autistic nitpicking about time travel and Caroline being absolutely the worst

[David Kay]

This thread contains spoilers, play the game first.

There is a time travel mechanic in the game and since time travel theory is kind of my thing I wanted to share some thoughts.

There are several ways you can do time travel and neither of them is wrong or correct because we can't really do a scientiffic test to prove eihter way. So the only thing we can go by is thinking it through, coming up with set of consistent rules and sticking with them.

So whatever the rules are in this game I don't think they are consistent.

At some point in the game Caroline goes back in time to take her own eye out because she needs it to solve a puzzle. But at the beginning of the game she already has her eye removed and the game implies that she did it to herself. This would mean that changes made in the past through time travel are already applied to this timeline before you actually go and do the thing. This is just begging for an incoming potential paradox - If Caroline is already missing an eye but lets say she decides that she will not go back in time to remove the eye from her past self - then who did it to her in the first place and where is the missing eye? Would some magical force make her go and do it exactly as it happened to her to avoid the paradox?
And what if she did go and do it but also made a mistake and took out the other eye instead? Would that be a whoopsie?

Paradoxes aside, This retroactive property of time travel is inconsistent with the rest of the game. If Caroline is to go back in time and free Anna from prison then Anna should be already free from her prison cell in the present, just like the eye was missing before Caroline went back to take it out. And this would create the same paradox - what if caroline didn't go back in time to open the prison door after she discovered it's already open?

The way it works in the game:
- you arrive at the prison and the door is locked.
- You go back in time to open it
- THEN after you return to your present - you find the door open.

In the same way upon finding the freezer - the frozen blood medallion should already be there. And yet you need to bo back in time and put the mold inside first. You see the result of your time travel only AFTER you actually go and do it.

So If you first need to go back in time to make something in the past and only after returning you see the results - then to be consistent Caroline should have both of her eyes on her until she goes back in time to find her past self in the bathtub. But then even when she takes the eye out of her past self she should keep both of her own eyes intact.

It works like this: there are four eyballs in total - two in the present and two in the past. She removes one eyeball from the past and takes it to the present. The number of Eyeballs is still the same only now it's one eyeball in the past and three eyeballs in the present.

This doesn't end there though.

The Caroline that was left with one eye would then also eventually return back in time in her own timeline and there she would find her past self in the bathtub... But wait - the two-eyed Caroline would also come for the eye. So now in this timeline there would be Carolines from THREE timelines: one Caroline in the buthtub and TWO Carolines coming here from the future - the two-eyed Caroline and the One-eyed Caroline.

So one of them will get there first and remove the eye. After that the second one will show up.

So depending on which one will get here first, the second one would find Caroline in the tub with one eye already missing, which would turn out to be quite a conundrum. She would either have to leave her past self completely blind or decide to take out her own eye instead... Or just give up, return to her timeline and leave this cursed place, leaving the bunker unopened.

That would take for a quite interesting ingame puzzle right there.

If the player chose to take out the second eye then the third caroline would wake up completely blind and completely screwed. Caroline in this timeline would just die.

Then again if the player would chose to take their own eye instead (it would probably require a ton of morphine) then it still wouldn't be over because the third Caroline would also eventually go back in time. And I think you figured it out by now - now there would be THREE Carolines coming back in time to the exact same place.


Okay.

But listen


All of this aside

Can I just point out


that the whole thing

is

incredibly

fckng

stupid


in the first place?


I mean...
You have two retina scanners
and
you need to use them in the same time.
Then you find out you can go back in time
and find your other self from the past.
And instead of..


I don't know





WAKING her UP and TAKING HER WITH YOU




So that BOTH of YOU can WALK there TOGETHER





What Caroline CHOSE to do INSTEAD



was to CUT a FCKING EYE
OUT OF THE BODY
OF HER OWN UNCONSCIOUS PAST SELF



WITH A MTHRFCKING SCALPEL



AND LEAVING HER PAST SELF TO BE CRIPPLED


AND TRAUMATIZED


FOR LIFE.



AND SHE DID IT TO HERSELF FOR ABSOLUTELY NO ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ REASON.




Yeah...





Basically.



I mean Jesus Christ, Caroline, Girl, Dafuq is wrong with you???


I don;t know maybe I'm missing something.
She knows that the girl in the bathtub will wake up with the tube in her throat, completely terrified. And also, it's technically her. She could be there to calm her down, comfort her and explain what's going on. Make it a little less horrible. You know, do something she would want for herself when she was in this place not so long ago.
And then her past self woke up and calmed down she could give her some tips and pointers...

You know what, scratch that,

she should give her a weapon and just take her along to the future so they could finish this thing together.

And after saving the day they could even go back in time to help her past self deal with this whole thing in her own timeline and do it together as well since the first Caroline already knows what to do.

Hell they could even sequence break the game by going to dark places that were previously inaccessibe and even killing Noah on their first encounter to get him out of the way because from their perspective the Jig is already up.

In that scenario There would be no reason for the second Craoline to go back in time to the bathtub anymore since the future Caroline would be already there and together they would make the retina scanners work. No eye removal surgery necessary.

Okay I guess that's all I had to say about time travel. It's really hard to get right and you need to think it through and through if you want to use it as an important plot point.

Even Back to the Future completely messed it up. Man, time travel in those movies makes no ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ sense. At least it makes a little sense in this game. You did better than Zemeckis, I'll give you that.

Also,

No matter how difficult it gets,

no matter how dire your situation is,





cutting out your own or somone else's eyeball

with a scalpel



should NOT be the FIRST thing to go for.


Consider your other options
for the love of god

also


I never thought I would ever need to give an advice like this and yet here we are.




God I'm such a nitpicky nerd.
Hey, it's still a pretty damn good game though. You should make more.

cheers

[purplepolecat]

Good analysis, you covered a lot of things I have also been thinking about!

My take on this is:
For most of the time travel shenanigans Caroline engages in, she travels from timeline A back to a point in the past, and immediately creates a branching timeline B that diverges from A. Then, after accomplishing her task, she returns to the point in time that she came from, but in timeline B. This neatly avoids almost all time paradoxes, and justifies why things in timeline B are different from when she left (e.g. the battery is now fully charged in the closet).

It does raise the question of whether your actions really matter if you are only changing one timeline out of many - if you rescue Anna from her cell in timeline B, what happens to Anna in timeline A? Does timeline A cease to exist just because you can't access it anymore?

There are two events that I can think of that use a different model, where she jumps back to timeline A and it doesn't diverge. The most obvious is where she removes her eye, the other is when she talks to the priest in the chapel (evidenced by the fact that he remembers her at the start of the game, before she jumps).

This time travel model is problematic because if she doesn't do one of the actions that changed timeline A, it creates a time paradox. Example: if she dies before discovering the dentist's room tape, or sneaks past the priest in the chapel without talking to him, the events of the game no longer make sense.

Waking up sleeping Caroline and taking her with you wouldn't work because after your adventure you would need her to a) go back to the bathtub and be rendered unconscious, and b) forget about everything that happened after you woke her. And you'd need to remove her eye anyway, because YOU woke up without an eye, so past Caroline must also lose an eye to prevent the paradox.

[David Kay]

Yeah I don't think doing certain actions just to prevent paradoxes makes sense. Unless there's some magical cosmic force making you take the exact same actions of wouldn't make sense. Caroline could die before that point and would not be able to do anything. Either allow paradox to happen or create a system that prevents them from being a possibility.

[Cayde Stroke Max]

another thing is why would caroline, strip her self naked ?

Aside from the ' organ harvesting victim is put in ice logic, they don't have to be naked, leave their underwear on !? or just leave them on a bed and covered in blanket ?

Imo it's a cheap trick for shock value that doesn't hold water the more you look in to it,

why would her eye work compared to other people / monsters if she's never been there ?

( ok so maybe the future caroline also put herself in the system but not someone else who was already dead or to be killed?)

[2/3 Hangnail Anxiety]

Necro thread to shout at someone with no media literacy

Originally posted by Cayde Stroke Max:

another thing is why would caroline, strip her self naked ?

She didn't, the dude used her as a test for the vaccine.

Originally posted by Cayde Stroke Max:

why would her eye work compared to other people / monsters if she's never been there ?

( ok so maybe the future caroline also put herself in the system but not someone else who was already dead or to be killed?)

She's the second twin that was to be sacrificed before she fell off a bridge and vanished. She and her sister are the only ones who could open the door. (Albiet this is kinda dumb but who am I to tell cultist nutjobs how to do their job) Did you even play the game?