Isn't the Reseed Protocol Sort of Flawed?

[M.R. Smith]

^^^ Title, theory time, and spoilers if you want to find the lore out for yourself and haven't done so already.

So the ARKs were intended to come down and repopulate the earth with the life they had been growing right? But if you think about it, isn't that sort of a flawed idea? I guess it was the best that would have a chance at working.

The thing about the ARKs is that they run on Element. Lots of it. And isn't ridiculously high Element Toxicity part of what made Earth begin to die? Element shoots off little particles of itself when it gets used up, and these eventually find their way into the ground and form together to make more Element. I'm no TEK expert, but I feel like thousands of massive space stations running on Element would send of quite a few Element particles, which would then form in the ground and potentially reach quite toxic levels again.

Another thing is this. The ARKs were designed to have very hazardous creatures on them. That's the only way survivors could learn what they needed to take out the Titans. But if they want the ecosystems to function as they should, that's not the way to do it. The ecosystems on the ARKs are only there because the ARK makes sure that it doesn't collapse. It regenerates the dinosaurs and what not to keep them at stable levels. But Helena notes that the ecosystem on The Island shouldn't be possible, because there are many more carnivores than herbivores, and that's how she discovers it is all artificial.

If there are more predators than prey in an ecosystem, it will not last. And that is the type of ecosystem each of the ARKs would seem to be producing. Unstable, impossible ecosystems that would fall if it weren't for the fact that the ARKs were keeping them alive. And that is the type of ecosystem that will be repopulating the Earth to try to return it to a sort of normal state.

There's a reason none of the real life biodomes in which they attempted to sustain an ecosystem actually worked, because they are too complex and unpredictable, to easy to become unbalanced. And the ARKs make no effort to make a balanced ecosystem. You end up with failed stations like Aberration, which I think we can tell will become a much bigger problem in Genesis Part 1 and 2. So what I'm saying is that the ecosystems on the ARKs won't spread and flourish very well, unless the ARKs continue running forever and continue to run off Element to replenish the lifeforms it is attempting to spread. Which in turn, would shoot out more Element particles into the air, to form into the ground and form Element veins, and up the Element Toxicity again. Putting us right back where we started.

Also, as a side note, why doesn't the ARKs design humans who know what is going on, so they would be able to fix the problem on Earth better?

Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.

[retsam1]

I think that in terms of lore, you are making alot of assumptions based on a knowledge gap of things. You're also looking at the arks too statically not dynamically.

I like to think of the arks more as problem solving test parameters. They were looking for a way (s) to solve survival problems due to the issues with the planet. Arks were test tubes if you will. Once the problems were solved(denoted by defeat test parameters with Extinction), then that is why they were brought to the planet: the next phase of problem solving begins.

To me the key is in the game's name: Survival Evolved. The real question then is "what are we and why are we continuing to evolve for survival?" That's where the noodle cooking should be.

[zerassar]

Helena herself stated to the player that the Arks can handle residual element infection.
They just couldnt deal with the Titans and hoards of corrupted element dinos without help.

Aberration being a bit of a mess was all on them using a damn element nuke on the overseer and messing with the system.

You also assume that the Ark's would manage the Earth in the same way. A leap on logic given the info we have available. Speculation.

[Shahadem]

The whole idea is kind of ridiculous.

I mean the Arks are full of GIANT PREDATORS THAT LOVE EATING PEOPLE. Are these really the creatures you want repopulating the planet? And what about the Arks full of ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥? Are those the people you want repopulating the planet?

Or how about those Nameless and Reapers in the Aberration Ark? Do you want those getting loose?

Or was the plan for some Arks, such as the Aberration Ark, to self destruct when they became contaminated by something like the Nameless and Reapers?

Furthermore they already had the tech to simply generate dinos and people on demand which is how the Arks remain densely populated despite the huge number of constant deaths on each Ark. Why don't they just replicate 1000 max level gigas or like 1000 Alpha Dragons and send those against the King Titan?

Plus you have the GIANT PLOT HOLE of that field on Extinction that INSTANTLY DESTROYS ANYTHING THAT CROSSES IT. HEY HERE'S AN IDEA, USE THAT DEATH FIELD AS A WEAPON AGAINST THE KING TITAN. It will kill him instantly, problem solved. Anyone who has such a ridiculous plot holey deus ex machina death field cannot have any enemies. While the infinitely strong force fields on the edges of the map didn't really make a ton of sense given that even Tek tier and player force fields weren't indestructible, we as players know the map has to end somewhere and there has to be some form of control to keep players from falling off the edge of the map. Between the lesser of the evils the forcefield was probably the best choice. The Death Field was the worst choice because it completely contradicts the setting due to it being impossible that someone could make such a Death Field but would been unable to use such technology to kill the King Titan without any effort.

Now one could argue that the actual purpose of the Arks was to try resetting the human species to the time before they all turned themselves into mad with power ♥♥♥♥ deuses while setting up conditions which would allow the humans to evolve to a point where they could survive the harsh conditions on the now ruined Earth. At the very least the mad ♥♥♥♥ Deuses may have looked at the Arks as some sort of Gladiator meets Truman Show, created for their entertainment which is why the boss arenas have viewing ports.

Ark's dino mutation system and its necessity for beating the Alpha King Titan reminds me a bit of Chaos Rings. To quickly sum up the plot to Chaos Rings:

The player's characters find themselves mysteriously teleported into an Ark arena with no knowledge of how they got there and very little knowledge of their past. They are told that their task is to survive and perform better than the other 3 couples who were also pulled onto the Ark arena from different places on the planet. Each of the 4 couples was considered to be made up of one of the strongest 8 people on the planet. The first time you "beat" the game by being the last couple to survive you prove that your genes are superior. The Ark Arena, which is actually a time traveling ship, teleports the winning couple 10,000 years into the past so that they can pass their genes on to the human species in order to try creating ever stronger humans with ever better genes.

This Ark Arena timeship has gone through thousands of iterations of its mission and through this process of quasi evolution has led humanity to evolving genes for creating and controlling magic, with successive iterations leading to genes for greater and greater magical potency and ability.

As the player continues to replay through the game they continue to make further and further progress through the Ark Arena by beating ever stronger bosses and learn more of the story before being transported back in time again to start the process all over.

Once the player makes their way far enough into the Ark Arena they discover that every single thing they encountered has been an artificial construct replicated by the Mother who was a human that had been melded to a machine in order to constantly birth more monsters that the player has been fighting the whole game. By combining the newly evolved genes with the old monster genes the Mother is able to birth monsters with ever higher levels and stats which the players have been fighting and explains how the monsters have kept getting stronger as the player has been reaching a higher and higher level through each new game plus. During this time the Mother has begun to go insane from her incredibly long and tiring labor lasting billions of years and instead of helping the the characters grow she desires their death and creates creatures with the intent to kill the heroes.

Eventually you learn that the entire purpose of the Ark Ship's mission was to produce humans evolved to be strong enough to destroy the devourer of the universe named the Qualia (and which looks like one of the monsters from the Langolier movie).

https://youtu.be/xB7h7QTd7wM?

Skip to 17:29

Chaos Rings is an absolutely fantastic game which I highly suggest playing if you can (although the 2nd and 3rd game aren't good imo).

[zerassar]

Originally posted by Shahadem:

Plus you have the GIANT PLOT HOLE of that field on Extinction that INSTANTLY DESTROYS ANYTHING THAT CROSSES IT. HEY HERE'S AN IDEA, USE THAT DEATH FIELD AS A WEAPON AGAINST THE KING TITAN. It will kill him instantly, problem solved. Anyone who has such a ridiculous plot holey deus ex machina death field cannot have any enemies. While the infinitely strong force fields on the edges of the map didn't really make a ton of sense given that even Tek tier and player force fields weren't indestructible, we as players know the map has to end somewhere and there has to be some form of control to keep players from falling off the edge of the map. Between the lesser of the evils the forcefield was probably the best choice. The Death Field was the worst choice because it completely contradicts the setting due to it being impossible that someone could make such a Death Field but would been unable to use such technology to kill the King Titan without any effort.

The field was meant to only affect specimens. Not EVERYTHING. So wouldnt work on the titans.

[Shahadem]

Originally posted by zerassar:

Originally posted by Shahadem:

Plus you have the GIANT PLOT HOLE of that field on Extinction that INSTANTLY DESTROYS ANYTHING THAT CROSSES IT. HEY HERE'S AN IDEA, USE THAT DEATH FIELD AS A WEAPON AGAINST THE KING TITAN. It will kill him instantly, problem solved. Anyone who has such a ridiculous plot holey deus ex machina death field cannot have any enemies. While the infinitely strong force fields on the edges of the map didn't really make a ton of sense given that even Tek tier and player force fields weren't indestructible, we as players know the map has to end somewhere and there has to be some form of control to keep players from falling off the edge of the map. Between the lesser of the evils the forcefield was probably the best choice. The Death Field was the worst choice because it completely contradicts the setting due to it being impossible that someone could make such a Death Field but would been unable to use such technology to kill the King Titan without any effort.

The field was meant to only affect specimens. Not EVERYTHING. So wouldnt work on the titans.

And? That doesn't mean they couldn't make a field which COULD KILL EVERYTHING. Just because they modulated the field to only affect specimens doesn't mean that they couldn't make another field to effect other things. In fact you actually demonstrated that the field could kill EVERYTHING by saying that they MODIFIED THE FIELD TO ONLY AFFECT SPECIMENS. So if they didn't modify the field then it could destroy everything.

[necaradan666]

The reseed protocol might have been the original idea but I think you're forgetting that the Arks were broken, the Overseers had been running for so long that minuscule errors in their programming were building up, in essence making them crazy. It's mentioned in some of the notes that the Overseers kept raising the bar for survival because the situation on Earth grew beyond their ability to problem solve. That's why increasingly hostile testing conditions such as imbalanced predators, fantasy creatures and monsters were being created.

Whatever the reseed protocol was supposed to do to get Earth back on track when they left has been thrown entirely out of whack. That said the problem the Overseers had to solve was indeed solved by Helena when she influenced the system allowing the PC to be able to respawn and become enough of a badass to kill the king titan, the intelligence of the element. The Arks should deal with the remaining infestation, and perhaps the Arks can now start working on balancing their ecology creation so the reseed can succeed. Even if there are still a bunch of reapers and wyverns running around.

[Captain Striker (Empo)]

No one said the characters in a game were smart. Which might also be the only realistic thing about this game.

[M.R. Smith]

Originally posted by zerassar:

Helena herself stated to the player that the Arks can handle residual element infection.
They just couldnt deal with the Titans and hoards of corrupted element dinos without help.

Aberration being a bit of a mess was all on them using a damn element nuke on the overseer and messing with the system.

You also assume that the Ark's would manage the Earth in the same way. A leap on logic given the info we have available. Speculation.

Yeah, I know that the ARKs can handle the toxicity in smaller amounts, but I was simply suggesting that since the ARKs are such big machines using such vast amounts of Element, I was wondering if such large amounts would be too much for the ARKs to handle again. Maybe they just absorb the Element particles the moment it gets used and put it towards powering themselves again. Or I suppose they will just continue running and get rid of any Element before it gets too toxic so humanity doesn't have to lose the most potent energy source on the planet.

Originally posted by retsam1:

I think that in terms of lore, you are making alot of assumptions based on a knowledge gap of things. You're also looking at the arks too statically not dynamically.

I like to think of the arks more as problem solving test parameters. They were looking for a way (s) to solve survival problems due to the issues with the planet. Arks were test tubes if you will. Once the problems were solved(denoted by defeat test parameters with Extinction), then that is why they were brought to the planet: the next phase of problem solving begins.

To me the key is in the game's name: Survival Evolved. The real question then is "what are we and why are we continuing to evolve for survival?" That's where the noodle cooking should be.

So your saying that the ARKs were just a stepping stone. A way to make it so though not all problems are solved, it provides an opportunity to solve more problems in the future.

Originally posted by necaradan666:

The reseed protocol might have been the original idea but I think you're forgetting that the Arks were broken, the Overseers had been running for so long that minuscule errors in their programming were building up, in essence making them crazy. It's mentioned in some of the notes that the Overseers kept raising the bar for survival because the situation on Earth grew beyond their ability to problem solve. That's why increasingly hostile testing conditions such as imbalanced predators, fantasy creatures and monsters were being created.

Whatever the reseed protocol was supposed to do to get Earth back on track when they left has been thrown entirely out of whack. That said the problem the Overseers had to solve was indeed solved by Helena when she influenced the system allowing the PC to be able to respawn and become enough of a badass to kill the king titan, the intelligence of the element. The Arks should deal with the remaining infestation, and perhaps the Arks can now start working on balancing their ecology creation so the reseed can succeed. Even if there are still a bunch of reapers and wyverns running around.

No I totally remember that the ARKs were not doing a good job. Their purpose was to create humans who could fix the Titan problem so they could go down and repopulate the planet, but somehow or another the parameters were set so high that the ARKs would never think anybody ready to go down and fix it. If I remember correctly, Helena said that ARKs like Aberration would become the rule and not the exception. That's why it was so important that people fix the bigger issues on Earth before that happened. The System was flawed, playing by broken rules.

I also think that at the point that stuff with the Corruption began to take place, dinosaurs and wyverns and other creatures had already become the norm. They were commonplace. That's probably part of why you don't see normal modern animals that are corrupted, because there were none around by that point to be corrupted (or I suppose they could've just been wiped out by the corrupted creatures rather than corrupted). The prototype domes on Earth seem to have been constructed to cater to the genetic creations like morellotops or snow owls or velonosaurs though, not normal creatures like lions and tigers and bears (oh my).

What I see part of the conflict we will fight against in Genesis is the fact that the Aberrant ARK (and maybe others like it, for all we know) are dangerous, and 100% not in line with what the System was built for.

Honestly, I feel like you guys are right, in general. There are lore gaps that may be filled in Genesis. But I suppose the major negative about the Reseed Protocol is now the hard work we've done is about to be undone. Aberration is controlled by Rockwell, he is the Overseer there. And now that he has free reign on Earth, I suspect that he will be spreading sort of a new Corruption. He went insane probably because Element Corrupts people differently, in that in tampers with their brain rather than just taking control of them and joining them to a hive mind.

Plus all that molten Element in Aberration is bound to somehow find its way out of the ARK eventually, and something tells me Rockwell won't care too much about that. He says how the ARK whispered to him about a plain higher than the one he was on now. It's my belief that it was saying that after the reseed protocol he was going to be able to become sort of the mind of the Element in the new corruption or something.


I primarily created this thread so we could have a lore discussion. Sorry if it got unpleasant or unwanted in any way.

Edit:

Originally posted by Shahadem:

Originally posted by zerassar:

The field was meant to only affect specimens. Not EVERYTHING. So wouldnt work on the titans.

And? That doesn't mean they couldn't make a field which COULD KILL EVERYTHING. Just because they modulated the field to only affect specimens doesn't mean that they couldn't make another field to effect other things. In fact you actually demonstrated that the field could kill EVERYTHING by saying that they MODIFIED THE FIELD TO ONLY AFFECT SPECIMENS. So if they didn't modify the field then it could destroy everything.

The thing about the field is probably just to explain the game mechanic that makes it so the map ingame is limited, because it sounds like Diana and Mei went to Arat Prime, a place all the way on the other side of the planet. They just didn't want to make a map as big as the whole Earth because that would be much harder to make and probably impossible for most computers to run, but they didn't have an excuse of a holographic atmosphere like on the ARKs to explain why you couldn't go beyond the map bounds.

[necaradan666]

We still don't really know where Genesis falls into the timeline. I'm under the impression that the devs have said that Extinction was the end of the Ark story, but they'd find ways to fit a further expansion in. Meaning the entire Genesis DLC could be taking place in the time between leaving Aberration and arriving on Extinction, like a training montage before the big boss fight. Have pretty much ruled out a full on pre-The Island prequal though because of some lore tidbits not fitting, not that I remember off hand what those were. There's a few lore threads on survivetheark if you want to search for them.

[M.R. Smith]

Originally posted by necaradan666:

We still don't really know where Genesis falls into the timeline. I'm under the impression that the devs have said that Extinction was the end of the Ark story, but they'd find ways to fit a further expansion in. Meaning the entire Genesis DLC could be taking place in the time between leaving Aberration and arriving on Extinction, like a training montage before the big boss fight. Have pretty much ruled out a full on pre-The Island prequal though because of some lore tidbits not fitting, not that I remember off hand what those were. There's a few lore threads on survivetheark if you want to search for them.

I read somewhere (don't ask where as I don't quite remember) that 1. The devs expected Extinction to be the last DLC and had plans to begin thinking about ARK 2, but realized by how well Extinction did that people were still into ARK: Survival Evolved, and figured they could make Genesis Part 1 and 2. 2. They were able to continue doing DLCs for ARK: Survival Evolved because they left Extinction off on a cliff hanger ie. that Rockwell and Aberration had landed on Earth.

Aside from that, somehow the whole teaser trailer for Genesis with Helena talking to the survivor just seems a bit after the fact of Extinction. Additionally, having Genesis take place after Extinction where something must be done about Rockwell makes most sense story-wise. There is some interesting conflict there, and no doubt people would want to see that happen. Helena and the survivors are essentially the one thing standing between Rockwell and his supposed "godhood". He would hate us for that, and would leap at the opportunity to get back at us for it. It has lots of story potential, and seems like the logical course of action, at least to me. But hey, I could be wrong I suppose.

Edit: Found it...
"[Extinction] really made us think, 'Hmm, maybe we should give players more,' because there's more story to tell. We left a cliffhanger at the end. We didn't know what we would do with it, we thought maybe there would be a sequel or some kind of spin-off later, but we had an opening to do more story. There was also more gameplay stuff we wanted to do."

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2019-08-16-how-ark-survival-evolved-fell-into-sustainable-revenue-without-skins-or-loot-boxes