History Headscratchers / PROTOTYPE

--->'''Marine:''' [[CityOfWeirdos Fuckin' New York!]]

** Well he might be doing it because he "still has a job to do" and didn't want anyone with important knowledge vaporized before he could consume them, that and his sister [[spoiler:actually Mercer's sister]] is there and she's his only connection to humanity.
** The ending shows that Mercer, [[spoiler:actually the Blacklight Virus in his form]], after absorbing the thoughts, memories, and pain of thousands of victims, has actually developed a conscience. He admits in the end that he's become something less and more than human.

** To their credit, the developers realized that it would be ridiculous to show Cross still being able to fight Alex evenly near the end of the game, when Alex has practically become a PhysicalGod by that point. So [[spoiler:they had the Supreme Hunter eat Cross off-screen and take his form for an unspecified portion of the game, likely when he first started "cooperating" with Alex]].
*** I'm not entirely sure about that. [[spoiler:Let's assume that the Supreme Hunter was generated when Alex injected Greene with the parasite, since that's the first time we see it. Alex rescued Dana immediately after the fight with the Supreme Hunter (who was regenerating immediately after the fight). When he drops her off at Ragland's, there's already a handily drawn map which shows the locations of the phones Cross leaves. I'd assume at least the first few phonecalls are from Cross, who at some later point is absorbed by the Supreme Hunter (I remember a scene where Randall is fleeing Manhattan Island, and we see Cross from a creature's point of view right before the scene cuts out. That same point of view is later seen when Hunter-Cross attacks Alex on the carrier, so maybe that's when Cross gets eaten).]]

** Blacklight: the military seem adamant that the whole thing (including the appearance of new Infected) is because of Mercer's presence (i.e. his very presence causes the virus to spread around the city); most of the WOI refers to Blacklight's infective capabilities, and suggest that the Infected in New York are infected with Blacklight; [[spoiler:Mercer smashed the vial of Blacklight in Penn Station, suggesting that that specific event is the cause of the entire infection.]]

*** This also explains why [[spoiler:Alex and Ragland needed the bodies from Penn Station to create a cure for the parasite, as opposed to any random infected schmuck off the steet. Only those bodies would have had Alex's strain of the virus, as opposed to Greene's.]]

** This probably also explains why [[spoiler:the Supreme Hunter, unlike other Hunters,]] could [[spoiler:scheme against her]] since it was [[spoiler:originally the sentient cancer parasite that infected Mercer]].

* Why can't Mercer fully absorb Hunters? He leaves their bodies and can't put on a Hunter disguise (be it helpful or not). Did Greene actually produce some sort of organism resistant to consumption? If so, [[spoiler:it's irony that she was consumed herself eventually.]]

* One thing that always confuses me is the default WOI consume animation. [[spoiler:[=McMullen=]]] shows later on that if the brain is destroyed or damaged, Mercer isn't getting those memories. So... Doesn't anyone else feel it's a bit... counterintuitive to, for people he's eating exclusively to get info of, give five world-class blows to the head/face? Surely given his strength, that would utterly pulp the gray matter.

** In one of the Web of Intrigue nodes, McMullen (this troper thinks) seems to be trying and failing to convince someone else that Mercer can steal the memories of the people he kills. Perhaps General Randall heard these theories and dismissed them as ridiculous.

* Just a very minor thing but -- I can't help but feel the total lack of female doctors in this story is a bit sexist. Soldiers I can deal with, especially higher ups, but out of the dozens of doctors I ate so far in the game, not a single one is a woman.
** Well, if you complete all the costume events, you get to eat [[spoiler:Karen Parker,]] if that's any consolation.
** Negatory. I just spotted and consumed a female WOI target. Not all of them are male.
** There are fewer female WOI targets, that's true, and it's probably for the better considering that most of the WOI targets are {{Mad Scientist}}s with a big M on the MAD.
** There is exactly one female WOI target. I remember her distinctly because the brief period after I consumed her was the only time I disguised myself as a woman throughout the game.
** Less than 10 voice actors were hired for WOI and there are over a hundred WOI segments. They were probably too lazy/cheap to hire more female voice actors, since the female WOI target doesn't even talk in her segment. Why they didn't have more female voice actors to begin with might be sexist, but I've rarely seen games with female soldiers.
** Before complaining about sexism, think about the type of people in the game. Genetic science is overwhelmingly male dominated. The military, especially combat roles like infantry, armour and artillery are all men. Shady government agencies or the civilians working with Blackwatch might have more females, but we don't really interact with the governmental side of things. Most female doctors are General Practitioners, OB/GYNS or pediatricians, so since Mercer never gets a mission to devour the nearest childrens ward we have no reason to see them.

* This is kind of a minor thing, but still a little distracting. One of the WOI cutscenes notes that Mercer may be able to imitate voices and mannerisms. This would make sense in many ways; for one thing, if he's disguising himself by turning himself into a perfect copy of the person he consumes, he should also be copying the larynx. But if you consume a female and shapeshift into her, Mercer's voice doesn't change at all; the grunts he makes when he jumps are unmistakeably male. Not a huge deal, as I said, but it did bug me.
** I'd guess that when he's running around he just shapeshifts the outsides as masks instead of fully transforming into a perfect copy unless he needs to talk to someone disguised or pass an x-ray or something. Keeping his center mass as whatever he's made from would probably would take less concentration and be quicker to change into his combat skills from.
** Mercer can mimic voices; just try out Patsy, or watch the opening cutscene. He just doesn't use female voices when he doesn't need to.
** Same deal with [[spoiler:Karen Parker's murder.]] If he can imitate voices muffled by a gasmask, he can probably imitate any kind of voice.
** I know he's capable of it; the reason it bugged me was because it wasn't kept consistent. It does make sense that it might be more difficult to copy every aspect of the person, though.
*** Does Alex even ''care'' about disguising his voice? If he's doing something that involves him grunting, then he's not likely to be doing something a normal person is capable of anyway.
*** yeah besides it'd be weird having him grunt as all those different people.

* As Yahtzee so pointed out, Mercer's outrage at BLACKWATCH, Gentek, and himself and so on seem sort of moot when the player has been nudged to eat civilians (or even if they've been taking the Nice Guy route, kill with collateral damage).
** Mercer is not actively and deliberately killing civilians. They're collateral damage, and as the game progresses, you see him really develop a moral standpoint. And besides, Mercer's own actions result in the deaths of only a few thousand civilians. [[spoiler:The real Mercer]]'s actions - and those of Blackwatch - resulted in the death of [[AMillionIsAStatistic ten million people]]. Also, at no point does Mercer ever excuse ''himself'' from killing civilians. He wouldn't be ''in'' a situation where he's causing that much collateral damage if it weren't for them in the first place.
** Of course he's deliberately killing civilians, we're his ''food''. BLACKLIGHT isn't evil per se, but it ''is'' an immensely powerful and carnivorous animal, and we're its primary food source -- that doesn't preclude it from feeling for us, or wanting to protect our species as a whole, but it does need to eat. Even if the military and REDLIGHT weren't tearing up the city, it would still need to kill to live -- and I doubt it would see much wrong with that.
** It's developed a conscience, so I doubt it would go around grabbing some civilian and gnawing on him[=/=]her. Not to mention we're not its food -- we just provide extra mass.
** Mercer may also be thinking in a very pragmatic sense here. He's sacrificing a few hundred or thousand civilians to save millions, and to prosecute the criminals behind the atrocity. He may not like it, but he has to do it to stop REDLIGHT and Blackwatch.
** It should be noted that the game does seem to suffer from a very bad case of GameplayAndStorySegregation. It's really only during ''gameplay'' that Mercer acts like a monster, and that is something decided on by the player, not the story. During cutscenes, he acts like he's a hero, and since he never '''has''' to do anything explicitly ''evil'' during the course of the game, it is possible for him to never have "officially" killed an innocent person.
** In-game, the only time Mercer ever actually asks that question is during the mission to sabotage the Bloodtox blowers, and he asks that question in regards to destroying the Bloodtox blowers themselves (an act that could potentially condemn everyone in Manhattan to death by the infected) and in the process, he's demanding to know if ''Cross'' believes that this is the right thing to do, because Mercer is making it very clear that he doesn't know whether he should or shouldn't be destroying the Bloodtox blowers, as the devices are probably going to save hundreds of thousands of lives if they do their work correctly. It's a lot more morally ambiguous than Yahtzee is making it out to be.
** The "food" bit is illogical. Mercer regenerates without humans. Mercer can go a while without humans.
*** ''I'' can regenerate and go for a while without eating. That doesn't mean I don't need food.
*** You're human, and need water and nutrients and all that jazz to repair wounds. He's a fucking zombie-thing, and he could lurk in the ceilings making fun of the Marines after taking several armor-piercing rockets to the face until he was fine and dandy. (Yes, I am aware it violates biology.) He could have subsisted alone on birds and normal food and zombies. (The latter is entirely doable, by the way.) Anyway, the comics show that he only kills civilians when he needs to (for disguises and such).
** To expand on the comic by ''Wildstorm'': It's set in the early stages of infection, while the outbreak is still mostly contained and the general public and local law enforcement don't know anything. Two NYPD officers end up being trapped in an infected zone, and the army's orders are to kill any non-military personnel on sight. Just as the officers' car is about to be shot to pieces by a Blackwatch chopper, Alex deliberately leaps in front of the car, essentially tells the officers to get the hell out of there, and then darts off -- thus distracting the Blackwatch soldiers from the pair, since "Zeus" is their top priority. Randall even takes note of what Alex has done, saying, "He's got some hero in him. [[JerkAss That doesn't make me happy]]."\\
Alex also takes the time to warn bystanders to run when Blackwatch/Marines show up to take him down (and he subsequently tears them apart), and when leaps into an office building (at night, when people aren't expected to be there) he yells at the janitors to get down just before a hail of gunfire follows him in. The ''only'' innocent person he consumes is another janitor on the way down the elevator, in order to avoid the Marines outside who are telling people to evacuate the premises.\\
In short: Alex is specifically portrayed as ''not'' being a monster; any innocents who are killed are collateral damage, which he clearly tries to avoid, with Alex himself only consuming when absolute necessary for his own survival.
* From what I understand Alex is now just a mass of biomass he doesn't need to "eat" in a strict sense, he only needs to sustain the biomass he's actively controlling. If it begins degenerating (which it probably was from all the fighting he was doing) then he'd have to "eat."

* Anyone else annoyed that you can't eat supersoldiers outside of stealth consume?
** They may have been deliberately built by Blackwatch to be resistant to being consumed.
*** In the Web of Intrigue, as well as on the soldiers themselves, you can see that their bones are reinforced with armor. A key part of Alex's consume process is that the victim needs to have their spine broken, i.e. be paralyzed (it's a plot point with the leaders, who have two spines to counter Alex). In short, they cannot be consumed because you cannot paralyze them.
** You can use stealth on supersoldiers? I thought a key point of the supersoldiers was that they can see you all time, and entering line of sight of them results in instant beatings.
*** I'm just going with what the Prototype wiki told me...
*** I don't see how that's even possible. You so much as tap their detection radius and they automatically orient themselves in your direction. Plus they chase you.
*** There's a challenge where you team up with a pack of Hunters to fight Supersoldiers. The Supersoldiers ignore you until you either accept the challenge or start punching them. This troper has ambushed them there, and can confirm that stealth consume works. Sort of. You keep your current disguise, for some reason. And, yes, the fact that you can't consume them except with stealth consume.
*** That would explain how it's possible. You certainly cannot pull that trick on an ordinary Supersoldier. The ones in the challenges are built without the detection radius. My guess would be that they didn't think anyone would try it, or simply forgot to turn that option off since it's supposed to be impossible to trick them like that.

* Was anyone else annoyed by how useless the civilian disguises were? I understand they're there as essentially free health packs but the disguises themselves are effectively pointless. Any time you have to disguise yourself for story purposes, it's a military disguise, the military disguises get access to all the things like artillery strikes and patsy, you can't combine offensive powers with disguises which is admittedly reasonable, but who doesn't want to play as a Blade-Armed Death Granny? Also, Alex consumes Elizabeth Greene and I don't get the option of running around as her? Total rip-off.
** God knows I always wanted to use the power of accounting after I eat a civilian...
*** "Sir, we've spotted Mercer! He's -- He's... ... ...uh, sir, he's recalculating the city's debt on the side of the Chrysler Building..."
** Possibly because Alex doesn't care about the more mundane/nonlethal disguises/skills. It's the military he's trying to infiltrate, not the civilian population (who are largely irrelevant to him outside the player sending him on murder sprees), and he doesn't want accounting or flower-arranging or whatever, he wants what'll allow him to murder the ''crap'' out of Gentek. (It's possible to be a Death Granny, though, since Alex is perfectly capable of crushing human beings with his bare hands whatever shape he's in. Feel the arthritic wrath.) As to why you don't get a Greene disguise, with the disguise mechanic as it is in-game, it would create extra work for the devs for only a very short-lived benefit. Alex also might not want to take Greene's shape and use her powers for the same reason he doesn't try to control the Infected as mentioned above -- because he's worried he'd lose what shreds of humanity he has.
*** Also, running around as Greene would be pointless; you're getting into disguise in order to ''disguise'' yourself. Diguising yourself as Greene is kind of like prancing around with a giant flashing "INFECTED!" sign on your head.

*** He was just a high level grunt at the time. Besides that, the "cut off his own arm to stop the infection" should not by any account have worked, especially seeing how fast the virus spread, and to make matters worse, he cut his arm above the elbow joint, which is really hard to do and should have taken way too much time. Even in-universe, it's a case of YouFailBiologyForever.

* Everyone Alex consumes dies. Why does General Randall survive long enough to realize that Mercer can harvest memories?

A page for VideoGame/{{Prototype2}} Headscratchers has been added at Headscratchers.{{Prototype2}}.

*** There's a challenge where you team up with a pack of Hunters to fight Supersoldiers. The Supersoldiers ignore you until you either accept the challenge or start punching them. This troper has ambushed them there, and can confirm that stealth consume works. Sort of. You keep your current disguise, for some reason. And, yes, ItJustBugsMe that you can't consume them except with stealth consume.

*** To add insult to injury, ''they were really badly prepared''. Blackwatch waited for the outbreak for 40 years? So what did they do during this time? Couch potatoes? Playing WiiFit? Their "containment" of the outbreak sucks balls the size of Jupiter. As said before, they only somehow manage to prevent a major worldwide catastrophe ''because ZEUS is helping them'' (in a rather convoluted way, I agree). Without Alex, the armored hives could not have been destroyed, Bloostox could not have been deployed, Green would have submerged the island and nothing would have been able to stop her. They would have probably screwed themselves if they ever managed to kill Alex at any point before the end, because then, it would have been a FailureIsTheOnlyOption.

** He's just the most BadAss soldier in the entire world.

* How did Cross know Alex was gaining immunity to Bloodtox when the rest of Black Watch didn't? Even if he'd already been consumed by the Supreme Hunter by then, that doesn't explain ''how he knew''. For that matter, why was Randall surprised when Alex revealed how he absorbed the thoughts and memories of the people he killed? That seems like the kind of thing the man at the very top the organization should have known that late in the game.

** Before complaining about sexism, think about the type of people in the game. Genetic science is overwhelmingly male dominated. The military, especially combat roles like infantry, armour and artillery are all men. Shady government agencies or the civilians working with Blackwatch might have more females, but we don't really interact with the governmental side of things. Most female doctors are GPs, OB/GYNS or pediatritions, so since Mercer never gets a mission to devour the nearest childrens ward we have no reason to see them.