Gamerescape E3 Interview

[Iscah]

It's kind of premature to get upset at a First-Haurchefant showing up considering there isn't even the slightest hint so far of that happening.

It's not so much specifically him as that it's an example of how the whole idea of "First-Anyone" is off-putting to me.

And as I said as the start, this story is being written by the same writer(s?) who did the DRK questline, who already brought back "not-Haurchefant" to play for drama in a way that I found incredibly disappointing. Even before this announcement, it made me apprehensive about how the story might turn out and whether I would be similarly annoyed by how they handle the plot.

So no, it hasn't happened yet but I wouldn't be surprised if it did, and thus am getting at least some of the frustration out of the way now. Hopefully I will be pleasantly surprised that it doesn't happen.

but as I said before, majority of people we know may have their doppelgängers dead or turned into Sin Eaters in the First due to the Flood of light covering majority of the world and the only place we can go in 5.0 are the few remaining places that have not been consumed yet.

This just makes the "alternate selves" thing even more depressing.

not to mention as I said multiple times, the doppelgängers does not mean that everything in the past is undone since these people are completely different people with only similarities are their name and appearance.

I can't actually agree with this if the doppelgängers has lived a completely different life because that would be just treating someone who only has the same name and looks like a person we know as a replacement for someone who already died.

Considering the First version of a person will stay in the First and continue to live a completely different life from those in the Source that person should still be treated as a different person and we should never feel fine about what happened to the person we know in the Source.

This is why I don't want alternate versions of characters. Not from this setup with 12,000 years of independent evolution and "butterfly effect" changes in the world. People aren't produced by independent random chance each time, they're the product of all their ancestors. It's not a dice roll that has the same chance to produce a result regardless of what has gone before it.

If they are different people living different lives to their Source-counterparts ... what about their parents? Their grandparents? Great-great-great-great grandparents? That's up to 128 people on just that line of the individual's family tree, and we've only counted back maybe two hundred years. And the further back you go, the more a single "disruption" to the chain is going to affect multiple people's ancestors, with a flow-on effect.

Did all of those 128 people live "different lives" to their counterparts, and yet all choose to have children with the same people?

And the next generation, where another 64 individuals all made the same choices?

And another 32?

And another sixteen? And eight? And four? And two?

None of them died as a child? Fell in love with someone else? Never married? Stayed home on the day they would have had a chance meeting with their future partner?

That's seven generations and 254 people who had to follow the same path in two worlds, just for a single person to be genetically the same as their counterpart. (And we're probably dealing with something more like four hundred generations, assuming three or four per century.)

It's improbable, and inconsistent with the base worldbuilding proposition that the worlds have been evolving independently since the split - and they clearly have been.

If the worlds are independent and different, the people should be completely differerent at this point.

If they want everyone to have a First-counterpart, the worlds should be far more similiar (and the split less distant) to seem at all believable.


And once someone isn't the same person either personality-wise or genetically... it's not them, it's just a chance lookalike. We could just as easily encounter one on the Source.

(Edit to add: from what we know of naming conventions on the First, they won't have the same names as their counterparts either.)

If they go the doppelganger route, even further anyway, I'd want it to be Mide (I think that's her name) from the Alexander story. Minus *touches scar.*

That could get... interesting. Have fun untangling that time-space-dimensional-travelmajig.

Though we did get brief flashes of both Mide and G'raha during one of the Omega cutscenes...

[LineageRazor]

I was going to write something like what Iscah did above.

Basically, alternate universes that are full of people we know only really work if one of the following is true:

- The split occurred recently, like a couple years ago. If the timelines were all identical between the two worlds up until a couple years ago, then yeah, there should be copies of pretty much everyone except for a few of the younger children. This doesn't leave a lot of room for DIFFERENCES, however; the butterfly effect takes time to get going, and a few years might not cut it. Not only would it be all the same people, but they'd basically be EXACTLY the same people.

- There are a LOT of alternate universes. Like more universes than there are atoms in our universe. Way more. Enough universes, that if you search hard enough you can find one that happens to have a bunch of the same people that managed to be assembled by sheer random chance. This is the monkeys writing Shakespeare analogy - when you approach infinity, anything is possible. When you approach fourteen, however, it becomes pure schlock. This is the route that comic books and Star Trek takes, though they downplay the truly mind-boggling number of alternate universes that must exist in order to make something like this happen.

The split happened 12,000 years ago, and produced a mere thirteen copies of the original world. Neither of the above scenarios works. In those 12,000 years Hauchefant's first ancestors MIGHT have married. If they all had sex at EXACTLY the same time, down to the nanosecond, they MIGHT have had the same children. But those children, and their children, and their children, for twelve thousand years... Even as their worlds follow different paths, they're still somehow pumping out the same kids generation after generation, all to lead up to a copy of Hauchefant? Just so we can feel melancholy? That would be so very, very stupid.

[Dualblade]

A couple characters being around on both the Source and First is okay. The merchant is mostly a little fun thing since his Source brothers were there at the start of ARR, and Minifillia is clearly going to be very important. Any other characters that are have doppelgangers on the first shouldn't be that important at least on the Source and thus should rule out characters like Louisoix and Haurchefant. Moenbyrda would be the closest character I could see to having a version of themselves on the First that we also interact with.

Please not Moenbryda. Not when Urianger has just slowly come to acceptance of her death.

I'd rather she'd not either, if only because I'd also rather not have a lot of doppelgangers and leave it as the only important one being Minfillia. She's just the only other one I could see being accepted by most people and not seen as just trying to use characters to pull at players by just existing again.

[Iscah]

Please not Moenbryda. Not when Urianger has just slowly come to acceptance of her death.

[Anonymoose]

Just think, this entire conversation about Bizarro NPCs (in spite of the devs shooting it down for months) because this generic Hyur has the same beard, shirt, and capacity as "random dude who talks to you about the world like he's two weeks from retirement" as the Brothers Bre. I feel kinda bad for whoever it is on the team with a romanticist attraction to literary symmetry.

[Iscah]

Just think, this entire conversation about Bizarro NPCs (in spite of the devs shooting it down for months) because this generic Hyur has the same beard, shirt, and capacity as "random dude who talks to you about the world like he's two weeks from retirement" as the Brothers Bre. I feel kinda bad for whoever it is on the team with a romanticist attraction to literary symmetry.

It's not about the merchant (I'd be fine with just him!), it's the interview quote from Yoshida, particularly the last line:

So, while they may look similar, they are not exactly the same person who follows the same path. Their fate may be different in the different realms. We wanted to depict that aspect of it as well. You will probably encounter other similar situations with other characters that you come in contact with throughout the story.

It's not a one-off, it's apparently something we'll see with multiple characters whose "fate may be different" to what we know.

Maybe the translation is misleading and/or I'm blowing it out of proportion - especially considering how often I tell others to calm down over interview quotes! - but that wording heavily implies we'll be seeing characters whose original fate (a term often linked with negative outcome if not death) we might wish could be altered.

[EdwinLi]

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There are multiple events that can lead to a doppelgängers creation and it is not always the result of "having the same parents".

Some doppelgängers can be born from different parents or with one parent the same and one different.

Another is that certain physical features may have changed with the doppelgängers due to the difference in parents such as hair color while their physical appearance and voice still remain similar. In another case the doppelgängers can be born of the opposite gender. Another can be born from different parents thus your DNA are slightly different due to the combination of certain DNA traits but physical appearance and voice are the same.

Similar to the multiple possibilities of a doppelgängers not being born, there are multiple possibilities for how a doppelgängers can be born. A doppelgängers existance is not bound to only "having the same parents."

[Seraphor]

There are multiple events that can lead to a doppelgängers creation and it is not always the result of "having the same parents".

Some doppelgängers can be born from different parents or with one parent the same and one different.

Another is that certain physical features may have changed with the doppelgängers due to the difference in parents such as hair color while their physical appearance and voice still remain similar. In another case the doppelgängers can be born of the opposite gender. Another can be born from different parents thus your DNA are slightly different due to the combination of certain DNA traits but physical appearance and voice are the same.

Similar to the multiple possibilities of a doppelgängers not being born, there are multiple possibilities for how a doppelgängers can be born. A doppelgängers existance is not bound to only "having the same parents."

Dopplegangers who clearly aren't the same characters, but just very similar, is acceptable. It's no less unbelievable than 'fate' like the FFVIII orphanage gang.

[QT_Melon]

It's probably far easier to reuse assets, including NPCs as dopplegangers for lore hounds that want to play Where's Waldo. I don't think there's much more to that. Re-using assets is all part of a game dev's plan.

Just like the bushes in Super Mario are the same as the clouds.

[Cilia]

I'm willing to forgive the merchant (though I was originally of the mind it was the same merchant from 2.0's opening and 2.55's ending, and that he was more important than initially assumed), but I'm not a fan of trans-dimensional doppelgangers. Having doubles beyond minor, low-key NPCs kind of ruins the whole "other world" feel Norvrandt is supposed to have.

Then again they all still speak the same language with the same accent despite ~12,000 years of divergent history making that nigh-impossible, so I guess it's not too surprising...

Maybe Urianger is calling Y'shtola "Master Matoya" by that name in the OP because it's not actually her, but her double...