T w e n t y S i d e d
So Talos-1 is enjoying the sweet embrace of a skyscraper-sized intergalactic horror. Thankfully, we already have a plan for this. Actually, we have a couple. We just need to choose one.
You can do what Alex wants and vaporize the Typhon with the nullwave device, thus leaving the station intact. Or you can follow January’s advice and blast the entire place into space-dust by making the reactor go boom. The latter is supposed to be for the hardcore Typhon haters who think that “man was not meant to meddle”, while the first option is for folks who just want to take a mulligan and have another go at taming the Typhon.
The thing is, I’m not totally comfortable with either option.
Nuke?
The Typhon are pretty durable and have a lot of non-intuitive properties. For one thing, they can build this coral stuff, which seems to be made of nothing and yet acts like a freestanding mass of neurons. They’re massively more durable than humans and they seem to be entirely immune to radiation.
So I’m not convinced that blowing up the station is a good idea. Maybe that will kill them, or maybe it’s like sneezing on a dandelion, spreading them all over the place in Earth orbit. In this world, people have built a moonbase. We’ve got spaceships. We’ve got other stations orbiting the Earth. It’s possible that the explosion will just launch a bunch of wiggling mimics at these other locations.
Aside: For the purpose of this analysis, we’re ignoring the events of Prey: Mooncrash, where (SPOILER!) the Typhon are already present on the moon, and spread from the moon to Earth. It’s possible that these events have already happened, or have been set in motion, and thus it doesn’t matter what we do here. For now, let’s ignore this and try to make this decision based on the information available to the Yu siblings at the end of Prey.
Nullwave?
At the same time, I’m not sure how the nullwave is supposed to preserve the Typhon research. The problem we have here is that there’s a bit of a contradiction at the end. Alex claims that the nullwave device will “lobotomize” the Typhon, but the ending cutscene shows the apex completely evaporating.
If the Typhon evaporate, then what’s the point of saving the station? No Typhon cells means no neuromods, which means the entire show is a bust. Maybe just the apex evaporates, and we’re supposed to understand that all the little mimics inside are still mimicking their little hearts out?
Even if this is the case, I’m not sure “lobotomizing” the Typhon will give us what we want. The whole point of their species is the cool stuff they can do with thought / consciousness / memories / identity. If you destroy their capacity for thought, then won’t they just be a useless pile of tentacles? Can you really make useful neuromods out of them at that point? If so, then why didn’t we do this ages ago?
Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s worth a shot. It’s just that I got the impression that what makes the Typhon so useful is the same thing that makes them so dangerous.
Porque no los dos?
But really, why are we even debating this? The real priority should be the safety of Earth, her millions of species, and her billions of human inhabitants. This neuromod tech is dope as hell, but it’s not worth risking OUR ENTIRE PLANET AND EVERYTHING ON IT. I realize Alex and Morgan (especially old-Morgan) would disagree, but screw it. Those two dipshits got a few hundred people killed with their antics, and now they have billions of lives at stake. Who cares what these idiots think? The arrival of this Apex thing just changed the entire calculus of the situation, and Alex’s TED Talk about how awesome neuromods are is no longer relevant.
If we’re going safety-first, then I think the only responsible thing to do is to use the nullwave to “lobotomise” the Typhon, and ALSO nuke the place afterwards. Or if the eggheads run the numbers and realize that the nuke might spread the Typhon around, then we stick some engines onto Talos-1 and shove that thing into the sun. Sure, that would be expensive as hell. It will probably take a decade to make it happen, and then a few more years for Talos-1 to complete its journey inward. I realize this sucks, but like, THE WHOLE EARTH, man. That includes Disney World and the LEGO store. You can’t mess around when the stakes are this high.
Ending Choices
Let’s get the obvious one out of the way: At any time, you can go to the Arboretum and take Alex’s escape pod to safety. You can do this before the game really gets going. This is seen as a sort of novelty hidden ending, and isn’t regarded as a “real” ending. It’s been ages since I did this one, but I don’t think it bothers to roll credits. You just get dumped out to the main menu.
Assuming you decide to stay and deal with the Typhon problem, then at the end your primary choice is whether you want to go with the nullwave or the nuke. And despite my griping, no, you can’t do both.
Ending Confrontation
Regardless of which way you go, you’ll eventually end up on the bridge where Alex is arguing with the January bot. Alex insists we should use the nullwave, and January insists on nuking the station. The game expects you to support one by killing the other.If you do nothing, then Alex will destroy January. I think. It’s been a while.
If you like, you can park Morgan’s narrow ass in a chair and go down with the ship. The game will even let you sit in the command chair for this. I guess this is fitting if you feel that Morgan doesn’t deserve to live after what past-Morgan did. Moreover, it’s possible that dying on the ship is better than flying back to Earth and facing years of lawsuits, trials, and the possibility of a prison sentence that would outlast her. It’s not clear how Earth laws work in spaceAlex seems to think they don’t. but Morgan is directly responsible for the death of a lot of people, and indirectly responsible for even more. It’s tough to say what would happen on Earth, but I’m willing to bet that “happily ever after” isn’t on the table.
If you saved Dahl, then you can go to the shuttle. You can have a final few words with all the main characters you saved. You can also see a little counter on the cargo bay that will let you know how many extrasMostly people who’d been possessed by telepaths. you managed to rescue. They’re all back there, and they’re all really grateful to you. We just don’t have the budget to let them thank you in person.
Whether or not you saved Dahl, you always have the option of going to the Arboretum and taking Alex’s escape pod. Despite what I said earlier, the final cutscene does indeed show this thing heading for Earth. I don’t know how it could possibly have enough fuel for that, but now is not the time to nitpick those sorts of details. If the director says you fly all the way to Earth in an empty sphere the size of a Prius, then that’s what happens.Yes, it takes very little delta-V to get to Earth. But the escape pod is ALL hull and cabin space. There’s no volume allotted for fuel. But whatever. Maybe they have some better propulsion technology in this setting. It’s fine.
Regardless of which road you take, Alex stays behind. There is no ending where Alex abandons Talos-1. I respect that. Like I keep saying, Alex is a really interesting bastard.
Fun fact: During the scene in the Arboretum where the Apex shows up, it’s possible to grab Alex’s unconscious body and haul it to the escape pod. Sadly, the devs didn’t account for this choice, and so when the pod launches, it phases right through Alex, leaving him behind.
Damn it, Alex. Let me save you!
Those are, to the best of my knowledge, all of the endings.
They are also, of course, not the endings, because none of these endings really happened.
The REAL Ending
We don’t find out what really happened until after the credits. I think that’s lame and if you’re going to pull some last-minute switcheroo ending on the player, then you should at least have the decency to do it right and not slip it in after the credits like a secret Marvel cameo.
We learn that this whole time – everything we’ve been through, all the lives we saved, the monsters we fought, the decisions we agonized over – it was all just a simulation. The headset comes off, and we find ourselves looking at Alex and a handful of operator robots.
Alex is here with his robo-buddies to tell you it was all just a simulation, and you just took the red pill. Welcome to the real world, Keanu. You haven’t been running around Talos-1 fighting Typhon and saving people, you’ve just been strapped in a chair and experiencing the accumulated memories of Morgan Yu through the next-gen Looking Glass headset.
Alex drops another bombshell by showing us images of the Earth. It’s overrun with Typhon. I don’t mean they’re ravaging the Earth, I mean the deed is done. Fait accompli. Everybody’s dead.
*BUUUUURP*
His final bombshell is that you’re not Morgan Yu. You’re a big ball of Typhon cells that just downloaded Morgan Yu’s memories. Alex says that we spent so much time trying to give Typhon powers to humans, but it wasn’t until now that they tried to put human powers (mirror neurons) into the Typhon. I guess this was a sort of reverse neuromod kinda deal, where we injected human brain cells into a Typhon?
And now Alex and his robo-buddies are going to judge how well this worked by looking at how you behaved inside of the simulation.
Just like January was a construct of Morgan as of January 2035, these robots store the personalities and memories of our supporting cast:
- TranStar bootlick / Yu fanboy Dayo Igwe
- Ex-girlfriend Mikhaila Ilyushin
- Security Chief Sarah Elazar who led all the plastic-faced mopes in the cargo bay
- Danielle Sho, the doofus that locked us out of Deep Storage using her voice for no explained reason and then sat outside the ship and suffocated, also for no explained reason.
Yeah. I don’t know what Danielle Sho is doing here. The only flash of cleverness in her entire story is the ingenious way she abandoned her post in Deep Storage. There are over two hundred other people on the station. Most of them had the decency to fall over dead without causing hours of needless confusion and hardship for us. Why didn’t Alex bring one of those people back as an operator robot? How about Chef Will Mitchell? The real one, I mean. The dude won an award and everything. Which suggests that, unlike Danielle Sho, he was actually good at his job.
Or how about Calvino, the borderline senile old fart that made the original Looking Glass technology? Dude was pretty smart. Aside from inventing Looking Glass, there was the way he didn’t use his voice to lock the entire crew out of his labs for no reason.
This ending is… a lot. There’s so much going on here that we’re going to spend a couple more entries unpacking it all and figuring out how well it worked.
Footnotes:
[1] If you do nothing, then Alex will destroy January. I think. It’s been a while.
[2] Alex seems to think they don’t.
[3] Mostly people who’d been possessed by telepaths.
[4] Yes, it takes very little delta-V to get to Earth. But the escape pod is ALL hull and cabin space. There’s no volume allotted for fuel. But whatever. Maybe they have some better propulsion technology in this setting. It’s fine.
Diablo III Retrospective
We were so upset by the server problems and real money auction that we overlooked just how terrible everything else is.
Borderlands Series
A look at the main Borderlands games. What works, what doesn't, and where the series can go from here.
Gamers Aren’t Toxic
This is a horrible narrative that undermines the hobby through crass stereotypes. The hobby is vast, gamers come from all walks of life, and you shouldn't judge ANY group by its worst members.
Charging More for a Worse Product
No, game prices don't "need" to go up. That's not how supply and demand works. Instead, the publishers need to be smarter about where they spend their money.
I Was Wrong About Borderlands 3
I really thought one thing, but then something else. There's a bunch more to it, but you'll have to read the article.
Did you kill everyone the first time? I did because I thought it made for a funny troll ending.
Heh. A much more satisfying ‘Fuck this ending!’ option than attacking the Starchild in ME3.
Alex puts on a whole show to try and fix the consequences of his reckless research, and at the end his test subject just kills him and smashes all his robots. Perfectly in character for a Typhon.
Mass Effect’s ending must be truly terrible for “It was all just a dream” to be an improvement.
“Actually, we’re all clumps of Typhon cells and your real job will be to save Typhon from the Exarchs which have pursued us across the universes. Strap in for launch.”
But it was all a dream and then the sun went nova.
And for a moment, a beautiful light shone from the St. Elsewhere Snow-globe.
Thus destroying a massive amount of television history.
Zooming out from the television, we see Max Payne is watching it. The TV flickers for a moment, and then Lords and Ladies resumes broadcast. Wearily, you resume the business of seeking vengeance for your dead wife.
And then John was a zombie.
Especially if you believe in the Tommy Westphall Shared Universe theory
Taking the pod out actually gives you a glimpse of the ‘real’ ending, with Alex telling the robots “this ain’t it” and restarting the simulation. This and the glimpses you get of the Coral communicating with you here and there I feel like were enough foreshadowing, but then again I already knew about the ending as I was playing
Yeah, I plonked a save and gave it a try, figuring it’d be a funny non ending or something. And while I was half right.. .. yeeeah, I wasn’t keen on the way it just like.. half spoils the ending surprise. Cause after seeing that, it wasn’t hard to figure out roughly what was going on. Kinda irritating, don’t think they should have done that personally, not with it being unlockable way earlier than the actual ending
Yeah, I feel the same way. Perhaps something more appropriate would have been showing the Typhon presence on Earth and Alex saying “We failed”, implying that such was the ending we were trying to avoid. But Alex’s actual dialogue makes it too clear that the events of the game are being simulated.
I know it’s a super commonly used trope but….nuclear reactors don’t explode.
The Hollywood image is that a nuclear reactor is basically a nuclear bomb where the detonation has been slowed way down, and if you just remove some controls/have a control failure, you get a megaton detonation.
That’s not it at all. While a nuclear reactor at its core uses the same basic physics of a chain reaction, they’re not designed in a way that makes it possible (even uncontrolled) for all the fuel to be consumed at once. Quite the opposite. The fuel is spread out and everything about the reactor is designed to make it be consumed as slowly as possible.
In a bomb, on the other hand, explosives are detonated to smush all the fuel into the smallest volume possible, allowing everything to react as close to simultaneously as possible.
One doesn’t turn into the other. If you have a loss of cooling/control on a reactor, you get a runaway reaction. It gets hot. Very very very hot. And will stay that way for a very long while, throwing a whole lotta radiation. But the nuclear fuel won’t explode. It can’t.
The runaway reaction can cause other things to explode. Chernobyl had multiple explosions. But not from the fuel. They were caused by either massive steam pressure as the intense heat flashed all the water coolant to steam, or hydrogen gas explosions as the intense heat/radiation split the molecules of water in the coolant. Which isn’t nothing, but way way less powerful than a nuclear (or even reasonable sized conventional) bomb would do.
“Blow up the reactor” is a terrible failsafe. Put a proper self destruct actual bomb on the station if you need this capability.
Clearly, we need to design vastly more dangerous reactors in case of alien invasion. Same way we need NASA to outfit their astronauts with space-guns; you can never be too sure.
It really is incredible that nuclear power plants have the potential to become giant dirty bombs, but not because they’ll explode in a giant nuclear explosion, but because of the water. Which really means any really hot thing near enough water has the same potential.
And yet, it was water that were the real cause of the fear that Chernobyl could render much of europe uninhabitable. The molten nuclear material mixed with sand hitting the cooling tanks would be a huge steam explosion, but the real danger was it getting into the ground water.
I was spoiled on the prey ending before I played it, which did take away from the game a bit for me. Like, I know video games aren’t real anyway, but when the story isn’t even real inside the game it’s a little hard to care that much. I can only suspend so much disbelief.
I personally took the escape pod first chance I had, because it seemed like what I would do if I woke up on a space station full of aliens. Plus I was really hoping to get to experience re-entry from the pod (Nope, doesn’t happen). I don’t get why more media doesn’t portray atmospheric re-entry when they have the setup for it. To me, the concept of going from being in space, way up, orbiting the earth, to flying through the atmosphere like a comet, to splashdown, is incredible, and video games are always going into space anyway…
Seemed like a missed opportunity to me.
Still, overall, prey was a pretty interesting game, and I would have been more invested if I hadn’t been spoiled ahead of time. It’s a solid 8/10 (Where 7 out of 10 is something like oblivion). The early game was much tighter than the late game, but that’s hard to avoid in the ImmSim genre. And I don’t know if people would actually enjoy the stress of being super low on supplies throughout the entire game.
To me, the neuromod crafting did help with that problem, in that it gave a resource sink, but even printing all the neuromods i wanted and buying every skill that looked good, I still had way more stuff than I needed, and I didn’t even go around with recycler charges. Some way to spend those resources to “win more”, like if you could spend tons of materials to repair the escape pods and save more people or something, could have helped there.
If they make a real sequel to this game, there are definitely some things they should change up, even though 90% of it is great.
1. More difficulty options. This is actually just to save the devs a lot of trouble trying to make the game tune itself to the player, instead just let the player crank the difficulty up or down. Gimme options with reduced resource drops, increased drops, higher neuromod costs, more damage, less damage, etc. Give me some stupid little cosmetic reward for playing on harder modes.
2. Don’t cancel out the events of the entire game in the ending. I can’t imagine they’d make a sequel with the same twist, but just throwing this one out there as general advice.
3. Remove the neuromod add ons that auto detect typhon. This undercut so much of the game’s tension (The rest being undercut by the fact that the mimics aren’t actually that dangerous and quicksave)
4. Integrate death into the game mechanics. System shock 2 and the bioshocks did this, although quicksave/quickload made them pointless. If dying means you lose some resources and the game gets a little harder, it’s a lot more scary than just having to hit quickload.
5. Make phantoms rarer and harder. Phantoms are made of creepiness. Unfortunately, prey throws so many at you they lose the creepy factor, plus they’re not all that hard to fight.
6. Remove the time slowing upgrade. Trivialized every single fight in the game.
7. Make the big scary monsters pick you up and throw you around. The nightmare would be much scarier if it did some scary things to you. It should probably just autokill you on contact.
8. Ghosts & shit. System shock 2 made wonderful use of these. Tie it to neuromod use, like the more neuromods you use the more ghosty type stuff you see. Make the player a little nervous about those neuromods.
9. Resource sinks. Give me some repeating trivial upgrades with increasing costs. Or hell, they don’t even have to be upgrades, give me a way to spend resources to make a “crew saved” counter go up, and I guarantee you many people will do it. Suddenly I’m making decisions between making myself more powerful or saving more people.
10. If you’re gonna give an evil option, go all out. It’s not enough to just let me kill people for no reason and maybe get a scolding, let me get my evil overlord on. Like good=save humanity, neutral=bad stuff happens, evil=you take over the typhon and use them to control humanity.
Might have worked in this specific game, specifically because of the “twist” ending, but I personally hate it when games do this. The idea of dying being a trivial inconvenience and tripping over your own dead bodies because “hey we’ll just make another one” really trivializes any “survival” theme. Because survival is guaranteed!
There’s something to playing with this idea, and “which one am I really?” when the system makes a clone. Soma did this really nicely in the diving suit scene. But you need to roll around with it a bit as a theme, or it negates most of the stakes of your game.
Well let me explain what I mean.
In this game, or in the system shock or bioshock games, or honestly most modern video games barring roguelikes, the player character is going to die. A lot. Dying is the fail state.
However, in most modern games, the response to dying is to press F9 or whatever the quickload key is, and try again. In a sense, the video game character never dies, because that sequence of events is stopped immediately. So it’s the same problem, survival is guaranteed with enough patience.
Thinking back to my more intense game moments, I remember when I first played system shock 2, I didn’t know about the quicksave and quickload keys, and for some reason I can’t really explain, I just didn’t save that often. Every time I heard a hybrid nearby, every time I heard monkey noises, I tensed up, I experienced fear, because my character dying would actually negatively impact me. I would go back to the regen chamber, lose some nanites, and have to possibly fight anything that respawned in the meantime, meaning more resources lost.
When I replayed it years later, that same tension was there, up until I started quicksaving and quickloading. That killed the tension instantly. Now dying means nothing. Oops, the hybrid hit me, load and try again. Hell, sometimes I’d load before anything bad happened, just because I thought I could do better.
Now, of course, I was at fault for this, but nevertheless, the result was real. The game lost the tension and therefore most of its draw. I ruined system shock 2 for myself.
Now, prey is very similar, change hybrid to phantom and monkey to typhon. But, again, all I have to fear from death is a bit of loading.
However, look at how system shock 2 works if you DON’T have save and load. Instead of just reloading on death, you are reconstituted at a regen chamber, and you lose some nanites. Nanites are the money of that game. Resource scarcity is a big theme. So by dying, you make the game a little harder. More importantly, dying seems like a big deal. And theoretically, one could run out of nanites/exotic matter/one up mushrooms and actually stay dead. This works better as a distant threat than a reality, of course, as a softlock like that is an exercise in frustration.
Dark souls has something somewhat similar, there you’re losing progress for dying, basically forcing you to try again from the last waypoint, but you do get to keep any equipment you found. This is another reason I like this system better than hard save/load, you can keep things like collectibles and secrets so the player isn’t re-exploring and finding stuff just to get back to square one.
Unfortunately, a lack of quicksave/quickload system is a major detractor for people who don’t have a lot of time to play videogames. Having to retry long patches of game after a loss is a major issue if you only have an hour or two to play a day.
If anything, there could be a meta aspect to the game, sort of like Resident Evil does, where the game judges your performance and gives you a reward accordingly. If you die or save too much you get a lower rating and therefore you don’t get certain rewards. This incentivizes you to try harder at the game without outright taking opportunities from you or removing any semblance of fear of dying (though these games don’t have a quicksave system, but they do have a reliable save system anyway).
See, what i’m talking about is a system that is constantly autosaving, like Diablo 2 or dark souls.
AKA the game is always saved. Even after you die. I totally agree with you that replaying long stretches is not something a lot of people are interested in.
So, for example, if in System Shock 2 i go and smash the camera in medical, use my psi powers to retrieve the box of ammo, and complete a mission and recieve some cyber modules, then a hybrid kills me, I respawn in the regen chamber, I lose X nanites (I don’t remember how many), however, I still have that box of ammo and those cyber modules. That camera is still smashed.
Dark souls is pretty hardcore about this, making you go through the area again, as well as making you get back to your death spot in one try if you want your XP back. Also you lose human status. So I don’t thing the replay the whole section and fight every single enemy again approach would be any good for the shock ImmSim genre. That’s fine for people who want that kind of game, but prey is not that kind of game.
The “the game is always saved” style of game design leads to some players (e.g. ME) to close down the whole game quickly after death and restart the whole program. Most games will not manage to auto-state-save before a CTRL+ALT+DEL.
Yeah, I’m sorry, someone above was talking about “limited game time” as “one or two hours a day”. I’m lucky if I manage 2 hours a WEEK. Fuck off if you think I’m replaying hours, or will “suffer through” lost time/energy/experience because this is “intended”. Maybe I’ll make an exception for a game where dying really is an important story beat, but even so, if I want to get the “didn’t die” ending, I’m reloading.
I’m playing games on my terms and with my intent. Any attempt at the developer/creator to force me into specific ways of playing or patterns to follow because “that’s the right way to play” is likely to backfire.
On a technical level, yes. On an immersion level, though, regen chambers mean the character is immortal, while load/retry means the character is dead and the player has to use their infinite player powers to reverse time and try again.
…not actually sure which side I fall on, here. All I can say for sure is Nier Automata letting you respawn in the first half and then shutting that off in the second half is a really rude way to do it.
Yes. This was what I was getting at earlier in the thread. While a Vitachamber is mechanically similar to a save/load from a player perspective, the existence of “negate death” technology in the world is not the same from a world building perspective.
The existence of tech that can revive you at any time is a big deal. Who wouldn’t want to cheat death. If you include this, you need to at least wave at why such tech exists in this world. You need a reason why only you can use this tech and not enemies (or you need to let enemies use it). You need a reason why the big baddie doesn’t wake up right after the big boss fight.
Yes, this is a fair point, you do need something to support it, which would have been a very tough fit for Prey. I mean, not impossible, you just have to come up reasons why this only works for the protagonist, or at least, doesn’t work for the enemies. But yeah, it’s true, it adds some burden to the storytelling.
System shock and bioshock did have those lore reasons for their vita-chambers, but I think Prey would have to make it some kind of prototype emergency teleporter. However, the problem of why can’t the big bad do it isn’t a problem in prey, because the big bad is a totally alien species, why would our magic lifesaving tech work on them, after all?
And yeah, it can reduce the stakes. Just going by experience, I will say that it can also up the tension a lot. The story saying my protagonist is a fragile human doesn’t go that far when in actuality they kill everything they go up against, up to and including multiple story height supermonsters.
Of course, some games just don’t even bother with an explanation. Why did your character in diablo 2 respawn in town with all their gear on their corpse, and minus some gold? The game never even acknowledged this. Wasn’t Baal a little pissed that the dude he killed keeps coming back to try again? But it worked, and you couldn’t save/load your way through a tough boss. Then again, an ARPG has less expectations when it comes to story and internal logic than a supposedly immersive RPG.
There’s something to be said about the tension and excitement when you’re playing without a safety net, so to speak. The extreme end of this is the roguelike genre, or even playing POE or Diablo on hardcore difficulty, but of course the average gamer isn’t all that interested in the super hardcore end of things.
I dunno, maybe I should just unbind quicksave. I just feel like there’s a better way to handle it.
If it helps, the Talos reactor is FUSION, not FISSION, and from my understanding of hydrogen fusion, it actually does (theoretically) function like a bomb going off slowly. So yeah, it would vaporize the station and its immediate surroundings. My question is how the pod/shuttle got out. I thought the whole station was surrounded by the Apex, wouldn’t that include the shuttle bay and pod hatch?
Hydrogen fusion needs a) a LOT of pressure or b) a LOT of heat to overcome nucleus repulsion forces. As we cannot simulate enough pressure (like inside the Sun) here on Earth we resort to giant magnetic fields holding deiterium+tritium plasma and blast them with lasers. As soon as laser stops the reaction ends. So there is even less ways for fusion reactor to go boom, than for a fission.
Indeed. Fission will keep on fissioning along on its own for a long time even when left alone, fusion will stop in timespans probably best measured in nanoseconds as the very hot (=moving very, very fast) hydrogen goes shooting off when no longer contained. The way a fusion bomb works is that a regular fission explosion compresses a lot of hydrogen into helium fast enough to get a huge release of energy before this can happen. I guess we can’t rule out the Talos-1 fusion reactor having the ability to suddenly dump enough hydrogen in at once to blow itself up, but that seems like bad engineering to me.
I think even this we can discount.
There’s a reason why the sun undergoes nuclear fusion and Jupiter doesn’t, even though they’re both huge balls of hydrogen.
Hydrogen doesn’t undergo fusion absent massive pressure.
This will depend on if you’re using magic or not for your fusion reactor. There are two main methods of fusion: using a small amount of well applied force to force atoms together, or using magnetic fields to sustain an ongoing reaction. For both, if you turn off the reactor, then fusion stops. Now you’d think the second means that you’d have a sudden explosion, but in practice thermodynamics can tell us that it won’t be that hot, as the power generation depends on heat generation. At best you might get a sudden shotgun/rocket effect if containment is breached in a local area, but still. No bomb.
Now if you’re using magic such that your fusion reactor behaves more like a fission reaction? Then yea, maybe you’d get a good sized explosion. These typically involve the reaction being self-sustaining by itself, the same way that fission is, with the reactor equipment moderating the reaction to reduce the effect in order to keep it manageable. As far as we know this would be effectively magic.
Fun fact about the escape pod: You can use it to get off the station and still get a real ending if you start the self-destruct first. Which means you can kill Dahl and do all that, ensuring everyone on the station dies except you. I thought Mikhaela’s speechless reaction was pretty funny.
Putting the real ending after the credits is amateur hour. Disciples of His Loquaciousness, Hideo Kojima, know that the best place for an ending of a game is after the credits and hidden inside _the tutorial mission_.
The Nier series make you replay the games multiple times to get their true ending.
and then made sequels spinning off continuities from a variety of those endings. It’s getting difficult to keep track of, or even to summarise.
And the original Nier was the consequence of the alternate ending of an entirely different game. I’m sure it’s a boon for fans, but shit’s as confusing as it goes.
Not just any other alternate ending but a joke ending, it’s like Silent Hill making a very serious and dark sequel to the Shiba Inu ending from the second game.
And you’ll never get to Mornington Crescent.
*tips hat*
Funny of you to say that, considering that the last Spider-Man movie stuck its ending-smashing switcheroo in the post-credits scene. It wasn’t something of this nature, but it was still not the sort of thing you’d leave for after the credits, even if by now everyone stays for the scene.
I think the twist in the game is pretty good. The fact that the entire gameplay is based off Morgan’s memories skirts around the problem with all the “it was all a dream” twists and the fact that you’re revealed to be a member of the creatures we’ve been fighting against this whole time adds a lot of food for thought. That being said, I don’t know if a sequel is even viable with this scenario without straying too far from this game’s format.
I don’t know. Considering that he’s in charge of the simulation, it wouldn’t cost him much to give himself a much more heroic sendoff than whatever actually transpired in real life. Seeing that he’s alive and there aren’t signs of Morgan who knows who actually managed to do a sacrifice.
A few possibilities. We never do find out what happened to Talos in RL, so maybe Morgan sacrificed themselves, or selfishly left Alex to die and fled, spreading the Typhon to Earth, or maybe Morgan and Alex did both escape, and that’s how they got the memories to do the simulation.
Or maybe Morgan jammed so many Typhon cells into her own head that she became a Typhon, and led her new people to ravage the Earth, and that’s where Alex got the idea to try the reverse!
(Disclaimer: I have not played this game and know nothing about it outside of this series. >.>)
In fact considering that the goal of this simulation is to make a Typhon have empathy for humans, the whole experiment hinges on a lot of factors Alex would be incentivized to manipulate. For instance, framing himself and Morgan as -basically- the only people on the ENTIRE station who ever did anything wrong, everyone else was clueless, a victim, or actively atangonistic. Making himself both a martyr but -also- perhaps redeemable by making it so he never makes it off Talos as a noble act…since our Unreliable Narrator is a reconstruction of Morgon’s memories and not…a true and accurate account of Morgan’s Memories…who’s to say what really happened on Talos I?
I know some people don’t like that the entire game is basically a morality test and their CHOICES(tm) don’t have real-world consequences based on who’s alive and what you did, but I kinda like that spin where its not the outcomes of the choices the matter, it’s THAT YOU MADE those choices.
Late to the party but… While Prey specifically uses it as a narrative device this is actually true of many game choices in general. Sure, many games override player choice, or create the infamous “illusion of choice”, or retcon player choice in further instalments for reasons like budget, or bad writing, or change in creative direction. But the truth of the matter is that, especially when dealing with player defined character personality, it’s the MAKING of the choices that largely matters because it informs and defines your character.
To be clear, I get annoyed as much as the next guy when ME first limits my choices to only the stupid ones, then ignores them (e.g: the “baby Reaper” choice at the end of the 2nd game) but this is to a large extent because the game false advertises the extent to which it follows the consequences of your actions and how you can “shape the fate of the galaxy”. On the other hand there are multiple choices that do not amount to anything in Life Is Strange (for the sake of the discussion I’ll ignore the final choice of the game) but I like them because it’s a much more personal story and they define who this particular Max is (Walking Dead kinda falls in the middle of these two for me).
I’ve never played this game, but that ending sounds supremely unsatisfying.
Like, I’m imagining playing the original Deus Ex. You decide to merge with Helios and become the singularity. As soon as you do so, it flashes to JC Denton, pod person, being looked over by Simons and Page.
“No, the simulation is working fine. He’s still choosing to rebel against the programming, though.”
“Make the necessary adjustments and try again.”
People wouldn’t remember Deus Ex so fondly. They’d scream to the heavens about that ending. Why did anyone think this was a good idea?
Kind of sounds like the ending of Brazil.
Yeah, Terry Gilliam is… strange.
The only way you get a “reboot and try again” ending is if you jump on the personal escape pod and do nothing about the Typhon on Talos. And, well, that’s *supposed* to be unsatisfying.
If you either Nullwave or detonate the station, present-day (i.e. post Typhon takeover) Alex removes your restraints and asks if you’ll help the surviving humans. The whole game has been an experiment to see if a Typhon with human neurons is capable of displaying empathy and working with others.
I loathe “It Was All A Dream” endings, because they remove all stakes from the preceding story. But this simulation *does* have stakes – can a Typhon with human neuromods be convinced to care about humans, and thus collaborate with the few survivors? Or are they as reflexively lethal as all other Typhon, and humanity is doomed?
I consider it a damn near perfect case of “this matters, but not for the reasons you think”.
To be slightly fair to the ending, the entire opening sequence sort of foreshadowed the ending. You woke up, thinking you were somewhere doing something, and it turned out that you weren’t. You we’re in an elaborate simulation designed to test you for reasons that you were unaware of but were very important.
Handled slightly better, the idea of an ending where it’s STILL a simulation and a test is a neat callback. Waiting until after the credits roll to bring this up is not awesome, but I don’t hate the idea.
There are also a lot of ways that they could have foreshadowed this better. Alex could have leaned more into “The old you would have been onboard with all of this! You’ve changed!” Survivors who knew Morgan pre-typhon (especially Mikhailia) could have been more direct in that Morgan seems like a different person. We could have had Morgan actively confront the disconnect between how “new Morgan” feels and what we learn about “old Morgan”.
I’ll agree they could have foreshadowed it more…but this is where they get tripped up by it being a video game, and variable player behavior. I mean, you *can* play Morgan as every bit the same ambitiously amoral woman who tested Typhon on live humans – it’s entirely possible you *haven’t* changed.
That said, I imagine most players won’t do that (especially on their first play through), so having Alex hammer on about “this isn’t the Morgan I know” every time you demonstrate some empathy would be a nice hint.
The beginning game test feels a little weird, once you know the ending. So Alex programmed the simulation to expect that you were a Typhon, and that you’d try to hide by replicating the chair? They were very confused if you just duck and hide. What were they expecting? Was it a hint to your real self? An AI running the sim screwing up because it was expecting you to behave like a Typhon?
The beginning of game tests were taken from real-world tests of Morgan having been injected with what they thought were Typhon power neuromods. The reason the tests didn’t work is because January sabotaged them.
Although it’s not clear why January sabotaged them, because it doesn’t seem to do anything useful towards the goal of breaking you out of the apartment sim.
This was already discussed in a previous post in this series (although I think it should have been made clearer given that as far as I know it’s only ever mentioned once, in optional dialogue): It was to break the amnesia loop. January replaced a day’s testing batch of neuromods with placebos so that the memory wipe procedure wouldn’t work, allowing Morgan to know what was going on.
Yes, but as discussed previously, why? Morgan knowing something’s up doesn’t get her out, barring some kind of attack on the sim it just results in them noticing she knows, sedating her and doing a proper reset. January still needs to physically bust her out and the inevitable act of smashing through a looking glass to reveal the scifi test chamber beyond gives away the same “something is up” information. What possible step 2 had “Step 1: Sabotage the neuromods” as a useful prerequisite?
There’s never any mechanism given by which such a reset would take place; the reset is done by removing neuromods to go back to the time the neuromods were first installed. If she developed those memories as a clean slate then they’re no longer removable by anything established in the game. (I realize that does raise further questions that I don’t have a great answer for, as I think we agreed on last time we talked about this)
Now that I’m thinking about it, the fact that Morgan was getting reset to 2032 in her apartment before her Transtar onboarding really doesn’t make sense. Firstly, that doesn’t seem like a situation where she’d have any neuromods to remove (did they send her an orientation package containing a Transtar jacket and giant eye-jabbing needle?) and secondly why is she in bed? Surely her reset point should involve holding a great big jabby needle she’s about to use, or being in some kind of Transtar medical facility where she’s about to be jabbed.
So clearly they do have some kind of ability to wipe memories before the moment of neruomod installation, and given that Morgan’s only been awake for about ten minutes when the loop is discovered it seems like that same ability should be able to effect a proper reset.
BTW I’m curious. What happened to real Morgan? Was her brain ground up into paste and fed to a Typhon? Did she never really exist? Or what?
It’s not stated but strongly implied that Morgan is dead and that Alex and his crew have her remains:
The retrospective hasn’t talked about this yet, but there are several points throughout the game where the player character (that is, the Typhon version) starts to wake up and sees the operating room briefly. There are also some other flashes of things like the ruined city shown in the post.
In one of these sequences, Alex orders someone to “inject it with some more of Morgan’s cells”
On more than one occasion, a voice whispers things like “they’re lying to you”. This is in Morgan’s voice (made more obvious if you’ve played both genders as the voice changes to match)
If you do decide to take the last-minute choice to help Alex, he says “we’ll shake things up, like old times,” something I don’t imagine he’d say if the real Morgan were still alive.
Interesting that you mention Deus Ex. I was thinking while reading this how Prey’s needless ‘kill the person who you don’t agree with’ dramatic booster-shot fundamentally differs from how you choose your ending in DX.
In that game you get representatives from each of the factions chiming in with a last-minute attempt to recruit you to their side, but you don’t have to murder them to express your opposition to their outlook*. It made me think how this simple difference reflects the contemplative and philosophical timbre that can be found behind the elder game’s paranoiac thriller veneer.
* You do, of course, have to kill
Bob Page. Although I’ve always sort of wished there was a fourth (or even fifth) ending where you reason with him, or go along with the deal he tries to strike with you.You don’t actually have to kill anyone, the only “person” you have to kill in January, because he hacked into the console and won’t let you push the “vaporize typhon” button until he’s dead. Also if you wait long enough, January forces the issue by tazing Alex after they both make their positions known and reach an impasse.
…well, I remember that being roughly my reaction to the ending of Vampire The Masquerade Bloodlines, and people still love that game.
To be fair I’ve never heard a kind word spoken about the ending.
I liked Bloodlines’ ending, despite hating the latter half of that game, and don’t get why people dislike it so much. Did folks really want
a jack-in-the-box Big Bad Vampire? Boooooring.I had multiple issues with the ending. The first is
you don’t fight the Big Bad. You fight the Dragon, and then you get to the Big Bad and it’s just a cutscene. We already fought a guy possessed by the Big Bad, we know he can fight, so give him a fight and let me punch him. With my guns.The second is
The choice you’re given doesn’t map to the choice you make. Maybe that’s a Humanity thing, mine was bottomed out on my only run, but the choice of Kill Big Bad doesn’t suggest I’m automatically going to open the box afterward, and walking away, leaving the Big Bad alone with the box, is an absurd idea when you don’t know what’s in it.The third is
yes, I wanted something supernatural. The thing’s been vaunted since the very beginning of the game, so to find it already looted and loaded with mundane human traps is the most shaggy dog ending you can have. Give me an Ancient, or a Plague, or a hex from Pandora; something that isn’t from Home Depot.So… disappointing.
See, I find that interesting because I actually thought the ending was kind of awesome. To your first point: something that annoys me about Bloodlines is that you can approach it as an almost combat-free game for the first half, which is pretty true to the tabletop, but the second half is a straight up dungeon crawler. I would have been doubly annoyed had I been forced to
fight Lacroix at the end, particularly since he wasn’t really a physical antagonist. What can actually happen—he tries to do the Ventrue mind control thing and you smack him—is far more satisfying.To your second point, I’m pretty sure the dialogue I picked specified beforehand that
killing Lacroix meant opening the box.I agree that there is little reason tojust leave the box unless you’re fairly sure there’s not a Big Bad Vampire in it.That’s a fair criticism, though to be fairer stillthere are endings you can pursue if you specifically want to keep the box closed.To your third point, the moment the whole
Big Bad Vampiretalk began I was dreading what was coming. It was bound to either bea big, goofy, forced last minute boss fight like RPGs like to throw at the end for no good reasonor a cliffhanger/sequel hook, which I despise. Later I started to think that maybethere was nothing special in the box, and that’d be the twist,though I reckoned that lacked a certain oomph.What actually happened was unexpected and, again, kind of awesome. It’s so thematically appropriate that
these petty assholes with their self-aggrandizing power games and apocalyptic mentality would have their hubris literally blow up in their face.I chose toopen the box myselfand still was laughing through the credits. It even gets foreshadowed!Beckett is a skeptic at first, but towards the end of the game he warns you not to open the box—and he points out that his advice is not necessarily because he thinks there’s a Big Bad Vampire in it.Incidentally, I suspect the game’s ending and even the premise of the plot was lifted from a noir film called
Kiss Me Deadly.I recommend looking it up; there are some pretty cool parallels.If they want that, they can play the previous VTM game, Redemption.
Oh, about January: She wins the confrontation with Alex by stunning him before he can shoot her. The game forces you to deal with her personally if you plan to do anything but see her self-destruct sequence to the end.
From what I’ve seen, it’s possible to have either Alex destroy January or January stun Alex. I don’t know for sure what parameters are involved, or if maybe Alex only wins if you’re going for the nullwave ending, and January wins if you’re going for the Arming Key one
It actually depends on whether or not you make yourself known, oddly enough. If you hang back and let them talk it out between each other, Alex will shoot January (while quipping “you don’t know the difference between a bug and a feature”, and no, I have no idea what he’s talking about). If you roll up and get them to start talking to you, January will taser Alex.
A bug is an unintended behaviour in a program. It can evolve into a feature if you change the requirements. Alex may be chastising January for being inflexible.
Building on this, I’d interpret it as an expression of Alex’s belief in the potential for harnessing the typhon anomaly, against January’s desire to eradicate it. There might be a double meaning, in that the typhon are kinda bug-like in appearance.
Are any of them feet-like?
You can actually destroy January at any point in the game, though. I wonder how the ending will react to this.
It just kinda skips over most of her dialogue, except December steps in for some of it (kinda wish they’d done more with that as it’s literally the same voice actor with a filter)
A big issue with the simulation twist is that it raises the question of how real any of that was. The real Morgan Yu didn’t do all the things you did in gameplay, so clearly the simulation isn’t a pure recording, it can generate novel new events and reactions. My instinctive thought upon seeing the Igwe robot in the real world was “Oh I get it, Igwe’s not a real person, he’s your pet robot you inserted into the sim.” Upon reflection I don’t think that’s what the developer intended but it could be. Given everything just established, for all we know Talos 1 might never have existed, everything we just experienced could be a carefully constructed fake designed to produce the best chance of a friendly Typhon training environment. That’s what I’d do in this situation, it’d be weird if they just plugged you into an unmodified recording because it’s what they had lying around.
That’d be an interesting question to raise halfway through a game, but instead it comes up with sixty seconds of runtime left and zero opportunity for the player to get more information.
This is where I think Shamus (and some other posters) may be going wrong. There’s nothing to indicate there even was a Morgan Yu, and the robot buddies are likely just that: robots performing a function.
Most players seem to be instinctively trying to headcanon some amount of validity back into the events, but logically it seems very questionable. There’s no reason to assume there was any real story. The entire thing, invented to manipulate you.
And, it was. That’s the quirk. This all was invented to manipulate you, the player. The problem is that when pulling back the curtain, the wizard forgot he wasn’t wearing pants that day. Doing this destroys the emotional resonance if the choices and sours the whole experience.
I mean, the whole thing, “PREY the video game”, was in fact invented to manipulate the player…same as every other video game. (For a sufficiently broad definition of “manipulate”, anyway.) Ultimately, none of these characters are real, and none of it matters to the reality the player inhabits.
I 100% agree with you that saying the player’s actions had no effect in the *game* world either is horrible game design…but that’s not what happened. The player *wasn’t* Morgan Yu trying to escape/destroy Talos 1…they were a human-Typhon hybrid being evaluated as *humanity’s last hope for survival*. Your actions toward the people in the simulation weren’t meaningless, they were indicators of whether you had any sense of empathy.
I can see being angry at the designers for pulling a bait and switch on you (particularly if you played as a steely-eyed pragmatist), but saying endgame Alex is unconnected to the larger narrative is just not true.
I saw your post above, and I don’t agree with it there, either. Now, before I go on, allow me to state that if it works for you, that’s fine. We all react to stories differently.
However, don’t tell me it’s good storytelling, or that this was some brilliant writing. There are several *massive* problems. First off, like Mass Effect 3, it’s trying to replace whatever emotional attachment the player may have to the events, characters, or choices with an abstract conceptual framework that is introduced in basically a closing cutscene. And it’s arguably even worse that ME3: the player here has no useful information on what the new real situation actually is. We get a static shot of the planet Earth (supposedly – see below).
In addition, this scenario was hypothetically intended to test Empathy. Now, this is a Big Red Flag for me because some time in the 90’s Empathy was turned into a moral sense, which is it not. To this day, people are being confused by a constant stream of mis-communication on this matter. That said, while I am bringing up this point, I don’t want to discuss it broadly because, while I have very strong feelings on the matter, it goes right over most people’s heads.
The more specific issue is that the scenario as presented *doesn’t* relate to Empathy. The system blindly assumes that in all the game’s choices, one action is caused by Empathy and the alternative is not. But Empathy is a presumed reason for an action, not the cause of it. Or, more specific case: Let’s say that Yu is choosing whether or not to hand over the unfortunate tape of killing the prisoner with the Typhon experiments: Empathy can help someone understand the situation, but does not make the choice. Yu could hand it over because she understands how this knowledge or lack thereof is affecting the other person, or withhold it because she knows this will cause immense hurt. Either choice could be driven by Empathy.
But, as I said above, Empathy is dangerous. It is not a moral sense, not does it occur automatically. We can actively choose to extend it or not, and I should point out that serious moral thinkers have questioned whether Empathy can really be trusted or even has real value. I wouldn’t expect a video game to dwell on that question – except the scenario here is a good one to raise those questions, except it doesn’t give the player a way to express the critical question of *why* they do anything.
Finally, or at least “finally because I’m not writing anymore right now”, we have the problem that we know one thing for certain: Alex is a liar. Nothing he says can be trusted. We know precisely *nothing* about him that can be trusted, although I’ll assume for the sake of argument that the final cutscene is accurate. We don’t, and can’t trust his version of events or even that they actively occurred. We don’t know whether “Morgan” existed or any other characters, nor that any of the relationships as presented existed. We cannot know that the scenario here happened at all, because the only thing we do know is that it was created to manipulate us. Worse yet, even though we are apparently playing some kind of Typhon organism, we have no understanding what that means.
Now, before I close, this *could* have been managed. It would not have been easy, but all this might be fixable. For one thing, starting with a Mute Protagonist who, over the course of the game, more and more actively communicates would do wonders and change the nature of the story. Since I don’t want to drag this post out too much, here’s a short list:
(1) This should NOT be the twist. The player should 100% have been clued in to the situation.
(2) The real story should be that the Typhon are potentially learning through us, the player.
(3) I think the Looking Glass gimmick, while cute, is a bit of a mistake thematically. Go one step beyond and delve into the actual psychology of characters. The core idea of this game is the *Mind* itself, so the fundamental conflicts that we are resolving should also be about thought.
I agree with you in that it doesn’t seem to be a well-designed experiment, and I would not be at all confident that the results prove what Alex seems to think they do. Although at least you can’t say that this isn’t on-brand for him!
IMHO, your core objection is this:
“This should NOT be the twist. The player should 100% have been clued in to the situation.”
The author lied to you, it broke story cohesion for you, and as a result you no longer trust anything they say. Their frame for the story – a psychological test masquerading as disaster survival – does not work for you.
The entire idea of this test rests on the subject being tested without knowing how it’s being tested (like a lot of psychological experiments). I mean, “I don’t appreciate being dragooned into being a test subject” is a feeling I can understand. In most cases, this would mean you put the book down at page 5 (or video game equivalent), but here you weren’t aware of it until the very end. I feel like that’s the inevitable risk any twist ending takes – alienating people who don’t like how it changes the story – but it worked for me here. Possibly because of my (extremely limited) background in psychology.
No, that is only a part of my distaste. Twist endings have to be used very carefully because reframing any story causes issues, which would be too long to fully discuss here. I think you may be trying to “psychologize” my response. However, even at its most generous, this is a fundamentally broken premise because the new frame is less interesting than the old, with sparse detail and no relevant context.
Going to go off on a twist tangent.
This is why you usually keep twists small, affecting a single character rather than the entire setting. If someone’s gotten to the twist, it’s because they were invested in the untwisted setting. The best ones add information to the setting, rather than challenging its foundations. Bruce Willis is the only one who’s dead. Tyler Durden is the only one who isn’t real. Norman’s Mother is Norman in a wig. Everything else you’ve seen is the same; the pillars still hold weight.
You have more leeway when you’re telling an emotional story. The old Twilight Zone episode with the woman being tormented by tiny aliens, and then the twist is that the tiny aliens are actually normal human astronauts and the woman we’ve been empathizing with is a giant space monster. Citizen Kane, where we go through all the highs and lows of Kane’s life, to discover his last thoughts are of his childhood before any of that happened. Those twists are designed to make you think about the nature of morality/success/whatever emotion you were feeling beforehand.
But you’re still focused on the same emotion. You shouldn’t have a story about a mother’s self-sacrifice, only to have a twist that it’s all a bad drug trip and the true moral is drugs are dangerous. If your twist attacks the foundations of the setting, which was good enough to carry the audience to the end, then your twist’s new setting has to be even better, in which case… why not make a second story, that starts in that setting instead? You could have two good stories, instead of one good story with a really harsh direction change at the end.
Keep twists inside the established setting.
The thing that gets me is, this experiment is designed to be successful if “Morgan” displays empathy during the simulation…but the Looking Glass recording indicates that, in order to save Earth, everything has to be destroyed. The recording specifically states that “nothing can survive….including you.” So, in order to save all life on Earth, everything on Talos I must die. But Alex designed the simulation to test whether “Morgan” will show empathy by saving people, deliberately endangering all life on Earth? Am I being empathetic by killing everyone or by saving everyone?
There’s a confusion here.
Alex set-up the test so he can claim victory whatever happens! Let’s see that journal editor reject his paper now!!
That particular choice is the opposite of empathy. Going out of your way to personally deliver the news you killed a loved one so you can watch their reaction? It is straight up the ending from Se7en. There’s no way to parse it that makes it empathetic. But the game doesn’t view it that way so /shrug. The game doesn’t give any choice that is empathetic in that situation at all. Because they missed the obvious.
Note that I’m not disagreeing with you. I think this makes your point stronger.
That’s ultimately my problem with all sorts of these kinds of stories. They decide what you are motivated by and why. When most of the time it is off the mark (like above) or it is too much of a leap general. Will you save the neuromods or not? (Umm I don’t care anymore. I care about Earth.) Punish Morgan for her crimes or not? (Umm don’t care. Care about Earth still.) Will you do everything you can to save *NPC#3* or *NPC#7*? (But I don’t care about those people. I care about *Theme#2*.) So ultimately for every one of these stories (especially ones with twists) I have to be on exactly the same wavelength as a committee of writers or it just falls flat.
Dreamfall Chapters actually had a good solution to that, which has gone tragically uncopied. Whenever you have some big choice to make, you can mouse over your options and hear your character’s inner monologue about why they might choose that option. Still doesn’t let you do everything you want, but neatly avoids the issue of “I chose to do X because Y, but then my stupid character said they were motivated by Z!”
It’s empathy in the sense of “the ability to understand that another being is sentient and / or sapient”. Alex’s experimental conditions are designed to determine whether the Ball of Titan Cells can recognise sapience in humans. It’s hard for a human to detect, let alone prove, empathy in non-human and it’s telling that, in the “still a Typhon” ending, the BoTC manages to “trick” Alex despite tens of hours of intense scrutiny – hence the elaborate scenario.
(Tangent: I completely fail to buy the “empathy might be dangerous” argument because it’s clearly evolutionarily conserved. Benefits outweigh costs, says Nature).
Empathy is often dangerous in the real world. Empathy in a general sense has benefits by allowing efficient cooperation between trustworthy people, but when it makes you ignore the red flags that tell the more cynical among us that some people aren’t trustworthy, people die.
Evolution isn’t a perfect system; some traits might end up passed down through happenstance, and some might be overdeveloped to the point of drawback; see, for example, species that grow horns or fangs so large they hurt themselves.
A better example is the human spine. We get no end of health problems from taking a structure which is supposed to be horizontal and in extension, and using it vertically and in compression. On the other hand the huge gains in dexterity and communication afforded allowed us to dominate the entire darn planet. For empathy, benefit has very obviously outweighed risk.
Empathy isn’t the same as being nice. The ability to understand that another entity has reason, memory, and an emotional state makes it easier to predict how they might react. There are plenty of ways in which empathy can be weaponised.
Murder is also a behaviour Nature has conserved, evolutionary fitness is not the opposite of danger.
“Nothing” is definitely false here. Alex calls the simulation “a reconstruction of events based on Morgan’s memories” and even with the reasonable objection that Alex is 100% willing to lie about that, one of the “waking up on the operating table” events has Alex ordering someone to “inject it with some more of Morgan’s cells” and there’s very little reason to believe he would make up something like that just to fool the player.
This also offers a built-in explanation of why the simulation events would at least try to hew to actual events: that some of the memories are (or could be) coming directly from Morgan and not from the simulation, and so anything in the simulation that diverges too much from what actually happened risks the subject spotting the thread and concluding the entire thing is a sham.
All of that said…I do somewhat agree with you. I’ve said elsewhere that I despise “it was all just a dream” fan theories, and while most of the reasons don’t apply here, some of them do. And I am willing to agree that a stance of “okay none of this actually happened but it’s at least a broad-strokes representation of what actually happened” is needed for me to care at all, otherwise it turns into the same kind of fictional Calvinball you get with the likes of Shepard Indoctrination Theory, the Sole Survivor as a synth, or Squall dying at the end of disc 1.
I knew someone else was going to say it! There are hints of this twist interspered in the game – a few ‘waking-up-on-the-table’ scenes that don’t make sense the first time through.
The first time you touch Coral in-game is one, but there are others that I can’t remember.
I am responding to both you and Dreadjaws, as below, here.
A character’s statements are facts, but the interpretation of them in a literary work not (as Dreadjaws but not you, stated) “headcanon”. For example, Alex Yu, presuming that’s his actual identity, orders to robot as you describe. However, here is a relevant question: Who is Morgan, and how do we know?
The simple, but potentially naive answer, is that Morgan is clearly Morgan Yu and the player character just experienced her memories. However, from a literary perspective this interpretation is more or less provably false. The player character (referred thereafter as !Yu) cannot have directly experienced Morgan’s memories because the scenario specifically allows for several definitively non-canon endings, such as the “escape” early option and the “Alex dies” events and, y’know, the actual nuke-everything option upon which so much rests.
This directly calls into question the fundamental validity of anything we experienced. Although we can presume from the weight of evidence that there are some human “Morgan” cells involved, the only specific thing Alex describes as being provided at the so-called Mirror Neurons. This is actually very questionable itself as I posted some time back in this series, but there’s no way for me as a player to know whether *Alex* is babbling nonsense or whether this is supposed to be how things work in the Prey universe. it could be a clue or it could be sci-fi, but either way it doesn’t particularly add anything. However, we don’t know if Morgan was an actual person or some kind of cell culture and, even if you presume it’s a person’s cells we don’t know whether Morgan was related to Alex. The fact that the game begins by allowing you to pick Male or Female actually suggests to me that there may not have been a real individual, but again, I’m having to essentially write a story for the game because all the fundamental basis of one has been erased in the last scene.
Additionally, there are further problems to point out. The “moral choices” presented are highly binary and appear to have been scripted in that manner, which inherently raises issues about how accurate they can possibly be. basically everyone you interact with is a character played by an Operator. You can handwave it and suggest that the operators are “based on the minds” of real people but, (A) Facts Not In Evidence, and (B) it’s mighty curious that this specifically technology wasn’t shown in the game itself. Even according to the game’s own events, Morgan’s operators were programmed to carry out his/her but not based on the actual mind. It might be true, but the actual evidence for this is highly suspect. The neuromods created contain memories in a manner of speaking but they are never used to impart lived experiences, only skill and talent, nor does there seem to be any way to upload this to a computer.
The other, *other* problem is that Alex is basically writing himself as the main character in !Yu’s experience in this and the actual information that we get is highly selective. It’s a common argument to suggest that, “Aha, Alex wanted to hide certain details but here and there the truth comes out” but the problem there is that, again, the experience we have is inherently fake. Once you have to suspect someone of manipulating you, !Yu can’t trust anything they came up with. Also,oOnce you have to suspect someone of manipulating !Yu, you can’t trust anything they came up with.
Worse yet, the your emotional investment in the story, and also !Yu’s investment, is replaced at the last second with an abstract relationship with Earth and/or humanity. However, we’re not really given enough to base our response upon. Having only seen a highly suspect array of humans we don’t know anything about what humanity on Earth, if it exists at all, is still like, or even was like prior to the Typhon Invasion (which is a pretty great British Punk band name). How many humans are left, in on around the planet? What are the Typhon even doing at this point? Is this a war? And despite !Yu being Typhon, we have no insight at all into their actions, intentions, thoughts, or what.
TL;DR, you can believe or not believe what you want. For me, personally, this is precisely what Tolkein relates to on failed Secondary Worlds: “You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside. The moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken; the magic, or rather art, has failed. You are then out in the Primary World again…” For me, this is part of the problem here. In the ending, I am now having to second-guess the intentions of the writers rather than rely the work itself.
Extra Extra TL:DR -> If you make a story with Questioning of Reality as a central theme, you had better make it airtight as a story, and any ambiguity must be intentional.
But, again, the game perfectly states that it’s not Morgan’s memories, but a reconstruction based on them. The fact that you’re allowed for different outcomes is the entire point. Why would they give you just her memories if the entire thing is a test of character? You’d only replay what Morgan did.
The basis of the memories is clear: the Typhon escaped and wreaked havoc while Morgan had no choice but to step up and fight them. Then we can assume Morgan encountered all the possible scenarios (meeting with the ex, saving co-workers, etc) and made her own decisions. Then Alex started from that and tooled the simulation to give the test subject choices in every chance, regardless of what Morgan chose, seeing if the subject did the same as Morgan, better or worse. There’s no “calling into question” anything. You’re deliberately ignoring stated lore to go on a rant about your perceived nonsense.
So of course the moral choices are binary. This is a test to see if the Typhon can empathize, not deep examination of the complexity of human morality. Alex is just trying to see if the Typhon can, when given a choice, pick the option that’s likely to help others rather than itself. Binary choices are ideal for this.
And are you even questioning the validity of the gender choice at the start? Well, that puts into question the reality of every game that allows such a change. Hey, maybe the events of Mass Effect never transpired, since you’re allowed to pick Shepard’s gender.
Seriously, you’re nitpicking to ridiculous levels here, and you’re ignoring established story to do so.
That’s not a fair characterization of what Rho is saying at all.
I’ve pretty much said my piece on the matter. Your arguments aren’t persuasive. I think you may be confusing what the player character can confirm, with what !Yu is told, and in process, handwaving the logical problems with the latter. I can’t trust people who spend all their time prevaricating to my face and inventing fantasy scenarios while demanding I believe them over my lying eyes. Probably why I loathe politics so much.
You’re free to ignore that and insist on maintain the suspension of disbelief. I cannot, and I don’t think it’s a reasonable demand.
Except that Alex very clearly states that your whole adventure is reconstructed from Morgan’s memories. I mean, sure, you can assume Alex was lying about her to manipulate you, but then you’re the one headcanoning stuff. There’s no reason not to believe Alex here. Morgan’s existence as an actual person (or even the entire events of the simulation being real) is irrelevant to the point of the simulation, which is to see if a Typhon can learn empathy, so there’s absolutely no reason for Alex to be making it all up.
If anything, if Alex was trying to manipulate you, he would have painted a better picture of himself to make sure you never felt the need to retaliate towards him.
Any time a setting has a full-on “Matrix” level simulation of reality, there’s the in-universe possibility that we’re not seeing the ultimate reality. (And hell, if the author’s willing to pull “It was a dream!”, you don’t even need that.) But I would argue that’s not the case here.
The scenario we see at the end is Alex nearly (totally?) alone in a world taken over by Typhon. He doesn’t have the skills or time to generate a perfect Typhon-human hybrid morality testing simulation – but he *does* have data from a real-life crisis that could serve his purpose. Plugging the hybrid into a Talos 1 simulation makes perfect sense to me.
This assumes some level of “ideal” being possible. Society has collapsed at this point, and we are supposedly grasping at straws, with the tech we have.
Assuming that the neuromods are “real” and work roughly as described, they’re much more a recording than a programming language. The recording is modifiable – you’re not limited to playing the piano pieces the master they scanned played. But they’re not created from whole cloth – you need to scan the expert.
This isn’t explained, so it pointless to argue the “right” answer, but I assumed Morgan was real and you’re playing Morgan’s real memories is because the tech as described sounds much more capable of working that way than being a fully programmable simulation environment.
More likely, to avoid programming some way to fit all of them in there.
I’m fairly certain 26 people couldn’t fit in that cargo bay even if they all inhaled AND went on keto.
Must…not…derail…with more discussion…of Arkane’s…politics!
I don’t see “Punishment for Morgan” as the primary reason to go down with the ship. You’ve been told a few times at this point that even a few Typhon cells getting back to Earth risks a full extinction scenario. There’s even the scene with the shuttle that’s already left Talos I that you can choose to remotely destroy. Saving even yourself alone, considering all your neuromods, is just too dangerous (if you believe January, and if you think you’ve covered all the bases for other… escaped contaminants.)
There’s also always the distinct possibility of a Typhon hiding and stowing away in your escape pod. This is why January is adamant that you shouldn’t bother trying to save anyone because the entire station (escape pods included) is compromised.
As a counterpoint, there is also the question in the personality questionaire at the start, in which you are about to be punished for an unspecified crime, and how you react. The “Go down with your ship” option can be seen as a reframing of that question.
If you refrain from using Typhon neuromods specifically (‘Human’ ones are fine) and still decide to destroy Talos 1, January will comment and say that it should basically be safe for you save yourself (For the same reason its safe for the other people you can save to be able to leave).
Although January does say she is programmed not to allow you to leave so…hint hint, I’m going to turn around now Morgan…
Typolice:
Should be “is a more serious problem”.
Also, are you OK, buddy? Would you like to talk about your feelings towards Danielle Sho? Pent up frustrations are bad for your health!
Yeah I really don’t think Sho deserves the battering she’s taken in this retrospective. She forms an emotional core of the early story that NotYu is supposed to react to one way or another, that’s why she’s there – that and presumably she was alive in Morgan’s memory of the incident and Mitchell and Calvino were not. The fact she didn’t act rationally is perfectly in line with what we learn about her character, and it’s not as if there weren’t plenty of other humans not doing the ideal thing in this very stressful situation throughout. Leave Dani alone!
I find it interesting that, for this experiment in imparting the capacity for empathy into a Typhon, the memories they chose to instill in the hybrid are those of *Morgan Yu* of all people — a human with minimal empathy for other humans.
I kind of like this plan! If the hybrid can acquire empathy while under the belief that it’s acting out the life of Morgan Yu, that’s a very strong indicator of success.
They might not have much choice, for them to use the memory it need to be first recorded. They also needed someone who had interacted with typhoon. Morgan might have been the only person, aside from Alex, who would fit that description.
Although now that I think about it, it could have been pretty cool if in the ending the real Morgan was still alive alongside Alex.
Ooooh, the ending is just Morgan, and you get the explanation of what they’re trying to test for, and it ends with “what would you have done, February/Whichever Month Hasn’t Been Used Yet?” With the idea that this is an iteration and all the sim’s Yubots are the conclusions of previous experiments.
Someone suggested it in the discussion of Danielle Sho and the trial of getting into Deep Storage: I think the robot characters present at the end are representative of various points of view for the the test subject (You) to consider.
– Dayo Igwe is pro-neuromod research, pro-Transtar, thinking, talking and acting in an (ostensibly) rational, considered way. He’s also connected to a very simple moral choice.
– Danielle Sho is prone to making emotional, kneejerk reactions, rarely considering other people and acting on instinct. Agressively anti-Transtar, and of course she ends up full of regret for her actions.
– Mikhalia Ilyushin is an ex-girlfriend, with some obvious moral choices attatched, mostly centred on how much you as a player (or captive Typhon) can emphasize with someone.
– Sarah Elazar is wary of Transtar, worried about neuromod research, and directly responsible for dozens of innocent lives. Which you can help her safeguard, endanger, or just end.
– And there’s Alex: partly responsible for the disaster, driven by flawed reasoning to pursue dangerous and lethal research by saying the ends justify the means.
Also related: they’re all senior members of Talos 1’s crew, or connected to other powerful people who were…so the most likely people to have been ‘backed up’ into Operators. Potentially, they’re all Alex could find for his experiment, holed up wherever he is in the Typhon-pocalypse.
As a cobbled-together ’empathy test simulation’, it works.
Ok, so there’s no way Talos-1 is anywhere near the L2 point of the Earth-Moon system in that shot of the Nullwave ending. Depending on how large the orbit is around the L2 point you might be able to see the Earth poking around the Moon, but that looks like you’re practically in a right triangle with both, when the defining nature of the L1 through L3 points is that they involve being in a straight line. Though props to the art team for attempting to get the far side of the Moon looking correct—it actually does a pretty good job of recreating the mostly cratered, brighter lunar highlands of the far side, without the dark lava plains of the maria present on the Earth-facing side. (I’m not sure how the Moon and the Earth are being lit by two different light sources though, given their differing amounts of illumination…)
…that said, I’m OK with it! It’s all a simulation by a few desperate survivors, which covereth a multitude of sins. I read the spoilers in the comments along the way so the ending wasn’t a surprise, but I actually love this idea. I get to be a human 24/7 in real life. I want more games where I get to be something else, something different, something alien. Having a Tomato in the Mirror ending actually sounds pretty cool, especially when you turn out to be a Typhon with all(?*) of the nifty powers they’ve been revealed to have. I now want a sequel where you’re fully cognizant of being a Typhon from the beginning, and have to make use of your powers to try to save what remains of humanity through either fighting or reasoning with the other Typhon on Earth**. (Sure, to us the Typhon appear to be mindless, but to a Typhon perhaps they can communicate somehow…)
*I don’t actually know which powers you have, since I haven’t played the game and I gather there are different “species” with different powers, so I don’t know of you’re some sort of ur-Typhon that can assume any of the powers of the others, or if that’s technically possible for all Typhon and they just don’t manifest it, or if that was just part of the simulation.
**Assuming, of course, that the destruction of Earth shown on the screens is actually true and isn’t just another lie Alex is feeding us to try to get us to empathize with humanity; though I hope it isn’t, it makes for a really enticing sequel hook.
Thematic naming strikes again: that shuttle you escape in in that screengrab is named Camazotz, after the Mayan bat god of night, death, and (most fittingly) sacrifice.
Hey, I know Camazotz! He was that guy! From the thing!
Specifically, the first boss in Digital Devil Saga, a MegaTen spinoff using the engine and mechanics (more or less) of SMT: Nocturne.
There’s a surprising dearth of well-known bat gods.
I mean, at least it didn’t tell you at the end that none of that stuff really happened AND ALSO you’re the bad guy and you murdered a bunch of civilians for no reason. Stupid Spec Ops: The Line…
There are degrees of alienating the audience, and prey certainly didn’t do it that hard at least.
I also agree with Shamus that Danielle Sho makes little sense. Her plan was pretty terrible.
My reasoning for picking the nullwave ending wasn’t necessarily to save the neuromod tech, but to protect whatever other research we had on the typhon.
These things are out there still, and could somehow find their way to earth again. Keeping some kind of knowledge on things like the nullwave device, coral, etc. would be our best way of stopping them if we ever encountered them again. I was really surprised when this turned out to just be the “meh, ok,” ending.
Danielle Sho is obviously one of the four because she’s one of the more developed characters on the station. The voice lock and having to trace her logs is a pretty transparent attempt to force the player to look into the lives of the Talos I crew prior to the disaster, and given how meta the whole simulation thing is I’d say there’s a decent chance that’s true in universe. The twist reframes Crew Quarters as one of the more important sections, and Danielle is very much the focus of that section.
Another important detail is that Sho cannot be saved, she appears to die no matter what course of action you take. That she shows up at the end regardless is a disconnect between the ‘real’ world and the simulated Talos I that will be present in any playthrough. I have to assume that’s a deliberate contradiction, a way of getting the player to question the reality presented to them.
Holy M Night Shambles Endings Batman!
I never knew about this post-credits ending. Didn’t wait through the credits, I guess, and didn’t read enough spoilerful reviews after the fact.
There is a very good video analysis of the game (link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GkVXw4LfkQc ), with an idea on the game and the ending, which I understood as “The simulation is an experiment in creating empathy in a typhon”.
Basically, the point of any and all ethical dillemas was not to make a good/evil decision, but being able to make the decision itself.
Okay, Earth is being overrun by Typhon and humanity is on it’s last legs. But is it too late to save the dogs?
Asking the Real Questions!
By the end of the game I was 100% really ready to do both. Wipe out the Typhon with the null wave then nuke the station to destroy the research. These things are dangerous, man. Stop messing with them.
Didn’t lore in the game speculate that they got here by transforming into/swapping places with asteroids? And just drifting through space like spores? No way a nuke is going to touch that. Heck, it could be that the only reason they didn’t get to the surface before is that they burned up in the atmosphere and needed to wait in space until something on earth evolved enough to build spacecraft they could hitch a ride on.
Destroying the station is just to smack the company in the nose with a rolled up newspaper for all the torturous human experimentation and for being great species-imperiling idiots in serious need of oversight/regulation.