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I also thought it odd that they treated Kara like she didn't know, when she saw the brochure for the robot child at the start of the game, and also saw the family drawings with the blonde daughter, not the brunette. Clearly, she had to know, but chose to treat the girl like a child in need, anyway - which makes the reveal at the end meaningless to anyone but the audience.
That was one of the few parts of the game where I felt they really missed the mark.
Lastly, I don't understand why Alice only has that indicator on her temple at the end of the game - if it was there the entire time, the npcs would have mentioned it - so why did it only show up at the end? At first I thought Kara simply didn't notice, as part of her going rogue, but that doesn't explain how no human ever noticed. None of the other robots could hide theirs and had to yank them out to pass as human.
The name Alice does reference some early AI work from the mid 90s, so maybe she _was_ always planned to be an android. IMHO I feel the narrative would have been stronger were she not. Many of the scenes - protect her from abuse, help her to warm up, find her food, are meant to elicit a response in us as the player in the assumption that she's a vulnerable child. Once you know she isn't human, it makes those scenes carry less narrative impact. Or maybe it's meant to make us question whether we could care for an android "daughter".
That the in-game fiction explains away her LED indicator as being "some people wanted the option to not have it so that the child androids were more life-like" clearly contradicts the "all androids must be clearly identified" law. That part is a frustrating inconsistency.
It's also weird that, given the androids can communicate wirelessly (except for when they decide they need to touch hands instead) that Kara didn't immediately know Alice was also an android. Perhaps as mentioned by jack_of_tears she didn't want to believe (though wouldn't that have only happened when she broke into being a deviant?).
Hmm.
Damn you David!
It was Kara's fundamental belief that Alice was a vulnerable child that led to her breaking her program. So whether or not Alice is a "real girl" doesn't matter. It is the implication that she is real and in danger that makes her [Kara] face the Android law (core programming) that no Android shall let a human come to harm which causes a cognitive dissonance which directly leads to her breaking the programming and starting her (or restarting her) path to deviance.
And the fact that Alice had the same name as the chat bot A.L.I.C.E was a nice easter egg.
It also diminishes the story greatly. The entire premise of the arc up until that point is can a machine and a human love each other. That is the question Kara's arc tries to answer. But now that question is pointless. Was their bond real, or was it just Alice running child.exe? All evidence points to the later. All of Kara's actions are based around saving or caring for Alice, who is just running her program to be cold or hungry (despite never eating) or tired.
These androids are machines so advanced, they can identify humans or androids by simple visual scans, Conner and Markus do it all the time. There is absolutely no reason why Kara would not know that Alice was an android. And even if she didn't, the first thing that would have happened is Todd yelling at her for wasting his spaghetti.
Yep, this is also a great point. We are not even 100% sure if Alice's deviant, as it's never brought up. Also it makes reaching Canada all more bittersweet: it would be a tad easier for Kara and Luther to hide their identity, but what about the child that never grows up? I think sending her to school would blow their cover almost immediately.
Kara discovers the YK500 brochure in Todd's room very early on - before Kara becomes a deviant, potentially even before Kara sees hard evidence of Todd mistreating Alice. The brochure is illegible to the player, but Kara reads it. We're supposed to believe that Kara, even Machine Kara, cares so much that she forgets the truth, or just doesn't accept reality. Luther comes right out and says as much. But it's hard to believe.
There are plenty of clues in the game for the player before the reveal, though. Alice never eats or gets hungry. She doesn't seem to have any friends or go to school (although Todd *says* she goes to school). In her picture box is a picture she drew of herself with an LED (the player is led to believe it's blood, but in hindsight it's obviously an LED). She is uncomfortable and unhappy but never really emotionally breaks down when most children would in the circumstances. There's a magazine article about the YK500 model (which also says that the usual LED is removable). Alice isn't afraid at all of going to a hideout filled with violent revolutionary human-murdering androids. And there's a defunct child android in Jericho when Markus arrives (but that one is a boy, so he doesn't look like Alice).
Alice just living with Todd at all is a clue. What human mother runs away from a drug-addicted, abusive husband and leaves her daughter behind?
Zlatko is the biggest giveaway. When Kara tells him Alice is human he doesn't really seem particularly moved by the news. At the time, we don't know what Zlatko is up to, so we can't draw conclusions about how the sudden arrival of a "human" child might influence him. But after the fact, it's clear that Zlatko knows the truth and is just playing along.
He tells Luther to bring Alice to him after Kara is reset. We know Zlatko experiments on androids, not humans, and he's doing those experiments at the time he asks for Alice. And while Zlatko might be able to get away with what amounts to an illegal salvage business, there's no evidence he's up for kidnapping and abuse of human children, a much more serious crime.
Depending on dialog choices, Alice can all but come out and admit it at Rose's house. She will refer to herself as a member of the race of androids, saying things like "Why do humans hate us? If we could talk to them, they would see we're not bad." If she were human, she'd say something like "Why do grown-ups hate androids? I can see you're not bad."
There's not only enough evidence here to foreshadow (if not give away) Alice being an android, it seems very likely that Alice *knows* she's an android, and is continuing to run child.exe for Kara's benefit. It kind of raises the issue of how much even deviant androids retain their programming. Kara is built as a caretaker, and Deviant Kara is still dedicated to that purpose in life. Deviant Connor goes from being an empathetic, but fundamentally serious counter-revolutionary soldier, to being an empathetic, but fundamentally serious revolutionary soldier. Jerries go from being excitable, clown-like carnival workers to excitable, clown-like helpers. Deviants might gain the ability to ignore orders, but it still seems like their personalities are as pre-programmed as ever.
She is. If you threaten Todd with the gun but then lose the ensuing fight, Alice will pick up the gun and shoot Todd. She couldn't do that if she weren't deviant. While it might theoretically be possible for Alice to only be deviant in this specific timeline, nothing else changes as a result (one of the less plausible parts of the game, IMO, which otherwise usually makes choices meaningful for secondary characters as well as primary ones) so the conclusion must be that she is always deviant.
Fine how? Being a blue-blood doesn't mean she wasn't in trouble. If anything it meant she was in MORE trouble.
As far as Kara goes... she broke her programming. Once that was done, she was just a human with blue blood. Whether she was programmed to care for humans or not wasn't a factor past that point.
As for Alice... Children only whine and cry because they're biologically programmed to do so. It would obviously be in their best interests to clearly state their needs once they have learnt how to talk, but they tend to just keep making a mindless racket... sometimes even into adulthood. And often enough even when their whining is coherent, it is for things they don't actually need. Children are horribly impractical like that.
I didn't particularly mind catering to Alice's whining because it is what I'm used to from children. They're nuisances one is obligated to cater to in order to guarantee their survival and get "good" ends. I never cared in the first place, but if the game gives me a prompt to play parent, I take it.
Plus there is the other matter: We don't know if Alice herself is deviant or not. She isn't being tracked, but she could be stuck behaving in accordance with her original programming even if every other droid around her has gone deviant.
And as far as droid children in particular go, the game explicitly confirms that they are weak to the cold (when trying to cross the river on a boat in that ending), so Alice's complaints about being cold are 100% legitimate. As far as I'm aware she never claims to be hungry, and most of Kara's attempts to feed her seem to be optional (but are there to maintain the ruse). Similarly, she never displays any of the other needs that droids would probably have because, again, it would reveal her nature, which would derail David Cage's smoothbrain story. That doesn't mean she doesn't have needs. We're just not subject to them. Unless the droids are fitted with nuclear reactors to last a hundred years, they necessarily need some sort of power supply replenishment.
Yeah, it makes no sense in hindsight, even if one assumes that deviancy made Kara a complete idiot.
But if you've ever played Heavy Rain... this is nothing compared to Ethan waking up in the middle of the street with an origami figure in his hand and having a psychic connection to the killer.... which ends up being a completely abandoned plot-thread.
This might even constitute an improvement on David Cage's part.
[quote[Lastly, I don't understand why Alice only has that indicator on her temple at the end of the game - if it was there the entire time, the npcs would have mentioned it - so why did it only show up at the end?[/quote]
That wasn't Alice.
That was another YK-500 model. That was the whole point of the reveal: that Alice wasn't unique. Another girl had her exact face and had the ring LED.
That sounds very probable. Likely even.
Probably she was meant to be a human... but someone was all like: "You have the option to let a girl shoot her abusive father?!" and "You have the option to abandon her in the cold?!" .... Yeah, I can see that.
But then if it is all okay on the grounds that she has blue blood... doesn't that defeat the entire purpose of the game? Like we're not allowed to abandon and neglect a fictional natural-human child, but we're totally allowed to abandon and neglect a fictional droid child who behaves like, and for all intents and purposes IS, a human child.
Hmm...
The droids are basically human anyway, at least once they've gone "deviant". In fact they're so human I can't really buy the idea that they're meant to be machines at all.
So maybe they intended for that to be a point of contention, but I don't see as it makes any difference from a caring standpoint.
Not to mention they're all fictional.
Does it? Ever?
I figured Todd just illegally removed it before the events of the game.
Maybe she can't. Maybe her model doesn't have that functionality, or maybe she is under orders not to do it so as to pass as a normal child.
It does kinda ruin the potential evidence for red-bloods and blue-bloods caring for each other... but we've already got Connor and Hank for that.
What I don't get is why the game pushes the angle that Kara should give a damn about it. Like why the hell would she suddenly reject Alice if she finds (for the 2nd time) that they've got something else in common?
For the same reason he had her LED removed, most probably. He was trying to play happy families, even if he was terrible at it.
If you haven't encountered Todd the second time in the bus shelter in the last chapter, you might want to go back and do that again. Kara outs his motives.
"Real"?
Y'know, I found this thread and am necroposting in it.... because I wanted to see if there was any discussion on whether Alice was deviant or not. My guess is that she isn't. In which case she has no choice in how she behaves... much like a real child.
And sure enough, if you have a "real" child who is whining and crying and threaten them with consequences if they don't stop whining and crying... they tend to just keep on doing it because they can't help it. That is just the way they're programmed to behave.
Also as I noted to the other guy, she mostly just complains about the cold.... and she has a VERY legitimate reason to complain about the cold because the droids in this game CAN die of exposure (except Jerrys, apparently).
Oh, she did know. She just didn't want to believe it... or at least that is what we're meant to believe.
More likely, she had to behave like she didn't know so the story could keep it a secret. Meta justification. Bad writing.
THIS is what I necro'd this thread for...
That route is one I haven't got yet... but I'm interested to see how it plays out.
Still, what you say about Alice only being deviant in this timeline and nothing otherwise changing reminds me of a visual novel I played a long time ago. I can't remember the name... but what struck me as VERY odd about that particular visual novel was that the backstory of the game was retroactively changed by player choices. I was young at the time, and rather confused. I had completed the game on a different route once and thought I knew what was going on, and then I took a different route and suddenly the explanations for things happening were different... and not just in the unreliable narrator way. The backstory itself was retroactively changed. It kinda incepted the idea into me that a branched story medium can take a Schrodinger's Cat approach where the reality of the situation isn't set until you make a choice that sets it... retroactively.
Of course more likely is it is just bad writing.
Most of Alice's behaviour suggests that she isn't deviant. The only suggestions that she might be deviant are the one you mentioned... and the thing Zlatko said about tracking devices (he might have been lying, but then he might have been foreshadowing). If Alice is NOT deviant then, in theory, Cyberlife could have been tracking her location for the entire story. Then again, maybe they just don't care.
On the flipside... maybe Alice COULD shoot Todd in self-defence without being Deviant... much like Connor could choose not to shoot the Chloe and endanger the mission before he went deviant (he was called deviant at the time, but we saw he only explicitly broke his programming later). Maybe Alice has been close to going deviant but never entirely there the whole time.
Edit: I now see this thread was made in 2020 which means the game was already 2 years old. Still stupid.
It would have been far more meaningful for her to be human and to accept an android as an adoptive mother because the android in question learned to love her.
Like Arnold did in the last Terminator movie.
Their power source last 170 years. Them standing in the waiting bays makes it feel like they are charging (they very well could be) but I just attribute that to self-diagnostics/waiting bay.