The missing mood in the existential horror of the last zone of the game (spoilers)

[Soxxx]

Tagging along here to say that I couldn't agree more with this post, thank you for making it. This sums up why the final area was the worst part of the expansion for me. They ask a lot of hard questions about souls and life, never bother to answer them, and then they really just drop one line saying "don't worry this is morally okay" and expect us to just run with it. I felt horrible going through it the whole time.

What I think you didn't quite cover though was the real kicker for me. Cahciua states that the reason we're killing all of the Endless is so that Sphene won't have any reason to kill people for souls anymore, which will therefore stop her conquest. That's technically the whole reason we even decided to on this specific solution, not just that they're unsustainable. The problem then, is that killing all of the Endless did not, stop Sphene's desire to kill for her people. In fact, we don't even bother mentioning what we did to her, nor does she mention at any point that she knows they're dead. The fact that we killed them all never comes up again, and we fight and defeat Sphene regardless. So the very basis for us effectively massacring arguably living people is actually totally meaningless in the end, which not only feels horrible to me when I went through it, but it also wound up feeling like a fundamental waste of 6 hours of questing that had no impact on anything at all. Like, why didn't we just go directly to Sphene, beat her up, and then leave the Endless to run down the supply of souls they already have until they pass away?

There's also the fact that after we decide to kill them all, we immediately decide to go spend 6 hours getting to know them and getting to see just how human lively and grateful they mostly all are to be alive, with killing them hanging over our heads... It just felt emotionally insane to me.

That being said, I do understand what they were going for, especially since it was really just a mirror of Ultima Thule. I feel like there should've been a lot more emphasis from the get-go and the entire way through on them accepting death and being trapped, like Cahciua. Freeing her from the Living Memory was totally fine because she wanted to leave, but everyone else seemed kind of happy to be there. That, or the Endless should have not actually had a soul of their own, like AI or androids or something similar to those spectres in Amaurot, that basically just creates hollow shells that mimic the memories of real people as close as possible, but the technology used to do so simply uses souls to power itself for whatever reason without actually creating what are functionally real people. In fact, I feel like that's honestly what the writers were actually going for and wanted, but they made a huge mess of this weird deal with souls and memories and just never bothered to really answer any of questions of "are these real people?" properly, and in my opinion that's the real root of this whole problem.

So much of this could have been avoided if someone just read the writing back and asked, "Why?"