Encountered incredible science fiction, inspired some of your favorite video games

Back to the day, the original quality effect was my favorite video game. Before the quality effect 2 came out, I played more than ten times, eager to immerse myself in the mystery of BIOWARE's Slick New Space Opera and its universe. At that time, I was still young and still a college student. His age was not big enough to drink legal drinking. For a long time, the nerd of “Star Wars” was dealing with the degree of my prequel movies. The quality effect attacked the scene.

After decades. I just read a series of novels, called Revelation space After the first book, Wales writer Alastair Reynolds series. Among the early Oguts, Reynolds and independent novels, a prequel novel, a pair of novels and a bunch of short stories released the trilogy of these books together. All these works are set with his own original and extremely weird science fiction universe, which seems to have a great impact on the game industry. Now that they have been read, it is hard to see some of the best, the most strange ideas in the way of entering various games-stable, destiny, dead space, the knights and quality effects of the old Republic, this is a immediately spring.

I finally start reading these books because they are usually inspired by the harvesters of the quality effect. In terms of quality effects, the harvester is a group of ancient machines, and they will appear regularly to eliminate any museum civilization that may be increased. In the “Revelation” published in 2000, we have inhibitors, which is an ancient machine race that will appear regularly to eliminate any possible galaxy civilization. Although science fiction writers have always loved their ancient space civilization, these civilizations are too special and cannot be ignored.

Although the impact of revealing space on the quality effect is obvious, I do not blame PLA to steal (such as all stories), and the quality effect is the interest of many things that happened before. There are many “Star Wars” in its DNA, the revelation space of Babylon 5 and Star Shipping soldiers, and the quality effect is not the real hard science fiction of revelation space. Bioware may borrow some concepts from the field of revelation, but this brings them all in a very different direction. In this author's clumsy opinion, there are no other directions in other directions that can bring candles to Renault's vision.

As a series of inspiration space tells the future history of humans expand to the depths of the outer space, and some super weird things they discovered when they go. Thanks to Reynolds as the background of celestial physics, Revelation The space is the work of “hard” science fiction, and it has thoroughly studied all the mechanisms of how to operate, even though Reynolds tries to describe impossible things. This preference can lead to an unusual storytelling structure, which may not be satisfied in all ordinary way-but one of the abilities, this is a problem of violation of the practice.

Enlightenment space is a huge series, but its core is a 400 -year legendary story. The legend began in the archeological mining of a remote planet called Resurgam in the 26th century. This outstanding person involved an alien race named AMARARANTIN, which was extinct a million years ago, just like they started to expand to space. As we learned later after the book, AMARARANTIN is the victim of the inhibitor, the victim of the machine, and the machine that appears and destroys any civilized machine, is enough to leave the home solar system and accidentally trigger any signal left by the inhibitor. Equipment Galaxy. Although humans managed that 20 centimeters around the earth did not trigger the inhibitors, the stripes of luck are about to end.

However, this conflict is a long conflict due to the difficult science fiction of revelation of space. One of the key pillars of this universe is that it is impossible to travel faster-those who try in interesting small turns, they often accidentally delete themselves from history during the attempt. No FTL ability, travel between the solar system real For a long time (such as several years or decades), the entire universe will not be as good as a big deal.

Along the way, we have studied a lot of strange concepts. We have the outside of the corpse cloth (reorganization and compressed areas living in time and space) and model juggling (obviously a sense of marine bacteria, all kinds of weirdness of human consciousness, exciting and horrible things) Star. We have human interconnected vendors. They have computers in their minds, so that they have the appearance of honeycomb thoughts and have been communicating with their future versions in order to prepare for the inevitable arrival of the inhibitors. There are many interesting Cyber ​​Punk concepts in the novel, including dialogue on all methods of artificial intelligence, digital consciousness and physical modification. Moreover, I will not mention that from the beginning of a person, I can only access my body through my body to access the alien computer's neutron stars.

It can be said fairly that Reynolds did not have a stream of stories to reveal everything he wanted to do with these books-for the first novel, the space for reporting was very ridiculous. Especially the most common complaints about those early books are their rush climax, but I believe that this problem is a strong promise that Renaitz is committed to thinking all the way. When he is in this model, the natural stop point will not appear at all, because one thing will always lead to other things. Therefore, his ending is often suddenly clean and tidy. However, the journey of these endings is always so strange and shocking that I can forgive those mistakes.

Nearly twenty years later, it was the specific aspect of the universe that it helped me deal with the residual subconsciousness I encountered in the quality and effect of the trilogy for a long time, but I don't know how to express it. I have always felt that quality effect 2 is the weak link of the trilogy-it has one There are many cool personal stories, but they have not added upEssence CERBERUS and illusory people are completely unpredictable without any sense Harvester It is a wet fart, and you spend the entire game that has a large attachment task that has nothing to do with the main plot. I see What Part of the game made me frustrated, but I didn't really get it Why it.

However, after reading these novels, I was angry with that person's harvester again, because now I can better grasp its representative of how to tell the story of Mass Effect. The premise of the harvester is that when they destroy civilization, they “harvested” people by breaking down them and uploading their items to the new harvester. Quality Effect 2 really don't want you to work too hard-it put forward this process, it is just a kind of horror, you need to stop in any way. Therefore, you have to shoot human harvesters until death, and then choose to choose with the unimportant corpse.

However, if BIOWARE follows its initial thoughts, then human harvesters will actually be a very interesting idea, that is, the harvesters are actually wholesale these people into certain digital structure-more or less complete, intact, intact No damage and store them in the form of harvesters. In terms of machinery, this is basically the same as the neutron star supercompititive in the revealing record space I mentioned above, but it is applied in a very different way.

However, the quality effect has never had time to spend time for such complex ideas, and the entire concept has been soiled. However, imagine that if BIWARE is willing to keep going all the way in this concept, then the ending of quality effect 2, not to mention the entire third game. This will fundamentally change how we handle human harvesters, which may lead to what people do with illusory people and Ceburus, and it will have a different Men's tweeter.

For me, this is the real tragedy of quality effect, reviewing this new shot. Bioware seems to have borrowed many concepts from the field of revelation, but rarely explores any depth exploration and does not give any ideas to improve their new twists and turns. Human harvesters can have been improved in this way, so as to provide practical characteristics for the harvesters, and give players a practical reason. They can consider allowing the harvester to maintain existence at the end of the quality effect.

However, because the quality effect avoids most of the weird things, the ending of the quality effect 3 never really has the opportunity to become good. The choice proposed by the catalyst at the climax of the trilogy is a very large and influential choice. We cannot handle it because the basic work has never been established for them. How many additional the stupid nonsense they added to the expansion of the cutting ending came out from the left. Because that's it.

Fortunately, since Mass Effect 3 came out, at least in some corners of the game industry, it has matured a lot. Cyber ​​Punk 2077 is a sensational title. It is difficult to avoid all the fantasy online punk. Today, I feel the same about the quality of quality and effect in 2007. Cyber ​​Punk 2077 and Revelation Space actually have it Many things in common. In this regard, as Renault's book is full of network punk's weirdness, and in 2077, these ideas actually explored these ideas. Therefore, the game is an excellent entry of revealing space.

However, whether you are an old quality and effect fan, you want a deeper and more interesting story, or a Cyber ​​Punk 2077 fans who want to make or even more strange. Where you know. These books and stories are very strange, and they must be read for any sci -fi nerd.

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