Yahtzee's review of human revolution made me think about how it ends. He's right that the endings provide no closure, basically ignoring agreed upon story structure. For some reason I loved the ending, and Yahtzee's criticisms made me realize why. Giving closure would actually have undermined the point of the game!
Human augmentation raises many more questions than we initially realize. Think about any technology. Now list all the applications of said technology. Now imagine the likelihood we've discovered all of them. Now remember that the people who discovered this technology in the first place knew even less. I doubt the inventor of the printing press forsaw Hitler's Mein Kampf paving the way for genocide. We are in this same situation with any of our intentions and their consequences. We have no idea what's in the box we're opening.
The World doesn't care about your plans, so you will never gain purely intentional results. There are so many examples of this problem in the game. When Adam catches an agent the man is murdered through his augment. Hugh Darrow realizes too late that his attack won't save mankind but destroy it. Sarif's decision to trust Hugh blows up in his face. Taggart's desire to impose order enables chaos. Every augmented soul makes the mistake of going along with that shady upgrade. By the end you even see human augmentation's ultimate nightmare; Humans forced to bond to machine in the name of the species' survival. All this time people's decisions came with undesired results.
"It is not the end of the world, but you can see it from here"
There's no mistaking it. The world is about to become a completely different place, and you're choice - not you're desires - will decide it's future. The reason we never see what happens to the world is that we never know what will happen in reality. If the developers had made a wild guess as to what became of humanity we would inevitably split our choices up into the "good" or "bad" ones. But we didn't get that. Whatever we chose was justified by Adam. The whole point being that since you can't control the outcome of you're decisions there is no right answer, instead focus on making you're reasons something you can live with.
Human augmentation raises many more questions than we initially realize. Think about any technology. Now list all the applications of said technology. Now imagine the likelihood we've discovered all of them. Now remember that the people who discovered this technology in the first place knew even less. I doubt the inventor of the printing press forsaw Hitler's Mein Kampf paving the way for genocide. We are in this same situation with any of our intentions and their consequences. We have no idea what's in the box we're opening.
The World doesn't care about your plans, so you will never gain purely intentional results. There are so many examples of this problem in the game. When Adam catches an agent the man is murdered through his augment. Hugh Darrow realizes too late that his attack won't save mankind but destroy it. Sarif's decision to trust Hugh blows up in his face. Taggart's desire to impose order enables chaos. Every augmented soul makes the mistake of going along with that shady upgrade. By the end you even see human augmentation's ultimate nightmare; Humans forced to bond to machine in the name of the species' survival. All this time people's decisions came with undesired results.
"It is not the end of the world, but you can see it from here"
There's no mistaking it. The world is about to become a completely different place, and you're choice - not you're desires - will decide it's future. The reason we never see what happens to the world is that we never know what will happen in reality. If the developers had made a wild guess as to what became of humanity we would inevitably split our choices up into the "good" or "bad" ones. But we didn't get that. Whatever we chose was justified by Adam. The whole point being that since you can't control the outcome of you're decisions there is no right answer, instead focus on making you're reasons something you can live with.