on the station you interact with the still-in-development Looking Glass (soon with touch technology!) which is at that point already doing fully 3D recordings and display. The actual interaction physics of the VR you need to handwave away with you just being disoriented from being shot up with human and developing consciousness for the first time.
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Jul 11, 2017 09:03
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Question: is the contents of supply crates randomised? Because I found a neuromod from a supply crate in the exterior of the hardware labs, and now I want to go through all of talos I exterior huntin for loot.
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Jul 11, 2017 14:19
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double nine posted:Question: is the contents of supply crates randomised? Because I found a neuromod from a supply crate in the exterior of the hardware labs, and now I want to go through all of talos I exterior huntin for loot. I don't think it is, you get same stuff in loot in every playthrough, except the suit/scope chipsets, you still get a chipset from same place as previously but it'll likely be a different chipset. Basically same as Dishonored system of bone charms.
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Jul 11, 2017 14:23
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Ojetor posted:Gameplay-wise, maybe it's because I played on Normal, but Combat Focus feels completely broken. The game started out challenging until I got points in Focus and just bullet timed everything to death with the shotgun (or stun gun for mechanicals). Even the Nightmare is a huge chump if you Focus and unload your shotgun on it. I went from "OH GOD RUN" whenever it appeared to "eh, you again?". I played on hard, and no, that's just the way the game goes. I didn't really bother with combat focus, I went psi-heavy, and the game starts out with you being terrified of a phantom and ends with you chumping the hardest stuff the game can throw at you. The difference seems to be largely how long it takes for you to go from peasant to murdergod, the higher difficulties make it take longer. Combat focus is very strong indeed, but it's not stronger than psychoshock or superthermal or any of the other abilities; the game's difficulty progression is just generous as long as you're doing things besides beelining the main story, in which case I guess you'd have few enough mods and upgrades to make it tough since the spawning of tougher enemies is linked to where you are in the main plot.
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Jul 11, 2017 23:05
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I've actually found Nightmare with most of the difficulty mod on the Nexus enabled is pretty solid so far. I'm about to head into Crew Quarters and I'm finally at the point where I can reliably take on basic Phantoms. It hasn't felt like the difficulty was ever higher than the peak of Hard, but it's maintained a pretty good level so far. The only issue that I'm running into is that I have tons of medkits stacked up because I usually either survive combat unharmed or die.
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Jul 11, 2017 23:11
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Not done with the game yet, but I do have to say that the Nightmare's implementation has been one of the more disappointing aspects of the game. The concept of a super-alien created specifically to hunt you is ace, but its execution is lackluster - it's not a particularly challenging combatant, and in my experience levels with a Nightmare typically spawn it ten feet from the level entrance so there's no opportunity to evade it, which might have been game-breaking if it wasn't so easy to kill. As-is the Nightmare goes down pretty quickly in a single Combat Focus, so it's just too bad missing out on the intended cat-and-mouse dynamic. My other beef is the reallllly slippery jump controls on the many, many rounded surfaces you are expected to climb on, including gloo ledges. For a game with a ton of platforming, it's annoyingly easy to slide off of a platform because you were a few pixels too far to one side, and I'm speaking as someone who used to practice jump maps back in the TF2 glory days.
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Jul 12, 2017 02:18
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double nine posted:Question: is the contents of supply crates randomised? Because I found a neuromod from a supply crate in the exterior of the hardware labs, and now I want to go through all of talos I exterior huntin for loot. Yes, there are a bunch of neuromods in the exterior supply crates. There's quite a few crates in less obvious places, like behind vent covers (there'll often be a big red blinking light next to these) or narrow crevices that take you deeper into the station.
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Jul 12, 2017 02:25
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Rinkles posted:Yes, there are a bunch of neuromods in the exterior supply crates. There's quite a few crates in less obvious places, like behind vent covers (there'll often be a big red blinking light next to these) or narrow crevices that take you deeper into the station. wait, there's more?! I've flown through a bunch of the talos exterior hunting specifically for those crates, but the only 5 supply containers I found had generic medical and scrap supplies. The exterior neuromods I did find were on corpses, in breaches and one supply crate. Also I ran into a weird bug where the Life Support and Power Plant map completely reset. All containers, all enemies, all doors are back to where they were when I first entered. All computers that I have read the emails from have them as read, the audio logs I can pick up are similary marked as listened to, and I have all keycards to re-unlock all doors, but it's very strange. Normally the big coolant room should have the white gas, but that's not there right now - it's in the state you first find it i.e. a bunch of mimics and generic/voltaic phantoms and an active turret, with several fires going. The biggest concern I have is that now, there are two Mikhailas in my game. One is in the lobby in my office, the other is leaning against the pillar in the office near the exterior airlock. I seriously hope this doesn't ruin my I and thou run. Also also, is there a trigger for more Mikhaila/Januari/Igwe conversations? They're all giving me the silent treatment - except for the generic "Hello morgan" greetings e: I changed the difficulty from hard to nightmare - could that have done it? double nine fucked around with this message at 10:52 on Jul 12, 2017 |
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Jul 12, 2017 10:15
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Voyager I posted:Not done with the game yet, but I do have to say that the Nightmare's implementation has been one of the more disappointing aspects of the game. The concept of a super-alien created specifically to hunt you is ace, but its execution is lackluster - it's not a particularly challenging combatant, and in my experience levels with a Nightmare typically spawn it ten feet from the level entrance so there's no opportunity to evade it, which might have been game-breaking if it wasn't so easy to kill. As-is the Nightmare goes down pretty quickly in a single Combat Focus, so it's just too bad missing out on the intended cat-and-mouse dynamic.  Also even if you don't take Combat Focus, or want to save ammo, or don't want to fight the Nightmare for any other reason, it's also really trivial to hide from (unless it spawns right in front of the entrance) Wafflecopper fucked around with this message at 13:27 on Jul 12, 2017 |
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Jul 12, 2017 13:24
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Wafflecopper posted:
My first encounter w/ nightmare was right after loading into the bridge, and i just hopped the railings and apparently the nightmare is unable to get over a waist high barrier, and i just murdered him with psi powers since i had like 50 psi hypos
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Jul 12, 2017 14:20
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I really wish the game allowed one to bind multiple powers or weapons to the same button and so toggle between them. 10 shortcuts is too few keys to deal with all the weapons and powers you'll use in a given playthrough.
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Jul 12, 2017 15:07
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My first experience with it was great; I thought it was scripted, even. I hid under a desk in Deep Storage (I think?) while it stomped around near me and gradually came closer. It was very Alien: Isolation. But after that I never had an equally good experience with the thing, because it always seemed to spawn just into a new area, and all I had to do was go back the way I came. A loading screen is a terrible solution from a player perspective, so that forced me to fight the thing, and I found out it dies pretty easily with combat focus and the shotgun, making the monster a chore more than anything else. It was a great idea in a game full of them, but the implementation needed work.
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Jul 12, 2017 15:11
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I'm so peeved that the chips are random. I just did my final sweep before ending the game and I'm missing a couple of chip types. At least they weren't important for my build, missing out on psi regen would suck.
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Jul 12, 2017 15:17
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aniviron posted:There are definitely places shown in the game that the Typhon are alive and conscious in some form on a level roughly equivalent to humanity- the best example is when the player Typhon has the visions that break through the simulation ("They're lying to you" etc) which wouldn't be happening if the Typhon were just mindless devourers like lions or what have you. Palpek posted:Those visions do seem like a sign of consciousness though, I agree. I disagree. The visions the PC experiences are due to Morgan Yu's connectomes being implanted into it. The goal was to make the PC more "empathic", and whether or not that's successful depends on the player's actions and choices in the game. But I'd argue that at the very least Morgan's connectomes made the Typhon conscious. Perhaps this was the idea in the first place...you can't have empathy without consciousness. Empathy requires a theory of mind. The regular Typhon probably aren't actually conscious or sapient, so far as we can tell from what's depicted in the game. As others mention, the Phantom mutterings are just leftover "echoes" from their host. The only reason the PC is different is because they had human neural material shoved into them.
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Jul 12, 2017 18:08
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Shnakepup posted:I disagree. The visions the PC experiences are due to Morgan Yu's connectomes being implanted into it. The goal was to make the PC more "empathic", and whether or not that's successful depends on the player's actions and choices in the game. But I'd argue that at the very least Morgan's connectomes made the Typhon conscious. Perhaps this was the idea in the first place...you can't have empathy without consciousness. Empathy requires a theory of mind. The Typhon's mutterings might not mean anything but that doesn't mean that the Typhons don't have conciousness. The station is has too many narratives where the Typhons deliberately sabotaged the station in order to facilitate the takeover.
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Jul 12, 2017 18:16
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Palpek posted:
Speaking of which I think it's funny that all but 1 of the lines that Phantoms can say all come from one of the security guards you find in the Cargo Bay, that never even gets turned into a Phantom
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Jul 12, 2017 18:49
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double nine posted:The Typhon's mutterings might not mean anything but that doesn't mean that the Typhons don't have conciousness. The station is has too many narratives where the Typhons deliberately sabotaged the station in order to facilitate the takeover. Maybe they're capable of complicated behaviour without being conscious at all.
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Jul 12, 2017 18:55
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Are there actually any of these? The only sabotage I can recall was performed by humans under the control of Telepaths or machines under the control of Technopaths. They both work by forcing their victims to empathize with the Typhon, not actually directing their actions.
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Jul 12, 2017 19:15
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turn off the TV posted:Are there actually any of these? The only sabotage I can recall was performed by humans under the control of Telepaths or machines under the control of Technopaths. They both work by forcing their victims to empathize with the Typhon, not actually directing their actions.
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Jul 12, 2017 19:54
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GRINDCORE MEGGIDO posted:Maybe they're capable of complicated behaviour without being conscious at all. Exactly. I was thinking of the novel Blindsight by Peter Watts; basically, that sentience and sapience are different things that don't necessarily have to occur together. The Typhon potentially sabotaging stuff doesn't automatically mean they're conscious or self-aware. Maybe it's possible that all the Typhon we see in the game are being guided/controlled by the Alpha Typhon, hive-mind style or like they're it's individual "limbs".
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Jul 12, 2017 20:56
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GRINDCORE MEGGIDO posted:Maybe they're capable of complicated behaviour without being conscious at all. Like some sort of interactive computer program?
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Jul 12, 2017 21:30
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double nine posted:Also I ran into a weird bug where the Life Support and Power Plant map completely reset. All containers, all enemies, all doors are back to where they were when I first entered. All computers that I have read the emails from have them as read, the audio logs I can pick up are similary marked as listened to, and I have all keycards to re-unlock all doors, but it's very strange. Normally the big coolant room should have the white gas, but that's not there right now - it's in the state you first find it i.e. a bunch of mimics and generic/voltaic phantoms and an active turret, with several fires going. I had this happen to the Arboretum. It was weird and bad and unsettling but didn't seem to affect my progression though the game. Still seems like a pretty major bug though and it was a long time ago, before the save corruption thing was patched; I guess it hasn't been fixed though. Fiannaiocht posted:I'm so peeved that the chips are random. I just did my final sweep before ending the game and I'm missing a couple of chip types. At least they weren't important for my build, missing out on psi regen would suck. What, you don't need six laser resistance chips? I made good use out of all of mine.  I do wish the chips were quasi-random instead of fully random though. Three of my first four were laser resist chips and this was right at the beginning of the game and nothing even does laser damage until the end with the military operators. I was so loving confused, I thought maybe I had to be upgrading them or recycling them or something, but no it turns out they were actually just worthless. Did a run that was almost entirely psi-focused and never got the psi regen chip either.
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Jul 12, 2017 21:52
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Dishonored 2 "fixed" the random nature of bonecharms by allowing you to break them down and rebuild them, better, stronger, faster. Kind of a shame you can't similarly break down useless chips and strengthen useful ones. Lvl 4 scan speed upgrade - full scan in .5 seconds.
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Jul 12, 2017 21:55
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Shnakepup posted:Exactly. I was thinking of the novel Blindsight by Peter Watts; basically, that sentience and sapience are different things that don't necessarily have to occur together. The Typhon potentially sabotaging stuff doesn't automatically mean they're conscious or self-aware. Maybe it's possible that all the Typhon we see in the game are being guided/controlled by the Alpha Typhon, hive-mind style or like they're it's individual "limbs". One thing that story absolutely nails is including the most alien alien of all. I like what he did there. A physical Chinese room  . Blindsight can be read free online if anyone wants to check it out.Arglebargle III posted:Like some sort of interactive computer program? GRINDCORE MEGGIDO fucked around with this message at 21:59 on Jul 12, 2017 |
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Jul 12, 2017 21:57
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