Elite: Dangerous PvE - Mobius

So, the nature of player characters in sci-fi games is sometimes a little...interesting...In Eve Online, for example, PCs are not technically human - they're brain-scan copies of real people who have been uploaded into cloned bodies. When your pod gets breached, the brain is immediately scanned just before the body dies, and the data uploaded into another cloned body - so, you actually do die, its just that someone else who thinks the same as you do continues on your "life" (they have a little aside to this that when your character dies, you get a mail message saying "enjoy your afterlife!").

Thinking about it recently, I've come to wonder on the nature of our own Commanders:

- For one, we never die - when our ship explodes, even through Siri tells to eject, we wake up in the cockpit of a copied ship with all our knowledge, and an "insurance" bill. I think it was Outside XBox who questioned the financial capabilities of this "insurance" company, since they can't make enough back to cover their outlays.
- We seem to have the ability to tele-control other ships no matter where we are in the galaxy - from the Arena, to multi-crew to launched fighters, we just appear in the pilot's seat and away we go.
- Our ability to alter our appearance - at any time, we can change how we look, and even our gender. In fact, its even more strange, since the actual avatar is referred to in-game as a "holo-me".

So, how the heck does this work? Are we actually alive? Are we actually sitting in our cockpits or are we just figments of some computer's imagination?

The way I see it, there are fourpossibilities for the nature of our existence:

1. The Cloned Body - much like Eve Online, we are simply cloned bodies that have our brain patterns uploaded everytime we die. We have the ability to change our appearance since we're effectively chunks of biomatter in a suit and only the face is visible, so it won't take much to change that around, if that face actually does exist and isn't just a holo-projection.

2. The Singularity - we are not human, but in fact either post-human, or true AI - our brain patterns are simply extremely complicated computer programs. Our physical bodies are not actually bodies, but just holographic projections tailored to as we like.

3. The Surrogate - we are not actually in our ships, but instead tele-operating sophisticated biological surrogates through quantum entanglement communication systems, whilst we either lie a bed in our homes on various worlds, or in an isolation chamber some where.

4. The Matrix - none of what we are actually exists. The entire world as we know it is actually one big computer simulation and we're just "dreaming" our way through it. Who knows? Maybe the Thargoids won the last war, but we haven't realised it yet...

Although, items 2 and 4 does not explain why we have to activate emergency life support if we have a canopy breach...

Either way...its interesting speculation.

Your thoughts?

Interesting!
This is what "really" happens

You get shot down and eject on an escape pod that teleports you to the last station.
This is very standard technology that you don't even thing why people still use space ships
these days ... lamers!

You arrive to the station with a huge hangover and pissed off with life and wishing you
had gone to medical school, as your mother wished. But no, you wanted to "make if big!, live life!".

You go to the nearest bar and ask for a Sidewider with a lemon twist. The name reminds that you
can go back to the bucket of scrap metal called Sidewinder and the lemon twist is just for taste.

You gobble two.
At the third one, comes a friendly insurance clerk asking you to pay to get a replica of the deceased/demised ship.

You pay and slowly go to hangar and into the cockpit of your new ship, that feels like the
old one, apart from the mothball smell (yes because space moths are very troublesome).

The real problem here is we have the old mechanics, and then about a month before 2.2 drops they start up with the telepresence bullshit for fighters.
And with multicrew take it all the way to complete record breaking levels.

It's simply just bad lore building.

I think it's best not to confuse game play conveniences with Lore.

Lore - we pilot our ships, when our ship explodes we are ejected in our Remlock escape pod which takes us back to the last station we visited (n.b. only PF members have access to the Remlock system), our PF insurance pays for a new ship to the same specification as the one we lost, the holo-me system is for creating the hologram that we use for telepresence.

Game play convenience - the Remlock escape pod takes no time to return to the station (in the same way as it takes no time to load 700+ tonnes of cargo into a ship, or no time to repair a badly damaged ship), we retain our 'one-off' engineering modifications after ship destruction, we look like our holo-me.

A bit of both - we telepresence to our fighters (the body we see is a hologram), we telepresence to other peoples ships as a hologram.

Without the conveniences the game would be unplayable, or at the very least extremely dull and inconvenient.

Exactly what Xebeth said.