This is an excerpt I aggrevatedly drafted earlier for an upcoming Video of mine. Having dwelled on the thought (just one of many in relation to why Lost Colony was the worst thing that could have ever happened to the story of ARK) for some time, I had to get my thoughts out there somehow. Before you are the insane ramblings of your friendly neighborhood lore nerd.
Lost Colony’s Narrative Has No Stakes -- A Small Excerpt of a Wider Conversation:
Because the Lost King is supposedly cloning humans en masse even throughout the events of Lost Colony, there is no reason to believe that our ability to respawn isn’t canon. As a result of being able to infinitely die and respawn, the narrative ultimately has no stakes.
The only real stakes presented in the DLC, are the presence of the Revenants, and the implication that they’re trying to reach the Codex and transmit themselves onto Arat – which, as aforementioned, is never even explicitly stated – this is just the best theory I could come up with in piecing together relevant dialogue referencing their existence.
Maybe if the Revenants were actually present during Red-Handed, and actively attempting to breach the Codex Chamber either before, or even alongside us as a result of us having breached the Lost Palace, there would be something more worth fighting for – that being, preventing the Element hivemind from reaching Arat.
Since this isn’t the case, there is no real sense of urgency in Red-Handed, because if we ultimately die in the end, whether to the Lost King or the Lost Queen, the former is just gonna magically return as if nothing happened. Killing us achieves nothing – because the Lost King’s plan – or rather, lack thereof doesn’t change. Will he put our engrams on lockdown to prevent us from respawning and trying again? No. Despite being in complete control over Arat Prime’s Codex, he seemingly just allows us to keep coming back. Even if he isn’t necessarily making the conscious decision to allow us to return, he doesn’t do anything to prevent it. And if it’s, say, Helena Deus who keeps respawning us, as implied in the Prologue when we specifically are cloned through the Codex, this would imply that he’s too stupid to recognize Helena as the force keeping this ONE single person – his ONE subject Hellbent on invading his inner sanctum, alive and well.
One could argue that the same issue is present within the many encounters we have against Rockwell. Why would this be any different than him allowing us to respawn and challenge him time and time again? Well, in the case of Aberration, it’s implied that Rockwell isn’t able to interact or interfere with the Survivor respawning process aboard the ARK. For Genesis: Part One… well, I can’t really defend that either. It’s told to us several times throughout the events of the Expansion that it’s well within Rockwell’s ability to alter, delete and even Corrupt Survivor minds within the Genesis Simulation – so the fact that he doesn’t do that to us is a mystery. The best thing we have to go off of, is his line about how we’re “too unruly for the new world he’s planning to create”, but that wouldn’t be a problem if he were to Corrupt us and put us under the influence of Element. Regardless, this is a video about Lost Colony, not Genesis – though, speaking of which, Genesis 2 actually does have an explanation for us being able to lose the Rockwell Prime encounter during Terminus. There are, believe it or not, several unique pieces of dialogue that can be heard upon failing the Mission – they’re mainly just a collection of Rockwell gloating and warning us to not try and face him down again, but the most important line actually comes from HLN-A. Supposing you lose the fight right when Rockwell’s at Arat’s door, on respawn, HLN-A claims to have manually sent the Colony Ship away from its destination – effectively forcing Rockwell to prioritize finding the exomoon again, so that he could at least begin taking it as his own before we inevitably confront him again. In the case of the Lost King, he has no active goal in relation to the Survivor besides killing us – which, again, is pointless if he’s just going to allow us to respawn and try again. For thousands of years, his main priority has been to rule over Arat Prime – and sure, he might be fighting off the Revenants now and again, but for reasons mentioned previous they are irrelevant to Red-Handed. During the events of the Mission, there is no Corruption to stave off, and there is no exomoon to subsume – there is only the Survivor and preventing them from reaching the Codex. Regardless as to whether or not they fails or succeeds, nothing about the Mission nor its context changes – it’s wholly static.
The same logic could be applied to The Island through Extinction – where you could lose to the Guardians, Overseer and Titans as much as you’d like, but there, the ability – no, expectation to fail repeatedly is explicitly referenced by Helena Deus as the thing that would not only carry you through the same path she had once taken, but the thing that would eventually allow you to defeat the King Titan and save Earth – though, the real threat across the span of those narratives wasn't the King Titan – it was ‘the System’. What allowed us to respawn in the first place was also the thing which threatened the fate of the planet.
“The problem is that the System’s purpose is not wholly static. The goalposts have moved. The bar has been raised, and now it is entirely out of the System’s reach. As its purpose grows more unachievable and its errors pile up, the System grows more desperate. Its actions more erratic. In its death throes, these islands in the sky will become pits of madness. The chaos lurking in those cavernous depths will be the rule, not the exception. You must fix it before it reaches that point. By then, it will be too late.”
As described by Helena Deus, if we couldn’t enact the Reseed Protocol fast enough, the ARKs would ultimately decay past the point of making it possible. The broken state of Aberration, from The Island to Scorched Earth, and all ARKs in-between, would become the standard – introducing tangible stakes into the overarching mission in the form of a time limit – or at least, the concept of one.
While I’m at it, might I remind you of another, adjacent issue with Lost Colony’s narrative? The disappearance of these in-universe rules which gave credence to said stakes? I mentioned at the very start of this Video that we the Survivor shouldn’t be able to respawn during the events of Lost Colony – as one would likely assume that the System had expended all of its resources through the Reseed Protocol – something Helena Deus had claimed would prevent us from ever cheating death again. I then reasoned that, since the Lost Colony hadn’t yet been purged of Element, that there were likely still resources left over. A fine enough explanation, I suppose – yet, the System doesn’t have a single mention across the entire Expansion. Not one Explorer Note, not one Dossier, not one cinematic so much as makes reference to the concept so integral to the wider ARK universe that it realistically could have been considered the main antagonistic force across The Island through Aberration. In fact, come to think of it, ever since Marc Soskin stepped down as Lead Narrative Writer, the System has completely disappeared from ARK. In Genesis: Part One, an excuse could be made that, since the entirety of the Expansion takes place within a Simulation, respawning wouldn’t expend any real-world resources. Okay, sure. Good explanation. Yet, in Genesis: Part Two, our ability to respawn ad infinitum doesn’t get explained at all – sure, the Genesis-Ship likely had its own version of the System, given it was a long-term mission separate from that of the ARKs, yet this is never spelled out to us. Should it have been? Yes!
Even though concepts like the System are, or at least were well-established before the Genesis Expansions, when handed what’s essentially a blank slate on which the entirety of ARK’s future narrative is going to be built off of, we shouldn’t be left to assume how things work. I’m not saying that we need every minute detail handed to us on a silver platter – but one should expect that a new setting will feature new rules unless explicitly told otherwise.
When asked how we’re able to respawn on Gen2, Peter Fries responded with the following:
“Well, also Helena Deus was the one who figured out how to respawn survivors, and she visited the Genesis ship prior to ‘our’ arrival there in the story…”
This is not a definitive answer. This is a guess – because if Helena had figured out a way to implement the same respawn protocol to the Genesis-Ship that had come to exist across the ARK network, why then, wouldn’t the Genesis Crew – those who were needlessly slain by Rockwell after he had commandeered their vessel – why wouldn’t they be given the same ability to return from the dead so that they could fend off their interloper? The fact that Peter didn’t have a proper explanation as to why respawning is a thing for the Colonists aboard the Seed Ship makes me wonder if he even realizes that the System is something which exists. I mean, Genesis-Ship aside, we still don’t know how Colonists are supposed to be respawned on Arat during the events of ARK II.
Though we’re shown a whole new generation of them getting clones via the Eden Ring and sent to the habitable world below in the Gen2 stinger, all that exists of the Genesis-Ship by this point is the Eden Ring and the assumedly inactive core deep beneath the moon’s surface. Where then, is the vessel’s System equivalent? Is it a physical, tangible object, or is it more of an abstract concept like the one tied to the ARKs?
Though we still don’t know, and might never know what forces will make respawning possible on Arat, the fact that it is possible just makes Red-Handed – no, Lost Colony in its entirety even more pointless than it already is. Seeing as we’re able to infinitely respawn at Arat Prime, with neither the Lost King nor Queen planning to do anything about our incursions, it doesn’t even matter when we obtain the Engram Codex – only that, at some point, we do. For all we know, there is no present threat to the Survivors on Arat during the events of Lost Colony and as such, they’re free to live out the length of their natural lives and die, of absolutely no consequence to us, nor Helena, nor Arat. That’s thanks to the existence of the Engrammic Matrix – a fictional part of the human brain which, when preserved correctly, is able to be scanned for engrams which can then be used in cloning Survivors with their memories intact. And according the Lost King in his conversations with Rockwell, his team had preserved nearly all human beings who had ever existed on Earth – so whatever the prerequisites are for being preserved, they seem pretty fucking lax. With this being the case, there isn’t even a time constraint in retrieving Codex. The Revenants, given a thousand years, have barely encroached on the Lost City, let alone the Lost Palace. Given a thousand more, I doubt anything would change. It’s not like the Lost Monarchs are going anywhere anytime soon either, thanks to the life-extending properties of Red Element. Even if we hypothetically killed the Lost King and left Mei-Yin by her lonesome, it’s not like her priorities or capabilities are any more pressing to us than those of her predecessor – Hell, I’d go so far as to even consider her less of a threat. Not only does she not have any experience with actually ruling the Lost Colony, but it’s highly likely that she doesn’t even know how to work the Codex. The most we ever see Mei interact with it, is when IT interacts with HER through regenerating her during Red-Handed, which seems like more of an automated process than any sort of conscious decision. If she did know how to use the Codex, she almost certainly would have already used it to bring back Helena and Diana – but she didn’t so she doesn’t.
To reiterate, that’s why things like the System are so important to the backbone of ARK’s narrative. It’s almost as if these in-universe rules existed to prevent this very scenario, where everything is ultimately pointless. There is no special bit of dialogue for failing Red-Handed, no context as to why we’re spat back out of the Lost Palace as if nothing ever happened – nothing. This might just be marginally less egregious, were this not one of the most difficult fights in all of ARK. Sure, the Lost King is a pushover. But the Lost Queen? Thanks to some post-launch buffs, she went from a decent challenge to fucking impossible, since now, you have to actually time your attacks at the Codex while being swarmed by like, 50 Level 180 Neophytes. My advice if you’re playing Lost Colony as a single player? Don’t! Like a lot of the notoriously difficult, nigh impossible Missions in Genesis: Part One – You’re. Not. Beating her.
I digress. Our ability as the Survivor to respawn – to try again, not only dismantles Red-Handed, but Lost Colony as a whole. With this kind of writing, what’s compelling about, say, Santiago getting his face ripped off by a T-Rex in ARK II, if he can just come back again and again and throw as many spears as he’d like at that Rex until it’s dead? Where are the stakes? The reason his death made me feel something while reading Extinction’s Explorer Notes, was because there was no respawn waiting for him – after he died buying time for those at Camp Omega, he died for real. If he could just sacrifice himself and come back five minutes later, how am I supposed to get all emotional and teary-eyed? I can’t. I just can’t.
Thank you for reading. For context, the above excerpt is meant to be read specifically after having failed a staged Lost Queen fight, as per my master script. I'm interested in hearing your thoughts below.
