Is UAC bad?

[myk]

GreyGhost said:
Someone must have decided to revive it for Plutonia 2 as a replacement for the UAC.

I wonder who that may have been...

But yes, since the company failed yet again, humanity took an additional step and replaced the corporation with a multi-planetary security force called the Union Aerospace Armed Forces. (See PL2INFO.TXT, that comes with the PWAD).

[GreyGhost]

Someone associated with these forums? Creaphis - our resident literary critic - might be able to enlighten me. ;-)

[Splatter]

The "new UAC" of TNT/Plutonia seems to have undertaken their teleportation research with good intentions, but they inadvertently incited the demon attacks of those games.

We all know where a road paved with good intentions can lead.

[eargosedown]

You'd really think that now, after what, the 4th time the demons attack, that people would get the idea to not play with teleporters anymore.

[Creaphis]

GreyGhost said:

Someone associated with these forums? Creaphis - our resident literary critic - might be able to enlighten me. ;-)

Ha ha. It sounds like you remember the thread where I found out that Myk is our writer (the hard way).

[GreyGhost]

I had forgotten who'd written the storyline until Myk posted - don't tell anyone.

[Tetzlaff]

eargosedown said:

You'd really think that now, after what, the 4th time the demons attack, that people would get the idea to not play with teleporters anymore.

That would be like saying, after the 4th time a steam engine exploded people should have stopped with developing steam powered machines.

[40oz]

yeah but a steam engine exploding and a global hostile crisis are two different things.

[Pirx]

eargosedown said:

You'd really think that now, after what, the 4th time the demons attack, that people would get the idea to not play with teleporters anymore.

not to play, but strike back, when it's now clear that this demon world is a permanent threat.

[kristus]

Anyone even read the damn back stories?

Only one of the games have the demons invade because of UAC teleportation experiments. Doom1.

Doom2 is a direct continuation of Doom1.

TNT they attack using some spaceship that is built from dead creatures.

Plutonia they do attack through teleportation. But that's he demons opening the portals. The story is about how the scientists try to prevent the demons from creating these portals. But something about the experiments ends up attracting them and though it's largely successful in stopping the portals to open. Or rather closing them as soon as possible after they open. The base is overrun when a larger number of portals open at once and in the end one is left open and you have to go through hell and back to close it.

[Gez]

kristus said:

Anyone even read the damn back stories?

Yeah. And there's something that never made sense to me in Plutonia Experiment. So there's this accelerator thingy that zaps portals out of existence, but the demons overrun the base faster than all their portals can be closed. The Doomguy then endeavors to infiltrate the demon-infested base to reach the accelerator, and then... destroys it. Huh? What about using it to close the last portal? Didn't find the user manual? Preferred the old trusty "let's go in hell and shoot rockets in wall-demons' exposed brains" method to close portals?

Something else of which I'm dubious is why did the demons wait until that portal-closing accelerator was ready to invade. I wonder if they haven't been kinda prodded by the UAC so as to provide a testing opportunity...

[40oz]

Torr Samaho said:

not to play, but strike back, when it's now clear that this demon world is a permanent threat.

That's a good argument. Instead of isolating ourselves from the hellspawn, maybe it's more necessary to open those portals and fight back. They invaded our territory, now we have to punish them.

[Creaphis]

Gez said:

Yeah. And there's something that never made sense to me in Plutonia Experiment. So there's this accelerator thingy that zaps portals out of existence, but the demons overrun the base faster than all their portals can be closed. The Doomguy then endeavors to infiltrate the demon-infested base to reach the accelerator, and then... destroys it. Huh? What about using it to close the last portal? Didn't find the user manual? Preferred the old trusty "let's go in hell and shoot rockets in wall-demons' exposed brains" method to close portals?

Something else of which I'm dubious is why did the demons wait until that portal-closing accelerator was ready to invade. I wonder if they haven't been kinda prodded by the UAC so as to provide a testing opportunity...

Again, this is what happens when making levels of a certain theme and style is the primary goal, and a story is cobbled together to match them.

Myk, I'm curious: if the decision to write a story including the UAAF was yours, at what point in development were the textures with the UAAF logo made?

[40oz]

I think the UAAF logo was used in other megawads before. It looked really familiar. I'll edit this post when I find out where I've seen it (or something similar)

[myk]

One could assume that the Quantum Accelerator technology got subverted by hellish forces. By then, all the marine could apparently do was destroy it all along with the invaders.

Creaphis said:
Myk, I'm curious: if the decision to write a story including the UAAF was yours, at what point in development were the textures with the UAAF logo made?

I uploaded the first draft of the story on November 19 and suggested changing the logo to correspondingly make the WAD consistent with it. Shortly after TV uploaded a version of the resource WAD with the UAAF textures, which he made, getting an opportunity to use the gray interface texturing (as in the status bar and screens) in the levels.

[Splatter]

kristus said:

Anyone even read the damn back stories?

Only one of the games have the demons invade because of UAC teleportation experiments. Doom1.

Doom2 is a direct continuation of Doom1.

TNT they attack using some spaceship that is built from dead creatures.

They attacked a UAC base that was doing teleportation research after the UAC base attracted them by doing teleportation research. First the demons invade through teleportation themselves, and after they get their asses kicked they hop in their DEMON SPACESHIP.

For more information, you could read the damn backstory.

Gez said:

Yeah. And there's something that never made sense to me in Plutonia Experiment. So there's this accelerator thingy that zaps portals out of existence, but the demons overrun the base faster than all their portals can be closed. The Doomguy then endeavors to infiltrate the demon-infested base to reach the accelerator, and then... destroys it. Huh? What about using it to close the last portal? Didn't find the user manual? Preferred the old trusty "let's go in hell and shoot rockets in wall-demons' exposed brains" method to close portals?

Yeah, that was pretty weird. The story said the government was terrified the accelerator would be either destroyed or used against them somehow. It would have made more sense for him to destroy the accelerator only if he couldn't recover it, but I guess the Doomguy isn't good with mission objectives other than "shoot everything" or "press switch."

Gez said:

Something else of which I'm dubious is why did the demons wait until that portal-closing accelerator was ready to invade. I wonder if they haven't been kinda prodded by the UAC so as to provide a testing opportunity...

That's an interesting idea, especially since last time the demon's couldn't teleport to Earth until the UAC did their experiments. I also wonder if the data from the experiments in TNT lead up to the ones in Plutonia, but that's probably putting more thought into it than the writers did.

[tycp_08]

What confuses the hell out of me is that only ONE GUY survived the demonic invasion. (Talkin about Doom 1 here) Out of all of the other marines/scientist/higher ranked soldiers on both Phobos and Deimos, at least some other people had to survive.

[GreyGhost]

It's straighforward enough -

• The forces of Hell over-run Deimos and Phobos - probably with orders to take no prisoners
• Someone on Phobos broadcasts an emergency message before being killed/zombified (Deimos - having disappeared from the night sky - is presumably beyond radio range)
• Doomguy's squad is dispatched from Mars to investigate
• Doomguy guards the shuttle while his squad is slaughtered and - being the only survivor - gets all the glory

Then again - with chunks of the storyline being written from Doomguy's perspective - we only have his word that he didn't shoot the odd survivor in order to keep all the glory for himself.

[Gez]

In Doom 3, I put it on account of everybody who had been in Mars City long enough before the onslaught had been weakened by demoralization and exposure to Betruger's occult practices, making them easy to possess. The three guys who had just arrived were not possessed, but two of them were killed during the battle, leaving only one survivor.

For Doom 1, I'd say that it's partly because the slaughtered squad softened up the demons enough for their leader to mop it all up. I mean, you can see marine corpses with weapons even in Hell, meaning that some of them managed to go pretty far, actually.

[myk]

The marine wasn't their leader, just a guy left behind to guard the hangar while the rest advanced. Once left alone, he decided to move on.

As for the story, the marine (or the small group of marines, during coop) only survives sometimes*. That is, when handled by a player capable of surviving through the game (or, well, cheating with saves and cheats). This means that when he does survive, it's because he's more awesome than all the rest of those losers that died. After all, while the group of marines may have helped a bit, the ratio of dead human corpses compared to dead monsters doesn't seem to show they were very effective, unless hellish monsters bury their dead or like hellish flesh over mortal flesh. Some monster deaths could even have been due to random infighting. I doubt, for one, that the barons hanged in E2M8 were put there by marines...

* Cue GreyGhost, with the many worlds theory :p

[Creaphis]

Isn't it interesting that the least-likely scenario (ie. the player wins) is the one that is considered canonical?

[TheeXile]

myk said:

...

After all, while the group of marines may have helped a bit, the ratio of dead human corpses compared to dead monsters doesn't seem to show they were very effective, unless hellish monsters bury their dead or like hellish flesh over mortal flesh.

...

Monsters could be getting revived after battles. But I'd also assume the fallen marines would turn to zombies or something, so I guess there's a few points of debate open on that matter.
</geek>

[geo]

Does the UAC become "the company" from the Aliens franchise? No wait UAC becomes Weylen becomes Weylen / Yatuni becomes "the company."

[Gez]

UAC vs. Umbrella vs. TriOptimum vs. Weyland-Yutani vs. VersaLife vs. InGen vs. Cyberdine Systems vs. Pentex Corporation. Round one, fight!

[GreyGhost]

Add Halliburton to that cage-fight and it might be worth watching.

[40oz]

It turns out that it was the wad Invasion II that I thought I saw UAAF in but it turns out to have been USEC but with a similar logo.

[geo]

QUESTION : Can someone explain to me why the UAC needs space marines? Wouldn't they just have a security force? Maybe I just don't get the obviousness, but I keep trying to make a connection. Is it the UAC ran the place and it got out of control so marines needed to take over?

[myk]

The UAC is a military contractor, so it works closely with the Armed Forces. You could also say that many of the zombies appearing throughout the games were security guards and the like, in addition to any military personnel.

JohnnyRancid said:
Wow United Aircraft Corporation is dangerously close to Union Aerospace Corporation.

According to the Wikipedia its industry is "aerospace and defense", which is pretty much what DOOM's UAC does.

[Gez]

geo said:

QUESTION : Can someone explain to me why the UAC needs space marines?

The UAC doesn't (their research center is on another planet for suck's fake, it's not like they have any threatening neighbor), the genre does.

In classic Doom, at least, the marines are not here on UAC's behalf. They're stationed on Mars and stormed Phobos after the distress call.

In Doom3, well... But in either case, why are there space marines on Mars? What are they needed for? It doesn't really make sense. But look, it's a game about space marines fighting demons and zombies in space. Why should it make sense when it makes awesome?

[Tetzlaff]

Gez said:

In Doom 3, I put it on account of everybody who had been in Mars City long enough before the onslaught had been weakened by demoralization and exposure to Betruger's occult practices, making them easy to possess. The three guys who had just arrived were not possessed, but two of them were killed during the battle, leaving only one survivor.

Who says the protagonist in Doom3 is the only survivor? I don´t remember it that way. You meet plenty other characters during the game, and it is not suggested that they all die or become possessed later.