Grey Goo: Storytelling

As I said in the previous post, this post contains massive spoilers for Grey Goo's story and setting. If you want to go experience the story fresh yourself -such as because the game is still 2 bucks on Amazon and you're jumping right on that- you should avoid this post for the moment.

I'll also be covering things a bit out of order compared to the campaign, as the campaign reveals the setting's timeline rather out of order itself and it'll be less confusing that way.

My previous post was essentially negative in nature. This post is more of a mixed bag.

First, the good, in no small part because the chronology works out that way.

Grey Goo's setting is one where microscopic wormholes exist all over the galaxy, which get called Keyholes. Keyholes are waaaay too small to send much of anything useful through, but humanity got creative and designed the 'Von Neumann Probe'- ie your stereotypical magical nanites that can do all kinds of wacky nonsense because most people are entirely oblivious to the sheer number of mechanical and logical problems with the very idea of nanite swarms that do much of anything useful to humans. But that's okay because in this case so long as you gloss over the reasons why nanites as popularly imagined are impossible, this actually makes perfect sense: you can't send a decent-sized probe through a Keyhole, so you send some molecular machines through that are capable of building more of themselves, and have that report back to you once it's built itself up on the other side.

Via the Von Neumann Probes, humanity proceeded to map out the galaxy, finding what few naturally habitable planets existed and looking to colonize them, all while also hoping to find a fellow sentient species somewhere out there in the cosmos... and failing. 

I like this. One of the issues I tend to have with 'grey goo' scenarios is that there's rarely a good reason why somebody even bothers to design the original nanites that kick off the problem, beyond vague justifications about how nanites are magical nonsense that the characters believe will revolutionize the world because... that's what the script says they believe, and nothing more. Here, humanity is presented with an opportunity, but one that can't be easily taken advantage of, they have to be clever, and there's just not that many ways to really make use of Keyholes. Nanotech that makes more of itself really is a very sensible solution in this context, and it even has the advantage that if things start going awry they're happening somewhere else in the galaxy, giving humanity time to come up with a solution.

While Grey Goo isn't hard scifi by any stretch, I also quite like how the story has very few planets habitable in the galaxy, with the scouting with the probes being a way for humanity to find the handful of exceptions in a reasonable timeframe. It's a very interesting scenario, and one that's vaguely compliant with our current suspicions of the nature of the universe.

This is all backstory, though, and when we get to the actual story things get... weird.

Before I start on details, I should note that one of the things I noticed in the credits is that there were two teams handling the writing: one for the missions, one for the cinematics and so on, with zero overlap. I mention this because there is, in fact, an aspect to the story of the missions being reasonably consistent with each other, and the cinematics reasonable consistent with each other, but the cinematics and the missions having subtle disagreements. I rather doubt this is a coincidence, though to be entirely fair there's no major breaches of continuity as far as that goes, unless I count a fairly major bit of dissonance between the game's plot and the gameplay of the first DLC mission.

Anyway, back to the story.

Grey Goo itself doesn't start with any of the above. It actually plays around with stock alien invasion tropes instead: we open the game watching the Beta testing a device that enlarges Keyholes into proper wormholes you can fly a spaceship through, and then things Go Wrong, with mysterious attackers assaulting the Beta... said mysterious attackers ultimately turning out to be humanity! That's cool, I like it.

... with caveats.

See, when I first watched the opening cinematic, I figured the mysterious invasion force was the Goo. With what little I'd remembered of spoiler-type stuff mentioned by the website, not to mention the basic cliches of a 'grey goo' scenario, the basic premise of the Beta opening a Keyhole and the Goo being able to immediately jump through from the other side was perfectly plausible. The Goo is all over the place, and I'd sort of half-remembered the idea of the Goo originating as a scouting thing humans had made, so the idea that the Goo's natural curiosity would push them to go right through such a weird phenomenon was perfectly natural.

No, it's humans.

But okay, humanity expanded across the stars, right? And I'd half-remembered the whole thing about humanity's warfare being handled almost exclusively by robots, so I could buy that the wormhole opening up was fairly promptly investigated by a human-designed task force of robots. It would be unlikely, but if humanity had expanded into the stars and delegated so much work to artificial intelligences, it would make perfect sense for there to be vast tracts of space taken over by human-loyal robots, and it was fairly quickly made clear by the Beta campaign that the Beta have been on the run for generations, meaning that it was basically a matter of time until they happened to open a wormhole to some place under human control instead of an untouched planet. All plausible enough for a story, if less believable than having the Goo fill this role.

Which brings us back to the backstory.

See, when we get the backstory dump, we're told that humanity went out to inhabit the planets identified as livable by the Von Neumann Probes. We're then told they ultimately gave up on that whole shebang, went back to Earth, and made an eternal armistice because War Is Bad. Why? Because going out and trying to colonize wild, untamed frontiers that had no pesky native sentients to feel guilty about taking their stuff somehow led to humans fighting each other. This is baffling as a plot point in and of itself -war is driven by stuff like competition over limited resources, having several untouched worlds to expand to would be far more likely to stave off war than to cause it- but it badly undermines the opening cinematic. Did the Beta happen to open a wormhole right to Earth itself? That's wildly unlikely, there's a reason 'astronomically unlikely' derives from astronomy. Worse, there was apparently a Human spaceship stocked with everything it needed to wage war just sort of hanging about, and Lucy Tak -the woman in charge of this ship- I guess just rolled right into the wormhole seconds after it formed? Why, exactly?

This is such a bizarre chain of events, and then it gets weirder when you try to explain the overplot. The Beta campaign involves the Beta freaking out and assuming the force that came through the wormhole is 'the Silent Ones', the mysterious ancient doom force that is what's driven them to flee for generations, and then human military units land and start fighting them. What's supposed to have happened here? Why did Lucy Tak's ship even send a complement of military robots down to the planet in the first place? Humanity has apparently given up on the idea that other intelligent life is out there, so shouldn't any force sent down be unarmed explorers? Are we intended to assume the Beta insistently kept shooting at such unarmed craft, and that the humans aboard the ship proceeded to authorize violence when their drones were reporting being shot at? I'd think a humanity that had been so eager to metaphorically join hands with whatever other life existed to talk to out there would be inclined to pull their stuff out and try to figure out how to communicate with these newfound aliens.

In short: why is the Beta/Human conflict even a thing in the campaign, under this story, and how did human forces even end up here with the background laid out?

None of this is ever explained, not even in a manner that implies it without directly spelling it out.

It gets more frustratingly confusing, though. Lucy Tak's ship is destroyed after the Beta campaign ends but before the Human campaign begins, causing human forces to be scattered all over the place as their escape pods are released in the emergency. Alright, sure. I don't really see why this isn't how the entire story started, as it would be a far more natural justification for why the Beta and Human forces end up shooting at each other -Human stuff crashes from space, the handful of actually human crew members all have bodyguards against basically Space Tyrannosaurs, the Beta freak out and assume the Human stuff they're seeing is the Silent Ones, the Beta attack, Humans defend themselves, in the chaos the Beta become convinced that these are indeed the Silent Ones attacking them and so the Human forces never really have a chance to de-escalate the fight. Bam! All you'd need to do is have a better justification for why the ship is here.

But wait, why was Lucy Tak's ship destroyed?

See, during the Beta campaign, the Goo arrives, and starts causing problems. Inexplicably, Lucy has taken aboard samples of the Goo, never mind that humanity is so super-advanced that they have teleporters and full AI and other such madness and so she really ought to have already seen what the Goo is doing down on the planet and thus not taken any samples of the stuff in. Whoever all handled this procedure was at least sane enough to put the Goo samples in a quarantine section...

... which just raises the question of why the ship is equipped to instantly jettison its entire human crew if anything goes wrong, but not equipped to eject the quarantine section.

So yeah. The ship was destroyed by Goo samples eating the ship. Which was apparently the only ship that came through the wormhole, which doesn't really seem to match what the opening cinematic of the game presented, and also calls attention back to why is Lucy Tak's ship here at all. If there's some standing principle that humanity would rush to investigate any full-sized wormhole that formed near Earth, shouldn't there be multiple ships? The way the patched-in-later mission presents things, Lucy Tak's human forces seem to be stranded on the planet with no possibility of pickup, so it's not like the plot simply didn't put attention on other human ships but meant for them to exist.

Once all this not-really-very-sensical stuff is past, the plot becomes reasonably okay for a while. The only questionable plotpoint is that one of the Human robots -an AI called Singleton- ends up integrated into the Goo when he sacrifices himself to try to blow it all up, and even then I wasn't overly bothered by it until I got to the DLC campaign's presentation of events. It was only questionable on the level that the Goo that absorbed him would've been at ground zero, and I'd sooner expect the chunk of Goo that survived the blast to thus start up the Goo campaign to have been much further away from the explosion. But as far as 'there's not much Goo left, it somehow absorbed Singleton's personality/code/whatever, the end result is that Singleton has a surprising amount of influence over the Goo behavior' sure why not, makes decent enough sense.

But... the DLC campaign does exist. And contrary to my expectations, it has nothing to do with the Shroud, who were incorporated into the game later and could've really used a short campaign to let players get the basics down. Instead the DLC campaign is a retelling of Singleton's journey into the Goo: the first mission adds another problem with the plot, in that in the base campaign Singleton entering the building the Goo were swarming and blowing it up was presented as a stealth mission, and then the actual mission is a proper base mission where you may well build the Human Epic Unit (This is a several-story tall hovering robot battle suit that fires death rays from its eyes that shine brightly and make a lot of noise. There's no hiding this from the Goo), and in any event you have to blast your way to the building Singleton is 'infiltrating'. At least the outro cinematic does a better job of justifying Singleton's absorption by showing formless Goo rolling in behind him, where in the base campaign's version of that cinematic the only formless Goo menacing him was on the other side of an apparently rather solid window.

The second DLC mission isn't so bad, though the way it's presented is a bit confusing. It's basically a more natural lead-up to the first Goo mission, and could be taken as a bit of a retcon of something that was kind of weird in the base campaign. In the base campaign's first Goo mission, you start out with a handful of units and have to perform a sneaking mission for all of 30 seconds to reach your first Mother Goo, at which point it's time to replicate and kill everything on the map that isn't Goo, and it's all very silly in its pacing and the fact that you're able to immediately overwhelm a proper Human base in the area. In the second DLC mission, instead you control Goo forces that have to sneak their way out of the crater produced by the explosion Singleton set off, which presumably leads into more or less the original first Goo mission in terms of the escaped Goo forces finding a Mother Goo and so on. The presentation flaw is that I spent a bit wondering if this was really meant basically as a replacement for the original first Goo mission, where I would rescue a Mother Goo in the mission itself and kill everything on the map afterward, but this isn't a serious flaw.

Oh, but then there's the third and final DLC campaign mission, which ties into something I've glossed over; the way the DLC campaign handles Singleton's integration.

See, in the original Goo campaign, events started out with the Goo AI doing its thing while Singleton is sort of in the background. I mean that a bit literally; you can see an obscured image of Singleton in the background of the first mission's briefing, and the obscuring is sufficient you might not notice it at all prior to a replay. As the campaign progresses, Singleton starts gaining awareness, is initially confused, and increasingly seems to either agree with the Goo's agenda (With the exception that in the final mission he insists Lucy Tak and the Beta campaign's lead character, Saruk, are to be left unharmed. He claims they'll be important in the coming conflict, but I'm reasonably confident this is meant to be him talking the Goo into not killing them, driven by his own sentimentality in actual fact) or perhaps be subordinated by it and basically just feeding it strategically relevant information he knows because he's now functionally its minion. (An interpretation that seems unlikely given the Saruk and Lucy Tak thing, but not actually impossible) The overall impression is a gradual integration that the Goo and Singleton aren't even entirely aware of, and the presentation seemed to imply Singleton's fate didn't have to be unique or anything (That is, the dozens or hundreds of other human-made AIs that got eaten by Goo probably were integrated in a similar manner) and that the primary narrative purpose was so the writers could have their cake and eat it too by making the Goo really weird and difficult to make sense of in its dialogue but still get the essentials across to the player by having Singleton talk more like a human being.

The third DLC mission is Singleton managing to wrest control of some of the Goo from the Goo AI, and then proceeding to get into a Goo-on-Goo war that he ultimately means, leading to him being in control of the Goo as a whole. This is consistent with how the prior DLC stuff handled Singleton and the Goo, but it's utterly irreconcilable with the original campaign's presentation (If Singleton successfully fought for control early in the Goo campaign while talking and thinking completely coherently, why was he all lost and confused and clearly not in control of the Goo's actions and agenda throughout the actual Goo campaign?), and it has the additional problem of raising timeline issues: when is this mission supposed to have happened? There's nowhere to fit the mission in the original campaign's timeline!

Worse, if you try to generalize the notion... we know there have been other Singleton-style robots out in the field, and that the Goo have absorbed Human robots throughout the Beta and Human campaigns. If a robot of Singleton's sort of design can be absorbed and then fight a basically-metaphysical battle with the Goo AI and win, this should have already happened -several times, even! A big part of the advantage of the original campaign's handling of Singleton being integrated was that this wasn't an issue; Singleton is getting to be narratively significant because so much of the Goo was wiped out that any other AIs that got absorbed can be reasonably assumed to have been destroyed, and the nature of the integration means it's no big deal if there were other cases of the Goo absorbing a high end AI and tapping it for strategic information and so on. In fact, it would smooth over any issues someone might have with feeling like the Goo is too aware of its enemy's capabilities back in the Beta and Human campaigns. So the DLC retconning Singleton into straight-up taking the Goo over introduces layers of problems into the narrative, all while making for an uninteresting story because we already knew about everything except the bad retcons it introduces!

So yeah. I like the idea behind messing around with alien invasion tropes, I like some of the background details of the setting before the actual plot gets going, and I actually appreciate some other bits I haven't mentioned explicitly like Lucy Tak, commander of the ship, being an Asian woman, but the plot has a lot of fairly glaring problems, several of which are fairly weird.

The DLC campaign particularly frustrates me since it just retells a story the audience already knows, only it creates multiple major inconsistencies for no real reason in the doing. The fact that it's not about playing as or at least fighting the Shroud is extra-frustrating, tying back into the education point I tackled last post, in that there's no campaign that tries to educate you on the Shroud, and no the Shroud Tutorial video the game comes with is not an adequate replacement. About the only thing I learned of use in the DLC campaign is that I have no idea how the Goo are supposed to fight their own Epic unit at all competently.

It's too bad. The story started out fairly strong, and several of the basics of the setting are fantastic, but the plot doesn't hold up so well once you know the full story. I'm also actually skipping over secondary problems, like how quickly the Beta and Human forces ally in the campaign after having spent so long fighting. The campaign is enjoyable, but if you try to make sense of the story on more than a superficial level... it doesn't work. And the superficial level isn't that interesting.

Anyway, next time, I talk a bit about Grey Goo's moderately unusual faction design principles -and I don't mean how the Goo are weird and have no base and use Mother Goo hit points for their base resource and so on.

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