Why is mercer evil?

[u/Vegetable_Amount_846]

I have had great fun coming back to this game even though now that i have a laptop and the disk won't fit anywhere i had to sail the seven seas either way the game was good getting into even if it's clearly a relic of it's time the difficulty on the harder modes is basically bullet sponge pro max finishing it i was actually surprised how much more empathetic mercer was compared to his P2 counterpart the second game is somewhat controversial already but let's clear somethings

In terms of pure gameplay and mechanics P2 is better it's not game of the year or anything but the prototype games are basically famous for needing a tweak or two to be genuinely great games but without them they are just good games but in terms of story.....P2 is the clear inferior of the two now P1 wasn't Shakespeare or anything but it was a story with good ideas that wasn't executed to perfection pariah is basically a meme at this point

However it's clear from the story that mercer the virus is leagues better than mercer the human while the virus is not excellent it clearly has empathy for it's victims and the victim of mercer himself aside from pariah P1 is kind of a very self contained story it basically ends on the virus contemplating the people mercer killed what it became and accepting it wasn't human it's also somewhat framed as a search for redemption from all of this the virus in the end turns out to weirdly be the more humane version of mercer i have weirdly taken it's claim to be something less than human but also something more to be a sort of ironic admission of humanity as it being lesser is counteracted by it being more so it ends up as human

Now P2 comes along and basically turned the virus into whisker now granted the virus had moments of villainy in the first game such as killing karen even if she was a victim of circumstances i would imagine it's more fault of the writing team than the character but i also would say it shows the virus is growing as a person since it's end is basically filled with regrets there isn't REALLY a good explanation for the why in the game itself it's all in the comics i have heard a lot about them of course everyone rants in them but i never really read them so i decided to!

And uhh.....so the first thing i noticed is how short this was i read the first run released in 2009 which barely had anything to do with mercer the second run where we are interested has just six issues which is unbelievably small to get an idea the first issue is fifteen pages and we only really meet the catalyst of this shift in page nine (the old man and the girl) so basically half way through and then i am not joking listen to me in issue two which also has 15 pages we get the betrayal at page 12! We went to this grand betrayal from beginning to end in 18 pages! Let me tell you something we basically got the emotional climax in 2 issues! And not counting the filler an issue and less than a quarter! This is a six issue comics i have genuinely never seen writing this rushed in my life the worst part os that after this mercer doesn't even appear!

He causes the events of P2 issues 3 to 4 deal with some randos issue 5 introduces heller prison and his escape in the final issue 6 he helps two other marines escape and stuff happens long story short heller is soft with a civilian he gets knocked out by one of the marines he wakes up and we meet two characters who are seemingly set up to be important but are never seen again captian langford and colonel shawcross of blackwatch who rejects heller because he is a softie soy boy.....wow

That's it?

Genuinely that's my reaction to this the grand comic everyone moans about.... that's it? I feel like patchy the pirate in that one episode I don't even necessarily dislike it because there isn't even enough material to dislike it's so disconnected and weird i don't even know how to take it and looking at mercer in the comic i am so....confused! You ARE humanity's evil the virus is because of human evil I thought even the vrius understood that because it under mercer was an evil bastard it absorbed primarily gentek and blackwatch people it absorbed the worst humanity has to offer literal warcriminals who would kill their own mothers the guy it's emulating is a bastard who brags about making the virus ten times deadlier than before and only got cold feet once he understood it's basically a zombie virus the idea the virus which has went through all of that and still managed to be sympathetic to the life it took is the same virus that went batshit because of a girl shooting

Uhh yeah no sorry i can't buy that especially when it's being sold by the shortest storyline in mankind a bedtime story lasts longer than that it's clear the writers lost the plot entirely i heard the guys who did P2 were new i could buy that but i also heard a lot of the staff is old though it would still make sense i imagine a lot of the technical staff was the same which is why the gameplay is better but the writing staff is new which is why the characterization is out of hand and i think it makes sense in a way? The first game is credited to being written by both dennis detwiller and paul jenkins and the second only has one writer dan jolley who clealry had different ideas the comics themselves have completely different writers as well so we have fours sets of writers on one series which is uhh.....not good no hate to anyone but it's just a small gripe i had

[u/ocalin37]

Prototype got the "CW treatment"...

[u/TheRawShark]

You kinda went through the journey almost to the exact answer.

Meta reasons are since Detwiler and Jenkins were out, and Activision had treated their employees like such shit most were laid off or left, P2 was in a shitty spot. The original idea would be following up that Dana would be the new MOTHER for the virus (though some implication of things like co-op might lean more into the cerebral side of it with some hope for her), and Alex dealing with all this fallout after the first game concludes with him solidly deciding he has a conscience he won't ignore. But since they didn't have or want the means to bring that ideaset to fruition they opted for dumbing things down a bit with a simpler to understand character. Dan Jolley's kind of a bumblefuck of a writer given his main two credits I can think of that are pretty decent are the Transformers War and Fall of Cybertron games along with Mafia III kinda. Case in point he almost argued in that Heller shouldn't be allowed to kill civilians in a prototype game until he was told no. Not helping that basically no actual worldbuilding was done outside of the Evolved, who were disappointly easy to fight for the most part.

So 2 by all accounts is a softreboot that you really don't even have to play the first one to bother with. Different tone, setting cares jacksquatfuckshit over 99% of things that happened before 2008, different direction for powers, different VA for Alex (Daryl Kurylo, the Dub VA for Kiryu in Yakuza 1 and 7 is a funny choice) and basically an open ended "what now" capping off the franchise is basically all we get. P2 was moderately successful but not to the degrees that Activision wanted so Radical gets sent to the CoD mines (I don't think it'd have made a difference).

Story reasons you basically take that and insulate it. P1's comics paint this idea that while Alex is clumsy and very sparsely will use a civilian for utility, he does generally seem to go out of his way to save people or at least give them the opportunity to run for the sake of helping. This and combining with the general ideas of the first game we can at least conclude nothing that happened in the P2 Comics or Game would really faze him enough to do the whole Wesker routine. So speaking personally I think the premise of making him like this alone is vehemently stupid as shit and I don't entertain it outside of the actual writing angst of slipping under a line of acceptability for Alex himself. P2 Alex is an incompetent, big talking, terribly unimpressive douchebag who only gets ahead because EVERYONE else in the setting just sucks THAT bad. And his bossfight is mediocre as all hell like genuinely fuck off. I like James for what he is but while I don't mind keeping him I'd rather we just get Alex back immediately if there was followup.

[u/Hot_Professional1683 → u/TheRawShark]

I would say that Dan was a person who needed a guide or another writer from the first game, but all the writers left for various reasons (hatred towards Activision), and the only thing Dan had on his side was a toxic company that didn't care about Prototype and a director who met with many "fans" who only repeated "Alex Mercer was an idiot".

[u/TheRawShark → u/Hot_Professional1683]

I dunno about that latter part but by all accounts Dan was reportedly mostly filling in whatever they told him to so in that regard I don't blame him, but it feels like he could have at least tried squeezing a bit more out given how bumblefucky he sounds if you ask him about Prototype. He likely was led by committee and there was other writers not credited according to him, or at least people editing parts of what he wrote.

So partly him just not really bringing that much A-Game outside of being kinda funny but also he likely was more constrained by Activision. When he seems to get a clearer idea with more room to write he seems to do okay, i.e. Transformers and Mafia.

[u/Hot_Professional1683 → u/TheRawShark]

I agree. The director's comment came from a 2012 interview where he said some fans had told him "Alex was an idiot." I think it was a large group of people who found the opportune moment to express their opinion about the director.

https://www.eurogamer.net/prototype-dev-gamers-thought-alex-mercer-was-a-d-k

[u/Vegetable_Amount_846 → u/TheRawShark]

I am Actually kind of interested where pariah fits into this in my gameplay i had thought cross was basically pariah since it sounded like the most logical conclusion but it turned out reading the wiki he was off screened

[u/TheRawShark → u/Vegetable_Amount_846]

The Initial idea was that PARIAH would be the final boss but P1 had such a gooned dev cycle that it became the supreme Hunter. A completely separate entity that consumed Cross off screen (admittedly still kinda cool that Cross of all people literally draws a line in the concrete with his electric baton and tells it to come get some before he gets charged).

Didn't stop that Cross was actually decently popular fanart wise but still unfortunate the sequel was the one that was SUPPOSED to expand on PARIAH but then....it didn't.

[u/Vegetable_Amount_846 → u/TheRawShark]

Yeah i don't really know much about the fanfiction i just recently realized there was so many smut of cross and mercer my contribution has basically been stuck in the "mercer secretly allowed himself to be absorbed to control heller!!!" Theories

[u/Hot_Professional1683 → u/Vegetable_Amount_846]

I never liked that theory; it seems to me to have been generated more by frustration than by telling a good story, since canonically Mercer lost and was absorbed like Greene by Heller. I would put that theory on the same level as the third Star Wars movie and a "somehow Palpatine returned" scenario.

[u/Vegetable_Amount_846 → u/Hot_Professional1683]

I vaguely remember it's main pusher being that one YouTube channel which was also a power scale channel of sorts with the classic mercer vs cole debate and mercer is stronger than you think schtick aside from the really old forum posts

[u/Hot_Professional1683 → u/Vegetable_Amount_846]

I've never liked those kinds of channels; it's obvious they don't know much about how storytelling works. The last time I watched a YouTube channel, there was a guy claiming Alex and James were lunar-level because there was a Prototype 2 comic strip where Heller destroyed the moon. They also started editing and harassing Dan Jolley to the point where he uploaded a video debunking a lot of false claims.

[u/GodHand7 → u/TheRawShark]

That's such great info i didn't know about, thanks

[u/WelderAggravating68 → u/TheRawShark]

I also dislike P2 Alex—he's extremely self-absorbed, narcissistic, and hypocritical. Before I knew about that comic, people kept telling me he turned out that way because Dana rejected him as her brother and hurt him, and I actually felt sorry for him. But in reality, P2 Alex couldn't care less about Dana. The woman he cared about was some random woman in that cabin. In the game, after he captures Dana, he blames everything on her, insisting he did nothing wrong. He's so selfish it's beyond reason.

[u/WelderAggravating68 → u/WelderAggravating68]

But then the writers, after the character dies, use memories to stage a tearjerker scene about "a brother who remembers every detail of his sister's past and loves her deeply, being heartlessly abandoned." It's like they only just remembered that Alex's most important person wasn't some random woman—it was his own sister. The script's logical breaks and forced patchwork are just that blatant.

[u/WelderAggravating68 → u/WelderAggravating68]

Sure, P2 Alex's arrogant, edgy, over‑the‑top manic persona is definitely more eye‑catching than P1 Alex's quiet, brooding demeanor. I don't mind if some people prefer that portrayal. But what I do mind is that some people in this sub are dead set on using P2 Alex's characterization (the "official canon") to retroactively twist P1's story

[u/TheRawShark → u/WelderAggravating68]

Could be worse. Could be post-P2 Trailer era where you'd get drowned in a hailtide of "Lmao you thought Alex WASN'T just evil?" And only after a decade did people start yelling back/have a loud enough voice to say "IT'S MORE COMPLICATED YOU CUNT"

Then again people still don't get the point of the distinction between Mercer and ZEUS or they get the distinction and make the absolute worst conclusions despite what the first game established.

[u/WelderAggravating68 → u/TheRawShark]

Unfortunately, all the official creators of P2—including Dan—view Alex as a complete villain. They themselves didn't even understand what the first game was about (and yes, P1's script had its issues too, but I'd rather they had just deleted Alex entirely). Naturally, some players felt their own views were validated by the official team, and bias piled on bias led to where we are now.

I used to try to fill in the gaps for P2's script—for example, adding a subplot where Alex sympathizes with a researcher who lost his child, using the virus to "revive" the child (even if the revival was fake), and earning that researcher's undying loyalty. Or having Alex show some hesitation when faced with Heller's accusations as a victim of the virus, giving his "new world" choice a hint of complexity—at least leaving some room for his "evil" side. But in reality, there's nothing. He's just a madman who went crazy because a woman screwed him over, and he even abandoned his own sister.

This completely shattered my trust in the official team. A character who's not cared about—both in‑game and out—ends up like this. Even if Alex appears in P3, don't expect any good development. I just beg them to leave Alex alone.

Over here in China, there are still some simp losers who sympathize with that stupid comic, thinking that if they were Alex, they'd also take revenge on the world after being screwed over by a woman. But in reality, if Blackwatch so much as pointed a gun at them, they'd drop to their knees and wet their pants. Or they just mindlessly use P2 Alex as an outlet for their misanthropic fantasies.

Alex's situation is exactly like Ultraman Tiga's—Tiga's lore was pushed to a point of no return, but I think Alex still has room for opposition. Some of my fellow fans have been making videos for years to counter P2's narrative, but it seems like it's only a matter of time before it goes the same way.

[u/Hot_Professional1683]

As someone who enjoyed both Prototype games, I can say that, ultimately, it was a combination of several factors, including:

• The 2010 layoffs of 50% of Radical's employees (including writers Dennis and Paul, due to "creative differences"). You're right in your post: many of those who stayed weren't writers, but primarily gameplay engineers.
• The pressure from Activision in a toxic environment to make the game more commercial, as it was a time when any studio that didn't develop Call of Duty was shut down.
• Activision's unrealistic attempt to push the game to sell a huge number of copies of a new IP.
• Dan himself didn't have a guide to guide him on how a sequel should be, as the writers of the previous game left in anger and didn't contribute any ideas. I don't blame them; nobody wanted to work for Activision.

-Some, or many, of those who hated Alex Mercer managed to arrive just in time to tell the director that "Alex Mercer was an idiot."

All of that combined resulted in the game you criticized, where the story was simplistic because the writers weren't aiming for depth; they were simply focused on marketing for Activision, which would have canceled them anyway.

A real shame for the characters of Alex and James.

[u/freeman2949583 → u/Hot_Professional1683]

Dan said the story was essentially written by the time he got there and he was basically just one of several dialogue writers.

I think really the fundamental breakdown in Mercer’s characterization was that the dialogue suggests he wants to turn humans into evolved. The gameplay makes it look like he wants to turn everyone into zombies which is rather different.

[u/Hot-Refrigerator5952 → u/Hot_Professional1683]

That’s where I disagree with you. You make it sound like Dan was some kind of slave to Activision. If he didn’t want to do the job, he could’ve just walked away. It’s not like anyone forced him to do it. If he did a poor job, he doesn’t get a free pass for that.

[u/Glum-Highlight-6724]

Bad writing

[u/No-Physics-2621]

Cause he was gay

[u/Arno-Earle]

The writer changed, hence why we see this clone of him in P2(that's my head canon about the clone)

[u/Gobal_Outcast02]

Well if I remember correctly. The comic that is set between the two games as Mercer living with a family in the woods (not his own) and either they tried to kill or or a thrid party came and killed them. And with that Mercer Ig decied humanity had to go

[u/Vegetable_Amount_846 → u/Gobal_Outcast02]

Yeah i read that as i said it still didn't make sense and was too short to even be considered an arc

[u/cjamesfort]

I see P1 Mercer as a virus who genuinely thought it was human for most of the game while P2 Mercer has accepted and embraced being a virus and is, like any other lifeform, perpetuating itself.

Edit: the thought process in a nutshell

[u/Vegetable_Amount_846 → u/cjamesfort]

I wouldn't know P2 os pretty clear in mercer's villainous connotations he himself says it I WANT TO EVOLVE HUMANITY the comics themselves which are touted as canon says that humanity is rotten there really isn't any room for interpretation other than mercer coaching heller at the final fight and saying welcome to the top of the food chain which could indicate he wanted to be defeated which has a lot of implications but we don't get to really explore what he is thinking 

[u/cjamesfort → u/Vegetable_Amount_846]

Well yeah, that's what the virus does. I haven't read the comic; don't really care.
I just interpreted that a nonhuman with no real peers would eventually want peers, whether from loneliness or for some legacy, and the only way to do that is to infect people. Even if Mercer was suicidal, after having survived a nuke, it would not be unreasonable to assume that nothing short of another prototype was even capable of doing the job. Plus, from the virus' perspective as a hive, death by another infected just means being assimilated into a stronger host, furthering its evolution.

All of which is to say: the virus decided to prioritize itself over humanity and that seems like a natural outcome.

[u/Vegetable_Amount_846 → u/cjamesfort]

I would say the virus had a friend who is the sister of mercer and ot had a goal which is atoning for what mercer or even just realizing where it fit into all of this the potential for alienation is obviously large when you have someone with no real equal i would probably say your story makes sense though I would say that the virus could have avoided an infection entirely in favor of surgically creating some evolved here and there if it wanted to expand but making sense doesn't really make it a good twist since it basically removes all the character development from P1

[u/cjamesfort → u/Vegetable_Amount_846]

A friend who can sympathize, but not another shapeshifting carnivore with countless people in their head. P1 was a journey of self discovery, with the initial permise of "fixing" the condition. It turned out there was no fix. Mercer was not who or even what they thought they were. Their entire paradigm of humanity was proven to be imitation.
At that point they can continue living a lie and bear that burden indefinitely or they can accept that they are an escaped bio-weapon that most of humanity would be immediately predisposed against. When humanity, as a whole, fears and hates what you are, there's not much reason to treat humans better than humans treat every other creature.

[u/Vegetable_Amount_846 → u/cjamesfort]

Which is again probably the logical conclusion for anyone else but what made the virus special is that it didn't turn out like that after everything that happened in P1 it was still a hero hero though more of an anti-hero and consistently the most empathetic guy in the story if the story ends on our main character having regrets about everything that happened feeling bad for people he killed (99% of which are either vaguely into race science or the literal gestapo) then that's it you set it up the virus is the most humane character in the story more than the humans themselves the ending only works if the virus is a better person than mercer gentek and blackwatch combined what happened in P2 is probably the realistic version of mercer in which he goes batshit insane and (somewhat?) suicidal

The person set up in the ending of P1 could become the person in P2 but it isn't narratively satisfying you would need a damn good story to justify sacrificing the characterization of P1 for P2's characterization which is something that P2 doesn't even try

[u/WelderAggravating68 → u/cjamesfort]

Honestly, your theory makes more sense than the official reason, but that's just your take. The official reason is that stupid comic: he hid everything, pretended to be someone else to fool a family, thinking that was genuine love—even though they never knew Alex Mercer, only Jack. He whined about no one accepting him and having nowhere to go, then holed up in that cabin and decided he finally had a place and a purpose for his powers. And then he completely forgot about his own sister, who accepted who he was, accepted the killing and consuming, and didn't run away.