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HR would've been better if the eidos offices would've been playing coast to coast am 24/7 while they were making the game.
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Apr 20, 2018 03:35
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I never really saw the story of Mankind Divided as being about racial dehumanization. I think the marketing pushed the idea and random NPCs talk in those terms throughout the game (they're characters with their own written perspectives, not ciphers for the authors), but honestly I saw it as more akin to discrimination against immigrants and religious minorities. People were basically being trashed for making lifestyle choices, ghettoized for embracing a technology that the reactionary cavemen didn't like. Some have said that it's not realistic that people would react that way to augmentations, but I think issues like abortion, GMOs and the stupid anti-vaxxer thing demonstrate that people can be very phobic of certain emerging health care practices and biotech, even attaching religious significance to it. Ghettoizing the augs is akin to barring Muslims (people who have been raised with or have chosen a religious path), and treating them with suspicion. A person living in the West can choose to be a Muslim or not, but mistreating them for making that choice is still bad. A lot of folks seized on the idea that MD is supposed to be about (and hence trivializes) Black Lives Matter and other US-centric racial issues, but I think it is actually much more about anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim xenophobia in Europe. The whole Golem City episode can almost be seen as a metaphor for places like the Calais Jungle. And I think when viewed that way, it works pretty well. The game also tried to provide a glimpse of what it's like being in a national security state where the war on a dangerous alien other is used to justify placing everyone in a cage. Again, I think it does this well. As for the class issue raised earlier, I think Human Revolution and MD do handle class in a more subversive way than simply poor vs. rich. HR kind of makes the point that many of the foot soldiers of the anti-Aug are actually working class people involuntarily augmented or who couldn't afford augmentation. There's this idea that the poor people left behind in the aug revolution are basically being manipulated in populist fashion by the wealthy and the powerful to carry out their larger agenda. It's kind of an interesting angle on class warfare that's consistent with the Deus Ex worldview (cynical as gently caress basically). Large swaths of the DX poort and working class are basically xenophobic and looking for easy scapegoats, or just passive victims of engineered diseases. I don't mind that so much because class consciousness is not something very many people in the West have anymore. Even the NSF and Silhouette were compromised by the powerful. All that said, MD has no third act and will always be hobbled by that fact. Love Rat fucked around with this message at 04:28 on Apr 20, 2018 |
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Apr 20, 2018 03:54
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Xander77 posted:Yes, the problem with MECHANICAL APARTHEID is definitely how it forgoes the class metaphor in favor of a race metaphor. Nailed the issue right on the head, buddy. With Eliza and whatnot it would have been so easy to make a point about how you can't tell a real human from a fake one but you can tell a rich man from a poor man. They dropped the ball so hard.
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Apr 20, 2018 03:56
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Neurosis posted:I listened to a couple of hours of it and wasn't particularly impressed by the non production staff. I found their knowledge and observations to trite - the sorts of things above average intelligence but not particularly bright geeky people might know or think. Which matched up with the fairly boring writing in HR. This was a general impression from two hours of stuff I listened to six months ago so it may not be fair. In comparison the writers of the original DX clearly knew their essential liberal political philosophy as well as their conspiracy theories. The best parts of the commentary were when they criticize things about the original game, like there's a part when you're going up an elevator in Hengsha and a hacker character from earlier calls you on your comm system and Jensen freaks out about how his system is compromised which was inspired by how in the original game Denton had like a dozen different people openly using his comms at all times without batting an eye by the end of the game. Or in the mission where you rescue a young Tracer Tong and they had a lot of trouble with trying to make the character recognizable when the graphics were so muddled and the dialogue so clunky in his original appearance. Also I wasn't effected by the odd mention of something cool they wanted to do but couldn't because of time and budget issues because that's how literally every collaborative work of media works and and if you don't ha e someone there to reign the creatives in then you wind up with the Duke Nukem Forever and Half Life 3s of the world. I was more pleasantly surprised by the times when they owned up to their own failures, like how they were never happy with the way the augs from the final level looked and acted because they were too zombie-like and then after finishing the game they later watched an episode of Fringe that had people falling to similar hallucinations and loss of control and were like "aw gently caress, that's what they should have looked like". Or how they didn't pay attention to the tech they were working with when they wrote the script and then had to figure out a way to have a large conversation when their dialogue system can only support two people, which is how you get that scene where Sandoval is awkwardly shouting in the background during your conversation outside of Sarif's office. Or how when they recorded voice acting for the first mission they had the shopkeeper NPC record lines saying his prices and then when they finished the game the in-game economy was completely different and they had to edit his dialogue as best they could to show the new prices; this is why every other merchant just uses a laptop you interact with.
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Apr 20, 2018 04:16
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Love Rat posted:I never really saw the story of Mankind Divided as being about racial dehumanization. I think the marketing pushed the idea and random NPCs talk in those terms throughout the game (they're characters with their own written perspectives, not ciphers for the authors), but honestly I saw it as more akin to discrimination against immigrants and religious minorities. People were basically being trashed for making lifestyle choices, ghettoized for embracing a technology that the reactionary cavemen didn't like. Some have said that it's not realistic that people would react that way to augmentations, but I think issues like abortion, GMOs and the stupid anti-vaxxer thing demonstrate that people can be very phobic of certain emerging health care practices and biotech, even attaching religious significance to it. The problem with allegories is that they need to be applicable more than they're inapplicable, and the problem with augments in the new DX games is the devs can't decide whether its good or bad or whether to poo poo or go blind. This makes it difficult to have any kind of grown up conversation about it one way or another. If being an undocumented immigrant were a choice to be a drug addicted supersoldier or not, we'd be having a fraught motherfuckin' discourse about that. But on the basis of experience of undocumented individuals, it's the opposite of being a supersoldier conditionally dependent on a larger societal structure granted the blessing of liberal overlords. The parts where it merely doesn't connect with reality are stupid videogame bullshit. The parts where they do connect with reality piss folks off. That's not how sci-fi became a genre unto itself! dangit!!! Uncle Kitchener posted:None of the people writing this game or doing art seem to have any real life experience outside of school and their jobs and probably their Canadian uptown Steakhouse gathering.
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Apr 20, 2018 05:45
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Sure, but I don't think the majority of augs in MD are super soldiers. Most of them were probably augmented to keep up with the Joneses, to be more competitive in industries where augs were increasingly sought out, to bling out and indicate status, etc. Jensen and the PMCs represent a small minority within the aug population. I agree with critics that Jensen isn't the best protagonist to make any political points with (because he's a power fantasy made flesh), but for me he's more of a window into the setting. The story itself is kind of rubbish really (we're dealing with Dan Brown type poo poo here, which is really a hand-me-down from DX), and as you'd expect limited by the fact that you're playing a loving super soldier (who really cares about Jensen's conflicts really?). But I think the world and many NPCs tell a much more interesting, less direct story about how a lot of people got sold on the idea that they needed augs, the augs were the future, and when technophobes who felt left out found and excuse they went after them. I don't think their choices were be a super soldiers or not, but rather get auged or don't work or succeed in society. Given the utility immigrant populations play in society and the resentment that causes in majority populations, I think the analogy works fine. If it comes down to the actual plots, I don't think any Deus Ex is really consistent or interesting, and other than their pro-level sarcasm none of the protagonists are particularly great in the ideas department. Hell, I'd argue that Invisible War is the only one with a good story (too bad about the rest of it). Love Rat fucked around with this message at 06:31 on Apr 20, 2018 |
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Apr 20, 2018 06:20
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It's not just plots, the game world, as brilliantly designed as it is, doesn't seem to line up with what we're told. There are approximately 7.2 million people still with Augmentations in 2029 following the Incident. In the game, we go to Golem City, which is absolutely insane. It's a 3/4 of a kilometer high block that looks like a couple dozen of the Megacity blocks from Dredd 3D stapled together, plus an outgrowth of shantytown around the central ghetto. And when we're inside, it is utterly packed. Golem City as it is presented in the game could easily house at least a million augmented individuals with room to spare, but the obsession with scale means they've got a gigantism fetish.
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Apr 20, 2018 07:08
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Yeah, most of the basic future stuff is wildly inconsistent. MD seems to take place like 75 years after HR based on the scale of change.
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Apr 20, 2018 07:31
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Love Rat posted:Yeah, most of the basic future stuff is wildly inconsistent. MD seems to take place like 75 years after HR. I mean, even with the Illuminati manufacturing a crisis to turn the population against augmentation, two years to go from techno renaissance to massive super ghetto that makes Hengsha look like a jenga tower is insane. If they ever get around to making the third game and wringing enough control back from Square Enix to get it finished, I just hope there's a world war 3 scenario that trashes absolutely everything and gets back to the style of "future now" that the original game had.
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Apr 20, 2018 07:33
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Arcsquad12 posted:I mean, even with the Illuminati manufacturing a crisis to turn the population against augmentation, two years to go from techno renaissance to massive super ghetto that makes Hengsha look like a jenga tower is insane. If they ever get around to making the third game and wringing enough control back from Square Enix to get it finished, I just hope there's a world war 3 scenario that trashes absolutely everything and gets back to the style of "future now" that the original game had. Agreed. One of the interesting things to me is that the first Deus Ex feels more like a real continuation of our time than the later games (IW is sort of excused because it's moving into a truly post-human age). The first game really feels like a rundown, rapidly declining progression of the world we know. The thing is they'd have to do a WWIII thing storywise to be consistent since nuclear weapons had been used in Deus Ex and the US had entered a pretty dark age (half the country had succeeded, cities were in a state of collapse), nano tech notwithstanding.
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Apr 20, 2018 07:40
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Love Rat posted:A lot of folks seized on the idea that MD is supposed to be about (and hence trivializes) Black Lives Matter and other US-centric racial issues, but I think it is actually much more about anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim xenophobia in Europe. Not going to weigh in on the substance of this in any meaningful way, but the pre-launch advertising campaign of "Aug lives matter" makes it seem like this is indeed what either Eidos or Squarenix wanted. I will absolutely weigh in on the setting of the games though. DX1 felt far and away the most plausible simply because when you came across weird technology stuff or odd iconography (the giant MJ12 hand, anyone?) it did really feel weird and out of place- mostly because the world of DX1 is very grounded in reality. Not only does this make the game feel more relateable, but I think it's probably realistic too. People aren't going to suddenly demolish entire cities and rebuild them in a decade or two, and most new construction is architecturally conservative. We see outliers like Dubai where this does happen, but for the most part cities tend to keep looking the same with small changes over time because it's practical.
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Apr 20, 2018 09:51
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I'd love to see a game with the amount of playstyle approaches as MD but with weaker graphics, more hubs and a more freeform story. Give me an 0451 game crossed with something batshit let me eye divine cybermancy. Speaking of 0451, man does mankind divided love to reference that sequence. I've seen it mentioned at least a half dozen times in the game already, while the only reference I could find in human Revolution was Sarif's personal elevator code. Someone realized people like 0451 references and went overboard
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Apr 20, 2018 09:52
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Arcsquad12 posted:I'd love to see a game with the amount of playstyle approaches as MD but with weaker graphics, more hubs and a more freeform story. Give me an 0451 game crossed with something batshit let me eye divine cybermancy. I really really hope that Prey wasn't the death knell for Arkane, esp. now that Colantonio is gone. An Arkane take on DX would be sublime.
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Apr 20, 2018 10:00
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aniviron posted:I really really hope that Prey wasn't the death knell for Arkane, esp. now that Colantonio is gone. An Arkane take on DX would be sublime. They're working on Prey DLC right now, they've been teasing it on the official Twitter for the past few weeks. Going off of the clues it looks like it's going to be a side story set on a moon base.
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Apr 20, 2018 15:47
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Arcsquad12 posted:I'd love to see a game with the amount of playstyle approaches as MD but with weaker graphics, more hubs and a more freeform story. Give me an 0451 game crossed with something batshit let me eye divine cybermancy. Yeah, 0451 nods should only ever be the first passcode you see, or an important critical passcode. Done once.
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Apr 20, 2018 17:24
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You have to compare the Devs of OG DX and HR&MD. You're comparing old experienced veterans in Ion Storm with a lot of push from Romero back in the day to Jean Francois and his producer buddy with hundreds of hungry people just having reached their 30s wanting to put something on their belt. There was really no comparison there and honestly, we shouldn't have expected and real quality outside of visual and very good game programming to be involved. I'm looking at this both from the POV of a consumer and a developer (contractor, really). You can't have people with no life experience doing a game based on these subject matters, let alone Canadians. Personally, I'm not gonna stick or might probably forget them. HR and MD are great virtual playgrounds where you can mess around with augs and the environments like the original games, but that's where the similarities end. Willie Tomg posted:There's a playlist LP here, from a goon smart enough to hush up while there's content going if you're just absolutely dying to kill the time at some point. Even scrubbing through it quick, the opening walk is triggering me a little, lol Thanks a lot, mate. I'll have to watch the LPs, since I can't play the games on my PC.
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Apr 20, 2018 17:39
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Just a reminder than the MD dlc is way way way better than the main game and is quite often on fire sale prices on steam. Shame about everything else but I genuinely do enjoy those Deus Ex moments in the rare time they get it exactly right.
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Apr 21, 2018 12:21
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrH0qN0Iw50
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Apr 24, 2018 00:36
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The endless mashup vids on youtube get pretty old after a while, but that one put a big smile on my face. So perfect.
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Apr 24, 2018 01:08
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Honestly I just respect how dedicated the dude is to making them. I would make one, maybe two, and then move on with my life. I don't think this guy is going to stop until every action movie has received the treatment.
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Apr 24, 2018 01:48
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He has to retire the line about the Skul-Gun since you can't top that ending.
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Apr 24, 2018 03:06
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The less that MD deals with the Aug vs natural debate the better the writing gets. The stuff about Eliza's fragmented personality was pretty neat.
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Apr 24, 2018 04:15
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The way that MD handled augs reminded me a lot of the way that Bright handled fantasy races, in that the marketing and a lot of the critical response seemed to focus on the fictional marginalized group as if they were a metaphor for/parable about a real-world marginalized group when in the actual fiction it's an entirely new thing that exists alongside our existing prejudices and is shaped by them but isn't really a direct parallel or commentary on any one thing. Racism, classism, xenophobia, etc all exist in MD and continue to exist and augmentation is just a new wrinkle that lets people further draw lines between themselves and existing power structures to shape and be shaped by it in the universe of the game. That doesn't mean the game is blameless though. Zootopia did a similar thing in telling a story about about bigotry using predator and prey animals in a way that has no real direct parallels to the real world, but most people seemed to get that and take it on its own terms instead of the reductive "the augs are refugees"/"the orcs are black people" takes because it did a better job setting up and explaining it more clearly and also setting it in a world that was more fantastical and without humans to latch onto instead of being the modern human world with a sci-fi or fantasy slant.
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Apr 24, 2018 04:47
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So I just got back from the Swiss alps mission.From that mission on, this game just feels unfinished. I mean, that Alps mission sucked, but it also felt like it was supposed to be where a lot of stuff is revealed, but all of the info is frontloaded in Marchenko's muffled dialogue, then its a big open room, and then a helipad. And then you're forty minutes from the end of the game.
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Apr 26, 2018 05:33
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I think I remember the big open room having a turret (or something) that you can hack and it murders a bunch of guards before they destroy it. At least that was mildly amusing.
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Apr 26, 2018 07:16
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I had crafted about seventy bio cells and I ran around the room knocking people out like robot batman while permanently cloaked.
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Apr 26, 2018 07:17
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Arcsquad12 posted:So I just got back from the Swiss alps mission.From that mission on, this game just feels unfinished. I mean, that Alps mission sucked, but it also felt like it was supposed to be where a lot of stuff is revealed, but all of the info is frontloaded in Marchenko's muffled dialogue, then its a big open room, and then a helipad. And then you're forty minutes from the end of the game. You mean like the last third to half of the game was missing, meant as some kind of sequel you mean?
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Apr 26, 2018 20:01
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It's not just the back end of the game that is missing. What actually is still in the game from that point feels super rushed and half assed. Compare Koller introducing you to your new augs on your first visit to the scene where he calibrates them for you. The first scene has a cool diagetic tutorial that simultaneously introduces you to the new augs, the overclocking system, and shutting down redundant augs, all while giving a cool explanation that the upgrade HUD you see is also what Jensen sees. Then you have the return visit with the calibrator where you watch a prerendered cutscene of Jensen sitting down in the chair, fade to black, then another prerendered scene if him standing up again. And all Koller says is "jobs done!" Before vanishing from the plot.
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Apr 26, 2018 20:20
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Is there a mod for that game that fixes stuff? I don't really feel like playing it as it is.
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Apr 27, 2018 03:55
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No, but there are like zero annoying bugs and the game runs fine, the problem comes with the story, shoddy writing, and unfinished plots. No mod is going to fix that in the coming decade at least. However, it's actually really good gameplay wise and I'd recommend it just for that. Break into heaps of appartements and a cool bank, play the good dlc and you'll easily get your money's worth.
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Apr 27, 2018 09:42
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I think what should be stressed is that even if Mankind Divided has a disappointing narrative conclusion, it's still worth playing as it's a really good stealth-action game. It's core mechanics are sublime.
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Apr 27, 2018 11:55
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I played it at release and I remember it being like super super unoptimized. Did that ever get fixed?
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Apr 27, 2018 18:59
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It still runs pretty poorly and DX12 doesn't do much for Nvidia cards
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Apr 27, 2018 19:28
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Are there any fixes for crashes in Mankind Divided on PC? I keep getting crashes while trying to do the cult in the sewer in Prague and my attempts at trying to google it turns up a different answer everytime
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Apr 28, 2018 19:47
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So why is Adam so much more powerful than JC? Seems like Gunther should own the hell out of JC.
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Apr 28, 2018 22:06
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A lack of excessively violent cinematic melee takedowns
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Apr 28, 2018 22:11
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I think the real advantages of nano augmentations over mechanical augmentations isn't the raw power, but rather not needing unique hardware installed for every single enhancement, them generally being less "visible," and not needing neuropozyne.
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Apr 28, 2018 22:50
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jc becomes a demigod
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Apr 28, 2018 22:51
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Pakled posted:I think the real advantages of nano augmentations over mechanical augmentations isn't the raw power, but rather not needing unique hardware installed for every single enhancement, them generally being less "visible," and not needing neuropozyne. Agent Orange knows I love the infinite power of nano-augmentations.
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Apr 28, 2018 22:52
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JC actually wins. Adam is pretty clearly the sleeper agent Bob Page activates after the council of five meeting at the start of Mankind Divided.
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Apr 28, 2018 23:02
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