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

[dezzmont]

I think the game doesn't actually come down on the side that "endless aren't people." There are a lot of little moments that betray even characters who say that don't truly believe that. For example, Cahciua may say she is a false life and just a copy, but she also is the literal worst at hiding how happy she is that she got to see her little bun bun, how much she treasures that last little adventure she has, how much she cares that the other endless have a good exit. We, the player, also are sort of encouraged to see them as people, as we are told very explicitly to help any endless who can't move on to move on. We are told in no uncertain terms they still have moral weight, and that makes sense because our promise to remember them to ensure they aren't forgotten makes no sense if they are just machines.

"Is a human brain emulation a person" is a question for nerds. Its navel gazing. Its interesting to think about, but like so many fantastical questions, its not actually a good through-line for a story. It is better used as a vehicle to think about something actually relevant to the lived human experience.

If you look at Unlost World on that metaphorical level, it becomes clear what is happening: The endless are a society with no future. They are on life support. Their story cannot continue. They still matter, they are still people. But its the end of the line. You know what is happening. On some level they know what is happening, so many NPCs talk to you about how they are starting to come to terms with things ending if Sphene isn't successful. Or outright say they know what your doing and support you. So you treasure your last day with them... and pull the plug. It is a tragedy to agree that the cost of living is no longer worth it, but it not amoral to come to that choice, especially when someone is facing a natural end everyone faces that can only be extended by suffering.

Your WoL didn't commit genocide. They took a people off life support. In this case, the literal life of others.

I actually respect the analogy that the writers were perhaps trying to put across here: by all accounts it feels like an equivalent of how the final moments of 'cancelled' MMO must feel right before the servers are shut down for the last time. And a little reminder that nothing lasts forever.

It is SUPER not an accident that the final zone was a themepark for a themepark MMO. MMOs, Themeparks, summer vacations, they are inherently transient. Once a ride is demolished, once a server closed, heck once an MMOs system is gone... it will only exist in the memories of people who experienced it. Some day someone is going to walk into a server farm and delete the WoL and all the people you met and love in the game who are real to you, just like you did. Someone HAD to do that for 1.0.

[LylyAmery]

I don't get why everyone is obsessed with calling them a "facsimile" of life just because they need things killed for them to live, we kill things to stay alive, we have to eat after all. Even if they aren't continuous with the people who once lived, they still live. Given that the game gives us no humane alternative whatsoever it makes perfect sense we would defend ourselves in a dog-eat-dog world, it doesn't make the tragedy of the Endless any less tragic.

The attempts to reduce them to being subhuman are constantly thwarted by the emotions and new experiences they have on a daily basis. It's the same logic the Ascians use to justify their own genocide of us to bring about their civilization once more. Cahciua carried out a sophisticated plan to see about her demise and felt every feeling her organic predecessor would have felt, and somehow to us she is supposed to be subhuman? What separates us from the Ancients who clung so desperately from life is the fact we're willing to recognize the hypocrisy of life and perpetuate ourselves, not try to diminish those we had to fell to keep going. After all, if we were made to feel pathos for every cow, every pig, every chicken, and every pest animal that infests our crop we kill on a daily basis we'd feel pretty awful all of the time, but it's part of being alive that other things cannot live concurrently with us.

However, with these dormant beings left behind in memory, that stay sustained purely on discontent alone, and monsters generated from nowhere... Is there not a hope for these people through whatever energy is spontaneously manifesting all of these things that 100% need energy to exist? I find it worrisome we never explored what mechanism creates these things because refusing to explore every alternative down-the-line would actually reflect terribly on our WoL. Now that the urgency is gone, and all these people are preserved in dormant circuitry I hope we take some care to them in the patch quests, perhaps there is another way.

[Jojoya]

I don't get why everyone is obsessed with calling them a "facsimile" of life just because they need things killed for them to live, we kill things to stay alive, we have to eat after all. Even if they aren't continuous with the people who once lived, they still live. Given that the game gives us no humane alternative whatsoever it makes perfect sense we would defend ourselves in a dog-eat-dog world, it doesn't make the tragedy of the Endless any less tragic.

Do you completely cease to exist in every way when there's a power outage where you are?

Do you have something selectively controlling what memories you have access to and which you don't?

Do you lack a soul?

The attempts to reduce them to being subhuman are constantly thwarted by the emotions and new experiences they have on a daily basis.

What emotions? Go watch The Stepford Wives (the original from the 70s, not the remake). The Endless are just like those title characters except they don't even have a physical form, only a virtual avatar.

What new daily experiences? There was nothing new for them to experience between the time the living were banned from entering LM to when we arrived even when the computer decided it was their turn to be reconstructed again for a short while.

The Endless are as much alive to the FFXIV universe as the Scions are alive in our real world. They're constructed by a computer when someone turns on their PC or console and decide to play the game. They only have the experiences that are programmed for them to experience, only feel the emotions they are programmed to feel. They cease to exist when the game stops playing.

There was tragedy there all right but it wasn't the Endless. The tragedy was the living left without the memories of their loved ones who had died because someone in a distant past decided they shouldn't have access to those memories. Those loved ones were truly forgotten by those capable of remembering.

[mouse_marple]

At first I was fairly confident the Endless were basically just digital echoes of a once living person. A bit like a voicemail of a deceased person. It can make you feel like you are in the presence of that person, but they are gone. When you view the Endless like this, then shutting off the terminals is easy.

After reading this thread, however, I have doubts that shutting off the terminals was morally correct. Edit: It was clear that it's wrong to continue harvesting aether and more or less bring people back to life this way, but it's not clear that we should have ended the ones who already had existence in Living Memory.

It's very unfortunate the MSQ funnels us to see the Endless only one way and doesn't let us consider this. I feel a bit bamboozled honestly. Hopefully this is touched on in the patches. If it turns out that shutting off the Endless was categorically wrong, then we should get a chance to confront that and make amends.

(Thanks for this thread, this subject is the most interesting aspect of DT for me by far for me)

[BadAtGames]

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

I laughed out loud

[BelegErkhten]

So I finished the msq, The story was lackluster throughout the xPac but the ending just felt evil to me, the writers try and push their point of view that life should end no matter what, that the endless are not really alive, even though we see that they are, they can hear, feel and think, express emotion, be happy and sad, the WOL just committed a mass murder and we are suppose to feel ok with that?

This has forever tainted my view of the wol, my character is now evil.

From EW where we forgave a genocidal bird girl who killed who knows how many planets to DT where we become the mass murderer yourself what up square enix?

Its not murder bro, they aren't alive. They are computer data. You aren't a murderer if you delete a .mp3 off your computer.

[Barachim]

I don't get why everyone is obsessed with calling them a "facsimile" of life just because they need things killed for them to live, we kill things to stay alive, we have to eat after all.

Yes, but unlike the Endless, we don't halt the cycle of death and rebirth. Our energies return to the Aetherial sea and return to every living being that is born. The Alexandrians halted that process by not letting souls return to the Aetherial Sea, instead recycled them for re-use or fuel that gets burned up to keep the Endless "alive". They were destined to all die for good one day, once all the life energies had been depleted. Living Alexandrians are literally dealing with a declining birth rate because of it.

Even if they aren't continuous with the people who once lived, they still live in carefully constructed world Sphene made for them. Given that the game gives us no humane alternative whatsoever it makes perfect sense we would defend ourselves in a dog-eat-dog world, it doesn't make the tragedy of the Endless any less tragic.

Question. Who's the real Otis? The one who was trapped in a robotic body, or the one in Living Memory? Neither were. Otis was the prime example that we're dealing with copies. Endless are programmed algorithms that act in accordance with the saved memories. We run through a whole dungeon that explained the process of the separation of soul and memory.

The attempts to reduce them to being subhuman are constantly thwarted by the emotions and new experiences they have on a daily basis. It's the same logic the Ascians use to justify their own genocide of us to bring about their civilization once more.

And the Endless are worse. Ok, the Ascians plan is to bring back their dead. Sphenes primary directive guarantees the end of life, period.

However, with these dormant beings left behind in memory, that stay sustained purely on discontent alone, and monsters generated from nowhere... Is there not a hope for these people through whatever energy is spontaneously manifesting all of these things that 100% need energy to exist? I find it worrisome we never explored what mechanism creates these things because refusing to explore every alternative down-the-line would actually reflect terribly on our WoL. Now that the urgency is gone, and all these people are preserved in dormant circuitry I hope we take some care to them in the patch quests, perhaps there is another way.

We're dealing with people with advanced technologies, hundreds of years ahead of us. If they haven't found an alternate way of sustaining the Endless by now, I doubt there was another way. Sure, we would have tried, but Sphene made the choice for us. If she doesn't want to look for an alternate option, then the only option is to shut it off right now, because she was just gonna get what she needs from another reflection.

[AnotherPerson]

It's a complete philosophical situation because they're effectively not the same people, just digitalized and given life based on what they were previously. They perceive it as a digital voicemail of those who are left behind. Unfortunately, they run on lifeforce of others so its immoral to the ones who currently live.

However, we already know those comprised of the same memories are not the same being unless they retain their original souls to animate themselves (which they don't, as Alexandria recycle the use of souls). The voicemail is not 100% from the same individual unless they were alive when they left that message behind. We even have Allagan cloning technology to reference. Even Graha ponders this question and mentions this in the final zone of Endwalker. The philosophical debate of events in ARR have already concluded to us that the beings that became the Endless are not the same beings even if they hold the same memories. It's a fallacy as they will never truly be the same individual. They can make similar choices and decisions, but they are never truly the same. By this logic, if we truly wanted to preserve them, it wouldn't be impossible to use Allagan technology to revive the Endless, but that also raises plenty of moral and ethical discussions as well.

Otis lived for ~400 years with his robot vessel. All he needed was some maintenance. Didn't need to suck aether out of everything and not an Endless. Literally a solution right there, but I guess they wanted their original bodies. Still would've worked as a stopgap measure while the scions and the story decided to look for a proper solution.

We are encouraged to help the Endless who linger behind after the servers are shut down because they have very strong emotional attachments to unresolved issues.

But do you know what else exists that doesn't require aether to live? That's right... beings composed entirely of Dynamis! We had an entire expansion dedicated to interacting with beings that no longer exist in the same sense, given life by the conclusion of Endwalker.


Paralyzed boy's sickness that specifically mentions aetheric imbalance leaning towards lightning? We heard that exact issue in The First and came up with a cure for various elemental imbalances in the Source. Yet not a word was mentioned... why?

There are solutions to many of those problems, just none that were acceptable because ... 'we're out of time and won't listen to any other alternative'. That was such an asspull and everyone knows it. If the Endless were truly running out of energy, they can temporarily shut down the servers and "reincarnate" as themselves in some other time while they look for solutions.

Finishing the entirety of Dawntrail MSQ 7.0 left me with very mixed feelings. I like plenty of the characters that show up (Kemakka, Wuk Evu, Hunmu Rruk, Wawlika, Cahciua, Otis, Mablu, Koana, etc. ) and the general story concept but the story was just told/shown so horribly. So many plot holes. So many issues. The adventure didn't really feel like an adventure but perspective from a bystander / observer. It was not very pleasant at all.

[Palladiamors]

These things were not people. These things were computer processes made to act like people who were long since dead and worse, they ran in the souls of the actual dead. They were tormenting the actual fallen and preventing them from entering the aether sea to power a mimicry of the dead forced to forever play out the lives of those they imitated.

It was a macabre puppet show where the strings were made up of the lives of actual people and all we did was remove the strings. Stop trying to make it into some moral dilemma.

[Pablomaldito]

The endless really are facsimiles of the people whose memories they carry. This is demonstrated by Sir Otis, who lived on in an artificial body with his soul and memories intact while and Endless version generated from his memories simultaneously existed. Two different entities are experiencing an existence as the same identity. It should also be theoretically possible to generate an Endless out of any living person with a regulator, since their memories are already backed up in the cloud.

However, even though they are "just copies", it doesn't necessarily mean that they do not experience existence as fully as any other sentient being. The Endless we interacted with in the MSQ were conveniently accepting of the need to shut the system down, but I'm not convinced that the average Endless on the street wanted to be erased right then and there.