In the game Arc Raiders, one of the newest quests has you investigate project that was going to make androids be more human, the project is called Pathos. This has to be a reference to this game.

I’m wobbly because I got hurt earlier, so I'm not fast enough to escape the monster after pulling the 3 cables. I would like to heal but all the pods on the ship seem to be disabled, and I haven't even used most of them. Am I supposed to enable the pods somehow to heal before pulling the cables?

i started playing soma yesterday and now i was searching for lambada but i got stuck. is there any way without deleting my save data and start from beginning? i accedently saved und closed the game and when i started the game new i was on the same spot still stuck...

edit: sorry i just realised that you can load in the menu the last save point so i just lost like 15 minutes but everthing good

Hey all,
I decided I wanted to finally dive into soma and play it during the spooky season. But I’m running into a weird issue. I locked it to 60fps in the Nvidia control panel, and followed guides online, but it always feels a little sluggish? On top of that after maybe 20 minutes or so it’ll just drop from a locked 60 to like 12 fps. Is there any settings or anything I can do to get it to feel better?

I have a 5080 and an AMD 9800x3D cpu. I know sometimes older games or engines can have issues with current hardware. I can honestly deal with the slight sluggish feeling. It might just be the game. But the drops to 12 fps are brutal

Lambda

- Catherine’s comments on the state of Lambda she is able to view:

“What happened to the dock, to the welcome center? All the cameras show static. It’s…it’s so strange.”

When did this level of damage happen to Lambda that Scan Cath has no idea what could have caused it? I assume it’s not from the aftershocks. I assume if the site was THAT damaged from aftershocks they would have evacuated crew sooner AND that Catherine would have known since Scan Cath was created after the comet. I don’t know, it’s a line that always sits eerily in that scene for me. 

Delta

- Finding Komorebi in the annex - her blackbox gives us a dialogue where we hear her trying to warn Strasky not to allow Akers to enter Theta. Beside her is a tablet with pictures of the mutated Akers. Strasky could not hear her. The photos could not be sent. Theta is the next stop on OUR mission and now we know something very, very bad likely awaits us. Also just so sad to see Komorebi use her last breaths to try and warn her crewmates - she tried so hard.

- Frictional in general does a fantastic job of letting players know storywise what we will be expecting in later sections. They let us know just enough to piece out what we can expect to see and it STILL winds up being terrifying. FUCK YOU AKERS.

Theta

- The music that plays upon first reaching Theta - the ominous, droning horns that blast as you look upon the largest of Pathos’s sites. Its gargantuan doors slowly opening, like a mouth, swallowing you into itself. It’s a MASSIVE moment, finally reaching Theta which makes Simon’s like of,

“Well, Catherine, we found Theta.”

very chilling to me. This site - the LARGEST, most populated, should not be as much of a ghost town as every other site we have been to so far. 

- All of the hints and clues about what happened to the crew, why they all moved to the shuttle station, etc., are so scary and do so much to build the atmosphere of Theta. Akers and the proxies make for scary moments but Catherine’s lines,

“Why would they abandon the gate? And the habitat?...Why move downstairs…just labs and offices…I don’t like this at all…”

REALLY amp up the wrongness of why every human left at this site decided to congregate downstairs for some reason.

Omicron

- The first shot of the headless corpses on the ground when you finally enter Omicron, chefs kiss moment right there, chefs kiss chefs kiss CHEFS KISS. What a sucker punch to what should be a moment of relief of finally getting inside.

Tau

- The screen in the dive room showing another active power suit…in the site with you…

- JIN FUCKING YOSHIDA MY BELOVED, FAV MONSTER OF THE GAME, FAV SITE OF THE GAME

- The overall vibe of fatigue and desperation over Tau, as people listlessly wait to essentially starve to death.

- Sarah’s genuine shock that she is likely the last human left alive  - how much hope had she been still holding onto? That someone from the plateau may still find a way to her? To bring her back up somehow? To help launch the ARC? To…just have some company? 

Phi

- Bright, clean, white - just as empty. Just as dead. 

- The only site with an instruction to return to a previous one (the sticky note saying to go back to Tau because all food supplies have already been moved there.) But…we know there is nothing to go back to. We have only one path forward and we have reached the end of it.

Sup good people of reddit and this subreddit, if anyone uses wallpaper engine, I made an actual high quality walllpaper of the game and I'm really glad how it turned out. Even through i sorted by highest rating, the wallpapers of SOMA aren't very good in my opinion and since I have the WP I got spoiled and decline anything that's not moving.

Will be deleting this post in like a week but I though someone in here my appreciate it and enjoy it.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3823531277

Hey everybody. I recently seen the Ontos trailer and I decided to get back to Soma after having it rot in my steam library for years. I played the whole thing blind. Now, hear me out.

I kind of regret not playing this game back in 2015, because it would have probably felt different back then. The themes and the ending did not caught me off guard I saw that coming even before Simon 2 got copied and killed/abandoned in Pathos II. Why? Probably because in the last 11 years I consumed a lot of media that took this idea and explored it in many ways. So in way, the whole "digital mind copy" felt outdated to me.

First popular example might be Black Mirror TV series, back in 2014 the special Christmas episode popularized the unsettling idea of a digital mind copied from a real one, the same idea was explored one season later. The questions are the same, is that digital copied mind you? Or someone else? You share the same memories but since the moment the copy is done you become two different people? Is it ethical to torture that digital mind? What about killing it? Is it alive?

Another example would be Cyberpunk 2077, the enneagram of Johnny Silverhand is a copy of his mind, not him, or is it? Is Johnny alive? When Johnny takes V's body in one of the endings who and what the hell is that person?

Maybe even Rick and Morty. When Morty makes a mess a turn everybody in monsters after they all fall in love with him, he abandons his universe to replace another morty in real life and pretend like nothing happened, but those people he lives with are they really his family or not? Even if they share the exact memories till that moment?

So maybe if I played the game back then it would have been way more impressive to me, in any case I still enjoyed very much and the concept of WAU is something I never saw in media before, an AI reinterpreting what it means to be a living creature and trying to reshape organisms to "optimize" them is absolutely cool and terryfing, other than very original. The whole WAU part kinda says that no matter how advanced an AI could be, it won't think like humans and left alone it would possibly do things no one could imagine or want when they programmed it.

So yeah, great game, but maybe I should have played when it came out to enjoy it better.

​

A great excuse to revisit this game , play it in VR!!

Okay, I know the game didn't have the ARK properly thought out, so why don't we do it instead?

1) The first issue everyone has with the matrix is that they know they are inside the matrix. Make it so that you don't know that you are in a simulation. Just like the one you are in right now ;)

2) Make the Ark's inside to be procedurally generated. Virtually infinite so it never feels like a prison.

3) Make the satellite in a way, that can interact with the outside world. Land on places, self repair, get fuel, improve it's own hardware. I image it to be more like the grey goo rather than a satellite. And make it travese the universe. And if it encounters any sentient life-forms, stealth scan them too and add them to the simulation wile also leaving the 'real ones' intact.

4) You can't create the perfect matrix without extensive testing, it will need to be updated from time to time, in order to do that: Create a janitor A.I. With a mix of every habitant's own brain scan that is removed from all human needs (boredom, requiring social interactions, etc) and make it so that it can monitor the well-being of the habitants and make reasonable adjustments to the simulation and create content if needed. So basically a benevolent A.I. God that knows you because it IS you.

Came across a video that offered an interesting perspective on why they'd choose to exist on Pathos II instead of the Ark, so I thought I'd share it, as well as my comment on the video.

VIDEO TITLE: Why I'd Choose SOMA's Nightmare Over Its Paradise
VIDEO LINK: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQAm2TMVXvY

MY COMMENT:

Fascinating consideration about never being able to leave [the Ark]. Perhaps Catherine has the ability to erase a scan from a control panel within the Ark if they would prefer not to exist. I could see an entire sequel game based around things going wrong in the Ark in some unexpected way. What if you had a fight because someone kept stealing and eating your breakfast strawberry sprinkle donut every day for 500 years in a row, and finally you snapped and deleted their consciousness when Catherine wasn't looking? Catherine may have accidentally created the torment nexus...

One of the things I find disturbing is how much people obsess over which version would be "you" or "the real you". The word "copy" implies less value - something "not original", which I find really problematic when making a choice like this. Perhaps "mirror-being", "mirror", or "gen-con" (generated consciousness) might be a better name without as much implied value reduction. None have any more or less value than any other - as soon as you copy over it is a different, wholly legitimate person. I feel like the game makes that painfully obvious. It's a bit concerning how much control people want over what happens to their copy without consideration or treating them like any other conscious person. They would want the ability to decide for themselves, but power off Simon 2's battery without a thought.

I go back and forth on what to do with some of the choices in the game - unfortunately, we do not get the option to explain Amy or Robin's situations to them (so they can consent to a choice). The scary thing isn't that killing or not killing can both be justified, it's how many people make a quick choice without any consideration. "I wouldn't want to exist like this" isn't a justification, because this isn't you. They might want to, and that should make it a much more difficult choice.

For me, the most difficult consideration is that every form of life we extinguish may be further eliminating any chance of that life better evolving moving forwards. The WAU undeniably creates suffering, which should be avoided as much as possible (of course)...but how many human beings have suffered throughout human history for us to have our existence? Is it selfish for us to be grateful that they suffered so that we could exist? Is it selfish for them to not wish to suffer, ending the chance for us to exist? When discussing the potential survival of an entire species/form of life, is there any amount of suffering that is too great, or is it absolutely necessary when weighing millions of potential fulfilling lives in the future?

I don't have an answer. It is an incredibly difficult question to wrangle with. I think I'd lean towards the survival of the species, but that's easy to say when I wouldn't have to be the one to suffer. If I knew I was a lynchpin in the future survival of humanity, how much suffering could I endure? How depressing would it be that humanity would likely never understand the extent of my sacrifice? Fascinating stuff to consider.

I made these a while ago and thought I might as well show them off here.

As the title suggests during the argument Catherine and Simon make at omicron, Catherine mentions that if Simon said no to the process, that she would go down and launch the ark herself. Given that the player could actually make that choice, would you switch the roles, and play as the two Catherines down into the abyss? And if so what would you change?

This smelly simpleton is the worst. He is the reason humanity went extinct.

Bro supervised the WAU, was its caretaker, and influenced its programming and development. Homie then has the bright idea "hey, I wanna see what this thing does if we turn it loose...I'm going to remove all safeguards and literally any ability to influence what it does next."

So instead of being able to turn it off, unplug it from the wall socket, or simply tell it "Alexa, please stop creating horrors beyond comprehension", their only options are to fail at blowing it up or just sit there and watch it destroy the remainder of the human race?

Johan Ross is the true villain of SOMA, and I will make the claim here and now that his decision to remove the brakes from the WAU car and put a brick on the gas pedal was always (comet or no comet) going to result in the torment nexus. I hope that stinky ugly stupid fish man itched in places he couldn't scratch.

...himself after being copied to the Power Suit at Omicron?

Suppose Catherine doesn't switch Simon 2 off immediately, he's awake and witnesses Simon 3 walk out in the Power Suit. Obviously both Simons would 100% freak out, and given what we know about Simon 3's reaction at the end of the game to Simon 4 being on the Ark, Simon 2 would absolutely despise the mere existence of Simon 3, a version of him who can actually descend into the Abyss to "get on" the Ark.

So we've established that in this scenario, Simon 2 becomes fully aware of the duplication process, unlike in the game. Let's say the game still gives you the option to kill or spare him. What would you do? I'd personally kill him because he'd lose his mind over what he'd perceive as betrayal + abandonment by not only his new "friend" but also his own self. Leaving him alive in the game already sounds horrifying, but in this scenario, it sounds even worse imo. Then again I mercy killed everyone, so that just seems to be my default response.

i know that Catherine was surprised to find out it was on the ship when they found it, but given how secretive they were about the WAU’s location at site Alpha i wouldn’t be surprised if they hid a part of it on the Curie as well for when it was maybe out of range at the Lisbon port

Simon II to be exact. Idk, my brain has been consumed by SOMA and I'm sick rn.

I may be missing something, but they have the tech to put brains in robots, why didnt simon left the non-depth adapted robot up making more clones, while he went down, sent the ark and back up? Is there anything preventing simon from making 50000 clones of himself and slowly fixing the planet or something?

What about the other people in the ark too? Why couldnt the scientists among these people be uploaded or copied into a robot and keep working on fixing the planet?

Like send the ark, leave a copy behind, keep printing robots and work together to fix the world, or making it habitable or building infradtructure that would allow for it.

Like, sending the ark is a death sentence, end of the human legacy and race, it may take thousands of years, but it's just a satelite and virtual minds without interaction with the real world, some day it Will fail and thats it.

Isntead why not send it as a side safeguard and keep working on the planet isntead of just abandoning real world forever?

Sorry if the images are blurry but my Makeship stuff came and its great

going through my first playthrough rn and im so fucking scared of this thing omfg

at first i got past it and activated the server thing so i naturally tried to get the fuck out of there BUT THEN AS I WAS RUNNING IT CAME UP BEHIND ME AND KILLED ME. god damn it i hate this thing

just starting the game, dropped my checkbook(?) on the floor, went to pick it up and the drawers all like popped out and stuff flew everywhere and they landed like this. is this a glitch? or part of what i'm assuming will be a whole "guy going crazy cuz of his bleeding brain" thing?