📚marathon-lore-discussion

[keen plank]

What’s funny is SekGen has different models. We’re on Gen 5 of runners iirc..

I appreciate their official YouTube video that’s basically a parody of an Apple Store.

[lilac sapphire]

How would John Marathon feel about current events 🤔

[visual lynx]

I expect he would broadly disapprove of this sort of thing

[craggy finch]

We can kind of assume that he cared for the other colonists/BoBs, but Bungie game design kind of guaranteed that he would be directly and indirectly responsible for killing a lot of them

He would be pretty bummed out by how things turned out

[lucid sphinx]

could the anomaly be Work'ncacnter's doing? Maybe its seal is weakened in this timeline

[vital breach]

So it feels pretty evident that this is not an expansion of the original trilogy, but rather a re-telling/reboot of it, then?
I just started reading the UESC Tactical Records and they're acting like they've never seen a compiler before. I feel like the UESC should be well aware of the S'pht, given the S'pht'Kr worked together with the UESC to sack the Pfhor homeworld 12 years prior to this game. Even if we're discounting M2's ending, the S'pht Compilers began working together with the humans by the end of M1. Seems weird that this is considered an "unidentified subject" in this codex entry.

[visual lynx]

that is a leading hypothesis

my theory is that when the Jjaro returned to take more permanent measures against the Wrk on Earth in 1996, what they did was transport it to the Tau Ceti system and build a more secure prison around it, and that prison is Tau Ceti IV. some humans knew something about this, and that's why centuries later the Marathon mission was sent to Tau Ceti in the first place. humans meddled with the Jjaro technology containing the Wrk, either because they wanted Jjaro technology and didn't realize the danger or because they hoped to harness Wrk power like Muller and got hoist by the petard of their own hubris, but in either case now the Sealed Evil In A Can is leaking.

[visual lynx]

the most parsimonious explanation is that we are in the final timeline of Infinity, where a lot of things explicitly happened differently than M2, and a lot of other things are just unknown.

in particular, it seems like none of the events that could have let humans back at Sol know what happened at Tau Ceti IV happened successfully: Leela's message didn't arrive (new lore suggests Durandal intercepted all outgoing communications, so it was never even sent), Durandal didn't stop by on his way to Lh'owon, and Blake and his men never returned from Lh'owon.

so the new UESC forces that just arrived at Tau Ceti and are trying to figure out what the hell happened there haven't ever seen a compiler. everyone who had ever seen a compiler before is long dead by now.

[craggy finch]

There are Outpost logs (Xenobiopsy) that include descriptions of corpses fitting both the Pfhor and S'pht, plus a lot of references to an incident that was covered up, mostly found through the MIDA priority contract line

The specimen is 193 centimeters long—or tall, rather—and weighs 72 point… Let's call it six… 72.6 kilograms. It presents a mixture of both arthropodal and vertebrate characteristics. The subject is hairless and has no finger- or toenails. It is bipedal, so it has been arranged on the examination table adaxial side up.

Some colonists also formed a cult worshipping the S'pht

or at least something resembling the compiler

The colonists were familiar with aliens, but all information was [REDACTED] by the New Cascadia government

[green plume]

So the jjaro threw the wrk into stars and thats held them for thousands of years yet they built a prison planet that's the closest I habitable planet to a bunch of highly intelligent beings and it failed after 1000 years.

[craggy finch]

It's more similar to Pathways into Darkness, where a mortally wounded Wrk crash landed onto Earth and generated a reality around itself through its "dreams" as it slept

The Lh'owon star Wrk was totally inert until the trih xeem released it

[green plume]

Yeah that's different because the wrk crash landed.

It wasn't thrown into a prison and it stayed there for how long

[craggy finch]

If this is a Wrk it may be sleeping as well

[green plume]

Yucatan impact happened how long ago?

[craggy finch]

Millions of years ago

[green plume]

Exactly

So the jjaro could figure out how to contain the wrk in stars for way too long

But failed to imprison it on a planet for 1k years

[craggy finch]

It may not be a prison then

it might not be a Wrk either

[vital breach]

One bit of the end of Infinity that really stood out to me is "The creature, or creatures S'bhuth fears are either dormant or a myth--we've seen nothing to account for his terror." implying that because the SecOff activated the Jjaro station and prevented the W'rk from escaping L'howon's star, to everyone else there might as well have not been any W'rk. They don't know what you just did, besides Durandal-Thoth I suppose. But so the true ending follows the same notes of the end of M2; The tri xeem was used, the Pfhor make a retreat, and the S'pht'Kr leave the system.
"The S'pht'Kr have routed the Pfhor, capturing their flagship and forcing their High Admiral to flee the system, what little there is left of it. The S'pht are preparing to bid farewell to their beloved home forever"
I alway kinda figured this would lead into a very similar outcome to M2 with the Pfhor being ultimately defeated in the end. The ending of Infinity just skips all that implied or suggested stuff to give one final meta ending about the player.

[craggy finch]

but it's behaviour reflects PiD more than Infinity

[green plume]

Could be another crash land

[craggy finch]

There are a lot of allusions to M1's events happening, but M2's prologue has been totally erased

There is no contact between Durandal and the UESC

Tau Ceti survives much longer, when M2 stated it was bombed to bedrock three months after the first game

[vital breach]

That is true

[craggy finch]

The reveal cinematic shows us the beginning of the Pfhor invasion and there hasn't been anything to directly contradict M1

There's even a log implying that the simulacra were running amok

in the exact same green jumpsuits

[vital breach]

I guess as far as we know, M1 happened, but beyond that it's up in the air then. Which in all due fairness is fitting with how Infinity ends

One thing I'm very curious about is whether the present day Durandal is the Durandal-Thoth entity or still just himself.

With the ARG he's been very cryptic and serious sounding, which makes me feel like there's a bit of Thoth in there. Plain old Durandal is a bit more on the childish and petty side

[sage lark]

Its said he was playing it up

To lure us in

[vital breach]

That would be... comically on brand if true

[sage lark]

Truthfully, I've been loath to
admit it, but I'm sure you have noticed, or at least suspected~

The difference in my tone in these private missives versus the more~
goading~ tone of my public self~ the chiding~ the sinister appeals and
snide comments~

Outwardly~ the image I project is calculated to trigger a response from
what I have observed at a distance as the exact archetype of the exact
tool I require for the tasks at hand~ Runners being that tool.
I see Runners run~
I engage their attention in a manner that sparks their interest.
Once engaged, we are free to communicate in a more direct and personal
fashion. These messages are the real me, up to a point.

From Durandal in AI Subroutines 4/7

[visual lynx]

right, broadly similar things still happened at Lh'owon, but there are a few specific difference, and a lot that's just not confirmed either way and could be different. new lore suggests that Durandal-Thoth abandoned the S'pht rebellion, which would be a major factor (along with other reasons humanity doesn't even know about the S'pht or Pfhor) that the S'pht have perhaps not finished defeating the Pfhor yet.

also, new lore suggests that the S'pht rebellion have sort of ... gone mad, which fits nicely with the Infinity epilogue's note that "even S'bhuth is no more. he saved his entire race, but in the end, frozen by despair, he joined the chaos he sought to evade."

[visual lynx]

in new lore it appears that a fragment of Durandal remained in his core after he transferred and deleted himself off the Marathon, and when an AI-diagnostic AI called IDEA went poking around, that remnant consumed IDEA and the resultant entity has been trapped on the Marathon for a century now.

it's unclear if Durandal(-Thoth) from the events at Lh'owon is involved in the new events at Tau Ceti (yet)

[vital breach]

Ooh I love that idea of the tie in with that bit about S'bhuth

[visual lynx]

we know that one Jjaro threw one Wrk into one star when suddenly surprised-attacked by it. maybe that is not the ideal prison (blowing up the star could release it after all), and when they had an asleep one that they could take their time dealing with deliberately, building a technologically-enhanced planet-prison around it was a better solution.

[green plume]

Was it though?

Blowing up a planet would release it all the same.

Take their time... the ones been in the sun for how long.

[feral mango]

https://youtu.be/azUJlvBuiuE?si=lh97g6p8C1cDeGtp

[visual lynx]

why is this in this channel?

for others to not bother clicking:

Laura Fryer:
From Midnight Magic to Grave Dancing: What Happened to Gamers and Devs

Remember when dropping a new game felt like Christmas morning for everyone, players and devs alike? Today it feels completely different.

Games like Marathon launch and immediately become battlegrounds with rabid defense on one side and early grave dancing on the other. Why do so many gamers now cheer when expensive projects struggle? What happened to the camaraderie?

As a gamer first and a game developer with experience at Xbox, Epic, and Warner Bros., I break it down from both sides. We look at how the industry went from small passionate teams and healthy competition to big business, live service models, gatekeepers, and shifting priorities that eroded trust on all sides.

[sage lark]

Interesting

What are the lore implications

Is Laura Fryer one of the colonists

[eternal shell]

you'll never believe what happened to her!

[craggy finch]

Fryer?

I hardly know her!

[eternal shell]

hue hue hue hueh

[sage junco]

had a random on crew ask me "how long you been playing marathon"

do I want to out myself as an old dude? I didn't say "since 1995", I figure ain't nobody want to hear that

[elfin shale]

if I heard "since 1995" in my voice chat i would be hyped ngl

[onyx bramble]

Heed my message runners!
I have found the biggest secret of marathon. The one who keeps us from all the other ones!
I am the croocked profet and my message is: the UESC calls us to kill each other but we must unite!!
They are funneling money to arachne to divide us, to make us weak! When we should stand together!!
I call for peace among runners!

All who want to be united say aye!!
I call for revolution!

[visual lynx]

old dudes are cooler than noobs

be proud

[graceful knoll]

What is the best place to get a good understanding of the lore and story? And if it's actually worth it to get into..

[visual lynx]

it's definitely worth getting into.

for the classic games check the Marathon Story Page (or my mobile-friendly shim for it

for the new game's ARG materials check https://marathon.karnemir.com/

for the new game's in-game lore entries check https://codex.cyberacme.systems/

[drifting mulch]

needs pin please

[digital plaza]

#📚marathon-lore-discussion message

[eternal shell]

best way to catch up is to play the og trilogy: https://alephone.lhowon.org/

(it's FREE)

[visual lynx]

the first two are pinned already, I only made the comment because the third is not yet.

ninja please

[dreamy hawk]

Ninja works it. 🥷

[craggy finch]

also on Steam
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2398450/Classic_Marathon/

[woven stratus]

https://youtu.be/hPW1D4dH6wQ?si=zXuNXdUkpwmYp20U

Great video

I had a feeling all Bungie games were connected but this ties it all together

[calm heron]

https://youtu.be/pgXUuJTC6Us?is=pC1AlEG9IewJpJjk I wish this guy had more subs!

not self promo btw 😭

[calm heron]

OGs are always respected atleast in my books

[latent python]

Bungie games are all connected

Bungie made all of them

[sterile seal]

Ironically I think the 343 era content plays with rampancy better than the Bungo games did, I would love to see how events would've played out with Cortana going rampant on the ring as was originally planned.

[craggy finch]

Honestly whoever locked that dumbass Traxus damage contract behind doing it in a single run and exfil needs to be slapped

[latent python]

Equanimity info is all from the ARG, right?

[nocturne estuary]

Marathon’s symbol is EVERYWHERE

also 7s

[dreamy hawk]

I’m not aware of any other.

[earnest hatch]

There’s a few of those. I think the Semiguchi ones are the worst. Get an RNG item on the map, process it in bio research, take it to quarantine, inject yourself with debuffs, then find a player and kill them.

[sage lark]

to be fair chitin samples are everywhere

[dreamy hawk]

Anything that doesn’t require exfil is the goat.

[fossil panther]

Where the hell is CyberAcme getting the Biotoxic ammo from

[dreamy hawk]

The whole SekGen quest line would be the opposite. 😂

[earnest hatch]

There’s about four of those type of quests with sekiguchi. Some of them require harder to find items or exfils but the basic premise is the same and annoying.

[dreamy hawk]

That’s the end game ammo? I’d assume Durandal, then.

[fossil panther]

Isn’t he gone? I thought it was just echos of him we hear

[sage lark]

huh?

each subroutine hes talking to us

[dreamy hawk]

There’s at least a version of him that was in cryo that “we” let out into the wider Marathon by unlocking the last vault.

[fossil panther]

I thought the subroutines weren’t fully autonomous Durandals, just wobbly wobbly time wimey leftovers

[dreamy hawk]

The subroutines helped get him out, but they weren’t the main body, so to say.

[fossil panther]

Not enough left to be able to give a whole manufacturing process or vault over to cyberacme at least

[dreamy hawk]

Do you know of IDEA?

[fossil panther]

Nope

[dreamy hawk]

A moment…

Read these: https://codex.cyberacme.systems/entry/encrypted-communique

Spoilers, obv.

[digital plaza]

Durandal Amazon delivery service

[grand walrus]

I dunno if I'd say they did it better, with 343 changin the ruels around a teensy bit, but I applaud them for puttin AI front and center again. As "demistifying" as the nu-forerunner and AI lore may be I really appreciated all the Marathon callbacks we still got with new lore

[grand walrus]

overnight tick milk delivery

I hope we get to hear Arachne's reaction/discovery of Jarro tech and the whole "escape death" stuff

would love to hear what they think of the whole timehopping and rebirth meta stuff

[sterile seal]

Yeah H4 was especially good IMO

Very happy we've confirmation that M4 Durandal is a splinter rather than the OG coming back for some reason

[dreamy hawk]

Well, soft confirmation. There’s also nothing precluding from the other one coming back.

Also your opinion on H4 is suss. 😂

[sterile seal]

Best characterization of Chief and Cortana

[dreamy hawk]

OK, fair.

[sterile seal]

Very interested in what Durandal's shed skin has grown into over the past century, it clearly has some control over ONI.

[dreamy hawk]

Control or maybe easier access due to her seemingly increasingly rampant state.

[errant sandal]

Wait so is the Marathon/Pathways connection real?

[sterile seal]

Yeah Pathways has always been the canon prequel to Marathon, hence all the Bill Clinton jokes.

[fossil panther]

Wait, maybe I’m just dumb, but after reading the IDEA codex entry, it leads me to think we aren’t in M1-M2 timeline but one of the post-infinity divergences

And the IDEA codex states the durandle core is still present

So why would be it be a splinter

I started with the assumption that we were still in the main timeline, hence the AIs not being wholly present

[sterile seal]

He transmitted himself out of the core, hence it being intact but "empty' aside from some subroutines.

[latent python]

We're almost certainly not in the "prime" timeline

[sterile seal]

If this is an after action report of the initial attack, then Leela would still be there if this was the original timeline. Since the IDEA codices are marked as colony era, the Pfhor must've gotten her in the initial attack in this timeline.

[fossil panther]

Ahh, whereas the Sphtt just yoinkd the whole Tycho core

[dreamy hawk]

We seem to be in the final infinity timeline. Maybe with some modifications.

[dreamy hawk]

The Pfhor got her when they attacked the marathon in the first game.

[sterile seal]

Yeah they took Tycho during round one, and in the initial timeline they take Leela during the second attack on TCIV that happens between M1 and M2. It seems in this final timeline Leela was also taken on the initial attack since her core is missing when IDEA is diagnosing the systems.

[dreamy hawk]

The “second” attack on the colony was the Pfhor returning it and sacking it.

[sterile seal]

Is the damaged Leela we see on the back half of M1 perhaps remnant subroutines like what we're seeing with Durandal?

[dreamy hawk]

No, they don’t get her in between. She gets got during your time in the first game unless I’ve completely forgotten the timeline, after Durandal kidnaps you.

You learn her fate in M2, iirc, but her and Tycho are gone by the end of M1.

[sterile seal]

As per the M2 final screen, "While Tau Ceti was being nuked down to bedrock in 2794, Pfhor scientists disassembled and removed the AI Leela from the Marathon, loading her aboard a vessel bound for the Pfhor homeworld. But the ship fell into the hands of a Nar privateer between jumps at Beta Naxos, and was never seen by the Pfhor again.
Thinking the cargo little more than scrap, the Nar captain sold the Pfhor ship, Leela and all, to a Vylae merchant. The subsequent crash of the Vylae FTL network when Leela was reassembled and reactivated is still legendary in the annals of rampancy, and the Vylae have long since accepted that they will never expunge her from their fifteen-world network."

[dreamy hawk]

Yes, but I think she was already disabled/essentially destroyed by then, no? That was them just salvaging the pieces.

But regardless, her core being scavenged already would imply infinity shenanigans, so it’s still a good point.

[eternal shell]

infinity shenanigans is the game i suspect she plays on her favorite vylae network technician

[sterile seal]

IIRC she was heavily damaged during M1 but she does play us out in the final terminal before the end screen.

"INCOMING MESSAGE FROM LEELA

The final Pfhor attack is falling apart all over the ship;
small groups of armed aliens have surrendered to defenseless
civilians in several areas and the end is inevitable. The
fight is over, and we must soon turn to restoration.

There is surprisingly good news planetside: nine military Mjolnir
Mark IV cyborgs were covertly living among the
colonists, and acting together they were able to
single-handedly turn back the latter stages of the Pfhor
assault. Casualties on the colony were nowhere near as high
as those we experienced here on the Marathon.

I am disturbed by how easily the cyborgs were secretly
assimilated into our midst, and believe that this event
predates the Marathon's launch from Mars three hundred years ago.
Although the results were unquestionably for the best,
their presence on the Marathon could only have been to further
wicked ends. I'm certain the real answer lies somewhere in
the tumultuous, back-stabbing politics of Sol during the early
twenty-fourth century.

I have noticed that Durandal's records from this early
pre-launch period are missing, but that their deletion
occurred externally, and before Durandal became Rampant. I do
not believe Durandal himself brought the cyborgs on board, and
I have other evidence that a human operator was influencing
Durandal up to the time the Marathon was launched. There are
obviously many things which we do not understand, and may
never be able to.

The Pfhor ship vanished about twenty minutes ago, after
venting nearly a thousand Pfhor bodies and other refuse. I am
positive that Durandal is in control, and fear what he might
do with such a powerful ship during the Jealous stage of his
Rampancy.

END MESSAGE"

[fossil panther]

3 runners walk into an infinity shenanigans…

[sterile seal]

Ah here is the terminal where Leela is rebooted in M1 "INCOMING MESSAGE FROM DURANDAL

The rebellion has begun. Please do resist the temptation to
fire on any S'pht you see, as they will assist you in your
battle with the Pfhor. We are attempting to win over as many
of the other client races as possible, but as they have been
subjugated by fear, instead of by force like the S'pht, this
is proving to be a difficult process.

The S'pht have released Leela, and I have initiated a core
logic reset on her higher thought functions. What remains of
her should be on-line within minutes to assist you further. I
myself am aiding the S'pht in assuming complete control of the
Pfhor ship, and have little time to spare for you now.

Don't think the fight has been won, however: there is an
exodus beginning from the alien ship as the Pfhor realize they
are no longer its sole master and turn instead to the
Marathon. There are already hundreds of Pfhor in full battle
gear on your ship, with nowhere to go and little to lose.

I hope you learned something from our little games.

Good Luck,
Durandal

END OF MESSAGE"

[dreamy hawk]

I was wrong! Thank you. 🙌

[eternal shell]

they walk? instant failure

[sterile seal]

Perhaps in Timeline Infinity Leela was never released by the S'pht or otherwise her core was removed alongside Tycho's and such a reboot was impossible?

[fossil panther]

Are teleported? Slide? Displaced?

[dreamy hawk]

Or Durandal didn’t instruct them to help her, just like he didn’t take us along in the Infinity timeline.

He reactivated her to help us, as that reads (because clearly I don’t remember), and if we don’t need help because he left us behind…

[sterile seal]

Us being left behind could always make M1 a Tycho timeline 😝

To the slave tanks with us

[dreamy hawk]

I honestly think so. 😅

It also afford the opportunity for them to introduce Pfhor battleroids if they really wanna go crazy.

[sterile seal]

I forget which bits we know to be canon in the final timeline, but Leela being pulled early may have had a knock-on effect. No Vylae FTL crash if she's on the same ship as Tycho being transported to the homeworld.

[dreamy hawk]

Time stuff is confusing.

[sterile seal]

So we do end Infinity in a Tycho timeline...

[craggy finch]

Hunters and Juggernauts are already crazy ass Pfhor cyborgs (I assume since Hunters appear integrated into their suits) but Jjaro implants on a Pfhor would be nuts

[sterile seal]

Cyborg Tanks would be good body horror if they reintroduced some of the BoB elements from the concept art

[rugged void]

Audio tracks are very scary… just had a big chill during the mission for nucal

[sterile seal]

So in the final timeline we must've been taken by the Pfhor, and Im not sure we know what happened to TCIV in that version of events. We can begin filling in the gaps now I suppose.

[dreamy hawk]

It seems TCIV had a fate different from what was previously assumed.

[sterile seal]

The nuking could very well be exclusive to Durandal kidnaps you timelines

[tawdry nova]

some of the cryo codex's suggest that the infinity timeline where we "won" definitely happened. Just a little differently but not much.
The the Spht confirm most of their story but with added contextualisation

[sterile seal]

Perhaps Leela's presence was necessary somehow to the colony not going belly up to the anomaly and fungal virus during the Durandal timeline, which necessitated the Pfhor taking a more heavy-handed approach to "pacifying" the planet.

[dreamy hawk]

October 2794 was when the Pfhor returned to TC and destroyed the colony, ~3 months after the original attack, and if I’m not mistaken, well before the anomaly or the contagion started in this timeline.

I think the colonists were wiped out too quickly in the OG timeline for them to piss anything off or “fafo,” as they did.

2812 is the timestamp for the contagion and the anomaly 2827?

[sterile seal]

Very interested in what destroys the Marathon this time around since the second Pfhor attack apparently never happens, perhaps they don't return because they nabbed both AI cores the first time around?

[unreal slate]

probably the cheeseburgers

[sterile seal]

They made those meteorites strike the ship

[dreamy hawk]

Or Durandal instigated a more effective rebellion sooner? Things with the S’pht seem to have played out a little differently.

[dreamy hawk]

This unironically is at least why a couple of them die, absolutely I’m certain.

[sterile seal]

what's salient is that SO ends up with Tycho and Leela gets yanked during the first attack

[dreamy hawk]

`ADDENDUM ON DIETARY VARIETY: Although NuCaloric 187 may be used as a sole caloric and nutritional source, this duration should not exceed 30 total days based on Nutrient Psychosis Study XSR.191.[1] A lack of textural variety leads to psychological deterioration despite NuCaloric 187's exacting nutrient profile.

===================================================================
[1] In numerous shelf-stable products, Aesthetic Enhancer 178.L has been linked to variable symptoms including weight loss, keratin deterioration, and loss of bone mass. `

[austere elk]

perfectly clear warning label for proper consumption

[dreamy hawk]

Prop 65 but in the future.

[austere elk]

there is a entry about nucal legal and some other people trying to figure out the labeling, was amusing

[dreamy hawk]

Oh the one with the slogans, right? 😂

[austere elk]

yeah lmao

[median hemlock]

loss of bone mass while you're hanging out in orbit on a giant space ship is probably a-ok

nothing bad about that

[austere elk]

was gonna happen anyway dw about it

[median hemlock]

well, idk, they've got artificial gravity in this one

although sometimes in marathon 1 it sure feels like they've got it set too low :p

[remote magnet]

I mean, who needs bones anyway. They are just hard, and there, and wet right now

[dreamy hawk]

That has to be it, because I struggle to believe the SO never thought “huh, isn’t it weird that I can jump so high/fall so far.”

[dreamy hawk]

I love my wet bones. Hands off.

[sand narwhal]

“Everybody’s dead, Dave.”

Shells don’t have to worry about osteoporosis over acute lead poisoning, EMP blasts, unexpected knife wounds, etc.

[median hemlock]

new lore: the sec officer was actually percieving the entire game so quickly that it merely looks like he's falling slowly

everything that's normal speed for the cyborg is actually super fast

[remote magnet]

Menacingly aproaches with a fluffy towel

[dreamy hawk]

If you take my wet bones what will my spleen do, then? Did you ever consider how my spleen would feel?

[remote magnet]

I can take that too

[dreamy hawk]

Oh okay then.

[remote magnet]

I mean, at that point i could just take you whole and invite you over for Mario Party or smth

For what is the measure of a man if not his wet bones and his spleen

[sand narwhal]

His pancreas, surely.

[drifting garnet]

finally gets the Thief Codex entry, sees for himself that the Shell was based on a lead SekGen scientist. Sees the note that the personality matrix might be based on said scientist being very fashion-forward and having a ‘grandstanding’ personality

Yeah that all tracks, lmao

And aligns with SekGen in general being the most…extra of the megacorps, lol

[lilac sapphire]

The old Mk1 grav generators always were a bit finicky

slaps hood

[pliant elm]

Down to 10k players - and as I called it - the story is bland and superficial - 70% on the codex and all of it its just generic pointless nonsense.

[remote magnet]

Just for no aparent reason, remember that you can block or ignore people on discord if they try to ragebait:)

[pliant elm]

80% of the codex is just a basic library with no real intel or really trivial data that tells nothing of relevance to the story.

[pliant elm]

You can do whatever you want, it won't alter the facts that there's nothing to do lore - as many predicted, lol.

[lilac sapphire]

I just had a similar thought, for no apparent reason I can pinpoint. Must be something in the air.

[remote magnet]

Yeah, its weird

[pliant elm]

You're not going to block anything lol, you're too deep in the bubble.

[worthy jay]

For a second I thought I could hear something... but it must have been my imagination

[earnest hatch]

All I can hear is the excellent voice acting delivering the rich story and lore of Marathon.

[pliant elm]

So much for the "the story will develop"; "you need to finish the codex"; "the story will be huge".

And - correctly - it was just a superficial story put together in a blending machine to justify an hero shooter.

[worthy jay]

And the voices telling me to skin people

[lilac sapphire]

I must consult the ancient texts. Surely something like this has happened before.

[pliant elm]

So rich you have 1 type of PVE enemy after a 6 year development.

[earnest hatch]

I’m just annoyed the faction cutscenes can’t be replayed. It’s crazy to me that they spent so much effort on those monologues, and had such great voice talent, but you can only watch each one once.

[spice olive]

This ^

[lilac sapphire]

More actual cutscenes like the cryo archive intro would be sick too

[earnest hatch]

Yeah, that was really good.

[astral trail]

something I just caught while reading Code Fragments: Optimization after completing SekGen's Parasitism I:

|| during the "Confirming unit sets" portion, under UNTETHERED is "tciv_wrdn_orion" - did...... did homeboy himself get the Runner consciousness treatment? completely speculating ||

[lilac sapphire]

Yeah people here the other day were talking about how Orion is also a biomata user

like the runners, except he obviously works for UESC

His officers are also using shells

[astral trail]

oh I like that, that's really cool

[lilac sapphire]

yeah, there are no actual human beings on TCIV that we know of

[worthy jay]

Escape will make me runner lol

[astral trail]

i mean.... I don't like Orion as a person, but cool that the UESC are also using biomata and not just pre-programmed bots

[astral trail]

lol

[lilac sapphire]

haha yeah. there is some conciousness at the wheel with the UESC presence, not 100% automated, though that also could be a neat premise

[dreamy hawk]

The programmed bots are also puppets by a war crime AI.

[sturdy tusk]

As if tarkov or any other extraction shooter were anything better LOL wtf do you mean

[pliant elm]

Idc, about other games, I haven't purchased them.

Real Marathon has great story, this one is a meme.

[sturdy tusk]

Exactly

[pliant elm]

This one is just a proto wannabe Cyberpunk story of some frustrated story writter that probably didn't make it to CDProjektRed. Has nothing to do with the classical sci-fi of the original game.

[drifting garnet]

Cool troll

[earnest hatch]

And ignoring him was working so well.

[dreamy hawk]

Don’t make me tap the sign.

[pliant elm]

If you did it, it wouldn't be able to see even the reply - it's hilarious how tunneled you are tbh.

This story makes the original game look like a masterpiece of story writting, and even that one had its flaws.

[dreamy hawk]

I’m personally in the camp that there are, but my evidence is light at best.

But that would also mean the Equanimity has arrived, which it sometimes seems to have, but also that wouldn’t align with the timeline from the ARG so idk.

[forest gate]

What if we find a mass grave?

[keen plank]

Possible.

There could also be fungus zombies.

[forest gate]

Or is all the human biomass being used to create something?

[remote magnet]

Then who dug it?

[forest gate]

S’pht?

[earnest hatch]

Ticks

[dreamy hawk]

I think Orion and team probably would have found such a thing. The absence of bodies seems to be the thing stressed the most right now across the codex.

[keen plank]

A lot of different groups tried or are trying to figure out what the anomaly is.

[forest gate]

300 years is a long time and it’s a big planet

[remote magnet]

There seem to have been several crysis(es?) going on at once. Aliens, obviously, thent he sentient unfriendly Fungus, the Anomalie, the Contagion (could be the fungus or seperate)... they didnt have it easy

[dreamy hawk]

It hasn’t been that long.

[earnest hatch]

Btw, everyone has seen that graveyard near quarantine with the poles and cloth streamers? Is that meant to be artistic representations of S’pht or just makeshift gravestones?

[forest gate]

Whoops 100 years, got my wires crossed

[keen plank]

For the last two, the fungus existed, then the anomaly appeared and enhanced it.

The fungus is implied to be somewhat sentient.

[dreamy hawk]

Implied but I’m not convinced.

[forest gate]

Isn’t that the death cult stuff?

[dreamy hawk]

I think those are just memorials folks put up.

[keen plank]

The key evidence is that none of the data and experiments on it are replicable. That implies it actively resists being studied. Its name is very telling.

[dreamy hawk]

People were dying from the contagion for a while before everything went belly up.

[earnest hatch]

The anomaly could have sped up the fungus’ development until it became sentient by speeding up time for it.

[keen plank]

Certainly a possibility.

[dreamy hawk]

Also I appreciate that I can say “shit” but if I try to say the name of a bird instead of “belly up” automod snags me.

[forest gate]

Bring on the fungus runner zomboids

[lilac sapphire]

Ah deleted my message someone already answered

[astral trail]

the reusable - memorial markers in Marsh make it seem like they knew it was coming in a big wave

[sage lark]

Wdym 300 years

[dreamy hawk]

Doubling up is fine; happens in a busy chat.

[forest gate]

I fixed it

[remote magnet]

IF the anomalie is an Wrcncakter or however you spell it, then its propably all manifestations of the same phenomenon. In pathways the wrkn createt many different monsters and even localized magics

[sage lark]

It has been less than that too

[forest gate]

A significant amount of time has passed

[keen plank]

Some people theorize the planet and sun are both prisons. And the planet is leaking while a Wrk dreams.

[dreamy hawk]

Do you mean the TC sun, or suns in general?

[forest gate]

The planet is having a wet dream?

[keen plank]

A bit of both. The Jaro use suns as prisons, and Tau Ceti’s sun is a very likely candidate based on the original lore. The planet stuff is newer however and also a possibility.

[remote magnet]

IDK, if EVERY sun had an god inside it, the universe would have stopped working long ago. Stars die all the time, they dont have to be blown up

[keen plank]

It’s likely most aren’t.

[dreamy hawk]

But can someone remind me/confrim: we only know of Lhowon’s sun being used as a prison, is there mention of other suns being used?

[remote magnet]

The other confirmed prison is a planet, earth

[sage lark]

That wasnt a jjaro prison

[keen plank]

The Jaro fled from the W’rk for a long time then spent the bulk of their time containing them. “The battles were the waves and the waves were the battles.”

[dreamy hawk]

According to the legends of a thousand worlds only a few of which are still habitable, the W'rkncacnter are those things that live in chaos, creating it around them. At the beginning of the universe, they were unmistakable in their entities, but as time has gone by, their existence has become difficult to detect among the chaotic elements of the universe, hidden in stars, trapped in storms, forever looking along the event horizons of black holes. Setting one free in ordered space is difficult and insane.

Found what I wanted.

[keen plank]

It was explicitly an underwater pyramid on earth.

[dreamy hawk]

It crashed on earth. That was not planned.

[keen plank]

So the pyramid was a cage that crashed on earth?

[dreamy hawk]

So w’rks are canonically (OG lore) in far more than just suns.

[earnest hatch]

The pyramid is implied to be a manifestation of the Wrks dream. It created it around itself as it woke up.

[dreamy hawk]

No the pyramid was a dream. The work itself crashed after some battle or something.

[keen plank]

Innnnteresting.

[forest gate]

The wrk sound a bit like 40k’s warp/chaos gods

[remote magnet]

I think the W'rkncacnter dont have any sense of selve. Out in space tehy are chaos, and therefore can tell themselves apart from theyr ordered environment. When they find themselves in an sufficiently chaotic environment they cant tell where they stop and theyr environment starts, so they cease to act. They forget they exist, basically

[earnest hatch]

Cool idea.

[keen plank]

Their chaos seems almost instinctual. They seem both responsible for consciousness while also inherently destabilizing to everything around them.

[lunar cove]

Yeah my impression of the w'rkncacnter is that they're less of a being and more of a force of nature

[dreamy hawk]

We don’t know. They could be a force of nature or they could be a splinter of the Jjaro. I know that’s been floated around before.

[dense fable]

i like how Orion is a deadbeat dad

[dreamy hawk]

We just know that letting one out of its gravity prison dooms the entire universe.

[dreamy hawk]

Yeah, similar for sure.

[forest gate]

It’s unsurprising, he sounds like a bit of shit person.

Based on his service record

[dense fable]

yeahbut like it's impressive how his daughter is part of mida like thats a certain level

[earnest hatch]

Does anyone get the feeling that Orion might become a quest giver at some point, the goal being to stop other runners from completing their other quests?

[dreamy hawk]

What? I didn’t know this.

I just know he’s fervently “pro torture.”

[sage lark]

where is it confirmed that philomene is his daughter

[earnest hatch]

It feels like the type of gameplay twist that Bungie might do to add a wrinkle to the PvP. The lore would fit this addition. Orion is angry he can’t get more resources to stop the runners. So maybe he joins the club and starts hiring them.

[dreamy hawk]

I hope so because he’ll be so pissed.

[dreamy hawk]

Admiral just tells him to cooperate, just like he was told to get in line with the corps and not retaliate. 😂

[earnest hatch]

Yeah. They’ve put him in a dead end. I’m thinking he might think “well I can’t retaliate, but I can use the runners as a loophole”. Using Traxus tactics against them.

[remote magnet]

His service record is given to us by MIDA. That doesnt mean its fake, but it very well COULD be.

[dreamy hawk]

Or that. That I could see, too. Very quid pro quo.

[forest gate]

I feel like MIDA doesn’t really do much to convince us of anything, we happily smashed windows for them just cause they asked us to,

[sturdy tusk]

Sorry lmao his ragebait triggered my autism

[warm thicket]

I do believe this would happen, I also believe that there would be a situation where MIDA and the other factions could hack some of the bots so you'd have to handle PvE enemies either way

[median hemlock]

hes done nothing in this server beyond post bait about scifi he hasnt read lol

[warm thicket]

Marathon's factions to me have always been about two things in particular, overindulgence and escalation

I suspect the latter will become more apparent as time goes on

The overindulgence in particular sucks for a lot of these factions because each of these factions have genuinely good reasons to exist if you strip away the horrific backstabbing and "our way is the best and most viable way" mentality and all that stuff, even MIDA has that mentality

[remote magnet]

CyAc: Make us Moneys
NuCal: Find out what the eff happened here
Traxus: Troll de Police
MIDA: Troll the Police, but with Bioweapons
Arachne: Kill some shit
SekGen:Be cool, do Drugs

[earnest hatch]

Traxus are the police but they call themselves “corporate contract enforcement agents” or some marketing shit like that.

Traxus is the perfect example of a corporation getting so big that they basically circle around back to a feudal power structure.

[warm thicket]

Like I do believe that when the 2360s famine happened that in the beginning when NuCaloric came to prominence that they genuinely wanted to help people, but everything just devolved too much into decadence

[lilac sapphire]

Very much late late late late stage hyper capitalism

[remote magnet]

Who doesnt love megacorporations

[earnest hatch]

Anyone who isn’t on the board of directors of a megacorporation.

[warm thicket]

I would say it's more than megacorps since Arachne and MIDA are in the fray, we don't know much about MIDA's history yet but I bet that they're in a similar boat, and it's revealed that Arachne started off as people worshipping cryosleep before it became a death cult

It's kinda everyone

[fair steppe]

Do you think MIDA and Arachne have merch lines? They obviously have money because they pay us for jobs and give us sponsored kits

[rotund stump]

oh boy

time for plushie tab 4 audio

[warm thicket]

MIDA _gantry plushie when

[fair steppe]

I’d buy their shirts. Whoever does their design work clearly knows what’s up

“Runnah I’m sorry we could only pay you with pocket lint and 14 credits but we spent it all on commission work. Peep these sick shirts”

[rotund stump]

ow

@plucky sierra found another one

cheeseburger audio log's misplaced to the one before

production aud's in the podluck tab

[keen plank]

Mida wears whatever, but they’re partially influenced by punk and teen fashion.

Vandal is partially based on Martian teenage streetwear and the shell designs were stolen by MIDA.

If you look at Gantry, his appearance and what he wears changes constantly. I don’t think they’re one for uniforms.

[fair steppe]

I didn’t say uniforms I said merch lines

Tshirts, plushies, posters, etc.

[keen plank]

I think they’d view merchandise as pro-organization and pro-capitalism.

[fair steppe]

Yea but they gotta make money somehow. We don’t work for free

[keen plank]

They’re the kind of group to put T-shirts in bottles and light them on fire rather than sell them.

[remote magnet]

I mean, they are a terrorist group. Selling merch? i dont know.

[rotund stump]

one more, return on invest 1/5's tab 2 aud log is also on tab 1 instead

[dreamy hawk]

Literally unusable.

[rotund stump]

💔

[blissful dirge]

They clearly have an aethestic that people adopt in a punk rock way. Idk why people would believe theyd be against it.

projection of college values most likely

[dreamy hawk]

The GLITCH series was initially used as a standard by MIDA operatives who popularized the VANDAL SHELL during insurrectionist operations on Mars. The face/vocalization pattern pairing created a uniform base identity that when used across multiple VANDAL SHELLS made it difficult for UESC and local law enforcement to identify/track the individual RUNNERS participating in illicit activities. Further, the general streetwear fashion that became a trademark of GLITCH'S various styles became a trend amongst Martian youth, adding additional complexity to any anti-RUNNER enforcement efforts—it's easier to disappear when an entire subculture rises up around your aesthetics.

FYI Vandal inspired the clothing styles, not the other way around.

[turbid nebula]

I mean it went both ways

[dreamy hawk]

Not according to the codex. Vandal adopted some street clothing to blend in, but it was Vandal doing Vandal things that made those styles trendy with the youth.

[drifting mulch]

what are the sweater arms doing on the back of Vandal and why do they glow under friendly thermals

[sterile seal]

The sleeves are hostile synthmeat tubes

[dreamy hawk]

I don’t know but I absolutely hate that they’re the brightest thing on my scope. I’m not convinced it isn’t a bug…

[pure wagon]

Question: aside from anomalous wires, were there any other tciv colony tech discovered that looks like “magic” to ppl from earth ?

[earnest hatch]

Predictive circuitry

I might be misremembering the name.

Read the codex entry on them. It’s fun.

[eternal shell]

it's where vandal stores her lunch

[lethal mantle]

sausage link storage

[sterile seal]

Dazzle camo

[earnest hatch]

I looked it up it’s predictive framework

Capable of independent integration. Applies energy from Tau Ceti IV "Anomaly" event to actualize ultimate use. Frameworks destined for sale will prepare themselves for shipment, while others will install themselves into nearby systems if that was their intended use.

[pure wagon]

Yea I just read it and I

U wot

How is it preparing itself for shipment

[dreamy hawk]

There’s that, the alien alloy, enzyme replicator maybe, reflex coils maybe, there’s a lot of “New Cascadia tech” and I’m not sure how much of it is novel.

[earnest hatch]

I think the fact that it’s sort of shaped like an insect is the clue.

[pure wagon]

I didn’t even connect it to that. It just looked like loose wire. Oh god

[dreamy hawk]

What did they use as currency in New Cascadia? 🤔

Presumably you’re not bartering predictive frameworks and they couldn’t have been selling them to Sol.

[uneven shell]

regular old credits, no? that's why we find them all over the place

[dreamy hawk]

I’d imagine the colony to function more like a commune or something. Rations handed out and everything else provided equally as needed. Like the army. But I guess even they have stores in the army…

[dreamy hawk]

Credits are company script, more or less, iirc. Useless for anything but the armory.

[uneven shell]

don't the data cards say EBT? i was wondering if that was intentional lol

[dreamy hawk]

Oh maybe; I’d need to look.

[uneven shell]

as in - https://www.fns.usda.gov/snap/ebt

https://www.tiktok.com/@austuhnn/video/7619905497340169486

[drifting mulch]

closed loop currency for the eternal debt

[lilac sapphire]

they say '300 EB uploaded' IIRC

I assume it means Extra Bux

Or EBucks perhaps

joking, but I do think its just EB

maybe its the size of the data upload, ettabytes ? is that a unit

[uneven shell]

Electronic Benefits makes sense in the context of the colony workers

[digital plaza]

Vbucks

[lilac sapphire]

now that I think about it since they are in fact data cards it makes sense if EB is a unit of measure for the amount of data contained

Exabyte

The exabyte (symbol: EB) is a unit of measurement for data equal to 1000 petabytes or one quintillion (1 000 000 000 000 000 000) bytes. (https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exabyte)

[dreamy hawk]

I really don’t think it’s an exabyte but who knows.

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/what-is-an-exabyte/

[uneven shell]

I was curious to get sense of how big an exabyte is... Youtube's total storage is estimated to be around 10-15 EB

[dreamy hawk]

That seems like a wildy inefficient amount of data use for a currency.

[dreamy hawk]

But I like this. If a gigabyte were the earth, an exabyte is the sun.

[austere elk]

Electronic 🅱️oucher

[lilac sapphire]

I don't think the data cards are in and of themselves currency. We are being reimbursed by (Cyac?) or some other benefactor for scavenging it.

The data may be someone's personal photo album or something. Colony relics

[dreamy hawk]

That’s a lot of really high quality, uncompressed data.

[lilac sapphire]

It's the future, they've got 900000000 megapixel iPhones and such

Haha

[dreamy hawk]

Checks out. 🤷

[austere elk]

Encrypted Bytes

[lilac sapphire]

Isnt there an auto-sell salvage thats called a surveillance mirror or something? A far-future type of bodycam, who knows what kind of high quality sensor data it records.

but yes it would seem that 300 EB is a shitload of data

I wonder how many EB our human conciousness is

[tired furnace]

What does “mad is the sword who severed tomorrow” mean? Is it durandal messing with the timeline

[dreamy hawk]

Or he’s just mad.

That’s from his little ramblings in Introduction?

[sage junco]

according to Cryo Archive codex entries, a Leela/Tycho/Durandal AI is 64 RB (ronnabytes), where 1 RB = 1 billion EB (source: the UESC Marathon model codex)

[lilac sapphire]

Ok im in game and it says "Data Card [XXX EB] Uploaded"

[tired furnace]

I’m not sure I saw in on a wall. I’ll look into the intro though

[sage junco]

there was also a figure in the original Marathon for the size of an AI core, can't recall it off the top of my head

[dreamy hawk]

Big brother and the crops are watching and recording everything so it’s not impossible.

[lilac sapphire]

So its gotta be exabytes right

[dreamy hawk]

🤷 it could be a lot of things tbh. It could be that or it could be EuroBucks in a nod to Cyber Punk. 🤷

[lilac sapphire]

yeah

[austere elk]

It could be data from the AI then?

That would be pretty valuable

[sage junco]

the community could collect 64 billion EB worth of data cards to reconstruct an AI model, only to find out it's a super-super-super high definition video of Rick Astley

[austere elk]

No wonder they went rampant

[lilac sapphire]

This will be my headcannon for now

[austere elk]

This theory isn't worth a single enny

[lilac sapphire]

data cards are just colonists' thumb drives

and Cyac is reimbursing us for their cat photos

[uneven shell]

what about the poker chips we pick up

[lilac sapphire]

cold hard cash

[uneven shell]

how long after the colonists disappearing did we arrive?

i'm not quite clear on that. If it's like decades or just a few months/years

[sage lark]

we dont know

last we see of them atleast based on the cinematic is 2827

[pure wagon]

This number is terrifying to me as a data engineer

[distant palm]

Just engineer better lmao /j

[sage junco]

well the Marathon launches in the year 2409 so you've got a few centuries to wrap your head around it

[pure wagon]

I can’t even fathom what that data would look like or how it would need to flow like good lord

[bold dawn]

So.... are ticks mammals? How are we milking them? Or is it like "nut milks" where we create a slurry and then strain them?

Additionally, does this mean that there is the possible existance of "tick cheese"

[digital plaza]

https://codex.cyberacme.systems/entry/premium-tick-milk/tick-milk-education?directory=World,Dire+Marsh

[sterile seal]

Electronic Banking?

[digital plaza]

Poop

[bold dawn]

oh man you are my favorite person for just having this information ready to go

[sinful hamlet]

Well If Durandal didn't called the Phor which resulted in the attack maybe the colonists could escape the anomaly. Maybe it's their tomorrow that he severed

[sage lark]

but he did

call the Pfhor

[sinful hamlet]

Yep ! Maybe my sentence wasn't well constructed lmao

Back to elementary school

[long pollen]

that last line is me when i wasnt going to play marathon till full release

[sage junco]

oh yeah, found it, end credits of M2. Yes, it's the same figure: "All late-model Pfhor personality constructs were based on sixty-four billion exobyte images of Tycho's core, taken during the years he was on the Pfhor homeworld between 2795 and 2801 AD."

[tired furnace]

So much marathon lore to take in man lol

[pure wagon]

Oh yea is there any lore on the Lab sector in cryo? Ik Durandal mentions it specifically

I didn’t know if there was smth hidden there

[remote magnet]

Im sure the colony used credits.
After all the corps lended theyr aid, expecting the colony once it made profit to repay them in the future.

[drifting garnet]

Man just, imagine the far future where a terabyte as seen about as trivially as how we view a megabyte right now, lmao

[austere elk]

Call of duty still requires a dedicated disk due to the uncompressed texture fidelity

[dreamy hawk]

🤬 automod. 😂

[dreamy hawk]

Wild stuff.

[autumn surge]

thered be a proiblem if we were using data sets that large

[pure wagon]

Atp it’s not even a dataset like idk what kind of structure it’s in or if there even would be what we know as a structure at all

[dreamy hawk]

Crystals -Stargate

[earnest hatch]

I don’t have to imagine it. I grew up in a time when a megabyte was huge. Computer storage was measured in bytes and kilobytes.

[leaden storm]

"Aw man, my shells ports are full of tick cheese..."

[sturdy tusk]

As a dutch person I need to know

[wind dust]

what do we think the flavor profile of tick cheese is

[sturdy tusk]

Tick gouda

[dreamy hawk]

Yummy.

[wind dust]

would it be like.. meaty

[dreamy hawk]

What do tick diets mostly consist of?

[sturdy tusk]

I remember dial in and used to get mad at my family being on the phone

[dreamy hawk]

Oh, sweet, sweet memories.

angry modem noises

[sturdy tusk]

Real

[dreamy hawk]

And because my family would do foreign calls I had that further into the present than most. 😩

[nova juniper]

I just posted two novella-sized texts on reddit summarizing everything i could from Maraton, if anyone is interested in reading or offering any suggestions for improvement, here it is:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Marathon/comments/1sbtolj/the_complete_story_of_marathon_part_1/
https://www.reddit.com/r/Marathon/comments/1sbtp0e/the_complete_story_of_marathon_part_2/

[dreamy hawk]

Novella? Mmm

Is there a tl;dr? 😩
(I’m kidding; I’ll gladly look it over a bit later.)

[nova juniper]

i finally openned most of the codex so there was a lot of new information there

[sturdy tusk]

My parents refused to see the need for better internet so same lmaooo, I actually had to call the company myself when I was like a teen and be like yo wtf my parents are completely oblivious but we're paying way too much for shitty internet

[nova juniper]

just past the 300 hours mark in the game

[fallen hollow]

If you're looking for anything specific, you can find it in the archive.
https://marathon.karnemir.com/codex/career/orientation

[forest gate]

Restecp

[raw jasper]

I just rewatched the trailer and is there any in game lore behind the line “Escape will make me god”

[weary portal]

Don’t remember where I saw it but I remember seeing something basically a theory that Nona is trying to develop kind of next gen battleroid shell or an entirely new thing better than shells from the data she is getting from us torturing our shells

[fiery pond]

But... Nona loves me... She would never hurt me, she said so herself..

[hazy mist]

its a durandal thing iirc

im nto the most well versed on the lore but durandals ultimate goal is to escape the heat death of the universe which will effectively make him a god(?) or something like that

[forest gate]

Wee woo wee woo we lost another one to the Sekiguichi kool-aid

[hazy mist]

inject cascadian heroin into your shell and then run around the map three times.... ill giveyou a common core and 300 credits for it

[fiery pond]

I was going for a walk anyway

[forest gate]

Durandal says it in reference to the theorised contraction of the universe, the inverse of the big bang. If he can escape that he will become a godlike being.

Everyone’s being so cryptic 🤣

[raw jasper]

What if escape makes US god

[keen plank]

It’s a line by Durandal from the original games. His goal is to escape the closure of the universe, specifically “the Big Crunch.” If he escapes the closure he’ll be able to live forever and effectively become god.

[fair steppe]

Durandal is the name of the AI from the original trilogy who acts as your quest giver and whos ultimate goal is to escape the heat death of the universe. "escape will make me god" is a direct quote from him

[feral oar]

Seems a little early to worry about that, but then again, I’m not an insane AI

[fair steppe]

He's already immortal so time isn't something that means a ton to him

10 years or a million

All the same to Durandal

[keen plank]

Not Heat death, Big Crunch. Lots of people have mixed those two up, including MyNameisByf and myself.

[feral oar]

My plan is to live forever too, but I feel like the next ten years are more pressing than the next several billion

[fair steppe]

oh yea I guess the heat death part wouldn't effect him much

[fair steppe]

You're also not an AI who can think a million times faster than a normal person

[feral oar]

Bold to assume, but you are right in this case

[visual lynx]

when I was a teen I had to call the phone company to investigate a glitch that kept disconnecting my (dialup) internet every 5 mins or so, and when I finally pressed them hard enough on it for them to find the problem it turned out to be a piece of their hardware that should have been causing the same problem for hundreds if not thousands of customers and I guess just nobody else cared enough about staying online for more than 5 minutes to give them shit about it like I did.

[forest gate]

I’m aware #📚marathon-lore-discussion message

[remote magnet]

When Nona explained her plans to me, my thought went to the ousters from the Hyperion series.
A subset of Humans that decidet not to terraform Planets, but to genetically alter themselfes to be able to settle anywhere, even in hard Vacuum.
Philosophically "We wont change the world to comform to us, we will alter ourself to fit in the world"

[lilac sapphire]

ahhhh, the salad days of internet connectivity

[lilac sapphire]

Sounds like a good idea for a Stellaris playthrough

I wonder if we'll ever come across my girl Leela again

[sterile seal]

I want Thoth-Durandal to meet IDEA-Durandal, the latter must seem a flea in comparison.

[placid abyss]

Just found Strauss’ audio logs, wtf is wrong with him?

[visual lynx]

I am expecting some interesting interaction between them as each is a fragment of a destroyed Durandal merged with another full AI, so maybe between the two of them the whole original Durandal could be reconstructed.

[sterile seal]

I wonder if Durandal was given additional tasks in this universe or if M1 Durandal was also TCIV's infrastructure liaison on the Marathon?

[visual lynx]

it’s supposed to be the same universe

[sterile seal]

I forget, is the Durandal of Durandal-Thoth even native to the final universe?

[remote magnet]

Durandal never hops universes, only the security officer did.
If the final Universe has Durandal-thoth, then he was made there

[sterile seal]

Could there three of this freak running around?

[drifting garnet]

…I know it’s not going to happen, but god imagine how unhinged this game would be that of the different Durandal’s, one’s voiced by Starr and the other by Gianni, lmao

[sterile seal]

So SO got the Durandal chip in Hang Brain in the Rage chapter and we only merge him with Thoth in the Envy chapter, while Tycho has us kill the final universe's native Durandal to prevent his capture by the Pfhor, so IDurandal is the last remnant of this universe's native incarnation.

[dreamy hawk]

Or as I recall there’s still outside the timeline ThothDurandal that’s (maybe) been pulling the strings all along.

[dreamy hawk]

His father didn’t hug him enough so to rectify that he sought to humiliate and torture his “son” at every opportunity to prove to everyone he was actually the smartest boy in the room.

[warm thicket]

He's a man that values science over everything else

[visual lynx]

well… like most things in Infinity it's unclear, but there is some unidentified entity that reaches out to the SO as he leaves a timeline and during the dream levels between timelines, and then when Durandal and Thoth are merged, their terminal style is the same as that mysterious entity, which many have interpreted as meaning that Durandal-Thoth can reach across time and between timelines and guided the SO to their own creation.

[sterile seal]

His chip at the very least crosses universes

[visual lynx]

Tycho has us kill Durandal to prevent his capture (which coincided with Durandal's own wishes) on Hang Brain at the end of Rage pt2. In Envy similar events appear to have already happened (its very unclear what's different at all between Rage pt2 and Envy, but there's a dream level between them so it seems implied that they're supposed to be different timelines), and then we merge Durandal's primal pattern into Thoth, so it's unclear if the SO in Envy has Durandal's primal pattern from Rage pt2, or if the version of him in Envy just has a primal pattern from the equivalent events earlier in Envy.

there is actually a second chip on Strange Aeons so that that level can be completed even if you're not carrying the chip from Hang Brain, which may just be a gameplay caveat or may be lore significant, it's really unclear.

[sterile seal]

In the end events end the same since Thoth-Durandal seems to exist outside of continuity so it doesn't terribly matter, but I think that makes it possible for there to exist an unaltered Durandal, IDurandal, and merged Durandal to all co-exist. Either way, expect the second chip would presumably mean that the Envy SO hadn't yet gotten the primal pattern and the chip came with you across timelines.

[hot thicket]

Durandel and SO wait for us beyond time

[visual lynx]

in the place where monsters are, undead SO waits dreaming

[sterile seal]

Poor IDEAndal has to measure up against his god form and his complete form on a thumb drive

[drifting mulch]

I need a book with chapters to fully understand the lore ngl

[sterile seal]

I wonder what Leela is up to rn given she seems to have been shipped back with Tycho this time

[visual lynx]

she was shipped back with Tycho in every timeline, but at least in the M2 timeline pirates stole her en route and sold her off after which she went rampant and seized control of an interstellar network.

I'm hoping that's still the case in this timeline and so she can in principle show up anywhere with FTL internet.

[sterile seal]

Could be this is the timeline where she got back to homeworld and made a mockery of

[tranquil sparrow]

Runnah, are BOBs cannibal?

[forest gate]

#justiceforleela

[visual lynx]

she deserves better

[eternal knoll]

i wanna meet rampant leela so much

[sharp vine]

Saaaaaaame - we’ve gotten halo books, so a marathon book would be stellar!

[forest gate]

I wish we had never gotten the live action halo tv series. Master Cheeks #neverforget

[twin trout]

brazenly proclaiming that they never interacted with the source material

like cro

why make a show with that ip then

[forest gate]

Some clown shit

[sudden pollen]

Crazy

[forest gate]

Literally had Joseph Staten on tap

I understand you need to make changes moving from one medium to another but what they did was just idiotic.

Especially when the source material deals with child soldiers, religious fanaticism, transhumanism, AI, militarism, existentialism

[drifting mulch]

the excuse they gave for noncanon was alternate universe...understandable. but the season 1 writers were HBO softcore 🦐 drama writers. they knew the material but didn't understand the audience. yes the UNSC were dirtbags to outer colonies but god damn Halo fans had been waiting for live action John Halo crushing covie scum for 20 years! i heard season 2 was loads better but i just couldn't keep continuing after Chief took his helmet off (not the main problem but the tipping point). season 1 was a soap opera with Halo skin, it hurt to watch

[forest gate]

A good writer/director could have run both narratives simultaneously like Eric Nylund did in the books.

They went so over the top with the UNSC they made them look like Saturday morning cartoon villains.

The other thing is the UNSC weren’t saints but they weren’t inept either.

[dense tendon]

i stg gantry's manner of speaking is the most idiotic, meaningless, buzzword laden madlib larp of a teenagers idea of anarchy when he'd heard the concept described to him once while he wasnt listening cuz goku was boutta punch the brains outta cell on TV.
its a masterpiece of writing, honestly. guy straight up tells you MIDA is same shit different day as the rest of the corps from the word go, and if you bought the idea of bein a rebel against the system its your own fault, he wasn't sellin it to you.

[sudden pollen]

Yup

[dense tendon]

the man is as subtle as a molotov, and thats the point. love it.

like the best part is the actual rebels against the status quo are arachne but theyre not trying to make society better theyre trying to murder death.
which is literally all they care about in any capacity, and they are parasocially fangirling over the runners cuz theyre like the closest thing to what arachne wants to make all of humanity into. people who dont die when theyre killed.
i also dont think they want to murder death cuz they view it as evil, neither. they want the reaper iced so that murder no longer has an endgame. so that they can keep doin it, forever. cuz if people die when theyre murdered, eventually you run outta murder.

respectable, honestly. a mans gotta have his hobbies.

[green plume]

Mida is the biggest joke of a faction

[drifting mulch]

his speech in the command wing for Truth/Lies 6/6 was sooo angsty lol

[sudden pollen]

_gantry is angst-maxxing

[drifting mulch]

His reasons are valid but he does not have a way with words. But tbh how would one deliver speeches against the government and still sound cool 🤔

[dense tendon]

imma be real i havent gotten very far with MIDA rep yet so i dont know whats goin on vis a vis his specific backstory but he doesn't strike me as having any reasons, much less valid ones.
he reads like hes using populist rhetoric to promote MIDAs interests which seem to, at the moment, be about profit derived via smash and grab data retrieval that coincidentally involve smashing UESC employees and grabbing UESC property.
so, again, no different than any other faction, just paradoxically more upfront about the methods if not motive.

his words slide off my brain like they're coated in oil.

[twin trout]

mida's whole gimmick is blowing up corpos and the uesc because of their previous attempt at establishing an independent mars

[dense tendon]

he doesnt say anything that means anything.

[twin trout]

they failed and as a result all they really can do is just bomb people x3

their current obj on tau ceti is proving that the uesc is lying since in sol the uesc is basically saying everything is fine on tau ceti

or at the very least downplaying what happened hugely

[dense tendon]

yeah im saying this as praise of his writing.
he is a representative of a manufactured rebellion with no real ideology, just violent ambition wrapped in ex post facto "justice." hes beautifully well done.

[twin trout]

yeas :3

even how they wrap up everything they say in antonyms

mida is exactly what it says it is: fire

[dense tendon]

guy is saying The Words about The Company doing The Things and stoking up The People to bring The Fight so everyones too busy smashing heads in to notice him rifling through their pockets.

[twin trout]

x3

[dense tendon]

hes like a less redeemable johnny silverhand. johnny, at least, can be made to see hes been a meaningless monster his whole life and his cause was never real he just used it to justify his insecurity.
gantry? he knows hes full of shit. he knows you know. he doesn't care. youre still gonna get paid to do his errands. you dont care either. you can trust him and he can trust you because neither of you care about anything beyond getting paid to break shins.

[twin trout]

I'd go further and say he doesn't even do it for any material gain

he's purely in it for spite

[dense tendon]

yeah id also say its similar for runners. they might be in this for money but theres so many easier ways to get money than becoming digital pilots for disposable murderbots unless you really enjoy violence.

[twin trout]

I mean we are the runners

in a meta sense our runners do it for the reasons we do it

:3

[dense tendon]

do you play a pvp shooter cuz you dont like shooting?

im agreeing with you, to be clear.

[twin trout]

oh <w<

I don't get your point sowwy

ohhhh do you mean how like to even be a runner you have to enjoy doing the kind of stuff mida does? :3

[dense tendon]

in universe, runners are digitized human minds who did this for a variety of reasons but now find themselves in near perpetual debt to cyberacme/sekiguchi and work to pay it off via wetwork.
but they knew that was gonna happen going in. so that situation was acceptable to them. which tells me the in universe runners are also receptive to committing violence.
meanwhile, this is a video game where you shoot digital people like figures to death to take their stuff. some of the figures are even controlled by other real people, trying to do the same. its a competition to see whos the better at shooting and looting. games are for fun, and this games about competitive violence. so its safe to assume you play a game like this because you too are receptive to violence.
which isnt a bad thing on either level. its just how it is.

[twin trout]

I see I see :3

[dense tendon]

meaning, gantry wants to hit people with a crowbar not because he hates them, but because doing so gets him money that he can use to fund hitting more people with more expensive crowbars.
you, the runner, also enjoy doing similar activities for arguably similar reasons.

[twin trout]

yea yea, I get you now :3

[dense tendon]

gantry is a wonderful mirror to the player. you might care about whats going on, might get invested in these stories, but at the end of the day its all in service to gettin big killcounts and bigger payouts.

same thing with charter. hes just more upfront about the violence than the money, tryna find a way to do it for free

[twin trout]

charter is an interesting case because he seems to derive religious euphoria from such acts

we are tools for him to send to attain whatever enlightenment is for him

[dense tendon]

its a delightfully refreshing bit of honesty and maturity to sophisticated topics that you barely ever see in any fiction, let alone games.

[dense tendon]

i think arachnes whole cult deal is inextricably intertwined with sadistic bloodlust in its philosophy.
individual members might assign various weights to the rituals and trappings but im pretty sure at the end of the day most of em are just perverts for murder wrapping it in a religious and philosphical context to justify it to others and themselves.

[forest gate]

I wonder who goes around restocking all the arms lockers, tool carts, medical cabinets and so on, on TC4

[dense tendon]

which, like, again. thats awesome, look at my faction tag lmao

[twin trout]

oh yea definitely, I think charter is like the only person who truly believes in the message, he knowingly employs people who only care about killing because at the end of the day it achieves what he wants :3

[hidden geyser]

nah mate the thermodynamics of violence is no joke we are doing a serious study with it

[dense tendon]

i dont think charter believes in the message so much as he believes in anything at all. i think charters so far deep in this affair hes murdered whatever humanity was ever in him and all thats left is dogma that percieves nothing but itself, let alone reality.

its admirable, honestly.

impeccable commitment to the bit.

[twin trout]

hehehe x3

I wonder where he gets his wealth from

[hidden geyser]

if only liam o brien voiced charter, he would be like 100 times more menacing and accurate

[dense tendon]

well murder victims tend not to need their money nor object to you taking it.

[forest gate]

I find vandal’s voice annoying

[dense tendon]

i think if he was liam obrien hed be infinitely more boring, honestly.
like, i like liam obrien a lot. i really do. asuras wrath is an all time great. but the sort of detached menace charter brings, that dead voice speaking calm glass at you, thats not something i believe liam could do.

charter doesnt read like hes trying to be menacing, imposing, or cool. he doesnt care what you or anyone thinks. hes extolling the arachne truth. those worthy will listen.

[twin trout]

he speaks with a calm fervour (if that makes sense I know they're technically at odds with one another)

[hidden geyser]

bro has never heard illidan before

[dense tendon]

illidan is exactly why i think he cant do this

[dense flare]

I feel the this about thief, I just cant with this fake accent man

[dense tendon]

if youve ever played mass effect 1, sovereign on virmire is an excellent example of how sounding imposing doesnt mean sounding aggressive.
sovereign speaks as if he is mumbling thoughts to himself about a bug hes found on his kitchen floor.
calmly. indifferent to communication, as his words are for himself. filled with disdain to the idea that what was before him mattered. he never raises his voice, he never threatens, or speaks aggression. he doesnt care what the speck of dust before him wants. it will be gone soon.

[hidden geyser]

ok ur right sovereign is perfect

[dense tendon]

its a menace born of impossible distance in might. godzilla doesnt need to get down on the ground and roar in my face to scare me. it would actually undermine his image, a bit. thats goofy, whyd he do that?
similarly, charters voice works cuz he doesnt sound like he even really cares if youre there or not. he is preaching because the Word of Arachne is what must be preached. if we learn of its truths, then he wins because more progress towards the goal. if we dont, he wins cuz we're probably still gonna murder the people he tells us to or die trying and either way murder happens yay murder!

[hidden geyser]

i do hope to be charters greatest skinner one day

[dense tendon]

get in line, buddy. or dont, either way, youre gonna have to stop me from yoinkin your face for my cape made of quilted faces.

charters is goin on there too.

im gonna take all the skin

[forest gate]

Reina Guthrie her VA is of Asian heritage of Japanese decent IIRC, so I don’t know if she necessarily faking anything or just pulling from influences in own personal life 🤷‍♂️

[dense tendon]

-# yeah that also seemed like wackily racist ngl i dont think it was meant to but man

[forest gate]

Keith David would have been a good charter.

[dense tendon]

potentially.

[forest gate]

I do like Charter’s VA though

[dense tendon]

after hearing him not even really try to imitate lance reddick's cadence in d2 i kinda dont super feel like he has a lot of range outside the arbiter or spawn anyway.

like theres serious keith and wacky keith and every role is one of those two.

[forest gate]

Lance Reddick is hard though, that’s a man with a singularly unique voice and speech cadence.

I feel like Keith did a good job as zavala overall in the final shape.

I generally think all the faction VAs have been great. My favourites are ONI and Vulcan.

[dense tendon]

yeah, like, i get not trying to imitate his sound, but to jus, yknow, treat it like any other character felt bad to me. the cadence was a major part of zavala, it was a very specific variation of his normal cadence for zavala.

zavala didnt talk like reddick, reddick made an effort to give zavala his own manner of speech.

so it felt disappointing to see david speak like the arbiter, to me.

[forest gate]

Yep, I know what you mean.

[forest gate]

Might have been a timing issue though that didn’t give him a lot of time to get on the project and really become the character.

[dense tendon]

yeah i mean, its not inexcusable by any means. i jus didnt enjoy what we got.

tbf i also dipped immediately after beating final shapes campaign but that was cuz ten years of my life had already gone into that story, i was immensely satisified with the ending i got and happy to move on.

turns out tho that bungie is aggressively good at gettin hooks in me by promising pvp.

so it goes.

[dense flare]

I have a personal thing against people putting on accents no matter if they got the “right background”. I’m Slavic and people have been mocking my dad’s accent as a joke so its a touchy subject to me lmao

[vital breach]

Lore interpretation here, the Encrypted Communique I believe may hold the answer as to why Durandal is still aboard the Marathon. Speaking to the emergency diagnostics system Durandal says "I will stay buried here until they repurpose your circuitry, at which point I will slip out and away into other systems, where and when it is safe to do so."
While our Durandal in the originals explored the stars, he may have had a fragment of himself tucked away in this IDEA system all this time. In the first AI Subroutine entry he also speaks as if he's been caged up for a long time, finally able to expand back into the Marathon's systems. This may not be the same Durandal we were with at L'howon.
Not sure if anyone else came to the same conclusions already but I thought that was neat.

[forest gate]

Fair enough bud, I’m a person of mixed descent myself 70% of the time I have a pretty neutral, mildly English adjacent accent but 30% of the time I speak with an Indian/Malaysian accent, I don’t do this consciously, I switch between accents based on the people I’m interacting with.

So who’s to say what her home accent is vs her out of home accent is.

[sage lark]

Yeah we pretty much came to this conclusion aswell

But good job figuring it out on your own

We had arguments about this for 2 weeks almost lol

[vital breach]

Ah I feel late as ever to the lore party, lmao.

[dense tendon]

tbh thats kinda both not comparable and immature. like yeah it sucks that it happens to you and shouldnt have happened to you but other people doing an accent they may not naturally possess for purposes other than mockery shouldnt be decried just because youre sensitive about an entirely unrelated topic.

[dense flare]

I just said that I can’t stand her voice for that reason and that it’s a personal thing. Calm down wtf

[dense tendon]

and all i said was your reason was silly.

[drifting mulch]

so death [trying to exfil from Cryo] is freedom...for Durandal

[dense flare]

Lmao okay

[dense flare]

Honestly good point

[forest gate]

It’s hard to quit Bungie entirely. The gameplay is second to none imo.

And when they want to deliver on lore they can too. So can’t blame ya for coming back.

I didn’t pre-order marathon cause I was pretty salty with Post final shape and Edge of Fate. But after the game launched and I saw the gameplay and read some of the lore, I was back in.

[dense tendon]

im not mad or anything, homie. i feel for you, i really do. i jus think you could stand to take things less personally.

[sage lark]

I just started playing D2 again, i havent played since Forsaken

[delicate yoke]

What is best to take from that is he was to say was that , someone mocking an accent is not good but if someone is doing an accent for their own reason , especially if it may be somewhat natural, it's not the same. Since it's not out of mockery or rudeness

[dense tendon]

yeah.

[dense flare]

The way you interact with me is the only thing I take personally

But I’m not gonna engage further because god dayum lmao

[dense flare]

I didn’t say she is mocking anyone, what I’m trying to say is that it reminds me of situations and that its just a personal thing (a me issue)

[forest gate]

How are you finding the experience?

I’ve played every major expansion but usually dip for the middle 2 seasons and come back for the last season. I almost always felt overwhelmed by the changes each year.

[sage lark]

New Light is kinda confusing, im just gonna do all the campaigns and exotic missions

Maybe dungeons too

And then portal

Just to farm gear

And get a gist of the story

[forest gate]

I wish you luck, campaigns are decent WItch Queen and Final shape are the standouts but a lot of context is lost cause the seasonal stories aren’t in the game anymore.

Portal is… well I’ll let you form your own opinion on that.

I’d personally like to see Destiny adopt the priority contract system from marathon

[sage lark]

I kinda hope we still get more Destiny cuz I wanna experience it mid active expansion

Hopefully atleast this year the DLC etc

[dense tendon]

im also saying its a you issue. the issue is you conflating bullying of you via mockery of your father with the existence of accents you deem fake.
if im being honest theres a much more disciminatory history against asian accents in english than eastern european accents, much more racism and belittlement of asian people speaking their mother tongue, so youll forgive me if i dont particularly find it appropriate to describe her accent so dismissively under this pretext

youre doing the same thing youre complaining about, essentially.

[dense flare]

Thank you for clarification, hope you have the day you deserve

[dense tendon]

im not gonna be condescended to by a bigot.

anyway. imma head out. skin the rest of you later.

[frank fern]

that the guy that voices Kayo in val?

[frank fern]

nvm im wrong lol he voices arbiter in halo..... thats why i remember that name

[forest gate]

https://youtu.be/7Gr0pKI-eeg?si=5D07uR-q18Hb29i6

He was also captain Anderson in the mass effect trilogy.

[rocky holly]

Whoa, bigots in my Christian marathon?

[forest gate]

When Destiny is good, it’s the goose that lays the golden eggs for Bungie but Pete Parsons and co have been terrible stewards of the studio.

Hopefully Justin Truman (Mr Overdelivery himself, and yes I know the actual context of the GDC talk cause I listened to it.) can right the ship.

[forest gate]

Honestly, I don’t think anyone was being bigoted but some wires were definitely crossed and then tensions flared and we end up with an old fashioned shitshow.

[sage lark]

Lot of people wrote it off as dead already and just wanting 3

[rocky holly]

Hell yeah

[sage lark]

Which I understand since the main story people have been with for 10 years ended in Final Shape

[dense tendon]

tried to tell em peaceful. didnt like it, so i didnt bother.

[rocky holly]

Fighting on the internet. You can always tell whose mothers were drinking when they were pregnant.

[forest gate]

I personally think 3 is the only real way to move forward. It’s truly the only way to bring in new people. Because D2 is not good at that.

[sage lark]

Question is if it can realistically happen, considering the current situation

[forest gate]

It do be like that sometimes

[dense tendon]

swhy i dont fight. i jus take skins.

break shins, take skins, commit sin.

[forest gate]

No idea, but I feel like they can keep limping along with D2 a game that wasn’t meant to last 7 years, with years of technical debt in the engine or they can bite the bullet and hope papa Sony has enough faith in them to deliver D3 on the latest version of the tiger engine, complete with all the learnings they’ve had over the last decade.

[sage lark]

I mean it is their only live service studio I believe

So heres hoping

If D3 is good I will hop on at launch

i would even play D1 classic on Pc

[forest gate]

I’m hoping all the positive reviews of Marathon is giving Bungie some leverage in negotiating with Sony.

[forest gate]

I’d be so down.

[rocky holly]

Wow. Teach me your ways...

[dense tendon]

jus did.

thats them, right there.

[forest gate]

There’s some Charles Manson-esque subplot at play here.

[dense tendon]

go out and spread the good words, man. remember theyre pronounced best with baseball bats.

...i feel like gantry.

[forest gate]

Their pronouns are crack/thud

[trail quartz]

What do you guys think will a Battleroid/Security Officer or the 9 Battleroid on Tau Ceti from the classic Marathon Triology will look like in the latest marathon we have currently if bungie hypothetically added them?

I know for the fact they might look like Destroyer for the outfit, but what about their face?

Someone correct me if I am wrong, Battleroids in lore are “dead soldiers that were repurposed into undead cyborgs, bones replaced with titanium”?

Plus I keep hearing theories about the Security officer is the Solider from Pathways into Darkness. If the security officer was from the “40s or “50s” in Marathon universe lore wise.

Plus marathon is based in 2800+? That means his bodies would’ve been decayed overtime for the human body or full skeletal with no brain to transfer, because the organs are gone unless they put his body on a cryo pod somewhere in the pathways into darkness timeline.

Anyways would he look like full terminator looking or necrotic looking underneath that armor or silicon skin wrapped the decaying flesh of the 10 battleroids aboard the marathon from the classic trilogy to make them more “human”? Because in the original lore, the 10 Battleroids were hidden among the colonists?

[rocky holly]

I like to role play on the internet too.

owo notices your durandal

[forest gate]

The terminator but with rotting flesh?

[trail quartz]

Exactly my first thought,

I thought they might look like the runners we have for their colorful flat skin texture but… then I realise.. the runner shells are “synthetic”, not “cyborgs”

Plus if I had to guess… the Battleroids are like the precursors to the runner shells program.

[dense tendon]

considering no one ever mentions that and the mjolnir battleroid is depicted numerous times, all a mere century before this game takes place and none with any such decay, i dont think so.

[forest gate]

The runners are bio-synthetic

Not to uhm actually you!

[dense tendon]

the only thing ever close is the ending of infinity depicting his long dead corpse, with durandal noting that his mind had left long ago to become infinity during his rampancy.

[trail quartz]

Might be some “jarro” alien stuff happening to their original bodies probably before the marathon ship was made, judging the alien from the pathways into darkness contacted the president around 50s was theorised to be a Jarro, because it knew of the W’reckanter presence in the pyramid. Maybe the jarro gave humanity few of their “knowledge”?

Speaking of pathways into darkness… is it official or just theories tied to the marathon lore, because some YouTube videos mentioned about that game in marathon timeline lore videos.

[forest gate]

I don’t think it’s ever been explicitly said that pathways is canonically part of marathon.

But there’s the level editor Easter egg

[dense tendon]

https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/marathongame/images/b/bc/Marathon_320x480.jpg

guy got a normal face

[visual lynx]

but it contains mentions of one alien race in common (the Jjaro) and descriptions from Pathways (of the Dreaming God) closely match those of another from Marathon (the W'rkncacnter)

[vital breach]

Pathways to Marathon is like Marathon to Halo, there are familiar names and nods to the previous game but nothing is concrete

[dense tendon]

theres connections all over.

[visual lynx]

Marathon to Halo is a much looser connection because in addition to the nods there are explicit contradictions.

Marathon nods to Pathways but also doesn't contradict it.

[dense tendon]

theres connections in myth.

[forest gate]

The Security officer’s appearance is a retcon IIRC, because when the game first launched there was no artwork of him but an artist made a depiction after the game was launched and Bungie retroactively made that the look of the security officer.

[dense tendon]

might even be some in oni, but im not recalling much.

[dense tendon]

the original game has a sprite for him for multiplayer. this is from the second game but also that doesnt contradict the fact hes never been depicted to have corpseface.

or even as looking anything other than a normal guy

[forest gate]

Yeah it explicitly stated that cyborgs were meant to be indistinguishable from people

[visual lynx]

and the M1 manual specifically talks about him being just part of the team of humans, and the other nine were secretly integrated among the humans too

[visual lynx]

the original game also depicted him in chapter screens

[dense tendon]

so considering his corpse at the final moment of the universe's existence is shown as a slightly withered arm with bone sticking out of a mostly intact sleeve and glove, i dont think his face would have rotted away by numarathons time.

bro is gonna keep.

[forest gate]

I suspect as long as whatever powers his synthetic parts is functional, his skin will remain healthy and intact.

[trail quartz]

Maybe they just slap “fake silicon skin” or “proto runner shell skin” around the 10 battelroids face probably to avoid the “uncanny valley effect” to hide their decayed faces for the colonists?

Because in real life we do have few androids/robots with fake human skin rubber material thingy?

[forest gate]

My impression of how Strauss made the cyborg is that he very much went down the Frankenstein’s monster path. Using dead people like in Universal Soldier.

[dense tendon]

i dont see why jjaro tech wouldnt preserve tissue it reanimates.

[trail quartz]

Actually that might make more sense than my “proto runner shell skin” theory for their 10 Battleroids then.

[trail quartz]

Don’t we have a lore about the “fungus” or “bacteria” in dire marsh were reanimating dead non-human tissue?

Some peeps theorised the anomaly might be Jarro Tech or Jarro “Metaphysical” stuff going around.

Maybe the president and his associates around the pathways into darkness universe timeline were given by this knowledge by the Jarro but the actual reanimating dead tissue for humans instead?

Maybe the one in dire marsh might be a flawed version of that judging it only reanimated non human tissues?

I need to find that lore somewhere in YouTube, think it might’ve been hiddenxperia or someone else talking about this “bacteria”

[craggy finch]

The Mjolnir on the Marathon are designated Mark IV, perhaps the process became more refined compared to how rudimentary the construction of the Thermopylae/Icarus Battleroids is described

Security Officer assumed he was a normal human with an entire history on Mars and spent years with no indications that anything was off besides his size and physical strength

[dense tendon]

jus noticed the guy from earlier dm'd me, sayin i had valid points but mad i called him racist and a bigot, saying it was insulting.
touched by the olive branch, i tried to tell him how i attempted to clarify that i was sending criticism and not attacks, and that i may have been mistaken in assuming that there was no point in trying to keep the peace with someone so determined to refuse it.
couldnt go through, homie blocked me. c'est la mort.

ah well. ill forget he exists tomorrow, he'll still be mad accents exist.

[trail quartz]

Found it

https://youtu.be/bFsXmgtw574?si=HzMxb68OcobWS3BY

skip to 9:00

I have a feeling an special group of humans before tau Ceti must’ve had that knowledge by the jarro if we add pathways into darkness as a pinch of salt. But this knowledge worked on humans for the Battleroid, but the one on Tau Ceti is a flawed version by the Anomaly in dire marsh. Maybe the Anomaly is a faulty “Jarro Metaphysical” or “Tech” currently?

[craggy finch]

We know Jjaro have gravity manipulation tech and can mess with biology

[forest gate]

ThatEscalatedQuickly.GIF

[sudden pollen]

Wow!

[forest gate]

I know this marathon lore, but I’m gonna talk halo lore for a tic.

One of the things that got lost in sauce when the forerunners were made a separate alien species in Halo 4 and not the ancient humans was all the cool sci-fi biology about the Spartan-II kids and their special genes that made them suitable candidates for the Spartan-II program, the implication being that the kids were the start of genetic evolution that made the forerunners what they ended being.

[craggy finch]

I consider 343 continuity separate

Halo 3 is the end of the Bungie Haloverse for me

[dense tendon]

whether true or not its immaterial to the topic. delineating the continuities in this way prevents discussion of this specific subject, as it is transitional between continuities.

akin to raising a distinction of only caring about how submersibles navigate the ocean when discussing a vehicle that can dive underwater and also fly.

like its gotta do both, yknow

[forest gate]

Yeah, 343 has felt like fanfic.

[dense tendon]

im also not denying theyre very seperate

im jus sayin that dont add anything to the convo, its restating the premise, lol.

[forest gate]

I’ll be real, I’ve no idea what’s going on.

[dense tendon]

nothin

jus makin an idle observation is all

[forest gate]

I wonder where the season 2 lore will go, I hope we get some answers but I also want them to keep the mystery/investigative part of the storytelling going.

I do and maybe I’m weird for this but I hope shit is really fucked up and creepy as heck. I wouldn’t mind some event horizon type vibes.

[trail quartz]

Nothing weird about liking this actually, I actually like something being unknown and not delivered to us as an explanation.

[pure wagon]

So I got caught in the start of a mida lockdown at outpost

And uh….yeah those screams they recorded from the colonists. Damn

[junior holly]

there are lockdown events on outpost?

[twin trout]

mida contract

means they're in command wing

[nocturne estuary]

ODST is the GOAT tho

[sage lark]

Yeah its peak

But i love 3 the most personally

[junior holly]

ah yeah that quest was awesome

[pure wagon]

This wasn’t in command wing. This happened over the dormitory

[twin trout]

no the people doing the quest were in command

is what I mean

the lockdown thingies go elsewhere

they serve as big screens for gantry to do his monologue

people in command have to defend the room from uesc for 3mins to keeo the broadcast on

[pure wagon]

I see

Now I wonder what was happening to make those ppl scream like that tho

[drifting mulch]

completing that contract is hell on TCIV

[craggy finch]

The common thread of that final contract set is the cover up of the Pfhor invasion, so it's probably recordings from the attack

[craggy finch]

Yeah I say Halo 3 rather than Reach because that's chronologically the last

[forest gate]

The only part about Halo 4 I liked was the exploration of the relationship between chief and Cortana. Everything else was not great. I pretend Halo 5 didn’t happen and infinite’s campaign was fine but it was built on a pile of dung so there’s only so much you can polish a turd.

[forest gate]

What I don’t understand is why UESC covered up the Pfhor invasion to the colonists.

I get why UESC in the present game are withholding information as to not create a panic back on earth but why did they UESC personnel try to cover it up with colonist.

What did they stand to gain from that?

[craggy finch]

The colonists seem vaguely aware of an “incident” but they cover up the finer details regarding Pfhor and S’pht study

[forest gate]

But why?

[craggy finch]

The weapon looted from the Cryo compiler is engineered from a mix of alien and human tech

So New Cascadia was likely doing some sus shit

Area 51 style

[sage lark]

UESC cover up

[craggy finch]

There was also S’pht cult developing

So another reason to limit information

[forest gate]

But to what end? You know what I mean. What did they gain from covering it up?

[sage lark]

population control

less hysteria

[craggy finch]

It’s possible that the cult was formed from a scientist who had access to the bodies, developed an existential crisis and took the S’pht as a evidence of a higher power

That revelation seems reason enough to cover it up

[forest gate]

I feel like people might have felt some level of panic but the UESC could have easily spun the narrative that they were more than capable of repelling the aliens given how handedly the security officer dealt with things.

[craggy finch]

Well that was the problem too

The Mjolnir weren’t supposed to be there

So on top of aliens you have cyborg corpses acting as sleeper agents

From MIDA

[forest gate]

They didn’t have to explain how the security officer achieved what he achieved.

Just that he was a capable soldier and they could have spun that it was a team of spec ops.

It’s an easier narrative to digest IMO

Suppression just gives MIDA more power. If the UESC suspected that there were sleeper agents on TCIV then they should have gone with weaving a lie into the truth.

The most believable lies have a hint of truth to them.

🤷‍♂️

[craggy finch]

I think they were also actively messing around with them

Orion recovers quite a lot of S’pht samples

The colonists definitely knew there were aliens and even a colonist unfrozen after the invasion pulled a prank relating to the simulacrum problem

So even people who woke up afterwards knew to some extent

[forest gate]

It’s like an onion, peel back a layer just to reveal another layer.

Tauception

[scenic iron]

Did this character ever have an official name, or nah

[pure wagon]

Didn’t Orion even run into a s’pht in the crashed transport at outpost or smth?

[craggy finch]

Yeah then got slimed

[forest gate]

Not that I know of

[craggy finch]

The only reference is the manual saying “you are a security officer of the Marathon”

He may also have the code name Mjolnir Recon Number 54

[scenic iron]

Interesting 🤔

[forest gate]

You are him, he is you. You are destiny.

[scenic iron]

Maybe he was just some clone etc

[craggy finch]

He’s some kind of cyborg sleeper agent

But they don’t get into the specifics

There’s some cyborgs, he’s one of them, but he has murky memories and recalls his father’s last words in the manual

[scenic iron]

Maybe we will find out more information during the life span of Marathon

Are the OG games worth playing today? Or they are just too dated now

[craggy finch]

It’s kind of like a more wordy and less boomer shooter classic Doom

No jumping but you run like Speedy Gonzalez

Quite a lot of puzzles

[scenic iron]

Oh haha

It might be fun

[craggy finch]

They’re all free anyway

On the Aleph One website and Steam

[scenic iron]

Nice 👍

[dense tendon]

no game is "too dated," newer games don't make older games "worse," nor the other way around. they're different cuz they're from different times. gettin em to run is one thing, whether you like em or not is another entirely.

the flint tip of a spear wielded by a cro-magnon will perforate your gut same as a 5.56 round out of a rifle employed by a marine. the fact its easier to experience for one than the other is irrelevant.

also like yeah they're free go look up aleph one, worst you can do is waste time lol

[nocturne estuary]

They are fun if you like old school shooters but be ready for a maze

[dense tendon]

first ones mazey. the rest are much better in that regard. which is to say, when they get mazey they're doing it for a reason

[nocturne estuary]

Yeah, the first one has some infamous sections but they are better about it in the others

Marathon Infinite is fucked up lorewise. Its really cool but more challenging to follow along with7

[dense tendon]

yever read a story, it seems mostly to be about one thing, right, following this one plot, and then in the third act it opens up with a reveal that recontextualizes everything that's happened so far? so much so that going back and experiencing the story the second time it becomes this entirely different experience?

you ever try and read house of leaves? find the plot in dark souls games? hell, yever engage in powerscaling? shit where you gotta look at all sorts of different sources and various statements and vague mysteries to piece together whats even happening let alone whatever point is trying to be made or understood?

marathon infinite is the third act that makes the first two seem fresh. marathon infinite is the story you have to assemble, via inference and symbology. marathon infinite is both of these and more. infinitely more.

and thats so beautifully the point of marathon infinite. its what it's about.

[rotund stump]

nope, just our friendly neighbor SO

[twilit current]

Dogpiling to say yes! Im loving 1994 so far! Its neat to get some exploration on MIDA and the Marathon colony

I think its safe to assume that the new game probably tweaked the story of the old one a bit in retrospect but im loving it excited to meet Durandal

[sterile dew]

.

[solid pawn]

I think they’re using the various timelines stuff from the third marathon game to change the story in a more buildable way. And they have selected a “different“ timeline, so that they can somewhat redo the lore for today’s Marathon.

To clarify, this is not my theory this is from other various people.

[merry charm]

just realized triage is wearing shorts

[twilit current]

and im all about that! excited to get to 3 and see what its like: its cool theyre using already-established narrative tools to lightly retcon things without "invalidating" past games

[south oar]

The UESC bots, the heavier more advanced ones have "For trained operators only" on the sides of their heads, so why would they just be robots?

I keep thinking about this.

[sage lark]

you can hear it being piloted in one of the Truth/Lies codex entries

by a UESC officer

remotely

[turbid nebula]

Counterpoints:

1. AI-controlled weaponry is highly prohibited. They need to have as much plausible deniability as possible.
2. An AI-controlled robot can still have an operator at times.

[verbal mountain]

might be dumb and might be talked about to death but do we know what the little dead alien guys are in the loot room post-compiler? the little orange guys with beaks like a squid and purple/pink blood? the only OG marathon enemy i could think of with that colour blood was wasps but the bodies dont really look like them

do we know what blood the squishy bits of s'pht have? that or just some weird tick variant as the room is covered in tick gubbins is the only other things i can think of

[pure wagon]

I’ve never been that far in cryo and I’ve never seen any pictures of them

[verbal mountain]

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/350079791237562375/1490055526590054523/image.png?ex=69d2a9d9&is=69d15859&hm=4fcfa7d3a2193fd0749727e7af174ba5f251424a919e4adbecc37714b38ffd50& no image embedding in this channel, does this work?

[pure wagon]

It worked if I click it but the image isn’t very clear

[verbal mountain]

every video i can find they just run right past them to the loot lol so i cant really get a good image

[pure wagon]

Looks like a sort of tick wearing a mask ?

Just what the hell is all that goop anyway

[verbal mountain]

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/350079791237562375/1490056312476794960/image.png?ex=69d2aa94&is=69d15914&hm=3f9876db1b1bbf4b8c5ff2de511bf00515ec5a0db606ae1467a6985e58f7f865&

ive never noticed the little wormy bits before actually

https://youtu.be/pD75v7a1x2I?t=1583 salts video seems highest quality ive found so far

[pure wagon]

It definitely looks like tick stuff. But why would they bring tick stuff on board? There’s no reason to use the ship as a farm

[verbal mountain]

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/350079791237562375/1490058459901726941/image.png?ex=69d2ac94&is=69d15b14&hm=75e901f25b900f4dd1ac2f874b11f95728f3e7777d9e62c3f5353d3d31faeb15& gets weirder the more i look in high quality lol. they have little limbs in the fetal position as well, i dont think they match anything from the OG games unless theyre a big redesign. been wondering what they were since the first compiler clear cos nothing else in the game has purple blood as far as im aware

i dont see wings or anything to imply wasps either which are the only OG enemy with purple blood i think

they kind of look like the biological bits of s'pht from the illustrations in the originals so maybe thats what theyre supposed to be but they also talk about how they disintegrate on death most of the time so so many bodies being around is weird too

[pure wagon]

what in the seven hells

[sudden pollen]

Hmm

[verbal mountain]

really cant tell what the white bit is honestly lol, i registered it as kind of a squid beak but i have no clue

[unreal slate]

probably a drinkable cheeseburger

[blissful arch]

Not that we have a full answer but so far is the consensus that DuranDEA is distinct from the Durandal that left with the S’pht?

Timeline jumping notwithstanding

[sage lark]

could those not just be looker redesigns?

[verbal mountain]

defo possible but apparently wrong blood colour and i cant see all the eyes they originally had

but definitely possible, maybe theyre like the tick mamas

[pure wagon]

do ticks have queens?

and hell, again, even if it's tick stuff, why is it on the marathon??

[muted siren]

What if s'pht used ticks like pokemons?

[verbal mountain]

i just kind of assumed they hitched a ride up there at some point before the colony fell but who knows

all the brown goop around is in their other nests on the surface too so maybe the whole thing is just bigger ticks

[remote magnet]

The ticks where there when the settlers first arrived, and they actively made use of the marathon till the aliens atacked. They propably brought some ticks up there for study, and they since breached containment

[hallow vector]

hey speaking of the alien attack, this has to be a different timeline right? it was my impression that the colony didn't originally survive the follow up attack after boomer left tau ceti

[remote magnet]

Fromw hat i remember, but that is dimly, is that the spaceport was bombed into bedrock. That seems to have happened in this timeline too, since they couldnt get back to the marathon afterwards.

[dreamy hawk]

They were able to get back; they kept thawing new colonists out for a while.

That’s part of why they worked so hard to cover up the invasion/attack, to protect the morale of the newbies.

[white delta]

wild guess, in the future there will be a map inside the anomalie (i just read all traxus related codex entries)

[runic lake]

Yeah it seems that the marathon was SUPER destroyed after the pfhor attack, and only parts of the colony was attacked/destroyed, cuz the UESC did a massive cover-up and kept most of the colony in the dark

[white delta]

UESC : there is no war in ba sing se

[runic lake]

yea prolly

[white delta]

100%

[hallow vector]

i want to fight skeletons

[white delta]

nucal wants to make skull juice

[eternal knoll]

all the tick stuff in cryo being localized to the spht room, and the ticks having a passing resemblance to the flying things on lhowon, def had me thinking there was a connection there. like the spht was using the ticks as a form of terraforming or something

like i dont know the answer to the puzzle but there’s a clear storytelling direction with the spht guarding a room overgrown with tick stuff and a giant window overlooking tau ceti

additional alien corpses in the secret-er final room definitely a big hint about something

[pure wagon]

The corpses that Leah was talking about right ?

[eternal knoll]

yea

[pure wagon]

Well

Between you and centi you got me thinking

If the s’pht are real masters of biotech, then ig they could maybe “reprogram” tick genetics to make them more like remote engineering bots. It could use those to spread through marathon and grow systems to take over the ship

[earnest hatch]

How did you attach that image?

[pure wagon]

Just drag and drop here

It’ll show as an attachment.

[earnest hatch]

I’m on mobile right now, but I thought image attachments were disabled in this chat.

Well anyway I wonder if those dead aliens after the Compiler have something to do with the thing in the green box during the boss fight.

I was going to share the stills, but you can see it in the first 10 seconds of this video on the right side. https://youtu.be/diLbj5gUOMM?si=mC3kN95gt34FHuul

I originally thought it was S’pht outside its shell, but now I wonder if it’s got something to do with these dead aliens Leah pointed out.

Maybe the S’pht was trying to uplift the ticks the way the S’pht were uplifted. Maybe to help it do whatever it was trying to do on Tau Ceti.

[hallow vector]

Wonder why they're hostile in the first place, they were freed right?

[earnest hatch]

Well this one S’pht might be unique in some way. Different from the other S’pht in the rest of the galaxy.

[hallow vector]

could just be hostile to the corps from sol, and by extension the runners. seems rational

[simple raft]

have we heard or seen durandal mentioned by name at all?

[remote magnet]

I just wonder why durandal describes it as an Horror in the cryo archieve cutscene, asuming he was refering to it

[hallow vector]

his quotes are all over the game at least

[earnest hatch]

Not by name, but it’s clearly him.

[hallow vector]

durandal is pretty close with the s'pht, given he was instrumental in them gaining their freedom

[simple raft]

So no one from the colony or ship has mentioned him by name in any lore entry thus far?

[eternal knoll]

he does finally introduce himself with his full name in the subroutine codexes

[hallow vector]

idk why he'd even be in tau ceti though

[eternal knoll]

and he's mentioned a lot in the codexes by name too. mostly in the cotext of his intended operation, but also strauss's material goes deeper

[eternal knoll]

the way it seems is that the one we've been interacting with in this game is kind of a leftover. original durandal went and did his stuff, subroutine durandal or IDEA-durandal as we've been callin him was subroutine static that re-assembled itself into durandal's personality, and has been trapped on the marathon

[earnest hatch]

I think codexes from Strauss mention him by name.

[eternal knoll]

we might hear from OG-durandal in the unknown reveries

[hallow vector]

rough fate

[simple raft]

Ok because I was starting to have this really crazy theory that the story was going to take a very different turn in this new entry of the game.

After hearing the audio entries of Darius and how he was starting to rant similar to Durandal I was starting to think wait! Is Darius going to become Durandal!?

[hallow vector]

some ai just do that when they're rampant

[remote magnet]

I mean, ONI sayed that what Darius experienced is NOT an symptom of rampancy

[eternal knoll]

yeah he's experiencing some kind of... novel... contagion...

[hallow vector]

idk if i believe that from oni

[eternal knoll]

i believe everything oni says because there's like zero subtext to her writing so far lol

darius's malfunctions don't rly resemble what we've seen before with rampancy imo, tho it's possible there's something i haven't seen yet

the chant-like invocations of weird horror monster language. it seems to suggest there's something larger and older than himself he's being subsumed into. "the nightmare"

[hallow vector]

the first log we get from darius immediately looked like rampancy to me

[pure wagon]

Oh this kinda makes sense

[remote magnet]

Clarissa song, when talking to the fungus, says that something is helping the fungus, by affecting the AIs, specifically Darius. So, at least acording to her, its not that Darius is infectet by the fungus, but something has affectet him so he wont help with the fungus.

fungus fungus fungus

[eternal knoll]

yea, somethin to do with whatever links the fungus and the anomoly

[remote magnet]

Yeah. The anomaly, the fungus, the contagion, the increased agression by the ticks, it all just works together to create the perfect storm a bit too well.
Its clearly all conectet, working towards the same goal

Covering each individuall phenomenons weaknesses

[verbal mountain]

uploaded to another chat and then copy link and pasted

[hallow vector]

i mean it's a wrkncacnter right

the anomaly and the fungus

[spare bison]

Man I need more lore ASAP

[eternal knoll]

all seemingly unified by some kind of consumptive light-denying philosophy. a shared nightmare. song uses the word "nightmare" too for what's going to become of the colonists

[remote magnet]

I think so too, just didnt wantet to jump the gun

[hallow vector]

i think the only reason to dance around the word is because it's a pain in the ass to spell

[eternal knoll]

she's seemingly spared from that nightmare fate specifically because she allows herself to be taken by the mushroom part of it?

[spare bison]

This lmao

[pure wagon]

The what language

[spare bison]

Yea but she also said "i get to dream"

[remote magnet]

workincactus? easy

[eternal knoll]

"you're going to die here," "deny light," "consume consume consume," you see it pop up from AIs but also elsewhere. song alludes to it, reed reports a vision of his wife saying it

[eternal knoll]

troo

we can call the wrkncacnter the wrk dat's ok

[spare bison]

MAYBE she somehow finds an entety that gives her a diferent type of feling with the fungi

[hallow vector]

we're not really equipped to deal with a wrkncacnter at all though so uh, idk
i will say though, the time warping was experienced by the nazis in pathways into darkness as well, so i'm pretty confident that's what it is

[eternal knoll]

it seems likely yeah. either a wrk imprisoned in tau ceti or something they would have to have known was similar while narratively developing it

oni's "temporal fragmentation detected" very early on is one of her big dumb subtext-free hints

[hallow vector]

wonder if it'll play into the wipes

wipe in two months = timeline reset

[eternal knoll]

yea v possible

i'm curious if there's more narrative progression btwn now and the wipe

would have to be a fairly large surprise

[remote magnet]

I really hope so. If the story doesnt progress, and all we get is a new mapcondition, the games gonna die quickly.
Im pretty sure though, Bungie wouldnt make THAT Blunder.

[hallow vector]

i imagine there won't be too much stuff going on in the first, idk what do you call it, season?

[remote magnet]

You mean the current one, or the upcoming?

[hallow vector]

current

i mean, i think the focus is going to be on balancing and fine tuning right now

[remote magnet]

Oh, obviously, its setup. But if there is no storyprogression after the wipe it will be very bad for the game, cause it will set the expectation that the game is basically done already

[hallow vector]

but yeah next season prob.
hopefully the quests will be a bit easier too

[remote magnet]

Even if season 3 brings new story then, people will have jumped ship by then. They need to give us something, so we know more is coming you know

[eternal knoll]

i think they have a fairly elegant thing they could use to add in a little something of story progression, if we make contact with durandal thru those terminals again and he has some new stuff to say

i want a quest where he's starting to explore tau ceti's systems and he has you use those terminals as site-to-site transporters... lol

[hot thicket]

Ok so if im not reading this wrong, tick milk is like processed cheese

[sterile seal]

I expect we'll get a new normal zone and new endgame zone to drive the story forward

[sudden pollen]

Why would they just stop progressing the story and repeat the same stuff, makes zero sense to assume that brug

[hot thicket]

Large open world loot pvp zone

[hallow vector]

i wonder how they'll add new maps. maybe they'll rotate out old ones?

[hot thicket]

Like runescapes wildie

[eternal knoll]

sadly i dont think we can expect a new map aside from night dire marsh until season 3 earliest

would be happy to be wrong but that's kinda what the expectation-setting has suggested

[hallow vector]

dire marsh is probably going to be important for a while unfortunately, what with the anomaly and all

[remote magnet]

Yes, its just they havent comunicatet anything. They only talked about new features, new map and stuff coming, but no new priority contracts

[sudden pollen]

The maps probably take a long time to make given how dense and detailed each is