MPQ's Biggest Plot-hole: The entirety of its gameplay

Unknown

So as I was waiting for health packs to regenerate I decided to pass the time by watching the ~1 minute intro to the game that lets us know what's going on in the Marvel universe (what ISO-8 is and how it affects us) before that thrilling first fight with a Level 1 IM35.

The way Iso as per that intial cutscene interacts with a player's hero development in-game seems to be the following: a hero's starting level is how powerful he/she is before ISO-8 falls to Earth. With enough Iso his powers are heightened, and much like a body needing more and more drugs to get high as your body gets used to it, the hero's powers need more and more Iso to be further boosted (and so later levels cost players more Iso). This stops at level 50/94/166, which would be as much Iso that hero's body can take without becoming unstable (while villains we fight don't care about safety and can keep absorbing more power up to 395)

The cutscene says that ISO-8 "could intensify almost any power... or unpredictably create new ones." It can intensify (reason for powers that scale with level) almost (reason for powers that don't scale with level) any power of a person with pre-existing super powers. Regular people, on the other hand, don't have powers, and so there's nothing to intensify. Rather, Iso can only affect that person by giving him/her NEW super powers.

And that's the issue: nowhere in that intial cutscene or any story episode are we told that Isotope-8 has any technological augmenting properties. Iron Man's Unibeam, Hawkeye's Blast Arrow, and the Maggia's/HAMMER's weapons thematically should be no more powerful at Level 395 than they are at Level 1. The very small set of ground rules that d3 set for themselves with the first thing they show new players dictates that Tony Stark should develop a new superpower when coming in contact with ISO-8, while the Iron Man Armor should seemingly be unaffected by it.

Now, of course this was just an observation that can't be implemented into gameplay because it would essentially ruin every goon battle (except for the mutants in ISO-8 Brotherhood) and would render quite a number of heroes useless. So basically my point is that d3 should really spend 3 minutes fixing that initial cutscene

squirrel1120

... and that's why true healing should be reversed. None of us had time for this beforehand.

OnesOwnGrief

Hawkeye: I saw this in a movie once. I just take one of these trick arrows, attach one of these crystals to the end of it and it should just amplify the effects. It should also make my little explosive tip closer to a block of C4.
Black Widow: Huh? That's nonsense. You know those movies are staged, right?
Hawkeye fires the explosive arrow and clears a building.
Hawkeye: Maybe that was just a bit more kick than I was expecting.

Unknown

I was reading an article about how the US Army is trying to build an Ironman suit and they say that in the movie the Arc Reactor literally runs on pixie dust which they don't have in real life so it's a lot harder to come up with the power source needed to run the same suit, so putting more iso 8 improves technology sounds quite legit.

Unknown

Phantron wrote:

I was reading an article about how the US Army is trying to build an Ironman suit and they say that in the movie the Arc Reactor literally runs on pixie dust which they don't have in real life so it's a lot harder to come up with the power source needed to run the same suit, so putting more iso 8 improves technology sounds quite legit.

It would sound legit... if they say it. The problem is that they only say it amplifies superpowers. The whole issue is fixed by one d3 guy adding an extra sentence in somewhere, but as is now story and game play don't seem to line up

wade66

Couldn't they say that the intellect of the weapon designer (in your example Tony Stark) is being enhanced by the Iso-8. This enhancement allows him to fine tune his existing equipment to such a degree that a radical energy output can be used with a minimal increase in consumed energy.

kidicarus

It's called a McGuffin.

It doesn't have to make sense.

Unknown

It's a magic space rock that gives tights-wearing super-powered vigilantes more super powers. Is it really that much of a leap in logic for it to be able to be applied to magical fictional machinery too just like pretty much any other given magic space rock has been known to do so in the wacky world of superheroes?

Unknown

@wade66 I suppose if you're willing to call an increase in intellect an "unpredictable new super power". Not really sure about that, though

@Raistonator again my problem isn't that Iso-8 could enhance machinery. It would make sense if it did. It's that d3 ignored its own bare-bones story line when making the game and it should spend 2 minutes fixing it

EDIT: Really, iPod? You autocorrect "fixing" to "icing" but don't turn "qould" into "would"?!?

Unknown

All technology in this world already runs on magical energy sources. Why wouldn't an even more potent source of magical energy make existing technology that runs on magic even more powerful? It's quite clear that Iso8 is also used as an energy source, as the story makes a lot of mention of HAMMER goons having Iso-8 enhanced weaponry from HAMMER goons. Those guys sure don't have any superpowers.

HailMary

Iso-8 is off-brand naquadah. Back when they made that cutscene, no one had bothered to duct-tape some Iso-8 to an arc reactor yet.