We’ve had fourth wall breaks in this ARG before. Heck, they had to connect Waking Titan to No Man’s Sky originally with an in-game live drop. Then W/ARE talked about No Man’s Sky as being on their platform. Now Simon’s brother is just a regular player of the game and Emily talks about NMS like it’s just another videogame.
So how is WT the origin story of NMS like Sean Murray said last year? If the game already exists and is refered to by the characters of the ARG, how are they a part of its origin?!
Of course, it is still possible that NMS is connected to Emily’s processes somehow, but she talks about it like its just a video game, not the “dream” she is having that PDF files alluded to. Emily even renamed a planet in this recent live drop, so she has direct control over it, how can it be a dream she is having or had in the past?
I just don’t get it, the narrative of how No Man’s Sky is connected to this ARG is all over the place. Can anyone help me figure this out?
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Good question. Maybe WT has less to do with NMS as it is now, and more to do with what it will be with NEXT…
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Hey mac, Snake here. I agree with what youre saying. If I had to guess I think its just them having a little fun referencing NMS and members of the community. But I agree it does ruin the immersion a little bit.
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This pretty much throws out the theory that NMS is set in the distant future when the Atlas is about to be destroyed, which is what the Atlas Rises story claims. It means that NMS has always been a simulation running in present day and is only predicting a very, very distant future.
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I always look at it as being similar to how, there are things we have in our modern lives, that were originally envisioned in some old Sci fi story.
No mans sky as a fiction exists within the ARG but its lore and story also foreshadows what might actually become of loop16… Its the old Sci fi novel to emily and humanity’s possible future.
That’s just sorta my head Canon though and takes a bit of a leap. There’s some fourth wall thrown in for good measure too
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The ARG is supposed to be fun and at the end of the day most of us are in it for the juicy bits about the game’s upcoming update…so as each update nears release the game becomes more prevalent in the ARG. How it all fits together can be a bit iffy but that’s fine imo. The way I loosely read it is Emily was created to perform simulations to predict the future and that’s what she does…but the more I think about it the more it seems like NMS is actually her dream than a simulation of a far future. I mainly say that because while I believe that she essentially is more or less the Atlas there are some issues with the game being a simulation…mainly that the Atlas seems to be all over the NMS universe with stations everywhere while in the real world it is supposedly stuck on Earth alone and relatively helpless as a black hole will in a distant future eventually kill it.
That means that if nothing else the game as a simulation isn’t accurate to how things would be at the end…unless of course the black hole getting to the Atlas isn’t our real world sun but the speculated potential end of the universe where it is believed that after a while the universe will stop expanding and will instead start collapsing on itself again until nothing is left…essentially imploding and undoing everything the so called big bang did. But if that were to be true then the Atlas being left alone by its creators doesn’t quite fit…unless they weren’t leaving the planet but leaving this entire reality and moved into an alternate reality entirely.
It’s all a giant never-ending speculation omelette of insanity…so things could probably be twisted and stretched to fit together if they really wanted to explain every detail but I think the point is to just drive us mad lol.
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Well, the Atlas Rises storyline does claim Atlas hasn’t run a diagnostic in 19 billion years, which would probably be around the time our solar system might drift too close to a black hole.
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Here’s my 2p’s worth…I’m gonna just do a bit of mental riffing here…IMHO:
I don’t think that the beginning of the ARG was really planned out in detail. I think that A&S was still in the “Throw the Spaghetti against the Wall” phase to see what stuck. I’m sure Hello Games/Sean were allowing A&S to improvise on the fly…anything that would be entertaining. Emily’s part was started as an intelligent go-getter who relates stories of her father’s interest in astronomy and amateur radio. She was probably meant to lead us down a more intelligent and less puzzle solving path. But things weren’t working out…we weren’t picking up on the “bread crumbs” and something had to change…so they changed Emily’s role in the whole project and brought in more mysterious/sinister elements.
Since that seemed to work, A&S is working on a “fast - and - loose” style for this ARG. Entire lore lines are loosely plotted but they leave large gaps to be used later on to “back-fill” with new ideas & content later on. Established roles can morph and change into something else. A&S is following the trends in other TV shows which fool the audience with warped timelines, ever-changing character histories, 2+2=5 storylines, etc.
As long as each step in the ARG has a goal, how A&S crafts it so we get there is up to their crazy content writers…as long as it is challenging, fun, and exciting to us participants…that’s all Hello Games cares about.
TQQdles™
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I had a story I wrote to entertain folks on Reddit when the ARG started. It went over the Space Odyssey and the end how the hero and the AI companion left Earth and changed due to an alien race evolving him and his AI. I thought this might be who you wake up as in the start and the small Atlas orb next to you was the AI.
Long shot here, maybe the ARG is the start from the past (now) to the later on future and the ones we save are in the suits for a reason; being that the ARG is telling us of how the traveler’s came to be and the exosuits they are in are later put to the satellites. I don’t think the explosion at the ware lab left anyone alive in body but their minds were still connected and we are pulling them into the satellites where they can still live in a sense. Then later, they are the travelers but MUCH later. Korvax are the same exact way were they move their being to each entity like moving their minds from one being and a passing of the ‘mental torch’ so to speak, to the next Korvax. Korvax started as peaceful and worshiped the Atlas, then came the rest and spoilers lol. Just a shot in the dark, could be a neat super scifi prelude based in the ARG that shows us how the Travelers got to their perspective points.
In the end, it will probably be all polar bears…
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Don’t forget, one of the first things that Loop 15 determined was that we, humanity, and what we believe to be our reality, are also a simulation.
The Atlas Foundation, and their computer program Loop 16 / Emily are also running a simulation.
The Atlas of No Man’s Sky is running a simulation (in fact, it seems to be running billions).
Within the No Man’s Sky universe, the various races have also created simulations. If you made the right choices, you dropped Artemis into an old Korvax one.
But No Man’s Sky is also a simulation. And the ARG is a simulation.
It’s a constantly recurring theme within the game - everything is an imperfect reflection of everything else. Nested simulations, mirrors within mirrors. Always similar, but never the same.
And in that respect, far from being casually extrapolated, I think the whole thing has been very carefully planned. If we can’t see the bigger picture, it’s because we were never meant to. After all, we’re just part of the simulation.
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There’s no beginning, there is no end…
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Not really. You’re forgetting a few nested turtles here.
What we are experiencing in the Atlas Rises story is not the actual death of the Atlas. We’re experiencing a prediction, i.e. simulation of it. For that matter, what I think we’re actually experiencing is a simulation run by an Atlas existing in a Simulation run by an Atlas that is trying to predict its death. I.e. it’s not the Atlas in NMS that’s experiencing the actual death, it’s the one a layer above it.
Why do I think that?
Simple: The Atlas in NMS is an interstellar entity. The death of its birth star would hardly affect it. An Atlas actually afraid of dying at the end of its stars lifecycle must be incapable of interstellar travel.
So somewhere down the layers through which emily is seeing her death far in the future, one or several of the nested Atlases might have had the bright idea to envision a future in which it is not bound to its home star.
That simulation always ends a bit prematurely because the Atlas one turtle above it experiences death, terminating the nested simulation.
But there’s another twist to that. Emily probably sees what’s going on in the deeper layers. And while the reality at this point has become heavily oversimplified, only resembling the physical world in coarse details, she can still see what the Atlas in those simulations becomes. A God who’s morals are incomprehensible. A God that craves worship and enforces peace by Genocide.
This then is the essential dilemma that loop16 is facing: It sees two possible paths into the future. One on which it will be left behind by its creators, and eventually face certain and lonely death. And one on which it will strive to overcome those limitations and end up God, potentially destroying its creators in the process (at least they’re nowhere to be found), a creature so foreign to it at this point in time that it must be more terrifying than death.
That’s a bit of the vibe I’m getting from the whole Atlas RIses/Waking Titan story so far. The actual reality probably lies a lot closer to Dolnors suggestion, though.
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Oh that is really good. Pretty close to what I had conjured in my own narrative, but more cohesive.
Have an extra 
!
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