The Radical Entertainment team has released a video going in-depth on Alex Mercer, his role in Prototype 2, and his relationship with the new protagonist.
The kindly developers of the upcoming Prototype 2 have finally bent under the collective curiosity of the fanbase and given us all a brief summary of what in hell Alex Mercer, the protagonist from the first game, will be doing this second time around. Apparently, he’ll be filling the role of black-hearted, evil antagonist.
The hero of the new game will be James Heller (who seems to share Mercer’s penchant for wearing hoodies beneath leather jackets), a man whose family was killed by the Blacklight virus that terrorized New York in the first game. This immediately puts him at odds with Mercer, who unleashed the virus. As if that weren’t enough, Mercer goes out of his way to infect Heller with the same virus, which proceeds to give Heller similar powers to Mercer. Heller then sets off to “destroy his maker”, as the devs put it, comparing the face off between maker and make-ee to the struggle between Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader, or the showdown between David and Goliath (which actually makes no sense, but Radical makes good games, so I’ll forgive them that).
Part of their reasoning behind switching protagonists, the devs say, was that you had just spent the first game building Mercer up into a god-mode killing machine, so there’s not much ground left to cover with him. What if instead you had to build someone else up to be powerful enough to take down the ultra-powerful Mercer? That sounds like a worthy sequel.
What’s interesting is that even though Mercer is the antagonist in the game, that doesn’t necessarily mean he’s a bad guy. Mercer’s motivations aside, Heller has more than enough reason to want to pummel Mercer into a smear on the wall to avenge the death of his family, so we could be looking at a battle between two super-powered shades of grey then a clear cut black-and-white battle between good and evil. Of course, Mercer certainly could have become a rainbow-hating, baby-scaring baddy since the last game, but we’ll have to wait for the game to come out to find out whether-or-not that’s the case.
