Finished the MSQ - Feels bad, pushed to do evil [Spoilers inside]

[Galvuu]

on a less serious note AI are not real no matter how hard you try the people we met weren't the originals they were fakes. heck the story even tells you how that sphene had no memories cause they were lost and was just given her zealous love of her people and the task of keeping them alive eternally.

Yea... but then, that same story, actually shows Wuk Lamat popping out of nowhere, appealing to Sphene's memories and love for her people and to stop the madness she's doing... and it works.
Despite the "fake AI that has no real thoughts or feelings" being deleted, she suddenly reforms, fights off the very system that created/sustained her, and had a heartfelt farewell to us before finally expiring.
Which is it? The story seems to be clearly showing me that, despite the circumstances of her creation and existence, that "new AI Sphene" had real thoughts, real emotions, real regrets and real love. Was the ending cutscene of the lv100 trial also just a fake? Didn't feel like that was the message being conveyed to me.

[Tsumdere]

Is a person the body or the memories/thoughts/experiences that make them them? I believe the latter.

I wouldn't mind if the story ended the same way with the Endless being turned off. It was a necessary evil at the end of the day (emphasis on evil). The issue was that it was brushed off so flippantly with the "they're not alive" argument in a few lines of dialogue when they are clearly sentient with emotions, goals, friendships, jobs, critical thought, and awareness of their existence.

The WoL is allowed to choose options to disagree, but ultimately are forced to oblige by people pressuring them to do it ASAP.

[Musashidon]

Which is it? The story seems to be clearly showing me that, despite the circumstances of her creation and existence, that "new AI Sphene" had real thoughts, real emotions, real regrets and real love. Was the ending cutscene of the lv100 trial also just a fake? Didn't feel like that was the message being conveyed to me.

she was AI so yes it's literally fake. yes she can portray learning and changing and having emotion but she is literally artificially created. the game did it's job if it made you care about something not real.

[Bunyon]

We spent so much time slowly learning about every culture in the first half of the expansion, with one of the most interesting concepts being "you aren't truly dead as long as you are remembered".

Then in the climax everyone just immediately agrees to wiping out this entire world made of people's memories because... Erenville's mom wants it? Can we spend some time discussing this? Can we go out the portal and ask Ysh if there's any alternative to doing this to stopping Sphene? Everyone just completely agrees this is the only way, despite then going around seeing that there are in fact people who are happy in this world. Are they alive? What is living exactly? Those would be interesting concepts to delve into. No? Okay, just wipe out the world, I guess.

I feel like we should have gone through the zone first and then come to the realization that we needed to shut everyone down. By deciding immediately that this was the only path, I had almost no investment into anyone we met. We go down a hallway of forceful sad reunions with characters that we hardly know, knowing that we have to wipe them out and making some goofy funny memories before we do that, even though we "have to stop Sphene as fast as possible". Krile's parents are especially hard to feel anything about, when she was completely and utterly overshadowed by Wuk Lamat's plot. We uncover the city of gold's portal, find that she came from another reflection and then... go play cowboys...

When I entered the final zone I was honestly impressed at how they managed to make such a beautiful map for the climax, because even if you don't like the story it's the zones and the dungeons and trials that stay throughout the many months you'll play this game. But no, we have to wipe out this reflection and there's literally nothing that can be done about it, and Erenville's mom wants to die so there are no moral implications about doing this. Zone is now permanently a black ugly mass, but at least you'll always have the memories you made with Wuk Lamat.

This is probably a mishmash of thoughts but I don't know how else to put into words. The world design, dungeons and music were all top notch. Absolutely excellent work from those involved. Story was baffling to me, and culminates in destroying a zone that would be awesome to hang out in. I'm not sad about it, just annoyed.

[DaveFishnomer]

Is a person the body or the memories/thoughts/experiences that make them them? I believe the latter.

I wouldn't mind if the story ended the same way with the Endless being turned off. It was a necessary evil at the end of the day (emphasis on evil). The issue was that it was brushed off so flippantly with the "they're not alive" argument in a few lines of dialogue when they are clearly sentient with emotions, goals, friendships, jobs, critical thought, and awareness of their existence.

The WoL is allowed to choose options to disagree, but ultimately are forced to oblige by people pressuring them to do it ASAP.

Yes, agreed, part of it was that they brushed it all off like it meant nothing, just killing them all like they are less than insects

[Lady_Silvermoon]

We spent so much time slowly learning about every culture in the first half of the expansion, with one of the most interesting concepts being "you aren't truly dead as long as you are remembered".

Then in the climax everyone just immediately agrees to wiping out this entire world made of people's memories because... Erenville's mom wants it? Can we spend some time discussing this? Can we go out the portal and ask Ysh if there's any alternative to doing this to stopping Sphene? Everyone just completely agrees this is the only way, despite then going around seeing that there are in fact people who are happy in this world. Are they alive? What is living exactly? Those would be interesting concepts to delve into. No? Okay, just wipe out the world, I guess.

I feel like we should have gone through the zone first and then come to the realization that we needed to shut everyone down. By deciding immediately that this was the only path, I had almost no investment into anyone we met. We go down a hallway of forceful sad reunions with characters that we hardly know, knowing that we have to wipe them out and making some goofy funny memories before we do that, even though we "have to stop Sphene as fast as possible". Krile's parents are especially hard to feel anything about, when she was completely and utterly overshadowed by Wuk Lamat's plot. We uncover the city of gold's portal, find that she came from another reflection and then... go play cowboys...

When I entered the final zone I was honestly impressed at how they managed to make such a beautiful map for the climax, because even if you don't like the story it's the zones and the dungeons and trials that stay throughout the many months you'll play this game. But no, we have to wipe out this reflection and there's literally nothing that can be done about it, and Erenville's mom wants to die so there are no moral implications about doing this. Zone is now permanently a black ugly mass, but at least you'll always have the memories you made with Wuk Lamat.

This is probably a mishmash of thoughts but I don't know how else to put into words. The world design, dungeons and music were all top notch. Absolutely excellent work from those involved. Story was baffling to me, and culminates in destroying a zone that would be awesome to hang out in. I'm not sad about it, just annoyed.

Yeah, it's really macabre worrying about entertaining the children knowing in a few minutes you're about to delete the children. Why bother? If these are just things of so little regard we can just delete them, why are we bothering to make the things happy?

[DaveFishnomer]

Yes, thanks, that part felt insane to me.

[AlexisLestrange]

"It was not a genocide, it was a mercy." - pretty sure Emet said this on the people of eorzea, the fact that the writers dont see that is hilarious.
Again, it's just a story, they could have written a better solution, they choose not to so they can drive in their view point that all life should die.

This is virtue signalling at best. The Endless are just the memories of their former selves when they lived right before their true death. They were sustained not by magic, not by electricity, but by the souls of other living people who were murdered for the sake of this futile project to continue someone's folly of a dream, someone who was but just a mere fragment of their original self. There's no justification for continuing said project, it is incredibly morally wrong. All of that is playing God and goes against the true natural living order of things.

The Endless don't even have souls because they were extracted from them. That process, which created the Endless, took the memories, spliced them from its soul, and put the memories into these bodies, kinda like the Replicants from Nier Replicant. The argument about Otis... his soul and memories were not spliced when his soul was placed inside that relic of a machine. One could say he was still living, but only within that relic. The version of Otis we met in Living Memory was the one where his memories were duplicated at the point he initially died in his original body over 300-odd years ago from the point of Dawntrail's story. These two are not the same and were essentially co-existing in two different spaces. The only difference is, I would say that Relic Otis was the real Otis all along and the memories he retained in that mechanical body were not transferred (or rather could not be transferred) to the version of him in Living Memory.

[Galvuu]

she was AI so yes it's literally fake. yes she can portray learning and changing and having emotion but she is literally artificially created. the game did it's job if it made you care about something not real.

Cool! Then her entire speech, her feelings, her sadness is all totally meaningless! Phew. Idk why I even cared about slamming my sword in her face.
But it's cool- next, I'm going to murder everything in the Ultima Thule, since those are also born from Meteion's memories and some Dynamis to animate their bodies, so it should be ok to blow that up too.
I'm also gonna squash Omega, it was a machine created by the Omicrons, after all. What's that? Omega shows signs of sapience and emotion? It started to wonder about its existence and place in the cosmos, about the meaning of life and hope on a wider scale? Nuh-huh, Omega was manufactured by the Omicrons. Not alive. You know who else is like that? Alpha, recreated by Omega from his memories of the strongest beings in the cosmos. Your feathery chocobo smile doesn't fool me, Alpha, you're not alive and next on the chopping block.

There's no dissonance with this message at all, neither in the face our understanding of sapient minds, nor past FF XIV lore.
(I love the idea of "all AI is fake", when human consciousness is, as far as we know, literally an emergent phenomena from pattern recognition... which is a lot like nature's "AI". If one day we created a real thinking, feeling machine, you're the kind of person to try and deny it any human rights and delete it or enslave it. Like we didn't have a lot of sci-fi exploring this concept and how cruel that is)

[Remilia_Nightfall]

Hey, hey

What if this is a gigachad galaxybrain preamble to our WoL being the next holder of the Emet Selch position? Let's wait for the finger snapping and the hand waving.

This is all we can hope for now