Strife Plot Questions

[printz]

Krazov said:

I don’t think so—he takes money for all his assignments, till the end. He’s a psychopath looking mainly for his own goals,

Aren't we all, really? Of course he needs money to buy all the armament.

[scaled]

Re: The Sigil Bits Make You Insane.
Maybe Strifeguy is insane to a degree and the Sigil just amped up his blood-knight tendencies to the point of going after bigger and more threatening targets?

Re: Blackbird as Entity in 'Meh' path, but still narrating the ending.
While It likely is an artifact of things changing during development it is what we have. Best idea I can think of is the Entity either used her voice as a last minute freakout, or the entity /ate/ her to act as a host, and then she was freed when it was killed. There is no real evidence of that in game which is a real shame since that'd make for a hell of a boss fight if done well, but if you're trying to reconcile the two paths... maybe?

Re: Beta Dialog
Is there a full script from the game, including bits from the beta and the Forgemaster/Timothy from Veteran Edition posted anywhere? I've seen references to the beta before but never the actual material.

Re: Sigil not being unified Sooner.
The 'Virus', be it nanomachines, parasitic creature that networks people to the Entity, or whatever seems to amp up people's more selfish and or violent tendencies. While the Order has/is an army that steamrolled opposition, I get the feeling that it's highly fragmented, with each head (Loremaster ,Oracle, Bishop, and Programmer) basically keeping their own fiefdoms and rarely interacting. There's a unified 'religion' and all the minions basically are loyal... if needlessly sadistic, but each leader has their own goals, but can't really act because everything is more or less in stalemate/mexican standoff where one person moves everyone then moves to shoot them out of the sky. The reason The Front won was because Strifeguy basically blitzed his way through before the slow unwieldy armies of generally stupid mooks could properly mobilize. Why he could do that when nobody else could I dunno.

I like this game for the potential the world has for storytelling. That and I like 2.5d games. This one just happens to give story and just enough fluff potential. It stumbles here and there (what with the stealth more or less failing constantly, false choices that generally are 'do you want to die?', and I really, REALLY hate the bullshit that is the factory and proving grounds in terms of mazelike layout.) However it holds up remarkably well. Do kinda wish someone would do a 'smooth strife' mod to double the frames each enemy gets. We already have unit variations purely because we can with the acolytes.

Anyway. I've actually tried my hand at novelization too, and only really got to the Programmer before my interest just wandered off. A lot of 'It almost feels right, but it feels like i'm totally fucking up the action bits.' I wish the thread starter luck, assuming he's still working on this. If not, hey I might want to pick back up and try seeing what i can do.

[Xfing]

scaled said:

Re: Blackbird as Entity in 'Meh' path, but still narrating the ending.
While It likely is an artifact of things changing during development it is what we have. Best idea I can think of is the Entity either used her voice as a last minute freakout, or the entity /ate/ her to act as a host, and then she was freed when it was killed. There is no real evidence of that in game which is a real shame since that'd make for a hell of a boss fight if done well, but if you're trying to reconcile the two paths... maybe?

I honestly just think the Entity did that to fuck with your mind and that's it. Seeing how deep people are trying to read into it - it has worked very well :P

Re: Beta Dialog
Is there a full script from the game, including bits from the beta and the Forgemaster/Timothy from Veteran Edition posted anywhere? I've seen references to the beta before but never the actual material.

You can find all this inside the Strife.wad file. Just scroll through the file (see it with F3 in Total Commander or something), and you'll get to the unused bits. Especially the oracle did have some more extensive dialogue and provided a bit more background, but that didn't really affect any of the outcomes and therefore the plot in general. Pretty sweet to read, tho.

[scaled]

I'd asked elsethread how to do that since all SLADE did was give me hex values and i have no idea. XWE keeps hanging on trying to open stuff. Total Commander? As in just a plain old file explorer?

[Quasar]

The altered dialogues for Veteran Edition are in SVE.wad, BTW.

What's really cool is that I got my interpretation of the backstory canonized, so my word is now Word of God >:D *muahahaa*

[scaled]

Figured the bits about the spaceship would be in SVE Wad (By the way, kudos for leaving the original strife1.wad and voices.wad files untouched.) I just can't get anything to read the things that the text bits are stowed in, which is annoying because i know it's obviously possible. Maybe I'm just derping on something. Ah well I'll figure it out. Figured it out. Interesting tidbits buried in there.

The thing i'm curious on is if the Entity and its spawn came from this world are they natural or did we make them? Or were they there first and humans were the invading colonists? There's a thought.

We show up to colonize a world.
The local starfish aliens don't like it much. War happens.
They get ejected into space because Reasons (maybe the intent was to dump them on another world and it didn't work out?)
Colonists are so smashed they basically go with a medieval lifestyle and eventually forget about the war.
Then the 'comet' hits.
I'm seriously thinking the events of Strife are in the same generation as the initial impact. At the soonest I'd say ten years (since one of the ending shots shows children) and at latest several decades. However most telling, to me, is that even with the advanced technology there's still the same kind of wood and stone buildings, just with random electronics embedded in them, so that's either cultural inertia on building design, the fact they didn't know how to build different (which I call complete bunk on if they're able to do computers, cybernetic implants, and make very modern weaponry,) or the order was just trying to make the existing buildings work for them.