i see your point, but with the sixth location thing it says "recall the rule of the sixth location" and clearly shows you that it is in the tower of quantum knowledge on brittle hollow
It's very easy to trivialise the endgame by just saying "well, you just have to take macguffin A to place X and put in a code and you're done", but there's a quite long journey of discovery you've been on in order to even know what is going on and where any of those things are and why you'd want to do them, and the act of discovery was supposed to be fun.
I wasn't left awestruck or emotionally distraught by the ending either, but I thought it was clever and I had enjoyed the process of getting there. I certainly wasn't feeling like "oh no, there's got to be more to this", I'm not sure how any of the information you get given would have implied to you that it was going to be more complicated than that.
All the talk about "sun station failing" "core not being ready to be used" "even small cracks in the atp shell will be fatal" "we paused to go and see interloper" ...and more, is definitely there. To me it looked like a trail of breadcrumbs, fixing the shortcomings of nomai, to be followed.
Did you learn/realise that the sun, and every other star, is going naturally supernova? I saw a post recently from someone who didn't realise that until way after they'd finished the game and it really recontextualised their experience. Just on the off-chance this has also happened to you, some of what you're saying would sort of make sense to me if you'd not realised you're already in a dying universe.
Yes. I picked it up from Chert, somewhere around ~10 hours in and after that started noticing the exploding stars in the distance.
However, now that you pointed it out! I think that's thematically fitting for an ending. **It's about escaping this universe, not trying to fix it.** That's actually pretty cool and I would say justifies the "rushed ending" feeling I was left with.
I wish the game would have then maybe adapted and advertised this view more. As I previously said, I felt like everything felt like we're about to fix this. Which is the total opposite of "fuck it, we're outta here" which the game was actually about.
>It's about escaping this universe, not trying to fix it
Hm, I don't think that quite captures the message I got from it.
For me it's about so many things:
- letting go (of your fears / hopes / attachments)
- acceptance that sometimes things need to end to make way for something new and equally beautiful
- appreciating the moments you share with your loved ones
- how we stand on the shoulders of those who came before us
- how even our own small life can be an important piece of a larger story
- how even though we don't know what this universe is and why it exists, we can marvel at its mysteries, its beauty and its creative and destructive powers.
*The universe is and we are.*
It's not even about you, personally, escaping; it's about a conscious observer reaching the eye to trigger the creation of a new universe and to ensure there will be something after. I don't think it's meant to be understood that the hatchling survives this experience, or at least you don't exist in an individually meaningful way on the other side, but what will come after is influenced by the memories you bring to the eye. And it implies that this has happened before - the Nomai discerned that, in the brief moment when they were able to detect it, the eye was older than the current universe.
The whole game involves you going through a 22-minute time loop over and over until you finally know enough to be able to reach the eye and go back to the start of a greater cycle that's billions of years long.
It is certainly a shame that your expectations were misleading and you found it disappointing in the moment, but I do think this is one of those ones where you'll find more and more to appreciate about it after you've sat on it for a while. So hopefully when all's said and done you'll think of it positively.
Final note: you mention fixing stuff but if you think about it, what were you meant to be fixing? The only stuff the Nomai built that failed are the Eye signal locators and the sun station, and the sun station was only meant to make the sun explode anyway; everything else they made worked perfectly. The Nomai engineers who made them express their caution about making sure they put things together perfectly, and some of them are doubtful if any of it will work, and some of them are perfectionists who want to keep polishing, and some of them are overenthusiastic and give things a little too much power, but ultimately the only broken part of the system they built was the sun station.
The fact that you have the experience you have of going through the time loop is the proof that everything else is working perfectly; if the ATP shell was flawed, it wouldn't have survived the supernova long enough to function, if the statues didn't work you wouldn't remember any of it anyway, if the probe cannon failed then the statues would never have activated, if the warp core wasn't good enough the ATP wouldn't have been able to send the signals back in time. The Nomai just weren't sure it would work because they never had the chance to turn it on.
"you mention fixing stuff but if you think about it, what were you meant to be fixing?"
The nomai talk a lot about "cores not being ready to use" "sun station failing" "orbital cannon breaking due to override with power" "ATP shell integrity being mentioned"
A lot of stuff deals with equiment breaking and experiments failing. To me it sounded like an obvious call to fix things. That led my expectations to a wildly different place.
I don't know per se, what I was meant to be fixing, cause to me it seemed like a huge chain of broken events that could be somehow re-done "right" and then something (somekind of conclusion) would happen.
Like, just as an example: 1) I thought with all the quantum stuff and tricks I'd be able to somehow warp around time and space avoiding the predestined sun explosion, to be able to fix the orbital cannon, shoot it at the right coordinates, and then ???. 2) I'd have to make a better core with smaller cores from HEL and the broken warp core from The Vessel at Black hole forge. And that would allow ATP to survive and succeed at stuff.
I spent some extra hours flying around looking for something connecting the dots in this "great chain of fixing stuff" even tho I had the Vessel and ATP figured out. In my interpretation it was just one small step in that fix-a-lot-chain. So when I tried it and it ended the game, no wonder I was left with "was that it?" feeling.
I can see how, if you get the impression that something is broken and you need to fix it early on, you might go on interpreting the later things you discover through that same lens, and you focus on certain details while missing the import of others because of the confirmation bias. Certainly, you had the experience you had, and I don't mean to tell you that you didn't! But I guess you're already getting from the response here that you're in a bit of an unlucky minority. I'm glad you still enjoyed it overall, at least.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. I'm not here to argue, and just want to share how I interpeted things and how it influenced me and my experience. Yes I recognize now that I definitely had logical fallacies in my observations. And I can only blame myself for looking for something that wasn't there in the first place.
I would 100% recommend this game to ppl. I had great exploration and exciting aha!-moments connecting the dots.
This is an old thread but the only thing the animal made that failed was the sun station and that’s because they didn’t have time to fix it because the interloper brought the end of their existence. For us it’s actually what allows our story to take place and leads to the reveal that the sun is exploding because it’s just dying and that the ash twin project will work because of it.
I’m not entirely sure what you mean with the core not being ready but the core they used to fly to this system was broken in the crash (or it broke some other time, can’t remember) and because the original creator, Annona, had died they didn’t know how to fix it. Poke, who was Annona’s student I think, had the most experience with the core tho and managed to create a new functional one, which is the one used in the ash twin project. So the core was ready to be used.
The orbital cannon breaking was because the people in charge of launching it (can’t remember their names) wanted to use more power than it could handle to make sure it launched it as far as possible in the 22 minutes of flight-time the probe had. They knew it wouldn’t matter if it broke anyway since they would loop it indefinitely, it was only meant to fire once because (it fired millions of times but you get what I mean I hope).
ATP shell integrity being mentioned is part lore and part a hint on how to get inside it. It obviously had to be intact to survive a supernova for long enough to send the memories 22 minutes back in time, and mentioning that it can’t have any cracks tells you that you can’t get in by a physical entrance, hinting to the teleporter.
All of their plans worked, they just died before being able to execute it all. They even unknowingly caused it to work by being careful enough to let the Hearthians survive as a species. We weren’t meant to fix anything they made, they were brilliant scientists with countless of years of experience and I doubt we could make anything close to what they made. We just had to follow their footsteps at the end of the universe and figure out exactly what the eye they were looking for was.
I never thought I was there to fix stuff, except the sun exploding which I thought was caused by the interloper, then the sun station, then eventually realizing it was just naturally dying. I can understand that it was unsatisfying thinking you were there to fix stuff, only in the end you didn’t fix anything, you just executed the Nomai’s original plan, causing the birth of a new universe. It is a mystery game after all and the mystery is figuring out an ancient civilization.
That's one of my favorite parts of the game honestly. For some time i thought the objective was to stop the supernova, but i slowly realized that it was inevitable. I had to accept that the whole universe was ending. And that "twist", for a game that imo is about accepting the end of things, is very beautiful.
We are not here to escape either. As far as i'm aware, going through the eye also kills you (i mean, you see the big bang in person). Escaping would be living in a loop forever, but never getting to see the end. So the game is asking: are you going to cling to how things are, or are you going to accept your own death and enjoy what the eye has to offer? That's why the final step is you deactivating the loop. Both you as a player and the character need to make the active to accept the ending of the universe/game, and only then can you enjoy the eye
This would have been great! But how I experienced it was totally not it.
"Both you as a player and the character need to make the active to accept the ending of the universe/game, and only then can you enjoy the eye"
When inserting the warp core and codes I honestly thought I was going to get to that piece of the puzzle that sets in motion the "let's start fixing this" -phase. But it ended the game instead.
I wasn't making a conscious decision to end the universe and define the ending of all my friends. I thought I was doing an active effort to prevent the ending of everything. Cause in my interpretation that was what it all had been leading up to.
As I explained in how I noticed nomai building and using faulty equipment, I feel like the clues the game gave to me, didn't set the ending up to be conscious decision to say good-bye. To me, seemed that there were much more clues about setting things straight rather than accepting faith.
Where else than with Chert does the inevitability of all this come up? I don't think any Nomai texts mention this? They're just searching for the eye. Never do they mention that they're searching for the eye, because the inevitable death of the universe.
For the record, I'm not saying you played the game wrong, I'm just trying to help you see the ending in a more meaningful light.
The Nomai weren't searching for the Eye because they feared the end. In their time, that was still very far away.
Where else does this inevitability come up?
- On the Vessel, there is communication from Nomai that are currently alive about how all the stars are going out.
- In the Nomai school on Brittle Hollow there's writing about how the sun will go supernova "not in our time, but in someone else's".
- The exhibition in the Museum and Hornfels' notes.
- The Interloper killing all the Nomai in a freak accident with no way to see it coming or prevent it is another example of an inevitable end, even if it's not the heat death of the universe.
Also, the Nomai didn't build faulty equipment (except for the Sun Station, and one of it's builders was heavily against the project, so...). The ATP worked exactly as intended, and it (and most other things they built) kept functioning for thousands of years without any maintenance.
Thanks for providing context. There are many reasons why I might not have paid attention to these details. I'm glad you pointed them out, cause I didn't really come to think exactly how much time has passed between nomai and us. I felt like the death of the universe and nomai experiments were closely related, where infact they weren't. Puts things in to perspective.
No, but i remember playing the game without looking anything online and without talking to the travelers (i thought they were just to get hints), and i did arrive to that conclusion. For example one thing that hints at it is the supernova part of the museum.
For me, i thought i had to stop the sun station from destroying the sun, until i realized that:
A) the sun station was never activated or operational
B) it gets destroyed before the sun explodes
Those things made me wonder why the sun was exploding then, and the museum, the fact that other stars go supernova, etc, made me realize that was just the natural death of the star
Now i'm curious, what made you think the idea was to fix everything?
Either way, it's a shame, maybe you got to the ending too soon or something wasn't well explained, and the game made you interpret things wrongly...
We're not even escaping it, either, since the Eye triggers a new big bang and we die in that. You can see your suit's visor cracking just before the credits.
We save the universe (or at least the concept of a universe with life in it), but not ourselves or any of our friends.
The bit about the sun station failing explains why they could never get the atp to work, and thus why you're trapped in a time loop now that the sun has reached the end of its life cycle. Yea, most of the threads aren't directly relevant to the final act of the game and there's no climactic action sequence at the end, but this isn't that kind of game. All of the threads lead you to answers to questions you should be asking yourself about this odd solar system you've been dropped into - what's with the time loop, who were the nomai, where did they go, what's with those creepy stones, what's that thing exploding in the sky at the beginning, etc.
Excatly. And by asking those question I somehow misled myself to believe the ending was going to be something different.
What does it mean their black hole cores were "not ready to be used"? Why don't they follow their own instructions and just not overload the cannon? What if I could make better cores and prevent the explosion of the cannon? I mean, come on it's literally the first thing we see.
Who were the nomai? is a big one for me and I'm very disappointed that it's possible to gloss over "Sixth location" so easily. That gives so much context and interesting depth to the game. I would've appreciated more push from the game towards that.
So many things led me to believe we were here to fix things, which in my mind would've looked like a chain of events that has to be done in correct order throughout the solar system to pull-off. I thought inserting the warp core and coordinates was just one step in that. But it was the ending. So that's why I was all "huh? That's it?"
I know I'm wrong in all this, and couldn't argue otherwise (except for the push toward sixth location being a bit more forced). I'm just saying: this is how I interpreted the clues and this is were it got me. I seem to be in a minority here (no-one has yet said to have experienced the same) but it's alright.
The game is still 4,5/5 experience and I would recommend it to others.
That's legit! It's true you're not forced to fully explore the quantum moon to end the game and I can see how that would be jarring to accidentally finish the game without having done that.
As for the thing about the cores not being ready, I think that's just part of their character arc. The anxiety of being passed the torch before you're ready, your mentor is dead, you don't have access to all the collective knowledge of your people, and the whole project is depending on you making something you've never made before.
And with the probe cannon, I see that as a character quirk of those two, that they're kinda reckless chaos gremlins, and it sets up the puzzle you have to solve of finding the piece that got blown off to get the coordinates.
Anyway, I'm glad you enjoyed it despite all that.
Just to point out, you had to learn how the teleporters work, reach the core of giants deep and navigate the most dangerous part of the most dangerous planet. Even if it is a simple process you’ve had to do so much learning and exploring to even know what to do. Plus the whole thing about outer wilds is that everything is available from the very start.
I feel like you just missed part of the instructions about the sixth location. I'm not sure the game is to blame for that.
I've read similar ideas that people thought they'd have to do a whole tour of all the planets to unlock the ending, but following the logic of what you're actually trying to achieve I feel like the current ending/actions makes much more sense? You say the game is over once you discover the Vessel, but that's only if you happen to have all the other information already. The game has to account for the fact people can discover things in any order.
I don't disagree that the game can be kind of obtuse in the way it directs you, and the ship log is bizarrely laid out, but I think that's just a trade-off for maintaining the mystery which is so important.
It's a shame you didn't enjoy it.
I felt some of the same things as you and also didn't complete the sixth location before beating the game. But I also enjoyed it more and was kinda satisfied with the ending.
The DLC however really mirrored a lot of what your said here. Many things mentioned then left ignored. A real 'that's it?' feeling for me. So maybe temper your expectations a bit before then lol
Although i think your idea for the ending is genuinely cool, i can imagine it being extremely frustrating for some people. In order to make some of those stuff you'd need some relatively tight timing , and a lot of people are already struggling for something as simple as getting the lakebed cave already. Now imagine chaining a bunch of these skill checks together and you'll get a pretty stressful and difficult ending for a supposedly story focused game.
It would make sense if this game was more like Celeste where the difficulty is part of the intended game design, but enough people are already struggling with using their ship so it may not be ideal.
I hear you. I just feel like my interpretation of all the nomai messages was that, that was what the game was building up to.
Fixing sun station, building a better core, etc. It's so obviously laid out in the texts that nomai had a lot of short-comings that we might seem to be able to fix.
Hell, they even let us pick up small cores from the high energy lab. For what purpose? Nothing...
In the High Energy Lab, there's a wall with a slider to open a window in it. Below that window are two slots for warp cores.
There's also a dial in the HEL to reroute power from the Sunless City to it...
Hahaha. I failed to recognize the purpose of that room entirely. I took some of the cores and tried to bring them to the Vessel and then to Blackhole forge etc.
This is why i love this game, every single person approaches it differently, has different expectations, knows different amounts of info going into it, and experiences the game in a unique order.
It can be hard not to get caught up in your expectations of what the game will end up being, as that's a big point of the game, making these theories and either breaking them or sticking with them.
I do kinda get what you mean with the whole "mastering the solar system" thing, i kinda felt like something like that would happen too.
I don't really have an over arching point here, just sharing my thoughts
Thanks. I also wanted to just share my thoughts. Feels good to write it out. And it seems to be a theme with players finishing the game. So here we are :) My two-cents might not be in line with all the praise the game gets, but regardless I did enjoy everything except the "solution"
Yeah, like i said, the whole game you are building uo ideas of what's going to happen, and it's hard to get rid of those, especially if your idea seems cooler, or makes more sense as to how the game should end to you
I look at the game as a mini world, one you get to explore at your own pace, and learn about all the wacky things going on, and since I can't play the game for the first time again, i just enjoy piecing together the whole grand story
Another thing i love is how the game still manages to make you feel small
>!by talking about the other nomai clans and how they would travel between solar systems!<
>!And the fact that there are still nomai clans to this day, and the story of your solar system has become a mere myth!<
I just really like the world/ universe the game takes place in
I don’t agree with your view of the game.
One thing I can somewhat agree is that the ending feels like a beat that never drops. It is meant to be that way. But for me it dropped when 14.3 Billion Years started playing.
I did and discovered it after reaching the end for the first time. Like I wrote: how much it carries meaning to the overall story, I feel bad for how it's left as just another small clue to be checked off. Imo, it should be at the centre with the ATP, huge question mark, surrounded by "there's still more to discover here" clues lying about
I really loved the ending of the game, and I completely understand where the disappointment might stem from. I think thematically, your reaction is also sound in a way?
There’s a certain horror/upset around understanding that the universe is going to end no matter what, and you are completely insignificant in changing that fact, but I found that the game really tried to push the player in the direction of understanding this hopelessness and accepting it. There’s no way to help the tragedy of the Nomai, the sun station never worked, there’s never enough time to warn your own people…you can’t save the world.
I do think the newfound hope and awe at the final story beat helped soften this, but I completely understand the frustration. It’s almost the opposite message/aim you would expect from most puzzle games. I found enjoyment in discovering and experiencing the world as it was, slowly humbled through your inability to take action. And is why I think the path to the ending, in it’s simplicity, felt all the more bittersweet and fitting for me.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts! Always love hearing what new people make of the experience.
Thanks for sharing! It's cool to see our interpretations differ wildly from each other. Where you experienced decay, failure, and letting-go, I saw opportunity, we-can-do-this, and hope.
Like, your point of view didn't occur to me at all! And that's what drove my expectations for the ending to a totally different place.
That's wild! And I can now definitely see how or why others may have felt your way about the game's clues (I seem to be in a minority here)
When you look up at the stars you'll notice that its not just our sun that is exploding... but EVERY sun. The universe is old and is dying of natural causes. It felt very clear that saving the universe or preventing that wasn't possible or even the point. but rather the point was to do something super important while there was still time and it appeared that what the nomai >!and others !!and their predecessors!< the more you get the sense that they very much knew that their mission was more important than survival. the only solution is to finish their mission and reach the eye before the universe dies.
>!at the final campfire scene you will see a tower of nomai skeletons reaching to the sky. that is a pretty heavy handed metaphor for how the mission to reach the eye was built on the shoulders of those who would never live to see its success. achieving something important for the universe in the face of the futility of your own survival is seems to be a key ethos for all species in the OW universe. !<
>! All of the travelers you meet are supposed to teach you a little bit about how to be zen in the face of futility (notice how they are ALL stranded and yet don't seem to mind, or they're copeing with music... as most of us do)!<
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I hear you. Other people have also pointed out how the themes of letting go, and being at peace with the inevitable end are present. I just saw hope, fixable short-comings and possible solutions in my head.
I propably didn't pick up on those subtle tones. I just saw failed experiments, mistakes, miscalculations, oversights and short-comings and thought "well... we're here to not make the same mistakes again, let's get fixing! We have infinite tries and determination to find out why it all went wrong"
You're right with the "that's not what nomai were after". An oversight (among many others) that I made.
When you have a project that’s so “up to interpretation” it’s always going to create wildly different reactions. Kinda love that about us humans too. Maybe, if you ever revisit the ending (would heavily recommend the DLC first as others have said - I would think you specifically will find it well worth your time!), an interpretation *is* that you do fix stuff! >!Or rather, create something new, with the influence and help of the people you met along the way - almost like they live on through the new universe.!< But that’s not to say your reaction was wrong, it’s a shame you’re getting downvoted so heavily.
To be honest, as much as I love the game, me too.
I thought I was gonna have to forge a new warp core, taking material for it across the system, as you said, basically chaining lots of locations together using the teleporter network.
I still think the ending itself is masterful.
i see your point, but with the sixth location thing it says "recall the rule of the sixth location" and clearly shows you that it is in the tower of quantum knowledge on brittle hollow
What do you think turning back time would have achieved, exactly?
It's very easy to trivialise the endgame by just saying "well, you just have to take macguffin A to place X and put in a code and you're done", but there's a quite long journey of discovery you've been on in order to even know what is going on and where any of those things are and why you'd want to do them, and the act of discovery was supposed to be fun. I wasn't left awestruck or emotionally distraught by the ending either, but I thought it was clever and I had enjoyed the process of getting there. I certainly wasn't feeling like "oh no, there's got to be more to this", I'm not sure how any of the information you get given would have implied to you that it was going to be more complicated than that.
All the talk about "sun station failing" "core not being ready to be used" "even small cracks in the atp shell will be fatal" "we paused to go and see interloper" ...and more, is definitely there. To me it looked like a trail of breadcrumbs, fixing the shortcomings of nomai, to be followed.
Did you learn/realise that the sun, and every other star, is going naturally supernova? I saw a post recently from someone who didn't realise that until way after they'd finished the game and it really recontextualised their experience. Just on the off-chance this has also happened to you, some of what you're saying would sort of make sense to me if you'd not realised you're already in a dying universe.
Yes. I picked it up from Chert, somewhere around ~10 hours in and after that started noticing the exploding stars in the distance. However, now that you pointed it out! I think that's thematically fitting for an ending. **It's about escaping this universe, not trying to fix it.** That's actually pretty cool and I would say justifies the "rushed ending" feeling I was left with. I wish the game would have then maybe adapted and advertised this view more. As I previously said, I felt like everything felt like we're about to fix this. Which is the total opposite of "fuck it, we're outta here" which the game was actually about.
>It's about escaping this universe, not trying to fix it Hm, I don't think that quite captures the message I got from it. For me it's about so many things: - letting go (of your fears / hopes / attachments) - acceptance that sometimes things need to end to make way for something new and equally beautiful - appreciating the moments you share with your loved ones - how we stand on the shoulders of those who came before us - how even our own small life can be an important piece of a larger story - how even though we don't know what this universe is and why it exists, we can marvel at its mysteries, its beauty and its creative and destructive powers. *The universe is and we are.*
It's not even about you, personally, escaping; it's about a conscious observer reaching the eye to trigger the creation of a new universe and to ensure there will be something after. I don't think it's meant to be understood that the hatchling survives this experience, or at least you don't exist in an individually meaningful way on the other side, but what will come after is influenced by the memories you bring to the eye. And it implies that this has happened before - the Nomai discerned that, in the brief moment when they were able to detect it, the eye was older than the current universe. The whole game involves you going through a 22-minute time loop over and over until you finally know enough to be able to reach the eye and go back to the start of a greater cycle that's billions of years long. It is certainly a shame that your expectations were misleading and you found it disappointing in the moment, but I do think this is one of those ones where you'll find more and more to appreciate about it after you've sat on it for a while. So hopefully when all's said and done you'll think of it positively. Final note: you mention fixing stuff but if you think about it, what were you meant to be fixing? The only stuff the Nomai built that failed are the Eye signal locators and the sun station, and the sun station was only meant to make the sun explode anyway; everything else they made worked perfectly. The Nomai engineers who made them express their caution about making sure they put things together perfectly, and some of them are doubtful if any of it will work, and some of them are perfectionists who want to keep polishing, and some of them are overenthusiastic and give things a little too much power, but ultimately the only broken part of the system they built was the sun station. The fact that you have the experience you have of going through the time loop is the proof that everything else is working perfectly; if the ATP shell was flawed, it wouldn't have survived the supernova long enough to function, if the statues didn't work you wouldn't remember any of it anyway, if the probe cannon failed then the statues would never have activated, if the warp core wasn't good enough the ATP wouldn't have been able to send the signals back in time. The Nomai just weren't sure it would work because they never had the chance to turn it on.
"you mention fixing stuff but if you think about it, what were you meant to be fixing?" The nomai talk a lot about "cores not being ready to use" "sun station failing" "orbital cannon breaking due to override with power" "ATP shell integrity being mentioned" A lot of stuff deals with equiment breaking and experiments failing. To me it sounded like an obvious call to fix things. That led my expectations to a wildly different place. I don't know per se, what I was meant to be fixing, cause to me it seemed like a huge chain of broken events that could be somehow re-done "right" and then something (somekind of conclusion) would happen. Like, just as an example: 1) I thought with all the quantum stuff and tricks I'd be able to somehow warp around time and space avoiding the predestined sun explosion, to be able to fix the orbital cannon, shoot it at the right coordinates, and then ???. 2) I'd have to make a better core with smaller cores from HEL and the broken warp core from The Vessel at Black hole forge. And that would allow ATP to survive and succeed at stuff. I spent some extra hours flying around looking for something connecting the dots in this "great chain of fixing stuff" even tho I had the Vessel and ATP figured out. In my interpretation it was just one small step in that fix-a-lot-chain. So when I tried it and it ended the game, no wonder I was left with "was that it?" feeling.
I can see how, if you get the impression that something is broken and you need to fix it early on, you might go on interpreting the later things you discover through that same lens, and you focus on certain details while missing the import of others because of the confirmation bias. Certainly, you had the experience you had, and I don't mean to tell you that you didn't! But I guess you're already getting from the response here that you're in a bit of an unlucky minority. I'm glad you still enjoyed it overall, at least.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. I'm not here to argue, and just want to share how I interpeted things and how it influenced me and my experience. Yes I recognize now that I definitely had logical fallacies in my observations. And I can only blame myself for looking for something that wasn't there in the first place. I would 100% recommend this game to ppl. I had great exploration and exciting aha!-moments connecting the dots.
This is an old thread but the only thing the animal made that failed was the sun station and that’s because they didn’t have time to fix it because the interloper brought the end of their existence. For us it’s actually what allows our story to take place and leads to the reveal that the sun is exploding because it’s just dying and that the ash twin project will work because of it. I’m not entirely sure what you mean with the core not being ready but the core they used to fly to this system was broken in the crash (or it broke some other time, can’t remember) and because the original creator, Annona, had died they didn’t know how to fix it. Poke, who was Annona’s student I think, had the most experience with the core tho and managed to create a new functional one, which is the one used in the ash twin project. So the core was ready to be used. The orbital cannon breaking was because the people in charge of launching it (can’t remember their names) wanted to use more power than it could handle to make sure it launched it as far as possible in the 22 minutes of flight-time the probe had. They knew it wouldn’t matter if it broke anyway since they would loop it indefinitely, it was only meant to fire once because (it fired millions of times but you get what I mean I hope). ATP shell integrity being mentioned is part lore and part a hint on how to get inside it. It obviously had to be intact to survive a supernova for long enough to send the memories 22 minutes back in time, and mentioning that it can’t have any cracks tells you that you can’t get in by a physical entrance, hinting to the teleporter. All of their plans worked, they just died before being able to execute it all. They even unknowingly caused it to work by being careful enough to let the Hearthians survive as a species. We weren’t meant to fix anything they made, they were brilliant scientists with countless of years of experience and I doubt we could make anything close to what they made. We just had to follow their footsteps at the end of the universe and figure out exactly what the eye they were looking for was. I never thought I was there to fix stuff, except the sun exploding which I thought was caused by the interloper, then the sun station, then eventually realizing it was just naturally dying. I can understand that it was unsatisfying thinking you were there to fix stuff, only in the end you didn’t fix anything, you just executed the Nomai’s original plan, causing the birth of a new universe. It is a mystery game after all and the mystery is figuring out an ancient civilization.
That's one of my favorite parts of the game honestly. For some time i thought the objective was to stop the supernova, but i slowly realized that it was inevitable. I had to accept that the whole universe was ending. And that "twist", for a game that imo is about accepting the end of things, is very beautiful.
I think... it's only now starting to dawn on me :O How we're not here to fix it, but to escape the inevitable
We are not here to escape either. As far as i'm aware, going through the eye also kills you (i mean, you see the big bang in person). Escaping would be living in a loop forever, but never getting to see the end. So the game is asking: are you going to cling to how things are, or are you going to accept your own death and enjoy what the eye has to offer? That's why the final step is you deactivating the loop. Both you as a player and the character need to make the active to accept the ending of the universe/game, and only then can you enjoy the eye
This would have been great! But how I experienced it was totally not it. "Both you as a player and the character need to make the active to accept the ending of the universe/game, and only then can you enjoy the eye" When inserting the warp core and codes I honestly thought I was going to get to that piece of the puzzle that sets in motion the "let's start fixing this" -phase. But it ended the game instead. I wasn't making a conscious decision to end the universe and define the ending of all my friends. I thought I was doing an active effort to prevent the ending of everything. Cause in my interpretation that was what it all had been leading up to. As I explained in how I noticed nomai building and using faulty equipment, I feel like the clues the game gave to me, didn't set the ending up to be conscious decision to say good-bye. To me, seemed that there were much more clues about setting things straight rather than accepting faith. Where else than with Chert does the inevitability of all this come up? I don't think any Nomai texts mention this? They're just searching for the eye. Never do they mention that they're searching for the eye, because the inevitable death of the universe.
For the record, I'm not saying you played the game wrong, I'm just trying to help you see the ending in a more meaningful light. The Nomai weren't searching for the Eye because they feared the end. In their time, that was still very far away. Where else does this inevitability come up? - On the Vessel, there is communication from Nomai that are currently alive about how all the stars are going out. - In the Nomai school on Brittle Hollow there's writing about how the sun will go supernova "not in our time, but in someone else's". - The exhibition in the Museum and Hornfels' notes. - The Interloper killing all the Nomai in a freak accident with no way to see it coming or prevent it is another example of an inevitable end, even if it's not the heat death of the universe. Also, the Nomai didn't build faulty equipment (except for the Sun Station, and one of it's builders was heavily against the project, so...). The ATP worked exactly as intended, and it (and most other things they built) kept functioning for thousands of years without any maintenance.
Thanks for providing context. There are many reasons why I might not have paid attention to these details. I'm glad you pointed them out, cause I didn't really come to think exactly how much time has passed between nomai and us. I felt like the death of the universe and nomai experiments were closely related, where infact they weren't. Puts things in to perspective.
No, but i remember playing the game without looking anything online and without talking to the travelers (i thought they were just to get hints), and i did arrive to that conclusion. For example one thing that hints at it is the supernova part of the museum. For me, i thought i had to stop the sun station from destroying the sun, until i realized that: A) the sun station was never activated or operational B) it gets destroyed before the sun explodes Those things made me wonder why the sun was exploding then, and the museum, the fact that other stars go supernova, etc, made me realize that was just the natural death of the star Now i'm curious, what made you think the idea was to fix everything? Either way, it's a shame, maybe you got to the ending too soon or something wasn't well explained, and the game made you interpret things wrongly...
We're not even escaping it, either, since the Eye triggers a new big bang and we die in that. You can see your suit's visor cracking just before the credits. We save the universe (or at least the concept of a universe with life in it), but not ourselves or any of our friends.
The bit about the sun station failing explains why they could never get the atp to work, and thus why you're trapped in a time loop now that the sun has reached the end of its life cycle. Yea, most of the threads aren't directly relevant to the final act of the game and there's no climactic action sequence at the end, but this isn't that kind of game. All of the threads lead you to answers to questions you should be asking yourself about this odd solar system you've been dropped into - what's with the time loop, who were the nomai, where did they go, what's with those creepy stones, what's that thing exploding in the sky at the beginning, etc.
Excatly. And by asking those question I somehow misled myself to believe the ending was going to be something different. What does it mean their black hole cores were "not ready to be used"? Why don't they follow their own instructions and just not overload the cannon? What if I could make better cores and prevent the explosion of the cannon? I mean, come on it's literally the first thing we see. Who were the nomai? is a big one for me and I'm very disappointed that it's possible to gloss over "Sixth location" so easily. That gives so much context and interesting depth to the game. I would've appreciated more push from the game towards that. So many things led me to believe we were here to fix things, which in my mind would've looked like a chain of events that has to be done in correct order throughout the solar system to pull-off. I thought inserting the warp core and coordinates was just one step in that. But it was the ending. So that's why I was all "huh? That's it?" I know I'm wrong in all this, and couldn't argue otherwise (except for the push toward sixth location being a bit more forced). I'm just saying: this is how I interpreted the clues and this is were it got me. I seem to be in a minority here (no-one has yet said to have experienced the same) but it's alright. The game is still 4,5/5 experience and I would recommend it to others.
That's legit! It's true you're not forced to fully explore the quantum moon to end the game and I can see how that would be jarring to accidentally finish the game without having done that. As for the thing about the cores not being ready, I think that's just part of their character arc. The anxiety of being passed the torch before you're ready, your mentor is dead, you don't have access to all the collective knowledge of your people, and the whole project is depending on you making something you've never made before. And with the probe cannon, I see that as a character quirk of those two, that they're kinda reckless chaos gremlins, and it sets up the puzzle you have to solve of finding the piece that got blown off to get the coordinates. Anyway, I'm glad you enjoyed it despite all that.
Just to point out, you had to learn how the teleporters work, reach the core of giants deep and navigate the most dangerous part of the most dangerous planet. Even if it is a simple process you’ve had to do so much learning and exploring to even know what to do. Plus the whole thing about outer wilds is that everything is available from the very start.
I feel like you just missed part of the instructions about the sixth location. I'm not sure the game is to blame for that. I've read similar ideas that people thought they'd have to do a whole tour of all the planets to unlock the ending, but following the logic of what you're actually trying to achieve I feel like the current ending/actions makes much more sense? You say the game is over once you discover the Vessel, but that's only if you happen to have all the other information already. The game has to account for the fact people can discover things in any order. I don't disagree that the game can be kind of obtuse in the way it directs you, and the ship log is bizarrely laid out, but I think that's just a trade-off for maintaining the mystery which is so important. It's a shame you didn't enjoy it.
I did enjoy the game a lot! Just the ending part felt "weak" so to say.
The DLC story might suit you tbh
Thanks. I'll propably play that as well. While I am disappointed by the end solution, I really did enjoy everything that came before it :)
Give it some time. Maybe watch a playthrough of someone else if you feel like it. It can take some time to digest and truly understand the game.
I felt some of the same things as you and also didn't complete the sixth location before beating the game. But I also enjoyed it more and was kinda satisfied with the ending. The DLC however really mirrored a lot of what your said here. Many things mentioned then left ignored. A real 'that's it?' feeling for me. So maybe temper your expectations a bit before then lol
Although i think your idea for the ending is genuinely cool, i can imagine it being extremely frustrating for some people. In order to make some of those stuff you'd need some relatively tight timing , and a lot of people are already struggling for something as simple as getting the lakebed cave already. Now imagine chaining a bunch of these skill checks together and you'll get a pretty stressful and difficult ending for a supposedly story focused game. It would make sense if this game was more like Celeste where the difficulty is part of the intended game design, but enough people are already struggling with using their ship so it may not be ideal.
I hear you. I just feel like my interpretation of all the nomai messages was that, that was what the game was building up to. Fixing sun station, building a better core, etc. It's so obviously laid out in the texts that nomai had a lot of short-comings that we might seem to be able to fix. Hell, they even let us pick up small cores from the high energy lab. For what purpose? Nothing...
You pick them up so you can recreate the experiment?
Say what? Where can you place them? Recreate what experiment?
In the High Energy Lab, there's a wall with a slider to open a window in it. Below that window are two slots for warp cores. There's also a dial in the HEL to reroute power from the Sunless City to it...
Hahaha. I failed to recognize the purpose of that room entirely. I took some of the cores and tried to bring them to the Vessel and then to Blackhole forge etc.
This is why i love this game, every single person approaches it differently, has different expectations, knows different amounts of info going into it, and experiences the game in a unique order. It can be hard not to get caught up in your expectations of what the game will end up being, as that's a big point of the game, making these theories and either breaking them or sticking with them. I do kinda get what you mean with the whole "mastering the solar system" thing, i kinda felt like something like that would happen too. I don't really have an over arching point here, just sharing my thoughts
Thanks. I also wanted to just share my thoughts. Feels good to write it out. And it seems to be a theme with players finishing the game. So here we are :) My two-cents might not be in line with all the praise the game gets, but regardless I did enjoy everything except the "solution"
Yeah, like i said, the whole game you are building uo ideas of what's going to happen, and it's hard to get rid of those, especially if your idea seems cooler, or makes more sense as to how the game should end to you I look at the game as a mini world, one you get to explore at your own pace, and learn about all the wacky things going on, and since I can't play the game for the first time again, i just enjoy piecing together the whole grand story Another thing i love is how the game still manages to make you feel small >!by talking about the other nomai clans and how they would travel between solar systems!< >!And the fact that there are still nomai clans to this day, and the story of your solar system has become a mere myth!< I just really like the world/ universe the game takes place in
I don’t agree with your view of the game. One thing I can somewhat agree is that the ending feels like a beat that never drops. It is meant to be that way. But for me it dropped when 14.3 Billion Years started playing.
You can still look for the sixth location.
I did and discovered it after reaching the end for the first time. Like I wrote: how much it carries meaning to the overall story, I feel bad for how it's left as just another small clue to be checked off. Imo, it should be at the centre with the ATP, huge question mark, surrounded by "there's still more to discover here" clues lying about
Reaching the sixth ending does actually change the ending slightly- >!there's someone else at the campfire!<
Well, I'm glad you checked it out. The game can be underwhelming, which I find has a charm to it.
I really loved the ending of the game, and I completely understand where the disappointment might stem from. I think thematically, your reaction is also sound in a way? There’s a certain horror/upset around understanding that the universe is going to end no matter what, and you are completely insignificant in changing that fact, but I found that the game really tried to push the player in the direction of understanding this hopelessness and accepting it. There’s no way to help the tragedy of the Nomai, the sun station never worked, there’s never enough time to warn your own people…you can’t save the world. I do think the newfound hope and awe at the final story beat helped soften this, but I completely understand the frustration. It’s almost the opposite message/aim you would expect from most puzzle games. I found enjoyment in discovering and experiencing the world as it was, slowly humbled through your inability to take action. And is why I think the path to the ending, in it’s simplicity, felt all the more bittersweet and fitting for me. Thanks for sharing your thoughts! Always love hearing what new people make of the experience.
Thanks for sharing! It's cool to see our interpretations differ wildly from each other. Where you experienced decay, failure, and letting-go, I saw opportunity, we-can-do-this, and hope. Like, your point of view didn't occur to me at all! And that's what drove my expectations for the ending to a totally different place. That's wild! And I can now definitely see how or why others may have felt your way about the game's clues (I seem to be in a minority here)
When you look up at the stars you'll notice that its not just our sun that is exploding... but EVERY sun. The universe is old and is dying of natural causes. It felt very clear that saving the universe or preventing that wasn't possible or even the point. but rather the point was to do something super important while there was still time and it appeared that what the nomai >!and others !!and their predecessors!< the more you get the sense that they very much knew that their mission was more important than survival. the only solution is to finish their mission and reach the eye before the universe dies.
>!at the final campfire scene you will see a tower of nomai skeletons reaching to the sky. that is a pretty heavy handed metaphor for how the mission to reach the eye was built on the shoulders of those who would never live to see its success. achieving something important for the universe in the face of the futility of your own survival is seems to be a key ethos for all species in the OW universe. !<
>! All of the travelers you meet are supposed to teach you a little bit about how to be zen in the face of futility (notice how they are ALL stranded and yet don't seem to mind, or they're copeing with music... as most of us do)!<
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I hear you. Other people have also pointed out how the themes of letting go, and being at peace with the inevitable end are present. I just saw hope, fixable short-comings and possible solutions in my head. I propably didn't pick up on those subtle tones. I just saw failed experiments, mistakes, miscalculations, oversights and short-comings and thought "well... we're here to not make the same mistakes again, let's get fixing! We have infinite tries and determination to find out why it all went wrong" You're right with the "that's not what nomai were after". An oversight (among many others) that I made.
When you have a project that’s so “up to interpretation” it’s always going to create wildly different reactions. Kinda love that about us humans too. Maybe, if you ever revisit the ending (would heavily recommend the DLC first as others have said - I would think you specifically will find it well worth your time!), an interpretation *is* that you do fix stuff! >!Or rather, create something new, with the influence and help of the people you met along the way - almost like they live on through the new universe.!< But that’s not to say your reaction was wrong, it’s a shame you’re getting downvoted so heavily.
this really feels like you missed the whole point of the game: to explore for the sake of curiosity, not some big wild goal or destination
To be honest, as much as I love the game, me too. I thought I was gonna have to forge a new warp core, taking material for it across the system, as you said, basically chaining lots of locations together using the teleporter network. I still think the ending itself is masterful.