Cobra was a spy...

Wasn't the "personality overlay" something to give more credit to Hobbes change of heart? Fighting with the humans against a government he didn't agreed is one thing. Helping the humans blow his home planet to bits is something else.

I doubt Project Manhattan used Japanese in any (if all) key roles.
 
Wasn't the "personality overlay" something to give more credit to Hobbes change of heart? Fighting with the humans against a government he didn't agreed is one thing. Helping the humans blow his home planet to bits is something else.

I doubt Project Manhattan used Japanese in any (if all) key roles.


I certainly do believe that the personality overlay was invented to make Hobbes defection seem less out of nowhere... if you simply played WC3 and had no knowledge of the novels or deleted scenes, do you really understand why Hobbes all the sudden turned traitor?

The nice thing is that I think it does tie in well with Freedom Flight, where Hobbes is being interrogated. You can imagine that that scene may have been the beginning of his persona, at it all comes to fruition years later.
 
The nice thing is that I think it does tie in well with Freedom Flight, where Hobbes is being interrogated. You can imagine that that scene may have been the beginning of his persona, at it all comes to fruition years later.

Not so much the BEGINNING of the persona as much as it is an argument that it exists. Why else does Thrakhath show up to free Ralgha in the first place? It makes so much more sense that Jahkai has happened to stumble upon the fact that Ralgha IS a traitor... and Thrakhath is there to free him because it's all his plan!
 
That is interesting. I had always made an assumption that he had undergone the personality overlay at that point in time, and that the interrogation was part of creating his persona. Although, I suppose his ties to the other Kilrathi traitors should have tipped me off :)
 
Haven't read Freedom Flight yet, but I had always thought the bit in SO2 where Thrakhath escapes and the *knocks Hobbes out* instead of killing him was a bit odd...until I heard about the personality overlay. Then it made sense. Until then I had wondered, if Hobbes had really betrayed the Empire, why Thrakhath would not kill him (Kilrathi being so honor bound and all) when he had the chance...and "He's one of my few relatives that has not tried to kill me" seemed like a very flimsy reason. It makes more sense in the context of the sleeper agent thing.

Only problem with this line of reasoning is that I seem to remember LOAF telling me once that SO2 was written long before the sleeper agent personality overlay idea had been conceived of...

For the record, the idea always seemed a little weak to me. I thought "being asked to help in the destruction of his own homeworld" would have been enough of a motivation for Hobbes to turn. I've often wondered if the personality overlay was left out of the PC version of the game purely for space reasons, or if some of the folks at Origin agreed that it was similarly weak, and so axed it when they had to choose something to ax.
 
Haha yeah, it was. Freedom Flight, too. All of these are just fun coincidences. (Unless it was something Ellen Guon had considered... but she wasn't around for WC3!)
 
Wasn't the "personality overlay" something to give more credit to Hobbes change of heart? Fighting with the humans against a government he didn't agreed is one thing. Helping the humans blow his home planet to bits is something else.

I doubt Project Manhattan used Japanese in any (if all) key roles.

Agree with your general thought, but your analogy is flawed. The Manhattan project was not fundamentally designed to rain mass destruction down on Japan, as the Behemoth and T-bomb were designed to do on Kilrah. The Manhattan project was intended to keep us abreast with Germany's attempts to build an atomic bomb (Japan was nowhere close). And it was never clear that it would be used at all if developed, or if it was used, which axis power it would be used against. It was used against Japan because Germany had the good fortune to be defeated first. Had the Germans been subbornly holding on (hypothetically, let's assume they were victorious at the Battle of the Bulge, held the western Allies to a standstill, and then redistributed troops east and threw the Russians back on their heels..in other words, let's assume Hitler's fantasies of 1945 were reality), we may well have dropped the first bomb on Hamburg, or Dresden (if we hadn't already fire-bombed it), or Frankfurt.

And the Manhattan Project *certainly* used Germans in key roles. And also Italians, who we were also at war with at the start of the Project (Oppenheimer was U.S. born to German immigrants, Peirls, Fuchs, and Franck were German, Fermi and Segre were Italian). I think the only reason why it didn't use Japanese was that none of the world's leading physicists residing in the U.S. and Britain happened to be Japanese.
 
The difference is that Hobbe’s true personality was pro-Kilrathi, and the overlay was pro-Terran, and it would be the other way around with Cobra if she had received an overlay. Not sure on how that would work, since the programmed personality would have to be activated instead of the true one.
 
The difference is that Hobbe’s true personality was pro-Kilrathi, and the overlay was pro-Terran, and it would be the other way around with Cobra if she had received an overlay. Not sure on how that would work, since the programmed personality would have to be activated instead of the true one.

We don't actually know where Cobra's sympathies lie in this scenario. Her true personality could be a broken one that will support a Kilrathi agenda. Her vitriolic personality is a perfect cover because she is the last one that would be expected to betray Confed.
 
Back
Top