I’m confused about the Exodii, they feel like a solution to a non-existent problem. I mean, there is plenty of reason for humanity to have their own bionics, there was literally a cold war for super soldiers! We already have some primitive bionics in OUR timeline, and the world of CDDA has all kinds of advancement over ours. I’m not saying that having friendly aliens is a bad idea, it just seems absurd that they’re the only source of CBMs. I’m probably just missing the real purpose of the Exodii(In which case, please tell me).
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Exodii are human, they’re not alien.
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Exodii solve the problem of CBMs having to make sense as a thing you’d lose body parts for. Even if you managed to reconcile the dozens of problems integrated prosthetics have in our world, you’d still need to figure out a use case for somebody cutting off their finger for a nifty lighter. Shifting that kind of bananas thinking to a dimension-hopping band of transhumanoid refugees having to contend with an eldritch horror trying to digest them forever lets us have our cake (we don’t need to remove the wackier CBMs that could bever fit into real-world thinking) and eat it (pre-cataclysm world stays Current Year Plus Portals).
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As far as I know they are time traveling transhumanist’s. While I do agree that CBM’S are completely fine in their current state I am willing to see how they are reworked. Perhaps a middle ground could be achieved in which simpler CBM’S could be harvested or found in labs. While the more esoteric and complex ones come from these entities. Personally, I believe that the Human NPCs should be worked on rather than an entirely new feature. Still I am going to see how they interact with the game before I judge them.
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The exodii serve a number of roles. The first is that they’re just fun: they’re strange interdimensional scavenger-survivors. What’s not cool about that?
From a game design perspective they offer the following:
- add world building by showing that not all dimensional travellers are overtly hostile.
- also add a source of lore regarding how the apocalypse plays out and some of the backstory that would be almost impossible to add any other way.
- lets us reinstate several categories of monster that, if they originated on cdda-earth, require cdda earth to have been far more unfamiliar than I’d like. Exodii quadrupeds fill a similar niche to tripods and beagle tanks, without wondering why the hell America would field such an overly dangerous and stupid thing and yet otherwise be similar to our world.
- removes most of the requirements for cbms to make sense, allowing us to stop the cycle of either removing fun but silly stuff or having to create really bizarre lore explaining why there are shotgun arms
- makes it possible to have a new way to get cbms that’s far less random and contains some new play elements distinct from just randomly looting them like you did with everything else
- makes it feasible to have far more weird and extensive cbms than before, like a full body conversion.
It’s also important to understand that they’re not friendly aliens. They’re not really friendly (just not hostile), and they’re human. People keep thinking these are UFO flying green men. They’re much more like your survivor than anything else.
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Exodii being human bugs me more than anything else.
There is no reason for humans to somehow have developed fantastic technology to move to another dimension and back in time only to somehow lose it with no trace in the fossil record, or for trans dimensional humans to somehow have settled on Earth twenty thousand to ten million years ago somehow losing all their tech while at the same time blend in with the evolution of humans from an ancestor common to the other great apes.
Them being humanoid but not related to human life would be strange, but acceptable (strange given how many design flaws the human design has: a convergent evolution should probably have made a few other mistakes instead).
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I am pretty sure the Exodii didn’t develop and/or evolve anything. They just survived their own version of Earth’s fall to the Blob, Mi-go (etc.) and looted their lab stuff.
The Exodii then took off through one of the portals the blob made from their Earth to another, repeating their scavenging efforts. Traveling on though other blob portals as the time past and that Earth grew harder to live on. Until they landed at our dimension to repeat the cycle.
Living off different Earths as the (endless?) wave of blob invasion moves through (infinite?) dimensional versions of Earth.
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What are you talking about? They didn’t settle on earth thousands of years ago. They’re from other earths. For example, they just came from another version of earth where the zombie apocalypse struck during the middle ages, so they’re really glad to have arrived somewhere where they can scavenge plastic and aluminum again. They’ve been making jumps like this for countless worlds, presumably having originated in a world that got a little bit further along with portal technology than cdda-earth did before the apocalypse. Wherever they came from is long-lost though. They’ve been doign this a while, replacing their numbers with people from the worlds they visit.
I would suggest that you appear to be deeply confused as to what the exodii are, and you would be best suited to just wait until they come out and you can ask them this stuff than to make really weird assumptions about them.
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Marty! You’re not thinking 12th dimensionally!
The exodii are from an alternate universe where the blob didn’t arrive until humanity-ish was significantly more technologically advanced. As such when the cataclysm occurred, the initial exodii survivors were able to band together and complete a dimensional translation system. Unfortunately they discovered that the only dimensions they were able to visit were ones already visited by the blob. Ever since they hop to a new dimension when they can or must, hoping to find a way out if their eternal diaspora.
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Slightly related question, what spurred the idea of these additions? Never been to this discourse before and I am a bit out of the loop.
Fevered ramblings in discord. It gradually evolved from a combination of ideas including “we should have a less hostile faction”, “we could reintroduce robots if they were interdimensional”, and “it’s really hard to make cbms fit the timeline without ruining the world building”
Thanks for the info, I am awaiting extended interaction with this addition. To be frank I am skeptical but won’t knock it till I try it.
I’m not entirely sure what people are so skeptical about. The competition is “imbalanced random spawns of items with no clear backstory for why they exist and no design plan”… I’m adding a fairly fleshed out faction that provides you with the same benefits but in a way that isn’t identical to everything else in the game and has some coherently written lore to unlock if you’re so inclined. Very little is being taken away, a lot is being added, and there’s a much more open design space as a result.
I personally don’t mind lore accuracy or holes in the story of a game, or the visuals that much to be honest. Mechanics and working with what you can scrounge is my bread and butter. Which is why I like the random and imbalanced nature of CBM’S. Could find anything from a Cerebral Booster to a Radiation Scrubber. Then installing the thing is another risk. But when it works it brings a fantastic feeling of accomplishment, for me at least. I feel the same way about the Cybernetics in COQ. A few don’t make sense or aren’t worth the investment but it’s entertaining random mechanics. Plus even if you don’t get the CBM’S you want crafting them is an option for intelligent characters down the line. Having such a core aspect of the game getting reworked is a bound to bring skepticism. Your idea doesn’t deserve hate or needless contrarians. However, criticism will help said idea be even better than you anticipated. I sincerely hope that this addition is a fantastic one but, I am just accustomed to the current formula.
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My problem with human Exodii stems from the infinite dimensions that differ only extremely marginally from each other and in history only, as there’s nothing there to explain why only those dimensions out of the infinitely many where other aspects may have differed (such as biological development). If it’s a matter of the distance from when the dimensions split the Exodii would be visiting the infinite number of dimensions that are very close to theirs (i.e. equally advanced), rather than the fairly distant “main” one.
If they’re trying to probe dimensions further and further away from their time line in an attempt to get ahead, I would have expected them to drop this primitive one in favor of one that’s more advanced than their own. Even if they originally were the only time line that succeeded to use portals (which should be impossible, given that time line splitting should result in an infinite number of them doing that), time line splitting would have resulted in an infinite number of versions of them.
If the Exodii have been running for millennia or millions or years it’s probably not possible to define a time line split (and in the latter case, at least, not explain why they haven’t evolved quite differently), but if it’s a matter of hundreds of years they could come from one where the industrial revolution in China wasn’t rolled back. In that case their exodus can have been going for only a limited number of generations.
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You’re presuming a lot more tech than they have. They are only able to probe target locations pretty randomly and within certain constraints, and finding one they can even survive in often takes a long time. Getting one with decent technology and a fairly fresh blob invasion like cdda-earth is considered a huge win. They’re not dramatically higher tech than the cdda world, and there are only a few dozen of them in this node. They don’t have unlimited resources or the ability to pick and choose what happens next. They are very comparable to any other cataclysm survivors.
Again, rather than assume I just haven’t thought this through at all in the year or two I’ve been rambling on and taking notes on this, maybe you’d be better off just waiting to meet them? You are making enormous leaps of logic based on a bunch of assumptions that as far as I can tell you’ve just pulled out of nowhere.
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You’re making strong assumptions about the nature of inter-dimensional topology here. It’s not necessarily the case that more similar dimensions are “closer” to each other for the purposes of transit between them. We’re not explicit about it, but it’s far more likely that effort to probe and transit dimensions is more strongly related to the sequencing of cataclysm events than anything related to the properties of the different dimensions. Practically speaking, that means “random”.
Here you’re more explicit about it, you’re using an “every action induces a split in the timeline” model of a multiverse, but we do not follow that model. This is not about time travel, this is about fully separate but similar dimensions. Similar dimensions are not the same dimensions at different points in their timeline, they are completely independent of each other. Similarities between dimensions is because of selection for compatible environmental factors and convergent evolution, not because of any true correspondence.
Just to repeat, this is not time travel.
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I’m NOT assuming time travel, but was using a branching universe model to have something that would yield humans, all of which have the same rate of time (for the ones similar enough to be sort of recognizable).
Parallel dimensions following identical evolution (not similar, as that would not end up with humans [it’s not as if the human design is perfect or the only possible result of evolution], but something more or less different, unless there’s an infinite number of parallel universes and the “random” connections end up in virtually identical universes when they’re worth exploring), which is implausibly improbable unless there’s a reason for such universes to be probed.
If the Exodii were following an identical time line up to a point and the rate of time is the same and using a common baseline (i.e. they started at the same time), they haven’t had much time during which they’ve been on the run. If they’re only marginally more advanced than humans in terms of technology, they probably started off their technological development slightly earlier. Obviously, if universes didn’t start out at the same time or progressing through time at a different rate (while still going though an identical evolution of at least humans), they can have been on the run for however long the story calls for, but that still makes Exodii being identical to humans a stretch beyond at least my ability to suspend disbelief (it won’t make the game unplayable to me, just have an impossible coincidence that makes no sense unless there’s a reason).
If you’re assuming a branching universe model where you can visit branches at a different temporal offset from origin, that’s time travel. You also explicitly brought up issues around continuity paradoxes.
It’s no more implausibly impossible than life existing in the first place. Again, you are adding a LOT of extraneous detail and then reasoning from there instead of taking the scenario at face value. The things you are complaining about are things you made up independent of the scenario as presented.
Again with the time line, there are no time lines, there is one time line and multiple universes that resemble each other. The universes are not necessarily the same age.
Ok, so you have a failure to believe that something resembling humans would evolve given practically identical starting conditions. I mean I can’t argue you out of that since it seems like an article of faith, but I don’t see what’s so improbable about it.
Multiple universes don’t follow the same timeline. They don’t even have to follow the same laws of physics, and I’m not sure why synchronicity would be assumed. However within infinite universes, there are infinite universes identical to our own and infinite universes with every possible variation of every event throughout history occurring at every possible time compared to your universe of origin. Planar travel in our universe is not and will never be clearly described, but we know from XEDRA’s experience that locating universes that are similar to but offset from your own along the time axis is relatively easy with their technology. The Exodii have tech that locates universes that have recently experienced a cataclysm-induced portal storm and then scans those universes for compatibility features (there’s more to it than this, but it’s not likely to ever pass beyond my design notes, the Exodii themselves probably don’t know all of it).
This means that these universes are similar enough to cdda-earth to have portal storms when infected by the blob, and it happens that that fits a pretty narrow set of criteria, sufficient to then be searched more closely for universes with traits the Exodii want, like other humans that can be convinced to join the Exodii cause, tools that the Exodii can comprehend and use, books the Exodii can read and share experience with, etc.
You could see this as a strong anthropic principle. The Exodii are humans because cdda-Earth is filled with humans. There could be more alien species displaced by the blob and travelling similarly out there, but they wouldn’t be very likely to come to CDDA-Earth.
Or, in short, you’re assuming all kinds of stuff that hasn’t been written and then using it to fuel further incorrect assumptions, and it’s really annoying. I am done replying now I think.