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

[Loggos]

Yeah in the end I don't know if it's long or short term storage but what I wanted to get at is that they seem to perceive themselves as one stable, continuous self even if they get shut down and recreated from time to time.

[Silver-Strider]

The comparison to a life support device is inaccurate. A Life support doesn't require attaching itself to a perfectly healthy individual and slowly killing them to sustain someone. The Endless are a parasite, much like ticks or fleas and while technically living beings, their way of life is deemed as problematic due to their requirement of needing a living host to survive. It's not that much different from Parasitic Twin Syndrome, where the only treatment for it is to extract the parasitic twin from the dominant twin in order to ensure survival of the dominant twin. It's not a happy situation but a necessity to ensure survival and little more.

[Eyrilona]

The comparison to a life support device is inaccurate. A Life support doesn't require attaching itself to a perfectly healthy individual and slowly killing them to sustain someone. The Endless are a parasite, much like ticks or fleas and while technically living beings, their way of life is deemed as problematic due to their requirement of needing a living host to survive. It's not that much different from Parasitic Twin Syndrome, where the only treatment for it is to extract the parasitic twin from the dominant twin in order to ensure survival of the dominant twin. It's not a happy situation but a necessity to ensure survival and little more.

Or you could like... get rid of the parasitism, since in this case that is merely a consequence of Sphene having a very inefficient method of keeping the Endless going. Their dependence on outside energy and living aether is only something they are afflicted with due to one particular technological paradigm. We know the Omicrons did storing minds as data better, and we still have access to their civilization in Ultima Thule.

Your argument that what the game made us do was the only solution under those circumstances, is conceptually no different from saying that the only way to rid us of a curable affliction is to kill all the patients.

[Lady_Silvermoon]

Who would we find this solution for? Have not played the same story? Sphene did not want to find any other solution. She was so far gone in her own world that she could not see any other way out.

It feels as if a lot of people never met people who do not want to listen to your help. Who only see their way.

The kids. We should have found another solution for the themepark kids. Otis. We should have found another solution for Otis. The parents of half the people we're with. We should have found another solution for those people. The man who has been waiting centuries to finally marry the woman he loves. We should have found another solution for him. All those feeling, thinking people with dreams and ambitions. We should have found another solution for all of them. The 90% of them saved on the server carrying the culture and history of an entire world. We should have found another solution for them. Just because a little girl whose will is being influenced by a program couldn't find a better way forward didn't mean we shouldn't have at least tried. But instead we hung around, saw a few sights and then deleted innocent people. When the issue wasn't their memories being preserved, but the method by which they were given bodies. We could have saved the data and then had all the time in the world to figure out a way for them to have bodies that didn't require the souls of other living beings.

We would've been at odds with them either way. The story memories into something is one thing, gathering souls into a quantifiable and usable thing is a whole different story. Delaying their end with the tradeoff being having to end a different life-form's and extracting their soul for consumption. Not only were souls being made into a commodity that could be exchanged with currency, but also it would become a finite resource. They would either turn on themselves, or their paranoia for death would push them to invade other shards and the source to steal their souls.
We would've had to make this decision in the future anyways.

I haven't finished because after I killed the kids I needed a break. But from my understanding we did nothing to destroy their soul cleansing machine and therefore the people of Everkeep are still functioning off the same currency they always have which means that no, Erenville won't find his mother in the aetherial sea as her memories have already been extracted and now deleted and her soul is a token in someone's headpiece.

[ZavosEsperian]

Don't worry, since we don't consider them to be alive we're not guilty of murder for killing the-- hey wait a goddamn minute

[ShudeneSifu]

I never posted here or on any MMO forum, but after finishing the MSQ this evening...this expansion's MSQ was just painful. Bad dialogue, too much Wuk, too much cringe moments, I have never skipped more cutscenes than in any other story. A lot filler/errand missions. The story just didn't hit at all for me and I think whoever wrote it is mentally ill, I honestly could not understand half of it.

Boss fights absolutely sucked for normal content and those kind of fights should reserved for the last fight in the MSQ, or Extreme or higher. Every dungeon boss fight was misery.

And to amplify my pain, I am BLM main. This was pure hell. I glad this MSQ is over. I usually take my time to savor the story, but no, not this time. I felt compelled to just grind through it, and be done with it. Good riddance.

[GrizzlyTank]

AI is not real ? you and all humans are AI, our brain is just a computer running on electricity that is powered by a biological engine, it is not a matter of if AI is alive it a matter of at what point is becomes alive, I dont know where the line IS but I do think that having feelings, memories, senses, self awareness and agency is well above what you would consider most "real" animals to be.
The "AI" that are the endless are very much real.

Seeing how potent the latest "AI" models have become. I'm firm believer that ourselves are nothing more than biological analogous computers, specialized in pattern recognition (give or take other services). The question is how far away we are from a model that contains self-preservation and better long-term memory to make them more comparable to existing life.

And inb4 "Humans have to learn from experiences and whatnot". Humans and other biological life-forms comes "pre-compiled" with a bunch complicated algorithms that it took billions of years to develop through evolution. We are and will never be a clean slate, much like the currently developed AI aren't.

[Shialan]

Otis. We should have found another solution for Otis.

You mean the guy who we saw DYING after he sacrificed himself? They made it so clear that the Otis in the Living Memories was not the same Otis we met in Heritage Found.

And for the rest, you clearly didn't understand what the story was trying to tell.

There was NO TIME for us to try and find any other way. Have you not played the story? After we beat Zoraal Ja, Sphene told us what she is going to do and vanished. Only after we traveled through the gate did we get told by Cahciua what we even could do to stop that plan.

We even stood in front of Meso Terminal, trying to reason with Sphene, but she just told it us that it is too late and she sees no otther way. Who do you think would we try to reason with to find another way? All while the computer was calculating the fusion stuff.

[GrizzlyTank]

You mean the guy who we saw DYING after he sacrificed himself? They made it so clear that the Otis in the Living Memories was not the same Otis we met in Heritage Found.

And for the rest, you clearly didn't understand what the story was trying to tell.

There was NO TIME for us to try and find any other way. Have you not played the story? After we beat Zoraal Ja, Sphene told us what she is going to do and vanished. Only after we traveled through the gate did we get told by Cahciua what we even could do to stop that plan.

We even stood in front of Meso Terminal, trying to reason with Sphene, but she just told it us that it is too late and she sees no otther way. Who do you think would we try to reason with to find another way? All while the computer was calculating the fusion stuff.

And us walking through parks giving people their last send off as we headed for the consoles took at most a few hours. Compared to finding working solutions to the problem which would have taken months to years to make functional. Sphene gave us no time. It was either now or another calamity.

Not to mention that the endless are also fairly accepting to the predicament they were in. Even Outis understood that Espene wasn't the queen he swore to protect.

[Eyrilona]

Not to mention that the endless are also fairly accepting to the predicament they were in. Even Outis understood that Espene wasn't the queen he swore to protect.

There is a reasonable problem with this this though -- all those people agreeing with the need for their own destruction, are written in by the devs that themselves believe they are right about their story being good, so we know they are crafted to loyally to the intent of the writers defend the indefensible. There is no independent source of fact there.

The way the MSQ story goes is true and good, because the way the MSQ story goes teaches us so. It is totally circular, and building an argument on that will never be able to convince someone who is already outside the circle looking at it from the outside. Our characters are inside the story nodding it along, but we players exist outside the game, and are capable of looking at it from the outside by definition.