City of Heroes: Live Forum Archive

(SPOILERS) Number of Methods of Time Travel

AmazingMOO

By AmazingMOO,
Posted on: 2012-03-18 11:36 in CoH and CoV General Discussions

 

Posted

Quote:
At some point you're going to have to decide what's a game mechanic and what's game lore.
You may as well draw that line around Ouroboros in its entirety, since it only exists to provide the "flashback" mechanic.

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Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Venture View Post
You may as well draw that line around Ouroboros in its entirety, since it only exists to provide the "flashback" mechanic.
Not true. It also exists to introduce players to the Incarnate system.

 

Posted

The Incarnate system got tossed in, but it's no longer necessary. You can unlock your Incarnate slots without ever setting foot in Ouroborus.

Current Blog Post: "Why I am an Atheist..."
"And I say now these kittens, they do not get trained/As we did in the days when Victoria reigned!" -- T. S. Eliot, "Gus, the Theatre Cat"

 

Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Venture View Post
The Incarnate system got tossed in, but it's no longer necessary. You can unlock your Incarnate slots without ever setting foot in Ouroborus.
Its not necessary to go there, but its an integral part of the incarnate lore now. Technically speaking you do not need to step foot in Cimerora or Kings Row, but that doesn't automatically make it possible to dismiss them from the game lore.

Game mechanics are game mechanics until the devs open their mouths and try to explain them. The moment they do so with actual in-game story, as opposed to out of band rationalization outside the story, they become accountable for that particular canonicalization.

There's no in-game canonical explanation for targeting reticles, or how global channels actually work, or whether other servers are alternate dimensions. That's all just game mechanical necessities the devs don't explain in the actual game fiction, so its ok to dismiss it as game mechanics. They could have done the same thing to Ouroboros, but they decided to actually wrap a story around it. The moment they did, it and its mechanics become fair game for being assessed relative to the lore.

Any player can of course ignore any part of the game they want. But they don't get to decide what is and is not canonical.

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Posted

Mender Silos/Nemesis has a number of hints about him that explain how he traveled back in time past the 'carbon law' limit.

1. We know the the 'current' Nemesis is really just a data pattern at this point. All the organics have aged and died. He brags about uploading himself into the Rikti Psychic Network and possessing the entire Rikti Race in Dark Watcher's arc.

2. The 'Carbon Law' limit doesn't seem to impact the flow of information... just the flow of matter. Mender Lazarus can give you information and then send you further back in time than he can go for a mission.

A future Nemesis who's decided that he genuinely wants to fix the crap he messed up can travel back in time 5k years at a time with only the Crystal of Ice and Flame with a fabrication lab (the internals of Oroboros' floating steam-powered time machine) and use that fabrication lab to duplicate itself, any extra components, and a Fake Nemesis body from 'local' materials. He then uploads his data-pattern of consciousness to the new Fake, making it 'Real' and turns off the old body.

Rinse, Repeat, until you've arrived in 20XX AD.

For extra points, once he reaches the 21st century he can make use of any of the several cloning methodologies that exist in-game in order to build an organic body for himself and imprint the data pattern of consciousness on its brain, Revanent Hero style.

tl;dr Nemesis is not subject to the Carbon Law because he doesn't really have a body

 

Posted

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Originally Posted by Arcanaville View Post
The predestination paradox does not preclude changing the past. If the laws of physics demand consistent causality, the only thing precluded is changing the past of the traveler. You cannot go back into the past and change something that would prevent you from going back into the past. But you can change the past in a way that would not interfere with you going back into the past. This preserves causality for all independent observers.
Sure it does. With the predestination paradox you can't change the past because whatever you're going to do you've already done. History is set. It doesn't matter what you do from an outside observer's perspective because their view never changes. You were always there and always did exactly the same thing. Likewise with future travel, since whatever you do there is the past for later observers and is equally fixed from their perspective. Free Will becomes nothing more than an illusion since the story never changes to an outsider.

You could argue that only certain events are fixed and the details don't matter. For example the Rikti must always invade and Statesman is always going to die, but it could be someone besides Nemesis who triggers the invasion and someone besides Wade can do the killing. However Recluse's Victory should not exist if the predestination paradox is in effect for CoX, even in a limited fashion.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Venture View Post
You may as well draw that line around Ouroboros in its entirety, since it only exists to provide the "flashback" mechanic.
Reductio ad ridiculum
I could also claim the whole thing is simply an exercise in throwing sharks at people and everything else is just window dressing and time sinks. Feel free to declare that the entire UI must fit in with game lore if you want; I'm comfortable with my decision not to do so.

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Posted

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Originally Posted by Oldeb View Post
Sure it does. With the predestination paradox you can't change the past because whatever you're going to do you've already done. History is set. It doesn't matter what you do from an outside observer's perspective because their view never changes. You were always there and always did exactly the same thing. Likewise with future travel, since whatever you do there is the past for later observers and is equally fixed from their perspective. Free Will becomes nothing more than an illusion since the story never changes to an outsider.

You could argue that only certain events are fixed and the details don't matter. For example the Rikti must always invade and Statesman is always going to die, but it could be someone besides Nemesis who triggers the invasion and someone besides Wade can do the killing. However Recluse's Victory should not exist if the predestination paradox is in effect for CoX, even in a limited fashion.
The article you link to has nothing to do with what you're talking about. The predestination paradox is a statement about how closed time loops violate the intuitive sense of cause and effect: events within the loop do not have root causes outside the loop.

You're talking about something else totally different: the viewpoint partially reinforced by general relativity that there is no cause and effect: that the fabric of space-time exists as a manifold, and time is an illusion, and therefore cause and effect are also an illusion.

Its worth noting that while this is consistent with general relativity, its not consistent with quantum mechanics, at least to the limits of my understanding of it. Its unclear to me how to rationalize a fixed space-time with the requirements of quantum mechanics. In particular, I suspect a totally fixed space-time has a way of tripping over Bell's inequality. I suspect fixed space-time is an incomplete description for that reason.

I'm mostly a proponent of Novikov self consistency myself; I particularly like the way it appears, at least from a relatively casual eye, to be consistent with path integral formulation and Feynman diagrams. It seems quite powerful and compact to say that paradoxical paths sum to zero.


In any case, Recluse Victory exists in the future relative to us now. Its existence is not precluded by physics that either enforces or disallows predestination paradoxes per se. If Novikov self consistency exists in the City of Heroes universe, the existence of Recluse Victory only means that whatever else we attempt to change relative to the future, we cannot preclude the events that create Recluse Victory. And as of yet, there is no proof that anything we do canonically has done that yet.

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