Oni2 talk:Truth Number Zero/Course Of Events: Difference between revisions

:::::::You seem to be implying that the bush from the Zone is "wild"/untamed in the sense that it has defense mechanisms that are in-sync with its immediate surroundings, but out of proportion with ordinary Earth fauna/flora. In that view, you present the Chrysalis as a "tamed" counterpart of Zone fauna because Konoko doesn't have acid blood and doesn't spread deadly viruses with every footstep. However, apart from being poisonous, a Zone bush looks pretty much "tame" (ordinary-looking, not giant or deformed, no horns or alien glow, nothing paranormal happening nearby). So I am really not sure that Konoko's symbiosis is in any way limited/restrained as compared to that poisonous bush. If anything, they look to me like two completely different kinds of symbiosis, with two completely different origins/explanations, and to imply that one is a "tamed" form of the other is quite a departure indeed. --[[User:Geyser|geyser]] ([[User talk:Geyser|talk]]) 13:05, 10 June 2020 (CEST)

::::::::Strange that suddenly you are using the "dream photos" as a visual reference for what the bush looked like :-) Usually you're the first to point out that we didn't see what actually happened in the Preserve (and surely you're not going to say that you're trusting the newspaper account instead :->). I see no reason, though, why all the plants and bugs in the Preserve have to be crazy-looking mutants in order to be Daodan-powered. Keep in mind that Hardy also believed that life there was incredibly mutated (Cf. the giant man-eating fish), so why doesn't the game depict the Wilderness as full of crazy killer plants 30 feet high? You're running to an over-dramatized extreme depiction of the Wilderness that is neither necessary nor practical from a game design perspective. There's no reason to assume that the Daodan Chrysalis in a human behaves like the life that has been evolving under Daodan power for generations. --[[User:Iritscen|Iritscen]] ([[User talk:Iritscen|talk]]) 16:11, 10 June 2020 (CEST)

:::::::Not sure what you mean with the role of "game design" (2D/3D themes/assets? or gameplay choices?), but I'm trying very hard to keep additions and "departures" to a minimum. Biopunk, as far as I can tell, is already in Oni (it doesn't matter that it started as a GITS clone -- by 2001 it already had an identity of its own, with the original SLD and Daodan/Chrysalis concepts at its core). And the balance with cyberpunk is achieved quite naturally, because you still have those huge machines for growing/monitoring all the biotech, the man-machine interface, sub-dermal chips and cables, cyborg parts, etc. As for the rest, I tend to list alternative takes intermixed with my preferences, so you may not always realize how little I'm actually adding. For one thing, I haven't had any need for Forerunners or Protheans so far. --[[User:Geyser|geyser]] ([[User talk:Geyser|talk]]) 13:05, 10 June 2020 (CEST)   

::::::::"Not sure what you mean with the role of "game design" (2D/3D themes/assets? or gameplay choices?)" — the former. The atmosphere of the game will be cyberpunk precisely to the degree that the levels are set in cyberpunk surroundings. If the focus, on the other hand, was on exploring the Wilderness, it would be a very different game indeed. I'm not suggesting we do that, if you look at my settings concepts on the SoW Settings page. --[[User:Iritscen|Iritscen]] ([[User talk:Iritscen|talk]]) 16:11, 10 June 2020 (CEST)

::::::::"For one thing, I haven't had any need for Forerunners or Protheans so far". No, just intelligent non-corporeal aliens that guide the development of the Daodan telepathically from across the phase veil ^_^ --[[User:Iritscen|Iritscen]] ([[User talk:Iritscen|talk]]) 16:11, 10 June 2020 (CEST)

:::::Mostly agree about the Wilderness Preserves being mostly overgrown -- not like a large dump can't be covered in greenery, mind you, or covered-up by limiting access to satellite imagery (Oni's space programs are not the same as NASA's and ESA's, so we don't know what satellites they had in orbit before the Uprising, and who was running them). At any rate, Hasegawa's tale is really telling us that "the world outside the ACCs is poisonous" so, at least in the one Zone that he and Jamie set foot into, the virus (or whatever) had apparently "gone to seed" in most of the Zone's lifeforms (that's if it wasn't in fact airborne, merely using Jamie's open wound as a way in). This is not telling us that the virus (or whatever) didn't spread from a man-made container discarded somewhere deep in the forest, or from a secret underground lab, or from an enigmatic phase portal (or xenoforming time capsule). Like I said earlier, Zones (Preserves) don't all have to look the same or kill their local Jamies in the same fashion. It's only your own Wilderness fixation that's giving you that idea. (For what it's worth, would Jamie's Zone cause "biological contamination" on a plane passing overhead, that would be immediately noticed and reported by pilots? I wouldn't be so sure.) --[[User:Geyser|geyser]] ([[User talk:Geyser|talk]]) 02:58, 9 June 2020 (CEST)

::::::"would Jamie's Zone cause 'biological contamination' on a plane passing overhead?" In my conception, the Wilderness is emitting all kinds of stuff all the time, and there's not just flora down there, but fauna too. So there's any number of things that could cause biological contamination, including bugs that attached themselves to the fuselage, or splattered on it. --[[User:Iritscen|Iritscen]] ([[User talk:Iritscen|talk]]) 03:23, 10 June 2020 (CEST)

::::::I somewhat agree about the dangers of depicting aliens. For how I planned to deal with that, see [[Oni2:Slaves_of_War/Story#Daomen|this section]], starting with the paragraph beginning "Whatever form". Short answer: barely show them, and use human agents as their proxy. --[[User:Iritscen|Iritscen]] ([[User talk:Iritscen|talk]]) 03:23, 10 June 2020 (CEST)

:::::That said, I plead guilty myself -- I imagined an alien race a while back and had been thinking of ways of incorporating them into the Oni universe... as invaders. The Daodan, in that "story", would have been helping Mankind to prepare -- by hyperevolving -- so that they'd survive the encounter with the "actual" enemy all the way in Oni 3. From what I recall those "other aliens" were going to be powerful-but-stupid, kinda like furry zerglings. Good times... --[[User:Geyser|geyser]] ([[User talk:Geyser|talk]]) 02:58, 9 June 2020 (CEST)

:Having the WCG instituted in 2012 also feels a bit weird, with Jamie dying in 2014 and Chrysalises already grown in 2016 -- it just doesn't leave much time for the TCTF's regulations to have kicked in, or for the Network to have already evolved into "The Syndicate" by the time Hasegawa and Kerr start working there. --[[User:Geyser|geyser]] ([[User talk:Geyser|talk]]) 18:42, 7 June 2020 (CEST)

::The only awkwardly-tight timing is the development of the Daodan Chrysalis, which itself is not hard to explain if one assumes that (a) Hasegawa and Kerr had relevant prior experience, (b) the technology of the time was close enough to what they needed that they didn't have to advance all of science by a human lifespan in 3 years, and (c) they ''found'' the Daodan, rather than creating it. --[[User:Iritscen|Iritscen]] ([[User talk:Iritscen|talk]]) 02:59, 8 June 2020 (CEST)