Omicrons and The Endless (Do Endless Dream of Electric Sheep?)

[ElHeggunte]

And why do we care if she was interested or not? Us defeating her has nothing to do with the fate of the Living Memory. She didn’t even notice we shut down it already. The question of why we were doing it before confronting her was never answered.

Because we were trying to find a peaceful solution first? The first thing we did upon arriving was confront her and ask her to stop until we could figure out a solution that would benefit all parties. She said "piss off, kupo" and started purging the memories that made her even remotely reasonable before initiating the countdown to her plan, leaving us little time for anything else. Because remember, the entire reason this topic keeps coming up is because some players are upset that we "killed" the Endless without bothering to find a solution, completely ignoring the fact that we did try, were immediately rebuffed, and then put on a strict timer where the only solution really available to us was to alt+F4 the Endless.

Us defeating her had everything to do with the fate of Living Memory and the Endless. There was no way to stop her without "killing" the Endless at the same time. Sphene was sustained by the Meso Terminal. The Meso Terminal in turn ran everything else in the Living Memory. The Endless were going to "die" no matter what we did. Hell, even if we rolled over and let Sphene have her way, the Endless were on borrowed time anyway. The whole point of contention is the system was unsustainable and the twisted reasoning of her programming wouldn't allow her to see it or care. Even when Wuk Lamat managed to Talk no Jutsu her personality back, Sphene doubled down on her position.

She didn't notice at first, because as the story points out, she was busy with the calculations required to put her plan into action.

And they did mention why we chose the route of shutting down the Terminals first. First and foremost, the idea was hedging the bet that if Endless no longer existed, Sphene would abandon her goal. Unfortunately she didn't. Second, there was a fear that immediately attacking her directly would possibly force her to accelerate her timetable, giving us even less time to stop her.



Whatever. You folks are welcome to die on the hill that the Endless are alive and that we "genocided" them without making an effort to save them. That's you asserting your headcanon over what the game explicitly tells us about the situation, but you're free to reject that reality and substitute it with your own.

[Turtledeluxe]

Because we were trying to find a peaceful solution first? The first thing we did upon arriving was confront her and ask her to stop until we could figure out a solution that would benefit all parties. She said "piss off, kupo" and started purging the memories that made her even remotely reasonable before initiating the countdown to her plan, leaving us little time for anything else. Because remember, the entire reason this topic keeps coming up is because some players are upset that we "killed" the Endless without bothering to find a solution, completely ignoring the fact that we did try, were immediately rebuffed, and then put on a strict timer where the only solution really available to us was to alt+F4 the Endless.

Us defeating her had everything to do with the fate of Living Memory and the Endless. There was no way to stop her without "killing" the Endless at the same time. Sphene was sustained by the Meso Terminal. The Meso Terminal in turn ran everything else in the Living Memory. The Endless were going to "die" no matter what we did. Hell, even if we rolled over and let Sphene have her way, the Endless were on borrowed time anyway. The whole point of contention is the system was unsustainable and the twisted reasoning of her programming wouldn't allow her to see it or care. Even when Wuk Lamat managed to Talk no Jutsu her personality back, Sphene doubled down on her position.

She didn't notice at first, because as the story points out, she was busy with the calculations required to put her plan into action.

And they did mention why we chose the route of shutting down the Terminals first. First and foremost, the idea was hedging the bet that if Endless no longer existed, Sphene would abandon her goal. Unfortunately she didn't. Second, there was a fear that immediately attacking her directly would possibly force her to accelerate her timetable, giving us even less time to stop her.



Whatever. You folks are welcome to die on the hill that the Endless are alive and that we "genocided" them without making an effort to save them. That's you asserting your headcanon over what the game explicitly tells us about the situation, but you're free to reject that reality and substitute it with your own.

The characters in the game distinguish the difference between alive and dead. Cahciua is an Endless and establishes it quite directly. Sphene admits in dialogue that her perception of the Endless as living is simply based on being remembered. I wasn't aware that in the game or reality, we qualified being remembered as being alive.

She doesn't even refer to it as killing. She refers to it as erasure. They're literally data.


And just being able to still do new things doesn't change the fact that they are a data based instance of the original human soul.

[ChrysOCE]

We didn't have time. Sphene was making calculations to begin enacting her plan. Did you even play the game???[/B]

We certainly had time to do several quests, take a gondola ride, buy some ice cream and take a quiz....

[MikkoAkure]

BUT CLEARLY, there was no time to consider alternative solutions to the endless or discuss the moral implications of what we were about to do.

Not sure what kind of solution we could have cooked up in just an afternoon. All of the scions are personally aware with how the lifestream cycle works and probably wouldn’t support keeping them around anyway.

The aether has to come from somewhere and the Everkeep with its electrope is probably the most powerful and efficient power source in the entire world and that’s apparently not enough to power the Endless. There’s no place else in the world that uses so much power even discounting anything to do with souls. You expect a handful of people to suddenly think of a way to generate more power than has ever been conceived in just an afternoon?


As far as dynamis goes, Ultima Thule isn’t a power station. You can’t just pull up with your city of the living dead and say “fill her up!” and magically expect it to fulfill any and all future plot by just existing. The beings there were pulled out of nothing by Meteion’s observations and pure dynamis or by Stigma-4 copying her work out of the Dead Ends. I don’t think that translates to suddenly being able to grant dynamis bodies to hundreds of thousands of dead people made of aether that just showed up one day. Especially since the only person who was even capable of moving the city was belligerent and refused to talk to us before we killed her.

[Rowde]

In the same span of quests we also organized all of Eorzea to reconfigure a spaceship for faster than light interstellar space travel when most of the people helping had no idea what any of those concepts were.

It's crazy what we can accomplish in an afternoon when we reach out to the multitude of allies we've made over the years for assistance rather than taking matters into our own hands based on the words of a single individual who again, is an unreliable narrator at best since they are part of the very system supposedly filled with "non-people" only presenting the best versions of themselves.

[ElHeggunte]

BUT CLEARLY, there was no time to consider alternative solutions to the endless or discuss the moral implications of what we were about to do.

That’s a bit of a cooked take. Having time for one thing doesn’t mean you also have time for another longer thing.

We were on the clock. The very first thing we did upon arriving was trying to reason with Sphene and try to convince her to seek a peaceful solution. She told us to kick rocks before starting the timer. We didn’t have a choice but to shut down the terminals. Having a little spare time to do silly little tasks along the way (and to give Krile and Erenville closure) doesn’t somehow translate to having the time to not only figure out a way to “save” the Endless, but to also convince Sphene to go along with the plan.

And some of the characters did voice the opinion that it didn’t feel right to just erase them, but again—no real choice in the matter.

[MikkoAkure]

In the same span of quests we also organized all of Eorzea to reconfigure a spaceship for faster than light interstellar space travel when most of the people helping had no idea what any of those concepts were.

It's crazy what we can accomplish in an afternoon when we reach out to the multitude of allies we've made over the years for assistance rather than taking matters into our own hands based on the words of a single individual who again, is an unreliable narrator at best since they are part of the very system supposedly filled with "non-people" only presenting the best versions of themselves.

That was a case of us already having a spaceship present for us to use that just had to be reconfigured to get us to a destination that we already knew where it was. All the work was also handled by the actual scientists and engineers who made it who were the best in the world.

The Endless power supply issue requires the main characters that happened to be present getting together in an afternoon to make a plan to somehow power hundreds of thousands of people that the people who created them couldn’t figure out in 400 years with their own much higher levels of technology and understanding. We would also require the help of the being who outright refused us and was in the process of getting ready to kill us and everyone so we didn’t exactly have all the time in the world and I don’t know how that was all supposed to go down.

The only realistic plan that was presented to us was to shut it all down and all parties present accepted it. WoL wasn’t the end of the line and we had 2 experts in aetherology with us. The only other thing I can think of would be to teleport the crystal tower to Living Memory but that required 200 years and generations of scientists to figure out.

We had no time to “gather all our allies and put our minds together”. We accepted the loss of the Endless and had just enough time to get to know them since not even the living Alexandrians did so that we can remember them when we shut it off.

[Boblawblah]

Sometimes I wonder what people honestly want from these discussions. Do they expect the devs to go "Oh yea, you're right, we're going to rewrite that part, and make it so the endless live, and also, we're going to preach about how bad Venat is, and how we're making the player do bad stuff"?

Because with how heated these arguments get, you'd thing it's a serious issue.

That, or people just like arguing on the internet, and anonymity lends itself to exaggeration/aggressive comments, there's that too I suppose.

[OdinelStarrei]

Sometimes I wonder what people honestly want from these discussions. Do they expect the devs to go "Oh yea, you're right, we're going to rewrite that part, and make it so the endless live, and also, we're going to preach about how bad Venat is, and how we're making the player do bad stuff"?

Because with how heated these arguments get, you'd thing it's a serious issue.

That, or people just like arguing on the internet, and anonymity lends itself to exaggeration/aggressive comments, there's that too I suppose.

There are two ways I was interpreting this comment.

1. "Don't think about product, just consume." Which is reductive, and I doubt that was the intent, trying to not see the absolute worst in other people for a change.

2. "People care too much, and that's bad." Which, you know, valid. I think you should consider not just what we have on the surface, but what happens when the potentiality of a plot arc reaches it's terminus. To abridge a really, really subjective topic, once a writer has written something into the canon (In this case, DT, in previous cases, the sundering), those outcomes are now fixed without substantial retcons to the canon. This is a problem for some outlooks on things like perspective, morals, or congruence with a player's character and the player themselves. Before, people could cope that there were not fixed answers and the taste of not knowing was far more palatable than the answer that was provided for some. Once the infinite possibilities for such a long-term plot had collapsed into a single fact, there was always going to be division, and for better or worse, people put themselves into the plot as a self-insert. I can't really fault anyone for that.

This is why people get so insanely mad when someone says "The Endless are not alive." because that's what the story is telling us in plain text in the moment, but not what the story is showing us, presumably for the intent of drawing out emotions from the audience over the situation. The discrepancy grows more severe the more sympathetic one is towards non-traditional definitions of things such as sentience or actualization, which can come from previous examples in XIV itself (specifically auspices come to mind) or from other works, such as Soma or Signalis. It's like...narrative cognitive dissonance, and some people are way, way more susceptible to that kind of double-logic, to the point where the entire plot fails to maintain a suspension of disbelief for the intent of storytelling, and then becomes less of a fun ride and more of a tedious, arguably frustrating waffle. This varies per person. If the argument then becomes, "It's not real, so who cares, it's just a story." I mean, people care about what they care about. Can't really blame them if they spend 300+ hours getting to that point at a bare minimum in order to even discuss the plot details properly.

[Boblawblah]

There are two ways I was interpreting this comment.

1. "Don't think about product, just consume." Which is reductive, and I doubt that was the intent, trying to not see the absolute worst in other people for a change.

2. "People care too much, and that's bad." Which, you know, valid. I think you should consider not just what we have on the surface, but what happens when the potentiality of a plot arc reaches it's terminus. To abridge a really, really subjective topic, once a writer has written something into the canon (In this case, DT, in previous cases, the sundering), those outcomes are now fixed without substantial retcons to the canon. This is a problem for some outlooks on things like perspective, morals, or congruence with a player's character and the player themselves. For better or worse, people put themselves into the plot as a self-insert. I can't really fault anyone for that.

This is why people get so insanely mad when someone says "The Endless are not alive." because that's what the story is telling us in plain text in the moment, but not what the story is showing us, presumably for the intent of drawing out emotions from the audience over the situation. The discrepancy grows more severe the more sympathetic one is towards non-traditional definitions of things such as sentience or actualization, which can come from previous examples in XIV itself (specifically auspices come to mind) or from other works, such as Soma or Signalis. It's like...narrative cognitive dissonance, and some people are way, way more susceptible to that kind of double-logic, to the point where the entire plot fails to maintain a suspension of disbelief for the intent of storytelling, and then becomes less of a fun ride and more of a tedious, arguably frustrating waffle. This varies per person. If the argument then becomes, "It's not real, so who cares, it's just a story." I mean, people care about what they care about. Can't really blame them if they spend 300+ hours getting to that point at a bare minimum in order to even discuss the plot details properly.

For number 1, no, I've always been a proponent of voting with your wallet. If you're not happy, stop paying for something. I go out of my way to applaud those that do so, even when they do the whole "I'M QUITTING" posts.

For number 2, eh, it's closer to that, but more of a 'what are you expecting exactly?' musing. Are all of these thousands of posts simply a rant? Finding someone else who was frustrated and sharing that frustration? I can understand that for sure, I've done it lots. But are people honestly expecting something to change? We've had years of "Venat committed genocide", there's no way people can honestly think that the writers are going to simply retcon entire expansions to change what happened and how it was framed, but here we are, still yelling about it.

I guess I'm fortunate in that if I dislike a story (the final zone in DT for example) I rant about it a bit, get frustrated, and then I move on. The story isn't changing. They're not going to suddenly remove Wuk from 90% of the quests. They're not going to let me ignore making the endless happy and just turn them off like I wanted to, or call Sphene out on her obvious nonsense.

Eh, I'm not saying to stop arguing, I was simply wondering what result would make the really angry people happy, and I'm not seeing any plausible answer.