Hello everyone! It’s time for me to make another long post. Now, you’ve seen the title, and yes: it’s a point driven into the ground. Sam’s story line in Below Zero is hot garbage. I’m not here to rant about how bad it is. I’m here to (try to) explain why it’s hot garbage.
[TL;DR]: Sam’s story had a confusing history, with several revisions being scrapped due to poor development and time concerns.
But that’s not enough to explain why.
The story of Below Zero started off janky, as do most games. I’m fairly certain Sam was supposed to be part of the game in some way throughout development, but this much is obvious. Sam was originally going to be a (not dead) character that would guide you along through the world. The devs scrapped the storyline in which this happens. They said something like how they were concerned with the quality and how they couldn’t think of a way to wrap it up. They threw the story out nearly entirely, just a few months before the game’s release.
That’s where our (current) story begins. The characters were completely re-written, many things can still be seen in scrapped PDAs and other voice clips. Instead of an Alterran Employee on a mission to do some work, instead we have a more free-form main character, searching for her deceased sister (for whatever reason) and getting caught in the crossfire of a precursor. Now, I actually do think AL-An’s rewrite turned out well. He used to be snarky, and pretty rude. I think him having a fascination rather than annoyance of the human race just makes sense. But that’s not the point. Sam’s (and by extension, the rest of the Alterra crew) was originally just as, if not more important as AL-An’s. However, in the rewrite, AL-An’s became the main driving point. Why go down to this place? AL-An marked an artifact here. Why go deep underwater, swimming with the most dangerous monsters in the game? AL-An needs a body. Sam’s story got shoved to the side, pushed into PDA logs and a few short voice clips. This was the ultimate death of Sam’s story: her irrelevance. You could easily play the entire game without even bothering with Sam’s storyline. Only AL-An matters. I genuinely thought reaching the frozen leviathan was the end of her storyline, because I picked up the only PDA entry some time ago, read it, forgot it, and just assumed I was done. Nope! Surprise, there’s actually this random serum (that somehow exists) stashed away, and only a single PDA entry vaguely mentions it!
Her story just got forgotten about during the rewrite. Some parts seem to happen for no reason, others are absent even though they would be a crucial part of the story. Sam’s ultimate death was not because of negligence, or an act of heroism, but because the devs panicked too far into development, and pulled the plug on her story.
