The missing (spaceship) necessities
A common detail shared by all games since c1 is that the necessities for civilised life are missing. By which I mean that all games have wild sources of food but very little beyond that. No workshops for fabrics, metals or even the processing and storage of food.
On albia this could be explained away, to an extent. The background held entire temples and castles, and the far mountains and forests were home to the purple mountain norns and the forest norns. A dairy farm, wool spinning wheel or a small blast furnace and smithy workshop could easily stand out there and be invisible from the foreground norn farm and garden.
C2 showed the various underground workshops and laboratories that were hidden from view during c1, and c2 albia housed no real intelligent life besides the doozers anyway.
Sleeping and living quarters for the shee, though. You never see any bed in the game because creatures sleep where they stand, but the Shee were not unlike us, and I prefer a bed over sleeping on the ground. I also prefer not to have my chickens sleep in my bedroom, despite my love for them, so where were the Shee’s separate living and sleeping rooms?
Especially in c3 and ds, where even the background illusion of distance is limited, the question is all the more reasonable.
But here, other necessities would be needed. Even if all garments, tools and even living creatures can be synthesized with the agent creator, where is the biomatter stored? Where is the engine that propels the ship? Where are the fuel tanks or the fission/fusion plant?
In docking station you can see an entire lake in the background of the meso, and the underground swamp also seems to stretch hundreds of yards into the distance. These backgrounds too could be the basis for entire metarooms, so a farm and a laboratory could be hidden in the distance where the lone Shee would sleep and live.
How would you envision a room built for the Shee? Do you think it would be too dull a thing to show ingame or would it have practical use to the player?
This reminds me of when I played the first game as a kid I would often look at the buildings in the distance and wonder what it was like out there. (which is something I often did with a lot of games I played as a kid) And if I ever get to a point were I can make meta rooms the unseen side of Albia would be on my to-do list. That said if I recall correctly it is semi implied (in the menu for the observer kit) that the player in the first game is in the one castle building in the background, and I think the C2 world could be the mountain range area that you see in the first game.
ReplyDeleteHi anon, thanks for your comment! I didnt know about the observer kit being the castle, I'll look into that! C2 being an entirely different place on albia also makes sense in a way. Some places are reminiscent of c1 but others so different.
DeleteDo you happen to have scetches of those far side of albia rooms? I know I still have some metaroom sketches from when I was a kid in the attic haha.