Ok, two questions:
1) when you travel back in time to kill yourself, you can instead try and kill Demichev. If you do that, the scene immediately repeats itself, suggesting nothing at all has changed. Why? If Demichev dies right then, the original timeline ought to be restored.
2) why do the writings on the wall warn you against trusting the girl? I expected Katryn to turn up as a traitor up until the very end of the game.
Edited by Fallingwater Hide / Show Replies
1. Because the game averts The Dev Team Thinks of Everything. It's unfortunate, but it's just the narrative we're given.
2. There's a double-meaning here; first, Kathryn is the one who tells you about Mir-12, but to quote one of the wall scrawls, "Mir-12 is wrong." Going deeper, Kathryn herself is responsible for Mir-12, as she's the one who writes in the journal that inspires the dissenters to form Mir-12 in the first place, and she is thus the cause of their erroneous belief that Renko can fix everything by going from Point A to Point B.
1. Demechev is a tough guy, he survived being shot with assault rifle or shotgun and falling out a window (in 1950s labs), and then being shot by player with revolver during confrontation in front of the singularity, he got back up and did big speech and stuff. So simply shooting Demechev as he is being carried by your past self is no guarentee - the guy would be injured but the past version of Renko could still carry him to safety and he might live, the scientists in the lobby area might save him. The only way to be sure is if the past version of Renko is unable to carry him out of the fire.
Also, on PC patch 1.1 has been released, no more hex editing or unofficial fixes are needed to avoid the texture streaming bug.
1. You're right, it should. The devs give the player the illusion of choice, then take it away by making Demichev completely invulnerable even when there's no in-game reason for him to be - a complete No-Sell and/or But Thou Must!, to force the Downer Ending.
2. We have no idea how many iterations Original!Renko, if that is who's leaving the E99 messages, has been through, or how many alternate timelines he's seen trying to fix things. Maybe he ran into one at some point where MIR-12 took over the world. He doesn't really seem to have that much better of a grasp on events than anyone else, just an extra-temporal perspective on the many, many timelines.
More plot discussion; is it possible that the initial disaster on the island that causes the fire in the village is the cooker in the E99 production facility going kablooey? I don't remember being the cause of that when I was running around the 1955 version, although I might've just missed it; but if Renko didn't cause it, it would likely be the original, actual accident that caused the whole shebang to be shut down in the original timeline.
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This is Jossed by the fact that the cooker is relatively intact when you first enter it, just abandoned. After recharging the E99 Bomb, the alarm starts blaring, and when you get back to the present, it's suddenly completely destroyed, implying that Renko changed history again by causing it to explode. It probably overloaded or went into meltdown when Renko was charging the bomb.
Can someone explain to this poor slow troper how Devlin is a Red Herring? If anything he came off more like a Sacrificial Lamb / Sacrificial Lion.
Edited by Tableau Hide / Show Replies
He and Renko share a voice actor, so if you actually notice the future Renko yelling at you to not save Demichev when you first go through the burning building in the beginning, it's possible to assume that either the voice actor is being recycled or that it's Devlin yelling at you as a result of some kind of alternate timeline. Either conclusion is misleading.
Let's try and have an explanation here for how to fix that texture streaming glitch. I don't understand what the poster in the forum meant by finding the "SHA-1 hash". How about some help for the people?
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It depends on the hex editor you're using. This might be a little rough since I don't have a great memory; if you're using HxD, once you've made the alterations to the first file, click Analyze —> Checksums and find SHA-1, click it and it'll pop up the hash. This is what you use for editing the .exe, as you're replacing a now-outdated hash (because you've altered the first file) with this one.
Alternatively, someone made a tool
to do it automatically.
Note that neither the manual hex-editing fix nor the tool will work on the Steam version of the game, because the .exe is slightly different. To make either of these fixes work with the Steam version, you need to replace singularity.exe with either the retail version or the cracked retail version that comes with pirated copies of the game. (Also note that doing so violates Steam's terms of service, so use at your own risk/don't say I didn't warn you.)
Incidentally, Preda, thank you for clearing up the plot on the main page. I somehow managed to listen to the little model of the island tell me the Barisov Reactor was never finished, make all the right connections, and then utterly failed at translating it into words for the article. Glad someone can brain better than I can. :)
Edited by Alhazred
When was it released?
Will I be informed if people reply to my discussion post?