Author Topic: The Blue Planet Oracle (full BP2/3 spoilers within!)  (Read 140664 times)

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Re: The Blue Planet Oracle (full BP2/3 spoilers within!)
Byrne's actions are definitely supposed to be interpreted as frustrating -- from the perspective of the player as Laporte and as an active agent with the gameplay's emphasis on action (the Tevs are out there! All we need to do is go out and shoot them til they die!)

Ah, right. Thanks for clearing that up, i'm glad I didn't slip up too badly on that front then - the clarification is much appreciated, as i'd been wondering about some of the command choices on both sides (granted, they both had their own agendas, but still.)

 

Offline General Battuta

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Re: The Blue Planet Oracle (full BP2/3 spoilers within!)
Almost as if we need you to resent Byrne as much as Laporte herself does!

 

Offline An4ximandros

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Re: The Blue Planet Oracle (full BP2/3 spoilers within!)
S-s-s-stupid idiot Byrne! It's not like I b-believe he has something up his sleeve, you baka! :p

 
Re: The Blue Planet Oracle (full BP2/3 spoilers within!)
Obviously the scope of the Shivans, the GTVA, and the Freespace universe has been given a tremendous degree of depth in the BP universe.

We already know from Morgan in the Shadows (although that is not an exact parallel), and some answers here about Feds fighting Shivans, that the Feds and Teves aren't going to murder each other back to the stone age. At SOME point, the greater battle against the Shivans/Darkness is going to return.

It's already been stated that the Shivans are in essence, a force of nature or a galactic immune system, one essentially impossible to destroy. Not counting the ongoing existential threats to the universe.

That being said, this is also a space game where the player character has to make some kind of impact with all the shooty and exploding space ship bits (I don't expect the BP story to be "all for nothing," you guys are better writers that that).

A lot of prefacing to ask the following: can we expect a CONCLUSION to the Shivan threat in a Third Incursion? Whether humanity's reunification to face a common enemy convinces the powers that be there is still virtue and valor left in our races, or decide simply going out guns blazing, a lot of fans, myself included, do view BP as sort of the epilogue in spirit to the Freespace story. That's not to say you guys don't have the right to tell your own story, but rather, the fans would like a satisfactory moment of catharsis against a race of cosmic destroyers. It's a fight we never got to finish due to the end of Volition.


 

Offline HLD_Prophecy

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Re: The Blue Planet Oracle (full BP2/3 spoilers within!)
A lot of prefacing to ask the following: can we expect a CONCLUSION to the Shivan threat in a Third Incursion?

Exactly this.

  
Re: The Blue Planet Oracle (full BP2/3 spoilers within!)
<3

I would wait another ten years to see y'all finish BP. :D

 
Re: The Blue Planet Oracle (full BP2/3 spoilers within!)
Four questions, oh mighty Oracle:

1) As conventional arms are so unlikely to tip the war in favour of the UEF at this point, will Laporte/Calder succeed at moving the pieces in such a way as to force Steele into accepting a conditional surrender, or maybe even a white peace?

2) Will this kind of outcome happen because the GTVA forces on Shivan-watch spot something (or a lot of somethings)?

3) If CASSANDRA "dies" in the attack, will there ever be new Fedayeen, or at least new ones on the level of Kovacs, Falconer etc.?

4) What is the name of the book you're writing :)?

 
Re: The Blue Planet Oracle (full BP2/3 spoilers within!)
4) The Monster Baru Cormorant, follow up to the formidable The Traitor Baru Cormorant

 
Re: The Blue Planet Oracle (full BP2/3 spoilers within!)
4) The Monster Baru Cormorant, follow up to the formidable The Traitor Baru Cormorant

"The Formidable The Traitor Baru Cormorant (a novel)".

Hm..."Baru Cormorant; the Formidable, the Traitor"?
« Last Edit: September 08, 2017, 11:05:56 pm by Kestrellius »

 

Offline Mito [PL]

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Re: The Blue Planet Oracle (full BP2/3 spoilers within!)
I've re-watched a clip of UT2 playthrough and a couple things got me interested.

Ken says to Laporte that "There have always been others". As in, other people like her. While she seems to have been the best "design" of them all, therefore the most successful one... Others? I once figured that Simms might be one of them, but... nah. Any tracks of these other people we'd like to know of? I don't think any of Beis would be related, the same for people speaking in Ken.

One of the background tracks (addamb2) seems to be a modified "Voice of the Jupiter" (for reference: https://youtu.be/-MmWeZHsQzs?t=34). Is that a relation to something?

Plus, one of the madness debriefings (the ATATATATA... one) looks a bit... familiar. A genetic sequence?
« Last Edit: September 11, 2017, 05:10:56 pm by MitoPL »
How do you kill a hydra?

You starve it to death.

 

Offline starlord

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Re: The Blue Planet Oracle (full BP2/3 spoilers within!)
I'm actually more concerned about the great darkness than the shivans at this point. Will the story offer a conclusion at what that eldrich is exactly? Can humanity be instrumental in its destruction? Can it actually be destroyed? If so how? Clearly the shivans know the answer...

 

Offline General Battuta

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Re: The Blue Planet Oracle (full BP2/3 spoilers within!)
It should be possible to get a complete idea of the Darkness' nature and origins by now.

 

Offline starlord

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Re: The Blue Planet Oracle (full BP2/3 spoilers within!)
The former is somewhat clear to me, however whether humanity can address this problem isn't really. Then again, maybe some things have escaped me.

 

Offline Gray113

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Re: The Blue Planet Oracle (full BP2/3 spoilers within!)
So could Bosch's dream of a Terran/Shivan alliance be a realistic possibility?

 
Re: The Blue Planet Oracle (full BP2/3 spoilers within!)
It should be possible to get a complete idea of the Darkness' nature and origins by now.

What it is, I think I understand. Why it's something to be avoided, I don't quite get. Why try to prevent what's effectively the birth of God? How does an ontological intelligence explosion equate to the end of intelligence?

Or is the idea that since any system can be subverted, then if all intelligence is made part of the same system, if something goes wrong everyone's screwed?

 

Offline An4ximandros

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Re: The Blue Planet Oracle (full BP2/3 spoilers within!)
Because there is no point. That "God" cannot think. It's just a replication matrix. It has no creativity, no evolutionary capacity, nothing to do. It is a prion, it subverts and destroys things into more of itself for the simple purpose of replicating itself. It is a dead end to life.

 

Offline CT27

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Re: The Blue Planet Oracle (full BP2/3 spoilers within!)
Because there is no point. That "God" cannot think. It's just a replication matrix. It has no creativity, no evolutionary capacity, nothing to do. It is a prion, it subverts and destroys things into more of itself for the simple purpose of replicating itself. It is a dead end to life.


So sort of like Peter's father, Ego, from GOTG 2?

 
Re: The Blue Planet Oracle (full BP2/3 spoilers within!)
Because there is no point. That "God" cannot think. It's just a replication matrix. It has no creativity, no evolutionary capacity, nothing to do. It is a prion, it subverts and destroys things into more of itself for the simple purpose of replicating itself. It is a dead end to life.

Ah. I think I misunderstood something Battuta said. I interpreted "At the highest possible scales of computation, consciousness is a fatal pathology" to mean that some property of consciousness results in sufficiently large-scale consciousness being horribly destructive to reality. I guess what he actually meant was that consciousness is inefficient compared to non-consciousness, and so gets outcompeted by viciously efficient automatons, which then constitute the Great Darkness? Apparently 'defect-strategy hegemons' such as the Ancients inevitably (or, well, it wouldn't need to be inevitable, just non-trivially likely) destroy their own consciousness in pursuit of survival, and would end up destroying any other civilizations that didn't?

Pretty relevant to my interests, then...I've often thought about the fact that evolution is ultimately a murder-cycle with no actual end goal or objective, just more murder.

(The Great Darkness mostly seems to be a potential future event, rather than an entity or object, but WiH definitely indicates that there's an extant thing of some kind out there. 'Deepness that stalks the cold roads', etc.)

 

Offline General Battuta

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Re: The Blue Planet Oracle (full BP2/3 spoilers within!)
The Great Darkness is consciousness. It is self-awareness and nothing else. It is thinking about itself. Read that again, and understand. It is thinking about itself.

 

Offline General Battuta

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Re: The Blue Planet Oracle (full BP2/3 spoilers within!)
The most terrible thought in the universe is the perfect awareness of being aware: and the beauty of the trap is that it cannot be detected or foreseen until one possesses the godlike power and scope of awareness which makes the metadamnation inevitable.