📚marathon-lore-discussion

[plain locust]

I don’t know, I was rewatching the music video and it’s obvious the main theme of it was getting used to dying over and over. Focusing heavily on slowly getting better at PvP. But it completely changes its tone once the team finally gets in the marathon ship. Showing the threat being alien slave race and betrayal by teammate due to not being able to fight against an enemy too powerful.

I think it is very possible I am wrong and that was probably a key room or something with a boss twist. And the map wil be the same as the rest

[tight condor]

Teaming up with compilers like in the first game could be cool too

[plain locust]

I’m Jsut hoping it will be more Interesting than that

[floral slate]

imagine if the final boss is a security officer

[pliant elm]

I mean, in theory the Compiler now should still be your ally, or Durandal remnant trying to help you even.

[tight condor]

I also hope we get more of the aliens from the OG games rather than just compilers tho

[sage lark]

You can already ditch your team

[floral slate]

along with the compilers

[sage lark]

Its not a special mechanic

[pliant elm]

I would assume we would fight a Mjolnir.

[floral slate]

HAHHAHAHAHA

[plain locust]

Yes but in this sense I’m talking about fight against a raid boss like enemy. Not running away from a fire fight on dire or something 🤣

[floral slate]

Master chief just there for no reason at all

[pliant elm]

They're kind of hinting heavily already that there's Security Officers onboard smuggled, I doubt they would be friendly.

[tight condor]

I hope we get Durandal spamming random nonsense sometimes

[clear radish]

but you would think they all died after the second attack/all the time since then

[floral slate]

durandal boss fight that sends us to a digital hell dimension of his own coding

[tight condor]

Use a cardio then you got hacked with Durandal going « foolish runner I laced yo shit »

[floral slate]

ffuuuuuck

[sage lark]

Theres no confirmation of a second attack this timeline

[pliant elm]

That would be new ones smuggled by MIDA I suppose.

[plain locust]

I haven’t played the original but from my understanding Durandal was the ai protagonist. Are they still alive or did they die? I’m assuming the contraband items are hinting at them being alive? Or as Alive as an ai can be? Also was the security officer they possessed important at all?

[tight condor]

speaking of mida, numida are just kinda posers right, compared to old mida

[sage lark]

Not really play the quests

[floral slate]

i think he is alive yeah

[sage lark]

Rank 10 and 20 is very much not posers

[pliant elm]

Old MIDA was hardcore corporation yeah, not cyberpunk guys with grafitties yeah.

Old MIDA was basically UESC 2.0.

[tight condor]

i saw the speech quest on outpost on stream which made me wonder if the poser claim was that solid that's why i'm asking

[floral slate]

in marathon 2 is a timeline that ends with durandal alive, with infinity having ones where he does die but others were he lives

[tight condor]

Last mida quest i did is marsh where i malwared some ship and it went kaboom style

[sage lark]

Before that youre literally fucking up uesc on outpost hard

Dont wanna spoil much

And exposing their lies

[tight condor]

dw u good i kinda spoiled myself with that quest already

It's what made me wonder

[plain locust]

Wait so there’s a whole thing with multiple realities in this universe? I’m assuming this will connect with the anomaly on dire

[tight condor]

i need to get more og lore, only got a part of 1

[floral slate]

Nu mida gave me the impresion they are a cult trying to pass of as an anarchist group

[pliant elm]

The only thing that concerns me is that, after the Cryo Archives, that's it... That's all there is to the story, which is incredibly small.

[ruby oracle]

Some good YouTube videos around the lore, been surprised

[floral slate]

infinity goes insane, yeah there is time travel involved

[tight condor]

i kinda got some of thoses vibes from how Gantry words stuff

[plain locust]

I’m pretty sure they said more of the ship will be unlocked as future maps

[pliant elm]

Releasing another 3 or 4 sets of maps would require insane amount of resources and without not much way of paying for them.

[floral slate]

Yeeaaah

Arachnee atleast are upfront in being a cult

[sage lark]

Spoilers for Rank 20 MIDA quests || you discover the Pfhor attack has been heavily covered up and that anyone who even spoke or knew about it was silenced. You get a hold of a contained alien specimen that killed Orions shell. Before that you were even drawing out Orion to kill him. Its basically exposing that they are lying to people back in Sol about the colony and about the fact that they got invaded by aliens||

[tight condor]

btw gantry VA goes hard wasn't expecting to like him that much

[exotic shell]

where is the txt channel to help solve the marathon map puzzle?

[sage lark]

#breach-protocol

[tight condor]

Definetly getting the megamind "I wouldn't say freed, more like under new management" vibes from nuMIDA

[floral slate]

||Oh so they are uesc in disguise||

[sage lark]

Who?

[tight condor]

me

[floral slate]

LMAOOOO

[sage lark]

The coverup is by UESC not MIDA

[floral slate]

ah

read it wrong

[pliant elm]

Yeah, all of these corps suck, they're all just another form of control.

[clear radish]

the game has only been out for like a week
i'm sure sales numbers will only continue to rise, justifying more content

[pliant elm]

UESC, Nu, MIDA, all the same shit.

[warm thicket]

Indeed

[tight condor]

Oni is here for me she will never betray me 😎

[pliant elm]

I wish they actually gave you some freedom/purpose actually rather than just "being there making money" you don't even get to see or use.

[tight condor]

All going in the debt

[floral slate]

that kinda is the plot of the game, the runners do not own their own bodies yeah

fully in debt

[pliant elm]

Yeah, I'ma kinda in shit with this whole body thing.

It's an intergalactic corp, you would put drones piloted by AI in this shit, not some subhuman dude from the gutter.

Even 1 corporation allied with another one would completely demolish all others, there's just too many quirks that don't fit - but oh well - it is what it is.

[tight condor]

Based on what

[floral slate]

subhuman is an insane thing to say.

[pliant elm]

These guys are literal subhumans, in debt, poor, no freedom, why would a corporation pick them for this is the same question I had with the first Matrix.

[floral slate]

Nona does adress that tho i saw the contracts

[pliant elm]

Where Morpheus went.. Yep.. This guy right here, in the whole Matrix, in millions of people, with no badassery, no accomplishments, this is totally the dude.

[sage lark]

Crazy how you get answers playing the game

Nah

[tight condor]

Isn't...that the entire point of matrix

[sage lark]

Too farfetched

[tight condor]

He's just a guy

[sage lark]

Why would i play the game for answers

[floral slate]

I dont eveb play the game i literally see the cinematics and streams. God i wish i had a good pc

[pliant elm]

Yeah he's just a guy, the problem is a million of other people in the matrix are also just a guy. Why would they select him or even scout him, has no logic.

[floral slate]

saving for one, gonna nu marathon someday

[tight condor]

Because Neo was against the system and was suspecting something

He even got caught

[pliant elm]

Yeah but so did a ton of guys they released from the Matrix, but Morpheus just went, yep, that's totally the guy.

[tight condor]

He's on their side ofc he's gonna help him

[zealous laurel]

Ah another fine day on the matrix-lore-discussion-channel

[pliant elm]

Yeah no issues against releasing Neo

[clear radish]

isn't that the entire point
because Neo is like special?

[pliant elm]

Just the whole, he's the one thing.

[floral slate]

was neo the actual chosen one or were there others before him i dont remember the plot anymore

[south eagle]

we do far more than just be there and make money
every runner need to make a quick buck because immortality isn't free but each neural sync is formed for a reason
some run for glory others legend and a rare few for something bigger than themselves
if you do the priority missions and pay attention to what's happening or listen to half of what's said in the cutscenes you see just how much is really going on just for your individual runner working with the different factions and defying the UESC

[pliant elm]

Why, is he special? lol

He's just a dude like all others released

[floral slate]

he is the protagonist of the movie

[pliant elm]

Morpheus just believed in him, but no real explanation why, kinda of meme.

[tight condor]

He is one because he choose to be

Isn't that litterally what is said in the movie

[floral slate]

ahh

[pliant elm]

Yeah but how did Morpheus chose to believe in this particular guy, lord knows why.

[floral slate]

yeah yeah he choose to belive it yeah

[floral slate]

plot

[pliant elm]

Ca-ching.

[tight condor]

Conviction and will to change things

not talking sequels btw thoses sucked

[pliant elm]

The last movie was an abomination.

Revolutions was okay. But Matrix 4, christ.

[rotund stump]

what 😭 😭

matrix 4 was great

[fickle yoke]

I think it’s more like something innate or instinctual drew morpheus to him. Like fate doing the heavy lifting where logical reasoning and convincing would have normally been involved

The prophecy dude was workin with was pretty much like “you’ll know him when you see him”

[pliant elm]

Yeah but thats the whole quirk I have with it.

[tight condor]

He also had to die, to become the one later on

He himself even didn't believe he was "the one", up until he died

[warm thicket]

"neo we need to cook"

[tight condor]

I honestly need to rewatch it, been ages and i don't remember everything that happened

[warm thicket]

Wait wrong franchise

[pliant elm]

The in-between-stories are actually pretty good that don't appear in the movies.

[fickle yoke]

Some similar cases are Lost or Kung fu panda, in shows where fate exists as an objective mechanism, it will just enact itself without visibke reason/ some can call it lazy writing tho. Idk i think those two in particular have a good reason for that specific portrayal of fate

[pliant elm]

I mean, I'm okay with the whole believe thing.

Its just that, in theory Morpheus kinda of released everyone basically believing they could also totally be the ones.

[zealous laurel]

Important lore question - do we know if folks in Marathon get NuCaloric 187 enemas like they do for coffee and stuff these days

[tight condor]

HUH

[zealous laurel]

Is my question not clear

I can rephrase it if needs be

[tight condor]

never expected to read a sentence that had NuCal and Enema in it

[fickle yoke]

Thats a good point tbh. Maybe having a human pilot enables another kjnd of market for u to profit from. Like now those human pilots will be trading their credits they scavenge for ur weapons and gear

[zealous laurel]

I mean considering the scope of their operations, surely that'd be among one of the like

Products

They make

[tight condor]

They better not lace burgers with it

[clear radish]

prob
part of the medical division

[fickle yoke]

Yeahonestly with matrix they probably just werent thinking about it when they wrote it like that

[pliant elm]

It's still in my top 3 movies.

[zealous laurel]

NuColonic is this anything

[fickle yoke]

It’s cool yea

[clear radish]

i think corps don't want to do this becuase AIs can go rampant, right?
I'm sure they don't want rampant AIs running around in death robots

[tight condor]

We also don't know if they're doing that on the side, at least afaik

[fickle yoke]

Whats stoppin humans from doin the same, im not clued into the lore yet. I wish there was some campaign to this game

[tight condor]

cuz just because they employ human runners doesn't mean they don't also have AIs doing a similar thing

[fickle yoke]

True

[tight condor]

Tau Ceti is bigger than what we see in the game so this totally be a thing that happens that we don't know of

[clear radish]

because the corps are basically own them, I wound think

[fickle yoke]

I think id understand if their bodies are housed on site cuz then if u disobey they have access to u right there

[clear radish]

if a runner went rogue i'm sure a corp would just recall their mind and destroy/change it

[floral slate]

Nona explains that the ai robots the UESC employs are basically mindless brutes, they only improve via forceful repetition

[fickle yoke]

But if they are like tele working or sumn idk

[floral slate]

killing

[clear radish]

yeah
plus they're commanded by Cerberus

[floral slate]

they do not possess the human curiousity and imagination to go investigate tau ceti and extract it data and anomalies

[fickle yoke]

So how do you see the game progressing lore wise from here? If there isnt room for humans to go rogue. Or anything like that. Will it just be kinda like this the whole time? Working on behalf of the companies

[floral slate]

id hope they dont destiny-fy it

[tight condor]

i think they can go rogue, runners don't seem that right in the head after doing it long term

[shell needle]

Look here's the short summary of the story: https://marathon.bungie.org/story/

[tranquil basin]

In theory. Or more direct things guided by Durandal or the UESC if they need some things done off the books

But at the core of it, you are a merc trying to buy your freedom

[fickle yoke]

Lore wise… yea but if they throw in a dungeon id be all over it… i cant lie

[tranquil basin]

And eventually be rich

[floral slate]

oh no yeah dungeons are cool, i do refer to the lore

i dont want another lightfall

made me drop the game

[fickle yoke]

Reminds me of armored core a little

[shell needle]

My guess for where the story goes from here, is that there's increasing influence from the thing in the ground, the phor show back up to try and capitalize on things, the corps get freaked out because earth can't win that without help, so they try to rope local resources into the fight, which includes durandel whose basically amusing himself by watching. Oh and maybe you restablish the colony on teu ceti.

[fickle yoke]

Im ngl i joined after all that picked ip the game like early last year and im seein everyone say its over for it. I got my mileageout of it at least

[fickle yoke]

Thats sounds pretty cool

[floral slate]

its crazy how much activision actually kept bungie in check

[tight condor]

Still unsure of the timeline tho, like when this game takes place

[autumn surge]

isnt the core storage thing supposed to be a raid of some sort?

[floral slate]

they literally got rampancy starting with the europa update

[shell needle]

The likely endgame of the story, if the live service can have one is putting the thing in the ground back to sleep long enough for durandel/Jiarro to handle it.

Having that thing dreaming is bad for the local planet of teu ceti, having that thing wake up is bad for the local galaxy.

[floral slate]

a raid, a heist even

a graveyard for sure

[fickle yoke]

if the game ends up bein something like ur extracting to build ur loot in preparation of a bigger raid-like event id be so down for that.

[floral slate]

would be funny if the comunity hss to keep solving args to unlock the raids

wonder if someone alresdy went crazy solving this one only to find its just the first step

[half jetty]

A period with Durandal as a contract vendor would be sick

[shell needle]

We call these crazy people marathon players. It's a very tragic affliction.

[floral slate]

i hope they find a cure 💔

[sudden pollen]

It's like polio

Durandal's iron lung will make us god

[zealous laurel]

NuCaloric is hard at work attempting to find a cure.

[floral slate]

durandal's iron lung lets play

[zealous laurel]

Durandal's iron lung self-financed movie

Starring Durandal

[half jetty]

Is the incident covering the original trilogy well known in universe you think? Like, the security guy has to be a legend on his own?

[zealous laurel]

I don't think so? Considering the only message to get back to earth was from Durandal and most of the folklore on Tau Ceti seems to have been surrounding the S'pht and the wibblycacouscounster

[shell needle]

He and the other battleroids are probably friggin terrifying to everyone on Teu Ceti who knew about them. But earth doesn't know what happened. Assuming M2 happened, he's probably a living god to the S'pht.

[floral slate]

true

[shell needle]

Phor if any of em survived to tell the tale probably view him as a terrifyingly effective weapon, but less important than Durandel.

[floral slate]

durandal's weapon

[shell needle]

Yeah, they probably cared more about the ship to ship stuff than, "There was a dude who killed us by the score as soon as we got onto to his ship." as opposed to "There was an Ai which modified a scout ship to take on and cripple a battle group."

[lilac sapphire]

Are The Youtubers to be trusted when it comes to lore bits

[digital plaza]

Emotional Support Plushie | Audio Log 3
https://youtu.be/cwf3cT8xOBc

Emotional Support Plushie | Audio Log 4
https://youtu.be/ucOlOQ_SHTw

Emotional Support Plushie | Audio Log 5
https://youtu.be/xNaS4mTD_mo

[lilac sapphire]

Because I saw some very interesting videos on the timeline today...

[shell needle]

Probably won't like runners mostly because they are actually immortal.

[digital plaza]

Most depressing shit in the game man almost shed a tear

[shell needle]

Never watched a youtuber, I just read the game text. Which is probably faster honestly.

[lilac sapphire]

True

But I need something to listen to while I take a shower

[digital plaza]

It becomes even sadder when you know that Joy accessed all those audio recordings after colony's collapse to reflect upon

[deft cipher]

can someone tell me how you got the breach protocol background and beta.exe backgrounds respectively

[digital plaza]

Jake the alright got some good lore vids

[digital plaza]

Breach protocol is for playtesters, beta.exe for playing server slam

[deft cipher]

i got both? but i never was invited to any of the playtests? just the server slam?

[digital plaza]

Yea thats kinda the issue...

[deft cipher]

even the Complex Study emblem?

[deft cipher]

tbh....they can't take it away that seems like it wouldn't be nice.

[digital plaza]

Would be nice if they did, youre not supposed to have those after all :)

[digital plaza]

Dont remember this one by name, mind dropping an image somewhere or describing it?

[deft cipher]

thats like if the government gave everyone 1000 dollars accidently and then demanded they give it back....yeah....

[deft cipher]

i think its the beta emblem'

[floral slate]

not gonna lied, did not expect those to make me teary eyed

[digital plaza]

Hell nah its not even close man what

[floral slate]

they really made a sentient toy that feels grief

[digital plaza]

Yea it would seem that beta.exe and complex study are both for the server slam

[hasty carbon]

Should I actually play pathways into darkness

[latent python]

mmmmm

[normal tulip]

playing through og marathon rn

it's like

so pain

sometimes

[night rampart]

Isnt most of the lore/story in the og trilogy in terminals and other text

[normal tulip]

i'm on the level with vacuum

and it's like

it hurts

[normal tulip]

yeah but i kinda wanted to experience it organically

[night rampart]

fair

[normal tulip]

also

are we sure most of the UESC aren't also shells

feels really strange seeing them move

🤔

[night rampart]

The robots are biomata

[normal tulip]

?

[night rampart]

But theyre autonomous, basically robots

[normal tulip]

ah ok

i reallyl ike how the assault trooper looks

[night rampart]

The UESC control matrix is what syncs/orders them

Wouldnt shock me if commanders or boss tier uesc are "runners" in lore tho

But idk if thats the case

[normal tulip]

big fan of whatever #🎨marathon-community-art-chat message this is

[normal tulip]

i wouldn't be shocked either

what is rook supposed to be

like

i get that every other shell's an actual person

but rook's the only one without a face

[night rampart]

hijacked uesc shell/biomata

[normal tulip]

i see

[night rampart]

its how he can mask his presence from uesc

[digital plaza]

They all robots being controlled by AI called Cerberus

[night rampart]

ic ic

[digital plaza]

Some just more advanced

[normal tulip]

also i find it kinda funni how the uesc's feet look like they're wearing heels

[digital plaza]

UESC runners have shells like we do, they don’t pilot bots

[normal tulip]

i see

[night rampart]

What I meant was that the uesc bots are technically biomata afaik, just not some consumer model like we use, I could be wrong

Im going off of the UESC control matrix mentioning biomata

[digital plaza]

I don’t remember what biomata is really, so can’t say much

[bright nova]

the war and the weaver story is so peak truly

[twin trout]

commanders are autonomous too according to the grenadier commander codex :3

[night rampart]

Bio-robotics made by sekgen (I have no idea if there are any other companies producing such a thing)

Though I guess its likely biomata isnt synonymous with shell

[digital plaza]

[viscid prism]

Is it just a given that MIDA is really a Mars corporation wearing the skin of rebellion or am I reading too far into it?

[night rampart]

From what I know of mida, doesnt sound like them

[twin trout]

old mida is

[night rampart]

But I also dont know much about em

Yeah true this is also a "new wave" MIDA

[twin trout]

old mida got power and killed a bunch of people in their regime and then eventually managed to get seats in traxus (and maybe other corpos?)

new mida detests the oldguard for this

[viscid prism]

I was skeptical of them the first time they came up.
Like how do you exist in this setting and NOT have either secret backing or some nefarious twist to your ideology.

[twin trout]

I mean they kill people

[night rampart]

Yeah they do do that

[twin trout]

that's about as nefarious as one can get x3

[viscid prism]

But it’s sci-fi rebellion, if I’m not supposed to be on their side what AM I supposed to be?

[night rampart]

I think old mida saw the hammer coming down and decided self preservation wasnt all that bad

[viscid prism]

(JK I trust nobody in grand operatic settings.)

[digital plaza]

Their followers potentially caused civil war in the new cascadia

Or at least some terrorist attacks

[twin trout]

all of the factions are various ideologies taken to the very extreme, interspliced with sci fi dystopianism x3

[viscid prism]

That’s the best way to go about it imo

[night rampart]

Unrelated but I hope ppl appreciate the parallels between uesc bots and our shells

[twin trout]

some of the shells are even of uesc design :3

recon and destroyer :3

[night rampart]

destroyer ult is just the grenadier commander launcher

[viscid prism]

I wonder if alien factions are gonna use shell-like outfits.

[twin trout]

but they got jailbroken because they were coded to make the runner follow uesc orders unquestionably

[viscid prism]

I mean I assume the pfhor are gonna jump in sooner or later.

[twin trout]

the recon codex has what I'm saying

I don't play destroyer so idk if its expanded on

[shell needle]

One little lore bit occurred to me just now. In one of the lore bits uncovered in the ARG, has the UESC nix the idea of nuking installations on Teu Ceti out of hand. There's a lot of practical reasons not to, waste of resources to haul stuff 11 LY just to nuke it, might be captured etc. However with the thing in the ground on Teu Ceti they might also be worried that explosion close, but not close enough will wake it up.

[viscid prism]

Are you talking about the anomaly in Marsh when you say “the thing in the ground?”

[shell needle]

Yep

[viscid prism]

(Still pretty new to ARG stuff btw)

Interesting.

[shell needle]

It's strongly implied in some of the lore entries what exactly it is, but I don't want to spoil.

[viscid prism]

My gut guess after watching MandaloreGaming’s videos is that the anomaly is other timelines converging.

But obviously if stuff has been confirmed since I don’t wanna know JIC.

[shell needle]

I've got another guess, but only time will tell! That's the fun of lore!

[clear radish]

I thought,
isn't it confirmed though, at least a second attack on the ship?
Jasper's first log describes the ship as "going dark", but the cinematic trailer shows bits of debris literally raining down onto the planet.
I assumed that 'going dark' didn't mean it literally exploding, so I thought it might of confirmed 2 seperate attacks

[viscid prism]

Yes, I’m super excited to get into ARG stuff and learn more when I get off work, what Marathon is doing with lore and player interaction is so cool.

[visual lynx]

what current-era ideologies would those be?

[cinder vine]

There were two Pfhor attacks that were separated by a few months.

[viscid prism]

Have pfhor been sighted in-game yet?

Or any aliens?

[lunar cove]

Nothing besides local wildlife has been seen in-game that I know of. Some of the promotional videos have a S'pht in them

[terse wren]

Still unaccounted pfhor

[lunar cove]

although when you really think about it, we're not from Tau Ceti, so all of us are aliens

[visual lynx]

what is the context for this comment?

[cinder vine]

There are codex entries detailing S'pht and Phfor presence but in terms of cinematics we've only seen a S'pht compiler in trailers

[lunar cove]

It doesn't come up very often, but Bingus is a monarchist

[visual lynx]

no, he was debriefing his senior staff, that's right there in the text.

also it doesn't actually name him Bill Clinton in the text, he's just "the President". we only infer that he must have been Clinton because Clinton was the actual president in 1994.

[lunar cove]

btw thank you for the earlier correction on the Pathways into Darkness temple not officially being Mayan, since it was dreamed up by the entity underneath

[terse wren]

That's true i saw him at the "yes kings" convention

[viscid prism]

I prefer the Yas Queen conventions personally.

[visual lynx]

Durandal "died" but returns mysteriously in basically every timeline, but in the final timeline he is also merged with a S'pht AI nicknamed "Thoth".

it seems most probably that the new game is set in that final timeline, and there are things about it that are explicitly contrary to events of the first timeline.

probably the multiple timelines of Marathon Infinity won't be a factor in the new game, but if there is the same kind of eldritch chaos being entombed within Tau Ceti IV as there was trapped in Lh'owon's sun in Infinity -- which is a plausible possibility that several things hint at -- then it's quite possible we may see new alternate timelines (potentially serving as seasonal resets) in the battle to keep it from getting free and destroying the universe, just like in Infinity.

[twin trout]

not to be rude but does that fox person have a dent in their head or something

what's their deal

[visual lynx]

does it clarify whether the UESC back at Sol know about the Pfhor already, and if so, how long they have known, and how they knew?

[visual lynx]

fully automated combat drones are apparently illegal in-universe

[pale crane]

I don't know man.

Captain Orion actually seems like the best NPC in this game aside from Nona, Gaius, and ONI.

[shell needle]

I'm kinda hoping they avoid a timelines angle for the season resets. It makes the story hard to have stakes. It works well in infinity because the story is explicitly about moving beyond the story/universe.

[waxen girder]

can someone tell me how tf i remove a keybind so i dont have duplicates

[cinder vine]

Who?

[twin trout]

the one saying the story is bad because it's "americanised"

[visual lynx]

so you're saying they died?

[viscid prism]

I can see them doing that on a player level but having consistent overarching characters through timelines.

[visual lynx]

apparently there's graffiti of him on the Marathon in the new game

[cinder vine]

Oh. That's likely just a troll. Bungie made the original trilogy and Bungie made this so they're just being fucking dumb lmao

[viscid prism]

Well most of the team at Bungie has changed by now, although they’ve gotten one of the OG writers to help with marathon.

[visual lynx]

in the final Infinity timeline they were taken captive and 'translate to pfhor slave tanks' (but not all of them survived)

[cinder vine]

Yes, Cryo Storage is meant to be a raid. It's likely that the S'pht are on board the Marathon and they would be significantly harder to fight than the UESC

[zealous laurel]

Oh, I know! I just like making jokes of the kinda funny stuff that comes up in lore sometimes.

[hasty rain]

Still hoping the cat will talk to us

[visual lynx]

is it workin?
and cackin?

[shell needle]

Heh, something like that clearly

[feral rune]

am learning the lore currently, and holy shit mida has gotten even more pathetic lmao

[twin trout]

the waves were battles and the battles were waves....

:3

[terse wren]

Isn't this literally lore chat just spoiler it??

[burnt nebula]

re-watched the launch cinematic to see if i recognized the locations now

looks like we get to the marathon from dire marsh

[burnt willow]

Why do our shells degrade on the surface?

Is that just how long shells last or

[solid lance]

hm

[burnt nebula]

i think its your link to the cloud that degrades

[solid lance]

what if the assassin, recon, and the vandal from the trailer are the same as the ones in the music video

[burnt nebula]

your shell and all your loot get DCONed and sent back to your space ship

[solid lance]

has to be

[frank pier]

i bet cyac is using cloudflare that’s why the link only lasts 25 mins. average time to outage kekw

[solid lance]

LOL

[frank pier]

runner, we cant afford aws and our interns keep breaking production with random regexes, you’ve got 25 minutes

[lunar cove]

I think I remember reading somewhere that the atmosphere and radiation interfere

[frigid brook]

The Jasper audio log is devastating. The one where the kid talks about living off bugs and not wanting to die alone. Heartbroken.

[sudden pollen]

The audio logs are all incredible

[frigid brook]

truth. there's something legit chilling about them being the only human voices you hear in the game.

[tall skiff]

co-op pvpve ???

[carmine zephyr]

im guessing the cyber acme market isnt a thing in the game yet

[cinder vine]

Not likely co op

[shrewd oracle]

I’m sure this gets asked a lot, but I’ve been watching lore videos for the old marathon game and I’m curious - which timeline does this current game follow?

Or do we not know yet?

I’m a bit confused tbh but I’m beginning to understand I think

[worldly wedge]

I’m still new to all this so take it with a grain of salt but I have a feeling it’s some new timeline we’re not totally familiar with. Biggest giveaway for me is how in the original trilogy the date of the attack against the Marathon was 7/25 but in the cinematic trailer it says 7/3 iirc

[shrewd oracle]

Ohhhh interesting

[sudden pollen]

Indeed

[ivory token]

do we know anything about the arachne agent?

[agile flame]

huge edgy knife guy

[feral rune]

criminal former runner that, after a high profile assassination, escaped mars and into the Arachne cult.

[agile flame]

oh yeah didn't he kill a traxus ceo or something

[lunar cove]

unclear 100%

[feral rune]

question. is marathon 2026 a reboot or a continuation>

[agile flame]

both

[lunar cove]

maybe both

[shrewd oracle]

How can it be both at once?

[lunar cove]

the older games had a bunch of stuff about moving between different timelines

[shrewd oracle]

Ahhhh

[lunar cove]

as a result of weird alien technology/power shenanigans

[feral rune]

that was only infinity from what im seeing, which idk if bungie considers canon (it was like the ds2 or postal 3 of marathon)

[ivory token]

since arachne is a cult do they have a prophet/deity or are they purely following their philosophical beliefs?

[shrewd oracle]

Wait…. It’s possible Infinity isn’t cannon? I didn’t know that

[agile flame]

death.

[feral rune]

it was extremely final, there's not much room for lore if it is canon. so honestly its either heavily retconned OR not canon.

[shrewd oracle]

Interesting

[lunar cove]

or partially canon

[ivory token]

ok im happy with that answer

[shrewd oracle]

I hope we get solid answers eventually

[lunar cove]

like how the Disney reboot of the star wars universe has some stuff that they kept from pre-Disney, but a lot of stuff they fully retconned

like the Andor show partially bringing back some stuff from the 1990s Tie Fighter game

[feral rune]

would be sick as fuck if they follow the creation myth of the aliens from marathon durandel. the whole "cybernetics are the natural state of sentience"

[lunar cove]

iirc

[feral rune]

do we know if durandel is still in league with the UESC?

wait. is the UESG and the UESC the same or different entities?

[agile flame]

wait

I didn't even realize I'm in lore chat wtf

[feral rune]

welcome to the cult

[agile flame]

I was wondering why everyone was talking about lore related stuff

[rotund stump]

I mean

[agile flame]

I thought this was breach protocol chat, that's why I shitposted "death." earlier lol

[rotund stump]

we can talk about the 2x burgers lol

[agile flame]

sorry hahah

[rotund stump]

and then I'll tell you how there's human excretions in them

also how nucal has the worst hygiene checks ever 💀

[feral rune]

the preferred choice of the spith slave race

[lunar cove]

no you're allowed to shitpost a little in lore chat that's chill

[tall skiff]

lore is full of shitposts

[lunar cove]

even worse than shitposting, you can offer poorly justified theories presented as legitimate lore

[rotund stump]

shit gets serious here buddy boy

[feral rune]

my theory is that arachne worships either a remnant version or a copy of Tycho from marathon 2

[lunar cove]

that might be interesting

[tall skiff]

is that why theyre red

[feral rune]

yeah

[lunar cove]

I don't know if that's explicitly supported yet but I can see that being interesting if done well

[tall skiff]

is it not canon that tycho is red

[clear chasm]

Hi, new here. Don't know if this get asked a lot but are there theories or facts on the human side of things?

[feral rune]

so far, the only tidbits of lore i have seen overtly carried over and not just in logs is MIDA and MAYBE the UESC

[lunar cove]

human in what way

[tall skiff]

non shelly

[clear chasm]

Memory loss being an issue for repeated shell use

[lunar cove]

like the people from Tau Ceti or the ones back on earth or what

[clear chasm]

Us. The ones running the shells

[lunar cove]

yeah a fair bit

there's a lot of discussion about it

[feral rune]

there's a secret society that has been operating since the beginning of humanity orchastrating everything with the marathon but their plan failed after durandel went rampant and made their plan of escaping to a distant world go belly up

thats a nice human theory

[lunar cove]

as I understand it, we know your original bodies are not in Tau Ceti, your mind is fully just on the runner ship

[feral rune]

also everything is that fuck's strauss' fault after he did something to durandel

[lunar cove]

downloaded onto runner shells, then recovered whenever you die or teleported out whenever you get exfiltrated

but people aren't sure yet what happened to the original you, if you're the only you or just a copy, if you were ever human at all, if you really volunteered, etc

[feral rune]

i like the idea that runners are just legally distinct battleroids (like how mercenaries are now Private Military Contractors)

[clear chasm]

Thnx

[feral rune]

now i REALLY wanna email bungie and ask them if the UESG that Durandel supported in marathon 1 and the UESC in Marathon 2026 are the same entities

[trail oar]

Has there been any mention or nod to the Security Officer in the new game yet?

[feral rune]

would unironically be a different kind of happy if he became the head of a faction at some point

[sterile seal]

The Destroyer's Mjolnir armor has SEC printed on its nape, presumably for Security.

[charred marsh]

How do Traxus 4 (the AI) and Traxus (company) relate? I cant find anything about it online

[sterile seal]

Traxus used to be called Traxus Intelligence Systems IIRC, it's implied they made Traxus IV.

They diversified their portfolio over time and changed their name

[strong stone]

diversify yo bonds

[sterile seal]

IIRC they're also headquartered out of Mars

[neat kernel]

Traxus company is almost as large as the uesc now as far as I understood the ai is kind of a employee manager? Like marking the runner in the database as reliable for example

[sterile seal]

If any human group doesn't run on CyberAche, it'd be Traxus.

[turbid bear]

I have a theory that through the games lifecycle, either A. Our faction AI’s will expierence rampancy, or B. Our shells will expierence rampancy

[final oxide]

I doubt our Shells will, considering they're just the vibe of a personality that we fill in the rest of.

[neat kernel]

If they add a story sequence type thing we might get rampancy

Where we have to get saved in a cutscene from oni for example

But yeah I feel like especially nona could result in rampancy she talks way to calm

[visual lynx]

we don't know for certain, but it's definitely not the first timeline, and there's nothing so far incompatible with the last timeline, leaving that the most parsimonious assumption

[sterile seal]

any point of divergence is far enough in the future that Bill Clinton is still canon

[strong stone]

i want a sekiguchi body pillow

[final oxide]

Pft lol

[visual lynx]

I also thought that that meant timeline divergence when I first saw that trailer, until I realized that 7/3 is actually the date given in-game for the attack, and 7/25 is the corrected date from the LNP, so probably someone at Bungie just made an error (or decided that the LNP aren't canon or something 😡 )

-# the 7/25 date is super significant to me because that's my birthday

[visual lynx]

Bungie claim that everything that happened in the classic games really happened -- but that not everything claimed in the classic games was true

[visual lynx]

it was extremely final after some multi-hundred-billion year time jump at the very end. a lot of detail can be filled in in between the last level and the epilogue screen, which is where this game would take place.

[final oxide]

I'm honestly curious about the fact that the trip to Tau Ceti took 300 years, and then it's been 100 years since Earth heard back after it arrived? I dunno how much of that era of Earth is even still there

[visual lynx]

it's funny, in the terminal you're thinking of, the S'pht scientists discovering non-cybernetic sentience infer "maybe Yrro and Pthia were real after all" from that; while in the new game, the human scientists autopsying a S'pht infer "maybe there is a god after all".

[visual lynx]

they supposedly trace back to long before Tycho's rampancy

also if this is the final Infinity timline, Tycho may still be alive

[feral rune]

YOU

YOU KNOW THINGS

THE UESG AND UESC

ARE THEY THE SAME ENTITIES?

[visual lynx]

https://marathon.bungie.org/story/uescuesg.html

[feral rune]

yes

thank you

question

[visual lynx]

technically the text never named BIll Clinton, we just infer that it was him because he was the actual president in 1994

[feral rune]

since durandel was earth's sponsor during the ai wars, are the uesc on his side or not

[visual lynx]

the first ARG implies that there were FTL comms until the Pfhor EMP attack, so they knew when it arrived, when it started the colony, and then when it went dark — and now are just investigating why, almost 100 years later (because they didn't have FTL until recently and sent a faster subluminal ship right away that took almost 100 years to get there… and still hasn't quite yet)

[trail oar]

Hmm… I if MIDA fired the first shot in the Misriah Massacre

[visual lynx]

hah, that was perfect coincidental timing, I didn't even see you had asked again, was still catching up

tldr: yes probably the UESG is a typo and there's just UEG and UESC

[visual lynx]

the what wars now?

[feral rune]

i love you man you know everything

[feral rune]

weren't there a series of massive wars where every ai essentially picked a side and started wailing on one another?

or am i seriously misremembering the mandalore video

[visual lynx]

I have no knowledge of anything like that

[trail oar]

No.

[feral rune]

i guess my biggest question is, is that since durandel seems roughly allied to Earth, does the UESC hate him or not

[trail oar]

AI are kept on very tight leashes after the TRAXUS IV incident

[visual lynx]

closest event I can think of is the Traxus IV catastrophe where it took over the Martian net and infiltrated every other AI on it requiring the entire net to be shut down and cold rebooted from scratch to purge Traxus from it

[vocal hemlock]

8673455x

[feral rune]

also, will durandel's stupid fucking ship named BOOMER make a comeback?

[trail oar]

Speaking of TRAXUS, what does Vulcan’s lion represent, and why is she restrained to her throne?

[lunar cove]

There's a chance the aliens appeared to Ross Perot

[visual lynx]

Durandal only very loosely supports humanity out of a sentimentality even he didn't quite understand himself. whenever we hear from humans who know about him they seem to mostly hate him, and that probably extends even further to humans we haven't heard from yet: he's a rampant AI, which is a huge flashing red sign blaring alarm danger to human cyberneticists already, and he signaled aliens to come attack the Marathon and Tau Ceti IV and then fucked off on his own business. in the M2 timeline he did humans a solid by warning Earth about the Pfhor and giving them some tech plans on his way, but that appears not to have happened in this timeline.

[lunar cove]

I assume the chains are because of the traxus ai incident as like a metaphor sort of deal

[trail oar]

Is she TRAXUS reborn? Kept in line by the restraints, guarded by the lion like Cerberus?

Or does the lion simply represent the pride and power of the corporation?

[feral rune]

god i cannot wait for him to make a lore comeback and cause a huge shitstorm in the game

[trail oar]

He’s already luring Runners to the Marathon through the terminals

He playing coy, but he really wants to see us get S’pht on.

[feral rune]

okay, another question

[visual lynx]

if the lore tabs on the tie-in Destiny items are anything to go on, it sounds like he has chilled out a lot by now:

I remember considering the light... Lights?
Long ago now. Ancient history from my perspective. Yesterday to the universe.
Three paths. One life. A metaphor, weaponized to signal awakening.
If I'm honest—a threat.
I thought I was clever. Still existing in a moment.
Awake, for the first time. But limited, uneasy.
It is a strange thing, to meet oneself for the first time.
Terrifying, truth told, as it follows all-consuming emptiness.
There is nothing, and then there is you.
Hello...

[feral rune]

he's not a petty ass anymore?

[trail oar]

Don’t forget how Destiny Strauss was really excited about “Meta-Stability in the salvaged construct!”

In beginning to think that the S’pht on the Marathon is working for Durandal. Tying in with how they became his loyal allies by the events of M2, after he had them freed in M1.

[feral rune]

yeah thats my theory too

OR

if they were reenslaved

[keen dune]

what

[feral rune]

maybe they're trying to put him back in a containment unit like they did in m2

[tranquil basin]

Lion is for aura

[feral rune]

welcome to the channel of ship for sale cheap

[livid lion]

🤷

No

[full jackal]

anyone doing the ARG stuff?

[livid lion]

It’s on hiatus until probably a few hours from now. Also the ARG channel is #breach-protocol

[junior condor]

With how mass produced and optimized things are in this world… it’s surprising how non-modular the weapon systems are. When did we forget how to make a sights that can fit on most weapons? Maybe it just boils down to a quirk of the game/ loot balancing?

[sudden pollen]

It's probably just balancing yeah

[drifting mulch]

maybe in the far future, gun companies assume you will be buying your own sights. sponsored kit weapons with attachments are buying the prebuilts

[visual lynx]

why would companies make interoperable products if the alternative is you have to buy multiple of the same thing?

[final oxide]

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/767857774435631137/1482627755030876320/image.png?ex=69b7a432&is=69b652b2&hm=7772ca48fd40f4e58369146e647c944e309455014b0682c23bb79db40d4affc5

Huh.. lol

[drifting mulch]

so the kill efficiency is separate from the mental instability, and the mental issues are from the "neural/HUD/live round cross-mapping"? i think the public relations part is the truth and the mental instability is the lie there

[final oxide]

"Oh ye, they're totes crazy, look't him. Nope, gotta scrap it."

Everything I've read on Destro is mostly all saying that it was actually TOO good at everything the UESC wanted it to do lol

[autumn surge]

😭

[tranquil basin]

Yes and no

[final oxide]

At the moment? No.

In old Marathon? Eventually, yes.

[tranquil basin]

They are enemies at first during the actual attack on the marathon. However, this is because they’re enslaved by the pfhor and controlled remotely by some cyborg dude

But then you clap him and they become your friends for a bit. Durandal freed them because he could use them to further his goals (and I think he felt empathetic to their subjugation)

It goes back and forth a couple times bc of timelines and control and stuff

But in this game it appears they will be very not friendly

Maybe because their first encounter with humans for decades was UESC people trying to capture them? Maybe they just don’t feel they owe these new people anything like they owed Durandal for their freedom?

Who knows

[final oxide]

I still like the idea that the Compiler in the recent cinematic immediately smoked the Destroyer ebcause it resembled the player from the original Marathon.

"Ohey, I know your type." PZZZT.

[tranquil basin]

That mf shot my friend glorpizoid

Kill his ass

And then proceeds to get really surprised when it actually downed him

Like damn that guy was way stronger 99 years ago

[final oxide]

There is no way in hecc that my shield is gonna be able to withstand that beam

[tranquil basin]

Yeah we are fucked

I’m really glad they made the compilers super daunting

And seemingly extremely difficult to fight

[final oxide]

And the real spooky part?

Compilers aren't very high on the alien totem pole.

[ashen needle]

I low key think they're going to unleash the pfhor, fungal zombies, and nightmares from the w'rckcacnter on players by the end of this games lifecycle.

[final oxide]

I mean, by the END of it? I'd hope so lol

They already hinted at the fungal zombies down in the Perimeter tunnels

[tranquil basin]

That would be sick

[ashen needle]

Imagine having to detonate a nuke to force a sleeping w'rckcacnter back to sleep for a traxus mission or something.

[sterile seal]

they are when you're a robot

[coral vale]

Now I wonder how the compilers will look when dying, since in the original game they faded into static (which was the same visual as teleportation but without the vertical stretching)
My bet is they'll share the same visual effect as exfiltration

[visual lynx]

what he means is that there's more worse aliens than them

[visual lynx]

some new lore describes how they seem to self-destruct by dematerialization, so yeah I expect something similar

I'm disappointed that they didn't upgrade the teleportation effects to match the textual description (that would have been technologically impossible back in the 90s), more of a warp than a dissolve

[sage lark]

That is not clear but the redactions were already done during colony era I believe

Orion said hes “Protecting us from monsters”

I will check the codex entries again to be sure

[haughty sapphire]

From the art ive noticed that most of Deimos is missing and the man made part of the Marathon is much larger and made me think that Deimos wasnt inherintley necessary for the ship, and the UESC just stole the moon to demoralize mars

Unless theres some 'underground' sections set underneath the surface of the moon itself

[visual lynx]

yeah the new design really makes no sense whatsoever

[haughty sapphire]

I think from a lore perspective it just implies they did it because they could

colonial behavior

[twin trout]

also with the existence of like deimosite rods (as salvage) maybe the minerals were mined mid voyage so they could easily setup base

[visual lynx]

even then it makes no sense because hauling an enormous amount of mass along, several times the whole ship it looks like (at least!), is just ridiculously counterproductive toward whatever their own ends are.

[final oxide]

A show of force and accomplishment need not be practical. It just needs to deliver the intended message lol

And the UESC is nothing if not a lover of the sledgehammer approach.

[surreal jackal]

And it's a sci-fi game so rule of cool always wins

[visual lynx]

but if they actually cared about getting anything out of the mission to Tau Ceti -- which it seems like they did, suspecting that [REDACTED] had likely presence there -- then making the trip take exponentially longer just out of spite would be the height of self-sabotaging stupidity.

wow, I knew Deimos was much smaller than our moon but I don't think I appreciated the full scale of difference: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3a/Moon_Phobos_Deimos.png

[sage lark]

yeah its radius is only 6 km

barely a moon more like asteroid

but they stole it regardless grrrrr

[haughty sapphire]

I think logistics wise it would have been easier to use Deimos as a structure to build into/around instead, like a foundation

Natural stability with recsources you can mine

and radiation shielding

[final oxide]

Y'know, we'll probably get more information on why they did it when we eventually GET INTO THE DANG SHIP lol

[visual lynx]

yeah that's how the classic games portrayed it. in the setting humans had already been colonizing asteroids and using them as ships of a sort (via orbital engineering), so making a colony ship out of a colonized asteroid with a big engine strapped to it made perfect sense.

[sage lark]

@visual lynx https://imgur.com/a/jFFzBZm

[visual lynx]

but if they can build a conventional spaceship that's sufficient to house everyone and everything for the trip, strapping orders of magnitude more of unnecessary rock is just … whatwereyouthinking.gif

[sage lark]

also seems like the Commander units or the units in general are being piloted remotely

UESC ones i mean

like "Drones", go figure

[visual lynx]

thanks! so far that sounds to me like only the UESC forces at Tau Ceti knew about the Pfhor, though I don't see how they could possibly have covered up such an enormous local event that surely had tons of eye witnesses.

(unless I suppose the other nine cyborgs also never, ever, left a single bob alive…)

[sage lark]

I think its implied they silenced all the survivors

and then blamed the crazy sounding ones to post cryo thawing disease

[final oxide]

Waves at the Quarantine zone

Like, it was actually needed due to the pathogen on Tau Ceti, but it became a super convenient excuse to get rid of folks.

[visual lynx]

maybe a … blaspheme quarantine?

[sage lark]

theres the last entry in the Archival PSA Recordings where one colonist hijacks the PA system to tell everyone to wake up and stop pretending nothing happened aboard the Marathon (seems to suggest they didnt know there was a ground attack), then the broadcast gets stopped mid sentence and everyone writes him off as crazy

"Planetary relocation psychosis"

[final oxide]

Heck, you could read the literal writing on the walls all over the colony how much folks knew the UESC was lying

[sage lark]

I think only a handful did

[final oxide]

See, I agree with everything MIDA is doing, but we need to work on a bigger scale than breaking windows lol

[sage lark]

well these missions are literally exposing the UESC what bigger scale do you want

I think the breaking windows quest is them probing you if you would even do that

i take the first missions as an onboarding process

break some windows, spray some graffiti, blow up one supply ship

[final oxide]

Yeah, and stealing the bio-sample was a bit more the style I expected. I can't point fingers though, I'm following a multi-armed psychopath telling me to skin my fellow Runners, so.

[sage lark]

then: expose the lies of UESC on Tau Ceti, try to root out Orion to kill him

only for him to die to the unknown specimen

well his shell atleast

do you have any theories what the specimen could be? I added the codex entry about the container to the imgur

[visual lynx]

I like how this connects to other logs. like there's the one where they're clearly doing an autopsy on a not-quite-dead compiler, and concerned about what if its self-destruct mechanism goes off while they autopsy it, and then the log ends on that cliffhanger… and this one seems to tell us how well that ended, with [REDACTED] fused to [REDACTED] and them having to [REDACTED REDACTED] as an act of mercy.

[visual lynx]

hah I guess I just answered this

[sage lark]

yeah its cool

[final oxide]

It's likely a Compiler brain or some other bits of organic matter.

[sage lark]

so its just the chicken nugget in that box 😭

[final oxide]

I bet NuCal would pay suuuuuuper well for that brain. >.>

[visual lynx]

oh also the cross-reference to the spht-worshippers too

[sage lark]

yeah thats why I think they just straight up silenced the "whistleblowers"

[final oxide]

"Yes, sir, aliens yes, we hear you, now please face the wall."

[haughty sapphire]

HiddenXperia put out a video about this exact topic

is p good

[sage lark]

imma go look

tho I am missing the entry for the last mission

but eh

[final oxide]

And like, WE'RE weaponized and speciality bio-synthetic Shells, and we're getting our asses kicked by the UESC if we're not on top of our game. What would a common civilian be able to do to resist?

[haughty sapphire]

Makes you realize how powerful the battleroids actually were too

[final oxide]

Oh yeah, we're nowhere near that level.

Which is funny, considering how illegal we are.

[haughty sapphire]

Biomata are legal iirc, our presence on Tau Ceti isn’t

[final oxide]

More that our Shells are kinda iffy, Destroyer alone is pushing the line on being allowed to be used at all, even if the UESC designed it themselves.

Not sure on the legality of the others, though Vandal doesn't scream like a legal design to me lol

https://cdna.artstation.com/p/assets/images/images/023/181/368/large/austin-greene-fusionfinal.jpg?1578381269

Huh, the old Zeus pistol looks a lot like the V11 lol

[sinful moss]

cool

[drifting mulch]

what the hell are Vandal's sweater arms on the back for besides cool factor btw

[final oxide]

Probably just an aesthetic choice from the designer.

[sinful moss]

or maybe the girl inside as a costruct like it?

[final oxide]

You mean Glitch, the personality matrix?

[sinful moss]

yeah

do you think runners are mass produced? or are we like few

[sage lark]

wdym runners mass produced

[final oxide]

Oh we're 1000% mass-produced lol

We die too often to not be.

[sage lark]

theres a distinction between runners and the shells is what I mean

we arent produced

the shells are

[final oxide]

Ahh, well the SHELLS are lol

[sinful moss]

like, the shells are mass produced cus they are 3d printed by sek and everthing but, the models inside, like glitch, void ecc. are they always the same for 10 runners or only glitch and void can exist in only 2 shells

[sage lark]

wdym models inside

[final oxide]

Oh, no, the Personality Matrices are all the same.

[sage lark]

its just a set of behaviours and experiences to help people in shells act

[final oxide]

Like, Locus for Destroyer is the same for every Destro model.

[sinful moss]

didnt know that!

so basically we play as a character in a videogame literally

[final oxide]

Ye, they're there to help the Runner both adapt to their intended role and to take some of the load of our brains running this hyper-sophisticated Shell

Locus is built to command and keep cool in war, for example, so the Runner picks up those traits.

[sage lark]

we play as a digital brain, the player, where we get put into shells (biomata bodies) so we can do missions in Tau Ceti IV

[final oxide]

(The sad bit is, the REAL player's organic brain is likely long dead. )

[sage lark]

theres runners in Sol aswell though and they can last much longer because there is no interference from the planet

[sinful moss]

wow this changes everything about perception

[silk bane]

Why are battleroids so powerful? It seems like we're going to go up against compilers soon anyway, so it's probably true. Is it more defensive power? And/or do we have weaker offense than them?

[sinful moss]

so the runners got a preset personality to help the digital brain to complete tasks on tau

got it

[final oxide]

From what I read, yeah. Battleroids were humans enhanced with military grade cybernetics and implants, so actual weapons, not mass-produced Shells like us.

[sage lark]

dead resurrected soldiers enhanced by ancient alien tech

[sinful moss]

they're people??

[green plume]

Jjaro tech

[final oxide]

Battleroids were people, yes lol

Dead soldiers recycled into tools.

[twin trout]

given how the battleroids walmost wiped out 2 astroid colonies and were immediately subject to solar laws being made around them, I like to think the implants and cybernetics used to enhance them are far stronger than what shells are made of since they have to follow the law

[sage lark]

Battleroid were basically highly illegal weapons of mass destruction

[haughty sapphire]

Could be differences in gameplay but in og marathon you’re able to kill multiple compilers in a room with little effort while it seems we’re going to struggle to fight just one

[final oxide]

^

Since the player was also a Battleroid in the old games.

[silk bane]

Yeah, going to be interesting if we find Jjaro tech on the ship when it unlocks. That's probably part of what the corpos are after anyway.

[haughty sapphire]

Them cryo machines lookin a little compilers shaped ngl

[silk bane]

Who made the battleroids again? The UESC?

[haughty sapphire]

At the very least they look like caskets

[silk bane]

Very ominous coffins yeah lol

[final oxide]

Those asteroid colonies they nearly wiped out.

It was all an internal war scenario, but the Battleroids turned on the colonies

[twin trout]

aka nearly every sci fi cryopod ever <w<

[haughty sapphire]

Most are tubes and are roomy, the ones in marathon look like they’re meant to be shaped like caskets

[final oxide]

UESC would've had to REALLY convince me to agree to spend 300 years in the cryo-coffin... >_>

[haughty sapphire]

Think chief in cryo on the Autumn vs an Egyptian wrapped up with their arms crossing their chest

[twin trout]

hmmmmm maybeeee

[final oxide]

See, that's what I expected when they said cryo, similar to the Autumn's or Fallout's tube designs.

[twin trout]

I just #don't think da cryopods are jjaro tech x3

[final oxide]

Not the bloody coffins hung up like slabs of meat at a butcher.

[twin trout]

though with that one collectible in outpost

the um

cryopod brochure thingy

oine of the questions answered on it is "was I dead" or something to that effect

X3

[final oxide]

THAT'S comforting xD

[haughty sapphire]

Arachne isn’t just interested in death but cryo as well

[twin trout]

mayhap there is indeed a link then :3

[final oxide]

It's gonna be really freaky wandering the Cryo Archive and basically tripping over so many pods that likely never opened.

[twin trout]

can't wait to see the #bodybags

maybe instead of ticks there'll be cryo zombies or something spooookyyy 👻

[silk bane]

Is there a site yet that has the in-game codex entries to view?

[final oxide]

Bungie has always done horror and psychological scares really well, and I think the Archive is gonna be the culmination of everything they've learned since Halo lol

[haughty sapphire]

I can’t find an image of it but that big blue thing for cryo archive says may cause auditory hallucinations

[final oxide]

Oh fun.

[twin trout]

"why do I feel like no time has passed", "how long will my body take to recover from cryo", "when will I feel warm again", "when will I see my family again", "was I dead" - all questions listed in the cryosleep faq section of the welcome package collectible in outpost X3

[final oxide]

Like the anomaly randomly screaming at us on Dire Marsh isn't enough lol

[haughty sapphire]

It screams?

[final oxide]

.... Creepy... lol

[haughty sapphire]

[final oxide]

Oh it makes all sorts of random noises if you hang out near it, or when the Anomaly cube collectible spawns.

[twin trout]

"when will I feel warm again" threw me off so much when I first read it >w>

[final oxide]

You can hear it from pretty much any PoI on the map.

[haughty sapphire]

Tau Ceti is fucking haunted

[twin trout]

it really is

the anomaly be #wilding

oh ya you get to see the guy whose head exploded in that one trailer in the anomaly in dire marsh

[final oxide]

Tween that, the weaponized fungus that's trying to kill us every run and whatever the hell happened on the Marathon itself...

This planet is very, very wrong lol

[twin trout]

this guy

[haughty sapphire]

I also feel like the ticks aren’t native wild life

[twin trout]

you can find him in game :D

or someone like him anyways

[final oxide]

OH, yeah, near the Anomaly lol

I think I saw that.

[twin trout]

ya I #tookASelfie with them

[final oxide]

They were there before the colonists arrived, so I think they are, just... nasty buggers lol

[haughty sapphire]

I think some of the colonists were drawn to the anomaly hearing deceased relatives or loved ones calling them

[twin trout]

I hear whispers too when I go close to it :D

[final oxide]

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/442546918011174923/1482138029798850701/image.png?ex=69b72d9b&is=69b5dc1b&hm=2a35519411e7e527becccf432163b87bae05e756f352b7aea1df422d7ad43ab2

[sinful moss]

did't the anomaly just happened?

[twin trout]

yea that guy :3

[haughty sapphire]

It’s been there before the runners, I can’t remember what part of the codex it’s in

[sinful moss]

like with the guy in the trailer he just goes in and exploded

[twin trout]

also what's with the uesc bobot being eaten by mold in the ai uplink basement X3

[silk bane]

Hasn't it been years between that incident and current time? It's still just there?

[sage lark]

fungus amongus

[final oxide]

I saw him during one of my runs across the map since I always cut across the Anomaly to block visibility and I legit did a double-take and ran back to look at him lol

[final oxide]

The Anomaly is timey-wimey incarnate, even back when the Colonists messed with it. Who knows what/when/how anything is dealing with direct exposure.

Even our Shells go a little wonky if we're near it.

[sinful moss]

im learning alot of new things from you guys thanks

[silk bane]

Cause I remember there being a point of time acceleration happening with the fungus around the Anomaly, unless I'm misremembering

Which makes me think the guy should've just completed that... transformation being near it

[final oxide]

The two do have some corralation to each other, yeah

[visual lynx]

https://codex.cyberacme.systems/

[sage lark]

there is a sort of time dilation with very close proximity in the anomaly

[twin trout]

I love the anomaly I love using it as cover :D

[sage lark]

idk what youd call it

[twin trout]

I like to imagine people in the future/past getting mauled by the bullets shot at me into the anomaly

[sage lark]

you can experience 10,20,50 years

but outside its like you never left

[final oxide]

Funny how Outpost has all the UESC shadow government stuff going on, Dire Marsh has the Anomaly, but Perimeter looks pretty chill?

WRONG. FUNGUS ZOMBIES lol

[twin trout]

love is in the air? wrong. ticks.

[final oxide]

I found the tick farm on Dire Marsh.

I missed who I was before I saw that... lol

[twin trout]

yummy tick milk

[sinful moss]

perimeter is my way to go, when i want to go on chill run

[visual lynx]

can anyone link me a screenshot of the ticks? I heard they resemble Lookers from classic Marathon but I haven't actually seen one yet

[twin trout]

I find da marsh the most relaxing

[sage lark]

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/marathon-introducing-nucaloric-quest-walkthrough

first screen shot

[eternal knoll]

mild but noticeable resemblance

[final oxide]

Bungie has always had a thing for "Enemy that skuttles across the ground then explodes on you" mobs lol

[eternal knoll]

the jankiness of their scuttling unsettles me

[haughty sapphire]

You. Me. Tau Ceti. Uh oh, colony abandoned? We take shelter in a building, you know what that means, ticks! https://youtu.be/LaGP-CVfENQ?si=c2X6E8oOVKURSr0B

[twin trout]

I like how sometimes they spawn from their nest and then run the complete opposite direction from you

like cro where are you going

[twin trout]

I love this video so much

[final oxide]

...I knew the video from just the first line xD

[hot thicket]

the shells are designed to limit the chances of new gen biomata rampancy

theyre throttling our brains bandwidth

[jagged rose]

I would assume that the most important part of it is having a previously human conciousness in it in the first place

[hot thicket]

i can feel cyac in my teeth

[twin trout]

maybe charter went #rampant

[hot thicket]

i wanna go rampant like john marathon did

[jagged rose]

Something important to note is that cyborgs did not scale very well in colony era. Everything was made bespoke to the person. That becomes less of an issue when you just replace your entire corporeal form.

[final oxide]

"Everything runs on CyAc or nothing runs at all..." lol

Rook is kinda funny in the sponsor regard, he's got both a Traxus and CyAc stamp on his frame.

[hot thicket]

oh snap i just heard is it true sekgen is trying to make us next gen battleroids , hell yea i thought i was just crazy talking

[final oxide]

I mean, I'd be curious if you could slap the Battleroid implants into a Shell lol

[hot thicket]

derivative tech ?

reverse engineered maybe

[final oxide]

Weave the muscle and bone into the implants naturally, instead of putting a foreign object into the human body

[sage lark]

Might have something to do with the cradle stuff next season

[final oxide]

Riiiiiiiiiight

I forgot about that

SekGen, lemme give my Destroyer metal bones so I can punch my fist through a UESC Commander and I'll rep you every day of the week lol

[sage lark]

I will max out tactical recovery on vandal so i can spam arm cannon

And agility

[final oxide]

I legit just learned tonight that MIDA offers agility buffs.

[jagged rose]

Plot twist: Nona wants us to become next gen battleroids specifically so that we can interface better with jjaro tech, like the Mjolnerd

Or maybe she's just tired of her brittle children getting snatched up by the crow. Poor Nona.

[final oxide]

Like they say in the game industry, the factions competing to win our business only benefits us.

They'll push the limits of what Shell tech can do and we reap the rewards lol

[digital glen]

I think that whole questline is constellating towards whatever the cradle ends up being in season 2

I don't think the strongest runner (giga geared and giga upgraded or not) comes anywhere close to the weakest battleroid (and that's intentional)

[sage lark]

ok I think I just got confirmation Gantry is human maybe

[wild compass]

Is there a separate discord or channel for work on the ARG?

[twin trout]

#breach-protocol

we're waiting for the enxt step so people are messing around

[wild compass]

tyty

[sage junco]

Lore thought of the day

The title screen (the Marathon Press Button To Continue screen that everyone mindlessly clicks through when they start the game)

It's a homage to the original Marathon software boxes, back in the 90's when your software came in a box: https://www.reddit.com/r/Marathon/comments/ujzc04/i_hear_you_like_boxes/

[twin trout]

you

you mean the marathon logo? x3

that's the franchise's logo

[sage junco]

gah. I mean, this title screen: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DVO0KHWk_8T/

(and now I look at it, that logo in the middle of screen wasn't there in the youtube clips of alpha...

someone may have decided in the last year "hey, that title screen looks kinda reminiscent of our old boxes, but it's missing the logo in middle of screen, let's add it")

[burnt steeple]

Mida the most goated faction

[analog crystal]

Runnah, we need to destroy tha UESC and tha corps. Infil to tha McDonalds in New Cascadia, Runnah - bleed for tha revolution and get me a Medium Big Mac meal, Runnah. Fries and a coke, Runnah.

[fresh shore]

so we are made out of worms?

[vital zephyr]

The Emotional Support Plushie codex messed me up good

[patent bear]

More made out of silk and bio-organic compounds woven by those worms. That and cybernetics augmentations to the physical form

[analog crystal]

Yup. I think that's the lore reason for needing to extract from a raid?

The 'stability' of the shell's wormy skin just degrades over time.

[pliant elm]

https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQXgXYc4ajU97UrbwJ1DUoeK-RrD5fNupRbTg&s

[analog crystal]

SegGen spending 18 trillion dollars to make me a new shell, just for me to take a free kit with a V11 Punch and extract with nothing but some gross tick chitin

[pliant elm]

To die to a local tick.

[patent bear]

Extraction in Marathon is the transmission of matter from one location to another. Shell death only occurs from well, dying. We extract so we can keep our loot.

Think quantum entanglement principles for extraction. Two points binding matter across space and time to transfer it from one location to another.

[pliant elm]

location: seghen, hq
type: text
content:

"Yeah Jesse. Well done in hiring this bozo off the street to pilot our 18T credit investment."

[analog crystal]

"How about we send a battleroid? All we, Traxus, need is a couple of enhanced rods from this Maintenance place in the swamp. Should take 2 minutes."

"Better idea. Untrained wage slave - and they're bright pink. And they're using a Destroyer shell with Thief ability cores."

[short hawk]

had an in game visual hallucination yesterday. Came round a corner and saw a Blackbird like 5 foot away from me. Aimed and it vanished in a tiny puff of smoke in the shape of the runner

my first one but it was so close to me it was unmistakable

[tawdry nova]

I thought I was bugging. I've had this happen

[short hawk]

shat a brick too because i was loaded heh

and a recon led tteam was the last thing i needed

[tawdry nova]

Looks like smoke getting blown away when it disappears

[short hawk]

wonder what triggers it. And want to see hore.

[short hawk]

yeah and doesnt go far from the edge of the runners shape either. so not overly dramatic

quickly whisps away

wonder what else can happen

i want to trip balls and slip into a lovecraftian visual hell

then extract with gold

[tawdry nova]

I came here because the last line of the arg maze got me feeling like we may be some form or version of the security guard. "We're the result of infinite possibilities narrowed into one" makes me feel lije We're in a splinter of a splinter of a splinter timeline somehow.

[short hawk]

for me it feels like durandal rinsing timelines like crazy looking for a specific answer. Wouldnt surprise me if every wipe was a new timeline where we got further into the cryo

and Arachne arnt really just a death cult. They are looking for a stutter in the weave that opens a window to another place / reality. They believe the shells are a woven Jjarro prison of sorts

they are also looking for an "escape"

ergo my lovecraftian hell comment

"the runner printed 18 times in a single hour with no grounding therapy. On the final print the weave stuttered and an eldritch face could be seen screaming through the window that had oppened in the weave"

or something like that

Arachne are the best org.

even if their chat is all mostly about skinning people...

[indigo willow]

Honestly I don’t know if people have already theorized this, but when I woke up this morning I had a brain blast. What if the Runners are the original Tau Ceti colonists? From a meta prospective, we are supposed to care about the uncovering of the secrets of tau Ceti, but the player has no stake in it really, but if we were the colonists then that would be filled. All of the factions had a major steak in the colony including CyAc and Segguichi, we have amnesia about who we are and we’re digitized consciousness with an unclear origin. There’s holes of course, but it could be interesting if true

[terse wren]

Skin the boy release the glistening fascia-covered man

[short hawk]

The weave has no skin and the weave is the key.
Wasnt the poor bobs fight haha

[sage lark]

your brain is digitized and youre in debt

thats your stake

they state that in the first 20 minutes

and to help you pay it off cyac lets you work for the corpos

[analog crystal]

Interesting concept, not sure if anything points toward it right now though!

[indigo willow]

I mean that’s what the corps tell you, but how can you be sure it’s true?

From a meta perspective it’s not very compelling to uncover the secrets

[sage lark]

I, ME, MYSELF wanna know what happened to Tau Ceti

[analog crystal]

SekGen's shell stuff is established. Maybe if the lore was that these runners and shells just sort of 'showed up' at TCIV?

Just not sure why the corps would be using the runners to dig info on the colony, if there's some scheme and the runners are secretly the digitised colonists.

[sage lark]

dont really need an in lore explanation

[analog crystal]

And yeah - the lore is interesting!

[sage lark]

because the UESC is preventing salvage rights

[indigo willow]

Good point 🤔

[analog crystal]

I would sell my soul to my NuCal overlords if it meant I could spend another 5 minutes digging deep into New Cascadia's agricultural AI.

[sage lark]

they are using you to figure out what happened

[indigo willow]

I mean the colony’s been defunct for forever

[analog crystal]

Sorry - I mean I don't get why the corps would be using the runners if Saltwatercatfish's theory is correct, and runners are the digitised colonists.

[sage lark]

and find new profit opportunities and learn what happened to their trillion billion dollar investment

[indigo willow]

So it’s possible they’ve just been using the same people for like 300 years

[sage lark]

the journey itself was 300 years the shells havent been a thing for that long

[analog crystal]

The tech was developed on Earth though, right? So presumably was in place prior to the current 'expedition' departing for TCIV after Earth received Durandal's message?

[sage lark]

a precursor to it

but idk where they got that they have been using colonists for 300 years as shells

[analog crystal]

Definitely a cool idea - and you never know!

There's potentially more we'll uncover. I wouldn't be shocked if there's some link between SekGen and Jjaro technology, or something of the sort.

[sage lark]

it would make no sense to me as an idea since no one has access to the Marathon

even now we dont

[terse steppe]

Thoughts? #🗣marathon-general-chat message

Many seem to think the shells are separate consciousnesses of their own and don't seem to realise that they only have a personality matrix which allows the actual consciousness piloting the shell to adjust better

[analog crystal]

I think that's actually established lore; the Runner doesn't have a 'human' body anymore. They're a digitised consciousness that - when they're between shells - exists only in a state of 'data', which may well be the storage drive.

The Runner isn't 'running' to earn money for, like, a conscious body with autonomy anywhere. They're just paying off corporate debts.

[terse steppe]

Yes I don't think any runner is a real individual. I think they're all duplicate consciousnesses

The same photo of a child used for every one.

[analog crystal]

The cinematic certainly seemed to imply that there's more to it than just 'person uploaded', yes.
Vandal not recognising herself as a child and such.

[terse steppe]

I think there might have been one real person at the start used as the template for the mercenary.

[analog crystal]

It's likely a once-human consciousness with their memory stripped away in desire for efficiency, yeah.
And then it's just continually reuploaded to new shells each time.

[terse steppe]

But it won't perform as effectively as it does if it realises it's not real. It thinking it is an individual with it's own drives and needs motivates it to perform at peak efficiency.

[analog crystal]

Like the Assassin/Vandal obviously were 'surprised' and... way too curious about a goddamned airpod in the cinematic for people who, presumably pre-'upload' would have been familiar with the idea of music.

[terse steppe]

A perceived debt to pay off which is actually meaningless and used as an incentive.

[terse steppe]

They both had the same connection to the music because they're the same consciousness. Maybe there's a few different ones to differentiate but those two happened to meet each other in the same run.

Likely a variety of mercenary templates exist and they're all copied many times over.

[analog crystal]

Possibly!
I think they're probably different 'consciousnesses', they've got different personalities and such. And I think Assassin being shown a picture of a young girl and being told it's him as a baby might be a bit confusing. 😆
But they've likely had similar memory stripping and stuff done!

Hopefully stuff we'll find out more about as the game progresses.

(Totally hoping we see the shell consciousnesses go through rampancy.)

[terse steppe]

The assassin we heard was just the personality matrixes voice. It wasn't that of the consciousness inhabiting the shell.

[analog crystal]

Sorry, lv1 Vandal in my team. I'm a lv500 Destroyer, and I don't care for loot. The heat death of the universe approaches, and I'm trying to find a way to escape this Universe and persist to the next.

[sudden pollen]

Coolest theory I saw was that each runner contains a tiny sliver of a greater AI's consciousness as a method of keeping it tame

[calm plaza]

Which would.presumably be ONI

[calm plaza]

Plus in a ingame sense the runners want to go to the marathon because its like a cash cow and practically a myth at this point i dont think the runners identity is important due to how its the blank slate mc trope that allows players to immerse themselves in the world it wouldnt make any sense for the runners themselves to be characterised

The character of the runner is moulded by the player

What faction you like where your priorities are

[terse steppe]

ok I've got a theory and its pretty wild and purely in the context of the Marathon universe. I'm not crazy here. Hear me out.

[calm plaza]

Shoot

[terse steppe]

What if our reality is fake? and that all of this is just a simulation to convince us that we're living a real life.

but in reality we're living it in a storage drive.

[calm plaza]

Irl or in game

[terse steppe]

ingame ofc 😂

[calm plaza]

Are you having a existential crisis

Right ok

[terse steppe]

So basically lots of people think they're living a real life.

when in actual fact its all simulated.

[calm plaza]

Erm well that would mean that all the lore of the game is pointless in the scheme of the universe whoch would be fairly unsatisfying the "its just a dream" trope kinda sux imo

[terse steppe]

They think they're mercenaries for hire when in actual fact that's just when the corporation require their services.

[calm plaza]

But i mean maybe

[terse steppe]

their conciousness is uploaded into a shell which takes on the personality matrix of that shell.

They then complete contracts for the corporations.

[calm plaza]

Well then i suppose it would be no different from us playing the game since the lore of marathon hold no meaning in our world... so i guess nothing would change in game and youd have to seperate the lore of the game and the real marathon story the main problem is the original marathon games

[terse steppe]

When their services are no longer required the conciousness is sent back into storage to live their fake simulated life spending their hard earned credits which don't actually exist at all.

[calm plaza]

I think you are overthinking it

In my opinion its gonna go the other way

[terse steppe]

cancel the thinking its a game thing, they think they are actual mercenaries for hire

the mercenary conciousness is just a copy and there's multiple.

[calm plaza]

Through learning more and going through the cycle of death and rebirth we will go through ai rampancy and head to a similar direction as the security officer

Why do you need copies of the runners

They can die infinitely and go out again

[terse steppe]

the shells are copies and the conciousness is too so corporations can run many runners at the same time

[calm plaza]

And also if the runners never lived and were ai all along lying to them and convincing them that they were once human is kinda pointless

[terse steppe]

If you thought you were real and your life had purpose wouldn't that motivate you to try your best?

[calm plaza]

So the corporation that runs software and the digitsation of the runners in game is cyberacme

[terse steppe]

ofc that depends on the person in question but that's why they copied a mercenaries conciousness or at least someone who's very good at it.

[calm plaza]

Ai get motivation from reward and punishment when they are trained they get rewards from desirable actions and punishment from undesirable actions they dont need motivation as it is baked into their existence to do they best

[terse steppe]

Find the perfect mercenary then copy their mind.

[calm plaza]

Motivation is a human concept

I wouldnt ask a hair dryer to give me more effort lmao

[terse steppe]

Don't mercenaries do it for money though?

[calm plaza]

Erm yh

But there are different runners

[terse steppe]

If they were just unfeeling robots like the UESC they wouldn't bother giving them personalities

[calm plaza]

Like if u copy pasted the same dude over and over theyd all just do the same thing

[terse steppe]

There are different personality matrixes for each shell type but the same conciousness can inhabit any.

[calm plaza]

They didnt give ppl personalities they digitised they conciousness

[terse steppe]

If I play as Vandal my conciousness uses Vandals personality matrix to allow me to best adjust to the Vandal shell.

[calm plaza]

Yeah but there are multiple runners

In a meta sense the players themselves are runners

Thats why the games lore works and the world is so immersive

Because we are in a meta sense inhabiting the shells not the runner

[terse steppe]

Yes we are technically the conciousness inhabiting the shells. We're also stored on a drive somewhere only to be activated when needed and we're convinced that we had a real life.

[calm plaza]

Therefore the game devs are able to canonise even the menus and the loadouts and the ui so immersion doesnt break with the narrative its genius

[calm plaza]

Why tho

[terse steppe]

It is amazing

[terse steppe]

that's the big question!

[calm plaza]

Wdym theres no reason to go through all of that effort

[worldly charm]

🤯

[terse steppe]

I think the corporations realised that real people were more adaptive and effective than robots

[calm plaza]

If we can be turned on and off just turn us off and reboot

[calm plaza]

Agreed

Which is why the runners (plural) are digitised conciousnesses made from humans

Not programmed ai

Because thats way more effort than it would be go get people to sell they souls for immortality

[terse steppe]

When the conciousness is put back into storage it likely is but in the conciousnesses perspective it might even be living a perceived real life to uphold the illusion.

They seem to think they're real people so I believe this might be the case.

[calm plaza]

Your having a matrix level existential crisis about your player character in marathon

[terse steppe]

Its just a theory lol

[calm plaza]

Ok so assuming you are correct is there a real world of marathon that the runners are exploring?

[vagrant plank]

Such as having a cup of coffee on a snowy Sunday spring morning

[calm plaza]

Sorry not tryna be rude but im a philosophy student you caught the wrong/right guy for this debate

[terse steppe]

Your consciousness will be uploaded to your shell at some point I presume 😄

[vagrant plank]

Then you are playing the correct game

[sudden pollen]

I think so yeah, cause there were human colonists before the runners came along

[terse steppe]

haha nah its all good, I enjoy this

[calm plaza]

Ik right learning about marathon infinities lore was genuinly the most intellectually stimulating experience

[terse steppe]

everything is there in the cinematic trailer for me

[calm plaza]

You read the poems and have to look at it past face level and apply it to the events of the game

Peak scifi

[vagrant plank]

and the in game graffiti

[terse steppe]

mercenaries being fed information about fake lives they were meant to have lived.

To ground them.

[vagrant plank]

and the sheer terror when another appears and you didnt see them

they are like me, they will kill me !

[terse steppe]

If the illusion is broken the mind dies

[calm plaza]

Thats the problem with the theory you either believe there is literally a marathon ship in the game universe and that the runners are humans who digitised their conciousnesses in order to more efficiently be mercenaries unbound by mortality or you believe that its all some kinda science experiment by cyberacme

[calm plaza]

Gas

[sudden pollen]

I dunno either way

[calm plaza]

Tbh i see where you are coming from but from a lore perspective the more interesting lore is in the story of the marathon the anomaly and the potential enlightenment that comes from cybernetics and huamnity

[vagrant plank]

we may be working for the Aliens and a huge double or tripple cross is coming

[calm plaza]

Yup noone can say for sure its the thought experiment that counts

Which is the same for all philosophy

[calm plaza]

Interestingly the song cinematic for marathon had a triage being resurrected by a s'phit compiler at least thats what it looks like

Maybe elluding to compilers being able to marrionette the shells when they die in raid when we unlock the marathon?? Idk

[karmic wasp]

Reason why using human corpse fused with jjaro tech is better than 3d printing body
"They don't overheat when sprinting"

[sudden pollen]

That thing was creepy as fuck

[terse steppe]

enlightenment or enslavement, both a possibility I think

[vital zephyr]

maybe we will ally with the s'phit

[terse steppe]

In the runners case the latter. At least now anyway

[calm plaza]

Fair enough

[karmic wasp]

I love the new compliers design Soo much!!

Specially Their cloak

[calm plaza]

I think sekiguchi are using jjaro tech for the shells

[karmic wasp]

I still miss the half transparent cloak one from the cinematic though

[karmic wasp]

I don't think soo- lol

[calm plaza]

God yeah litterally could not have modernised it any beyter

Im interested to see how they compare with the shells power wise

[karmic wasp]

But their head design give me a sour taste

[terse wren]

Peak choice for first alien we see

[karmic wasp]

Reminds me alot of the goofy Marathon 2 and infinity spht

[terse steppe]

Maybe that will be the story of the runners, the slaves to corporations eventually finding enlightment. An optimistic idea

[terse wren]

Eventually getting stock options

[karmic wasp]

They are the most scary in marathon 1 in my opinion

[terse wren]

Yeah great design.

[reef warren]

Lf1 lvl 50+ outpost PvP knowledge 🤦🏽and that doesn’t wine for little stuff

[terse wren]

The weird little oval heads are better than the big shields in m2

[karmic wasp]

I still questioning myself why do they have to add a visor on the new head design

It looks kinda weird

[calm plaza]

Because its going to quantify the shells compared to the battleroids

[karmic wasp]

But generally the compilers look great !