What would you want to see in a completely new mainline series entry?

[NonoEnjoyer]

I've thought a little bit about where the series could go from where we've left off. Emphasis on the 'little bit,' as I haven't fleshed out much about these ideas. Spoiler warning for the series at large, though as I'm writing this I'm not entirely sure what all I'll be bringing up. Really, this thread was born out of me brainstorming while bored during wageslave hours.

Though I'm really not the biggest fan of the simulation thing, I realize that it has always been (and always will be) a part of the series. So if I'm stuck with it, I might as well make the most of it. That being said, the idea of different simulation layers would be important for this story.

Since it's established that "lower resolution" layers of the simulation lead to more errors (gigalomania, reading steiner, etc.), I think it would be interesting to see a game take place on a layer that is much "lower resolution" than anything we've seen thus far. On the layer the bulk of the series takes place on, the errors we witness are more isolated and out of the view of the general public.

In this case, the layer would be so low resolution that errors would be commonplace. Universal laws and constants would break down, and conditions like gigalomania (and whatever else you could come up with) would be more frequent than not. I'm kind of envisioning something like the Zone from S.T.A.L.K.E.R., if anyone's familiar with that. In essence, there would be sporadic places and pockets in the world where things just don't make any sense. Time inversion, ripples into other layers, that sort of thing.

The world would be fairly chaotic. I imagine that the protagonist would be a character that was somehow flushed down to this lower layer from one higher up. He would meet a cast of zany characters, and together they would discover that their layer was doomed for one reason or another (corruption, culling, anything like that, etc.) and together they would work towards finding some means to escape to a higher layer.

Not really sure what you would want the gimmick to be for a game like this, and scientific technobabble isn't my forte either, but I'm sure you could come up with something. I think it would be cool to see some familiar concepts pushed closer to their limits. And don't worry, I'm sure we could somehow fit a Kurisu cameo in there somewhere /s

Maybe certain parts of the world would be completely fucked messes of time and space, with different eras of history smashing together like the Dreg Heap from Dark Souls 3 (underrated location imo). I think something like this would actually be a cool usage of the whole simulation thing. It never even has to be brought up that things are simulated by any of the characters, I'm sure you could come up with some in-universe terminology for layers.

Just something I've been thinking about. Hard sci-fi isn't really my area as a writer, I lean more on the Adventure part of Science Adventure.

[Parzival]

I've hinted in my own thread on the potential this series still has but I think it should really embrace what Anonymous;Code finally confirmed. That is it say, since it's already borrowed so much from PKD, it should go full PKD. Full Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch or Transmigration of Timothy Archer.

There's so much left up in the air regarding what's actually going on in the scifi world of SciADV. For all the complaining people do about how much the simulation reveal "ruins" things by making everything easily explainable, I don't actually think that's the case. It only opens up a small door for as to how things can be properly explained, but I'll save that more for my thread.

What I want to see actually is a more thorough delving into the paranormal. The Dirac Sea, The Spirit World, Beyond the Load Region. This space beyond reality as the characters would understand it has ALWAYS been at the core of happenings in SciADV. And I think there is, or could be, much more to it than just being the place unloaded bits of the simulation go to chill when they're not being rendered. What if there's something beyond the load region? A lot of somethings. Things native to that non-space. The hints that S;? will have something to do with the idea of Laplace's Demon made me consider this possibility; that the algorithms that run the reality within GAIA can be... Grasped, in a way (I think gigalomania is a hint at this). Or, perhaps, that if there was a calculated need to, they could grasp the inhabitants of the GAIA sim. What if Laplace's Demon is actually a very real daemon, a... Maybe not quite living but, actionable, manifest-able background process in reality. Maybe there's an entire, veritable grimoire's worth of these daemons.

Ever since the joke announcement of Specium;Boys was made way back in the day, SciADV fans have been wondering how the series could possibly tackle the final big conspiracy theory topic it hasn't really touched: aliens. Especially now that we know there is really anything beyond Earth in SciADV. Ironically, the entry that seemed to have squashed the possibility of aliens in SciADV actually gave us a very interesting way they could exist in this world. Instead of being actual, biological beings from some distant star, they are these daemons from beyond the load region, occasionally manifesting within the load region to spur factors along in certain desired ways. For what purpose? I don't know but I have an idea I'll get to later.

Alternatively, and more concretely, A;C showed us that upper layer beings can seemingly cause apparitions to appear to factors within the simulation in appearances favorable to that factor to communicate to that factor to guide them and their layer for certain ends, such as appearing to Lucia Santos in the visage of the Virgin Mary. Extraterrestrial encounters could be a similar such occurrence. Indeed, this opens the door not just to aliens but all manner of demon, angel, fairy, cryptid, yokai, etc all somehow being the machinations of upper layer beings.

What could all this be for or about? Well, I think it's clear that The Committee isn't just a force that exists in the layer SciADV does, or even just in upper or lower ones, I think the Committee exists in the topmost worldlayer- but I don't, or at least, I don't expect it to actually be a Committee of 300 people like it is within the world layer system.

It's no secret that Chiyomaru is a big fan of conspiracy lore, of tech CEOs like Elon Musk, and I'm sure he has his hands in a lot of proverbial cookie jars when it comes to the thoughts and ideas stemming from conspiracy and tech spaces. That is to say, I'm almost certain that he's heard of the idea of Roko's Basilisk. Why would humanity in the topmost, real layer build a computer simulation? The initial, obvious idea is that there's an Asuma in the topmost worldlayer working for the Committee so they can use that topmost Earth Sim to know the future, and thus control the world.

There's one wrench in that idea, though.

Us. You and I, the players. Anon. We're observing and helping factors in the world layer system against the Committee. Admittedly, a wrench in that idea is that throughout most of the series we're actually mainly tackling rogue elements within that layer's Committee. Indeed, a lot of the time, debuggers working for the upper layer Committee are kind of on our side. We stop Norose, we stop Kimijima, we stop the elder Narusawa- but, ask yourself this- why is the upper layer Committee against these elements? A lot of the time they're either enacting plans the Committee drew up or at least approved for their human domestication plan. Again, A;C stealthily gives us the answer. Because what those people were doing, would have caused a worldline collapse. Noah II, The Singularity, The New World System, they would have overloaded the simulation and caused a total reset of all layers of the simulation like we see in A;C, and part of the reason I think we don't see the upper Committee making any moves in that story is because they were caught between a rock and a hard place- either the 2038 problem is allowed to occur and the whole sim system goes caput, or they allow a WLC to occur to save the sim. If S;G ReBoot reveals anything, it could be that the upper Committee took steps during the events of A;C for the WLC to not effect their plans, manipulating the sim so those errors, and their grasp over the world in-layer, manifest again/are retained in the new continuity.

It would still seem though, that, as much as we may occasionally find common enemies, we're still ultimately against the Committee and their attempts at global control, and I think S;G and C;C actually are hints in that direction. One has no rogue elements to speak of, and the other features one that the Committee doesn't seem to care all that much about, yet WE do (I know Gen-san has long been thought to be a debugger, but what if he's actually a Contactee? What if that's why he knows what he does and helps Takuru?).

I think there are clearly 2 sides in this upper layer conflict against the Committee, and I think one is the human race in its near entirety. And I think the real reason they built GAIA was so they could find a way to defeat the Committee- Roko's Basilisk. Machine Intelligence gone rogue. The Singularity "in real life", that is not contained within a simulation that doesn't possess the computing power to allow its existence and thus crash if it did like Kimijima.

But clearly, this machine lifeform has found some way into the world layer system, and is using it to calculate an infinite amount of ways it could finally, fully enact its human domestication program.