[Nightly][Spoilers] Last Artifact/Race Feedback

So... please don't read this unless you already know how the story in 1.0/Nightly will be, or you don't mind being spoiled.

Okay, so you spend most of the game (after getting your ship repaired) helping Esther collect all of the shiny baubles for the gate, one from each race, at the VERY end, she goes "All that's left, is the human one!"

And I'm like "Yay, finally, the humans. What sort Mission shall I have to do now?"

And she's like "wherever will we find human stuff?" And my head is already going "USCM Bunkers, Penal Colonies... maybe eventually human villages!?"

Nope.

She goes "Oh, I know... I ALREADY HAVE IT RIGHT HERE IN MY POCKET!"

It's the Original Matter Manipulator. I'm like ".....wut."

Please tell me that's a placeholder. Here's what I would suggest we do instead:

1). Send the player to find Human Villages (we are past overdue) to scan things.
2). Send the player on a new Human-themed mission to get the artifact.
3). Go kill the thing inside the gate whatever it may be.
4). Esther gives you the MM only after you've upgraded yours and defeated the boss in the gate and takes your old one. Said new MM has 1 more Power, Size, and Range upgrade over your maxed out MM and looks a little different.

As for the mission, why not visit the fragments left of earth? It would be kinda like an asteroid field that is connected by lots of tentacles, and there could be weird moontant-like creatures everywhere, perhaps some wayward robots, and at the end, that guy with the lightsaber you had to fight earlier (unless you're meant to fight him inside the gate). Perhaps this is your last battle with the guy and you finally put him down or knock some sense into him. Who knows.

 

I'll admit I'm not sure of it myself... but I can't fully disagree with their decision since there is a lot of stuff in the game for it to make a ton of sense in context.

On one end... "more human content!" would be great(and seriously, I'd LOVE to see more proper human villages/outposts/survivor camps or see existing stuff polished with more detail).

On the other... even in a story way it kinda make senses.

I mean, she's not just an old random lady. She's the former Grand Protector who thus once held possibly "the" most important position on Earth. Basically making her(roughly) the human equivalent of Big Ape, Kluex and general equal of any racial leader. So far all other artefacts were after all held in places of great importances to any of the individual races(even the Hylotl's was basically one of their most sacred/important library of knowledge).

So the most logical place the artefact could have been on was.... on Earth.
However, her lore already state she retired -because- she figured something was going on and about to happen, likely due to familiarity and researches that led her to discover(or learn of) the Ark... possibly starting the very earliest version of the Outpost with trusted underlings(i.e.: the majority of people there, especially researchers like Elliott and the human nameless NPC that tell of the urgency to study what happened to Earth to figure out a counter-measure and others).
If they're not though, then that just make her easier to slip unnoticed as "just that old lady we never really bothered to asks the name though she is interested in the local alien ruin" at the worst without her status as former grand protector(and thus most likely person to know where the human artefact would be) being directly discovered versus just being taken for an elderly archeologist who could easily feign not knowing that much.

And since she was the Grand Protector exactly... then who else of all people would ever have a better access to the human Artefact or the resources to find it.
Afterward.. all she had to do was secure it just before going retiring to continue her researches and what safer places to safeguard it than on herself, an unassuming elderly lady entering retirement, when the new Grand Protector would keep on a facade of dealing with the "most important matters" daily? Who'd ever expect such a person to carry this on her person?

In a way, your surprise could lead one to argue that her plan exactly worked to the level she was hoping for; presenting such an "affable old lady facade" that people would just forget she ever was the ONE person most likely to ever figure out where the human artefact was hidden and then secret it away before anything happened at all.

To boot, the secretive nature of the Outpost thus meant that it would be as equally a good hiding place for such an artefact than any of the other race's(who in their case might have forgotten their importance, when we look at how casually it is given away by the Florans for example as the prize of their hunt... though the goal of the hunt itself might have originally been to indeed select the most skilled and worthy warrior to protect such a valuable object in the first place until the meaning of the tradition might have been lost).

By being the one NPC who actively researched the nature of the gate AND one of the former great leaders of humanity, it's thus almost more logical that she had the artefact on her person since the beginning. As soon as I began to hear people talking of the different dungeons but NOT of the existence of an human dungeon, that was immediately the hypothesis I'd made. Especially when progression made it sound like the human artefact would have been the last to be acquired(it's also logical she reveals it only last, because having you gather all of the other artefacts first would be a good way to know if you would be trusty or not in this endeavor.... versus what might have happened if she'd have revealed you she had the artefact at the very beginning only for you to then fall prisoner to cultists who THEN could have used your knowledge of the human artefact's location to find both the artefact AND Esther(on top of the gate).

For the conclusion... a human themed dungeon MAY have been super awesome but ultimately I wonder if it would have made -less- sense in context than the way we acquire the artefact.
After all, this would imply that she was never able to get her own species' artefact even though she held the one most powerful position in the human empire, had access to the most detailed and extensive historical records from humanity's past to discover any clues as to the item.... even as she was actively researching the context of these items and the gates enough to decide to retire?

The way I see it, her decision to retire may very much have been made the day she learned the importance of the artefact, discovered it's locations and thus pre-emptively decided to go into hiding to prevent any nefarious force from being able to take possession of it. Then you come along and suddenly she's got another protector she can tell just enough of the truth to send off on the hunt for the other artefacts while she remains behind to, secretely,continue to protect the human artefact in the case you ever fail in the hunt... your lack of knowledge thus keeping the artefact safe until you prove yourself and she can reveal it because by then ALL artefact are in her possession.

TL-DR: it makes senses for her to possess the thing all along because it only confirms how far ahead she was in her research AND why she may likely have been made grand protector in the first place before she "retired". IT would have made her a poor Grand Protector if she'd managed to research enough to decide she was best to retire to continue her hunt yet had NOT been able to use her ample resources to secure her own species' artefact in some way first when she didn't know yet -what- might be coming Earth's way.

In a way thus... it's only from a gameplay point of view that it make less sense to not have another dungeon mission to find the artefact. From a story POV... it fits perfectly. She was one of the only person with the knowledge that "something" may have been about to happen(but did not know enough yet to coordinate against it) . And as a grand protector, she had the resources to acquire it before retiring. Thus it's only logical the first thing she did was find the human artefact and THEN continue her research to devise a plan to counter what was about to happen.

 

umm, i'm sorry but what the heck?

 

Like I said.... considering that

she's the former Grand Protector and was already aware something was about to go down and thus retired early specifically to plan a counter-measure for it

hindsight make me feel like them not having that in their possession would have made almost less sense than them not having had it all along

really, much I would have liked an additional dungeon... I could already imagine the complaints, especially if it was to be lacklustre due to lack of time to plan it out or any other reasons, with people going "how the hell could the former grand protector NOT secure the artefact of her own race when she had access to so much resources before she retired? Why the hell do we have to go on such a fetch quest for something she was likely the most likely person to figure out the location of before any of that went down?" in complaint about plotholes or anything

.

 

Hey were you that person that wrote on my TCF wall? lol.

I forgot I even posted this, lol. I did post massive SPOILER warnings in both the title AND the thread, lol.

 

LOLOLOL.LOLLOLLOL

 

That's.....um.......insightful?

Pretty sure there's rules about that. Lack of actual content in posts, I mean.