boatorious

Happy birthday, man.

You are still missed.

I was thinking about this, because I actually read another interview with the Russos, who added the "bagging on Back to the Future" specifically because test audiences kept thinking Endgame was using Back to the Future time travel rules and getting confused haha.

In fact, thinking more about it, the idea that time travel creates parallel universes might be more problematic than if they had done it Back to the Future style. If changing the past creates an alternate timeline, an obvious question is "how much change causes a new timeline to form?" There isn't some arbiter of what change is significant and what isn't, and because of the Butterfly Effect there's no way to know which changes will have an impact and which won't, so the only answer is that ANY time travel creates a parallel timeline.

Banner's line before they travel is that they don't want to create a lot of "nasty" alternate timelines -- which could be taken to mean they know they'll create alternate timelines, they just don't want them to be "nasty". The Ancient One talks about preserving her "reality", as if Hulk just showing up has splintered hers off from his.

But, if that's the case, then when the Avengers did their whole time heist, it means they created THREE alternate timelines--one for every different year they jumped to. In that case, while Thanos is dead in one version of the past, he's still alive in the other two versions, and in one of these versions, Loki has the Space Stone, which causes a whole bunch of issues. Plus, when Tony and Cap go back again to the 50s, this creates a fourth alternate timeline. So, in summary, this means that by saving their universe, the Avengers have created four alternate universes, at least one of which is possibly doomed to Thanos winning? (since Loki gets the Space Stone, and is working for Thanos, we can assume that Thanos gets the Space Stone far sooner in that universe) That feels... bad.

Yup. And that's assuming there's a way for Cap to go specifically back to the altered timelines and not create new branches.

As for Loki and the space stone, I have a weird thought about that.

At the end of the movie, the movie makes a big deal of Sam and Bucky being with Cap, and Cap passing the shield to Sam. This is a big deal in the MCU, but it's also a setup for the rumored Disney+ show about Sam and Bucky.

Guess who else is getting a Disney+ series?

Also, I'm confused about how time travel works in terms of machinery. At first, it looks like the big machine is used to send them back to the past, and the wristwatches return them to the present; but, Tony and Cap use the wristwatches to go back further in time. Why have the big machine then? What purpose does it serve?

Yeah, there are a lot of little things that don't make sense and that's definitely one of them.

Clint's daughter is played by Ava Russo, Joe Russo's daughter, so it's unlikely they were setting up any sort of near movie future for her. This might interest you though.

Time travel worked how it's theoretically supposed to work IRL. Since you can't create a paradox, changing the past must create an alternate reality.

Cap went back in time to return the stones to their proper places and wouldn't return (or go to Peggy) until he was done. Presumably he talked with unsnapped Quill about how it really happened, and then just made sure Quill escaped in his ship with the stone, possibly in a different way than before.

The real problems are Cap returning from an alternate reality (Russo's had a Q&A where they explained that Cap had to quantum tunnel back to the current reality), Loki has the space stone (unless Cap fixed that too), and there's a reality where the infinity stones are still extant because Thanos died in 2014.

Traveling to the past in Endgame creates alternate realities, they do not alter the present. Hulk describes it that way, The Ancient One describes it that way, Nebula kills Nebula and is fine, etc. The movie is fairly consistent about it, though not 100%. The movie doesn't explain it well enough though, I don't think I understood the time travel until I watched it a second time.

I made a Giant ROM discord. https://discord.gg/WwwdfP7

I know nothing about discord and I barely use it, so if you do let me know, and hopefully I can make you admin or whatever so you can set up what you need.

Here are some voxel models I made in Qubicle of the duders for the last Giant ROM. They are not terribly useful because I didn't have time to separate limbs out so they can't be animated without rework. But I was thinking of reusing some stuff from these models, so I wanted to share so I was not "jam cheating" :) with resources not available to all. I saved the models in FBX, OBX, VOX (magicavoxel) and QBCL (qubicle).

Zip file

Thanks for doing this Zandra! I've been looking forward to this since last time.

There's a difference between mocking a single rude player, and mocking players who give feedback in general.

I don't know about now, but I haunted the WoW forums for years and you would not believe the astounding amount of bad game design advice that fans gave Blizzard, not to mention endless bad-faith complaints.

Yet, at no time did any dev go off on a polite commenter, call commenters sexist (in general), say the fans weren't worthy of talking to devs (in general), or rejoice that they had hurt fans "manfeels".

One of the people ArenaNet fired did all of those things in a single day.

I'm not aware of any MMO's made by studios that allow developers to mock players, if that's what you're after.

I mean, feel free to move to another game, but keep in mind that the makers of whatever new game you play would also fire devs that mock fans who offer polite feedback.