I think you might be thinking of somewhere else Geoff, as there doesn’t seem to be any references like that from the old Panzer section of sega.com (I saved the text pages a while back, kind-of correctly anticipating that it wasn’t going to be around forever.) Unless you’re thinking of a much earilier version of the site/section, of course. On the other hand, the reference sounds like it could be from Saga’s Dragon Bible; although I’m reluctant to take much from those bibles as realistic info myself…
For what it’s worth though, sega.com did literally state that the dragon was created to take down the Towers:
“… the Heresy Dragon, the one dragon that existed to destroy the Ancient Towers”.
“…it is the one dragon designed to destroy the Towers of the Ancients”.
Not that it was the most accurate source of info in the world, but I just thought I’d point it out.
The Heresy dragon could’ve been released into the world too soon, but if it was loyal to the ancients, it would not disobey them unless some outside force drove it to do so. Now unless the ancients wanted all the Towers destroyed even if the world they were supposed to restore was far from it, why would they order it to destroy the Towers anyway when Sestren was still guarding them? Even Sestren said the dragon wasn’t fulfilling its purpose (again, assuming Sestren wasn’t talking to the Divine Visitor). Why would Sestren say such a thing if the dragon was in fact carrying out its proper duty – a duty asigned to it by the ancient ones?
I couldn’t bring myself to believe that the Heresy dragon killed Sestren and gave “humans control of their own destiny” merely because the ancients ordered it to do so.
Its “original purpose” may have been to destroy the Towers when the planet had fully undergone the restoration process, but it was never supposed to kill Sestren Exsis and disobey the ancients’ will by deactivating them before their task was complete.
Trust me, I never forget important information like that. I was quite confused after reading it too, as I thought that the gods were some kind of alien race or something who created dragons and poured all their knowledge into humans only for them to abuse that knowledge by using it to wage war one another etc.
Dragons are said to be messengers of the gods whether those gods were the ancients or something else entirely.
Are you talking about the Flash site of PD Orta? That one did use the bibles from PD Saga, but for some reason they were changed and mixed together, which changed their meaning.
I should probably point out that I don’t firmly believe in the theory above; I’m just trying to follow lines of reasoning through to their own conclusions. My honest opinion is that we don’t have enough evidence to work out an absolute truth - but anyway, here’s why I thought that theory might potentially make sense:
As I mentioned before, this might have nothing to do with loyalty - it might just be diferent programs carrying out the tasks that they were made to carry out. For example, when you run the “Shut Down” command on your PC, that piece of programming endeavours to shut the system down; if any other programs are running, it tries to end them. It doesn’t really think of the bigger picture (that the shut-down might be perceived as “bad”).
What I was suggesting is that the dragon program may simply be Sestren’s shut-down program - which, following its activation, would carry out its one task unswervingly.
As I think I touched on before, Sestren and the dragon program are probably not talking on the same terms when they talk about “duties”. Sestren says that the dragon was “ignoring” its duty, but the dragon program thought that it was carrying out its duty that had “spanned thousands of years” (presumably since it’s - and the system’s - creation). It also considered itself to be fulfilling a mission, as is revealed in PDO.
For this particluar theory I was going back to the idea that the dragon program’s idea of “duty” or a “mission” was just to deactivate the Towers, whilst Sestren’s idea of “duty” and “fulfilling the will of the ancients” was to make sure that the whole Tower programme saw completion.
Thinking in these terms, Sestren would have been angered at the dragon program (the shut-down program) going active too soon and endangering the overseeing mission that Sestren had been given by the Ancients. Sestren could have been accusing the shut-down program of “defying” its masters by attempting to shut down the Towers, because Sestren understood that this act would not be the Ancients’ will - even though this was exactly what the Ancients designed the dragon program to do.
Another variation on that theme is the following (very simple) explanation that occured to me:
The dragon program was designed to shut down the Tower network after the network’s global programme was complete.
The dragon programme decided to shut the network down “early”, because it saw that the programme was never going to be complete and it felt like freeing the world. Thus Sestren categorised it as a “bug” - a part of the system that was not functioning as planned.
That would make some kind of sense, at least.
[quote=“Geoffrey Duke”]Trust me, I never forget important information like that. I was quite confused after reading it too, as I thought that the gods were some kind of alien race or something who created dragons and poured all their knowledge into humans only for them to abuse that knowledge by using it to wage war one another etc.
Dragons are said to be messengers of the gods whether those gods were the ancients or something else entirely.[/quote]
My apologies, I actually misread your previous post - the sega.com text does indeed describe the Dragon as something that carried out the will of the gods. I was right in that the description does indeed come from Saga’s Dragon Bible though, and I’m still very unsure of how far we can trust the Saga Bibles. Some details correlate with what we know, and some details are just wholly bizarre. Still, it does back up the idea that the dragon program was created by the Towers’ creators (to some extent, anyway).
If you look at Sestren and the dragon as just very, very complex computer programs, there is no such thing as loyalty. A computer program just does what it thinks it’s supposed to do, as opposed to what you want it to do and what it thinks it should do might actually be against your wishes entirely. It’s possible that the dragon was awakened and fulfilled its primary objective and it really didn’t care that Sestran was still guarding them. It’s primary imperative might have be to destroy the towers; no ifs, ands, or buts. Possibly, the Ancients did not consider that the dragon might accidentally be awakened early and so no contingency plans were ever formed, which lead to the confrontation between Sestren, which knew it wasn’t time yet, and the dragon, which believed it was.
Edit: And in a strange twist Lance beats me to a post. Aren’t your posts long enough yet?
If the Heresy program was just doing the duty the Ancients assigned to it there would be neither room for “friends” to feel for and ask Lagi to watch over them nor would he (like Geoff has pointed out a few times) claim he’s there to destroy the towers and return control to the “people”…
And about Lance’s thoughts of the Heresy Program being the towers’ “switch off” device, that’s what I thought too:
…and so Heresy had to resort to a more aggressive method of “switching them off”
It occured to me that - assuming the dragon’s original task was to return the world “to the hands of the Ancients” - the Ancients were probably humans and people anyway. If my previous reasoning is correct, the dragon program may have existed to end the Towers’ reign over the human world so that the Ancients (humans) could emerge from their rest and take control of things personally… but what it actually did was return control of the world to the “wrong” group of humans. So it may have fulfilled its original task, just achieveing a result that the Ancients never planned for.
And about the “friends” thing - I always assumed that was just because the dragon was grateful to Edge, Azel and co. for helping it fulfill its mission. And just because it was fulfilling a duty doesn’t mean that it was incapable of some kind of sentient warmth - though the dragon’s overriding purpose did seem to be the destruction of the Tower network, it also seemed to find compassion for the humans that aided it.
[quote=“Al3xand3r”]And about Lance’s thoughts of the Heresy Program being the towers’ “switch off” device, that’s what I thought too:
…and so Heresy had to resort to a more aggressive method of “switching them off” :)[/quote]
Yeah, I’m pretty sure that the dragon program was never meant to be forcibly ejected from the system - it does seem that it was meant to (or planned to) deactivate things from the inside. I get the impression that when the dragon started running around and blowing Towers up personally, it was just trying to carry out its one overriding task as well as it could (whilst not being inside the system).
The ancients would have made sure that the program could identify them differently from the humans. Besides even at the time the program should be activated the Ancients would still be hybernating or whatever so it wouldnt expect to find them outside sestren to give them control.
Also the program DOES know the difference between humans and Ancients.
In the end of the game it says “The will of the Ancients is now with me” or something along those lines no? It doesn’t say "The will of the ppl is now with me"
I don’t see a reason for it to call them “people” in one instance and “Ancients” in another
They equally might not have given it the inclination to recognise or even question these things. Going on my original line of reasoning, does your computer’s shut-down program really have any idea who you are?
If the Ancients really did make the dragon to be the system’s shut-down mechanism, giving it the ability to question or reconsider its mission might be wholly irrelevant. It might even endanger their plans as a whole, as it might risk the dragon program coming to its own conclusions and never shutting the Tower network down.
[quote=“Al3xand3r”]Also the program DOES know the difference between humans and Ancients.
In the end of the game it says “The will of the Ancients is now with me” or something along those lines no? It doesn’t say "The will of the ppl is now with me"
I don’t see a reason for it to call them “people” in one instance and “Ancients” in another :)[/quote]
But as I said, if Ancients = humans = people, and if the dragon existed to take power away from the Tower network so as to return power to the Ancients (who were people and humans themselves), it would just about make sense.
Alternatively the Ancients could have created it to shut off the Tower network to give the repaired world back to the other human races (which is a bit unlikely). Or the Heresy Program may actually have had some free will - to the extent that it decided to carry out its mission when it wanted to, rather than when the Ancients had planned it to.
There’s lots of possibilities here, and much less evidence
But like I said, why would it call them people in one instance and Ancients in another? Also no other creation of the Ancients calls them people or anything that leaves room for them being people. Abadd calls them Ancient Masters and sestren calls them Ancients (maybe masters as well, not sure).
Also if it couldnt recognise the difference then it would be a very dumb choice on the part of the Ancients. Think about it, if you could make your PC recognise values such as “people” would you tell it to “turn on for people” so that anyone could possibly use your PC at some point or would you only try and make it turn on for YOU and YOU only?
Besides if the AI can make the difference between people as a whole and it’s “friends” then it surely could also understand another different group of people to refer to as “Ancients”
I concede that the obvious implication when the dragon program says “return the world to the hands of the people” is that it means people other than its ancient creators - I’m just exploring other possibilities
Right now, what seems more likely to me is that the dragon program was created as the Tower netork’s shut-down mechanism, but that it simply decided to shut them down “early” in order to free humanity. This could be because either A) it made that descision on its own, B) it arrived at that descision because of a “bug” or system error, or C) it made that descision on its own and Sestren classified it as a “bug” or system error. Slotting that notion into my (huge) theory above would seem to explain almost everything…
waits for Abadd to swoop in and casually point out how wrong everything is
A sentient AI like the Heresy dragon has to be more prone to choosing to obey or disobey the will of the ancients than the term “shutdown program” would imply. The Heresy dragon itself said that it sought to give humans control of their own destiny. Now unless the ancient ones weren’t firmly in control but victims of their own oppression, the Heresy dragon could only be helping the current human survivors of the wartorn world.
Remember, according to Craymen, Azel’s “ancient duty” was to destroy the Tower of Uru, which is obviously not what her original creators had in mind for her. Similarly, the Heresy dragon was given a new duty (probably in the Ancient Age before “Sestren created it”) that disobeyed its original masters.
I believe any sentient creation of the ancient ones that was loyal to the ancients wouldn’t disobey them under any circumstances. By destroying the Towers before they were given the chance to regenerate the planet, the Heresy dragon was working against their will. As a sentient creation, it would recognize that. If it knew that destroying the Towers at this time wasn’t what the ancients wanted, it wouldn’t seek their destruction.
Creating a dragon that was meant to shutdown the Towers regardless of whether or not they had finished their task would be, dare I say, foolish.
I still believe that Abadd’s masters died at the end of Panzer Dragoon Saga as a way of concluding the final chapter in the story of the ancients, but according to Abadd (the poster) we never managed to figure out what triggered the Heresy dragon’s activation (I have a nasty habbit of never forgetting his cryptic remarks).
The passing of 10 000 years seems like the most logical trigger to me, but if “Sestren was always meant to create the dragon” and if it was an unquestioningly loyal minion like Abadd (the drone) was, it would obey their will (by allowing the Towers to finish their job) the only way it knew how (by not destroying the Towers).
Another fact worth considering is that the Heresy dragon only sought to destroy any of the Towers it did when they became active or were moments away from coming online. Why, if not to prevent them from oppressing humanity? Breaking the spell of the Ancient Age are not the words of one of the ancients’ loyal creations.
