Killzone/Headscratchers

Helghast wear gas masks because they can only breathe Helghan's atmosphere. Okay. Killzone 2 takes place on Helghan. Okay. The Helghast still wear gas masks, while the humans don't. Wait, what?
- The masks have become a symbol of pride for the Helghan, kind of like "reclaiming" slurs. How the humans breathe, I dunno.
  - The pride bit I can understand, but they probably limit vision and are bulky. I suppose they could have vision enhancers in the lenses, making them useful.
  - They never have a problem finding you, even in the dark, so I suppose the vision enhancers can be vouched for.
- Never knock gasmasks in a time of war especially when you fight an army who could resort to desperate measures if things go south. What surprises me is that the humans arent wearing them.
- I can get the masks becoming a symbol of pride, but what bugs me is the glowing eyes. Is there any purpose in helping the enemy target your face?
  - Even assuming that the lights don't have a functional use (like the vision enhancement mentioned elsewhere)... A: Intimidation/terror against the enemy to try and encourage surrender or withdrawl, and B: For IFF purposes: in the limited visability of Helghan, the Helghens might be using them to pick out each other as much as you are using them to pick up them (and those that don't have said goggles are thus the enemy and liable to be shot on sight).
  - Each of those has a backdraw though. They may enhance immediate vision, but they fuck up your peripheral vision, so I can't imagine anyone but snipers using effectively. Fear and intimidation is countered by them basically being targets. It's not just that they make them out to be targets, but because they put them specifically on the face. Wasn't there someone in Famous Last Words that lit a cigarette in the night and was shot for it? Now imagine an army doing that on a rather dark planet. And wearing them for identification seems pointless when the ISA wear those glowing blue things. Speaking of which, what are those and why are they wearing them?
- The developers didn't want you to empathize with the Helghast, so they made sure you can't see their faces. Seriously, that's pretty much rule number one in "Dehumanizing the Enemy". By hiding their faces you don't think "This is a person, just like me.", you think "This is the enemy, whom I should kill.".
- Firstly, the masks look cool. YMMV on how much of the backstory fluff is made up to support that decision. Secondly the idea is that the pollution/particulate matter in the atmosphere is something FIERCE still. That said, it takes years for serious issues to occur. Helghan workers used to die in their thirties of Lungburn. Will the ISA Troops have serious long term health issues (if they get home)? Yes, of course. Did the government know all about that and opt not to wait for a credible countermeasure to be manufactured in sufficient numbers? Do the maths. The ISA are bastards.

Shadow Marshals(Assassins) and Spies of that fashion barely if at all mentioned in Killzone 2 yet, in 1 and Liberation they were everywhere.

Rico in Killzone 2. Whose bright idea was it to HIM in charge of capturing the leader of the Helghast? The guy who is absolutely idiotic and kill-crazy!
- This troper found it very strange/infuriating that Rico hasn't been punished for his mistakes at all. You'd think one of his squadmates would knock him out or tie him up or something to keep him from making any more dangerous decisions.
  - Narville does bust Rico down a rank to Sergeant in Killzone 3, but it raises even more problems. First of all, he's still in a position to command troops to their deaths, so why not just demote him to Private and take him out of a leadership role entirely? As well, Sev and Rico appear to be the only NCOs in the ISA task force by the time that game starts, so it doesn't really alter their place within the chain of command; they're still taking orders from Narville and giving them to the grunts. That, combined with the fact that Rico comes back with the Raiders, renders it an utterly meaningless plot point.
- Oh, and on a slightly different note: Why does the pronouciation of "Jan" get so wrong in KZ 2? This is very puzzling given the developer is from Amsterdam!
- My take is that Ricos team just happened to be the ones who made it that far, and thus had to be the ones to attack. Infantry strategy places a heavy weight on tactical initiative, so them being there and assaulting immediately makes sense. Add in the Enemy leader being the target, and an elite team, and you have a done deal.
- Rico was Team Leader of one of many Special Forces teams under Templar's command. Templar chose to use Rico's team because he had history with Rico and Rico pretty much followed Templar's orders (more or less). It was really once Templar was dead that Rico become a serious liability.
The ability of the ISA invasion force to endure Helghan's climate conditions and atmosphere without any problem. Given that such a big deal has been made out of Helghan's alien environment, the fact that it's never even mentioned is really weird. You'd think that a throw-away line could be given, like: "Make sure you take your special shots, Sev, unless you want your lungs to decompose." It would have also added another dimension to the story of Killzone 3, maybe the ISA troopers lost their supplies of such a drug, and were forced to raid an old Helghan Administration-era medicial complex in order to get more, or something close enough they could modify it for their own use.
- As well, the terraformation excuse that some fans give also doesn't work, for several reasons. 1) You don't get to mention how Helghan is a Death World at every opportunity and then backpedal by saying it's been turned into something more Earthlike. 2) By the time the Inheritor Generation was born, they had developed the ability to cope with the atmosphere, and didn't need to terraform the planet (a pretty vital detail, considering how it's the basis of the Helghast ideology: we're not human anyone, we're the Helghast, so let's go fuck up Vekta). 3) The Helghan Administration was barely able to keep the factories running and feed the population, so a large-scale terraformation project was out of the question. And by the time Visari got in power, if it didn't involve killing the ISA, he didn't particularly care for it.
- On a further note, none of the ISA troops seem to suffer any radiation poisoning or exposure from the Red Dust nuke, despite the fact that they fight some major battles in and around the ruins of Pyrrhus in Killzone 3. Even Rico, who sticks his hand in irradiated Petrusite, a substance that is shown to be extremely fatal and dangerous in every other circumstance, has no ill-effects whatsoever.
- Rico is, for some damn reason, unkillable. As for the rest, the Helghan's Atmo is not immediately fatal (read the backstory - it wasn't even immediately fatal for a bunch of malnourished, political refugees with no supplies). I'd hate to see the statistics for the incidence of Lung Cancer in ISA troops post invasion, however. (If any of their lungs make it back to Vekta).
There are atleast two seperate occasions in Killzone 3 where the writers seem to just forget about stuff or pull it out of thin air. During the assault on the crusher/factory, a fairly large deal is made of the main ISA force not having flying APCs, forcing Rico and Sev to climb up from the wheels. Halfway up, Rico calls for intruders and they arrive no problem. The second part is during the end battle. Stahl just fixed his entire cruiser through one panel in the bridge, which is silly enough as it is, but then Rico tells you to "Launch the Nuke!". Was that one random Helghast fighter lucky enough to be able to carry a fucking A-bomb? A huge part of the second game's plot revolved around the Helghast having access to ONE nuke, but you can just randomly find one because Plot Convenience.
- The first point is also pretty remarkable, given that the mobile factory has a series of AA turrets on top that you must destroy after reinforcements have landed. What, did the Helghast operating it decide to be sporting and let the ISA airborne troopers land, or were the gunners on their union-guaranteed coffee break?
  - Not so sure in the first one. Maybe they just needed to get there now as opposed to waiting for Intruder's to show up? But as for point two, they stole one of Stahl's strike ships. All of which are clearly armed with the those Petrusite nukes Stahl has spent the last 6 months (Or more, given that they had stolen the ISA's Red Dust weapon for a while) developing, which is a major point of the game's plot, that Helghan has all those weapons now.

The architecture in the captial on Helghan. The palace and military academy are all very grand, made with marble columns and kept meticulously clean. The buildings surrounding it are all built out of a few I-beam supports put into the ground, with some support beams laid between them, and a bunch of sheet metal riveted over it for walls and floors. I get that the Helghast have a very particular set of priorities when it comes to constructing military and governmental buildings compared to others, but what bothers me is that the rubbish buildings keep going on right up to the palace walls. I would think that the government would spare a little investment in making better buildings immediately adjecent to the palace and along the main boulevards leading up to it. This is essential for propoganda reasons; if a ruler wants to play off their people's pride, any show of their best will be undermined if such shows also include them at their worst. They need some majestic steets to martch troops down for Triumph of the Will-style inspirational material if they want to rouse them to war. Granted, the player is intended to notice the stark difference between the delapidated cityscape and the grand palaces as part of the Helghast characterization, but even if the main streets had an good looking fronts behind which lay barely-maintained rusting metallic cobbles, the players would get it.
- Visari has only had ten years to bootstrap Helghan's entire industrial infrastructure and create a decent war machine. The palaces were a downpayment on what he intended to do after the War (which was supposed to be long over by the time of Killzone 2).

How did humans develop interstellar travel, colonize worlds, and even create their own subspecies all within a few hundred years?
- Humanity developed interstellar travel in 2095 according to the timeline, that is almost a hundred years. A hundred years ago the first airplanes were invented, flying for a few hundred meters before either landing or crashing. Since then we have reached the Moon, constructed space stations and flown in hypersonic speed. A hundred years is a long time by today's standards.
- Developing a proper colonisation effort was a global hero project that the majority of the world's nations participated in. Whilst the first colonisation effort was a disaster (and later ones suffered setbacks - poor surveying and contaminated food grow tanks, for example) the tech base was established through the UCA.