Essay: An analysis of Light/Darkness or Good/Evil in MM7

The role-playing games (I-X) that started it all and the various spin-offs (including Dark Messiah).
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tolich
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Unread postby tolich » 06 Jul 2011, 17:22

GreatEmerald wrote:Speaking of Kastore/Resurrectra's goals, it would be interesting if Resurrectra used the Oscillator to enable the Heavenly Forge and then replicate another Oscillator which would then be used to open the Web Gate.
No way. You have to obtain two Oscillators: one to activate the Forge and the second to be cloned by the Forge. The Forge probably deactivates if you remove its Oscillator. But if you have two, you don't need the third one.

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Unread postby GreatEmerald » 06 Jul 2011, 19:04

tolich wrote:No way. You have to obtain two Oscillators: one to activate the Forge and the second to be cloned by the Forge. The Forge probably deactivates if you remove its Oscillator. But if you have two, you don't need the third one.
Like I've said, they could have used it to make a few weapons and then put it into the Web Gate.

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Unread postby tolich » 06 Jul 2011, 20:32

GreatEmerald wrote:Like I've said, they could have used it to make a few weapons and then put it into the Web Gate.
They already have Ancient weapons, and has no need to arm someone else.

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Unread postby GreatEmerald » 06 Jul 2011, 20:52

Well, I don't think the buildings in the Forge existed before it and were merely duplicated. I'd assume that the Heavenly Forge has a certain set of molecular patterns already in the memory banks, so at least looking through it would make sense. Maybe they have some better armour or such. And taking a few extra Blasters won't hurt if their current ones break.

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Unread postby BoardGuest808888 » 10 Jul 2011, 05:15

Never thought much about this good/evil thing for M&M 7. I always thought it's only whether you follow the wizards or the necromancers (of course, you're going to be good for their side and evil for the others).

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Unread postby XEL II » 10 Jul 2011, 10:25

Heavenly Forge is not just a replicator. It could also create items, and one Forge ws practically enough to keep the technology on the fledgling advanced Enroth.

Overall, the goals of Resurectra's team are clearly more noble. Kastore also wants to make Enroth prosperous and advanced, but under complete domination of him and his allies.
Make you strong places to dwell and practice the evil of your arts. Build great monuments to stand through the ages and remind your followers of the task with which you have been charged. Use these halls of iniquity to perpetrate your schemes against the infestation that has taken the fields and lakes of this land from you, their rightful masters. Never forget the hatred that must finally overcome and consume mankind. Dwell in your dungeons and brood. - Sheltem the Dark

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Unread postby Xfing » 10 Jul 2011, 22:42

XEL II wrote: Overall, the goals of Resurectra's team are clearly more noble. Kastore also wants to make Enroth prosperous and advanced, but under complete domination of him and his allies.
I think that it's the explanation that the evil team would give to themselves to feel better about what they're doing... but in actuality (it's referred to a couple of times in-game), they want absolute power, tyranny and basically to conquer the world for their own selfish benefit. Hunger of power is what drives them.

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Unread postby Xfing » 07 May 2012, 11:45

XEL II wrote: BTW, what makes some people think that the Clerics of the Temple of Sun in Murmurwoods were hypocritical? They were acting as successors to the original Church of the Sun and were pretty much keeping up its traditions. Dyso hated them because he considered himself abandoned by his brethren in the Necromancer's Guild (where he was double agent). However, I don't remember much about the Temple of Sun plotline, maybe there was indeed something ugly about them.
Dyson Leyland explains this in a conversation with him in his tower in the Necromancers' Guild. He says something like "Those who claim to be "holy men", are actually guilty of worst crimes of greed and self-indulgence". This is easily proven actually - all you need to do is kill a Cleric of the Sun outside the Temple and loot his body - you'll find around 1500 gold on each one (only the highest tier monsters carry such amounts of gold).

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Unread postby Slayer of Cliffracers » 15 May 2012, 17:30

XEL II wrote:The notion that Ancients would be "worn out" is baseless. They are a supercivilization for crying out loud :) The matter is just that they are distracted by the continuing fighting against the Kreegan. But if they came into direct contact with Enroth, they would surely reclaim it.
I was under the understanding that the Ancients really aren't that interested in directly meddling in planets once they have created them. They arrive, terraform a planet, fill it with fantasy lifeforms along fairly predictable lines and then leave.

Can you point to any examples in which the Ancients have actually colonised a planet like Enroth; as I understand it the state of things in Enroth (minus the Kreegans) is as they wish it to be.
GreatEmerald wrote: Being a supercivilisation didn't stop the Klingons/Borg from wearing out the Federation (see TNG: Yesterday's Enterprise, for instance), so the Kreegan/Creators could as easily wear out the Ancients. There is little point in reclaiming a colony that is no longer an effective asset in fighting the enemy, since it would be too difficult to maintain it. Of course, if they had the Armageddon's Blade at the time, it could have made a difference...
I'm no expert in Star Trek at all but aren't the Borg at least high-tech enough to convert people into Borg. And the Klingons are also relatively high tech enough in the sense of having laser weapons and spaceships.

We are not talking about a small technological difference. We are talking about medieval worlds which could be conquered by a few thousand men with WW1 era machine guns. And the natives of these worlds can quite happily not only defeat the Kreegans but eventually even expel them from their world (as in Armageddon's Blade).

However if what I am suggesting above is correct, that the Ancients have no interest in colonising the world's they have created with their own people then perhaps the Kreegans fight the Ancients by attacking the worlds that they have created NOT by attacking the Ancients own homeworlds (or whatever Ancients are based in).

This comes down to the basic weakness of the Ancients, similar to the Star Trek rule of non-interferance. The Ancients morality prevents them from directly intervening on a world (or perhaps doing so with technology higher than is available to the natives) and the Kreegans who cannot possibly contend with the Ancients technology use this to their full advantage. They defy the Ancients by NOT fighting them.
Konfuzius wrote: I wouldn't consider Liches as evil. Liches sacrifice their flesh to increase their life and focus to increase their knowledge.
They can spend much more time in learning dark arts due to the longer live and because they don't have to please the needs of a living like eating, sleeping or being ill (although they can be diseased and need slepp, but that is more a gameplay element).
On paper Liche seems like the moral option for undead creature. You don't have to kill others to survive (vampire), which are more intact; so one could argue that Liche is a sacrifice of bodily integrity (spending eternity as a fleshless skelaton) to avoid having to hurt others.

However perhaps something about the nature of being a Liche (as opposed to why someone would choose the Liche option over Vampire) that makes a person evil. It could be that those living elements (like hunger, thirst etc) are needed to mantain 'love' without which one cannot be good. A pure intellect without any love is an evil intellect perhaps.

Alternatively there may be the nature of the magic by which Liches function, which bring us to the second question.
Konfuzius wrote: Also I wouldn't say that practising dark arts makes you evil (or vice versa with light), many people in MM6 told that.
In the end it is the way you life and the actions you perform.
It all depends upon the nature of magic in the Might and Magic universe works really, what's behind the mechanic.

If magic is (as I think) a sort of divine commerce, that is mana is the currency of the gods which allows them to act in the material world THEN if Dark Magic involves 'buying' FROM evil gods then it would follow that any dark magic spell would involve doing more harm than the benefit acrued as a result of the spell to the cause of goodness.

Afterall the sellers only want to sell if they can make a profit by doing so, thus the harm done by the mana will be greater than the benefit of the spell. You might cast a dark magic spell in the cause of your good way of life to destroy an evil warlord but if the mana expended in order to 'purchase' that spell allows that evil god to influence 10 people to become evil warlords then allowing the dark warlord to live rather than using dark magic is actually the good decision.

So the action (dark magic use) would then actually be an evil action regardless of how moral the motive for using it; unless you could actually manage to break the system by using a cheap dark magic spell to thwart a very terrible evil perhaps.

We know afterall that at least one evil god desires to gain mana
The Breeders were the result of Urgash crafting a material form that translated some of his own primordial drives. Specifically, the drive to consume mana and the drive to populate Ashan with hordes of creatures loyal to the dictates of Chaos.
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Unread postby Xfing » 10 Sep 2012, 21:20

Slayer of Cliffracers wrote:
I was under the understanding that the Ancients really aren't that interested in directly meddling in planets once they have created them. They arrive, terraform a planet, fill it with fantasy lifeforms along fairly predictable lines and then leave.
Um... and who sent Escaton to destroy the planet? :3

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Unread postby BoardGuest808888 » 18 Sep 2012, 09:31

Not the Ancients. They didn't send that guy to destroy the planet. They sent him to deal with the Kreegans' infestation.

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Unread postby Tress » 18 Sep 2012, 12:10

Not the Ancients. They didn't send that guy to destroy the planet. They sent him to deal with the Kreegans' infestation.
Thats would be same as saying, that US would send nukes to deal with commies not to destroy cities during cold war.
Estacon is robot, he do what he is programmed to do, in this case deal with infestation via extremely radical method.[/u]

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Unread postby BoardGuest808888 » 20 Sep 2012, 09:56

Well, "deal with the Kreegans" was his mission, but "destroying the planet" was but one (and not the only) option while "extremely radical" was just a matter of perspective.

Don't forget that the guy was also given a capacity to check and evaluate his own move even if he can't undo it on his own.

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Unread postby BMJedi » 29 Sep 2012, 17:53

Slight tangent here, but don't you just love the names in this game?

"Eschaton" is clearly derived from the same root word as "eschatology", which is a sub-discipline within theology that means "the study of end things", i.e., "the end of the world." The root word is also present in "to escalate", or "escalator".
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Unread postby Slayer of Cliffracers » 03 Dec 2012, 22:57

Xfing wrote: Um... and who sent Escaton to destroy the planet? :3
I don't think that Escaton was consciously sent by the Ancients to destroy the planet, more than he was "installed" by them to guard the planet and was triggered to activate planetery self-destruct according to a script. He's a computer afterall.

So basically he's say doing a count of the number of kreegans on the planet, if the number of kreegans exceeds X number then Escaton is scripted to activate the Convergance process (which will destroy the planet). There is no off switch and no way to stop the process once it's began, even for Escaton itself.

This ruthless measure makes sense because it means that the Kreegans cannot trick, fool or otherwise pursuade Escaton that he no longer has to destroy the planet.

Since he's a part of the planet, him acting to destroy it is not breaking the non-intervention pattern the Ancients abide by, indeed that's kind of why they need such radical solutions in the first place.

Kind of messed up morality the Ancients abide by, it is better to implant a robot that will destroy an entire planet and all lifeforms on it to stop the Kreegans it is to intervene directly to eliminate those Kreegans.

Of course it all comes down to what exactly is it that the Ancients want from their worlds. It seems to me that the whole thing could be an horridly grandiose and expensive social experiment; take a batch of creatures, create a world for them with the desired parameters and then see how they develop. The Ancients had determined that any direct interference would alter development in an unpredictable fashion and render the world experimentally worthless.

So the Ancients could intervene to save Enroth from the Kreegans but to do so would render it's experimental value worthless but intervening to save the planet does have a cost. They are therefore paying for nothing. A better solution would be to have the planet automatically destroy itself, saving other experiments/planets.
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Unread postby tolich » 04 Dec 2012, 08:16

Slayer of Cliffracers wrote:I don't think that Escaton was consciously sent by the Ancients to destroy the planet, more than he was "installed" by them to guard the planet and was triggered to activate planetery self-destruct according to a script. He's a computer afterall.
Then why did he delay this destruction? There's a long time passed since the Night of Shooting Stars.

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Unread postby vladimir-maestro » 04 Dec 2012, 10:02

tolich wrote:
Slayer of Cliffracers wrote:I don't think that Escaton was consciously sent by the Ancients to destroy the planet, more than he was "installed" by them to guard the planet and was triggered to activate planetery self-destruct according to a script. He's a computer afterall.
Then why did he delay this destruction? There's a long time passed since the Night of Shooting Stars.
cause kreegan's slain made escaton's protocols into a paradox: one side he triggers to destruction but other side - the main sorce (kreegans) that need to be destroyd - already were perished. so via this logical paradox he decided to seek help to stop himself. but this is another logical paradox^ why computer knows he must stop but cannot stop?! mainframe overrride? 8|
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Unread postby Avonu » 04 Dec 2012, 11:24

Image

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tolich
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Unread postby tolich » 04 Dec 2012, 14:25

vladimir-maestro wrote:
tolich wrote:
Slayer of Cliffracers wrote:Я не думаю, что Эскатон сознательно прислан Древними, чтобы уничтожить планету, больше, чем он был "установлен" ими для защиты планеты и был вызван для активации самоуничтожения планеты по сценарию. Он компьютер, в конце концов.
Тогда почему он задержал это разрушение? Больно уж много времени прошло с Ночи Падающих Звезд.
Патамушта убитые кригане ввели протоколы эскатона в парадокс... ляляля три рубля

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Unread postby Slayer of Cliffracers » 04 Dec 2012, 16:49

tolich wrote:Then why did he delay this destruction? There's a long time passed since the Night of Shooting Stars.
Firstly the number of the Kreegans that were present at the time of the Night of the Shooting Stars may not have been enough to trigger Escaton to begin the Convocation. However at some point during Might and Magic VI they reached the critical mass that caused Escaton to calculate that the odds of victory for the locals approximated 0%. Afterall the Kreegans are an advanced 'civilization', while the locals are armed with pointy sticks.

But your point stands, there is indeed some time in the middle between late Might and Magic VI and Might and Magic VIII. The tenses are confusing, Escaton refers to himself calling the Convocation when the Kreegans are already there but then talks of them being dust when he arrived.

However we do know that other defensive things happened related to the Kreegans, specifically the arrival of the Angels. So it would seem that there were other computerised defense systems activated as well. Perhaps these systems have precedence over Escaton and Escaton is not allowed to begin the Convergance until they have been deactivated.

They were deactivated because they have an offswitch triggered by the abscence of kreegans to fight. The Convergance is deliberately unstoppable because it is meant as a contingancy plan in case the Kreegans have sufficiantly compromised the defenses that no hope exists for the planet surviving. Best to save the other planets.

Thing is that Escaton would normally factor in the strength of the Angelic forces conjured up by the initial activation of the earlier overidding system in response to the Kreegan presence against that of the Kreegans. But what if the angel conjuring system was faulty so that while activated it did not correctly summon any angels? This means things worked in the following sequence.

Kreegans arrive.
Angel program activated.
Escaton activated.
Angel program is buggy and crashes not summoning any angels.
After scripted timeperiod passes Escaton calculates the stength of native and Angelic forces vs that of Kreegans and demon allies. In the abscence of Angelic forces Escaton calculates odds of survival at 0% and decides to activate Convergance.
Angel program is still active and overiddes Escaton. This is perhaps why the tenses are confused in Avonu's screenshots.
Angel program finally manages to conjure angels properly.
Kreegans are wiped out.
Angel program deactivates removing Escaton override.
Escaton's overidde removed and Convergance begins. Convergance cannot be stopped.

In summary then, it's all the result of faulty software. Alternatively the Kreegans actively sabotaged the angel summoning system.
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