The main Story in The Surge takes place in a heavily dystopian future as Earth nears the end of its life. Those who remain in the overpopulated cities must work to survive as social programs become saturated by an ageing population and increasing environmental diseases. As the intelligence of technology incrementally increased over the years, many jobs for the human race had been made redundant, forcing Earth's citizens to head out into the suburbs seeking labor, aided by exoskeletons to improve their efficiency. The world of The Surge offers a very grim vision of the future, where the evolution of our technology, our society and our relation with the environment led to a decadent state of the Human civilization. The events of the game's progression will be recorded chronologically here once more is known.
Story Information
From a developer interview with Deck 13: "The world is messed up. Ecological problems have progressed, and it's gotten really bad. Global governments have fallen, there are failed states, the normal people are just screwed. The company that you're an employee of is trying to fix this by putting satellites into the atmosphere. Their mission is to seed the atmosphere to heal the world's ecology and to do this they have to invent new technology. They have to “dig too deep” in certain ways. You arrive here as just a regular guy who's happy to have a job, but stuff goes super bad. A big part of the game is discovering bits and pieces of the scenario as you play through. It's a bit of a mystery, they're developing new technology to do this and like in so many stories when a group is extremely oriented and centered on achieving certain results sometimes there is a dark side to this process."[1]
Story Rundown
You (Warren) are a paraplegic in a wheelchair, on your way to the Creo facilities to begin as an exorig worker and regain your ability to walk. While on the train, you see a rocket launching into the sky.
As your rig is being mounted, something goes wrong. You don't get sedated and you pass out because of the pain.
You wake up in a wasteland with a robot trying to take your rig off. Beside you are dead bodies with rig connections on their body, but no rigs attached. All around you are signs of a violent unknown event, with graffiti, bodies, crumbling infrastructure, etc.
At the nearby OPS station, a woman named Sally contacts you and explains that a shock went through the whole CREO system. As a result, most sectors are under a security lockdown and most rig workers' cortical implants have fried, leaving them aggressive and unresponsive. She tells you there are survivors in the executive boardroom, and begs you to help those who are inside.
The lockdown prevents you from taking the direct route, so you detour through the abandoned production facilities, past a malfunctioning PAX security robot, a malfunctioning Firebug, and a malfunctioning Big Sister platform constructor, learning along the way about the various crises facing Creo, including Project: Resolve, an attempt at reversing widespread ecological damage.
You find your way to the Resolve Biolabs, where you meet the renegade Dr. Chavez. She tells you that Project: Resolve is toxic, Creo had covered it up for years, and even though she was fired years ago, she is still working in secret on a non-toxic solution.
She gives you a USB drive with important information on it and tells you to deliver it to a member of the executive board, an old friend of hers who is sympathetic to her cause. In her hidden lab, you find a drone upgrade that grants you access through more maintenance tunnels heading to the Executive Forum.
As you approach your destination, the floor collapses and you fall several stories down, into the eerie Research and Development sector. At approximately the same time, security personnel begin to clear the Creo facilities of defective rig workers and contain the growing chaos at any cost. Since you and Sally are trying to end the lockdown, their mission is incompatible with yours and they refuse to negotiate with you. You are forced to kill any security officers you come across.
You meet Dr. Gene Barrett, a visionary nanotech scientist working on a nanite solution to Project: Resolve, named Utopia. You also discover his hobby project: he knows Utopia will cause massive casualties, so he plans to transform/replace human beings with cybernetic neural skeletons (Homo machinalis). You can't stop him, but he inadvertently helps you by lifting the security lockdown over R&D. His machines are allowed to escape, and the path to the head of security is opened.
After you kill the head of security, the Black Cerberus, and take his security exorig, you're finally able to lift the security lockdown over the entire facility and clear the way to the Executive Forum.
When you get to the Executive Forum, Creo's problems are on full display. The board is on the verge of a takeover, the CEO is about to take drastic action, Creo's head of PR has killed himself to escape the massacre (and in his suicide note he admits he knew about the issues with Project: Resolve), security forces are apparently complicit to a cover-up, and you are not the only person Sally has tried to guide to the board.
Inside the executive boardroom, you find the mutilated bodies of the board members absent the CEO, Jonah Guttenberg. Sally reveals herself as a holographic AI and explains what she knows: during the Utopia launch vote, The Surge overloaded the eight board members' implants, killing and incapacitating them before the vote was completed, 4-3 in favor of the launch. Sally desperately kept the remaining board member (Dr Chavez' contact on the board) alive, defibrillating him despite brain death, in order to buy time for someone to 4-4 deadlock the Utopia launch. As he dies, the Utopia vote is confirmed at 4-3, and Sally despairs at her futile efforts, sputtering and crashing, finally overtaken by the fire in the server room.
If you now backtrack to Chavez, you tell her about the board and she tells you that there is still a chance to corrupt the Utopia protocols, even if you can't stop the launch. She urges you to go directly to the Nucleus launch site and assist in the attempt to upload the virus to the rocket core.
You find Chavez' courier, dead only steps away from the rocket core. At this point the decision to upload the virus is yours - Utopia is projected to kill 95% of all life on the planet, but corrupting the protocols is an unknown, because there wasn't enough time to fully test its effects (a running theme of Creo's projects).
Through audio logs, it seems likely that the nanite payload of Utopia was responsible for The Surge: for a long time now, it has been slowly gaining sentience as it consumed tech, people, and data until it reached a critical mass, exploding and awakening the nanotech present in the Creo facilities and the support structures of Creo World.
As you fight your way to the launch site, it becomes clear that Jonah Guttenberg has interfered somehow with the launch abort failsafes, and perhaps separately, something is clearing the rocket for launch.
When you reach the rocket, you encounter what defends it: a gigantic nanite monstrosity named Rogue Process. It intends to spread across the earth, like Jonah intended for Utopia, and sees you as an obstacle to that end. As you fight it, it seems to invoke memories and voices of the people it has consumed.
When you beat the boss, the rocket launches despite your best efforts. You are knocked out, and when you awake, it appears your exorig is no longer functional; you crawl toward a wheelchair.
In NG+, the story is the same but there are signs before Warren's rig augmentation that things have already started to unravel: bloodstains leading to a ventilation shaft hint that the sentient nanites, Homo machinalis, or demented workers are already killing.
AnonymousBut who was Sally? You find her in the Server Room, as an A.I. So she was a computer all along, but where did she come from? Who made her and why? Why was she working against the Rogue Process?
- Anonymous
The bit about us being a heavy fat ass gave me a good chuckle lol Thanks to whomever added that for your top tier sense of humor.
- Anonymous
To be honest as I was play through I thought, hey this feels like it’s leading up to the big f u Ending of guess what ur corrupted and the people you think are zombies are really normal people. But what happened in the end was kinda like what I thought, I knew sally wasn’t “real”, but all the stuff happening didn’t exactly line up well from everything the story was giving you. It’s interesting and a good souls clone, but I felt like so much of the story plot holes could be flushed out more like giving us more than just 2 endings to the main story or even allowing warren to be on the rocket to give a new lunar area to explore. I’m not complaining, but they had so much to work with for the main story to be more than a few areas and a lack luster final boss.
- Anonymous
there's some extra story stuff in the park dlc, warren went to the park with his girlfriend, then some accidents happened and warren wanted to work for creo to walk again, his girlfriend disagrees and think creo isn't the answer, and finally his girlfriend bought him an iron maus shirt and tell him to wear it in the interview
- Anonymous
Ive got a weird theory about all this. I think the surge is Sally's hell. She is the good ai of creo. She was supposed to deal with a rogue nanotechnology threat. It would consume, evolve, be aggressive and evil...in actuality, the ai lost, the nanite entity escaped. The ai of creo is left ruined with piles of corpses, she is playing back what happened, looping it. Trying to finish it but never really being able to. Warren and everyone else are dead souls/ minds fused by the nano entity when it took over the systems and messed with everything. Souls like warren, and mallory are not so damaged or maybe strong enough that sally chooses to control them as puppets, trying to score a win, which never happens. ( Mallory is another girl who sally tries to order around, similar to warren, except she grows tired, and refuses to enter the executive form and is killed by sally. Her death is very surreal, several wounds appear on her and she feels terrible pain then wastes away) perhaps sally revealed her true body, which was completely wrecked in real life or maybe sally keeps us alive, and in truth we are bloody pulps, because of all our deaths in the games. This also explains warrens revives. Sally will reset him, since he is the most determined. Maybe the others like hobs are just too weak to order around, or what if warren and Mallory were real. The reason why they had a painful no anesthesia surgery was because sally tampered with it. What if the anesthesia was having your mind linked to the server, which was hijacked by the nanitemass, then forcing them to sleep( feel no pain, but become infected later, since nanite already hacked it, like irina). They were never connected to the nanite thing, so they actually were ordered around by sally/ tried to stop it, but failed. And sally just reuses them in this weird limbo. Trying to win. Maybe when they lost, all the minds stolen by the nanite thing ( warrens and Mallory included, since they lost) was left there in creo, since the nanite thing left. then merged with sally and they just repeat their last moments. Or maybe they aren't in creo, maybe they are already in the nanite mass, and we are just reliving a few days/ hours before doom.
- Anonymous
You do find the friend of Chavez, there is a dead body near the place you upload the virus. She was found out and killed. Her audio log is also nearby.
- Anonymous
Its all a dream. The surge takes place in warrens head. Kinda like the movie total recall. Some proof. Near the first place you meet irina theres a vid on the wall playing about dream vacations. You can go anywhere you want using your neural implant
- Anonymous
The surge is pretty good but I have a threoy that is that the workers are dead and the rigs are controlling their corpses
- Anonymous
Spoilers ahead!!! And worse, guesses as to wtfs going on.
From what I gather, the main story line goes as follows.
The world has been harvested by men for a long time and is now ROYALLY screwed up, so Mr. Gutentag wanted to fix it with project Resolve. Resolve was going to reseed the atmosphere and fix everything. Resolve was put into action before it was done being tested and it was discovered that it makes the toxic stuff that we keep tripping over through the game. Resolve was seen as a failure by most, and project UTOPIA was created where instead of using chemistry to fix everything, nano machines were going to be used to fix it all. The head boffin working on UTOPIA was working to kill 95% of the worlds population using UTOPIA, but the remaining 5% would be near gods. Mr. Gutentag might have known about the whole mass murder thing, and might not, but he was thinking about trying to upload peoples minds to computers. Warren is guided through the game by Sally who is a Nurse program, designed to keep the Board members up and running, whether they want to or not. I believe she wanted Warren to assist the board in various ways with his fleshy physical hands, while she was just a hologram. After seeing her job failed and all members of the board dead, it fries her circuits and she "dies."
Warren dont give a *****.
Right about here is where my conjecture starts.
After heading down towards the missile, we get an audio log that says the tank wasnt designed to hold project UTOPIA for that long, and we see a containment vessel by the Rouge Process and I believe that UTOPIA broke out of its vessel and started infecting CREO from the ground up. Nanites are tiny 'lil ****ers, so their takeover would be subtle until it was too late, when they got into the computer systems and fried everything. I believe that all the security forces are quite brain dead, and the only survivors are the people we run into (and possibly kill.) As we saw with the engie-turned-security Irina, the nanites could control peoples minds with the neural links, making them do what the Rouge wants, like guarding the place. When "The Surge" happened, everybody with a neural link had visions of other minds, agony, and various other nasty things. I think at that moment, Rouge went into every Neural link and copied/took everybody's mind. A few resisted, were too drugged up to get a hold of, and some had dead power cores. Those that resisted eventually fell, the one that was drugged has multiple people in his head, but the only people that didnt really get affected was warren and Hobbs. I had Hobbs die, so I assume that he would have fallen to the Rouge eventually. Warren was thrown outside with the garbage, and didnt have a power core, so i think his "wifi" wasnt enabled at the time.
At the end of the game I think Rouge lived through our fight, and escaped into the world to do whatever it damn well pleases. I seriously doubt smacking a nanite cloud with a stick is enough to defeat it, even with an amazing stick. Warren crawled to his wheelchair, and I didnt see any handicap ramps while running around, just a **** ton of stairs, so I think he probably got killed by Rouge, got eaten by nanites, or starved to death.
Thats my take on the story, take it or leave it, but lemme know what you think :D
- Anonymous
I feel like warren is in hell, bound to repeat the same events over and over till the end of time no matter what he try's.
- Anonymous
- Anonymous
This game's plot is it's weakest sopt. However it would be really nice for someone to write it down. Some of my questions: 1. What kind of tech Creo used in the final area? It was really out of touch with the rest of the game. Who developed it?. 2. Who is Sally (and what did all this scene in the board room mean)? 3. It would be nice to accumulate all info about CREO, Reveal and Utopia, and about all characters (including audio ones) in articles. 4. So how game story ends (in general) - is there 2 endings (because it wasn't very obvious)?
I had to come here cause I have no idea what the f happened. The surge could be a better game had the story is more cohesively told. This is not souls where time is relative
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