Meisterdieb on 16/3/2009 at 17:37
Yes, the bodies in the Mechanist seminary were bugging me as well.
It seems clear from the set-up in the lab -"bacta tanks" and the mask fitting apparatus- that servants are made in there. And you have the "working" servant there doing whatever his job is.
IIRC you cannot pick up the bodies on the table (just the one in the secret dump). That could be simply explained by the game mechanics. If you had a "real" corpse there then the servant would freak out and you would get "Bodies detected" at the stats screen. But making those into objects so0lves that problem.
I think the bodies aren't dead, but simply unconscious or otherwise subdued and awaiting their servantification.
I also think that the Servants we see aren't dead or have their souls/ghosts captured within. I think they are alive -however that is accomplished. Hence their suffering and crying when you listen to them. And the thanking when you kill them.
(When I encountered a Servant for the first time and heard him, pleading for his death, I chose to end his suffering... and promptly got the "Mission failed" screen. I hadn't thought that the "no killing" on expert level would be triggered by such an act of mercy... That'll teach me believing anything NPCs say)
ManicMan on 16/3/2009 at 18:02
You can't pick the body up? hang on.. i'll just check the game again..
Must be something wrong with my version... I can pick them both up no problem....
Poesta on 16/3/2009 at 18:46
I can also pick them up. v1.18.
Gambit on 16/3/2009 at 20:45
Reminds me of those Half-Life 2 zombies.
You can truly feel their cries, they're still alive under that headcrab. You feel so disgusted that you want to kill then to end their pain.
massimilianogoi on 16/3/2009 at 20:55
Me too I could pick them up, and it appears "Corpse" as I picked up, that freaked me a bit :wot:.
Apropos of knocking out, I have a question for ManicMan: If they were dead, then why when you blackjack them they fall on the grouns senseless (after that you can pick up, and it appears "Servants", not corpse...). In fact, this is not clear...
ManicMan on 16/3/2009 at 21:09
that would be a bug.. i gotta try that.. blackjacking them corpes.. so it would seam they are knocked out and NOT dead which is kinda my point ^_^ when it comes to them not being dead that is.
Renault on 16/3/2009 at 21:33
Thought it was worth mentioning that in the (unreleased & unfinished) Thief2 Gold mission Waking The Dead, the ideas was that the Mechanists had commissioned the Necromancers to probe the powers of the Book of Ash. This of course leans towards the undead theory. Conversely, the Mechanists might just have been looking for an alternate plan, maybe that the time the servant project wasn't going well.
That said, I always thought the servants were alive, just reprogrammed and/or brainwashed. If they were undead, you wouldn't be able to knock them out, or kill them without holy water.
Meisterdieb on 17/3/2009 at 02:48
Just checked myself and I can pick them up and they show up as corpse.
So much for my pet theory...:sweat:
Incidentally, does the active Servant freak out at the start of the mission when he sees those corpses? DO they show up in the mission stats as "bodies discovered"? Or -if not- why doesn't he react to them.
And another thing, I never realized until reading a walkthrough or other Thief fanpage, that the Servant standing in one of those "bacta" tanks disappears mid-mission. Probably because I never went back there once I cleared that little shed.
Nameless Voice on 17/3/2009 at 03:14
Of course they could have made them unconscious if they had wanted to - but they didn't. Maybe making them corpses is (very marginally) easier, since they use that method more often, but there's no reason they couldn't have made them unconscious if they had wanted to.
Also, I don't think that "posed corpses" count as bodies for the purposes of AIs noticing them..
jtr7 on 17/3/2009 at 03:26
The Servant wouldn't react to the bodies, because it's in there attending to the process--at least, it's not in the "Servant Workshop" accidentally.
I think there's a lot of things at work to keep them from being classically undead. More like, artificially alive. Another item of note is that they bleed red blood, not the zombie black.
The number of servants in the tanks changes with reloads, just as the location of AIs can change with reloads, too. It's another cheat I discovered in Kidnap while waiting in ambush for Cavador coming my way, and having fun with a variety of ways to take him and his guards. Cavador may have three guards, but a quickload can change the number and formation, as well as change the location of the other AI on long patrols.:o It may have been rectified with the patch, because I haven't been able to get that to work with the current Thief 2, but it worked every time back when I was messing about in 2001 with another pre-patched copy.
Some Hammers practiced alchemy, and probably still did later, and The City has so many types of necromantic occurrences, and at least two stated Necromancers.
The Mechanists had Precursor technology that Cavador, with all he had seen and supervised the construction of, said "How beloved of the Builder these Ancestors must have been, for surely he did show them all matter of wonders we can barely comprehend!"
I don't think it's a coincidence that the Precursors practiced some form of mummification, or at least, the preservation of organs, and the Servants are wrapped up in strips of cloth.
The Masked Guards in Soulforge are freshly made, with blood trickling from their masks, and that implies quick work to handle Garrett, since Karras wasn't going to start the end of civilization until Garrett and Viki made him accelerate his plans. They don't have to be dead, but something is keeping them alive if the Cultivators and rust-gas canisters are at any depth behind the masks, and they can still speak (doubled, and with echo, not sounding muffled by the mask, unless only Garrett can hear them). Are they cold because they need a coat? They could ask for a coat--not that anyone would notice. They are cold and short of breath, or panting from distress (and not necessarily diminished space in the chest cavity).
