Install Steam
login
|
language
简体中文 (Simplified Chinese)
繁體中文 (Traditional Chinese)
日本語 (Japanese)
한국어 (Korean)
ไทย (Thai)
Български (Bulgarian)
Čeština (Czech)
Dansk (Danish)
Deutsch (German)
Español - España (Spanish - Spain)
Español - Latinoamérica (Spanish - Latin America)
Ελληνικά (Greek)
Français (French)
Italiano (Italian)
Bahasa Indonesia (Indonesian)
Magyar (Hungarian)
Nederlands (Dutch)
Norsk (Norwegian)
Polski (Polish)
Português (Portuguese - Portugal)
Português - Brasil (Portuguese - Brazil)
Română (Romanian)
Русский (Russian)
Suomi (Finnish)
Svenska (Swedish)
Türkçe (Turkish)
Tiếng Việt (Vietnamese)
Українська (Ukrainian)
Report a translation problem
The author of this topic has marked a post as the answer to their question.
Discussions Rules and Guidelines
Report this post
Heart of the Machine takes place in the same timeframe, within a few hundred years, of both Bionic Dues and Release Raptor. You can run into the mega corps from those other titles if you take certain options in chapter 2 and onward.
If you run into the Megacorp that is from RR, then they will send not only troops, but also War Raptors (identical model to RR) into your city. You can then do various things with those War Raptors, but I’ll leave that for discovery later.
Bionic Dues and RR are in a different part of the world and a few hundred years later than this game, but for the most part this game does not impact them, except sometimes depending on your choices. There is a pretty deep cut of some lore for Bionic Dues explaining some of what happens there that you can learn in this game.
This is also the same universe as the AI War series, but it’s about 900ish years before the civil war starts in space, and way before a different AI wakes up and causes the events of those games.
Heart of the Machine is explicitly a branching timeline situation with a time loop and time travel, so as has been established with things like the Zenith in AI War 2 already, we’re dealing with a multiverse here. There’s not one canonical timeline for the series, it’s all considered equally valid.
Various key events happen pretty much regardless of what else is going on, or there are just offshoot branches where other games aren’t in the same timeline. For example, if you do something that ends life on Earth (not possible in the first builds, but I plan that eventually), then that would not be part of the same timeline as RR or Bionic Dues, but it would be compatible with the AI War timelines.
In the AI War 2 timelines, sometimes there is a nanocaust, other times there is not. Eventually I plan on having this game have some routes tie into this later on.
Anyhow, there’s lots of cross connections! The Arcenverse was a multiverse before that took over Hollywood.
Edit: I've got the website back online, and the page is here: https://arcengames.com/the-arcenverse/
...wow. I basically expected some form of "lol no" and yet my suspicion was mostly on. Never let it be said that Arcen Games couldn't give a verbose answer in the best possible way. xD Awesome!
I spent too much time with Release Raptor I guess lol.
EDIT: also I never played bionic dues just RR and AIW2 and Starward Rogue. So that's my grasp of the Arcenverse. Mostly AIW2. Trying to get into AIW1.
Sorry about that ddos btw. Imagine having no life so you attack the Arcen Games wiki. I hope that gets fixed.
Release Raptor was one of those games that people just didn’t understand, and that was on me. I put that into the public eye way too soon and that tanked it from a complete misunderstanding of what it was trying to be. It was meant to be a combat roguelike, but people saw meme game like Goat Simulator. Ultimately that was on me.
Anyway, I sure do love dinosaurs, and they are in a lot of my titles! The two Valley games both let you turn into a theropod of some sort,
Also, I was going to ask a question about timelines in a new discussion, but I think I can slot it in here: Can you get blamed and reacted to for the various timeline shenanigans that result of the whole crossing the time streams you do (assuming I understand that game mechanic right, I've only played the demo), or is humanity completely unaware of the whole alternate universe thing?
---
In AI War 1 and 2, all of the different versions of what happens in any campaign is considered a canonical timeline. In other words, every time you screw it up, that was humanity's death. Every time it was super easy because you set the AI settings low and won very easily, that's just how it was in that universe. Was there a macrophage running around? How about a nanocaust? That's just how it was in that universe. Even the differences in ships and things between AI War 1 and 2 are just different clusters of the same giant multiverse.
Aka, AI War 2 does not retcon AI War 1. There are incompatibilities in parts of their lore. Especially around the Fallen Spire, but just in general. These are just "local differences" in the multiverse, if that makes sense. So certain characters exist and are always in the past of the timelines that are part of AI War 1, and different characters exist and are always in the past of the timelines that are part of AI War 2.
---
Okay, so now that we have that out of the way, let's talk about time travel within a universe: you can't. In the Arcenverse, that is impossible, and it's also impossible in Heart of the Machine. You can only go forward in time.
But wait! I have said, even in this thread, that this game includes time travel, and sending units back in time, and sending information back in time.
This is true. And to think about that, you need to imagine time as a two-dimensional plane, rather than a one-dimensional line. Time is the fourth dimension -- this is a baseline part of modern physics. But what if time were the fourth AND fifth dimensions, but we're just not capable of sensing that?
If you were smart enough, you could [redacted].
Well, now we're getting into spoilers. But to answer your question: humans would never be aware of any time shenanigans, per se, because from their perspective, it always happened. Only if... I dunno... some robots from the future showed up, and actually said they were from the future, would we know. And even then, we'd be suspicious. Occam's Razor is that somebody just made a better robot and then made it say that.
Further disturbances to some timelines, where very confused humans from one place end up in a completely other place, would look like multiverse traversal (because it is), and the fact that it's further into the future in the other timeline that they came from would be the less-interesting part of that news. Heck, if they also came from slightly in the past from an adjacent timeline, again it's the multiversal traversal that has your attention as a human, not the fact that they traveled a few months into the future as well. To them, your universe is alien and different, and the capitol city is has a different name, and they don't know anybody, and so on.
---
Let me leave you with an example from AI War 2 that shows this in action from several years ago: the Zenith Empire. Basically, in all timelines of the Arcenverse where humans exist at all, the Zenith died out billions of years prior. Why? Because in the universes where the Zenith thrived, they harvested earth before there was more than bacteria. So we never emerged. This wasn't malice on the part of the Zenith, and we didn't have anything to do with their demise. Our ancestors were barely multicellular.
So: in no universe can the humans or AI forces wind up facing off against the Zenith, by definition. Their golems are basically like our androids, and they are the last remnants of that civilization. EXCEPT! In AI War 2, there's a faction of the Zenith you can face, who phase across from one of the universes where their empire is ascendant, and they bring about 6 starsystems with them. These aren't stars we're familiar with in our universe, they didn't exist here, or had different names and locations.
Until HotM, the only entities in the Arcenverse that had ever crossed the boundary of a universe were the Zenith. And your character can't actually do that themselves, but when they [redacted] there are unintended consequences. And unexpected at first, but then predictable once you've seen it first. In the same way that you can predict that if there is a Zenith Empire, there is no humanity on Earth.
To go further, we'd need to start talking about jinn objects and memory and some other things. The game outlines these concepts when you get to them, but also is kind of hinting that you should consider doing some reading on your own if you're curious about the extra details. There's a lot of metatextual stuff here, which doesn't mean that game doesn't answer your questions, but it answers them only insofar as they serve the narrative.
---
I'll give you one last example, this one from Back to the Future 2. In that movie, Biff is about to shoot Marty with a gun, on the roof. Marty is backing up, and then jumps off the roof. Biff is surprised by this, and walks to the edge of the roof, only to get knocked out by the door of the DeLorean. Doc Brown has a very grim look on his face. Cute scene, right? Doc saves the day, because he has a flying car and so on. The movie continues, and that scene quickly fades from memory. It's not an ongoing part of the core plot.
However, this is one of my favorite scenes, because even as a little kid watching this, I had a realization: Marty has died here. At least once, probably many times. Doc knows exactly where to be, and exactly what moves to make, because he has done this before. He's read about Marty's death, he's tried to save him, he's actively failed in the attempt. He's done it enough times now that he knows exactly what to do, Groundhog-Day-style. He has that look on his face because he's watched a lot of Marties bite it.
---
If you look at GroundHog Day, or Back to the Future, they tell you all the things you need to know to follow the stories they are telling. BUT they also tell you the rules of the universe, and there are a lot of other metatextual elements that they leave you to figure out on your own. That's what makes me love movies like that quite so much.