Violation of Player Self-Identity, Lore Failure, and Spitting on Themes

[ishner]

Three massive failures in this quest:

1)
The Child of the Zaramon is the player in universe. Whether Operator or Drifter, they are *You* in a meaningful sense. New War added alternate POV questing, and Veilbreaker brought back KLEM-175 because there was value in telling those stories, but Jade Shadows is different. At the finale of the quest, you are asked to make a choice as the character you have been given for the mission. You are told to "Name Your Child".

The Stalker is NOT *Me* in any meaningful sense! It is NOT *MY* child!

This is a violation of our fundamental personhood and ability to draw for ourselves the Boundaries of Self.
This is ABSOLUTELY UNACCEPTABLE ON EVERY LEVEL!

2)
The fact that Jade and Stalker act independently without need for transference implies that they are Gen1 warframes. More, Jade having memory fragments implies that she is the actual original person infected with the Helminth Strain. The Jade we make in our foundry on the other hand, is very clearly a Gen3. For these to use the same character model is entirely inconsistent with established lore from The Sacrifice. Just like Excalibur Umbra (Gen1) uses a different character model then Excalibur Prime (Gen2) and Excalibur (Gen3), Either we need a different character model to distinguish the two, or our Jade needs to be capable of independent action while we are in Operator Form.

Specifically, The Pregnancy should not be a part of the mass-produced copies; She is pregnant because was pregnant before her infestation, but there was no preexisting unborn child stuck in the industrial machinery of our foundries.

3)
The Fundamental beating heart of the game's story is the importance of relying on others when you cannot carry on alone, most clearly expressed in The Sacrifice.

"--We had created monsters we couldn't control. We drugged them, tortured them, eviscerated them... We brutalized their minds... but it did not work. Until they came."
"And it was not their force of will - not their Void devilry - not their alien darkness... it was something else."
"It was that somehow, from within the derelict-horror, they had learned a way to see inside an ugly, broken thing--"
"And take away its pain."

That is the Meaning of the Tenno and the Warframes established time and again over the course of the story; That we are all broken together but can help to make each-other whole; That Transference is a metaphor for talking to someone and learning to understand each other; that Therapy is truly the best super power.

But in THIS quest, the point of a Tenno is that they can tell you "Uh... Ya might want to inject her with some infested brain juice". Never mind that the Helminth exists spicifically to provide the "milk [that] enriches your kindred flesh with endless strength and vigor". Never mind that Stalker coming back to life time and again implies that he *already has his own Helminth*. Never mind that Hunhow knew that the Warframe are infested and could have recommended brain juice on his own.
No.
We need to use the PC as an NPC without invoking literally any of their defining traits!

[Chewarette]

9 hours ago, ishner said:

1)
The Child of the Zaramon is the player in universe. Whether Operator or Drifter, they are *You* in a meaningful sense. New War added alternate POV questing, and Veilbreaker brought back KLEM-175 because there was value in telling those stories, but Jade Shadows is different. At the finale of the quest, you are asked to make a choice as the character you have been given for the mission. You are told to "Name Your Child".

The Stalker is NOT *Me* in any meaningful sense! It is NOT *MY* child!

This is a violation of our fundamental personhood and ability to draw for ourselves the Boundaries of Self.
This is ABSOLUTELY UNACCEPTABLE ON EVERY LEVEL!

Heh, considering we massively helped deliver the baby, I guess he's partly ours. 

[Bearssi]

Did our child/teenager Operator experience the birth through transference? 

There is already out of character stuff like using excess amount of curse words but this childbearing is a bit even more over the top. 

[Gaxxian]

Justo ahora, Bearssi dijo:

Did our child/teenager Operator experience the birth through transference? 

There is already out of character stuff like using excess amount of curse words but this childbearing is a bit even more over the top. 

Technically your child was inside Jade at that moment and we even have a syncronizing (with Jade) minigame. So...

[ExaltedZoro]

12 hours ago, ishner said:

The Child of the Zaramon is the player in universe. Whether Operator or Drifter, they are *You* in a meaningful sense. New War added alternate POV questing, and Veilbreaker brought back KLEM-175 because there was value in telling those stories, but Jade Shadows is different. At the finale of the quest, you are asked to make a choice as the character you have been given for the mission. You are told to "Name Your Child".

The Stalker is NOT *Me* in any meaningful sense! It is NOT *MY* child!

This is a violation of our fundamental personhood and ability to draw for ourselves the Boundaries of Self.
This is ABSOLUTELY UNACCEPTABLE ON EVERY LEVEL!

This is just straight up a bad take. At no point in the quest does the game try to say that you, as the player, ARE Stalker, it simply puts you in his shoes for the time being, same as when it happened 4 times in the New War. It's no different from Veilbreaker or Duviri because, like you say, those stories and this one are worth telling. The quest being from Stalkers perspective allows you to relate to him on an emotional level. If they'd done it from the perspective of the Tenno and we simply watched this all happen, it would not be nearly as hard-hitting.

12 hours ago, ishner said:

The fact that Jade and Stalker act independently without need for transference implies that they are Gen1 warframes. More, Jade having memory fragments implies that she is the actual original person infected with the Helminth Strain. The Jade we make in our foundry on the other hand, is very clearly a Gen3. For these to use the same character model is entirely inconsistent with established lore from The Sacrifice. Just like Excalibur Umbra (Gen1) uses a different character model then Excalibur Prime (Gen2) and Excalibur (Gen3), Either we need a different character model to distinguish the two, or our Jade needs to be capable of independent action while we are in Operator Form.

Specifically, The Pregnancy should not be a part of the mass-produced copies; She is pregnant because was pregnant before her infestation, but there was no preexisting unborn child stuck in the industrial machinery of our foundries.

Umbra is not a Gen1 frame. Or at the very least, if that is the case, Excal Prime is also Gen1. Umbra was one of the last of the original Warframes to be created as it happened so close to the end of the Old War. Excal Prime already existed long before Umbra. Jade still having the pregnant belly when we use her is because that's simply part of her anatomy now. It's no less a part of her as her head or her limbs. In terms of her not having sentience, it's the same reason why other frames like Limbo or Mirage don't exhibit sentience when we build them. It's probably because we don't have the original parts to extrapolate from, only the traces of them off of which we can then base a blueprint. With Umbra, we had access to his original parts in the courtyard. What the difference is between the original parts and the blueprints I can't tell you, but they're obviously different in some way.

12 hours ago, ishner said:

But in THIS quest, the point of a Tenno is that they can tell you "Uh... Ya might want to inject her with some infested brain juice". Never mind that the Helminth exists spicifically to provide the "milk [that] enriches your kindred flesh with endless strength and vigor". Never mind that Stalker coming back to life time and again implies that he *already has his own Helminth*. Never mind that Hunhow knew that the Warframe are infested and could have recommended brain juice on his own.

Why we didn't go to the Helminth, I'm not sure. But, there's probably a good reason along the lines of the Helminth is capable of maintenance, but not complete restoration. As for the Stalker coming back to life, what? That's never happened. We never kill Stalker, we only defeat him. And just because Hunhow knew that the Warframes are infested, doesn't mean he knows how to heal them.

[ishner]

On 2024-06-20 at 4:33 AM, ExaltedZoro said:

At no point in the quest does the game try to say that you, as the player, ARE Stalker, it simply puts you in his shoes for the time being, same as when it happened 4 times in the New War. It's no different from Veilbreaker or Duviri because, like you say, those stories and this one are worth telling.

You are willfully misunderstanding thrice over.
First off, Duviri and the majority of New War explicitly *is* from the POV of your same magic space child, just a different version of them from a different timeline. I literally said so in my original comment.
Second, we have LITERALLY NEVER ONCE been asked to make a single choice as someone else, and that makes all the difference. Seeing the world from someone else's eyes is not at all the same thing as deciding how someone else sees the world. When you play Veilbreaker, Klem decides for himself to include the random corpus he runs across in his band of brothers because we are playing as Klem rather than *being* him.
Third, after being asked to choose Sirius or Orion, the game gives a confirmation prompt explicitly saying "Name Your Child _____"! There is no other interpretation of directly addressing the player with a non-diegetic interface prompt and calling the baby "YOUR CHILD".

On 2024-06-20 at 4:33 AM, ExaltedZoro said:

Umbra is not a Gen1 frame. Or at the very least, if that is the case, Excal Prime is also Gen1. Umbra was one of the last of the original Warframes to be created as it happened so close to the end of the Old War. Excal Prime already existed long before Umbra. Jade still having the pregnant belly when we use her is because that's simply part of her anatomy now. It's no less a part of her as her head or her limbs. In terms of her not having sentience, it's the same reason why other frames like Limbo or Mirage don't exhibit sentience when we build them.

 

Just because they had transitioned to Gen 2 before the Excalibur line was created does not make Excalibur Umbra a Gen 2:
Gen 1 is the original infected individual retaining sapience and fragments of memory, or perfect copies thereof.
Gen 2 are modified copies of the Gen 1 with changes and "Improvements" made by the Orokin, near devoid of mind and reliant on transference.
Gen 3 are flawed copies of the Gen 2 produced by other people with inferior, non-orokin tech.

In game we only have access to Gen 3 on our own, Gen 2 with fragments of lost tech retrieved from the void relics, and a single Gen 1 Excalibur. For Gen 2 Jades to still have the pregnancy, the archimedians would need to have concluded that that was a useful part of her body. There is no way they concluded this, given that it explicitly drains her energy and weakens her.

On 2024-06-20 at 4:33 AM, ExaltedZoro said:

Why we didn't go to the Helminth, I'm not sure. But, there's probably a good reason along the lines of the Helminth is capable of maintenance, but not complete restoration. As for the Stalker coming back to life, what? That's never happened. We never kill Stalker, we only defeat him. And just because Hunhow knew that the Warframes are infested, doesn't mean he knows how to heal them.

Not sure what part of "you died" showing up on your screen is unclear to you. Sure, when Umbra was shredded into a million pieces and strewn around the room it took the foundry to reconstitute him, but every time you lose a mission, you get your warframe resurrected by the ship's Helminth.
Sure, it makes sense that our human combat expert has better understanding of biotechnology than the superintelligent AI farmer...

[ClockworkSiren]

7 hours ago, ishner said:

we have LITERALLY NEVER ONCE been asked to make a single choice as someone else

Except we have. At the end of the New War we, as Lotus, get to decide what name she chooses for herself. 
 

It’s literally no different when choosing a name for the Warframe baby 

[NameLessFreak]

How could the Helmith help when something impossible was happening?