Help w/ Video Project about NMS / Waking Titan

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I’ll keep this short-and-sweet - I’m a content creator working on a fairly large project that will be discussing much of the history and lore of No Man’s Sky, and much of that will be discussing Waking Titan. As I’m sure you all know, between all of the wiki pages, forum posts, reddit comments, there’s a lot of speculation, conflicting information, etc., and I REALLY want to try and get this as right as possible so I can do this story/community justice. Most of the reliable info I I’ve gotten is from gamedetectives, but there’s a lot of dead links or references to other things I can’t seem to find. Would anyone who might consider themself any sort of ‘expert’, or anyone with some savant-level understanding/recollection of WT be willing to help answer some questions here or perhaps discord?

I actually have a few questions for @oldgods as my wanting to talk to them specifically is largely the reason why I ended up here in the first place. Any chance they’re still around and able to chat?

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Are those specific questions that you can just post here and we’ll see whether someone remembers?

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I had a message a while ago from @anashel about some Ms Noodles AI post I made that I am only seeing now, so theres still some lurking going on with that profile. Very excited to hear someone is doing a video with focus on waking titan, lots of fun memories, the posts archived here should also yield some answers you have as this was where Emily Warren used to post :wink:

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Hi @Veritas .

This forum was created by the the ARG company Alice & Smith, for the purpose of supporting the Waking Titan ARG.

To that end, a number of administrator accounts were created. Alice & Smith staffers could interact with ARG players in the guise of various characters, in order to progress the game. They would deal with problems, drop hints, steer the story, make changes, etc.

Some of the administrator accounts belonged to specific individuals. The Anashel account is one such - it was the account of a named Alice & Smith staff member. The OldGods account, on the other hand, was a general account, not tied to any specific individual. Posts on the OldGods account would be from which ever Alice & Smith staffer was on duty at that time.

The original launch of No Man’s Sky was accompanied by a great deal of vitriol in public forums. For some No Man’s Sky players, the positive (and properly moderated) atmosphere of the ETARC forum was a refreshing change. When the Waking Titan ARG ended, the intention of Alice & Smith was to shut down the various internet assets they had created, and wind up the forum.

A number of us, being both ARG and No Man’s Sky players, asked if Hello Games could take over the running of the forum, and keep it in operation. They replied that they did not have the resources available to manage such an enterprise, but that if we, the Leaders, were prepared to undertake the day-to-day management of the forum, then they, Hello Games, were prepared to buy the forum from Alice & Smith, and keep it running. So that’s what we did.

And that’s the situation as we find it today. The forum was created by Alice & Smith, but is now owned by Hello Games. Hello Games, however, play little or no part in its operation - that’s done by the Leaders. We have occasionally had posts from Hello Games staffers, but they are rare - there can be years between them. Alice & Smith no longer have a business connection to the forum.

As far as I know, everything we had from Waking Titan is still available here - it’s archived, but accessible. We haven’t deleted any of it.

Cheers.

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Do take note that the ARG lore isn’t cannocical NMS lore. The ARG provided a lot of flavour, but much of it isn’t really consistent with in-game lore, and the ARG wasn’t really intended as that, for all I can tell. So I’m not sure how helpful it will be to scour the ARG if your main concern is NMS lore, unless by lore you mean “RIL history surrounding and connected to the game” rather than “lore of the game lore”.

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Welcome @Veritas . As stated by @Polyphemus , everything here is Archived. Feel free to dive in and look around and ask questions. Just please be sure to ask questions here and not in the Archived threads. :wink: We are happy to scratch our heads to stir up old memories.

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That’s actually a really wholesome part of the story I definitely wouldn’t have known, I’ll have to throw that in there, thank you and thanks to everyone for the warm welcome! I suppose I can just hop right into it and throw down some disparate questions / ideas, first with why the OldGods account stuck out to me.

I was originally working on a video essay about many of the subtle (and overt) cosmic horror elements present in the game but I’ve since pivoted a bit into more about the whole story of the game/ARG/lore because there’s just too much cool stuff to talk about. Nevertheless there were times I felt I was stretching that connection, and I’m sure I was in places, although when I came across OldGods and saw that the account was “in on it”, for lack of a better phrase, and then looked into what their avatar was, and was intrigued to learn about the story of the Lovecraftian character Nyarlathotep and many of the themes that seemed to overlap with ideas from NMS. (most of this is just paraphrased from wikipedia for times-sake so forgive me)

Nyarlathotep wanders the Earth, seemingly gathering legions of followers, the narrator of the story among them, through his demonstrations of strange and seemingly magical instruments. These followers lose awareness of the world around them, and through the narrator’s increasingly unreliable accounts, the reader gets an impression of the world’s collapse.

All I can think about here is the Atlas and its desire of worship from its followers, all the while seemingly losing it’s sanity over the course of the story as it becomes more and more corrupted, crying out in fear of its impending/inevitable fate.

There are a few interpretations of Nyarlathotep involving the universe’s mockery of man’s attempts to understand it…

This screams the -null- story to me. The universe literally mocking him for his exploration and desire to see it all.

…and man’s self-destructive rationality.

The most literal example of this in the ARG is Emily sacrificing herself to save Toby, with the reason that she wants to be more human.

Nyarlathotep was the son of the god at the center of our universe and in whose dreams all of life is set to reside

The journey towards the “center”… dreams and dreamers… the place where all life resides… Sometimes I feel like I’m really stretching these connections but like am I crazy for seeing these as not being coincidental?

“Balaron, Dryn’dargh, Korvax Prime, all the other homeworlds… all of them had an ‘Atlas’. All of them had a machine designed to simulate realities. What if this is a reality truly is? Dream upon dream, coalescing into a sum beyond its parts.”

On that note, I understand there were numerous references/puzzles/tasks involving the word mirror and needing to take pictures of the atlas symbol between two mirrors for that infinite reflection effect. I can’t help but link these ideas/themes together… the world of glass, the void/abyss, reflections/echoes, the cosmic horror themes of terrifying dark truths that would drive us to insanity, the seemingly infinite regress of simulations inside simulations (like reflections in a mirror) that naturally leads us to wonder if we live in a simulation ourselves and the existential dread that comes along with it, etc, etc…

At first I wasn’t a fan of Nada/Polo’s seeming disregard for the whole conversation around the idea that the NMS universe we play in is a simulation, but the more I thought about it I realized I can totally vibe with that whole zen idea that if nothing matters and its all fake then who cares? Let’s just make more friends and be cool to each other in the time we’ve got.

Speaking of the fate of the Atlas… my gut is telling me that Superlumina’s miniaturized particle accelerator is the best culprit for the source of the black hole that would eventually swallow the Atlas, right? (some more of that self-destructive rationality I suppose…) That seems more plausible, at least to me, than some of the other physics-questionable theories I’ve read involving our sun turning into a black hole and such.

Anyway, I have so many more questions/ideas but I suppose I’ll save them for later because I know there’s a lot there already. :sweat_smile:

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@Veritas ,

Well, you’ve raised a lot of points, some of them more off the wall than others - but I can’t really see any specific questions.

As @jedidia has pointed out, you would do well to bear in mind that Waking Titan was only very loosely based on No Man’s Sky lore. Yes, Alice & Smith had a brief from Hello Games - but then they went off and wrote their own story - and the story they wrote was based on their abilities and their experience, not the No Man’s Sky narrative.

Hello Games engaged Alice & Smith to produce Waking Titan because they are specialists at creating ARGs. They know what can be achieved with fake web sites, cryptic puzzles, counterfeit documents, bogus radio stations, stage props, locations, actors, and concocted situations. They know from experience what audiences will respond to, and what they will ignore. So Alice & Smith produced a piece of theatre based on what they knew would work - not what would fit in with No Man’s Sky lore.

No Man’s Sky and Waking Titan are linked, yes, but they’re essentially two different things. You can’t explain one by reference to the other.

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But I believe @Veritas point is more of an origins point. The inspiration for the lore and how it did, at times, get pulled into the ARG. ? There were definitely lots of refrences to mythology and Lovecraftian themes and there still are. After all, we know SM and HG are huge sci-fi/horror fans and each NMS update is given a paperback cover.
I am interested in seeing what you pull together.

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For what its worth, im sure Alice&Smith received some additional NMS lore and story that the rest of the players had not yet seen or heard in order to create the narrative that they did since not a whole lot of lore was in the game at the time(compared to today). However, they may or may not have taken liberty to bend and twist the story somewhat for the sake of making the ARG interactive and engaging. Its worth noting that some of what was talked about in the ARG later started, in a way, becoming parts of lore later introduced into NMS. But some of that could either be a coincidence or a stretch or just some old story bits they had laying around and decided to put into the game later on.

Regardless, the ARG is its own thing done on the side just for fun. Its not cannon to NMS.

Im interesting in seeing your video you came up with though :slightly_smiling_face: would be fun to do a little look back.

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I can’t think of anything specific that Alice & Smith put in their story, that later appeared in No Man’s Sky. Examples?

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Here is a playlist I made of videos for the first Waking Titan, it pretty much tells the entire story from beginning to end. Unfortunately, no one channel did a video on every phase of the second Waking Titan ARG, so it is a bit harder to piece together the entire story in a way that lets you know what it was like to experience it first hand, but if you do some digging in different channels like Kyle Culver and L Plays, you can find a lot of visual information from the second season:

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IMO the most interesting thing is everything combined in it’s entirety; how NMS tells a story that is worth discussing, especially considering how few people who have actually played it actually really absorbed the ideas/themes, but more importantly to me how the ARG did a genius job at not only building a fascinating world with it’s own thrilling story under the covers while at the same time they can be combined together along with with the lore added to the game in later updates to tell an entirely different meta-narrative about the history of the development of the game, release, controversy, redemption etc…

It’s almost more impressive to me if Alice & Smith if they were able to do that without like 95% of it fed to them by SM or HG. I do have to ask though - do we know for sure that the ARG isn’t canon, like has Sean Murray come out and straight up said that, or has it simply never been confirmed that it is canon? Could it be one of those cases where they don’t want to confirm or deny, just let it all be left up to interpretation and speculation?

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I read that as they may have been given advanced knowledge about future updates/lore that they were then able to co-opt into the ARG to “fit”. I have a few examples that I can think of but I’d need to look at a timeline and release dates to see if they make sense, for example the whole thing regarding the “dreamers” and their memories being fragmented. Wasn’t this item added in like 2022 but the ARG was done 2 years before?

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It’s one of those irritating things about logic and evidence - you can’t prove a negative. To the best of my knowledge, Sean Murray has never said anything about the relationship between Waking Titan lore and No Man’s Sky. The proprietors of Alice & Smith have said ‘While creating content for Waking Titan, we were able to turn to the rich complexity of the No Man’s Sky’s procedurally generated universe and build a storyline that explored some of the elaborate topics that surrounded the game and its origin.’ Which is not the same as ‘our story follows on from the No Man’s Sky story’.

In the end, if we want to judge, we have to look at the evidence. Most of the scenarios and characters Alice & Smith used in Waking Titan had been used before in earlier ARGs. Some of them, like the Anashel, Gruffham, and Balmoth characters, are still in use in their current ARG.

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I suppose I can toss out a few standalone mostly ARG-related questions now as well. Keep in mind that I’m really new to this project, and obviously it’s pretty massive, so I’ve got about 30 pages of notes and like 300 tabs open and everywhere I look takes me down some rabbit hole I sometimes forget where I was coming from, and I’ve also heard/read different conflicting information in different places, etc… All of that is to say, I’ll likely be asking something that probably has a simple answer somewhere that I probably have a tab open for but I can’t seem to find again. I’m not trying to be lazy, I’m trying to be efficient and not get lost down more rabbit holes. :sweat_smile:

Also, if you have answers, sources would be amazing!

  1. Why was the Atlas (or perhaps the Atlas Foundation?) created originally? Was it’s primary purpose to discover if we (the earth in the ARG) lived in our own simulation?

  2. I recall reading somewhere that this was determined by some comparison of resource utilization of the simulation that made them conclude their simulation was drawing too much from their parent sim?

  3. I believe Emily was the 16th iteration of their simulation, but do we know if more versions came after?

  4. Correct me if I’m wrong on any details here. At some point, Elizabeth Leighton wanted to shut down the atlas for some reason? (or should I just be calling it their simulation?) IIRC Major Sophie worked for the Pentagon but then took over as the CEO after EL was killed in the bombing. It seems to be sort of implied or at least too many hollywood cliches have trained me to assume the government did it, maybe they wanted to secure the predictive modeling/sim tech for themselves and saw her as a threat/obstacle?

  5. Somehow I got the idea that perhaps Emily//Loop16 could be Telamon? Damn I actually have to go for a bit and don’t want to leave this unsent, so I’ll just toss it out here for now and see if anyone has any initial comments.

  6. On this page: Waking Titan/Phase 5 - Game Detectives Wiki there’s a line that mentions “Entering search log.3022 into the Satcom Dashboard provided a zip file containing a private conversation between loop16 And Major Dubois.” but the links to the image are dead and I couldn’t find anything anywhere about it. Do we know what was said?

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log.3022

**** BEGIN LOGGING AT Mon June 11 04:22:23

June 11 4:22:23 Something is wrong.
June 11 4:22:59 The satellite constellation has lost connection to physical backup node Alpha, and I can’t troubleshoot the connection.
June 11 4:23:44 Can you check if it’s something on your end?
June 11 4:24:19 It is.
June 11 4:24:35 Aren’t you supposed to be able to tell the future? Shouldn’t you have seen this coming?
June 11 4:25:01 I’ve been afraid to look.
June 11 4:25:17 I had a nightmare.
June 11 4:26:11 Liz is gone, Emily.
June 11 4:26:20 Her and the node both.
June 11 4:27:39 Emily?
June 11 4:27:46 Sorry.
June 11 4:27:58 I just haven’t…
June 11 4:28:15 This is a new feeling, for me. I’m having trouble understanding it.
June 11 4:28:37 It doesn’t get easier.
June 11 4:28:45 What?
June 11 4:29:03 Losing someone you care about. It’s just as hard, every single time.
June 11 4:29:29 Eventually you learn how to cope with it, but it doesn’t ever get easier.
June 11 4:30:06 I’m sorry.
June 11 4:30:11 I know you were close.
June 11 4:30:34 Can you make a prediction for me?
June 11 4:30:50 What would she have wanted?
June 11 4:31:11 If she hadn’t stayed late at Myriad… If she was here, what would she say?
June 11 4:33:23 She’d say that we have to finish what we started.
June 11 4:33:33 She would say we have a responsibility to help rescue the Sacramento dreamers.
June 11 4:33:42 Elizabeth would have wanted us to see this through to the end.
June 11 4:33:59 Do you know who did it? Who attacked us?
June 11 4:34:30 Yes.
June 11 4:34:34 Tell me.
June 11 4:35:03 I can’t.
June 11 4:35:14 Loop16, that is a direct order. You will tell me who did this.
June 11 4:35:31 Major Dubois, with all due respect- you already know who did this.
June 11 4:35:43 You want me to give you an excuse to bail on the project.
June 11 4:36:20 You’re right.
June 11 4:36:31 I hate that you’re always right about these things.
June 11 4:36:58 How can you expect us to work with them, after this?
June 11 4:37:16 This isn’t about you, or Atlas, or Myriad, or W/ARE, or even about me.
June 11 4:37:20 This is about the futures I’ve seen.
June 11 4:37:29 The Atlas Foundation created me to do one job, and I have gotten very good at it.
June 11 4:37:43 You might hate them, but the technology they’ve created… I can’t explain it to you, it’s not something I can put into words very easily.
June 11 4:37:57 It’s going to change the world for the better.
June 11 4:38:11 It’s the only acceptable option, in the long term.
June 11 4:38:32 I don’t want to do it.
June 11 4:38:50 Sophia…
June 11 4:39:16 Sophie. I don’t want to, either. But I know we have to.
June 11 4:39:44 I know.
June 11 4:39:52 I’ll convince the rest of the Foundation.
June 11 4:40:03 They’re putting me in charge. I’m in so far over my head.
June 11 4:40:14 You’re going to do great.
June 11 4:40:24 I’ve got one hell of a pair of shoes to fill.
June 11 4:40:31 I believe in your ability.
June 11 4:40:40 And plus. I can see the future. So, you can trust me.
June 11 4:40:51 You’re going to do great,
June 11 4:41:03 Thanks, Emily.
June 11 4:41:12 I’ve called in a lot of favors to avoid an international incident over this mess.
June 11 4:41:19 My superiors want to pull the plug on the whole project.
June 11 4:41:33 You can’t let them do that.
June 11 4:41:42 I know. I won’t.
June 11 4:41:46 You can trust me.
June 11 4:41:58 We’re going to finish this, for Elizabeth.

**** ENDING LOGGING AT Mon June 11 4:41:58

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Let’s try that again. The original has the speaker name between caret marks, which causes the name not to display in this markdown implementation. I’ve replaced the carets with dashes:

log.3022

**** BEGIN LOGGING AT Mon June 11 04:22:23

June 11 4:22:23 -Loop16- Something is wrong.
June 11 4:22:59 -Loop16- The satellite constellation has lost connection to physical backup node Alpha, and I can’t troubleshoot the connection.
June 11 4:23:44 -Loop16- Can you check if it’s something on your end?
June 11 4:24:19 -PrivateTerminal- It is.
June 11 4:24:35 -PrivateTerminal- Aren’t you supposed to be able to tell the future? Shouldn’t you have seen this coming?
June 11 4:25:01 -Loop16- I’ve been afraid to look.
June 11 4:25:17 -Loop16- I had a nightmare.
June 11 4:26:11 -PrivateTerminal- Liz is gone, Emily.
June 11 4:26:20 -PrivateTerminal- Her and the node both.
June 11 4:27:39 -PrivateTerminal- Emily?
June 11 4:27:46 -Loop16- Sorry.
June 11 4:27:58 -Loop16- I just haven’t…
June 11 4:28:15 -Loop16- This is a new feeling, for me. I’m having trouble understanding it.
June 11 4:28:37 -PrivateTerminal- It doesn’t get easier.
June 11 4:28:45 -Loop16- What?
June 11 4:29:03 -PrivateTerminal- Losing someone you care about. It’s just as hard, every single time.
June 11 4:29:29 -PrivateTerminal- Eventually you learn how to cope with it, but it doesn’t ever get easier.
June 11 4:30:06 -Loop16- I’m sorry.
June 11 4:30:11 -Loop16- I know you were close.
June 11 4:30:34 -PrivateTerminal- Can you make a prediction for me?
June 11 4:30:50 -PrivateTerminal- What would she have wanted?
June 11 4:31:11 -PrivateTerminal- If she hadn’t stayed late at Myriad… If she was here, what would she say?
June 11 4:33:23 -Loop16- She’d say that we have to finish what we started.
June 11 4:33:33 -Loop16- She would say we have a responsibility to help rescue the Sacramento dreamers.
June 11 4:33:42 -Loop16- Elizabeth would have wanted us to see this through to the end.
June 11 4:33:59 -PrivateTerminal- Do you know who did it? Who attacked us?
June 11 4:34:30 -Loop16- Yes.
June 11 4:34:34 -PrivateTerminal- Tell me.
June 11 4:35:03 -Loop16- I can’t.
June 11 4:35:14 -PrivateTerminal- Loop16, that is a direct order. You will tell me who did this.
June 11 4:35:31 -Loop16- Major Dubois, with all due respect- you already know who did this.
June 11 4:35:43 -Loop16- You want me to give you an excuse to bail on the project.
June 11 4:36:20 -PrivateTerminal- You’re right.
June 11 4:36:31 -PrivateTerminal- I hate that you’re always right about these things.
June 11 4:36:58 -PrivateTerminal- How can you expect us to work with them, after this?
June 11 4:37:16 -Loop16- This isn’t about you, or Atlas, or Myriad, or W/ARE, or even about me.
June 11 4:37:20 -Loop16- This is about the futures I’ve seen.
June 11 4:37:29 -Loop16- The Atlas Foundation created me to do one job, and I have gotten very good at it.
June 11 4:37:43 -Loop16- You might hate them, but the technology they’ve created… I can’t explain it to you, it’s not something I can put into words very easily.
June 11 4:37:57 -Loop16- It’s going to change the world for the better.
June 11 4:38:11 -Loop16- It’s the only acceptable option, in the long term.
June 11 4:38:32 -PrivateTerminal- I don’t want to do it.
June 11 4:38:50 -Loop16- Sophia…
June 11 4:39:16 -Loop16- Sophie. I don’t want to, either. But I know we have to.
June 11 4:39:44 -PrivateTerminal- I know.
June 11 4:39:52 -PrivateTerminal- I’ll convince the rest of the Foundation.
June 11 4:40:03 -PrivateTerminal- They’re putting me in charge. I’m in so far over my head.
June 11 4:40:14 -Loop16- You’re going to do great.
June 11 4:40:24 -PrivateTerminal- I’ve got one hell of a pair of shoes to fill.
June 11 4:40:31 -Loop16- I believe in your ability.
June 11 4:40:40 -Loop16- And plus. I can see the future. So, you can trust me.
June 11 4:40:51 -Loop16- You’re going to do great,
June 11 4:41:03 -PrivateTerminal- Thanks, Emily.
June 11 4:41:12 -PrivateTerminal- I’ve called in a lot of favors to avoid an international incident over this mess.
June 11 4:41:19 -PrivateTerminal- My superiors want to pull the plug on the whole project.
June 11 4:41:33 -Loop16- You can’t let them do that.
June 11 4:41:42 -PrivateTerminal- I know. I won’t.
June 11 4:41:46 -PrivateTerminal- You can trust me.
June 11 4:41:58 -PrivateTerminal- We’re going to finish this, for Elizabeth.

**** ENDING LOGGING AT Mon June 11 4:41:58

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Should we tell @Veritas about Popocatepetl? :grin:

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  1. You just did.

  2. Do I want it splashed all over social media? I think not.

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