I think this actually fits in with the story. It's the only sensible way to end such a bizarre scene where the player can willingly give up their quest in the game. I say we keep it!

Why?

Normally when the player character gets destroyed, they get an epitaph and can be resurrected. If we figure that Domina is responsible for resurrection, then the fact that the player character can resurrect means that they still had a connection to Domina when they got destroyed.

In this ending, the player character willingly severs their connection to Domina completely. If Domina serves as the direct connection between us as the player and the player character that we control, then without the connection, this game shall effectively cease to exist.

Therefore, it makes sense for the game to crash if we choose this ending.

Thank you for this detailed and well-reasoned explanation. I was expecting the invoke dialog to display a <powers_no_longer_accessible> kind of flavor text, as a sort of imposed player challenge much like permadeath.

I agree completely - thinking about gentler ways to signal to the player that his/her decision is /permanent/ in a very strong sense would take away that effect.

I think from a debugging POV many new/returning players might fail to draw this intuitive connection as explained by you, which might lead to some gameplay frustration. Maybe a softer, more user-controlled exit (like the opening menu scene) would be friendlier?

Might I suggest also making the savegame unselectable/unplayable(since after this crash the game treats it as a resurrection should the PC return to the save) by indicating something like "Unable to re-establish connection. Resurrection is not possible now/no longer possible." This serves as a hint to the PC, without speaking out on either side of the Domina-meditated/Xenopsychosis debate that the PC goes through in-game.

 …Actually yeah, in favor of keeping this as a crash-to-desktop option. Arch makes a compelling argument. I also like the idea of it corrupting the save to be unloadable afterward.

I can't reproduce this. Does this happen in vanilla? Is there something else that has to happen for it to crash?

Mercenary is not protected by Domina in Eternity Port, yet he can resurrect.

I added some safety code in 1.9 RC 1 that could fix this.

In CHumanInterface::MainWndProc I now make sure that g_pHI is non-NULL before handling any message. Previously, we didn't always check, so if we got a message after g_pHI was freed, we would crash.

If it still crashes in 1.9 RC 1, please re-open.

It would be a great idea to have the hospital ending lead to a non-standard Game Over screen. It would resemble the crash screen, except the detail text describes what happened in-universe. The final message would say, "ERROR: COULD NOT ESTABLISH CONNECTION TO HOST INTELLIGENCE." Also, the player would have to click a button labeled "Terminate Game" to acknowledge the ending.

This would add a lot of narrative payoff to an otherwise mundane ending.