That's like two lines of Avenger dialogue: I can buy the devs forgot they had this stuff established and are writing Shen's Last Gift under the assumption of papa Shen having died when the X-COM base went down. (Which is something, but in non-games is generally an Informed Attribute, and in eg 4x games is generally carefully selected to keep humans the Boring Baseline Species without literally giving humans no mechanical distinctiveness)īut okay, let's gloss over that for a second. 'Humans are Good As A Species at developing AI/robotics' is certainly a lot more interesting than the usual scifi staples of 'humans are well-rounded' (Because the creators are just using humans as the baseline for designing their alien species and so can't think of anything interesting for them to have over their aliens) or 'humans are good at diplomacy/social stuff/inexplicably likable'. While that doesn't realistically make it more tolerable to have papa Shen inventing a 'strong' AI in this way, it makes it more narratively functional, not to mention just emotionally better: I, at least, am more willing to tolerate a certain amount of 'that doesn't really make sense' if it's in service to a broader goal that both does make some kind of sense and is actually interesting. (Whether from prior bad experiences with AI or from having built-in cultural fears of such a possibility that had led to their Best Practices successfully avoiding such issues for the centuries-or-whatever they've had robots)įurthermore, there's the meta point that in the no-robots-retcon scenario, the setting is effectively positioning humans as having a Species-Level-Specialization in robotics/AI. The more natural thing for AI-having Ethereals to do would be to purge Julian, or at most stuff him into a metaphorical box and study him if they think there might be something worth studying, but either way it's absurd he'd be in a position to take over the Lost Towers complex successfully, as you'd expect the Ethereals to know better. (In spite of no dialogue hinting at such a possibility) In that scenario, why would the Ethereals be impressed enough by a human first effort at 'strong' AI to coopt it? They'd surely have better AI, not to mention their AI would be vetted so 'goes crazy and betrays us' is a supremely unlikely possibility. Yet I still had to plant X4 at the designated pillar because the building apparently wasn't destroyed enough.This actually all gets jankier in key ways if you assume the no-robots-retcon isn't the intention, especially if you try to explain Julian as a product of papa Shen taking advantage of alien robotics technology. There was one mission I did where between a sectopod I hacked (and then ran through walls because it couldn't do much else), my grenades, the mutons' grenades, and several variety of explosive canisters, I would say a good 80% of the exterior walls of the building were destroyed as well as several sizeable chunks of ceiling from where I had blown up turrets to instakill them.
I was wondering if the whole place colapses or not with that kind of DMG done to it and wondered why did I even have to go there when their trashing their stuf bette then I ever could. My guy was hiding behind crates while they just roamed around thru walls. Sectopods wrecked 50% of the building before they even discovered me. I almost sneaked in and planted X4 charge with one of my dudes.
Haha! Went to an avatar blacksite and there was an advent sectopod there that trashed half of the outer wall while doing it's patrol route! :D I went to a factory with 3 sectopods.
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