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Правила и насоки за дискусии
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Overreliance on technology (and the message of the game is the dangers of this phenomena I believe) is already happening albeit on a much much smaller scale, a trend that does not seem to be on the downturn.
You surely do not assume that building millions of solar panels is that easy right? Sure it seems to be doable, if you have all the necessary resources, and knowledge at the same place, and it is also probably how a small number of planets did survive through this apocalypse. But humanity is spread across all the galaxy, even on planets that are barren, their climate control failing. Ferrying resources over long distances is no longer possible with the Folders down. And you also see how the huge power vacuum that happened after the imperial collapse paved the way for warlords all around. This is actually such human nature, instead of working together in the face of a crisis everybody rushes to take control, hoard as much resources as they can. You literally see this in our world where we have the looming very known disaster of climate change, and what is mostly done is lip service and half measures, while everybody is hoarding as much oil and other fossil fuels as they possibly can. And not even knowledge is necessarily around. While there are clever scientists still alive in the setting they are all around. You can't just look up the schematics on the internet either because the Fold Net is down.
And as to the needless cruelty of the OMNIs at the end, I don't know. This is honestly how I would think a true transcended AI reacts (indeed I also think this is how actual metaphisical gods would react, and if you do believe in gods, this is how they have been reacting for forever, that is with total apathy). They also have very real threaths to compute, them being immortal the heat death of the universe is something very real to them. Helping humanity (mind you after being enslaved by humanity) is just pointless. They could never help with that last great obstacle, and indeed everything humans do just increases entropy. In the grand scheme of things, our race is pointless. In fact worse then pointless, because the inefficient waste of energy that our race is doing just hastens the heat death of the universe (mind you yes, by miniscule amounts of time, but again for immortal beings bound by this "time limit" every second counts). You could argue that them just allowing us to *try* and live is already very graceful.
As for the pointless ending choices, while I do agree that leaving trillions to die is not a great choice at all, but it is also human. Remember if you believe what the OMNIs say, 1000years of harsh rule and rationing to MAYBE have a chance for our race. That is a lot of burden to carry for a maybe. I personally would think that I'd never make the choice to f off with my wife while humanity dies, nor would I just go searching for Earth (which even if you do find it, you still leave the galaxy at large to starve, kill each other, die etc) but I could see people saying "♥♥♥♥ this ♥♥♥♥ I'm out" accepting total hopelessness, in fact to some degree you in this situation could even argue that humanity is just beyond saving or that it does not deserve to be saved, after all the whole situation is entirely our own doing.
Kaliban not seeming to be intelligent is something I'd agree with though. You could explain it away with him trying to communicate in a way not to put humans off, but overall he could've been written better, though I suspect writing superintelligence is not an easy task.
Oh and the measure against catastrophic failure is well the plot of the game. You are that measure. Easy real world example is how Germany bet it's entire energy needs on Russia. A known warmonger state. And even IF russia had been totally trustworthy and the events of last year did not happen, the entire German energy need was based on one source with zero immediate contingency. My point is that us humans are indeed very much capable of not thinking about worst case scenarios.
Anyway, all in all, I do see your points, but I'd argue the story is well written, but perhaps more importantly then that sends important messages, such as the dangers of overreliance on anything (chiefly technology) and the dangers of the lack of long-term plans. All things that exist in this day and age. Humanity has no game plan boo, our species makes ♥♥♥♥ up as we go, and it is not going our way at all. If we don't wipe ourselves out with the nuclear arsenal we have, we'll just destroy the planet through more mundane means such as climate change. Everything we do is primed for short term profit, and the negative consequences, well that ain't our problem. Until it is. Anyway sorry, this got a bit too long and all.
IMHO the only really sad thing is that the message is not more wide spread. Even if you disagree and indeed do not like the writing quality, I think we can agree on the fact that the messages behind the story would be important and indeed pressing to get across.
If the food grows, then the soil is evidently not "unfit". If space time can collapse, then there is a way to make it do that. And there is nothing to suggest that these farming techniques or space time manipulations couldn't be understood. In fact, the game constantly indicates that humans can and do use and replicate these technologies constantly, simply because we see humans using them, building new space ships and even inventing new tech in the case of the brain transplants. The claim that we "could never hope to understand" any of these things is completely unsubstantiated and countered by the indications of what we see in the game world. It's a tired, overused and, frankly, cheap trope that is rarely executed well and certainly not in this story.
And yet machines are never seen to do anything god-like except at the very end and that is something only the MC witnessed... and, as ever, even that remains without any satisfactory explanation. The game just keeps saying "you wouldn't understand" without ever making the attempt and as a result it all remains not believable. Not earned.
No. You'd have to define what an "overreliance" actually is. You could argue that even just basic agriculture technology from several thousand years ago creates an "overreliance", because we'd all die without it and only relatively few people in our entire population actually understand it. Just because computers and electronic algorithms are new and permeate society while not being understood by the layman doesn't mean that's an "overreliance". You may just think that, because things that you don't understand are scary.
It's actually extremely simple and can be done locally compared to the tech we see the humans in this game use and recreate all the time. If they can build, launch and supply any of the myriad of ships we see in the game, then they can build a partial dyson swarm easy peasy. And if they can build a dyson, they don't have energy problems. Just because solar panels are low tech that these humans haven't used in hundreds of years, doesn't mean that it no longer works. In the same way you can still travel via horse carts, even if it's less convenient than trains, when you've ran out of fuel. It may be that the sustainable population total drops, but it's not zero. And since a dyson provides pretty much limitless energy anyway, the issues you point to should not exist.
Humanity has been through worse. If scarcity automatically results in selfish behaviour and societal breakdown, then how would society ever have formed from the scarcity ancient humans lived in before agriculture? You're just doomering with a twisted perception because you're scared (understandably). And that is exactly why you overlook the glaring plotholes in this story, because you just like that the story is needlessly doomer, just like you.
Again, if they can build and supply entire fleets of interstellar ships, they have the knowledge to build a dyson too.
Apathy is not a sufficient explanation for cruelty. As I said, if helping or not helping is ultimately the same to you, because the resources you'd need to expend to help wouldn't even register compared to the power you have, then it's at worst a 50-50 chance that you'd help. But from the dialogue we see the Omnis berating humanity for their lack of empathy, so that means the Omnis must somehow value empathy, so subsequently their own logic should give them at least some motivation to help which tips the scales away from 50-50. The cruelty of the Omnis is forced by the story. I could, on the fly, come up with a list of better explanations for their behaviour than we ever see in the story. It's just lazy writing.
That former relationship should not matter to them. They claim to hold no grudge against humanity, because they are above that. Subsequently, the logic I wrote above applies.
Sounds like you don't understand entropy. Any energy that you call "wasted" actually slows entropy, because if we were to use that energy more "efficiently" it would actually accelerate the heat death. And by not giving us advanced tech, the Omnis are actually accelerating the heat death as well, because if we could compute at lower temperatures with better tech, we'd move towards entropy slower. So clearly the Omnis don't care very much about our contribution to the universe's heat death (if that's even a thing - the heat death is only something we assume with our current knowledge). And who's to say that humanity couldn't help the Omnis? If they found a way to make themselves more intelligent to understand and use ways to aid with whatever their current coal is, then humans can be altered to be of use too. Any obstacle you might perceive with this process of altering humans in that way is only an issue of sufficient technology. And since the Omnis apparently have literally all the technology, it shouldn't be a problem to find ways to make humanity useful.
Honestly, it sounds like you're so willing to accept the bad explanations for the cruelty of the Omnis towards humanity, because you yourself are frustrated with humanity. Ironically that seems to make you less critical, which seems to be partially what you criticize humanity for.
And why would you believe the Omnis? They've given you no reason to do so, except a glorified "trust me bruh!" accompanied by a big glowy-sparkly effect to seem grand and powerful against the silhouette of Idaho. None of their explanations make sense and some even go against indications you've seen in the game world, so why trust them? In fact, you should probably heavily distrust the Omnis. If you think that they have a grudge against humanity for the enslavement, or if you think they don't care about us at all, then there's nothing keeping them from blatantly lying to us. Heck, you don't even know if it's maybe in their interest to lie.
Sry, but that is a child's understanding of morality. You're essentially saying "you did a naughty, so you deserve to be genocided". If you see a child playing with scissors and you decide to NOT step in and it subsequently cuts a finger off, do you really think it's adequate as the adult to just stand there and say "you had it coming!"?? Not only did you never try to interfere with the child's foolish play, but you knew fully well that it couldn't have known the consequences - so the playing with scissors was not a fully informed decision and thus the outcome is by definition not deserved. You'd just be a needlessly cruel adult and partially at fault yourself for not interfering - just like the Omnis.
But society wasn't run by humans, but by allegedly super intelligent Omnis. And for that their contingency plan is, frankly, crude and laughable. Idaho could've easily failed or kept failing until it was too late. Also, institutions that survive millennia in an interstellar setting must be infinitely more robust than current day Germany. Society makes errors, but it learns from them, even if it may not seem so for any individual in that society, because it's a hundreds years long process. We used to constantly create bio-hazards because we didn't understand germ theory. Now, hundreds of years later, we are much more robust and it seems stupid in hindsight. So any civilization hundreds of years from now will also be that much more robust.
I think that's an inaccurately negative framing. The fear of overreliance on tech reminds me eerily of the fear of overpopulation (another common cheap trope in sci-fi) that has been proven to be a racist/classist myth and is relatively easily solvable with enough political will. You also forget that your individual perspective is skewed, because a single person cannot imagine all of the horrible stuff humanity has already been through. Many statistics indicate that we're actually living in the best time humanity has ever experienced by many metrics. Even with climate change newer data indicates we should be hopeful (currently looks like billions dead, rather than complete extinction - that's at least something and we're moving in the right direction, if you factor in the speed of awareness and tech advancement). Sure, survival or even just a better future are not guaranteed, but currently many people seem to have an overly negative view of the future. I'm a marxist and aware of the fatal incentives the capitalist system creates, but we must remind ourselves not to fall into the trap of capitalist realism - the belief that the system we see is the only system possible, just because we cannot imagine things ever changing.
Think back to the peasant in the middle of the medieval age. Their uprising just got violently beat down, their family was murdered, their village burnt and even if they survive they have only a life of brutal work and unfair taxation to look forward to. Everything they've built in their life has been destroyed in but a few hours and this desolate existence would go on for many hundreds of years. Our ancestors would have every right to be doomer and think that the better world they dreamed of would never come and yet, today the world is better in a way they couldn't have even imagined.
You are in no position to lose hope.
It does not follow that if they can build space ships they know about solar panels. Solar panels could have been obsolete for 700 years by this point in the game. I also don't recall anything about developing new technology. For all I can tell, they're just using pre-existing machinery.
Also, yes it does follow that, if you have the vast amounts of knowledge of the concepts necessary to build ships that can easily travel between planets and stars, you also will know about solar panels. Photovoltaics is not that complicated to figure out, even if you haven't produced them in a while. We've had electric light for ages, yet we haven't forgotten about candles, or we only use mechanical or digital clocks today but we still know about sun-dials. And the fact that they never built a dyson swarm to begin with in this story is sus anyway. Even if it wasn't being actively used for, say 400 years, they'd still have at least a few in several systems being kept as a historical landmark or a museum. Heck, if their technology at their peak was really that advanced (as evidenced by the Idaho clones), there are probably a good few people around that are older than 400 years.
It might be novel application of the technology that already existed. They might just stuff a kid into the RoboDoc 8000 and tell it what they want it to do.
Nothing in the game suggests that humanity has the vast amounts of knowledge of the concepts necessary to build ships. It says the exact opposite. I worked two days on a car assembly line; does that mean I have knowledge of the concepts of how to design and build a car? Being able to operate a machine does not mean you have any appreciation of the engineering that went into making the machine. The engineers who build factory machines are far better paid and rarer than the subsequent operators of those machines.
What do you mean photovoltaics is not that complicated to figure out? There's no reason that any of the people described would know such an effect existed. We still know about candles because some people insist on buying and using them for some reason. Maybe Oberon decreed that humanity could no longer be permitted to waste resources on obsolete technology.
That argument is valid, but not sound. Because depending on the player's skill, you can play this game for a long time destroying hundreds or thousands of ships each run and yet there are always more new enemies to fight. To maintain the industry necessary to build interstellar ships on this scale requires the economy of entire planets dedicated to production and resource aquisition. Why did the production not shut down with the exodus of the Omnis? They have engineers. An army of them.
And now you have to start imagining things that Oberon or the society might have done just to make the story, as it is told by the game, work. Photovoltaics was discovered in the 1800s (!!), if such a primitive society with their means can figure it out, then so can an interstellar civilization - even if it is in decline. Especially, if they have used it in ancient history - all they need is look in a history book and see: "Ah yes, 700 years ago our ancestors built this massive swarm of satellites facing the sun to produce thus far untold amounts of energy... Hm, this energy crisis is getting kinda serious. Mayyybeeee..." That's all you need to fix the core issue of that society.
More generally, you are kinda defeating your own argument here, if you say, that the society that remains has found ways to get by. That would be my point - if the game is full of indications that people are actually kinda getting by, why does the writing of the story pretend like that's not the case?
And the society that remains, even if it's just 5% of the old empire, could absolutely build solar panels for more than enough energy. That's the cool thing about a dyson swarm - you don't have to build it all at once. You can just start building it and every single solar panel satellite you send up immediately makes your economy more powerful. If you can get even just a few up there, you immediately start an exponential economic growth. Like I said, several game events make it clear that factories and rudimentary automation still exist. If it didn't you couldn't fly any of the countless huge enemy ships with a crew of just ~20 people.
You had an empire where citizens were hooked up on drugs to stay happy, and the population was treated as cattle. People did not know true free will, as they were told how much they can copulate and never taught how to care for themselves or the technology they were accustomed with. On top of that, every house wanted to rule over each other and they would sacrifice everyone if they had as long as they had the advantage.
For society to even begin to think of rebuilding, they would have needed a unifying leader that would have the know-how and will to do it. Society collapsed itself because it never built any moral or educational support to fall back to. 20 years is little time to even bounce back, and even they had no idea where to start.. or may I say, they became complacent with the faith of their death.
That being said, the option where you become emperor and gather what remains of the population is the first step forward into rebuilding, and I think that is the best choice for the global survival of what remains of the empire.
Then again, maybe Earth rebuild and evolves after +1000 years (after you are gone) and the empire stumbles upon it and declares war when they refuse to join up. Maybe letting the empire die and going back to Earth with your wife is a much safer way to ensure the continuation of the human kind.
The end wit Rebecca is not bad either, as you let humanity find it's own way to survive, even if it's a tinny fraction.
And what you said about the empire collapsing, doesn't make sense, because - again - we see endless waves of ships coming our way. We see newly invented yet unseen bio-machine interfacing technology from that one enemy faction. We play through quests that involve the mention of currently working factories. And on and on. The story claims that the people are helpless, but the game mechanics and many aspects of the writing itself imply otherwise. Add to that, that there's no explanation as to why people don't just build dyson swarms and it becomes an unconvincing plot all together.
Any explanations as to why the supposedly helpless state of humanity might have arisen anyway is really just you coming up with reasons that are not explicitely in the story. And that's my critique. I'm not saying that it would've been impossible to include reasons for why this bleak state exists. I'm saying that the story didn't make a good effort to include any of them. And that makes the bleakness feel forced and unearned.
You could always give it a try to mod the game and make the story your way. For me it was fine just the way it was presented.
Also, all the technology that they barely have working, they have no idea how to maintain and everyone states that they have 10-15 years max before everything will inevitably crumble. Literally everything was built by the OMNI, and no one has any clue how it was done because they were never taught.
Do you know how to build a photovoltaic solar panel from scratch without having any schematics or tutorial? Do you even know how to store the power and distribute it without burning the whole circuit? It's easy to assume that just because they have advanced technology they know how to reproduce it. A dyson-swarm has to deliver wireless power to the entire solar system of inhabited planets, where do you even start with that? Would you even have time to think about it while you are waging wars or being invaded? You skip a lot of the logistics and think that technological solutions can happen at a snap of a finger.
Humanity has to start from scratch with basic tools to reinvent agriculture first, which is much harder than you would think and would take a majority of their time. Technology education and innovations would take many centuries, especially since the empire spans way more than the game presents to the protagonist on his journey. And let's not forget that religion always plays a role in human history that make people do stupid stuff when they are desperate and gullible, then science goes right outside the door.
I do wish Kaliban wasn't written to be so conversational though. Makes him (and pretty much the description of OMNI's and the story as whole) less believable.