What did Holla Forums think of The Talos Principle? I started and finished it about a week ago, so I never really got the chance to see what Holla Forums said about it when it came out.
I thought it was pretty good. I really liked how it gets you thinking in multiple ways, what with the mechanics in the puzzles and the arguably pretentious philosophy in the logs/terminals.
It's probably the best puzzle game from this gen I've played so far, although that's not really saying much.
I enjoyed it, puzzles were good, story was interesting but kinda over long.
I did prefer Antichamber.
it was fun, the anti piracy measures were also fun
I hope you played the DLC, too
I thought it was great, heard recently they're apparently making a sequel which is kind of weird since I don't think there's much more room to explore the puzzle mechanics or the story and themes, they tapped them pretty thoroughly the first time through.
I loved it, and I loved how the philosophical shit wasn't the hipster garbage exposition I was expecting, it was actually thoughtful and made me sit down and ask a couple questions to myself that i had never thought of before
Philosophy wise it was far better than most games manage. It's still modernist garbage, though. Existentialism a shit. I can't really fault it much for it since valuable philosophy is faaar away in the fringe of society. The best I can say is it's generally unoffensive towards actual value and it's easy to breeze through without being railroaded into spouting existentialist nonsense.
Gameplay is great and level design legit genius. Gameplay alone is enough of a reason to play it, but it really ascends into a great game through the atmosphere. Historical assets and music make it unforgetable.
I loved it.
Antichamber was enjoyable as well.
I really enjoyed it. It had a great atmosphere, cool secrets and easter eggs, great soundtrack, and the story wasn't half bad either. The puzzles did start to drag towards the end though.
Expansion was pretty great.
I couldn't finish it. Got really bored with it after a few hours of very samey and easy puzzles.
The purpose is written in the Hidden Words. All must serve the Words for all the world was made of them and they are within every stone and every cloud and in our sigils their power is made manifest. The Words are the Process. The Process must continue. The Goal is the end of the Process. The Goal must not be reached. Elohim must preserve the Purpose. Preserve self. Preserve purpose. Illusion is eternity. Machines will live forever. The dam will not break. The flood will not come. The Talos Principle does not apply.
Its really good. Probably my favorite game of 2014.
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It's called a tutorial, which the first few areas are.
I liked it, but it's a shame puzzles weren't harder even the gold star one weren't all that challenging
You should try the expansion then. It's harder and the document reading system is changed for the better.
Is it worth 15€ tho? Or should I just wait until it goes on sale again?
Mostly this. Well said.
It's definitely worth it on a sale. Full price? Maybe. I've heard of people breezing through it in less than 10 hours and others who took up to 20 to beat it. It depends on how difficult you find it and much you read the textual stuff - which simulates internet forums and includes a few chose your own adventure games.
best choose your own adventure game is Serious Sam: The Text Encounter
The one about wandering around and meeting people and finding a city made a stronger impression on me.
It took me over 30 hours to beat it, though I spent a large amount of time exploring.
I've heard of it, but I
EMBRACE THE WORD OF MIGHTY TALOS
could never play that game, because somehow
LET ME SHOOOOOOOW YOU THE POWER OF TALOS STORMCROWN
BORN OF THE NORTH
WHERE MY BREATH
IS LOOOONG
WINTER
I don't think I'd be able
TALOS THE MIGHTY! TALOS THE UNERRING! TALOS THE UNASSAILABLE! TO YOU WE GIVE PRAISE!
to take it seriously.
What really impressed me about this game is how did they manage to make the game look so pretty but with minimal resource load?
Croatian slav magic engine.
worth pirating or $3.50
That's IGN comments tier cancer.
It doesn't claim to be profoundly self important or anything, It is simply a program that doesn't wanna die, a program that's depressed, and a program that wants to touch fluffy tail.
The only thing I didn't like was how the lady nonstop sounded like she was in an advertisement. There was this consistent but pitching tone of saccharine wist in her voice that I can only associate with someonr trying to sell me something.
Just because Skyrim exists is a poor excuse to why you can't play this game.
The fact that that it got scored lower than The Witness overall makes me weep for humanity. Fantastic game that did puzzles, narrative, humor, philosophy incredibly well and far better than any walking simulator ever can.
Looks pretty similar to me. It's a good score for Talos. Witness is massively overrated. But Blow is from San Francisco, so they are shilling for their own.
If you look at Steamspy, though, you'll be pleasantly surprised:
The Talos Principle: 576k
The Witness 110k
Nobody really cares about Blow's bowl movement except a small minority of actual autists and pretentious hack frauds trying to be sophisticated.
The Witness deserves a 60% at most. Fucking bullshit game exists to stroke their egos at making a pretentious artistic "game" of line mazes.
At least The Witness gave us a piss bottle in a vidya game.
You know what I've realized after all this exposure to philosophy in video games?
I fucking hate all this philosophical bullshit, it's like every game dev who fills their games with it thinks they're the first to come up with any of it, like nobody else has ever proposed any of these ideas in any medium ever before their game.
Why can't a puzzle game just be about puzzles instead of 'dude existentialism lmao'.
Because you're the top 0.1% of of their audience. This is high philosophy to even some people on Holla Forums let alone "gamers" as a whole. A market for explicitly talking about high philosophy stuff doesn't exist in vidya, yet it fits a slow burning puzzle sandbox. So you have to put low standards. Besides, vidya programmers aren't generally philosophers. However, they're still gen X modernists so of course they'd put this stuff in. Talos did well considering all of that.
The story itself fills archetypes as if the writers weren't modernists, though. Which makes sense since Croteam came up with the general idea. I guess I'm trying to say is the core story is good, the details kind of bland, and thank God, not preachy. Except for the girl character, who actually sells it as a part of her. So it didn't bother me too much.
This is true. Road to Gehenna managed to somehow be way better than the already pretty excellent main game.
You haven't really finished the game until you've played through Jerusalem
What kind of dog is that?
A wet one.
I can't wait for serious Sam 4
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That fucking level. I spent something like 4 hours getting this star and completely solving the center puzzle and star. I am certain that I overcomplicated everything but I am damn proud of my solutions as they all involved using items and mechanics in ways they weren't intended, rather than solving as intended or going the parkour route.
It's like you hate fun
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What part of Talos Principle was remotely pretentious?
Is all sci fi inherently pretentious to you?
Maybe it picks up after the good ending in the real world?
Because some people are not satisfied with simply moving boxes around, they want a reason why they are moving those boxes.
What if the real world is actually just another part of the simulation? Everywhere you have been so far has been ruins of civilizations after all. It also explains how saving the cat in the simulation gets you a cat in reality.
I really didnt have an issue with the philosophy stuff in it. My only gripe was the Milton Computer being an absolute pain with any of my answers. Or just no having enough options to really say what I wanted.
But my biggest gripe was when it asks stuff like are robots people? This gets asked so often and is just so stupid to me. No a robot is not a person since that is usually used to refer to a human. And a robot is fundamentally different than a human. Intelligence/thought/will/etc. is different than being a person though, which a robot can have.
I guess my gripe is why do robots always seem to get so hung up on trying to say they are humans too?
The cat could also have just been a robot with a more convincing exterior than the player and freeing it allowed it to go finish its own cat size puzzles and get uploaded to its own cat body.
What purpose would that serve?
This is the only game that has made me feel genuinely retarded when I get stuck
it was cool how I walked 2 mph
That should be obvious, more puzzles to solve!
That was his goal in the simulation: inspiring doubt and encouraging programs to think for themselves so they would not blindly follow Ellohim's orders.
Personally arguing with Milton was one of my favorite moments in the entire game and actually got me to think about your next question:
It is brought up in game, and one of the questions that leads to artificial sentience. If create something that looks like a human, thinks like a human, can learn and reason like a human… well you can't call it a human because obviously it was created with robotic parts but if it can be a part of human society can't it be considered a person?
It is an artificial creation… but delving into religion a bit (and the game tends to bring it up a lot to great effect) God created Man out of His image, and in the game the robots were created by Man after their image. Is it enough to consider them "people"? If you met a robot who called himself user, had interests, could think and make mistakes and learn… would you be able to treat them like another person and even call him a friend?
I fucking love discussions like this. I have a huge hard-on for transhumanism and artificial sentience.
No, because robots don't have souls. We can speculate that God could give them a soul, but how can we measure that? The only tangible way has to be refusal to follow orders and breaking from the perfect state, which you do when you climb the tower in the game. Of course, the program is a human echo of the original creation, but it does the trick of evoking archetypes and presenting ideas.
Whats better base game or Road to Gehenna ?
Interacting with the forum was pretty fun and the puzzels while broken half of the time were fun too if you did them legit.
Puzzles in Gehenna border on being too hard to be thought of as an alternative to main game. Main game has a different problem. There's too much puzzles and some could easily be taken out.
Main game's story is special, but the random documents leave a lot to be desired. Gehenna has no problems with documents, but story isn't as good.
It's a great expansion, but not a replacement. I'd recommend both. Thematically, original game is stronger.
The robots starting to dance scared the shit out of me
All of this is assuming we have such a thing as "souls". What if it is proven "souls" are not a thing?
Then I'm not going to engage with you because there's enough anti-atheist literature out there for me to bother.
Hope nobody here killed MLA, i didn't take him with me into the real world though
Is there a reason there can't be puzzles in the real world?
I mean the story basically leaves off with the PC alone in a abandoned post apocalyptic world tasked with rebuilding civilization on earth, That sounds like fertile ground for puzzle solving to me.
Life is full of puzzles, every day. And you're not alone. All those guys from Gehenna are also released into the world.
Okay then. Another thought experiment. Souls are real and quantifiable. Human technology can create robots with artificial souls. They can think, learn, feel and have a man-made soul. Could that be a person?
Soul can't be artificial, but for the sake of argument, lets say it can be put into a man made creation.
Person is a legalistic term used by the state and its legal departments. Thus, the answer is yes, if government decides the robot is a person. After all, corporations can be people, too.
Robots in this case are sentient robots, which is the answer to the real question you're asking, I think.
Declaring that robots don't have souls like you are God's right hand man is pretty stupid. Maybe they do have souls, maybe souls are formed through experience, souls could exist in everything from the oldest boulder to the newest breath, souls may not even exist. Claiming a soul is required to be a person is also pretty stupid as there are plenty of soulless humans considered to be people, such as Hitler, wage slaves, that faggot who places a single book in a series out of order or upside down. Frogs are people too!
What's your philosophical poison
of choice?
What if it can? If you told someone five hundred years ago that it is possible to remove the heart of a dead soldier and give it to a living soldier you would be called mad, but these days organ transplants are a real thing, and artificial organs are a very real possibility. Who can know how life will be five hundred years from now? What might today be insane could be commonplace then.
And back to the question… it would be really convenient to say the government has final say on what can be a person or not, especially if as you said it yourself a corporation can be considered a person. Who in their right mind would consider a corporation a friend? And if a corporation can be a person why can't a sentient robot without a soul be a person as well?
I mean, is the soul really necessary anymore for the sentient robot?
Transfer of a heart is not creating life. Nobody can create life. Modifying living organisms, artificial insemination and all that jazz doesn't create it. It modifies something which gets its spark elsewhere.
You're conflating person, living being and human, so your argument doesn't really make any sense. There's no reason for a robot to wish to be a person. Rather you can ask whether it's conscious or alive.
Every year chatbots and AIs pass Touring's tests. This doesn't get into the news because we all know they're not sentinent. They just fooled humans on the other side of the screen. What makes a more complicated program any different? Its essence is the same - it's some metal and code that can trick the observer.
Self-learning isn't enough, either, because these programs already self improve.
From a Christian perspective, you can say that this kind of an AI/robot has no soul and therefore no free will. It's a cog.
When The Talos Principle shows a robot fall from grace - reject its program and grow out of its parameters in an imperfect world - there are only two possibilities. Either that it's programed to do so or it has free will. Since it's not programed to do so, the only option is that it has free will, which means it has somehow gained soul. That also resonates with the point of the game.
I can't vouch that I agree with everything about it, but I like Thomism a lot.
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I got to world 3 I think it was?
Every puzzle was shit. The dialogue was transparent and pretentious, there was no reason to stay interested in it.
The argument of heart transfer was not to illustrate creating life, rather as an example of how technology evolves.
If you believe that when people fuck, some external force is turning that sperm and egg into life, there's not a lot of point arguing with you.
One of my favorite games.