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Mr. Fortitude posted:I honestly think mechanically that Mankind Divided is the best Deus Ex game, even moreso than the first game. It's just kind of a shame that Square-Enix meddled in its development and it's the middle game of a trilogy that will never see a conclusion because Square-Enix are just that poo poo.
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Oct 3, 2019 06:59
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TheNamedSavior posted:Ironic that you consider the cliffhanger ending that will NEVER be resolved to be the best one in the series. Except it doesn't end on a cliffhanger at all. The game's story is wrapped up, including a nice denouement that explicitly reinforces the story threads for the next game. Since it's the only game in the series that was made with a direct sequel in mind, it lays out foreshadowing and plans for that game, which is what you're seeing as different. IW and HR grabbed loose ends left in the other games to construct something that fit into the story, which is how you make another game in the same setting when the previous one was designed to be self-contained. If you want to see a real son of a bitch unresolved cliffhanger ending game, play Anachronox.
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Oct 3, 2019 07:36
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Square Enix has said there will be another game, but it won’t be for a while. I’m good with that, there were what, 5 years between HR and MD?
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Oct 3, 2019 10:41
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No, it was within six months
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Oct 3, 2019 12:43
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El_Elegante posted:No, it was within six months
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Oct 3, 2019 12:50
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The entire Janus plotline could have been removed from MD and it would change nothing. The actual core plot is incredibly basic and yet nothing around it really fits in. In Deus Ex however has an expansive plot where everything fits into the big picture (albeit from Paris onwards being a series of dungeon dives). You start the game literally thrown into a fight over the cure to an epidemic. Everything that happens to the player from that point on is about unravelling the conspiracy behind the grey death and the consequential power plays.
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Oct 3, 2019 13:10
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Raygereio posted:HR came out in 2011, MD in 2016? It's all in the numbers.
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Oct 3, 2019 13:26
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i miss the conspiracy focus but the real problem with the writing in MD and HR is that the main plot is weird vague nonsense and they never really give you a convincing argument for why people would be racist to people with cyborg arms
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Oct 3, 2019 13:45
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Farm Frenzy posted:i miss the conspiracy focus but the real problem with the writing in MD and HR is that the main plot is weird vague nonsense and they never really give you a convincing argument for why people would be racist to people with cyborg arms Sadly “That person is different from me, therefore I hate them” isn’t really something you need to explain.
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Oct 3, 2019 14:04
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Grand Fromage posted:If you want to see a real son of a bitch unresolved cliffhanger ending game, play Anachronox. Or Psi-Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy, which literally ends with a massive "TO BE CONTINUED" screen. e: linked version is broken on windows 8 & 10 apparently. emulating ps2 version only option now. Proletarian Mango fucked around with this message at 15:35 on Oct 3, 2019 |
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Oct 3, 2019 14:35
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CaptainCaveman posted:Sadly “That person is different from me, therefore I hate them” isn’t really something you need to explain. for it to basically completely replace racial/class issues in a cyberpunk dystopia is an extremely lame cop-out. especially since the setting is supposed to be based on the real world.
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Oct 3, 2019 14:48
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One of the main problems with DX3 and 4 is that Eidos decided that the central theme of Deus Ex is augmentations, even though they were a pretty minor plot element of the first game and mostly an excuse for the player to have superpowers. And made it to the extent where 90% of characters in the games only talk about augs vs. non-augs all of the time, which turns out to be a lot more one-note and less interesting than the political themes of the first game.
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Oct 3, 2019 14:56
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Item Getter posted:One of the main problems with DX3 and 4 is that Eidos decided that the central theme of Deus Ex is augmentations, even though they were a pretty minor plot element of the first game and mostly an excuse for the player to have superpowers. And made it to the extent where 90% of characters in the games only talk about augs vs. non-augs all of the time, which turns out to be a lot more one-note and less interesting than the political themes of the first game. I don't think they were a minor plot in any of the games. All of the games have themes that revolve around those augmentations as a form of evolution. A large chunk of the original Deus Ex is all about how different shadow organizations are vying for control, and using augmentations to get what they want. And Deus Ex: I War is literally all about nano augmentation and all the factions involved are tied in directly based on their perspective on augmentation. HR and MD didn't introduce a focus that wasn't already there, instead the dropped focus on some of the other stuff that made the original memorable: the conspiracy theories and how they all lay on top of each other.
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Oct 3, 2019 15:25
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Item Getter posted:One of the main problems with DX3 and 4 is that Eidos decided that the central theme of Deus Ex is augmentations, even though they were a pretty minor plot element of the first game and mostly an excuse for the player to have superpowers. And made it to the extent where 90% of characters in the games only talk about augs vs. non-augs all of the time, which turns out to be a lot more one-note and less interesting than the political themes of the first game. It is actually one of the stronger elements in the new titles and they were not really just an excuse for superpowers in 1. All Deus Ex have had the implants very visible as a point of conflict.
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Oct 3, 2019 15:31
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Item Getter posted:One of the main problems with DX3 and 4 is that Eidos decided that the central theme of Deus Ex is augmentations, even though they were a pretty minor plot element of the first game and mostly an excuse for the player to have superpowers. And made it to the extent where 90% of characters in the games only talk about augs vs. non-augs all of the time, which turns out to be a lot more one-note and less interesting than the political themes of the first game. The main plot revolves around the grey death, which is literally the same as the nanoaugs. All significant actions in the game revolve around nanoaug tech, even if it isn't apparent at first glance.
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Oct 3, 2019 15:44
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Raygereio posted:HR came out in 2011, MD in 2016? No, within six months.
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Oct 3, 2019 16:22
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I feel like original DX was mostly interested in augmentations as an extension of political and class power, whereas nu-DX is interested in augmentations in and of themselves. Obviously there's a bit of overlap, but I think the main thrust of each is quite different in regards to how they approach augs and incorporate them into their stories. But also I think it's largely a product of AAA games being a multi-million dollar industry headed by cautious corporations and not Warren Spector and his merry band of misfits making a game about libertarianism.
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Oct 3, 2019 21:09
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It's the difference between augmentation being core gameplay in the recent games, whereas they were activatable power-ups in the original that are arguably less important than skills. The other difference is that HR/MD is about the proliferation of technology, whereas DX is about what happens if theres literally one guy alive with nano augmentation and he has an AI god buddy, what happens if there are three devices in the world that can make anything from atoms and the people that own them try to kill each other, etc
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Oct 3, 2019 21:19
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Farm Frenzy posted:i miss the conspiracy focus but the real problem with the writing in MD and HR is that the main plot is weird vague nonsense and they never really give you a convincing argument for why people would be racist to people with cyborg arms remember that time when everyone with robot arms went simultaneously insane and murdered a bunch of people lol that was a hoot oh well just off to work with my buddy Tony and his robot arms hope you don't go crazy again haha
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Oct 3, 2019 21:25
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I don't hate the heavier focus on augmentation in the newer games, specifically because it feels like a proxy for the very relevant issue of centralized control in technology that's emerging in a negative way right now. DRM in physical good, devices that make life more comfortable but are always listening & reporting back to their real owners, stuff like that. Variations on this theme come up a lot in HR & MD; but it's more immediate because it's not just your phone or toaster, it's a body part. That said, I do think it might have been handled with less depth than DX1 would have treated the issue with. I suspect that no longer being able to talk literature with barkeepers or tax codes with your prisoners is a casualty of being a triple A, blockbuster game.
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Oct 3, 2019 22:05
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Augmentation is a terrible analogy for racism, just like mutation is a terrible analogy in X-Men, especially after "The Incident". Why don't you want any augmented people living in your neighborhood with your new family, what are you some kind of anti aug racists? Sure there was that one time your augmented neighbor went into a frothing psychotic rage and ripped your old family apart limb by limb right in front of you, but stop holding a grudge, it wasn't their fault, and it probably almost certainly might not happen again. Instead of blinding hating people for being different, you should have been a caring, forgiving person and did your neighbor a solid by helping them clean the viscera that used to be your daughter off their shiny metal limbs, you bigot.
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Oct 4, 2019 00:35
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That aspect of MD never really made sense. It seems implausible that people would simply blame all augs for "the incident" and never ask more questions. Even if the public never knew exactly why the incident happened, it would probably be simpler ascribe it to outside factors.
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Oct 4, 2019 12:54
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Bathtub Cheese posted:That aspect of MD never really made sense. It seems implausible that people would simply blame all augs for "the incident" and never ask more questions. Even if the public never knew exactly why the incident happened, it would probably be simpler ascribe it to outside factors. The majority of people in the U.S. believe MSG is bad for you despite having no solid evidence that it is. People want to blame other things/people because it elevates their own status. I think MD does it right in that you can never underestimate mass ignorance through groupthink, even on a world-scale.
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Oct 4, 2019 15:09
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sebmojo posted:remember that time when everyone with robot arms went simultaneously insane and murdered a bunch of people lol that was a hoot oh well just off to work with my buddy Tony and his robot arms hope you don't go crazy again haha ahh drat!! my boss, cousin, sister, aunt etc all simultaneously lost their poo poo. time to put them in a ghetto for the rest of time and never speak to them again. edit: also i had to look this up because i genuinely couldnt remember but people being racist to augs is a major theme of HR too where it makes even less sense. its just an extremely lame theme to hang your satirical cyberpunk dystopia thats a prequel to deus ex on. Farm Frenzy fucked around with this message at 15:47 on Oct 4, 2019 |
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Oct 4, 2019 15:41
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Farm Frenzy posted:ahh drat!! my boss, cousin, sister, aunt etc all simultaneously lost their poo poo. time to put them in a ghetto for the rest of time and never speak to them again. Yeah there's a whole load of problems with MD's attempt at storytelling even when you ignore the bits of the story that were never finished: 1. The racism thing doesn't work when it was also a massive theme of HR. 2. Changing literally everything that's the foundation to the story (characters, location, organisations) makes it impossible to 'grip' the change the event had. Maybe if Jensen met someone who was an ally in HR but is not terrified and mistrustful of him that would have landed something. But we could have been playing an entirely new character. 3. All of the augs we meet in the game probably killed someone they cared about and it's barely recognised. I mean literally all of them should be dealing with massive amounts of PTSD and guilt. If that bit were there as a constant reminder then the racism issue would be more morally grey. But ultimately the problem is that if you really want to take the consequences of HR to their natural conclusion then you are telling a story about a world in which the Nazis are right. That's the hole that Eidos wrote themselves into, which is why they dance around ever really addressing that point. Alchenar fucked around with this message at 17:58 on Oct 4, 2019 |
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Oct 4, 2019 17:53
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Farm Frenzy posted:ahh drat!! my boss, cousin, sister, aunt etc all simultaneously lost their poo poo. time to put them in a ghetto for the rest of time and never speak to them again. irl racism is just based on people looking a bit different, i think thousands of cases of actual verifiable psycho murder might have a longer tail. This doesn't seem a stretch. There's one quest in MD which is quite good on the PTSD, the vet in the lovely apartment.
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Oct 4, 2019 21:49
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Some of you guys are really underestimating how dumb/tribal people are. "Family in ghetto" is specifically not a thing, there were multiple MD quests where people are forgiving of their relatives and trying to save them from being deported by the police state. Hating augmented for being augmented was also not at all the same in HR, where it was just the one faction of human purists. Again, I don't think there being an organization of people who are like "hey maybe let's not choose to cut our limbs off and make them robots" is a stretch. Not even including that the organization was some Illuminati astroturf thing anyway. There were also the class conflict parts like that woman in Shanghai who couldn't afford the brain implant the rich kids used to get ahead in their jobs.
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Oct 4, 2019 22:48
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Grand Fromage posted:Some of you guys are really underestimating how dumb/tribal people are. There was also the undercurrent of soldiers who were crippled in battle getting thrown back into the poo poo by being augmented, the Recycle Military Bill and all that.
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Oct 4, 2019 23:06
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Alchenar posted:3. All of the augs we meet in the game probably killed someone they cared about and it's barely recognised. I mean literally all of them should be dealing with massive amounts of PTSD and guilt. If that bit were there as a constant reminder then the racism issue would be more morally grey. This one, at least, is addressed. There are a handful of NPCs who deal with this, including the guy you can give papers to, the guy who was supposed to take the fall for the psycho killer quest, and a few others as well as incidental NPC dialogue that all talk about killing people they cared about while out of control. It's not like it's hand-waved away, it's just not what the game focuses on.
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Oct 5, 2019 01:35
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Some of the story snafus can probably be attributed to the ending of HR not being intended to continue Jensen's arc. Lead writer Mary DeMarle wanted a new protagonist for MD but was overruled by the higher-ups who felt that Jensen was too popular to ditch after just one game. This leads to the strange circumstance in the sequel of him being one of two Panchaea survivors - an unexplained disaster coinciding exactly with the Incident - but nobody else being interested in what happened there or if there's a connection between the two events.
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Oct 5, 2019 10:55
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Well, there is the implication that [Mankind Divided Spoilers] the Jensen you play as in Mankind Divided isn't the real Jensen but rather a clone used by the Illuminati to find out who among them is secretly Janus and working against them. It's alluded to by the body in the Versalife vault looking extremely similar to Jensen, Sarif mentioning that the augs Jensen has don't match the serial numbers given to Jensen in the previous game, an unexplained gap in Jensen's memory after the Panchaea incident, and the sidequest about the serial killer which shows the existence of augments that can implant memories from another person. I think that was going to be the big reveal for the next game. No idea if that idea will be scrapped by the time Square-Enix gives a new Deus Ex game the go-ahead though, haven't the director and all of the writers left now?
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Oct 5, 2019 13:25
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Yeah I thought that bit of plot came together really well. Shame about the cancellation, but it is what it is
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Oct 5, 2019 17:34
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Augs in Mankind Divided obviously aren't a 1:1 proxy for any single issue and they especially seem to draw way more from immigrants and refugees with a strong dose of mental illness and ableism than racism. It's like criticising Deadpool 2 for bungling the racism metaphor of mutants when it's super obviously having the villains be based on gay conversion therapy and the emotional core be about non-traditional families.
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Oct 5, 2019 17:55
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Cloning of people is the thread that's secretly running through the core of every Deus Ex game.
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Oct 5, 2019 18:11
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I recently finished Mankind Divided and thought the story was much better than some people were making out. It didn't seem to end abruptly at all, rather than evidently leaving scope to develop a sequel in. By setting the games pre first Deus Ex there's a limited amount they can do with the story so of course the stakes are going to be lower than the world changing consequences of the first game. I think the aug issue is fine by itself, if a little crass with the wholesale copying of the contemporaneous BLM protests, but it would have been better if there were more discussion and exploration of all the other social issues plaguing the near future world.
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Oct 5, 2019 18:11
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It's not that it ends abruptly per se, its that it ends naturally at the close of Act One of the story and you are left wondering where acts two and three are.
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Oct 5, 2019 18:16
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Mr. Fortitude posted:Well, there is the implication that [Mankind Divided Spoilers] the Jensen you play as in Mankind Divided isn't the real Jensen but rather a clone used by the Illuminati to find out who among them is secretly Janus and working against them. It's alluded to by the body in the Versalife vault looking extremely similar to Jensen, Sarif mentioning that the augs Jensen has don't match the serial numbers given to Jensen in the previous game, an unexplained gap in Jensen's memory after the Panchaea incident, and the sidequest about the serial killer which shows the existence of augments that can implant memories from another person. I think that was going to be the big reveal for the next game. Yeah, as part of my full playthrough I also read the novels. They're not bad for licensed fiction to be honest, the second one which covers the time between HR and MD in particular does a pretty good job of reading like the game plays. Anyway, it basically confirms that speculation.
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Oct 5, 2019 18:35
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Me: I want a Deus Ex protagonist to be believable and relatable yet also complicated and present a nuanced understanding of issues from multiple perspectives, all while having the potential to turn out completely different based on my actions and choices throughout the game. Also Me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZqAtOEBNURw&t=18s
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Oct 5, 2019 19:31
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Butterfly Valley posted:I recently finished Mankind Divided and thought the story was much better than some people were making out. It didn't seem to end abruptly at all, rather than evidently leaving scope to develop a sequel in. By setting the games pre first Deus Ex there's a limited amount they can do with the story so of course the stakes are going to be lower than the world changing consequences of the first game. Yeah. I actually enjoyed the story in Mankind Divided a lot, it was cool unravelling the terrorist conspiracy, being a double agent for proto-UNATCO and the Juggernaut Collective. Marchenko was a rather weak villain though and like Alchenar said, it feels like the end of Act 1 in a game that felt like it should have had 3 Acts. Even though Mankind Divided covered more ground and was longer than this, it'd be like if Human Revolution ended after the Barrett boss fight. It's good... great even, but you're left wanting more.
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Oct 5, 2019 21:25
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It needed another fully fleshed out hub. Prague looked great but it gets samey when it's the backdrop to 80% of the game. DX has always been about globe trotting.
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Oct 5, 2019 21:34
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