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Digirat posted:but it comes as close as it can to invalidating the entire rest of the game. No it doesn't. The entire rest of the game is a series of morality tests. That's it. Do you save this person, do you kill this person, do you own up to what someone not even 'you' did, do you run away the first chance that you get. The entire point is to see if you *can* operate on a moral level, which makes what your personal morality is secondary. As long as you have one, it was all worth it. The starting thesis was that you can't. The events of the story happened, by and large, so they aren't invalidated by finding out it was a test. They are still the history of the world, the events telling part of the story of how we got to where we are. All those people were real, and broadly did what you saw. *You* had no impact on what happened to them back then, but you can give their experience meaning in the now. Earth is lost, and there is no super weapon to kill the Typhon. Either they can be communicated with, and some common ground can be found.....or they can't, and humanity is doomed. It's understated, but taking Alex's hand or not is really the climax of the human species. Either we found a way to overcome and reach across species barriers, and there is hope.....or we didn't, and there is no hope. What happens after is just follow through, the extermination or rebirth of the species.
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Aug 28, 2017 05:58
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Digirat, the entire metanarrative of the game is about how your decisions matter because you made them rather than just because of the consequences they led to.
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Aug 28, 2017 06:29
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Mulva posted:No it doesn't. The entire rest of the game is a series of morality tests. That's it. Do you save this person, do you kill this person, do you own up to what someone not even 'you' did, do you run away the first chance that you get. The entire point is to see if you *can* operate on a moral level, which makes what your personal morality is secondary. As long as you have one, it was all worth it. The starting thesis was that you can't. The events of the story happened, by and large, so they aren't invalidated by finding out it was a test. They are still the history of the world, the events telling part of the story of how we got to where we are. All those people were real, and broadly did what you saw. *You* had no impact on what happened to them back then, but you can give their experience meaning in the now. Earth is lost, and there is no super weapon to kill the Typhon. Either they can be communicated with, and some common ground can be found.....or they can't, and humanity is doomed. It's understated, but taking Alex's hand or not is really the climax of the human species. Either we found a way to overcome and reach across species barriers, and there is hope.....or we didn't, and there is no hope. What happens after is just follow through, the extermination or rebirth of the species. Again, the fact that a real morgan experienced things similarly to you doesn't mean anything because that's not what you experience in the game. It's history and I'm not sure why people bring that up, I don't see how it changes anything. Then, whether or not that one real choice at the end means anything at all is unknown because the game's over, and the best you're left with is "maybe it will matter somehow." There is no guarantee that getting one single typhon to take a human's hand, after invasively forcing it think more like a human in the first place, is actually going to accomplish anything in the end (prey is not an idealistic game). there are still way too many unknowns about the situation for that to even feel like an accomplishment to me. You don't know whether it's "the climax of the human species" or if it means nothing, because the game ends the instant it happens.
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Aug 28, 2017 07:38
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Digirat posted:Again, the fact that a real morgan experienced things similarly to you doesn't mean anything because that's not what you experience in the game. It's history and I'm not sure why people bring that up, I don't see how it changes anything. Then, whether or not that one real choice at the end means anything at all is unknown because the game's over, and the best you're left with is "maybe it will matter somehow." There is no guarantee that getting one single typhon to take a human's hand, after invasively forcing it think more like a human in the first place, is actually going to accomplish anything in the end (prey is not an idealistic game). there are still way too many unknowns about the situation for that to even feel like an accomplishment to me. You don't know whether it's "the climax of the human species" or if it means nothing, because the game ends the instant it happens. Your logic should apply to any game with "canonical" choices; developers decide all the time that only certain choices are the "correct" ones, such as when a sequel gets made. Does that mean that the choices in those games also don't matter? When you were making the choices, did it feel like they mattered at the time? Is that what not actually matters? Does a choice in any game at all actually matter?
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Aug 28, 2017 07:52
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Lt. Danger posted:We failed. This isn't the one.
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Aug 28, 2017 12:28
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I am gonna second, Lt Danger, that was perfect in every way.
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Aug 28, 2017 12:45
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QuarkJets posted:Second, it nails down a specific outcome that's not any easier to write around than any of the hypothetical outcomes that the player may have seen: the Typhon made it to Earth, and seemingly another outbreak also occurs on the station, as you can hear the rattling of a disguised Mimic coming from the room next to Alex's in the ending. Wait, what? I never noticed this at all
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Aug 28, 2017 14:52
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So what do people imagine really happened? What is the most likely canonical sequence of events based on what we know? I thnk the prototype nullwave device is right out. It either didnt exist or was never used... or didnt work. Regardless, it definitely didnt cleanse the station. Without that, theres no reason for morgan and alex to work at cross purposes. We also know Morgan got off the station, or at least enough of him that Alex has access to his cell lines and memories. Hes dead, but he almost certainly died post escape.
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Aug 28, 2017 15:04
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Maybe both Alex and Morgan used Alex's escape pod. Neither a self destruct nor the nullwave device was used, which is why the typhoon got to earth Mod edit: use spoiler tags for poo poo like this. Somebody fucked around with this message at 08:37 on Aug 31, 2017 |
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Aug 28, 2017 15:27
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hell, I question even the fact that the world is overrun by Typhon. The entire game is just one layer peeled away after the other, who's to say this isn't just another ruse to incite you to do a thing.
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Aug 28, 2017 15:45
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I'm willing to bet that as brilliant neuro-biologists Alex and Morgan kept their own DNA on file just as a matter of principle. We also don't know that Morgan died. I think the best sequel would be a game where you play as Typhon Morgan and the main antagonist is human Morgan who is now like a crazy neuromod god. I don't think I've ever seen this in a game or movie.
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Aug 28, 2017 15:45
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Sounds like what happened in Prototype 2, ironically another game about becoming a mutated gently caress
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Aug 28, 2017 16:00
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Bust Rodd posted:I'm willing to bet that as brilliant neuro-biologists Alex and Morgan kept their own DNA on file just as a matter of principle. Would you kindly rethink that?
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Aug 28, 2017 17:39
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Regarding the fate of Morgan Yu, I inferred that xhe sacrificed ximself to be the source of a new Neuromod connectome, for the sake of injecting xis own experience, perspective, and skills into some typhon matter. The game was a simulation, based on real events. Original Morgan probably was going through amnesia therapy testing under Alex's control. The typhon outbreak on the station probably happened more or less how it was depicted. Morgan made a 'January' rogue admin operator modeled after xis own brain, broke out, and saved the day in some way or another. From January's dialogue, we kind of get insight into how Morgan thinks - January often says stuff about how it's faking Morgan's voice in order to seem trustworthy, and wants to be up-front about that. January says a few things like, 'The radiation will kill everything on the station. Except me, I'm a robot.' Because Morgan frequently thinks about the nature of xis existence, and if Morgan was a robot, xe would reflect on that periodically. If the Typhon invaded Earth after all that poo poo, Morgan would surely be willing to sacrifice xerself to save the world. There's an audio-log where pre-amnesia Morgan seems really excited about simulated experiences teaching a typhon. There are other situations in the past where Morgan has been willing to break moral taboos, sacrifice a lot of human lives in the pursuit of transhuman advancement, inject alien matter into xis own brain experimentally, and let's not forget, Morgan did originally volunteer to be mind-wiped. Morgan is definitely the kind of person who would volunteer to sacrifice xis brain in order to inject xis memories and personality into an alien. So, I think the Typhon Phantom playing the simulation has just been injected with a full Morgan Neuromod, and they're putting a simulated experience of Morgan's finest hour in front of it, to let it make the neural connections to the rest of the Morgan connectome, and it's up to the player to decide how much that happens. Also, regarding the Looking Glass technology, I think it might be more like a view-port into an alternate reality, or into an alternate reality locked to a particular point in the past, instead of just a really nice super-HD VR 108000P monitor. The other research going on in the station is horrendously dangerous stuff with alien lifeforms, injecting exotic matter into human brains, wiping employee memories, and loving around with nanomachine-recycler technology that could devour continents if it got out of control. Why is the Looking Glass laboratory up there, instead of on Earth? Probably because there's something fuckin' dangerous about it. Certainly because there's more to it than a really good display. Maybe it uses some spacetime fuckery that only became possible after the Typhon showed up with their physics-breaking matter. In Calvino's LG prototype lab, they mention some 'light-field capture' stuff, and the perspective of each screen appears to be locked. So, for something to get projected onto a Looking Glass, it needs to be recorded somehow. The Typhon Morgan is playing through the whole game on a Looking Glass VR visor. What's the source for that recording? I think the Reployers all around the station serve as Looking Glass capture points. None of the employees know what they're for, but the employees are also occasionally mind-wiped if they know inconvenient things. There's one brief mention of 'Reployer Logs,' with no indication what it's logging or for what reason. I think the Reployers are either making a LG-quality recording of everything around them at all times, or else are serving as spacetime anchor points that the LG Visor can later tap into. And I think any specific information about what the Reployers are doing or why has been carefully scrubbed out of the simulation, possibly by Alex, so the Typhon-Morgan doesn't get wise to the fact that it's in a simulation.
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Aug 28, 2017 17:42
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DLC Inc posted:Sounds like what happened in Prototype 2, ironically another game about becoming a mutated gently caress Damnit I was going to post this too!  If you don't know about about the game, your main character from the first game is actually a mutant version of a human counterpart. In the second game, that mutant becomes the final boss for a new character who also has mutant powers.
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Aug 28, 2017 19:24
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A.o.D. posted:Would you kindly rethink that? I am unironically owned, and doff my cap to you.
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Aug 28, 2017 19:33
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GlyphGryph posted:So what do people imagine really happened? What is the most likely canonical sequence of events based on what we know? Morgan saves all of the main characters, at least. The nullwave device was probably used successfully, since seemingly the station still exists and Alex would have gone down with the ship if the station exploded. Either Morgan didn't destroy the potentially-infested shuttle, which is likely, or possibly the one person on the crew roster marked as "off-station" accidentally brought a Mimic to Earth. There's also a good possibility that Talos I is not the only station with Typhon on board; in-game logs briefly mention another station-like object.
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Aug 28, 2017 19:59
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StringOfLetters posted:Also, regarding the Looking Glass technology, I think it might be more like a view-port into an alternate reality, or into an alternate reality locked to a particular point in the past, instead of just a really nice super-HD VR 108000P monitor. The other research going on in the station is horrendously dangerous stuff with alien lifeforms, injecting exotic matter into human brains, wiping employee memories, and loving around with nanomachine-recycler technology that could devour continents if it got out of control. Why is the Looking Glass laboratory up there, instead of on Earth? Probably because there's something fuckin' dangerous about it. Certainly because there's more to it than a really good display. Maybe it uses some spacetime fuckery that only became possible after the Typhon showed up with their physics-breaking matter. That's silly; by your logic the Huntress Boltcaster and the Gloo Gun would also have to be dangerous technology. In Calvino's room I think it's made clear that he doesn't know about any of the dangerous things going on on the station, he's just a super smart guy who they needed to help create the simulation area. Also his bedroom shows that the looking glass basically just uses a very fancy camera, nothing interdimensional about it
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Aug 28, 2017 20:08
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GlyphGryph posted:So what do people imagine really happened? What is the most likely canonical sequence of events based on what we know? I think the least heavy-handed way of dealing with it is having the typhon arrive on earth via the shuttle sidequest that real Morgan didn't blow up. Both endings actually do end up destroying the apex and all typhon on Talos, but there were mimics in the shuttle and they cause an outbreak. Talos is considered destroyed or cleansed, Morgan and Alex (if they survived) are too busy cleaning up the mess and no-one notices the occasional mimic-caused death. A few years later the earthside mimics reach a critical mass and overrun humanity double nine fucked around with this message at 20:13 on Aug 28, 2017 |
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Aug 28, 2017 20:10
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double nine posted:I think the least heavy-handed way of dealing with it is having the typhon arrive on earth via the shuttle sidequest that real Morgan didn't blow up. Both endings actually do end up destroying the apex and all typhon on Talos, but there were mimics in the shuttle and they cause an outbreak. Talos is considered destroyed or cleansed, Morgan and Alex (if they survived) are too busy cleaning up the mess and no-one notices the occasional mimic-caused death. A few years later the earthside mimics reach a critical mass and overrun humanity Getting killed by a mimic makes your body look like a victim from The Ring, I don't think it'd go unnoticed for long.
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Aug 28, 2017 20:19
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Yeah I think that the takeover would be rapid, just extremely difficult to stop since Mimics are so good at hiding
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Aug 28, 2017 20:25
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QuarkJets posted:Your logic should apply to any game with "canonical" choices; developers decide all the time that only certain choices are the "correct" ones, such as when a sequel gets made. Does that mean that the choices in those games also don't matter? What are some games where that happened? I can't think of any games I've played where that happened and the choices/story were important enough for that to substantially change anything. I also don't see how a choice being made "canonical" outside of the game itself is the same thing as a game's ending telling you that nothing you did mattered for the reasons you thought it did, or even happened at all--I'm not sure why you're asking that as it doesn't seem very relevant to prey. My problem with the ending is broader than choices, because it makes all of your actions over the whole game fake, not just your choices. Your accomplishments are robbed of their purpose and made hollow when an ending says "everything was actually just an elaborate test where 1% of the things you did were important and the other 99% meant fuckall because not only did they never happen, they had no bearing on the real world either." Again, anytime a story does something like this, it is a middle finger proportional to how invested you were in any of the stuff that turned out to be fake. I was pretty invested in it because prey is really well written and acted. If you somehow managed to sleuth out exactly what was going on early in the game (and I'm not sure there are even enough hints to do this without some leaps of logic at that point) then I bet the ending feels pretty cool, because you'd already know that everything you're doing is meaningless except how you treat the other people on the station, and the ending would validate you for figuring it out. I however did not Professor Layton that fact out ahead of time, and do not think it's cool to intentionally reduce the entire game to an extremely small subset of things the player did.
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Aug 28, 2017 20:28
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Perhaps part of the game's message is that how you treat others is the only thing that really matters
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Aug 28, 2017 20:37
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I hate all these fake videogames we get nowadays. I much prefer the real ones.
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Aug 28, 2017 20:42
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QuarkJets posted:Morgan saves all of the main characters, at least. I dunno, they're all robo replicas except Alex. Wouldn't surprise me if Alex made them from January-like brain backups made from pre-outbreak brainscans or something. I think it's impossible to say what happened on the original Talos because we're only shown an artificial presentation of it, deliberately altered in order to present a hamfisted trolley problem, which is also nestled in 30 hours of shooting and hiding for some reason.
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Aug 28, 2017 20:44
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I'm not sure where everyone's getting the idea that Morgan is a hero in the Real Timeline. Granted it could be that January Morgan, who was all about stopping the Typhon by any means necessary, was the one who lived through the disaster. But everything that we learn about Morgan suggests that she was, if anything, more lacking in ethics than Alex, and in any event she's ultimately responsible for everything that happens. It's stated that Alex is a mechanical engineer of comparatively modest skill, and that exploitation of the Typhon was Morgan's obsession. And it's heavily implied that Alex worships Morgan and his doomed drive to salvage the neuromod project in the face of overwhelming disaster is basically him being dutiful to what his brilliant sibling originally intended before the neuromods started changing his personality. My read on the ambiguous fate of Morgan is that she was always the stone cold version of herself. That would make the most sense given the conceit of the simulation's test - If Alex wanted to determine a Typhon's true potential for empathy, it follows that he'd imbue it with he memories and personality of Morgan, a human completely lacking in that quality. If Typhon-Morgan proves empathetic, there's no way it's a false positive. January and December / the rescue scenarios are floated as test choices. Basic Chunnel fucked around with this message at 20:58 on Aug 28, 2017 |
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Aug 28, 2017 20:55
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Lt. Danger posted:I hate all these fake videogames we get nowadays. I much prefer the real ones.
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Aug 28, 2017 21:01
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QuarkJets posted:That's silly; by your logic the Huntress Boltcaster and the Gloo Gun would also have to be dangerous technology. In Calvino's room I think it's made clear that he doesn't know about any of the dangerous things going on on the station, he's just a super smart guy who they needed to help create the simulation area. That's not quite my logic. The HBC is a nerf gun that an engineer put together on their own time. There are probably Gloo guns on Earth, too. Calvino is the guy who invented the Looking Glass, and there's a whole Looking Glass Laboratory which takes up extremely expensive space station floor-space. Also Calvino doesn't know about dangerous things, but Calvino is also experiencing severe memory loss - possibly because of multiple neuromod mind-wipes. Also in a psychiatrist's log, Calvino mentions that he has dreams of a hungry alien entity trying to reach through a Looking Glass screen. Basic Chunnel posted:I'm not sure where everyone's getting the idea that Morgan is a hero in the Real Timeline. Granted it could be that January Morgan, who was all about stopping the Typhon by any means necessary, was the one who lived through the disaster. I got that idea mostly from the video and audio clips from Past Morgan. Right after the first jaunt through the Hardware section, Morgan is saying that she needs to blow up the entire station, including herself, because the risk to Humankind is unacceptably high. She's also willing to kill questionably-guilty convicts for research. I don't think that's exactly a lack of ethics, so much as an ethical framework that is willing to advance transhuman society-altering research at the expensive of individual human lives. Because Morgan was willing to experiment on herself with the first alien matter neuromods, submit herself to a regressive neurotomy under Alex's supervision, and was really eager to blow up the whole station as January, I don't think Morgan considers her own life especially important, or sacred, with big stuff at sake. To reiterate: Morgan experimented on her own brain by injecting matter from human-eating alien life. In Morgan's apparent ethical framework, Morgan is a valuable but expendable asset, and human advancement is the paramount goal. StringOfLetters fucked around with this message at 22:12 on Aug 28, 2017 |
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Aug 28, 2017 21:48
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Note: People on EARTH are having giant monster nightmares about the Typhon, its common to everyone who doesnt have a hardened adult mind. Calvino is probably particularly susceptible but the whole planet is experiencing them.
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Aug 28, 2017 22:01
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Does anyone else feel like the Yu family portrait makes Morgan look MUCH older than they're presented in-game? If so, that could be the earliest clue in the game.
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Aug 28, 2017 22:06
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Calvino has alzheimer's. Neuromod removal resets the brain, you don't get to forget your wife's name (or was it their anniversary date?) and then remember it later.
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Aug 28, 2017 22:15
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Holy poo poo, just realized now that in light of the ending, these "survivor account" datapad things might be a reference to the actual Typhon invasion maybe?. ?? Otherwise I really did not understand what those 1 or 2 survivor accounts were talking about unless I missed something
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Aug 28, 2017 22:23
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I'm assuming (and I think the general consensus is) that it's the incident that Chief Elazar was part of before coming to work on the station (re: her interview with the psychiatrist) I read an unsupported theory that it was something about operators with recycler beams that went haywire. edit: here's a part from the first Evacuation book: quote:Some people were running with me, but we didn't know where to go. I saw a policeman directing people into a basement restaurant. I think it was an old bomb shelter. I looked up at the sky again and saw an airliner. It was not military, I am certain. I think it was going to the airport. While I watched, it turned into glitter without a sound. It was just gone. A man near me began to curse. I fell down and hit my head on the street. double nine fucked around with this message at 22:29 on Aug 28, 2017 |
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Aug 28, 2017 22:27
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DLC Inc posted:Holy poo poo, just realized now that in light of the ending, these "survivor account" datapad things might be a reference to the actual Typhon invasion maybe?. ?? Otherwise I really did not understand what those 1 or 2 survivor accounts were talking about unless I missed something e: Recyclers, not replicators. Ravenfood fucked around with this message at 22:35 on Aug 28, 2017 |
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Aug 28, 2017 22:28
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DLC Inc posted:Holy poo poo, just realized now that in light of the ending, these "survivor account" datapad things might be a reference to the actual Typhon invasion maybe?. ?? Otherwise I really did not understand what those 1 or 2 survivor accounts were talking about unless I missed something I think it was mentioned on a loading screen that recycler charges were banned from use on Earth's surface as a result of that. So, some kind of grey goo scenario, maybe after someone tried to weaponize it, since those books mention some fighting was going on. Pyromancer fucked around with this message at 22:36 on Aug 28, 2017 |
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Aug 28, 2017 22:33
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ah ok, thought it was a "glitch" in the system that referenced the future
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Aug 28, 2017 22:43
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Not really a spoiler, just background - The 'Survivor Accounts' are about 'The Evacuation', which seems to be running from a grey-goo kind of scenario that took place around, I think, the Middle East and Northern Africa. Planes are mentioned as disappearing in a cloud of glittering metal. Pretty similar to recyclers, basically! This is why there's text saying that recycler charges and recyclers can only be used in space, as a safety measure. It's mentioned that Elazar saw action in the Evacuation.
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Aug 29, 2017 00:22
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So is my L key permanently locked to that stupid satellite? I'm tired of having to go into my inventory to listen to transcribes.
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Aug 29, 2017 00:43
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Any word on if there was/will be a patch on the ps4 that lets you use keyboard/mouse? I rented it for a day from redbox a few weeks ago, but the game doesn't feel right at all on a ds4
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Aug 29, 2017 01:11
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I waived this game off as my computer is a piece of poo poo, and surprisingly the demo runs moderately well. I am stunned. Time to wait for another sale though.  I'd go back to play SS2 but I just can't after this, even if it was just the demo. God drat.
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Aug 29, 2017 01:29
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