Name a Plot Hole and Has It Ruined the Game for You.

[Grouchy Imp_v1legacy]

2) Little Lamplight. A community that has existed for the last 200 years in isolation despite ejecting citizens as soon as they reach puberty. If you need this explaining to you then I officially give up.

If I remember correctly children from Big Town are sent to Little Lamplight. Would make sense because there are no kids in Big Town and no adults in Little Lamplight.

Now that you mention it that does ring a vague bell. It still makes no sense though that parents would be willing to send their newborn infants off to a place that a) has no real protection and b) is right next to a Vault full of Super Mutants - so I'm gonna be stubborn and still call that a plot hole.

1- There are two super mutants; The original was created by the FEV, and the second are those created by the FEV and further mutated by radiation exposure.

2- The ejectees from Lamplight appear to be in their late teens, it's conceivable that once they hit puberty, they... conceive the next generation and leave one year after childbirth.

It's conceivable, but it still makes no sense. If you're going to leave your kids alone in a hostile wilderness (and what parent would?) there are better places to leave your kid than right next door to a bunch of homicidal Super Mutants. Sorry, but that's a pretty thin excuse for a pretty big plot hole.

1. Uhh no, what you are quoting was the master said his plan was, before he found out super mutants were sterile. Nothing in there suggests that super mutants became unsterilized, only that the master's plan didn't include something he didn't know about.

Ok, I'll give you that one.

2. pedophilia is an adult doing children, not children doing other children. Also, trying to squeeze modern day, real world, human actions into a world is that fundamentally different and trying to say "IT DOESN'T MAKE SENSE" is a flawed argument. Its like saying that people raised in cults wont follow the cults rules, even if they are very off base from modern society, and yet, people do.

The 'cult' defense isn't really tenable I'm afraid. Excusing this inexplicable behavior by basically saying "well crazy people could do anything" doesn't excuse the plot hole (or it can be used to explain every plot hole ever). As I've said above, even if someone could find a valid reason for parents to abandon their children alone in the Wasteland, there are better places to leave a kid than in the same cave system as a bunch of psychologically unstable Super Mutants.

 

[Goliath100]

I have really ever once stopped playing a game because of a plot element: And that honor goes to Fallout: New Vegas, and the existence of Yes Man. Question: Why can't I give it to The Brotherhood of Steel? Or the Followers? And why is this the only way to take over the place?

 

[Goliath100]

snip

There is a ending where the player takes over, the same way Mr. House does. If the player can take over, why can't I give the top spot to someone else?

 

[Nimzabaat]

BioShock Infinite

Almost too many to mention but...

Spoiler

The first time you switch dimensions why didn't Booker just take Elizabeth to Paris? He is now in a different dimension where he has zero obligations as far as he knows. He doesn't know that the people who gave him the mission could follow him, so in his mind, he can't even turn in the mission anymore.

Songbird was stopping them from leaving any sooner than they did.

That could work as an explanation except...
A) No sign of Songbird while they were on the air ship
B) That was Booker A and Elizabeth A in dimension B (or possibly C even, I forget how many tears happen before you get to the airship). Wouldn't Songbird be looking for Elizabeth B (assuming she had also been rescued, which is quite an assumption) in the last place Elizabeth B and Booker B had appeared? That's if Elizabeth B had escaped at all, If she hadn't Songbird wouldn't even be aware if a problem.

Yeah the harder they tried, the harder they failed.

 

[klaynexas3]

infamous, simply because of the time travel aspect to it. On top of that, all the conduits were supposed to die at the end of 2, and even though they just say "they actually didn't all die," how did these other conduits get their powers? It took explosive energy and the deaths of hundreds to fuel the power to give the conduits their powers in the first two, or a slow introduction of the power over days of constant injection, so why did the ones in Second Son just get their power? I smell a high concentration of bullshit.

 

[Timmaaaah]

Far Cry 2 & Far Cry 3: They seem to assume a complete reversal of established motivations that just don't make any sense. Why do I no longer want to kill the Jackal? Why on Earth would I betray the same friends I just went through Hell and back for saving?

For Far Cry 3 I just never pick the ending when he kills his friends. Just makes absolutely no sense. I found it really stupid that there wasn't a middle ground, but then again he was on some pretty fucked up drugs and was going kind of crazy. In the final quick time boss fight with Hoyt he murdered everybody else in the room without even realizing it

 

[Timmaaaah]

GTA 5... Not so much a plot hole rather than just a silly thing... In the endings when you kill either Michael or Trevor it leaves plot threads dangling. When you kill Trevor, Michael still would have Devon Weston after him, and if you kill Michael, Trevor would still have Merryweather, the chinese guys, and the FIB wanting him dead.

Assassins Creed was kind of ruined for me in Revelations when Desmond finally meets Subject 16. They talk about how "16 could explain what all of this means" in reference to Adam and Eve, Abstergo's plans, what he meant by "everything you care about is already gone... Find eve... Her DNA... The key"
All these mysteries that could have had a reveal but then Desmond doesn't ask him a single question we wanted the answer to. Just terrible writing... Probably because after Brotherhood Jeffrey Yolahem stopped leading the writing on AC

 

[Gaijinko]

Not so much a plot hole but something that has always stuck with me. In jak 2, jak has been tortured and injected with dark eco for what now? 2 years was it. Yet during that time as a prisoner he managed to cultivate a perfect chin beard, meaning if it was a prison situation, the guards must shave him and thought, damn it he would look fine with a goatee lets go with that, and then spend two years making sure it was properly trimmed.

 

[Timmaaaah]

OT- Far Cry 3's ending.
The endings are so fucking jarring. Why the fuck would I choose to kill the people I went through hell to rescue? And, more importantly, why the fuck does Brody (?)... the player character go emo and start acting like a pussy if you chose to stand by your friends?[/spoiler]

Pretty sure it's because he had killed literally hundreds of people and gone kind of COMPLETELY INSANE in the time he spent on the island. In the course of trying to kill Hoyt he TORTURED HIS LITTLE BROTHER. I'm pretty sure that is a good reason to have a bit of a fuckin breakdown. People have had psychotic episodes over way less. He's killed a shitload of people and has no idea if he can come back from that. Could anybody come back from that?

It's kinda fucked that you think that acting like a human being is the same as acting like a pussy...

 

[Timmaaaah]

Not so much a plot hole but something that has always stuck with me. In jak 2, jak has been tortured and injected with dark eco for what now? 2 years was it. Yet during that time as a prisoner he managed to cultivate a perfect chin beard, meaning if it was a prison situation, the guards must shave him and thought, damn it he would look fine with a goatee lets go with that, and then spend two years making sure it was properly trimmed.

Maybe his hair just grew like that... I usually excuse design. I just thought it was weird that he suddenly stopped being a mute.

 

[Gaijinko]

Not so much a plot hole but something that has always stuck with me. In jak 2, jak has been tortured and injected with dark eco for what now? 2 years was it. Yet during that time as a prisoner he managed to cultivate a perfect chin beard, meaning if it was a prison situation, the guards must shave him and thought, damn it he would look fine with a goatee lets go with that, and then spend two years making sure it was properly trimmed.

Maybe his hair just grew like that... I usually excuse design. I just thought it was weird that he suddenly stopped being a mute.

I thought the mute thing was handled quite well with Daxter making a few jokes about it, I guess its hard to carry a silent protagonist through games you want to make into a franchise unless its link of course, and even the Zelda games aren't really about the same guy, Majoras mask being the exception. The chin beard thing though always stuck with me cos those things need moderate attention to stop them sprouting into full on grizzly territory and all I could imagine is that Jak was wheeled to a prison barber between torture sessions to ask for a shave and a trim (but don't touch the hair, I wanna see what it looks like grown out).

 

[Treeberry]

When it comes to Mass Effect, how did Udina end up as the Human Councillor in ME3? How did Anderson get ahead of Shepard in The Citadel at the end of ME3? Finally, in ME3 as you're making the final dash towards the Citadel Beam thing, what happens to your party? Personally, I kept Garrus and Liara with me so they should have been killed by The Reaper beam and yet we see both of them safe and sound on The Normandy...Tha Hell?! None of those plot holes ruined Mass Effect 3 for me since they're minor when compared to the awesomeness that is Kalros vs Reaper and certain other character moments.

The biggest plot hole for me was also the simplest.

Anderson: "Our objective is to reach that giant beacon, which the Reapers now control. It'll be a slaughter, but if we can get even one man inside that thing, they'll be able to activate our magic (Deus Ex Machina) super weapon and destroy the reapers forever. Any questions?"

Me: "So why don't the reapers just turn it off...."

Just like that the magic was broken. I still loved the game, but the whole time I kept hoping that the writers would explain the plot hole. Maybe this was just another layer of control. Maybe Shepard was indoctrinated, and he was supposed to lure the entire Allied fleet into one place so that the Reapers could destroy them in one fell swoop. Therefore, the Reapers wanted you to reach the beacon the entire time. After all, Bioware had great writers. They knew what they were doing. Obviously... that's not what happened.

Also, anything David Cage related. It's not uncommon for games to have poorly developed stories, but if the story is the entire crux of your game, and if you're going to play tortured artist, you better make damn sure that you have all your ducks in a row, because plot holes are unacceptable. Heavy Rain was interesting, but the shamble of a story and the rapey bits destroyed the entire game for me. For someone focused on video game story telling, David Cage is a really poor writer...

I agree on Mass Effect. Perhaps everyone was slowly getting passively indoctrinated in Citadel? Actually, I agree with you about Heavy Rain as well. I thought it was amazing when I first played it until I realised that lot of it didn't quite add up and that I shouldn't plug in someone else's plot holes.

Anyway, for me I was completely turned off Yakuza 3 thanks to Kiryu's self-cleaning jacket. The main character gets blood on his jacket and this triggers a chase and stealth sequence only for his clothes to miraculously clean themselves in a cutscene. He doesn't throw away the offending article of clothing, he doesn't change - the blood just vanishes without a trace, for no reason, without so much as a comment. It might seem like a little thing but I just couldn't wrap my head around how the developers forgot this important plot-related detail and I just stopped playing shortly after that point.

 

[Vedrenne]

SC2:Heart of the Swarm.

There are many plot holes in this one, but there is one that overcasts everything.

Kerrigan goes to great lengths to become a Primal Zerg, because that will make her immune to the Xel'Naga and their mind control (ignoring the fact they had no issues controlling the Primal Zerg to turn them into current Zerg in the first place).

So, despite supposedly being immune to Xel'naga influence by becoming the Primal Queen of Blades, she walks up to Mengsk and is crippled by the Xel'Naga artifact. If it weren't for Raynor shooting the control for it to smithereens, Kerrigan would have be Mengsk's new doormat.

After it being shown that being a Primal Queen of Blades makes no difference to how much she is affected by the Xel'naga, she decides the best course of action wasn't using the Xel'naga artifact to turn herself human again so she could have her happily ever after with Raynor and tying up their storyline with Mengsk in a nice little package but instead getting all the corrupt Zerg under her control and going to fight the Xel'naga in the void...with no thought about how both herself and the corrupt Zerg are at risk of being placed under the Xel'nagas control.

Why can't RTS games have a racial leader with a degree of intelligence and common sense? (Except Eliphas, he know how to get the job done).

 

[Kaisikudo]

I'm not sure that either of these really qualify as plot holes. They were just questionable plot devices thrown in hastily, near the end of two otherwise fairly enjoyable RPGs, that were so farfetched I struggled to wrap my head around them:

1) Star Ocean III

After the dramatic deaths of numerous characters at the hands of a group of crazy enormous Cyber-Dragon-Thingies, the main party leap through some sort of warp gate that is said to take them into "4D Space". This fourth dimension however turns out to simply be "the real world".... Yeah... that's right... The characters of the game which you had just invested hours into playing as are revealed to be nothing more than characters in a virtual reality simulator. It made no sense to me how these purely digital entities could somehow take on a "real" or corporeal form, let alone LEAVE their virtual world. It also made for some pretty inception-like madness, considering that the tutorial of the game takes place in a virtual reality simulator, unknowingly within the hero's own virtual reality simulation. And what's to say that this "4D space" wasn't simply another VR world, within another VR world, within another VR world, within another...

2) Final Fantasy VIII

Okay, we all know this one. The freakin' orphanage business that they throw in your face on Disc III. Uhh.... what? Ignoring the extremely convenient circumstances leading to ALL of the children at this orphanage later assembling as adults, and ALL of them having managed to lose the memory of this highly specific part of their history - did none of these people think to question "Hmmm. I wonder what happened to me during this brief period of my childhood which I seem to have forgotten". Granted, they probably lost numerous memories, not simply these ones, but still.... AND IRVINE. MY GOD. Hey, lets not instantly recognize my childhood friends. Lets take forever to decide that "Yeah, they all look like my friends, and yeah they have my friends names... Hmmm. I think maybe they might be my friends. Maybe".

Did these plot holes ruin these games for me? Somehow, no. They're still two of my favourite games of all time xD

 

[Voulan]

OT- Far Cry 3's ending.

Spoiler

The endings are so fucking jarring. Why the fuck would I choose to kill the people I went through hell to rescue? And, more importantly, why the fuck does Brody (?)... the player character go emo and start acting like a pussy if you chose to stand by your friends?

Seconding this. Not for the same reasons, just general bullshitty-ness.

What's even more infuriating is the lead writer crying that we all just "didn't understand" what he was doing and his work was really good. Hey fuckwit, if no one understands your creative work, it means that it's shit. End of story. You can't write. Cop it on the chin like a man instead of complaining about your audience.

I'll third this.

Spoiler

The game did a really shitty job at making me want to stay on the island with these psychos, Jason coping a whiny attitude for all of 3 scenes does not suddenly justify turning around and killing his friends and family just because the crazy lady whose spent the whole game molesting and drugging you asks you to. Especially after the much better written scenes where Jason goes to really incredible lengths to rescue his brother, and they have the more emotional scenes on the helicopter, why the hell would the game just ask you to kill them 3 seconds after establishing the length Jason would actually go through to rescue them, he literally has no reason to do so beyond a few half-hearted lines about his friends not understanding how totally awesome it is to kill random evil mercenaries.

It comes off like one of those shitty moral choice systems that seems to equate evil with being a douchebag or psychopath for no adequately explained reason or benefit.

The writer whining about how that choice was totally how the game should have been and how it's like totally about subverting the standard gamer power fantasy of being the hero and getting the girl (even though nobody I knew had the kill ending as their first choice) certainly gave everything that lovely veneer of pretentiousness)

The best way to look at Far Cry 3 is to think of it being more akin to a parody of power fantasies - which is what the writer admits was the premise behind the game but wasn't obvious enough to the players. The idea of a young American saving the day for the indigenous locals is meant to look as stupid as it is, and this follows with the endings - do you give up everything to follow an unrealistic power fantasy that we're often presented with in games, or the choice that makes sense?

And of course, choosing the former will end in a punishment, because you've fallen for the fantasy.

 

[remnant_phoenix]

Well, I guess this dead horse could use a few more whacks. (drags out the corpse of Final Fantasy XIII)

In the final battle and cutscenes, there's a twist that defines all the crazy stuff that the heroes do to save the world, how it happens, and why it happens.

Problem? It's never explained in the cutscenes! I had to find out on Final Fantasy wiki just how the hell the characters managed to do all the crazy things that they did, especially because at least one of the things that they do has been established as impossible by established lore/rules/metaphysics of the world leading up to that point.

Yes, the thing that fills in the plot hole is HINTED at, but only in the most abstract way that only makes sense AFTER you know what it is.

FFXIII does this sort of thing pretty consistently, and the game expects you to read through the Datalog (Codex-like thing) to understand what's going on in the story, but this one specifically is beyond unforgivable because you can't access the Datalog once the final boss fights and cutscenes start. You have to wait until after the credits roll and reload your save, OR you have to look it up on a wiki or something.

Such awful storytelling. Such an awful game. It's all such a damn shame.

 

[remnant_phoenix]

And another one...

In Modern Warfare 2, Russia INVADES the EASTERN seaboard of the UNITED STATES.

There are so many plot holes in that sentence alone.

 

[EternallyBored]

And another one...

In Modern Warfare 2, Russia INVADES the EASTERN seaboard of the UNITED STATES.

There are so many plot holes in that sentence alone.

If only that were the extent of Russia's shenanigans in Modern Warfare. We can't forget that they withdraw from the U.S. and then pretty much simultaneously invade almost of Europe at the same time in Modern Warfare 3, including destroying Paris, the capital of yet another major world power with nuclear weapons.

That, and apparently they do all of this without getting nuked by any of the countries they just invaded, including the U.S. France, and the U.K. or the NATO ally countries protected by said nuclear powers (Germany, Belgium, Netherlands, Italy, and Turkey). Apparently, Russia has magical teleportation powers in the Modern Warfare universe.