Headscratchers / Mental Omega

• Why did they feel the need to kill off Boris in the first Soviet mission?. You could make the argument that they needed to kill him off so they can reintroduce a newly upgraded Volkov and Chitzkoi to the playerbase in the Soviet campaign...but it just feels like a weird emotional disconnect. You could've had Boris survived his encounter in New York and have him be more the side character (Like Reznov and Krukov later did). As an alternative, you could just NOT have Boris in the mod so as to get Volkov and Chitzkoi their spotlight without having to murder an oldie but goldie character in a dumb "poisoned by Epsilon" fashion.
  • That he is implied to make a reappearance repurposed by Epsilon using cyborg technology in the Earthrise mission suggests that the point of killing him may not have been to actually remove them from the plot entirely, but in the long run rather to be able to use Boris as an Epsilon character.
  • Boris was killed off so other heroes could take the spotlight specifically, to explain why the Russians were willing to risk reactivating Volkov & Chitzkoi. Why Yuri felt the need to do this so early in the game has never been satisfactorily explained and it's admittedly a weak point in the story. The modders seemed to have realized this, so the events of the Earthrise mission may actually hint that Boris' death had more significance than we were lead to believe. Though, we may have already been given the answer Killing off a national hero would not only make the Russians more dependent of Yuri's Psy Corps, but it did make them desperate enough to unleash what is basically the Soviet Terminator with a history of going Berserk (only once, admittedly, but still). This would certainly fit Yuri's MO.