The collective is an interesting take on humanity surviving an apocalypse. Id like to know more about it

时间旅者：重生曙光

jsp111183 9 月 30 日上午 11:37

Would you rather join the collective, or just die and fade to nothing?

Thats something I have wondered about myself and wondered what you guys thought.

To me one of the most interesting parts of the cronos world is that humanity loses . Theres no saving it in a traditional sense of things going back to how they were. But its not totally lost. The collective seems like we upload ourselves into a machine, beyond the corrupting touch of the change.

We may lose our bodies but we become beyond harm.

But will we lose ourselves? Some of the uploads we see seem confused and memories blurred. Is this what the collective does? Or just a consequences of a traveller carrying too many minds at once? Would we be at peace?

And finally would oblivion be better than the collective? A total loss of humanity? Or would it be our best, only chance of survival in some form, to evolve from man to machine?

Would love to hear thoughts.

< >

正在显示第 1 - 3 条，共 3 条留言

Bot Roh

9 月 30 日下午 2:55

I think it's at least implied the collective is the (majority of) changed people just at a future/alternate point in the timeline. This is part of the reason the anchors are needed during the ascension process, to connect to the Collectives spacetime like you would with a rift.

From what's presented in the game, my understanding is that the Travellers go back in time to target specific minds who wouldn't normally become part of the collective (orphans) that have valuable abilities or data. These are then basically stripped of all free will and humanity and forcibly become part of the collective on ascension. Normally after the change completes unmerged entities are incompatible with other entities so we time travel to get them before they change and become incompatible (corrupt).

The Travellers themselves are probably (I'm not 100% sure if this is confirmed or not) just lumps of biomass in the temporal shells with a stripped back essence put in them. This explains why we have to download essences from other phylacteries instead of ripping them off the bodies. We ourselves are the phylactery. When the phylactery is full we're effectively merged in the same way the collective or Eliza are. Traveller Essences have so little identity though that they contribute very little to the gestalt entity that emerges if the phylactery is too full for too long, unless they're able to gain a personality via long operation or interference (like the pathfinder and to some extent the traveller does).

Thematically the collective seems to represent the worst excesses of Marxist-Leninist utopian ideology, so it's certainly not a good time for the people subsumed by it (makes sense with a Polish dev). A lot of the other options the game presents are a pick your poison kind of deal though.