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And then there is this whole thing with TOM not being able to produce creative solutions... Yeah, so he is unable to pass a box through a hole in a wall, but he can come up with a plan of manipulating a crew member into doing things for him? And anyway, "creativity" isn't a module you can just switch off like a browser extension. it is integrated into the thought process on many levels. the way he speaks, the parallels he draws, the possible scenarios he tries to prevent, the reasoning he uses to prove his point - all these things need creativity in one form or another. a "talking CCTV" camera would either be able to solve this whole alone or wouldn't be able to do anything at all. If he is tasked with supervising and guiding or even basically controlling humans - he is expected to be able to meet decisions and find solutions. If you invest this much power into an AI - you wouldn't turn the very part off it that enables it to exercise these tasks, wouldn't you?
At first I thought the big surprise was gonna be that Ava wasn't a crew-member at all, but instead a bot built around a spacesuit, that was a separate standalone AI "fooled" by TOM into believing it was a human - a crew-member that is still sleeping or killed off by TOM. with fake memories and staff. the first audio recordings do not feature any conversations between Ava and other humans - there is only an E-Mail exchange, that is far easier to fake, especially for an AI. At no point you see putting on or off the helmet and when looking at the player model from outside you can't see through the glass shield. the whole game would be different, but that would still work for the current ending: Sarah tries to cut the chip out, but cuts into metal. and then the player would get to choose either to take TOM's side and stop the humans or be consequent with the nature of the simulation - i.e. be the human to the very end. or maybe taking the middle ground and be a medium between both. I mean the game title would be a dead giveaway for those who know a first thing about AI problematic, but for a general public it would work much better, IMO. You can ditch the whole immortality virus thing and swap it with something more trivial then. Throwing several different SF motifs that at no point correlate to each other in one narrative is just confusing and messy.
Or by all means do make the both thing correlate. Like maybe immortality virus not only makes them immortal - it is a neural network of communicating virions that is sapient entity in it's own way. The entity figures the humans out and suggests them the wish to go home and spread it. And then you have two mind-controlling semi-alive entities that try to control humans. This is a starter.
Idunno, there is so much one could have done with this setting. Pity.
The writer tries so hard to pass the game off as serious science fiction in the beginning, and then he completely destroys that with sloppy explanations that wouldn't even work in a pulp story any more. Trained scientists that have nothing better to do than injecting themselves with an unknown alien organism because it "accelerates the research" ... that's not even high school level of story telling.
In fact, the majority of actions of most characters simply don't make sense. You already mentioned some examples, but there are many more.
The debates between TOM and Ava could have been so interesting, even enlightening ... but what actually happens, is that each of them just has one single argument, and they keep rephrasing their one argument over and over and over. They also barely listen to each other nor really address the other's statements. The dialog also remains extremely superficial, there is hardly any elaboration going on. It's like TOM and Ava are having the stereotypical worst kind of an Internet argument. It feels like the author had an _interest_ in philosophical questions, but lacked the ability to actually grasp them, and hence resorted to an endless repetition of platitudes.
I don't dislike the game, but I think it is really meant to be enjoyed with one's brain switched off. As long as you don't think too much about it, you can enjoy it as a sci-fi story in an interesting setting, and you can enjoy the sense of progression that the puzzles give you. But as soon as you switch your brain on, you'll not only get bored by the extremely easy puzzles (almost all solutions are obvious), you'll also notice far too many glaring holes and inconsistencies to overlook.
wut? first of all this is a ''generic'' suit to protect you from the void, you expect it to look any different from astronauts suit?
second this game came out BEFORE Andromeda lol
It looks NOTHING like Andromeda. lol
What are these pencils about? Its probably H8 or BH (if you turn it upside down). They're in one of Chinese rooms on the table.
In this particular incarnation of the end sequence, there is no explicit information showing how the situation is resolved, so I must infer the outcome from character (and player) actions. It seems clear that something is making the humans mentally unstable. Ava is dead, TOM's ground-based portion is dead or disabled, and Sarah is either dead outright, bleeding to death, or alive but no longer has usable legs. TOM made one final attempt to resolve the issue non-lethally. Ava only had seconds at that console, certainly not enough time to destroy all parts of TOM (as even an emergency shutdownof some sort would be designed with some amount of security in place to prevent accidenal activation, and that ought to take more than a few seconds to pass through). Hopefully there has been a communication link back to the satellite so the remaining part of TOM has data on what happened to relay back to Earth.
Overall, I think it's an interesting subtle variant to the ending narrative, even if it was not explicitly designed as an option.
(H2 > H > HB > B > B2 There is scale of pencil core hardness from hardest to softest, at least this scale is actual in my country)
That's exactly what I wanted to say. I suspected this would be it for some time while playing, but the ending did not confirm it (but it was pretty close, I'd say quite likely).
>Edit: actually, now that I think of it, this was probably the correct interpretation. It says in the end that you passed the test. It looks like a print on a computer screen, so basically a confirmation to somebody being tested. Because the turing tests are meant to test artificial beings, one can presume that you "are" such a being in a game. In any case, who cares.<
Overall I think there's not much to discuss, as the script is pretty weak and/or illogical in many respects. For example, why should there be tests for Ava that are only possible to complete with Tom's help? Plus, the tests are easy. Don't tell me a machine can't learn to solve these kinds of tests, it's just BS, imho.
If you're looking for a sophisticated AI related script worth discussing, see Talos Principle. It's like 37 times deeper than this.
I thought some musical pieces were the same the Talos Principle used. Obviously, I must have been wrong, but man they sounded similar, almost identical. The main background voice (T.O.M. and "god" respectively) were also very similar. So no, there's no credit to give here, imho, it's just a lousy copy-paste job.
TOM tells her that he can influence her subconscious, and that humans takes decisions up to 10 seconds before they realize they did. And that's exactly what's happening. Even though Ava feels like she's taking decisions and chatting up TOM, in fact TOM control Ava by influencing her every move.
Almost her every move... because there are (at least) two places where you lose control, near the Faraday cage and at the end. And although other interpretations can apply, it's much more coherent to think that it's TOM losing it's grasp on Ava than her "panicking" or something.
Near the Faraday Cage, the controls are sluggy and don't respond well. Because you cannot control Ava in this environment. As you cannot control her without the implant. You never played as Ava. You were TOM all along.
This is the good part of the story. Yes, the dialog lacked sometimes, but remember: you were not playing Ava. She was a humanoid tool for which you hoped for the best. And knew that you would have to quarantine forever. TOM is not jeopardizing the whole earth's ecosystem for a handful of scientists - who should know best.
Ava cannot take a single step by herself while TOM is in control... unless she's near Sara, which is probably what Sara's telling when she says that TOM's control can be kept at bay - kinda - with electromagnetics. If you try not to go to Sarah, Ava will walk to her anyway. You can struggle, but you're losing control.
Even the level design tell it. After the Faraday cage, you start playing as both TOM and Ava - which is the same thing as saying that you are playing as TOM - and whenever you are not currently using Ava, she just stand still. As a security camera, you can watch her just being there as long as you want.
And the more you progress, the more you have to use Ava as you would use those small drones on wheels. Sometimes she's just weight on a button while you're doing something else. In one room, she just stand on a conveyor belt while TOM is doing the real work.
The subtext is all over the place.
Also: Congratulation, you have passed the Turing Test. A test of a machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behavior equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human.
Humans cannot pass that test. They are not machines.
This is why the culmination of society and government IRL was the understanding of race and nation, so that the collective might be governed most effectively in the most effective unit possible. The modern status quo involves irrationally breaking from nature, something we are not equipped to do now and may never be equipped to do. Obviously, our modern day problem is the censorship of real, uncompromising codes of conduct and honor itself.
As a prior jarhead, I must admit that looked down on the crew for being so mentally weak as to fail in their duties. On the plus side, I doubt that under the kind of silly nonsense that rules now that anyone will ever go anywhere significant in space, ever.
While political correctness is maintained, mental weakness is maintained. The most meta observation I have about this game is that the conditions it posits will never be a problem. People too weak to stick to duty, uncompromisingly, to the end (as there were many warriors even in the Bronze Age who could and would remain absolutely honorable, proving that we have gone backwards, socially and culturally). And yes, I did pay for my opinions in theater in sweat and blood, and I did not fail, so I understand this type of dilemma.
Whether or not they understand what they made, the statement is very clear: that we, in our present state, are no better than objects. This does not tell me whether they understood what they were creating or whether they approved. But that is my /pol/-tier opinion on the matter: I very much enjoyed the proto-redpill story arcs of things like "YOU ARE A DRONE." It's very accurate on a meta level, and as we all know, gaming is increasingly pozzed.
I'm not sure if snowflakes would try to censor this position were I to put it in as a review, but 10/10, would They Live again. Hopefully it made everyone uncomfortable and made everyone think.