The Eye of the Universe is some kind of cosmic test that rewards whoever can reach it with the ability to build a whole new universe
It's older than the universe itself, massive, and may be responding to the wishes of a conscious observer. While it cannot stop the universe from ending, it will create a means for life to appear again, ensuring that the end of the current universe doesn't mean the end of life forever. As to why it's so difficult to find, that is part of the grand test: After all, it gives you and your friends the ability to shape the next universe!Building off of the previous WMG, this means that the current universe was created by the previous winners
All the weird planets that live in Outer Wilds' solar system? 100% part of their design.- The devs were the real previous winners all along.
Building even further off of the previous WMG, the Outer Wilds universe was created via Sburb
the previous winners partially succeeded in their session, save for a potential genetic error which caused the Genesis Frog/universe they created to have a shorter lifespan than expected. As for the Eye? Its likely an alternate form of Skaia itself for universes in which Sburb doesn't exist.- Also yes this is very obviously meant to be a joke.
The Eye of the Universe is God
Not a traditional sentient anthropomorphic God, but a benign pantheistic Azathoth, of sorts, that has perhaps a vague unconscious desire to help those it created but is so alien it cannot truly communicate with them. The ending is it "destroying" itself along with all it previously made and making a new universe.The Eye of the Universe is a quantum black hole
It's established in the game that every black hole has a corresponding white hole, which spits out whatever the black hole sucks up at an earlier point in time. There is real scientific conjecture that the Big Bang looks an awful lot like a white hole. The Eye has apparently been around for as long as the universe has, and has been sucking up quantum possibilities the whole time. When the player jumps in at the end of time, those possibilities are collapsed by concious observation into something concrete that can finally be spat out at the corresponding white hole at the beginning of time.If nobody reaches The Eye of the Universe, the eye just resets the current universe.
Nothing strictly new comes of it. The universe may have minute differences in outcomes, though not physical laws. Presumably with enough resets, the right thing will change just enough for someone to finally reach the eye and cause things to change. The Interloper is some kind of stray ancient weapon.
The interloper is the source of all Ghost Matter in the solar system. It came from outside the system and contained a highly pressurized, high energy core that contained a substance capable of killing an entire system of planets almost instantly. It was most likely a Weapon of Mass Destruction leftover from a war long before the time of the game, waged by races long dead.- If it was even artificial in the first place, it's more likely it was a nuclear waste disposal unit. The Ghost Matter container feels a lot more "sealed away" than "primed for destruction".
The Orbital Probe Cannon didn't just find the Eye, it observed its position and collapsed its quantum uncertainty into a single position
The orbital probe cannon is basically an oversized scout launcher, except it uses time travel instead of teleportation to retrieve its payload.Like you did when landing on the Quantum Moon, the probe stored data about the observed position of the Eye, and with the Nomai memory statue constantly observing the coordinates, the Eye had to remain in its fixed position even when the timeline rewound.
This quantum collapse might have somehow jump-started the end of the universe, explaining why the stars start popping almost simultaneously when the loop begins and the Eye gets stuck.
It might also explain why Escall's vessel failed the original warp to the Eye - they hadn't managed to collapse its state, so when they stopped receiving the signal during the warp, the Eye was no longer in the place they came out.
- Jossed by Echoes of the Eye. The Owlks deployed a signal-jamming probe into the Eye's orbit long before the Nomai arrived. Assuming this probe is able to correct its velocity to remain in orbit for hundreds of milennia, it must be continuously observing the Eye. Additionally, due to the way quantum "entanglement" works in the game, the probe and the quantum moon wouldn't be brought with the Eye if it transposed due to not being in contact with it. The Eye's position was never said to have been transient anyway; it's just near-invisible and in such a far orbit from the sun that it took over nine million orbital probe iterations to find it. The thing wants (or is predetermined) to be found, after all.
In The Echos Of The Eye expansion, the new planet will have a ghost on it who snaps our character's neck
In some dummied out code in the base game, there is reference to an invisible planet as well as haunted rooms and a neck snapping ghost cause of death.Seeing as in the trailer we "see" an invisible planet, this troper finds reason to believe that we might have a new ghost related death on our hands. The Devs have also stated that Outer Wilds was always a horror game, they're just leaning into it more for this expansion.
- Confirmed! If you enter the Dark Realm in Echoes Of The Eye, drop your lit lantern, and then run into a Pursuer, they simply snap your neck. There's even an achievement for it, called Oof Ouch, My Bones.
Expanding on the former, The Eye of The Universe is causing the current universe to end because it was observed
While the Nomai were unable to cause stars to supernova in their experiment, given the Eye's quantumness and ability to create new universes, as well as the fact that it can react to living things as if it were sentient, and given that the way this universe ends fails to resemble any accepted scenario for the heat death of the universe, the Eye, observing that local life has been able to make it to space again, has triggered this end of the universe scenario in order to force one of these spacefaring lifeforms to find it and reset the universe. The Eye might work to enforce something along the lines of that one quote from ''The Restaurant at the End of the Universe''
note
note - "There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened."
