History Headscratchers / FirstEncounterAssaultRecon

* We kill Paxton in the penultimate level and the Replicas shut down. In the main game, only three Replicas are seen, the ones that appear right after you kill Paxton, and no more after that. Why is that? The Replicas were surely operating in the facility's surrounding areas, such as those old buildings in Urban Decay, but you don't see any in the warehouse area in Retaliation. I take it either most of them were wiped out (they're a battalion-sized unit so there's a thousand of them and you kill about three-quarters of them) or the devs wanted to establish the nightmares as the primary enemy at that point. Also, I know more are seen in the Vivendi expansion packs but those aren't canon.

* Why do they bleed when shot? Also, do they attack anyone else other than the Point Man(both lore-wise and gameplay-wise)?
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* Why do they bleed when shot? Also, do they attack anyone else other than the Point Man(both lore-wise and gameplay-wise)?

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Here's a big one: just how unlimited are Armacham's resources? Keeping in mind that all the Replica stuff is originally theirs, the things they have access to include:

Just finished playing the first F.E.A.R. and the Extraction Point expansion, and I gotta ask... What's up with that Blackhawk the clone soldiers are using? Never mind how a single blackhawk could not practically transport a thousand Replicas, or how they got hold of one in the first place; I'm more concerned about how it's ALWAYS there to shoot down your helicopter, or the helicopters you hope to board, over and over again, and neither you nor your superiors makes any real effort to do anything about it. If I were in charge of F.E.A.R or the Special Forces, the first thing I'd demand is that that Blackhawk be shot down. The game demonstrates very well how it gives the Replicas air superiority and ease of transportation, but the brass seems determined that their own aircraft and assault-recon teams can just try to avoid the omnipresent enemy gunship. I really don't blame Alice Wade for not believing that she'd be safer in a helicopter.

Here's a weird one that bugs me: who, exactly, is controlling the Replica in ''Project Origin''? Alma may have activated them, but why are they targeting Becket? My personal theory ils that Alma's psychic emanations and emotions are being interpreted as orders from the Replica, which is why they're targeting ATC troops, and they're interpreting Alma's aggressive "advances" on Becket as orders to kill him - or maybe she's just ordering them to attack Becket to slow him down so she can catch and consume him. Any other theories?

Does anyone else find it strange that Alma knows how to rape Becket, given that it requires a certain amount of, er, dexterity to do more than dry hump his brains out? How does an 8-year-old locked in a tube for a few decades pick up on this?
* She may have been an eight-year-old mentally, but she was an adult by the time she died. She grabs him, latches onto him, and does what comes naturally. It's also worth noting that when she does rape Beckett, it is extremely rough and violent and uncontrolled - pretty much what you'd expect from someone who doesn't exactly know what they're doing.
** Not to mention that Alma may not have been actually doing it physically to him. It may have been a symbolic projection into Becket's mind, just like many of the other things Alma does to him.
* I think that the moaning pretty much indicates that it actually happened, unless the game was really going for Silent Hill-level sexual symbolism, but I don't think it's anywhere near subtle enough for that.
* Keep in mind that Alma has been telepathic since childhood. It's entirely possible she's just "listened" to enough people's sex thoughts to figure out how to insert prong A into slot B, as it were.
* Also, remember Fettel's method for acquiring information in the first game? Alma consumes people as well, Fox, Griffin, Keegan and who knows how many others? It's quite possible that doing so conveyed their knowledge of anything and everything to her.
** It is never even close to stated that Alma can obtain others' memories by killing them.
*** Doesn't need to be stated; acquiring memories by consuming flesh is an established psychic ability in this setting. If Fettel is capable of doing it, it stands to assume that an much more powerful psychic like Alma can do the same.

I finally started playing FEAR 2, and I'm starting to wonder if there's some sort of hidden relationship between Genevive Aristide and Alma. I mean, Genevive has a gallery fully of paintings of Alma's dream imagery in her penthouse, she keeps Alma's music box in her bedroom, in her arguments with Snake Fist she doesn't even ''entertain'' the thought of trying to kill Alma, and on top of all that it was her idea to reopen the Vault and start the ball rolling. I can ''kinda'' explain away the paintings by just imagining them as part of a show by local artists who've been influenced by the bad mojo from Auburn, but not the other stuff.

Here's a minor one: in the Vivendi expansions for the first game, you can see several bloody graffiti symbols made of stacked triangles, which have a strong resemblance to the [[Franchise/TheLegendOfZelda Triforce]]. According to the timeline, Alma couldn't have played even the first game, far from it. So, why exactly are they there?

Um, did Alma just die at the end of F.3.A.R?

What exactly was the reason (in that continuity) why the fear sergeant looked so much like the point-man? We know Alma had only two kids, and the fact that he is a sergeant suggests he got into F.E.A.R. a lot earlier than the point-man.

* ... The "adult Alma" from F.E.A.R. bugs me. Yes, it's likely what she looked like when she died... but she was unconscious almost constantly since childhood. She has no reason to envision or represent herself as anything but a little girl.

* In the first two games, ATC was using a small black-ops force cleaning up evidence and were operating under deniability thanks to having significant support from various elements of the US government for their operations. Also, different factions within ATC were doing different things; Aristide had government support, which was how she got FEAR to go after Fettel and Dark Signal to try to rescue her, while the main ATC board was trying to burn all the evidence, including Aristide. As far as we're aware, no one has managed to get into Fairport by FEAR 2 because the city was just hit by the nuke and the entire game takes place over a single day, in which the outer edges of the city would be in total chaos, and we only see what happens in a small part of the city. In the third game ATC was carrying out a general quarantine of Fairport, and at that point the government was willing to let them suffer the expenses and losses rather than get involved and lose troops and equipment in the raging hellscape that is the city. That this would let ATC clean up their mess and let them continue without legal repercussions, and thus continue developing psychic weapons for the government, is a bonus.

* I thought it was just a stylized "A." A for Alma? Not a great justification, but certainly better than "Alma loves LoZ."

** The non-canon expansion to the first game, ''Extraction Point'', seemed to imply that Alma has a schizophrenic attitude towards the Point Man. On the one hand, she tells him how to get out of a subway station and sends Shades (or "spindlies," if you're a fan of Helloween4545's [[LetsPlay Let's Plays]]) to attack Replica soldiers that are in Point Man's way. On the other hand, she has no problem letting Point Man and his teammates be attacked by various nightmare creatures summoned out of her subconscious. Given her backstory, it could be assumed that she's simply no longer capable of creating any sort of coherent opinion on anything, so she acts entirely by whim and impulsive emotion.

In the first game ATC troops attack the U.S. military to buy time to finish destroying all evidence of Project Origin. Even if ATC thought that they could blame this on the replicants, in FEAR 2 and FEAR 3 there are no U.S. soldiers in Fairpoint, meaning ATC must be keeping out the U.S. military, and an operation like that is too huge to blame it on the just the replicants. So... ATC declared itself to be an independent country and told the U.S.A. to go fuck itself? And they have enough military might ''to make it stick''?

* They do send additional teams with the Point Man. When you go into the ATC building the Point Man has a pair of Delta troops with him. When he's picked up in the parking garage there' Delta on the Black Hawk. They all get killed pretty quickly, but they do try to back him up when they can. It's just that Shepard's got a limited amount of manpower and they keep constantly getting Alma'd, and Betters knows that the Point Man is superhuman. In addition they're not sending just the Point Man in; Shepard explicitly states he sent in a recon force to the building but lost contact. The Point Man is actually being sent in because Shepard's unwilling to send more of his Delta troops in without FEAR support. And at least two more teams are sent in: Jin's team and Holliday's team. So the Point Man was not operating on his own due to a lack of support from the higher ups. And if you take the Vivendi expansions into account, there's at least one other FEAR team and a large force of Delta troops operating elsewhere in the city at the same time, not discounting Dark Signal in Project Origin going after Aristide. The Point Man is only operating alone because his allies are stretched across the city and what support he gets is killed very quickly.

Here's a weird one that bugs me: who, exactly, is controlling the Replica in ''Project Origin''? Alma may have activated them, but why are they targeting Becket? My personal theory is that Alma's psychic emanations and emotions are being interpreted as orders from the Replica, which is why they're targeting ATC troops, and they're interpreting Alma's aggressive "advances" on Becket as orders to kill him - or maybe she's just ordering them to attack Becket to slow him down so she can catch and consume him. Any other theories?

* They do send additional teams with the Point Man. When you go into the ATC building the Point Man has a pair of Delta troops with him. When he's picked up in the parking garage there' Delta on the Black Hawk. They all get killed pretty quickly, but they do try to back him up when they can. It's just that Shepard's got a limited amount of manpower and they keep constantly getting Alma'd, and Betters knows that the Point Man is superhuman. In addition they're not sending just the Point Man in; Shepard explicitly states he sent in a recon force to the building but lost contact. The Point Man is actually being sent in because Shepard's unwilling to send more of his Delta troops in without FEAR support. And at least two more teams are sent in: Jin's team and Holliday's team. So the Point Man was not operating on his own bdue to a lack pf support fromthe higher ups.

Why on Earth does, in the F.E.A.R. organization, "point man" translate into "lone operative"? You'd think after the pick ups, they'd try to supply you with another squad, considering the one that was with you got liquified because they were asses, but nope. How did they expect to get anything done, considering they were sending one guy in? After the crash, sure it makes sense, but damn, one guy sent in alone to attack a building? It's a good thing he was a super soldier.

** Honestly this is a more than likely a case of the developers trying to have it both ways. If he can go into an invisible mode where he isn't materialized per se but can still speak to the Point Man it reasons that high level psychics could still notice him. People like Beckett for example. But this is obviously not the case in F.3.A.R and it leaves the situation making very little sense. If you wish to give the dev team a lot of credit you can assume this only fuels the fire that the Fettel in this game isn't real at all and more like a psychic manifestation that only the Point Man can truly interact with.

* He has a semi-tangible ghost body. He behaves a lot like the ghosts seen throughout the game, where he can be harmed by incoming fire. He can apparently turn invisible but cannot affect things while in that state.

What exactly is Fettel in the third main game, and how does his... condition work? Is he a ghostlike astral body, is he physical, or something in between? He can jump inside human hosts, but while out of them, bullets can still hurt him somehow. In cutscenes it's clear that friendly NPCs cannot see or hear him, but somehow the enemies can.

** The question here is....where in the lore surrounding this setting does it say that female psychic ghosts ''can't'' get pregnant? The only convention that says they can't is some kind of common fictional convention that ghosts are incorporeal dead entities that can't have children - which is an erronous assumption. We don't know the rules and limitations of ghosts in this setting, and there's nothing saying that a psychic ghost like Alma ''can't'' be pregnant. This isn't like ''TheDresdenFiles'' where the rules and mechanics of the supernatural are well-established and defined.

*** No. Again, you're making the fundamental mistake of applying the rules of other settings regarding ghosts to a setting where the rules do not work that way (this is like complaining that magic in ''TheDresdenFiles'' does not follow the rules of magic from ''FinalFantasy'' or ''DungeonsAndDragons''). Don't assume that because ghosts are incorporeal in other fictional media that they are in this setting, because the rules are not established beyond observable abilities. FEAR ghosts, particularly Alma, can manifest physical bodies that act exactly like human bodies. Fettel can do the same thing. And yes, Alma ''does'' have a physical body. The fact that Beckett has to grapple with her and force her away multiple times indicates as much.

What exactly is Fettel in the third main game, and how does his... condition work? Is he a ghostlike astral body, is he physical, or something in between? He can jump inside human hosts, but while out of them, bullets can still hurt him somehow. In cutscenes it's clear that friendly NPCs cannot see or hear him, but somehow the enemies can.

* SequelHook.

During TheStinger for Point Man's ending, Fettel claims that he "will continue", and invites Point Man/the player to do the same. What did he mean by that?