Who peed in your cheerios? Like I said before, this is all stuff that was written months and years ago. It’s right in the name of the game. Everything we’re describing was set up by expanding the game state, and “unknowable alien intelligence” is a horror staple as old as the genre. Since interaction with the blob is essentially nonexistent, I don’t see how it constitutes lazy writing… It’s not something we plan to write anyway. It’s sheer background information.
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Being old doesn’t stop a trope from being bad, the problems with humans writing a “unknowable alien intelligence” is inherent and usually boils down to whatever the writer wants the motives to be.
In this case doom and grim dark. It’s the same reason super intelligent AI in fiction usually have plot holes you can drive a bus through, the writer is limited to their own human intellect.
Also, more of a nitpick then anything but the title of the game doesn’t actually say anything about extinction, end of the world or anything of the like. Cataclysm just means a violent change, a more accurate title would be Apocalypse: Dark Days Ahead.
It’s the “dark days ahead” I’m referring to. It’s not “better times are coming”.
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Doesn’t mean extinction or end of the world either but like I said, I was just nitpicking anyway.
However, the network of researchers, engineers, designers, and manufacturers can simply be rebuilt and/or reconnected. There already exists a chemical counter to the Mycus, and, with the right weapons, skills, and planning, the Blob can be countered.
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I think it’s just an astronomical coincidence that the Mycus, an extra-dimensional species, is biologically similar enough to Earthly fungus that we happen have a relatively effective chemical weapon for them. Even then, the fact that we have that counter doesn’t help us with the fact that the Mycus reproduces faster than humanity could ever hope to deal with.
The Blob likely isn’t biologically similar to anything on Earth. From what I understand, we haven’t even faced “The Blob” in-game. The zombies and “blob” enemies in-game are effectively just bioweapons used by the Blob to prepare Earth for whatever the Blob wants Earth for. Even if the pockets of humanity left did manage to reconnect and develop an effective counter for the Blob’s small-scale bioweapon, the Blob’s full capabilities are totally unknown and it would likely switch tactics and finish off the less than 1% of humanity left on Earth if we prove intolerable enough.
“Dark Days Ahead” also doesn’t mean “Doom is certain”, it means the days ahead are gonna be unpleasant.
Also, “it would likely switch tactics and finish off the less than 1% of humanity left on Earth if we prove intolerable enough.”
Cause that’s what CDDA needs, more bad writing.
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wait a minute… are you guys thinking I’m suggesting to change the lore? NO! I thought this was just one of those debates like, "who would win? Frankenstein’s monster or Big foot? (Frankenstein’s monster obviously)
Like you go: “The blob is super good for X and Y reason”
And then I go: “The blob is super bad because Z and Y doesn’t make sense”
This is literary a who would win Humanity (as presented in the game) or The Blob.
also, thanks Kevin for calling me delusional, that was nice…
actually, I might have gotten a bit miffed (is that the word?) there, sorry about that…
=\ I guess you probably think that throwing around insults is constructive, somehow.
I’m a writer. I don’t hate Cataclysm. I’d have set things up differently, my blob would be different, sure. But, the average player could play Cataclysm for months if not years and never understand the correlation between the blob and the zombies.
Since it has such a small in-game presence, I don’t really understand this argument. When I saw this thread I thought it would be a lot of fun discussion about people who were saying ‘Oh, I’d totally make it. You probably wouldn’t.’ Instead, this seems petty and argumentative.
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People keep talking about how the zombies are just individual cells that are insignificant to the whole, and using that to justify humanity’s doom, but it actually seems more like the opposite. It’s actually the entire reason humanity will likely survive. See, if the blob - or really any of the big interdimensional factions - really wanted to kill the survivors, they probably could, whether by sending a few hundred world’s worth of zombies through a portal directly into the center of the humans’ fortress, or through some other means. However as far as the Blob is concerned, it’s basically already won. It doesn’t care that people still occasionally kill a few zombies, and so doesn’t finish the job.
And so long as humanity doesn’t do anything big enough to bring the blob’s full attention onto us, humanity can survive. Sure, it’ll be hard times - dark days, one might say - but the standard for attracting the blob’s attention seems rather high. Enough that entire islands could likely be cleared without it noticing, which would provide a base for rebuilding. Or fortress cities patrolling often enough to ensure farming is possible within the immediate area (likely helped by natural barriers like being in a mountain valley with only one or two major enterances). Though natural barriers might not even be necessary if the ranch commune’s continued existance is anything to go by.
Now, would humanity ever actually manage to reclaim the earth? Probably not. Humanity would always be a minor faction in the struggle for earth, with the triffids, blob/zombies, and fungus being the real players here. But humanity would continue to survive, despite the adversity.
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The only fly in the ointment here is looming ecological collapse. If the invading fauna ends up being capable of cohabitating with enough of the existing ecosystem, there’s a chance, but if the ecosystem gets completely overrun with zombies and fungus etc, humanity is doomed. Which way this goes is an open question, I don’t have a strong opinion one way or the other at this point.
As you point out, it’s just the “retake the planet” scenario that is being strongly rejected.
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I think you’re being too pessimistic about this (and that’s saying something considering the situation).
There are a few things you overlooked:
- Zombies are incredibly vulnerable to wear and tear, especially with the blob eating at them. First off they have no ability to avoid danger and will blindly walk into fire, crawl across glass, or beat their limbs bloody on a door, just to get a person. Plus without a way to heal like living beings in addition to the blog eating away at them, they will burn through their bodies very quickly. Decomposition and the weather will further accelerate this process, especially during hot seasons.Eventually they’ll reach the stage where they’ll run out of living hosts to infect and die off, much like how the black plague burned itself out because it killed more than it could infect.
- We never would have gotten out of the trees if natural selection favoured selfishness over co-operation. If you steal and kill everybody you see you’ll eventually run out of people to steal from and starve. Plus being alone is not a good idea since it means you’ll have nobody to wake you up if there’s danger, nobody to watch your blind-spots, nobody to carry extra equipment, nobody to care for you when you’re sick or wounded. Plus being a jerk generally makes more than a few enemies who will want you dead. Ultimately being completely selfish is futile and will get you killed, leaving only the more co-operative groups left in social Darwinism. And humans don’t love war. If humans loved war they’d never have surrendered any battles or pulled out of Vietnam. We aren’t illogical khornate beasts, we only fight when threatened (be it out fear of “others”, threats to ego, or lack of resources). If you go around picking fights with everyone, eventually everyone will get fed up with you and gang up and stomp you. Its what happened to the Germans in WW2. Warlike cultures never thrive for long and can only survive as long as there is somebody left to fight, otherwise they’ll starve or end up turning on each-other.
- We’ve survived without doctors and surgeons for thousands of years. The only event in recorded history that ever succeeded in even causing a small dent in humanity’s overall population was the black plague.
- With genemods, mutations and bionics the concept of “humanity” becomes kind of a gray area. What do you mean by humanity? Pure blood unmodified humans or people with a common genetic ancestor? Not to mention these factors significantly speed up the evolutionary process of adapting to the environment.
- At its current population humanity numbers 8 billion. If 99% were to die off we’d still be left with over 700,000 people. And considering this takes place in the future the beginning number of humans would be far greater than 8 billion. Much like viruses even if you get rid of 99.9% of surface germs those 0.1% will bounce even tougher and vicious than the rest.
In short it is far from meaningless. Humanity has, can, and will survive. To quote a wise man “Nature, uh, always finds a, uh, way.” It may not be pretty, much of the world we may never re-inhabit and may not even resemble humans anymore, but in the end humanity will survive. And the only way to make sure we will survive is to keep fighting tooth and nail. Giving into despair will certifiably kill you, but as long there is still a reality there is a chance of a miracle. After all, monkeys on typewriters. Its like reverse murphy’s law. Anything that can go right will eventually turn out all right.
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Zombies don’t really work like that in this world. They evolve and adapt faster than we do, and there’s no evidence they rot… quite the contrary, they seem to get stronger and more powerful over time. Mutations also don’t work like that: it’s not clear if, or even how, mutated humans can breed.
The game doesn’t take place in the distant future, it takes place “next year”.
The difficulty of balancing necessary post apoc staples like psycho raiders with the likely IRL banding together of surviving factions against a common enemy was handled a while back by writing in blob psychosis, which also conveniently explains the behaviour of a lot of players.
Roughly 1/1000 to 1/10,000 people survive to game start. If you consider how many players make it past a year, even with the benefit of metagame knowledge, you can guess how many NPC’s might survive that long… By the end of year one, when people have finally had some time to sort things out, the living human population of the planet is probably in the tens of thousands, and many of those are transhumans that are likely not viable to have babies.
The majority of survivors would be people who have hidden in bunkers and shelters though, probably outnumbering high powered risk takers at least ten to one. So that means there are maybe a couple thousand player level survivors after a year or so, at most.
If those survivors eke out a few safe spaces on the planet, they can likely figure out a way to live out their lives in peace. There’s no taking things back. Even that’s a tall order, but it’s achievable. There’s no way a population the size of a small city is going to have the skills to eradicate an infection of billions of monsters, let alone one that continues to adapt to defeat their weak points
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You can’t rebuild the research and design networks, because 99.9% of the people involved in those networks are dead.
The number of surviving professors of computer science, engineering science, and physics across the entire US could comfortably fit in an elementary school classroom. There are maybe 15 people remaining in the US who know enough RTL and Verilog to design a microprocessor, and that’s less than a third of the minimum amount of people you need to implement a modern processor (and I’m being generous in that number). It’s entirely possible that every single subsystem maintainer for the Linux kernel is dead. And so on and so forth across every industry.
I’d be the first to admit that modern production teams often have more people on them than they need. But if you killed even 95% of them, the remaining people are not going to continue working. It’s not that they will work at lower efficiency. It’s that to a very large extent that they will cease to work at all.
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The human race might survive, but it will never be what it was, and over time will likely be reduced to a pre-industrial society.
This is of course assuming none of the other world factions outright drive the others out, because without the distractions of the other monsters any faction could take the planet from what humans remain.
Also an interesting point has been brought up about mutants being removed from the gene pool. I didn’t realize mutations rendered humans sterile, that does change things since if even half of the survivors are sterile then it’s an inevitable demise from the shear impossibility of the people left alive even being able to reach replacement fertility.
I’m not certain if mutations would leave someone sterile or not, but I’m not sure exactly how breeding would work or even what the genetic effects of blob mutations even are. It’s a big black box.
I’m fine with the bleak direction. It’s about the journey down the drain. Not the drain itself.
A good analogy would be complaining about the Lovecraft Mythos because humanity can’t do anything to stop Azathoth from waking up.
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And that’s disregarding whether or not the remaining humans would want to breed with mutants, we havent exactly been open to different.
579 million I thought the US is like 320 mil? And I mean there is room to create lore for a lab or something with like a “PROJECT:EDEN” plan, especially since the US and China are basically post-Cold war and pre-Hot war at the beginning of the cataclysm, but Idk if Kevin even wants an ending to the game so don’t expect this to pass through unless it’s a mod or scenario
Holy, I went from being one of the first to post in thus thread to being on the last part of the discussion within an hour or so…