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Clonehunter

Freedoom back story

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Clonehunter said:

Ah, right, I remember the AGM now. Otherwise, the freedom/freedoom thing is sort of clever actually. Now the company just needs some aggressive Wal-Mart like backstory.

The year is 21XX, and centuries of corporatism has finally reached its grim conclusion. Antitrust laws have long been abolished by an all-too-happy Congress, blinded by greed and massive amounts of lobbyist money. As such, nothing stood in the way when the mega-conglomerate retail chain, Anything Goes Mart, forcibly bought out its last remaining competitor on the market.

Unfortunately for AGM, when you run all business in the world, it's hard to keep profits going up. They already have everyone in the world as customers, and interstellar travel is still a work-in-progress (having only recently made it to Mars)... where can you possibly find more saps with cash burning a hole in their pockets to funnel directly into your bottom line?

Fearing for its stock performance and millions of irate stockholders, AGM decides to embark in a risky research project, based on one simple conceit: when every living being is already accounted for, it's time to look at those beings who aren't living.

AGM begins researching into means of reviving the dead, as the undead can, presumably, be turned into even more customers, which means more money, which means less corporate heads getting sacked. The research project ultimately is a huge success; AGM opens a portal to Hell, and brings the eternally damned back for their financial gains.

This is where you come in. You were raised a highly religious fellow in the Bible Belt, but while AGM tried to keep you and your fellow Southerners placated by selling you every firearm known to man, you always had suspicions as to AGM's ulterior motives. Now that you know they're doing deals with the devil to make a quick buck, you feel they've crossed the line. Guns are great. Treating the lower classes like dirt for a quick buck isn't great, but that's life. Actively sinning against God? That simply won't do.

You grab your trusty pistol and drive your hover pick-up truck down to AGM headquarters, now guarded by the Hellish riff-raff and assorted ungodly creatures Satan makes in his spare time.

AGM wanted Hell to pay up. Now, you swear, they'll simply have Hell to pay.

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I'd really like to see a back story put in place because there are various things that are becoming difficult to complete without some kind of story, even a vague, loose one. Examples are the Episode 1/2/3 names and the end-of-episode story text (which currently basically just says "well done! now play the next episode.")

We already have some elements that suggest a story and we should try to weave in:

AGM: The big bad evil company. This actually plays into the project's free software/open source nature (which is often perceived as anti-corporate)

The title screen: Shows someone breaking chains to become free (Freedoom = freedom). Presumably this is the protagonist. What is he breaking free from?

Other artwork: Where do the monsters come from? I'd really like for the answer to not be "hell". Let's do something original. What is the final boss skull?

The levels: we seem to have established that Freedoom Phase 2 takes place on Earth. Phase 1, it's not so clear.

Intermission screen text: I wrote some short texts for the intermission screens in Phase 2. These can be changed but maybe there's something in there that people will find useful.

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Well, I'll note that that story up there was mostly just written as a joke (I wouldn't suggest including a snide take-that at gun lovers in an actual plot), but if it inspires any real ideas, feel free to borrow liberally from it.

Although tweaking the joke plot, I suppose we could tweak it such that instead of reviving the dead to make more customers, they started dabbling in the creation of mutant homunculi, intended for use as cheap labor, letting them lay off all of their actual workers. Then instead of being some pissed off Southerner, the player could be one of the workers laid off from a Phobos branch, who group together with their fellow unemployed former co-workers to stage an uprising against the totalitarian corporation that runs pretty much all of human society.

That said, it then wouldn't explain the Hellish aspects at all, which is kind of important. When writing that joke plot above, I was gonna go with "thanks to your involvement, AGM, who was secretly having trouble containing the forces of Hell for their little stunt, completely lose control, as Satan (the Icon of Sin) uses this opportunity to take more direct control over the fates of Men in the corporeal realm". If everything's just mutants, then there's not really a whole lot of room for Satanism to enter the picture...

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I actually have a loose idea of my own for a story. Feedback/suggestions welcome.

History:

In the mid 21st century, advanced robotics led to mass automation of all industry, and tech companies came to dominate all economic activity. The three largest tech companies merged to become the A.G.M. conglomerate, a corporate superpower more powerful than any government. The combination of its power and mass surveillance of the population mean that few people dare to oppose it. Most of humanity lives in poverty, serving the corporate elite.

In Freedoom you play a political dissident and rebel. For daring to stand against the AGM, you were deported to one of their off-world bases. The AGM has built 4 such bases on moons around the solar system. They use prison labor to build them: with the harsh environments, none of the prisoners ever return to Earth. One day, 3 months into your sentence, you are awoken by strange sounds from outside your cell. Discovering the corpse of a guard, you use his pistol to break your chains and proceed into the base...

Phase 1:

Episode 1: Your goal is to reach the starport so that you can escape the base. At the completion of the episode you discover that the monsters are an invading alien force; rather than mount a defence of Earth, the corporate elite have sold out humanity to the invaders in return for their own safety. There's nobody else to stop the aliens but you.

Episode 2/3/4: Take place on the different AGM bases - each on a different moon. The aliens are using the bases to assemble their forces for the invasion of Earth. The boss monsters are the tank-like vanguards of each army.

Phase 2:

You return to Earth to find the invasion has already begun. It's up to you to defeat the invading force, which has established its power base in Earth's largest city (needs a name) where the AGM is headquartered.

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fraggle said:

The three largest tech companies merged to become the A.G.M. conglomerate. . .

. . .It's up to you to defeat the invading force, which has established its power base in Earth's largest city (needs a name) where the AGM is headquartered.

Redmond strikes me as an appropriate city name, that's assuming AGM is Apple, Google and Microsoft.

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The chains thing is not appealing to me. The ones breaking free are the monsters.
Prisoners are a subject of pathos, not the strong character our players want to associate themselves with.

An adept fighter is going to be coming from the military (a Marine), not a prison. Prisoners are not healthy enough, nor trained in weapons.

A military prison might work. Works better if our Marine got sent there for discovering that the Corp boss he had to report to was actually a zombie.

Works even better if the corp is infiltrated by the monsters, and that is why the military is revolting against them. This is plausible given that most government and corps. would continue to operate without physical communication from management.
With computer assisted management, the bosses being zombies or replaced by Barons would hardly be noticeable. Even today.

It has to be the whole military revolting and fighting because we got dead marine corpses decorating many of the level maps. We have no dead in prison uniforms and no dead prison guards.

If there even is a military then there has to be some other side (like another government, or Mega-Corp) are still around. AGM could be huge, and could be in control of most of the space exploration, but they cannot control all of earth and not all of the space bases.

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wesleyjohnson said:

Prisoners are a subject of pathos, not the strong character our players want to associate themselves with.

An adept fighter is going to be coming from the military (a Marine), not a prison. Prisoners are not healthy enough, nor trained in weapons.

Except there is precedent for a prisoner being the star of a popular action game. B.J. Blazkowicz and Duke Nukem (in DNII) come to mind.

wesleyjohnson said:

It has to be the whole military revolting and fighting because we got dead marine corpses decorating many of the level maps. We have no dead in prison uniforms and no dead prison guards.

I dunno, just say the rebels managed to steal heavy weapons and armor from an AGM depot. It can still work.

wesleyjohnson said:

If there even is a military then there has to be some other side (like another government, or Mega-Corp) are still around. AGM could be huge, and could be in control of most of the space exploration, but they cannot control all of earth and not all of the space bases.

Disagree there, too. Totalitarian dictatorships still have militias to use against their own people, to quell uprisings.

This all said, I was thinking of reading the broken shackle as symbolic (breaking free from the oppressive regime), and nothing more than that.

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wesleyjohnson said:

The chains thing is not appealing to me. The ones breaking free are the monsters.

Interesting idea but it doesn't really work with the "Freedom/Freedoom" theme. My interpretation of the title screen is that it's a symbolic representation of the name of the project: Free-doom: breaking chains to become free.


Prisoners are a subject of pathos, not the strong character our players want to associate themselves with.

An adept fighter is going to be coming from the military (a Marine), not a prison. Prisoners are not healthy enough, nor trained in weapons.

A military prison might work. Works better if our Marine got sent there for discovering that the Corp boss he had to report to was actually a zombie.

Seems like maybe you misread what I wrote. The player is a rebel (=soldier) who got captured and sent to a prison camp.


It has to be the whole military revolting and fighting because we got dead marine corpses decorating many of the level maps. We have no dead in prison uniforms and no dead prison guards.

The idea is that the prisoners are doing manual labor to build the offworld prison camps, in very harsh conditions. Presumably if you were working in a vacuum or high radiation environment you'd need some kind of space / pressure suit - the wardens might not care if their prisoners die but they'd probably want them to live more than a few minutes. So the player's armor could be the pressure suit (also explains the visor).

If there even is a military then there has to be some other side (like another government, or Mega-Corp) are still around. AGM could be huge, and could be in control of most of the space exploration, but they cannot control all of earth and not all of the space bases.

Why not? Monopolies are just another example of corporate abuse and particularly in the tech industry they're sadly quite common.

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Also going to add my +1 to the chains symbol - it's a great powerful symbol. Although the mobius strip seems a bit generic for a logo, and confuses the symbolism somewhat.

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That is a bit of contrivance just to avoid having to go along with the points I raised.

Political prisoner and rebel could easily describe some of the current terrorists. I do not think you want anything in this story line that could be turned to support that faction.

You need to completely establish legitimacy, justification, appropriateness, and capability. A Marine sworn to defend the people works well for this, where the prisoner idea is ambiguous. A Marine prisoner is fine but they need to be a Marine first, then wrongly made a prisoner. Turning that around backwards confuses the importance and the time line.

When the opposition is the people being repressed that is a police force, and different weapons and tactics are employed. This is more than just the words used to name the force, the intent and nature are entirely different. These contrived explanations do not work to explain the weapons and military nature of the combat with the monsters.

The easy path for developing the story is to have a real military, that is capable of opposing AGP. It nicely explains the weapons, armor, and military nature of buildings. A police force with chainguns and plasma weapons would need more explanation, but not at all for a military.
Why make the story difficult to explain. There are always some opposing forces, why try to write them out of the story.

If you are just trying to avoid calling him a Marine, there are any number of special forces that could be used. No problem if you invent your own special forces unit name.

Space Marine, SEAL, Ranger, Black Ops,
UESP (United Earth Space Patrol),
UEDF (United Earth Defenders Force),
Making it something that can be pronounced is the difficult part and usually makes it somewhat contrived.

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wesleyjohnson said:

That is a bit of contrivance just to avoid having to go along with the points I raised.

Political prisoner and rebel could easily describe some of the current terrorists. I do not think you want anything in this story line that could be turned to support that faction.

I really don't think it's an issue. There are plenty of examples of the "Freedom Fighter" trope from popular culture. It's the entire plot of Star Wars, for example, and on TV we have Firefly and Babylon 5. Video games? You don't get much more prominent than Half Life 2, and what about Strife? People are smart enough to understand that this kind of plot line isn't glorifying terrorism.

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In Final Fantasy VII you literally ARE a terrorist and go around blowing up Shin-Ra's power plants.

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There are several games that I will not have anything to do with because they have the player as criminal, just for the thrill. Like stealing a car and going for a joy ride. Some parts of society want that kind of thrill. It does not justify a Doom game going in that direction and it would complicate the issue over Doom being rather violent.

That others have taken the trouble to "completely establish legitimacy, justification, appropriateness, and capability" only serves to emphasize my concern that this backstory do the same. I expect that most of Final Fantasy was setting up those concerns so the player felt justified in blowing up those power plants.

The continued practice of taking sentences out of context just to attack them in isolation, disappoints me. The next paragraphs went into how to avoid the concern. It is irritating that you were unable to read them in your haste to reply.

Much of Doom was generated with the military as a central character that it is going to create many loose ends in the story to try to write them out of the story. I am pointing out the loose ends that I see. I was hoping that the loose ends would be addressed and perhaps with some consideration of the ideas I suggested. If responses are ONLY going to defend, then I have no interest in continuing this discussion.

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Maybe the protag is some sort of slave captured by an Alien corporation named AGM (Ascension Gravity Multinational? Or Alien Gay Marriages), and the story is the Human slave fighting his way through the alien bases, killing aliens and brainwashed human guards as he attempts to escape and free other healthy prisoners. Maybe he's combat ready because he was a soldier once, and the hard work they put him through buffed him up, accidentally creating a one man army. By extension, the other Human slaves could also be buff form hard work, an oversight from the aliens, and the Human can persuade them all by the end of the game to rise up, break their chains, and announce their freedom.

Just tossing an idea into the hat, though reading it over, it sounds a little close to Hell to Pay.

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wesleyjohnson said:

The continued practice of taking sentences out of context just to attack them in isolation, disappoints me.[...]If responses are ONLY going to defend, then I have no interest in continuing this discussion.

I'm more sad that you're now apparently trying to suggest that I'm participating in bad faith. I read your concerns and responded to them. I've proposed a story; is it so unreasonable that I want to try to defend what I've come up with?

The next paragraphs went into how to avoid the concern. It is irritating that you were unable to read them in your haste to reply.

I literally took three days to consider your post before i responded to it. Is that "haste"?

You've focused unduly on this one "prisoner" aspect above all else when it's largely an irrelevant detail. You do not propose any actual alternative, only some vague ideas about what might be done.

Freedoom has reached the point where it needs a story to properly progress. I'm tired of (for example) the episode selection screen having the meaningless "Episode 1" and "Episode 2". I don't really care what the story is as long as it makes some kind of sense. Probably my story sucks. An imperfect story is better than no story at this point.

If you have an alternative story, then please propose one. If you want, modify mine to show the kind of changes you'd like to see. Or throw it away and write your own. Either way, propose something, don't just poke holes and throw tantrums because you aren't getting your way and think people aren't listening to you.

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If I may... @ wesleyjohnson: Not to gang up on you, but just to point out that "prisoner" does not automatically equal "criminal," and even "criminal" does not automatically equal "unethical protagonist."

I'm not even talking about anti-heroes that do illegal or questionable things for ultimately noble ends (most game protagonists, in a nutshell), but even in real life we have people unjustly imprisoned or held captive for things we'd deem acceptable or even righteous. And as has been mentioned already, the character could be a political prisoner (that also isn't a terrorist, lol), a P.O.W., an uncooperative test-subject, a slave; anything, really.

In short, no one's trying to turn the protagonist into some devil-may-care vigilante type guy who smokes in non-smoking sections and uses his cellphone in libraries. Either he was in the wrong place at the wrong time, or he went up against AGM and lost.

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A quick very rough outline of my story.

The sun will eventually supernova. The AGM group is a ridiculously rich and philanthropic organization that decided to plunge the solar system into a time loop. Long before and after humans existed and even dinosaurs, the earth was inhabited by monsters. The creatures before humans were primitive, dumb and extremely violent. Creatures after the period of humans were smart, understood technology and also violent. AGM's time loop ensured the solar system(galaxy maybe) would live on forever. In a certain era of smart monsters, the monsters discovered a way to ride the time loop (time travel) into eras that were occupied by humans. This of course created havoc on an unimaginable scale.
AGM sent a team of scientists and soldiers to block the point of entry of the monsters and destroy them all. But that would not be enough. They would need to travel to all the time periods the monsters occupied to destroy them all.

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Catoptromancy said:

A quick very rough outline of my story.

The sun will eventually supernova. The AGM group is a ridiculously rich and philanthropic organization that decided to plunge the solar system into a time loop. Long before and after humans existed and even dinosaurs, the earth was inhabited by monsters. The creatures before humans were primitive, dumb and extremely violent. Creatures after the period of humans were smart, understood technology and also violent. AGM's time loop ensured the solar system(galaxy maybe) would live on forever. In a certain era of smart monsters, the monsters discovered a way to ride the time loop (time travel) into eras that were occupied by humans. This of course created havoc on an unimaginable scale.
AGM sent a team of scientists and soldiers to block the point of entry of the monsters and destroy them all. But that would not be enough. They would need to travel to all the time periods the monsters occupied to destroy them all.


The time periods thing sounds sorta wonky, especially seeing there's no real time themes in the elvels really (compared to say, Chasm The Rift), but the time loop thing and the primitive monsters is rather cool in that B-movie sorta way.

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Catoptromancy said:

A quick very rough outline of my story.

It's an interesting idea. Would each of the Phase 1 episodes be a different time zone? Did the AGM build a base in each time zone? Maybe each episode is progressively further back in time, explaining the increasingly harsh conditions.

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fraggle said:

Other artwork: Where do the monsters come from? I'd really like for the answer to not be "hell". Let's do something original. What is the final boss skull?


Me too. I quite liked the idea of aliens, years ago. Demons is too close to Doom IMHO, and doesn't give Freedoom a different enough identity. I'd suggest the final boss skull is omitted from the freedoom levels (resources present so that the boss skull in PWADs works) but I guess MAP30 already exists and I'm not proposing to do the work to change it.

TBH my favourite idea when I last discussed this was to take a story very similar to UFO: Enemy Unknown, which had never been properly first-personed anyway. But it has now, and the new XCOM tactical game has come out and re-ignited interest in UFO/XCOM, it might not be such a good idea.

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Another question is, do the monsters have names? I mean, everyone more or less refers to them by what they replace, but unless I'm missing something (Possibly!) they don't seem to have their own names.

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fraggle said:

Other artwork: Where do the monsters come from? I'd really like for the answer to not be "hell". Let's do something original. What is the final boss skull?

Possible points of origin for weird monsters:

  • Alternate dimension of magic and malice (aka Hell and variants)
  • Distant planet (space invaders)
  • Genetic engineering gone wrong (Dr. Frankenmoreau's clone army)
  • Weird mutations caused by pollution (I detect Wyrm-taint)
Those are the obvious. We could come up with slightly more original scenarios, like Nightmares given flesh because of magical curse on the world (boss skull could be the source of the spell).

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Clonehunter said:

Another question is, do the monsters have names? I mean, everyone more or less refers to them by what they replace, but unless I'm missing something (Possibly!) they don't seem to have their own names.

They do. Though those are just pretty lame names that I made up and can be changed.

purist said:

I posted a story idea from the previous Freedoom story thread if it's of any interest.

I completely forgot about this thread. Looks like some good ideas in there. Your story looks similar to Cato's.

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fraggle said:

They do. Though those are just pretty lame names that I made up and can be changed.


Some seem alright, like Technospider (though it sounds like just another name for Arachnotron, a little too close even), though it'd need to fit for just one and not both. Otherwise Orb Monster is really only the worst offender. It sorta looks like a Trilobite crossbred with a jelly fish anyways.

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Doomguy is sick and hell is taking advantage of he's sickness and starts to infest, there's nobody like doomguy so the humanity just makes a cyborg army instead, only they all died except for one! And you control him.

Doomguy is tired of hell, so he sends his brother instead.

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My theory: AGM is a company in Mars that makes/kidnapps aliens and unknown creatures to do experiments on them, freedoomguy is a marine who broke some AGM rules and then he become a prisoner but then decided to escape but then made a big fat mistake causes the monsters and every creature to get out all the AGM scientists were killed by them and then freedoomguy decided to do anything to kill the aliens after he cleaned up mars he noticed that he isn't complete the monsters already went to earth freedoomguy decided to go to the AGM labs to portals that makes him go to earth and then he succeeded but where he landed? To the cities that has millions of monsters he cleaned all if them but one of the cities has lots monsters that freedoomguy can't kill them by himself he then decided to nuke the whole city after he finished to kill those idiots on earth he finds a portal enters it he goes to place that is so hot and it has even more monsters freedoomguy continues to sacrifice his life and then finds large skull spawns monsters from his brain kills it and then kills all of it's monsters freedoomguy decideds to hide from earth so no one can know who saved them no one will ever know how did all of this happened

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