Aberrant readthrough: Worldwide Phase One (part two)

Okay. Let’s freaking do this. The second half of Worldwide Phase One. This is where it stopped being funny for me.

But first things first. There are two more scenarios in this one, and only one of them is actually bad. The other one, in fact, is quite good.

SCENARIO THREE: GABRIEL

The first scenario concerns a nova named Gabriel “the Miracle” Melchior who runs one of those nova cults we keep hearing about, called the Church of the Immanent Escheaton. It’s another one of those things that was mentioned in the core book with a lot of “ooooh, there’s something going oooooon heeeeere” foreshadowing, and here we actually get to find out what we’re meant to use it for, which is this specific scenario and nothing else. Oh well.

Gabriel Melchior (which is apparently his given name, and that is something that would feel perfectly natural in a cheesy comic book but really looks out of place in Aberrant‘s thinking-man’s-superhero-story ) is incredibly powerful, can generate super-plagues at will, and is also suffers from Taint that has made him go loopy in the head. That being a bad combination, Project Proteus kidnapped him and stuffed him in their main secret prison slash Nazi research lab in Bahrain, where they first tried to cure him and then, when that proved impossible, proceeded to just slice him up and try to figure out what made him tick. Because Proteus.

And then, when the terraforming of the Sahara got rolling (as mentioned in the previous post), someone had the bright idea to bring him out and make him use his powers to speed things up there. Because Proteus. He obviously escaped, about ten times as loopy as he was before, and now he’s holed up in the CotIE’s compound in Nevada and yelling over the OpNet about how the end of days is at hand and he’s going to unleash plagues upon the world that will kill one third of all baselines.

The players, of course, are tasked by whatever faction they work for to get him to… you know… not do that, probably by killing him. The Teragen don’t want him dead, necessarily, but they’d also rather not get to a situation where the remaining two thirds of all baselines have every reason to hate novas, so they want to talk him down and get him to go into hiding with them. Meanwhile, the Directive is setting up a backup plan of erupting a neutron bomb by the compound, which they hope will fry everything in it so completely that even Gabriel’s quantum germs won’t survive.

This, by and large, is actually a scenario I like. Again, it shows Utopia having done something bad, and since this time it’s specifically Proteus it’s extra bad. But just like in the second scenario, you can see why they did it – they want to cure Taint, so they need to examine a heavily Tainted nova, and they had exactly one of those available and no idea when they might get hold of another. And then it all went pear-shaped because someone got it into his head to be ambitious and pull one of those “underhanded means of achieving positive ends” things that Proteus is supposed to be all about. That actually works pretty well.

The other factions, too, get a nuanced portrayal. The Directive’s plan is the antithesis of Proteus’ – Proteus is amoral in that it takes heedless risks for the promise of great rewards, the Directive is amoral that it will make any sacrifice necessary to avoid taking any risks at all. Utopia are well-intentioned but are also clueless about the fact that it was their own leaders who caused this mess. The Teragen are the most “humanitarian” of the bunch, but they are blinded by ideology in their own way – they want to save Gabriel, and never mind that he really is a walking-talking extinction event who is not in command of his faculties. Everyone gets to be themselves, and no one gets to be the hero.

Could this be it? Could Aberrant finally be starting to live up to its promise? Will it be smooth sailing from here?

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHA I crack me up.

SCENARIO FOUR: INTO THE ARMS OF THE ANGEL OF WRATH

First off, dumb title. I know I’m prone to overcomplicated names and sentences, and because of that, I’m always on the lookout for them. And this is one title that tries to pack in far more melodramatic imagery than it can comfortably hold.

Secondly, this scenario finally wraps up the stupid Aberrant (as in the faction) plot, presumably because the writers realised that it wasn’t anywhere near sturdy enough to hold the weight of the game line. Corbin (Slider’s soccer-playing ne’er-do-well bestie, who founded the Aberrants) has decided to turn himself in, only he’s going to do it right outside of the Project Proteus facility in Bahrain and to maximum press coverage. The players are given the chance to investigate Slider’s death (weren’t they supposed to be doing that the whole time? Wasn’t that the premise of the metaplot? Yeah, this is what I mean when I say that that it was a damp noodle of a plot hook…) and either cover it up good and proper or reveal it to the world.

But of course that’s not where the meat of this scenario is. No, this is the point where the Aberrant writers finally show their hand – and entirely too much of their personal issues at the same time. This is where An Incredibly Important Event In The Game’s Story happens. This is… where their self-insert Gary Stu totally PWNs Superman.

By which I of course mean that Divis Mal shows up outside of Bahrain, Caestus Pax (that guy in the picture, the foremost Team Tomorrow dude) tries to fight him, and he gets trounced. Like, absolutely demolished. The narration is very carefully to stress that it’s not even close, Mal is just toying with him, because he’s a ten million gazillion bajillion times cooler than Pax and TAKE THAT, all the macho jocks who bullied me in high school!!!!

Sorry, do you think I’m exaggerating? No, no, trust me, you cannot even imagine just how smug and snide and mean-spirited the whole thing is. Here, have some choice quotes:

Keep in mind that layers of deception cover everything : Caestus Pax appears to be a paragon of nova-dom but is, in truth, little more than a very powerful bully with a huge playground . Divis Mal appears to be a sinister villain but is truly an idealist (though not necessarily a nice idealist).

First off, this game seems to love the idea that being an “idealist” excuses a lot of things. The head of Project Utopia, who signs off on the sterility plagues and vivisections, is described as an “idealist” in the Project Utopia book, too. I guess he’s also “not necessarily a nice idealist.” I feel like the writers just divided the world into unfeeling brutes and deep people like themselves, and whole the deep people weren’t perfect they were at least all worthy of sympathy, unlike the brutes.

But most of all… yeah, such a bully, that Caestus Pax. You know what would have made it easier to accept that? If he had done, at any point of the last ten books, any bullying. In fact, it would have helped if he had done anything other than occasionally be mentioned in passing albeit unflattering terms. The core book, for instance, calls him “the authoritative Caestus Pax” at one point but never goes into how or why he’s authoritative. It just seems like he’s the ersatz-Superman, and the writers see Superman as a big, dumb, smug bully, so therefore they consider it too obvious to need pointing out that Caestus Pax is a bad guy who is unfairly seen as a good guy.

I mean, Jesus, even Garth Ennis put more effort into it than this…

Divis Mal makes his appearance at this point , conclusively demonstrating to Caestus Pax just how pointless (and painful) standing against him really is.

Dear Aberrant: please die.

Once it’s over, the glow fades. The fiery aura dies away, Mal’s preternaturally perfect features apparent to all. Divis Mal floats to the ground, gently lays Pax on his back and kisses him on the forehead. If anyone nearby has some form of enhanced hearing or Mega-Perception 2 or higher(and isn’t deafened from the battle), she can hear Mal whisper, “It is a thing most sad to see a god stooping to serve monkeys. As you grow wiser, 1 hope you’ll see the error of your ways. Perhaps next time, you’ll listen.”

Dear Aberrant: please die in a fire.

Characters who attack him or choose to simply offer insult or meaningless argument will be ignored or swatted away as appropriate. Divis Mal is civilized; he is not a bully, but he need not tolerate fools.

Dear Aberrant: please die in a fire surrounded by the smoking ashes of all your hopes and dreams.

Oh, and over the course of the next few weeks, we are helpfully told, people all over the world are squeeing over how cool Mal is and how he, like, totally demolished Pax, who everyone now sees is lame. And never mind that the people of the world (not being privy to all those OOC assurances that Mal is the good guy, really, don’t be so close-minded, he ONLY thinks that novas shouldn’t obey baselines and that’s completely reasonable and don’t you dare say otherwise!!!) just saw the guy they trusted to protect them get bitch-slapped by the guy who refers to them as “monkeys.” No, part of the nerd-boy fantasy is that when you beat up the mean quarterback, the whole school yard cheers, so the world is going to cheer no matter how little sense it makes!

AAAAARRGGGGHHHH.

And what makes it worse is that this whole section is plastered with pious sidenotes about how this is totally the players’ story, they should in no way feel deprotagonised by the fact that they absolutely can’t measure up to Pax and he in turn absolutely can’t measure up to Mal. Because, see, while Mal beats Pax up, they can do some stuff that will totally matter! Except it won’t, because Mal can just undo anything they did with a snap of his fingers and anything that happens in this setting happens by his benign permission.

Again, not exaggerating! He doesn’t even get a stat block. Here’s what he gets instead:

Where Pax can affect cities, Mal can affect continents, where Pax has orbital range, Mal can actually direct his fire around any obstacle (including the planet) to hit anything he desires. Finally, where Pax has vastly reduced quantum costs for his powers, Mal often pays nothing to use his. Additionally, Mal has access to a few powers unlike any ever seen before: He can sense novas (latent and active) over an area the size of Texas with little effort – conversely, he can also conceal his own quantum sig nature with near-total efficacy. With some difficulty, he can distinguish “quantum signatures” to identify individuals. Mal can sense energy production/ usage over a wide area (a city, perhaps larger) and manipulate it if necessary, causing blackouts or surges or interfering with quantum powers over a wide area (several novas at once). This can be applied selectively. Finally, he can focus his power on one nova and effectively shut that nova’s M-R node down for a time – several weeks on the outside. The effect is somewhat similar to Dormancy, only the target can’t voluntarily reactivate his powers. Mal can, conversely, use this power to help one or more latent novas erupt and perhaps guide the form that eruption takes.

So basically, he’s all-powerful, he can do anything you can think of, and he has no meaningful limitations whatsoever. And if you asked the developers – a pox upon their names! – why he doesn’t just magic everything into being precisely the way he wants it, I’m sure they’d say, “oh, because he has such a high regard for individual freedom and he wants everyone to find their own truth!” Barf.

Yeah. I’ve been giving this game a chance, I really have. Most of it hasn’t been great, but most of it hasn’t been terrible either. I knew it had a bad reputation, but I figured it was just the Internet overreacting like usual, because while I could see the things that people were upset about, they weren’t that pronounced.

I stand corrected. I was blind, but now I see. This game is an abomination. I am so, so glad that it failed dismally.

But I’m still going to finish it, damn it, so stay tuned! This readthrough is likely to get a lot saltier from here on out!