Plot Holes and Contirvances
BlueBottle
Australia Join Date: 2018-02-03 Member: 236674Members
Australia Join Date: 2018-02-03 Member: 236674Members
Just watched an interesting Youtube critique of Subnautica by Joseph Anderson (thanks @YouSeeMe) who rates Subnautica as a kind of flawed diamond. I'd agree with that, but not always for the same reasons. But what I found most interesting was his list of the game's plot holes and contrivances. 
(extreme spoiler alert)
Here's his list:
1. Coincidence of 4546B being the first Precursor planet found, despite their species numbering in the 100s of billions
2. Coincidence of crash location, safe from the abyss the comprises most of the planet, and conveniently right next to the quarantine enforcement platform
3. Why enzyme 43 is produced by only a single remaining individual Sea Emperor and its offspring?
4. The reluctance of the Sea Emperor to help the Precursors
5. Why the background levels Enzyme 42 (distributed by the peepers) is effective for local wildlife but not for Precursors or humans?
6. Why a quarantine enforcement gun shoots ships on arrival rather than departure?
7. Why the Degassi survivors needed to shelter in the seemingly more hostile deep?
8. The purpose of the Precursor museum
Some plausible explanations come to mind, and Joseph proposes a few good ones himself. Maybe these will be fleshed out in the Expansion, but I suspect he's right that some narrative content was left out of the game in the rush to finally release it. On the other hand, I wonder if it might not be a plus for a game's mystique to leave some things up to its players' conjectures?
(extreme spoiler alert)Here's his list:
1. Coincidence of 4546B being the first Precursor planet found, despite their species numbering in the 100s of billions
2. Coincidence of crash location, safe from the abyss the comprises most of the planet, and conveniently right next to the quarantine enforcement platform
3. Why enzyme 43 is produced by only a single remaining individual Sea Emperor and its offspring?
4. The reluctance of the Sea Emperor to help the Precursors
5. Why the background levels Enzyme 42 (distributed by the peepers) is effective for local wildlife but not for Precursors or humans?
6. Why a quarantine enforcement gun shoots ships on arrival rather than departure?
7. Why the Degassi survivors needed to shelter in the seemingly more hostile deep?
8. The purpose of the Precursor museum
Some plausible explanations come to mind, and Joseph proposes a few good ones himself. Maybe these will be fleshed out in the Expansion, but I suspect he's right that some narrative content was left out of the game in the rush to finally release it. On the other hand, I wonder if it might not be a plus for a game's mystique to leave some things up to its players' conjectures?
Comments
- For example, the coincidence of 4546B being the first precursor planet found. There are two ways of looking at this, first that it really isn't a contrivance and second that it isn't necessarily true. Contrivance wise, there really is not a reason why having the quarantine planet be the first precursor world found is illogical or contrived. The planet is a quarantine planet for a very dangerous disease, it would be entirely logical for any race of sentient creatures with planning abilities to place a dangerous research lab as far away from their civilization as possible in case things go bottoms up. Secondly, this may not be the first planet found at all. We know that the precursors like to place big cannons on their infected planets and that they are an extinct race, for all we know their entire race could have been killed off by the disease and they have those guns on ALL of their planets. Any humans who discovered another precursor planet would just get shot down and die on the planet as 4546B would be the only place where a cure could be synthesized as far as we know. If we crashed landed on another planet without the disease research lab, the player would die there unable to leave the planet due to the disease.
- This point is one that has to happen due to the plot. If the player crash landed on an area outside of an area with an enforcement platform then they would be killed by the leviathans and die there. All narrative is contrived. Why, in Lord of the Rings, were the hobbits able to gain all of the allies and strength they needed to overcome an evil that has felled those far stronger than they? Why, in Hero Academia, was All Might in the perfect place to meet his perfect successor despite Japan no doubt having hundreds of millions of citizens at the time of the story? Narrative is inherently contrived and asking why the circumstances don't occur such that there could be a plot at all is inane. If that argument is not enough, then I could just say that as the spaceships evidently could scan for land, they picked a spot that was potentially one of the few landmasses on the planet and headed for it. 4546B is evidently quite a small plant as can be seen by the last shot as the players depart the planet.
- Why enzyme 43 is produced by only a single remaining individual Sea Emperor and its offspring? The precursors tracked down and located a species that specifically had the ability to synthesize the exact compound they wanted. Now it could be said to be a contrivance that a species that had no previous contact with a disease would have the perfect compound to fight off said disease, but how would Mr. Anderson have it otherwise? The problem is that whilst this could be seen as a narrative convenience, unless a superior alternative could be suggested then it lowers the comment to the level of gripes sufficient for entertainment but not for criticism.
- The reluctance of the Sea Emperor to help the Precursors. Unlike the other points, this is just him flatly ignoring things stated inside of the story. The Sea Emperor stated, clearly, that she could not communicate with the Precursors and therefore could not ask for what was needed in order to incubate her eggs.
- Why the background levels Enzyme 42 (distributed by the peepers) is effective for local wildlife but not for Precursors or humans? It evidently isn't. The wildlife is running around, infected by the disease and dying all over the place. If anything, the enzyme levels appear to be sufficient to delay the disease for the organisms but not to cure it. As we have no set information on the disease, for all we know this disease could kill in literally days or maybe even hours and the only reason our plucky protagonist lasted as long as he did was as a benefit from the enzymes.
- Why a quarantine enforcement gun shoots ships on arrival rather than departure? Another example of why wouldn't it? It shoots a ship it sees, why does it matter whether or not the ship is approaching or leaving the planet? In fact it is more logical this way. The platform is a last ditch attempt after the precursors assumed that there is no way of fighting the disease any longer. If it shoots down the ships on the descent, then the debris goes flying towards the planet. If they shoot down a ship on the ascent, the debris goes flying away from the planet, potentially depositing the Kharaa into orbit or further away where they could be salvaged and spreading the infection.
- Why the Degassi survivors needed to shelter in the seemingly more hostile deep? They were going deeper and deeper because, like the player, they were looking to find the cure. As for why they build bases, for the same reasons that the players do. So they have a place to stash their stuff whilst Bart researches the world to try to find the disease.
- The purpose of the Precursor museum. This is, admittedly, a bit silly. I know labs and companies that do have museums in their lobbies, but it's mostly for visitors and the public which the disease research lab would not have.
But that might all be untrue as well. As for the narrative content, it would likely have improved the game for Mr. Anderson, but it may simply not be deemed enough of a benefit for most people for it to be worth the investment and not a large enough boon to the game to be worth investing in. Sandbox games to have a history of having very unwieldy stories due to the game's setup after all.Also, I don't agree with all of dasCKD answers to the points listed above, which is fine. I believe good art is supposed to be subjective, although some of these can be objectively answered using arguments present in the game.
This sentence was gold though:
My thoughts:
Precursors maybe warped-gated in from another galaxy to just a couple of our planets to do their bio-research. Another one being medieval Earth, as hinted at by the museum's contents.
Why come all this way? Well, maybe they initially picked it up exploring this galaxy and came back this way to exploit any local resistances.
2. Coincidence of crash location, safe from the abyss the comprises most of the planet, and conveniently right next to the quarantine enforcement platform
Sure, some suspension of disbelief is always required for any sci-fi story. Nevertheless, JA suggests a nice narrative solution could have been a 'caretaker sentience' residing in the quarantine enforcement platform. One that draws in passing ships (via tractor beam?) in the hope of co-opting survivors to complete the bio-research. If successful, it can then resurrect the uploaded Precursor consciousnesses we know are stored on the planet.
One of JA's best objections I missed out was Why is the blood sample of one cured human considered sufficient evidence that Kharraa is defeated and the quarantine can be lifted?
The 'caretaker sentience' theory could account for this 'formality' once it sees the player done sufficient heavy lifting for the research to complete, and the Precursors to download.
I like it. But if this was so, surely its presence would have been at least hinted at in the endgame?
3. Why enzyme 43 is produced by only a single remaining individual Sea Emperor and its offspring?
Yeah I think what you say is about right. Moreover this particular Sea Emperor specimen was likely at least partially the result of Precursor efforts, perhaps genetically engineering a line to concentrate Enzyme 42 with each generation - as evidenced by its offspring
4. The reluctance of the Sea Emperor to help the Precursors
I don't want to misquote the guy. He said the Sea Emperor first said that it was a communication problem, but it's later comments made it seem unwilling. Either way I'm fine with a Sea Dragon that either can't, or doesn't want to, communicate. I mean it was probably grumpy to say the least.
5. Why the background levels Enzyme 42 (distributed by the peepers) is effective for local wildlife but not for Precursors or humans?
Agree with you again. Also, if Kharaa is endemic to this planet/galaxy then we could expect these creatures to be much more resistant.
6. Why a quarantine enforcement gun shoots ships on arrival rather than departure?
Yeah, cruel but effective. Seems especially prudent if you consider what a great WMD Kharra could be, if exploited by certain enterprising visitors.
7. Why the Degasi survivors needed to shelter in the seemingly more hostile deep?
I think JA's quite reasonably points out some of the reasons the Degasi crew give seem flawed. How can the surface be more hostile when the have all the tech to survive at great depth?
His own theory is they may have been rationalising an impulse to go deeper that was implanted by partial Sea Emperor communications. That's much nicer than my own well worn theory that the Torgals were industrial spies covering their tracks from Alterra, using a bunch of confected PDA recordings.
8. The purpose of the Precursor museum
This is a horse I've flogged to death in another thread. But seems to me it holds all the tools/samples used by a small team of bio-tech field researchers.
But I also wonder if the missing pieces actually work for a game like this - one that seems to be unfolding in a series of expansions?
Allowing the story to easily fit several expansions is a big plus.
But also, open narratives allow the player to build their own assumptions and gives plenty of room for the fans to discuss about possibilities. Personally, I love games (books, movies) that allow me to do so.
Very strict narratives make mistakes far more apparent and, even if it feels like it doesn't cost as much, it needs a rigorous revision process to avoid inconsistencies and loopholes which wouldn't be necessary otherwise.
Sounds fair enough. But I admit I'll feel disappointed if all these threads are just left hanging as the series unfolds.
There is nothing--and I mean nothing--that brings my blood to a boil more than amateur internet critics calling things plot holes, when they clearly have no idea what a plot hole is.
For those who may not be sure themselves, a true plot hole is an irretrievable break in the logic of the story. It's when something happens that goes against the established narrative, for which there can be no reasonable explanation. (Good example: Ending of Mass Effect 3.)
Contrivances? Mmmmmmaybe, but I'd say even that is a stretch. Contrivances need to have the quality of making the set-up seem artificial. I don't really get that feeling from anything presented in this list.
This is the one I found most awkward. I forgot it, then put it in the revised list, so maybe you missed it:
2.5: Why is the blood sample of one cured human considered sufficient evidence that Kharraa is defeated and the quarantine can be lifted?
He made a good suggestion to fill this hole. But if his suggestion is correct (a ghost in the machine, co-opting the player to facilitate the Precursors' return), it seems a bit of a stretch that the devs let us leave the planet without so much of a hint of it - considering what an epic cliff hanger that would have set up for the sequel.
As a game design geek I guess I'm uncertain about:
- what was intentional and planned
- what was rushed together
- what I'm reading into it that really isn't there at all
This isn't a plot hole either.
The blood sample isn't sufficient evidence that Kharraa is defeated, but that isn't what it's checking for. All it's checking for is whether the person who hit the button is infected.
The button you hit shuts the gun down by disconnecting the power to the entire platform. The whole facility goes dark. This suggests to me that this button is like an Emergency Off switch, which the Precursors would have an obvious need for. For example, if a ship was coming in that had, say, a cure aboard, they'd want a fast way to power down their weapon of mass destruction.
The one that bothers me is this:
MARGUERIT: No building materials... nothing left of the ship... And your kid says we're gonna starve without more growbeds. Speak up, kid.
BART: It's true, father. The natural growth rates are too slow to keep supporting us.
I can survive indefinitely off 1-2 Bulbo trees. In a sub. With no natural light and no new soil. I am pretty sure they did not have a problem with food or water on the island.
Doesn't seem quite right to me. If so, wouldn't an infected Precursor be the one most qualified to operate the Off Switch?
My feeling is the glorious OTT design of the massive gun signals:
'When this disease gets out of hand the hardware is taking over and nothing organic leaves, or even visits, this planet'.
The narrative problem is how to allow the player to plausibly leave the planet anyway. I'm not sure the game it achieves this, but I'm hoping there's more to the story.
Of course many players won't give two hoots. But that's cool too.
Yeah I thought about this too. Along with the absence of the hellish weather that defeated their habitats (normally able to withstand many atmospheres of pressure). I mean it's always so nice sunny and lush on beautiful 4546B.
I guessed maybe the planet experiences wildly radical seasonal changes (you know Winter is coming!) - perhaps due to a madly elliptical orbit. If so, a line about that from the PDA would have done much assuage the curious gamers. But admittedly, the whole agricultural mechanic is dodgy anyway (let's not go there).
Personally I like the theory they were just losing the plot, perhaps under the misunderstood influences of the Sea Emperor. But there's no reason say the devs meant for that.
There was plenty of discussions on this a few years ago.
I have always felt like farming was too op and suggested in these same forums that growbeds should require power, and not negligible power. These plants should need proper lighting, fresh water and nutrients.
Requiring power would add to the base mechanics and would force the player to worry about either having extra power on their Cyclops or extra food.
@BlueBottle, you seem to enjoy your parallel theories. Maybe here's a new flavor for you.
The Precursors seems able to store their "minds" in computer hardware and, maybe, later restore it into a proper body.
Given the bio-engineering behind the warpers, it is plausible to assume that their bodies might be designed to fit the role/environment in which it will function. Therefore they might have very diverse morphology/composition, down to the genetic level. Except for the part responsible for a powerful enough mind to store their vast memories/knowledge and to allow advanced acuity/reasoning.
There's also evidence they came to Earth once, and very few creatures match the local primates on these qualities. Maybe cetaceans (the Precs do enjoy a swim).
I suggest that Precursors did not just visit early humans. They engineered and studied them, along with several other things on Earth. After a while they left and let the humans be. Maybe they were still studying how a sapient species society evolves, when the Kharaa hit. Maybe they left for good, after getting what they came for.
It doesn't matter, for they left mankind the sole trait that would allow them to interact with their tech and, who knows one day, bring them back.
I'm still optimistic that Natural Selection III (or IV) will have three way battles between Humans, Kharaa and Dolphins. In 3D maps with regular ground combat and also underwater and space combat. Grand battles with vehicles and all. Weaponized Cyclops dropping battle Exosuits down into enemy abyss, Fades that turn into Warpers by diving into water, a Telepathic Cetacean Officer leading a pack of Lazer Sharks in space suits.
Awesome
Yeah, I'm always sucker for all those transferred consciousness sci-fi plots. Human genome tinkering by ancient aliens? Yes please, serve me up some of that too.
But it what's the devs have/had in mind is what really piqued my curiosity. Anyway, all tasty brainfood.
I always passed that off as "Gameplay and Story Segregation" myself. Would any of us really be willing to engage in farming if it took (at earliest) in-game weeks for a single fruit to grow? If they actually grew as fast as they do in-game even in the story, then that'd definitely come off as Marg making flimsy excuses to go deeper underwater (or trying to like, go fishing or something to make up for what the vegetation can't)
The plants grow quickly enough to support us in the game and be fun to engage in, but if they slowed it down to realistic growth speeds we'd be dealing with the same problem the Degasi crew were dealing with. All these growbeds and they're taking way too long to be worth it from a gameplay standpoint.
That would add the other reactor types to the water purifier as things worthwhile building.
(In case there's some modder interest I might port this topic into a new thread).
Could be the difference between absorbing the enzyme directly via gills or indirectly via digestive system. Pretty sure nobody who tried to absorb the enzyme directly in sufficient amounts (i.e. breathing water for a prolonged period of time) did ever die of Kharaa infection. :-)
They had to move below the sea level because the floating island is devoid of resources, as everyone who tried to build a base there knows. :-)
Afterwards, they were moving along the same trail of evidence that the player does - they just didn't get far enough fast enough. If they managed to explore the Lost River and find the research facility, the story could be very different. Unfortunately, they probably never visited the QEP, and thus never knew for sure that there is indeed something important in the Lost River caves. All they had was vague sensor readings that the Bart speaks of, but nothing tangible to persuade the rest of the team to explore more aggressively.
1) Plot Hole-- A tablet programmed to "keep you alive on a hostile world" but which forces you to swim around the hostile world collecting blueprints to build things you need to survive. Even the "multipurpose room" which, by its very name, seems like a critical survival item isn't included in standard survival blueprints? But glass hallways are?
2) Plot Hole-- Life pods are capable of transmitting coordinates. There is some sort of GPS technology which the PDA can access. But you have to place beacons if you want to find a location again rather than simply adding a waypoint to the PDA.
3) A game that will never have multiplayer not only has a 3-man vehicle but also forces you to build it just to get a component you need for the endgame.
4) "Weapons were removed...."-- "Aliens" would have been a very short movie with that philosophy.
5) Strange vehicle mod overlaps. How in the world does a sonar system take up the space you might otherwise use for added cargo capacity? It's like telling me I can't put GPS in my SUV because I already have a roof rack.
6) Four different fabrication devices to win the game? The fabricator, the mobile vehicle bay, the modification station, and the Cyclops upgrade fabricator. I didn't count the scanner room fabricator because you can win the game without a scanner room.
Most of these are the sort of thing you'd find in any game. Studios have finite resources and want to get a product out the door in a realistic timeframe (except CIG) so they have to say "good enough" at some point. It's kind of silly to single out Subnautica as being flawed for doing something that every game does.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man
Outdated reason: originally the reason was because some idiot failed to do their job and make sure the PDAs weren't on vanilla. Because they were on vanilla things like the multipurpose room weren't in the blueprints by default. This was most likely changed as the log stating this also mentions events from the Natural Selections games, hinting that Subnautica was originally intended to take place at the same time as the Natrual Selection games before being made a prequel to them all.
Current reason: The PDA gets corrupted causing you to loose many blueprints. It says so at the start of the game in one of the starting data banks. About 80% of stored blueprints got corrupted
Likewise, how do vehicles remain cool for an unlimited duration while immersed in a hot area? They should heat up, slowly but surely, up to the ambient temperature, and that would kill the player (and not generate any power).
But well, it's a fiction, it doesn't have to follow all the thermodynamic laws ;-)
Anyways, the reason I mentioned the vid was to try and figure out if some currently unexplained story events (not unexplainable) might hint at some of the backstory, we might see play out in the expansion. Or they might not.
No strawman. I was listing genuine contrivances that could have been used instead of the weak ones in the video.
However, the disconnect between the technology level of the game and how many of the game mechanics are implemented is a real immersion breaker for me.
We've got scifi tech and materials, but for arbitrary Reasons have very poor, clunky methods for handling hostile fauna. The survivor could tell the fabricator to make a knife, metal rod and some cord and then make a spear which would be a more effective weapon than pretty much anything else in the game, but we can't for those same Reasons (which is incredibly sad).
The whole balance of energy is just wrong on so many levels. Solar panels and thermal plants are hugely OP, nuclear reactors are just sad. Nearly everything (except oxygen generation and base lighting) uses FAR too much energy (especially water purification). Overall it feels like the devs arbitrary picked a bunch of values without taking some time to think about how they could tie them in with RL physics. The game describes an ion power crystal as containing the same amount of energy as a small nuclear explosion, which does not line up at all with any of the other energy generation/usage numbers in the game (except maybe their completely wrong "nuclear reactor" numbers).
Good scifi needs more than just shiny tech, it needs consistency and logic behind it which this game really lacks (and is a major pet peeve of mine).