[Spoilers] The Device in DT msq

[Iscah]

Though I do think it's funny how many people are bringing Alexander and the horn into the mix. Remember what the horn/tablet combos were called...? <xfilestheme.ogg>

I wasn't around for that. What are the horn/tablet combos called?

I felt this when the comment was made about the regulators allowed souls to merged and only remember the memories of the person who was being resurrected, and someone points out that it is similar to what happens in the 13th except the original "person isn't erased". And in my minds eye I see the quest to Solution 9 to get a regulator, to give it to a scion to reprogram it, and then give it to Zero to save some new character. Like a relative new problem to the main plot has already got a solution waiting in the wings for when we're ready to redeem the 13th.

I don't understand what the problem is that you're envisaging to solve this way. How would the ability to consume "cleaned" souls help the Thirteenth?

And isn’t there some really bad happenings when you force/overwrite souls? We kinda see it with beast souls in Arcadion…but in the Sorrow of Werylt series, isn’t that kinda sorta what was going on with their over-drive mode? Or was that more mind-jacking? Is there a difference?

The corruption from the beast souls is presumably something along the lines of the identity-damaging issues of consuming souls in the Thirtenth, perhaps with some kind of additional damage from merging souls and then ripping them back out again – something like the wear and tear on velcro over time, or perhaps more like if you merge two different-coloured balls of playdough and then try to perfectly separate them again.

The weapons' Oversoul system seems to be along the lines of the regulators' "record memory and apply it to a new soul" approach, except the target soul is still in a living body with its own memories right up until they get copy-pasted over.

[Anonymoose]

I wasn't around for that. What are the horn/tablet combos called?

Keys　 ：)


(Pg. 78 of the EE has a quick one-pager on them. Gives the impression they might have been important plot devices in a discarded plotline.)


It's probably a coincidence.

I actually think something important to keep in mind is that the key actually isn't very easy to use at all.

I might not have been clear enough about the dissociation of in-world/out-of-world levels, here.

Just because it's similarly difficult for in-world characters to accomplish doesn't always mean it's similarly difficult for the plot to accommodate it.

Imagine if, for the sake of illustrating the point, the reason it happened to work that one time was because the Speaker of Aloalo was incidentally a reincarnation of the Azem shard - like us. That, yes, makes it very difficult for people in the game to accomplish it because no one can do it but the Azem shard. However, we are the Azem shard. Ergo, it would go from very difficult to effortless for the writing to accommodate cross-shard travel, coinciding with the moment that the restriction went from "necessary" (to serve the old plot) to "a hindrance" (to writing cool, new plot).

(If so, this might be why they wrote Y'shtola making it goal for the whole post-Endwalker / pre-Dawntrail story - to give it slightly deeper roots.)

Just because you can say, "well for the people in-world it makes total sense" doesn't meant the writing is automatically incapable of feeling overly convenient and contrived, you know?

This is why I used the porxie as an example. Tempering was at first a dark, terrifying plot device. There was no coming back from it. If you were tempered, you were - at best - a sleeper agent waiting to be activated. There was no cure but death. It was unsolveable when it being unsolvable was convenient for the plot (primal drama), and as soon as the plot didn't need it anymore (moving on from primals as a huge, in-focus threat) a solution was fast-tracked through the MSQ so tempering could be used for the Garlean radio with downsized consequences. Is it weird in-world? Not really. We got new information, expanded upon it, tested it, and produced a solution with organic limitations. (And making it a porxie is completely in-character for Alisaie.) In-world, it all works just fine. Didn't stop it from feeling a little rushed/convenient/tonally awkward, for me, personally, though.

What I mean by, "It makes me nervous," is, in short, "I've seen many a writer fumble similar bags," lol.

(Also keep in mind that I'm not really someone who sees recognizing a product's strengths and weaknesses as deeming the product "bad".)

[Cleretic]

Just because it's similarly difficult for in-world characters to accomplish doesn't always mean it's similarly difficult for the plot to accommodate it.

Imagine if, for the sake of illustrating the point, the reason it happened to work that one time was because the Speaker of Aloalo was incidentally a reincarnation of the Azem shard - like us. That, yes, makes it very difficult for people in the game to accomplish it because no one can do it but the Azem shard. However, we are the Azem shard. Ergo, it would go from very difficult to effortless for the writing to accommodate cross-shard travel, coinciding with the moment that the restriction went from "necessary" (to serve the old plot) to "a hindrance" (to writing cool, new plot).

(If so, this might be why they wrote Y'shtola making it goal for the whole post-Endwalker / pre-Dawntrail story - to give it slightly deeper roots.)

Yeah, honestly, I just don't think we're seeing the same things. Or at least, not seeing the same things as the same things. (If that makes sense; it's late here.)

Yes, the key's probably going to be core to traveling to other shards at some point. And personally, that's the least interesting hook the story could ever possibly explore to me... if that's the only thing about it. The thing that mainly saved Dawntrail there is that it used that nominally similar beat to tell a story that absolutely wasn't that; it's a story about death, legacy, and the notion of moving on after grief, that happens to use another shard to do it, while also using that other shard in a way they've never used one before (no matter how much G'raha insists the Everkeep is basically the Crystal Tower).

That part's mostly unrelated, but it does lead to me feeling like they're probably not going to make this easy. It'll be easier, mostly in the sense that before this point it was literally impossible, but I get the feeling that the writers aren't inclined to use the key as an easy... well, key, to do easy 'let's go to an alternate dimension' stories. They've laid the proper groundwork between the key, Y'shtola and Alexandria, but after Alexandria itself, but I don't think the dev team wants to pave an easy road.

The porxies felt to me like a way to finally clean a longstanding problem off the game board. But I suspect the key might actually be intended to make new problems, even as it opens doors.