Ok so seriously what should I call it
- Happy Birthday
- Happy Birdday
0 voters
It is clear those of you who don’t vote the obvious are merely scared of my glorious puns, and for that, I harbor nothing but pity.
Thankfully this poll is anonymous…
(I’m only joking! 
I still respect you whichever choice you pick! I just felt a strong need to redraw that meme in the heat of the moment, logging back on here.)
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Which organization do you think had the widest reach and ability to know anything about anyone?
- Providence
- ICA
- They are roughly equal, depending on what you are looking for
0 voters
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IAGO should be included too since they had lots of things aswell. They sold to Providence AFAWK and any other highest bider.
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But gaining information is all they did, as far as we know. ICA and Providence not only gain knowledge on people and places, but were able to do things to affect the world with that knowledge. IAGO just sold their stuff, and if it came down to a contest of power, I don’t think there’s any question that both organizations could stomp IAGO out of existence easily. In fact, ICA did just that with 47 killing Margolis and Novikov, and literally no other action.
Providence and ICA, on the other hand, broker information and, in the case of Providence, use financial and political tactics to act on that info, and in the case of ICA, use assassination to do the same. Providence is more monetarily powerful and better at secrecy, but ICA is more dangerous and better at infiltration to where they don’t belong, so it’s hard to tell who would win if they had gone to war with each other, as they both operate on a global scale. My guess is that ICA would have fallen first, but would have done so much damage to Providence on the way down that the organization would have to disband for its individual subsidies and affiliates to survive, essentially wiping it out. They’d destroy each other, and so I think they’re about equal.
The one plot point where Edwards knew more about 47’s lineage than Diana did makes me believe Providence may have won out on that front.
It might be roughly equal, but Providence is the secret cabal of the “top 1% of the top 1%” so to speak. The people with the most money in the highest echelons of power. I’d say that’s something that can be used to cover-up or dig-up info on anything.
Money talks, and all that. Or silences, depending on who you’re asking.
Given the huge party at Mendoza featured plenty of Providence operatives from around the globe, I also wouldn’t count out the possibility of making a “Six Degrees of Providence” game. There’s surely overlap and significant reach in many fields of work if Providence has so much power at their fingertips.
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All true, but Providence’s primary MO is manipulation, and at first they didn’t even know ICA was involved in the deaths of their operatives, so even they aren’t aware of everything. ICA is able to find out what they need without needing the connections Providence has - they tend to bribe or brute force their way into getting the info they need - and eliminate their problems completely rather than use manipulation, so their solutions are more definitive and less likely to backfire on them. Taking that into account, Providence’s money and political pull can only do so much against ICA’s weapons, investigative prowess, and remorseless killers.
While I think ICA would definitely win a straight shoot ‘em up fight, and Providence would win a war of attrition based on who had the most money and reach, if both approaches are happening, the two organizations destroy each other. Although, as I said before, I do think ICA, after mortally wounding Providence, would fold first due to having less money and fewer people at their disposal, leaving Providence to slowly bleed to death, so to speak.
In hindsight, this makes it kind of ironic that both organizations were wiped out by basically just two people, as 47 is the one who destroyed ICA using their own tactics, and Diana is the one who destroyed Providence using their own tactics. There was a bit of overlap, with lots of dead Providence members and the manipulation of ICA’s data, but you get the idea.
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Yeah but the ICA have been duped into working for the bad guys in every single game they have ever appeared in except Absolution which has such a bizarre and laughable interpretation of the ICA that it jars with the rest of the canon.
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That’s by design; they are not supposed to care about the motivations of their clients, just the money, and that none of their allies like the UN are targeted. They only start to become concerned that they are being used to achieve long-term agendas or start wars when it starts to look fishy that that’s the objective, so it’s more on the bad guys for getting sloppy and taking advantage of the ICA’s services than any incompetence on ICA’s part. You’ll notice that once they recognize that they’re being taken advantage of, the end up finding or getting closely on the trail of the offending party almost immediately.
In any event, it’s not in every single game, it’s only in the first two and the WoA trilogy. Contracts doesn’t count in the retelling of Ort-Meyer’s antics, and in the current timeline of Contracts and all of Blood Money, they’re in direct opposition to the Franchise, not being manipulated by them. And technically, in H2 and H3, their eyes are wide open to why Providence is using them, and they make an exception for it because they caught Providence doing it almost immediately, and they basically apologized for it and decided to go through the proper channels from that point, and ICA was more offended at how the Shadow Client played them, and they still caught onto him after only four missions. For the two remaining games, getting their own payback on him, settling down the global chaos he was causing, and the massive amounts of money they were getting paid led them to choose to be Providence’s tool voluntarily. So it’s really only three games.
47: “Now, the reformed Agency has finally tracked her down…”
Not only did they reorganize to recover from the damage Diana did, but all aspects of ICA activity we see in that game are only affiliated with Travis’s division, which he’s running like a little dictator and it’s confirmed in-game he’s keeping secret from his superiors and they’re starting to get pissed at him for it, so it’s canonically not an accurate portrayal of the rest of the Agency.
Oh God you projectile word-vomited while I was away.
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C’mon, dude, I’ve been here nearly a year; you don’t know that commenting on any view I hold is like opening the floodgates of a dam by now? And that debating me is like quicksand: you just keep sinking the more you struggle?
I know what you are like but I thought that you would have had a much shorter reply. I didn’t even say that much at all yet your reply is two times the length of my own comment.
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I have a lot on my mind, like, at all times. It’s half the reason why I’m borderline insane and constantly depressed and tired; 36 years of everything inside my head never shutting the hell up for an instant. It’s the price of above average intelligence and upper one percentile imagination and perception.
In an unrelated note, every time I see your image there, I keep thinking it’s Jim Norton, one of my favorite outrage comedians of the 00s.
Yeah, I do think you need a high IQ to understand Rick and Morty as well.
I might change it again, I feel like it is time for a change.
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I noticed while blending in as Tobias Rieper the walls of the auction room. They resemble eyes, and they’re all around the room. As if it were a symbol of how they have eyes everywhere. 
Well I’d actually switch to drive instead, so there could be a chance of finding another thing a bit further down 
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Did 47 kill non-targets with the light rig in Novikov’s generally considered canon kill?
- Yes
- No
0 voters
Did 47 kill the mercenaries in Mendoza?
- Yes, all
- Yes, 1 or both that stand with Yates
- Yes, the 3 that guard Diana
- No
0 voters
To clarify, the 3 that guard are the ones that need to be incapacitated before Yates comes up with the other 2.
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No, he didn’t kill any civilians. Either that kill is not canon or we are supposed to ignore how the game mechanic causes extra deaths.
I don’t kill any of the mercenaries, I knock them all out before Diana attacks, so that only Yates dies.
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Re: the Light Rig kill… I’d think that if something were a most unfortunate “accident” then collateral damage should reasonably be expected. Of course, those of us that want a “perfect score” would probably go out of our way to minimize non-target kills (I guess by getting next to the stage and pulling out an illegal item to shoo them away). But with non-target/innocent bystanders - the family members would be suing either Sanguine (or whoever was the next person in line to take over - if there were anybody), or whichever “contractor did this whole light-rig setup” - as mentioned by the guard in the attic.
Let’s say the contractor gets a summons to go to court for multiple deaths. They’d probably then hire their own investigation team to see what failed with the light-rig. Then that might depend on how the event was triggered. Was it with an explosive? Or tampered with using a tool such as a crowbar? Or would that make a difference and could be written off as a minor issue given the shoddy work of the contractor…?
These are things to consider. 