Kagim said:
poiuppx said:
Wow... That's a bit of a necro... Alright... Let me explain why i find it bothersome.
For starters if you have read anything outside the game, producer notes, side stories or anything that is not directly in the first game, I don't count that. I don't know if you did, but I'm going only by what is in the game.
Alright...
1) What exactly would be the point to hiding himself at that point either. Atlas had establishes himself very thoroughly as anti-Andrew through most of the video game. Hell there are Atlas posters on the walls decrying Andrew. Be him Frank or Atlas and whether Andrew was oblivious to the fact or not Atlas would be seen as a thorn in Andrews side. So why the alias? Either way Andrew would be trying to shut him down. Keeping the name Atlas has no meaning outside of creating a plot twist. Hell it would have made more sense if Frank choose some who was portrayed as some random loser trying to escape then a revolutionary. The problem here is that it is more obviously JUST for a plot twist. Which to me kinda weakens the sauce.
2) Why would Frank try and kill you at the point he does. When he gives the order to rub you out he believes he has total control over you. So if "he wants all the adam to himself" is the problem its one that could be solved with "Would you kindly stop using adam". Not only that but he spends the entire game building up a relation with you, what is the point of that unless he had planned for some point where you might no longer be under his control? Why throw you away at all?
Your a super weapon and the second that ONE enemy is downed he throws you away? Now here's where it gets sticky. If he thinks he has enough control over you to make you kill yourself why bother killing you. Why not order you to come to him and be his grinning guard dog. If he ever loses control over you he could exploit your loyalty to keep you under his thumb the old fashioned way. If anyone ever threatened him again, like Tenebaum with all her little sisters, he could send you to deal with it. Whether a small or large threat why throw away a hammer to use your fist on a nail? For someone who is built up to be this intelligent conniving fiend he pulls such a cliched super villain tactic it makes me cringe.
He has no reason to toss you away when there are so many threats. "But he can deal with them himself he thinks" would you toss away a shotgun because a pistol would work just fine. I'm not talking use the pistol instead I'm talking tear the shotgun to pieces so it stops working.
There is just NO reason for him to throw you out. He just does for essentially the same reason bond villains always tell there nefarious plot because they think they have already won.
3) When i speak of the twist not making sense I'm not talking about being Andrews son or the whole would you kindly thing.
What i am talking about is because of that twist it feels like the wool is being pulled over the players eyes, not the the Player Character. This is a problem for me. After the twist i felt like the game was trying to trick ME not my Character. Atlas's actions up to that point seem to be trying to manipulate the PC so that he likes him on a personal level. When he turns around and tries to kill you the second Andrew is dead it makes everything he did pointless. After all he has no reason to believe you can be deprogrammed. Therefor why work so hard to establish a relationship with you? If he knows Tenebaum can deprogram you wouldn't that make her a giant threat? Even greater then Andrew? If he doesn't know then what would be the point in trying to win you over emotionally as well?
Either way everything he does up to that point reeks of trying to fool the Player, not the Player Character. That bugs the shit out of me. That feels inorganic to me. He is trying to befriend the person in front of the screen, not in the game.
If that was the point of the game then I don't agree with that method. It leaves a bad taste in the mouth.
This is all purely from within the game itself, both what we learn from the dialogues/tapes and what one can take away from the way the characters act. Least, what I took away.
1. You seem to be missing the main point here; he wasn't portraying some new scrub to Jack or to anyone who was watching. He was portraying Atlas, hero to the people. Among other things, this -should- have bought Jack a bit more freedom, potentially convincing folks who hated Fontaine but liked or at least respected Atlas to leave Jack alone and let him do what he had to do. In one major case, Peach Wilkins, this SEEMED like it was working... until Peach's paranoia and/or ability to see through the deception came out and he tried to kill Jack for being Fontaine's puppet. Which in and of itself is the other major reason for the deception... people HATED Fontaine, but sooner or later he was going to run into someone who might be able to see through the deception. We saw what becomes of them in the housing development Fontaine/Atlas was using for a time as his base of operations, the corpse of a woman whose story we followed through the course of the game SMASHED through a nearby table, both her final message and Fontaine's give-away log near her broken body. The sub, more than likely, was always BS. Why? Because...
2. You still have free will. So long as he isn't saying Would You Kindly ever five seconds, you do what you want, how you want. And if he IS saying that every five seconds, again, he runs the risk of folks who are listening in figuring out what makes you so useful. Can you imagine if Sander Cohen, who clearly had been listening in given how he talks when first revealing himself, knew he could control Jack like a puppet with three simple words? Ryan best demonstrated the dangers inherent there... what if he decided not to die by your hands, and just told you to beat yourself to death with the golf club instead? Jack is only a useful tool so long as NO ONE ELSE knows he's a tool, and so long as when he ISN'T being actively used, he has no reason to go against Fontaine. And Fontaine, who clearly has no interest in continuing with being Atlas once Ryan is out of the picture, isn't about to leave that particular loose thread dangling. And yes, he knows- or thinks he knows -he has the power to order you to kill yourself now... key phrase being now. He's getting rid of you before you have the chance to become a threat. Remember, if Ryan figured it out, the secret is no longer his alone. He has no way of knowing who else Ryan might have told. Even IF he was going to keep you around before, he CAN'T now. Killing you immediately is the only sane choice.
3. The objective WAS ultimately to trick you. It HAD to be. Why would the programmers want to do something to trick Joe Blow in the fictional game universe while leaving you fully aware of what was going on? For the trick to work, it had to fool everyone; when Ryan revealed it to Jack in his final moments, through to finding out who Atlas really was, Jack, you, and everyone else in Rapture should have been shocked to have been so deceived. Things clicked for you, and for Jack, but too late for it to mean a damn thing. Ryan is dead. Atlas was a myth. Frank Fontaine rules supreme. And not only is it all your fault, you never had a choice about it. Except, you did. You had choices all along, shown most clearly by how you treated the Little Sisters. Fontaine could control you when he used your phrase, but he had no ownership over your soul. YOU chose to be a monster or a man when dealing with them. It showed that even with how powerful his control was, it wasn't complete. You were still you, you could still make your own decisions when he wasn't pulling your string. THAT was what ultimately undid Fontaine- especially karmically apt if you were to have saved all the Little Sisters in the game.
But then, you asked, why attempt to win over the character of Jack? Because he had to for this to work. Jack had to be motivated to press onward even when Would You Kindly wasn't being employed. Why? Because what happens if folks notice that the newcomer who somehow can use all the secured functions of Rapture, including the Vita-Chambers, dances like a puppet on a string every time Atlas radios over Would You Kindly? Now, if instead half the time he's just calmly chatting with Jack, seemingly building a friendship, only to occasionally ask in that oh so polite way only Atlas can for Jack to do something... well, even if you're listening in, or even if you're Jack and Atlas isn't currently in your ear, it makes sense to you to do it. Jack never questioned it until the moment Ryan confronted him about the truth of Atlas's control over him, partly for the same reason YOU never questioned it until then. It seemed by all accounts that Atlas was just a kind fellow with a string of bad luck to him, your only support and conversely his only hope at settling the score. By the time the truth stood revealed, it was too late for anyone to capitalize on it.
Yes, if you step out of it all for a minute and look at it from the perspective of the developers, of COURSE the goal is to deceive you. If it wasn't, why have the twist at all? But I think it seriously denigrates the developers and the game to claim there wasn't a logic in play here from the word go, and that the characters weren't acting logically given their underlying goals and understanding of the world at large here.
