Title.
There’s prescedent in the movies:
Predator - Dutch has his first contact, but Anna establishes that Predators have been visiting for years and Latin people know about their records.
Predator 2 - The CIA has tied Predators to a series of incidents including the first movie, recognize them as aliens that hunt people, have observed their technology and prepared countermeasures to stealth and vision tech.
Predators - They’ve been abducting people for years, though there’s no evidence people really noticed or were able to send word back.
Prey - Predators have been visiting Earth for centuries, and some of their visits have been included in folklore, paintings, and carvings.
The Predator - Humans have observed, documented, and collected not only evidence of Predators, but their hunting patterns, live specimens, and full-on reconstructions of their technology. Also nobody would shut the fuck up that entire movie so it’s fair to say that hundreds of other people learned about them.
Alien Franchise The USCM have had notable encounters with extraterrestrials from Xenomorphs to Arcturians and beyond, based on your pick of movies, games, comics, and books. As Predators couldn’t avoid detection from just eyes, and repeatedly failed to evade cameras, there’s no doubt that their documentation has continued into the 2100s. This includes evidence of them in seemingly unrelated missions, firefights with them, and even co-operation and romance .
CMSS13 - Beyond the fact that they’ve been in the game for the better part of a decade, we’ve also seen how tired the tropes of deploying a full battalion armed to the teeth to see why a distress call on a planet that probably doesn’t have any bugs on it before some Red Dog kills someone alerting Marines to a Rhino charging their lines before they find a bunch of black goo leading to a Screecher.
Beyond that, we’ve also seen the adoption of full-on Pred-hunting loadouts and cliques, despite my inability to find that one collage someone made of like, 50+ different instances of a robusto covered in glowstick goo while wearing predator masks. It’s safe to say that nobody’s keen on maintaining the illusion of First Contact anymore.
As we’ve seen with moving beyond First Contact with the Xenomorphs is that none of it carried the implication that each crayon-muncher now had a Xenology Doctorate and honorary degree in Metaphysics and could map-out the evolutionary history of the species or the precise cooldown and exploits for each strain’s abilities: It simply enabled players to call a Spade a Spade, a Runner a Runner, and to avoid having to find justification for bringing certain loadouts to the planet or evac/AA guns/defenses on the ship after hijack is announced.
Similarly, all this would meaningfully change for Predators is . . . being able to tell people to not derail a mission over the 7-foot boogeymen with plasma weaponry who hunt humans for sport, or if they’re shot at, or if they’re insulted. People could still hunt them, they could still hunt humans, command could confidently announce “Predators/Hunters identified on-planet: Maintain focus on Hydro and keep your distance” rather than “Unidentified Alien Organisms of Dubious Caribbean Influence Spotted” and even open-up more roleplay for people who are aware of these threats and want the glory of killing one, the pay-off of collecting their gear (“Huh? Why’d Laser Bigfoot break onto our ship and slaughter the entire research department? I’m stumped . . . literally”), or potential for diplomatic outreach. We don’t know that they’re Yautja with Predtonium Engines and Combisticks or whatever, but can still recognize Hunters with Advanced Technology seeking to hunt worthy combatants.
