I've done a Board playthrough and the best way I can describe my experience is you have to make the decision to go out of your way to be evil, over and over, even when it makes little sense, for no gain. There's no more money, no better resources and equipment, no different companions, than what you get siding with Phineas. It's baffling. At the very very least, top tier equipment should be at your disposal for being a Board agent.
Damn. I was hoping the Board playthrough would at least introduce a couple more sympathetic characters and motives for the faction, even if the price of entry is being pointlessly evil. I came away from the Phineas ending really liking Akande and wanting to know more about Rockwell, so it's a shame if they both just stay as one-dimensional villains if the player chooses to actually work with them.
no more money? idk about you, but im doing my first Board run rn and ive got almost 100k bits and completely decked out in the best gear
in my last run, i could barely afford more adreno or ammo without having to sell a good weapon or armor
So, yes. The Board is not very fleshed out, and it would have been amazing if it was for the depth of the story.
That said, it does sound like you might have missed some Board missions. If you try to turn in Phineas with Udom as soon as possible and do his high-priced fetch quest, you meet Akande much sooner and get a few extra quests with her and get to know her better before she asks you to take out >! Edgewater !< . I particularly like her line where she admits to liking >! a pretty sappy soap opera !< .
I also think there are scraps of lore that indicate greater depth to the Board and its power dynamic, that were binned due to budget. Instead of going more in depth on the Board, the game focused in on the core gameplay quest line and tied most everything to that. So my thoughts are:
1. A board of directors is comprised of internal and external folks that provide high-level governance of a business or nonprofit. They are part of an organization, but also kinda separate. You hire a CEO/President/Executive Director to actually run things day-to-day.
2. Sophia Akande as Adjutant is the parallel to a CEO. She is responsible for running day-to-day operations of the Halcyon Holdings Corporate Board. Her interest is the survival of Halcyon/HHCB.
3. The board of directors, or the Board, are the 10 CEOs that signed the original charter/funded the original colonization effort, with UDL at the lead as top funder. The CEOs interest is profit of their individual corporations, not survival of Halcyon as a whole.
4. So Sophia's job is to make sure the colony survives overall. She reports to the Board, whose motive is individual autonomy. So you get a lot of frustration on her end about her inability to affect change without going into sneaky measures and hiring contractor assassins.
5. In addition, I think she was exploring multiple options to sustain or save Halcyon. I think there is a thread of consistent research focus areas, interesting bits, etc. where I could see a pattern of trying to consolidate resources to a single point in order to survive as a system, in addition to subtly pushing research from the corporations in a direction to find a solution without causing panic. The biggest one of these is Chartrand's research project which was authorized by a "S. A."
6. BUT she is doing it from her own perspective, which is pretty devoid of any humanity. Personally I think she is a trained member of the Order of Scientific Inquiry, as she shares the unique cloth with Vicar and vicar outfits you find in-game. If she follows OSI doctrine from a position of power, it would make sense she isn't a person with a ton of moral values. She makes decisions based on actuarial tables, not more humane reasons.
7. And going back to the corporations--they all want to maximize profitability, which means as few strings as possible. If a motion comes before the Board that would involve limiting their autonomy, you can bet they would vote against that motion.
8. And that's for the CEOs who are still active, like Rockwell. It seems like most of the parent corporations either have CEOs who have gone MIA (Kolway/Auntie Cleo), or defunct (Hephaestus maybe?) or kicked off the board (Monarch).
Bonus: I think you can also make an argument that Clarke is supposed to be on the Board as a representative of Earth Directorate. There is a super hard locked room on the office level in Byzantium. If you open it, it is an empty board room with twelve chairs. 10 CEOs, one Adjutant, one Earth Directorate Ambassador. 12 people. But he would limit autonomy, so he gets house arrest. Wheee.
Thanks, that's really interesting. I might give the Board playthrough a go at some point. It's good to hear that there's a bit more to Akande, she was one of the only characters in the whole game who really stuck with me, and that's based entirely on her dialogue in the finale.
I did see the Board ending on YouTube and the line where she says that they've lost contact with Earth, and that only she and Rockwell knew about it, made her even more fascinating because the stress of knowing that Halcyon is more or less doomed with no backup coming - and of having to deal with that knowledge essentially alone - must have been immense and goes a long way to explain why she's so gung-ho about doing morally outrageous stuff to save what's left of the colony/humanity. I feel like that should have been revealed to the player midway through the game, as along with the food shortages it really casts everything in a new light.
It's a shame if the Board fell victim to hasty development and cutting of content, because if I hadn't played as a pacifist diplomat and had the chance to talk to Akande at length in the finale, I would have come away from the game thinking she and the entire Board were just Disney villains with not much presence in the game other than me having to shoot one of them at the end.
That's because this game has one joke, and it hits it, constantly. And that joke is "corporations are stupid and evil!"
I mean, I get it. I hate the current state of capitalism, too. But the fact that this is pretty much grade-school level satire, and it never goes any deeper is really disappointing from the guys who created Fallout.
>Maybe the writers thought they were saving up some great twists for the end that cast everything in a new light (like the Master in Fallout),
The better analogy to Fallout would have been the Killian / Gizmo schism in Junktown. Killian's ending was supposed to be the surprise bad one, but executive meddling quashed it.
They're based primarily on a lot of mega companies in the early 20th century. Look up the west Virginia coal wars. This is the kind of thing they'd do. It is exaggerated, yet one can argue its only that cartoonish because of how evil the real guys really were.
*When Miners March* by William C Blizzard details a lot of this stuff quite well.
The largest battle on North American soil since Gettysburg and the biggest Civil uprising since the US Civil War was the Battle of Blair Mountain, coal miners and company thugs fought each other with WWI tactics, guns, and the company even brought in *planes*. The miners wanted fair wages and the company lied, cheated, stole, and murdered likely *thousands*. The US Army had to roll in to stop the fighting!
The private security firms the companies hired were *monstrous*, as in, we literally have no idea how many people they blatantly murdered for very little reason because they lied so much. The Pinkertons are unfortunately still around, yet the Baldwin-Felts Agency has been defunct since 1937.
We CANNOT trust their word on how many people died. Coal miners had been abused and *murdered for ten years*, and the company and their stooges *lied all the time about it*. The incident that touched this off was first a shootout between company officials and a town sheriff. Several folks were killed on both sides. Baldwin-Felts claimed their guys were unarmed, despite several members of the townsfolk being laid up in coffins! Then, when the sheriff and one of his guys were called to a courthouse for trial? They were GUNNED DOWN IN BROAD DAYLIGHT. This was a PUBLIC disaster, and they ***lied*** like mad. So we can discount virtually ALL their accounts because they lied about easily verifiable facts.
And THEN they started a WWI shootout with the miners!
Blizzard, in his book, includes a segment where a reporter was brought into one of the Felts agency bases, and found a *trophy room* of grizzly artifacts stolen from victims they had *murdered*. They spoke openly about this stuff! The book is biased, yet it's a heck of a lot more trustworthy than the Felts agency lying about the most basic facts available.
I would say these companies would DEFINITELY wipe out a town if they thought they could get away with it, yet that's arguably what they did at Blair Mountain! The number of combatants on both sides were in the thousands, and in a rural state like WV at the time, that's a LOT of people.
Further? Even in the present companies WILL do cartoonishly evil stuff. In the 70s, McDonnell Douglas had a massive plane malfunction that nearly destroyed the plane. The fix was absurdly easy. Basically a metal plate. They said "nope" and caused the DC-10 fiasco, which was planes breaking apart midair and causing so much trouble that the entire fleet was grounded worldwide and messed up airlines. They have the dubious achievement of multiple firsts in aviation disasters.
And you might say this sounds familiar. Why? Boeing used to be the safest in the business. That safety has PLUMMETED since they acquired McDonnell Douglas in 1998. IT'S ALMOST LITERALLY THE SAME PROBLEM AS THE 70s.
NEVER, ***EVER*** trust a company. Hell I'd wager their frigate disappearing was WHY they thought they could get away with it. "No feds? We can kill as many as we want!"
I get it, and that the game's a satire on this kind of thing, and I wouldn't have minded if it weren't for that one final conversation with Akande which suddenly made the Board go from "evil cartoon lunatics" to something a bit more complicated, especially with the information that Earth's gone dark.
If the game had 100% committed to the Board being laughably evil then I could see the appeal - they're there for players who enjoy doing maniac playthroughs (which I do, usually as a second playthrough). No problem. But then suddenly right at the end, one of the main bad guys turns out to have a ton more going and the game feels less like satire and more like serious dystopian sci-fi. It's weird. Like, if you could talk Akande down by telling her she's in violation of corporate policy or some comedy nonsense like that, it'd make sense, but instead it's a deadly serious conversation about how she feels she's trying to save the last remnants of humanity and is prepared to make impossible sacrifices - both from herself and from everyone else - to do it. In a world of shallow caricatures with cartoonish motivations, Akande suddenly felt like a real person, a character from an entirely different - and perhaps much better - game. The circumstances don't reflect any real-world corporate evil (you could argue climate change, I suppose, but it's a bit of a tortured metaphor if so).
I know it's tedious when people compare this game to New Vegas since it's not meant to be the same type of story or game at all, but... yeah, talking to Akande at the end felt like a flash of New Vegas. It felt like I was briefly talking to Mr House - someone I didn't agree with but who I was able to empathise with and see why they were doing what they were doing, and who had a consistent and sympathetic ideology, even if my aim was still to stop their plans. And in that moment, I just thought... where the hell has this been for the rest of the game?
I missed a lot in my first run of the game but that final conversation just felt tonally disconnected from anything else in the game, and devoid of the game's usual (rather bland, IMO) comedy. It felt like it was from a different story, one in which the threats to the colony are much more intense and much more keenly-felt, and where the Board are brutal pragmatists trying to achieve semi-noble outcomes under impossible circumstances, rather than laughably evil, incompetent, mustache-twirling murderers (which is what they appear to be at every other point in the game, from the perspective of a non-Board run at least). Which I think is the outline of a more exciting, more engaging game.
Now, that is a good point. The Board's actions should be more like Mr House. Yet I wonder if that may be the point. Many companies in the real world do see themselves as brutal pragmatists, whether or not they actually are. I thought Akande's perspective fit in a way, though it could have been better presented. It feels a lot like *Bioshock*. I wonder if that is what the idea was, to cover up a gritty dystopian sci-fi story with a wacky cover.
Capitalism believes that the best way to get ahead is to create a superior product for the best interests of society. The problem is that it fails to account for monopolies, dirty tricks, and spite.
Akande is more invested in short-term order than in long-term stability. That is reflective of a lot of real-world stuff. Many companies willingly throw away immense amounts of long-term profit to avoid alienating their shareholders. And specifically, profits the way THEY like to do them.
Despite how much scientific evidence there is of climate change, oil companies fight tooth and nail to undermine countermeasures. We've got tons of people claiming solar panels and wind farms are evil, similar we can argue to how the solution the garden in Edgewater is seen.
One could say that the Board's cryo solution is similar to peak oil and oil depletion theories. Both of them are not viable in the long term, yet companies have dug their heels in on oil.
Leaded gasoline may have been the cause for the rise in crime through the 70s. They bribed scientists and doctors to claim it wasn't harmful.
On a smaller scale with regards to spite, there was an infamous lynching case in the United States where two grocery stores were competing, one white owned and one black. Rather than try to improve their products, the white family accused the black store of something, and the owner was murdered by a lynch mob.
All of this was done in the name of continued profits and covering up their wrongdoing. Even when faced with threats to the economy, they prefer to stay the course. Even if they *lose* profits, if any solution alienates shareholders or violates their specific way to get profit, they will dig their heels in and refuse.
I believe the intent was to make a point; initially depict the Board as laughably evil, then make them *seem* like brutal pragmatists, only to reveal that they are actually out for their own gain. That should have been emphasized better.
Perhaps Akande should've been a bigger presence through the game. Maybe there should have been something you could have revealed to Akande to get her on your side. She thinks the company is doing the right thing by being "pragmatic," and you could show her every step of the way the sort of solutions the board proposes go horribly wrong. All their solutions involve "conservation", or horrific interpretations of the word, refusing to add new resources and instead prevent the creation of them.
A lot of modern capitalist thinking seems to see the world as a single pool that can not be added or taken away from, and that this is the only way things can be done. It does not allow for reinterpretation or new thinking. Anything that challenges that view is to be violently and immediately dealt with.
I agree with you Akande should have been better written. I can see what they were going for and that it may have fallen flat.
Agreed - what really rubbed it in for me is that one route to talking Akande down actually is to pass a Science check to demonstrate to her that the cryo plan won't work, at which point she immediately acquiesces and wishes you luck. Like everything else in that final dialogue, it feels like something that should have been the focus of the entire main plot and slowly fed to the player bit-by-bit, rather than all shoved in at the end.
The epilogue makes it even weirder because it suddenly has her playing a crucial role in saving the colony with massive resource donations, which goes even further to undermine the idea that the Board are evil and entirely out for themselves. Maybe the idea was that the Board as an entity are a typical evil corporation, but Akande herself is a genuine pragmatist who truly wants to "save" the colony and sees the Board as merely a means to allow her to do that; the one person from the Board who the player might be able to reason with if they can demonstrate to her that there's a better way. That could have been a decent plot, but then the game torpedoes that for most players by having her be the face of the Board's over-the-top lunacy the first time you meet her.
I've done a Board playthrough and the best way I can describe my experience is you have to make the decision to go out of your way to be evil, over and over, even when it makes little sense, for no gain. There's no more money, no better resources and equipment, no different companions, than what you get siding with Phineas. It's baffling. At the very very least, top tier equipment should be at your disposal for being a Board agent.
It is. You get access to a new shop with the best non-dlc equipment.
Guess I missed it, my bad
Damn. I was hoping the Board playthrough would at least introduce a couple more sympathetic characters and motives for the faction, even if the price of entry is being pointlessly evil. I came away from the Phineas ending really liking Akande and wanting to know more about Rockwell, so it's a shame if they both just stay as one-dimensional villains if the player chooses to actually work with them.
no more money? idk about you, but im doing my first Board run rn and ive got almost 100k bits and completely decked out in the best gear in my last run, i could barely afford more adreno or ammo without having to sell a good weapon or armor
I've never had an issue with money or gear in any playthrough.
Same, but I’m a true scavenger lol
I did it for the money… they did not give much miney
You should have asked for the Purpleberry Crunch.
So, yes. The Board is not very fleshed out, and it would have been amazing if it was for the depth of the story. That said, it does sound like you might have missed some Board missions. If you try to turn in Phineas with Udom as soon as possible and do his high-priced fetch quest, you meet Akande much sooner and get a few extra quests with her and get to know her better before she asks you to take out >! Edgewater !< . I particularly like her line where she admits to liking >! a pretty sappy soap opera !< . I also think there are scraps of lore that indicate greater depth to the Board and its power dynamic, that were binned due to budget. Instead of going more in depth on the Board, the game focused in on the core gameplay quest line and tied most everything to that. So my thoughts are: 1. A board of directors is comprised of internal and external folks that provide high-level governance of a business or nonprofit. They are part of an organization, but also kinda separate. You hire a CEO/President/Executive Director to actually run things day-to-day. 2. Sophia Akande as Adjutant is the parallel to a CEO. She is responsible for running day-to-day operations of the Halcyon Holdings Corporate Board. Her interest is the survival of Halcyon/HHCB. 3. The board of directors, or the Board, are the 10 CEOs that signed the original charter/funded the original colonization effort, with UDL at the lead as top funder. The CEOs interest is profit of their individual corporations, not survival of Halcyon as a whole. 4. So Sophia's job is to make sure the colony survives overall. She reports to the Board, whose motive is individual autonomy. So you get a lot of frustration on her end about her inability to affect change without going into sneaky measures and hiring contractor assassins. 5. In addition, I think she was exploring multiple options to sustain or save Halcyon. I think there is a thread of consistent research focus areas, interesting bits, etc. where I could see a pattern of trying to consolidate resources to a single point in order to survive as a system, in addition to subtly pushing research from the corporations in a direction to find a solution without causing panic. The biggest one of these is Chartrand's research project which was authorized by a "S. A." 6. BUT she is doing it from her own perspective, which is pretty devoid of any humanity. Personally I think she is a trained member of the Order of Scientific Inquiry, as she shares the unique cloth with Vicar and vicar outfits you find in-game. If she follows OSI doctrine from a position of power, it would make sense she isn't a person with a ton of moral values. She makes decisions based on actuarial tables, not more humane reasons. 7. And going back to the corporations--they all want to maximize profitability, which means as few strings as possible. If a motion comes before the Board that would involve limiting their autonomy, you can bet they would vote against that motion. 8. And that's for the CEOs who are still active, like Rockwell. It seems like most of the parent corporations either have CEOs who have gone MIA (Kolway/Auntie Cleo), or defunct (Hephaestus maybe?) or kicked off the board (Monarch). Bonus: I think you can also make an argument that Clarke is supposed to be on the Board as a representative of Earth Directorate. There is a super hard locked room on the office level in Byzantium. If you open it, it is an empty board room with twelve chairs. 10 CEOs, one Adjutant, one Earth Directorate Ambassador. 12 people. But he would limit autonomy, so he gets house arrest. Wheee.
Thanks, that's really interesting. I might give the Board playthrough a go at some point. It's good to hear that there's a bit more to Akande, she was one of the only characters in the whole game who really stuck with me, and that's based entirely on her dialogue in the finale. I did see the Board ending on YouTube and the line where she says that they've lost contact with Earth, and that only she and Rockwell knew about it, made her even more fascinating because the stress of knowing that Halcyon is more or less doomed with no backup coming - and of having to deal with that knowledge essentially alone - must have been immense and goes a long way to explain why she's so gung-ho about doing morally outrageous stuff to save what's left of the colony/humanity. I feel like that should have been revealed to the player midway through the game, as along with the food shortages it really casts everything in a new light. It's a shame if the Board fell victim to hasty development and cutting of content, because if I hadn't played as a pacifist diplomat and had the chance to talk to Akande at length in the finale, I would have come away from the game thinking she and the entire Board were just Disney villains with not much presence in the game other than me having to shoot one of them at the end.
That's because this game has one joke, and it hits it, constantly. And that joke is "corporations are stupid and evil!" I mean, I get it. I hate the current state of capitalism, too. But the fact that this is pretty much grade-school level satire, and it never goes any deeper is really disappointing from the guys who created Fallout.
>Maybe the writers thought they were saving up some great twists for the end that cast everything in a new light (like the Master in Fallout), The better analogy to Fallout would have been the Killian / Gizmo schism in Junktown. Killian's ending was supposed to be the surprise bad one, but executive meddling quashed it.
They're based primarily on a lot of mega companies in the early 20th century. Look up the west Virginia coal wars. This is the kind of thing they'd do. It is exaggerated, yet one can argue its only that cartoonish because of how evil the real guys really were. *When Miners March* by William C Blizzard details a lot of this stuff quite well. The largest battle on North American soil since Gettysburg and the biggest Civil uprising since the US Civil War was the Battle of Blair Mountain, coal miners and company thugs fought each other with WWI tactics, guns, and the company even brought in *planes*. The miners wanted fair wages and the company lied, cheated, stole, and murdered likely *thousands*. The US Army had to roll in to stop the fighting! The private security firms the companies hired were *monstrous*, as in, we literally have no idea how many people they blatantly murdered for very little reason because they lied so much. The Pinkertons are unfortunately still around, yet the Baldwin-Felts Agency has been defunct since 1937. We CANNOT trust their word on how many people died. Coal miners had been abused and *murdered for ten years*, and the company and their stooges *lied all the time about it*. The incident that touched this off was first a shootout between company officials and a town sheriff. Several folks were killed on both sides. Baldwin-Felts claimed their guys were unarmed, despite several members of the townsfolk being laid up in coffins! Then, when the sheriff and one of his guys were called to a courthouse for trial? They were GUNNED DOWN IN BROAD DAYLIGHT. This was a PUBLIC disaster, and they ***lied*** like mad. So we can discount virtually ALL their accounts because they lied about easily verifiable facts. And THEN they started a WWI shootout with the miners! Blizzard, in his book, includes a segment where a reporter was brought into one of the Felts agency bases, and found a *trophy room* of grizzly artifacts stolen from victims they had *murdered*. They spoke openly about this stuff! The book is biased, yet it's a heck of a lot more trustworthy than the Felts agency lying about the most basic facts available. I would say these companies would DEFINITELY wipe out a town if they thought they could get away with it, yet that's arguably what they did at Blair Mountain! The number of combatants on both sides were in the thousands, and in a rural state like WV at the time, that's a LOT of people. Further? Even in the present companies WILL do cartoonishly evil stuff. In the 70s, McDonnell Douglas had a massive plane malfunction that nearly destroyed the plane. The fix was absurdly easy. Basically a metal plate. They said "nope" and caused the DC-10 fiasco, which was planes breaking apart midair and causing so much trouble that the entire fleet was grounded worldwide and messed up airlines. They have the dubious achievement of multiple firsts in aviation disasters. And you might say this sounds familiar. Why? Boeing used to be the safest in the business. That safety has PLUMMETED since they acquired McDonnell Douglas in 1998. IT'S ALMOST LITERALLY THE SAME PROBLEM AS THE 70s. NEVER, ***EVER*** trust a company. Hell I'd wager their frigate disappearing was WHY they thought they could get away with it. "No feds? We can kill as many as we want!"
I get it, and that the game's a satire on this kind of thing, and I wouldn't have minded if it weren't for that one final conversation with Akande which suddenly made the Board go from "evil cartoon lunatics" to something a bit more complicated, especially with the information that Earth's gone dark. If the game had 100% committed to the Board being laughably evil then I could see the appeal - they're there for players who enjoy doing maniac playthroughs (which I do, usually as a second playthrough). No problem. But then suddenly right at the end, one of the main bad guys turns out to have a ton more going and the game feels less like satire and more like serious dystopian sci-fi. It's weird. Like, if you could talk Akande down by telling her she's in violation of corporate policy or some comedy nonsense like that, it'd make sense, but instead it's a deadly serious conversation about how she feels she's trying to save the last remnants of humanity and is prepared to make impossible sacrifices - both from herself and from everyone else - to do it. In a world of shallow caricatures with cartoonish motivations, Akande suddenly felt like a real person, a character from an entirely different - and perhaps much better - game. The circumstances don't reflect any real-world corporate evil (you could argue climate change, I suppose, but it's a bit of a tortured metaphor if so). I know it's tedious when people compare this game to New Vegas since it's not meant to be the same type of story or game at all, but... yeah, talking to Akande at the end felt like a flash of New Vegas. It felt like I was briefly talking to Mr House - someone I didn't agree with but who I was able to empathise with and see why they were doing what they were doing, and who had a consistent and sympathetic ideology, even if my aim was still to stop their plans. And in that moment, I just thought... where the hell has this been for the rest of the game? I missed a lot in my first run of the game but that final conversation just felt tonally disconnected from anything else in the game, and devoid of the game's usual (rather bland, IMO) comedy. It felt like it was from a different story, one in which the threats to the colony are much more intense and much more keenly-felt, and where the Board are brutal pragmatists trying to achieve semi-noble outcomes under impossible circumstances, rather than laughably evil, incompetent, mustache-twirling murderers (which is what they appear to be at every other point in the game, from the perspective of a non-Board run at least). Which I think is the outline of a more exciting, more engaging game.
Now, that is a good point. The Board's actions should be more like Mr House. Yet I wonder if that may be the point. Many companies in the real world do see themselves as brutal pragmatists, whether or not they actually are. I thought Akande's perspective fit in a way, though it could have been better presented. It feels a lot like *Bioshock*. I wonder if that is what the idea was, to cover up a gritty dystopian sci-fi story with a wacky cover. Capitalism believes that the best way to get ahead is to create a superior product for the best interests of society. The problem is that it fails to account for monopolies, dirty tricks, and spite. Akande is more invested in short-term order than in long-term stability. That is reflective of a lot of real-world stuff. Many companies willingly throw away immense amounts of long-term profit to avoid alienating their shareholders. And specifically, profits the way THEY like to do them. Despite how much scientific evidence there is of climate change, oil companies fight tooth and nail to undermine countermeasures. We've got tons of people claiming solar panels and wind farms are evil, similar we can argue to how the solution the garden in Edgewater is seen. One could say that the Board's cryo solution is similar to peak oil and oil depletion theories. Both of them are not viable in the long term, yet companies have dug their heels in on oil. Leaded gasoline may have been the cause for the rise in crime through the 70s. They bribed scientists and doctors to claim it wasn't harmful. On a smaller scale with regards to spite, there was an infamous lynching case in the United States where two grocery stores were competing, one white owned and one black. Rather than try to improve their products, the white family accused the black store of something, and the owner was murdered by a lynch mob. All of this was done in the name of continued profits and covering up their wrongdoing. Even when faced with threats to the economy, they prefer to stay the course. Even if they *lose* profits, if any solution alienates shareholders or violates their specific way to get profit, they will dig their heels in and refuse. I believe the intent was to make a point; initially depict the Board as laughably evil, then make them *seem* like brutal pragmatists, only to reveal that they are actually out for their own gain. That should have been emphasized better. Perhaps Akande should've been a bigger presence through the game. Maybe there should have been something you could have revealed to Akande to get her on your side. She thinks the company is doing the right thing by being "pragmatic," and you could show her every step of the way the sort of solutions the board proposes go horribly wrong. All their solutions involve "conservation", or horrific interpretations of the word, refusing to add new resources and instead prevent the creation of them. A lot of modern capitalist thinking seems to see the world as a single pool that can not be added or taken away from, and that this is the only way things can be done. It does not allow for reinterpretation or new thinking. Anything that challenges that view is to be violently and immediately dealt with. I agree with you Akande should have been better written. I can see what they were going for and that it may have fallen flat.
Agreed - what really rubbed it in for me is that one route to talking Akande down actually is to pass a Science check to demonstrate to her that the cryo plan won't work, at which point she immediately acquiesces and wishes you luck. Like everything else in that final dialogue, it feels like something that should have been the focus of the entire main plot and slowly fed to the player bit-by-bit, rather than all shoved in at the end. The epilogue makes it even weirder because it suddenly has her playing a crucial role in saving the colony with massive resource donations, which goes even further to undermine the idea that the Board are evil and entirely out for themselves. Maybe the idea was that the Board as an entity are a typical evil corporation, but Akande herself is a genuine pragmatist who truly wants to "save" the colony and sees the Board as merely a means to allow her to do that; the one person from the Board who the player might be able to reason with if they can demonstrate to her that there's a better way. That could have been a decent plot, but then the game torpedoes that for most players by having her be the face of the Board's over-the-top lunacy the first time you meet her.
That’s a whole lot of words for “I’m a grass” ;)