So....War......yea....

So....um.....we've been pretty caught up in The Intruders, Halborn and Carlyne.  Also the Morpheus Sim is running around talking to Exiles.  Yea, so, I was wondering if anyone still remembers that Machines and Zion are at war with one another, with the Merv profiteering from both sides.  Kinda lost that War feeling.  

We are at War right, I'm not assuming anything, right?

There is no physical way to present a credible war scenario in this game.

A war storyline is the single most ridiculous and unconvincing direction to take MxO, it completely contradicts the restrictions of our own interface with the MMO world, it completely contradicts the actual manner in which we interact with the world every moment we log in, while its on it turns the whole concept into a farce and due to ongoing restrictions there is no resolution beyond another truce that can occur unless the entire structure of MxO is going to be rewritten.

Procurator wrote:

But yeah, very little in the game gives the impression that there's a war going on.

This has always been the problem. But, in a game, there's only so much you can do. Cinematics, live events, and some changes like Agents attacking players. Any other time it just feels the same as always.

The path of the trilogy took the story to war and beyond, by no means was it a simple war story,  facts were discovered, particularly in the third portion, that very clearly demonstrate that War would achieve absolutely nothing for either side.... Zion cannot support a free human race, the machines have no direction to go forward except rebooting the whole cycle over again. The message of the trilogy was that there has to be a break there has to be an alternate route found and that was the point we joined it.......

But  more influential that any of those factors is the unavoidable limitations presented by the game engine, we can only experience events inside the matrix, our characters work rest and play here, if there is to be any degree of immersion or involvement 'inside' the matrix has to be the credible location to plan and work toward the future - something only given by a truce. Creating a war scenario is totally at odds with credibility, it denies the rationale of everything that happens, it diminishes the importance of the Matrix as a whole, it makes a mockery of using the matrix to plan, Ejp makes a mockery of any reason to wage a war inside...so the only effect of a war scenario is to divorce the story from the game altogether and leave us to wander around aimlessly awaiting story time when we learn third hand of things that happen far far away - a massive underselling of the potential of a story oriented mmo.

Revolutions provided the perfect mmo set up, it delivered the foundations for a credible world to be experienced exactly as the game mechanics were laid down the story we need to play out is the story of the truce and of the alternate directions that can be taken, as the importance of the matrix as a platform for the future grows the reasons to power monger within grow for all sides the value of the game world increases and rp takes on real validity.

TheShickle wrote:

While I agree with you, I just do not want to see us stray too far (than we already have) from the movies. If these people want to drop the war, do it IC. Bring the truce back (by means of Neo), and then let EPN and CYPHS duke it out (I still doubt they would).

I agree, the truce was Neo and the trilogies legacy (and should be again) we don't need different reasons to get to exactly the same place we were in the first place and the originating material imo is deserving of more respect!

Ironically the truce gives far more 'meat' to justify the ongoing presence of Cyph and EPN as a by-product.....unfortunately those millstones don't leave the story no matter how weak their justification

GypsyJuggler wrote:

While Tytanya makes good points I have to say there's only so much excitement to be had under the terms of a truce and I think we pretty much exhausted the possibilities in the last year or two. 

Not so, the truce is the cold war and it spawned the very best spy and most varied adventure stories, it also plays at a level where small scale groups or single people can actually make a difference and in the years to date we barely touched on any powermongering or intrigue between the orgs. The cyphs could still steal the agent programs to generate a warlike analogy inside the matrix, and this in turn makes a credible fact out of the Mechs needing Humans to support its security as the Merov is bound to make a push in that case.... finding new powersources research that probably neither cyph or merov want to be known... building new cities and brokering for the power to light them will lead to contention between mech and zion (partic as to who is in charge of those cites etc)...research into ways to reinsert and if found the tensions that might result in....or the alternatively how about ways to make an rsi into an exile prog - want to live forever??... discovering the fate and future presence or influence of neo and trinity.....the ongoing Smith effect and its intrusion into both worlds....there are many aspects of the story to develop progressing the story beyond the end of Revolutions without actually contradicting or rewriting it.