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El_Elegante posted:are you joking Seriously, the prison expansion is great
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Oct 17, 2019 22:53
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What's the proper story order, not release order, for the games and expansions these days? If I'm being honest, I became lost after they added on following Invisible War.
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Oct 17, 2019 23:18
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El_Elegante posted:are you joking I started a Dishonoured 2 replay last night. Coming right off a Dishonoured replay really highlights how much the graphics improved, and how they went a bit less stylized with the design. The mission design of the first game is still great, but this the second really feels much better and I only just got to Addamire, and the best stuff is yet to come.
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Oct 17, 2019 23:19
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JustJeff88 posted:What's the proper story order, not release order, for the games and expansions these days? If I'm being honest, I became lost after they added on following Invisible War. Human Revolution, The Fall (lol), A Criminal Past I think is here, Mankind Divided, Desperate Measures and System Rift both theoretically take place during MD I think, Deus Ex, Invisible War.
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Oct 17, 2019 23:53
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ilitarist posted:What's not concluded? It's just the stakes of the story weren't as high as they usually are. I find it refreshing and more suitable for a cyberpunk/noir story. No zombie apocalypse prevention this time. The entire epilogue is Adam watching the news, then listing off the unresolved parts of the story he's still pissed off about and promising to go find the answers. Then fade to black, fin. No answers found.
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Oct 18, 2019 03:47
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Grand Fromage posted:Human Revolution, The Fall (lol), A Criminal Past I think is here, Mankind Divided, Desperate Measures and System Rift both theoretically take place during MD I think, Deus Ex, Invisible War. My biggest problems with MD is Prague doesn't work for me as a setting (it's not really Cyberpunk and it feels worse than Prague I've visited even when I was sober) and that it doesn't include those DLCs in the main game. I can understand Criminal Past, it's an isolated story that happens long before the game. But Desperate Measures and System Rift? I don't even remember if I've played them. There was DLC where you investigate that bombing and I think it's included in the game?.. Or not?.. counterfeitsaint posted:The entire epilogue is Adam watching the news, then listing off the unresolved parts of the story he's still pissed off about and promising to go find the answers. Then fade to black, fin. No answers found. It wasn't spectacular, sure, but it felt fine to me. Certainly better than the previous game that threw archive footage and powerful symbols at me making me Think the Thoughts. There are elusive THEM and Jensen only stopped one of their plots. To me, it feels more complete than, say, Mass Effect 1-2 or Witcher 2 endings. Or Empire Strikes Back.
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Oct 18, 2019 09:03
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ilitarist posted:
All of those got sequels. And I could talk myself in to them all* being perfectly fine endings if I wanted to, because actually if you think about it... MD just doesn't seem "as bad" because it got dunked on constantly for an incomplete ending, so going in anybody not playing at launch was expecting worse than they got. *Haven't played Witcher 2
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Oct 18, 2019 15:44
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Desperate Measures and System Rift both take place during MD, and feel very much like cut content. I hope the game gets a directors cut at some point that reinserts them.
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Oct 18, 2019 17:16
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I guess the ending is fine if your take on the story is 'Jensen is a policeman trying to stop a terrorist attack' but if you thought there was maybe some other stuff going on there you might be legitimately disappointed
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Oct 18, 2019 17:53
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It's more frustrating when the context is "Square Enix is resting the franchise as it is, maybe forever. Because the only child they love unconditionally is Final Fantasy"
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Oct 18, 2019 18:00
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Alchenar posted:I guess the ending is fine if your take on the story is 'Jensen is a policeman trying to stop a terrorist attack' but if you thought there was maybe some other stuff going on there you might be legitimately disappointed I think putting so much of the story in a tie-in novel prequel really hosed up the focus of the story in the game. They didn’t want to go all-in on the conspiracy stuff to not alienate people who didn’t read the novel, but that lead to bits and pieces without payoff. The obvious solution would have been “don’t do a tie in novel, those are stupid and no one reads them” but then you can’t talk about your multimedia experience or whatever.
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Oct 18, 2019 18:03
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Alchenar posted:I guess the ending is fine if your take on the story is 'Jensen is a policeman trying to stop a terrorist attack' but if you thought there was maybe some other stuff going on there you might be legitimately disappointed It’s not really up for debate if there was other stuff going on. There was other stuff going on.
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Oct 18, 2019 19:41
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Just finished Mankind Divided and yeah: The way the game ends is not great. The pacing of it felt off. I wouldn't say the game is "incomplete", but the way the story ends is somewhat abrupt and with the various plot threads that were left hanging I understand where that sentiment started. Have there been any rumors about a third Jensen-Deus Ex game that got cancelled? Because overall the game had a "middle-part-of-an-unplanned-trilogy" vibe to it.
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Oct 19, 2019 20:33
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Yes, there was going to be a third one.
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Oct 19, 2019 20:37
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First time I beat MD I rubbed my penis on my monitor and then flew out my second story window in the shape of a bat. It was weird.
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Oct 19, 2019 20:52
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New Deus Ex was supposed to be a trilogy, until MD sold merely "well" instead of SquEnix's completely, insanely over-estimated projections, so they shitcanned the third game.
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Oct 19, 2019 22:22
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Well now that Avengers is coming go out relatively soon, maybe Eidos Montreal or whoever can get crackin on the last game. Besides, Cyberpunk is coming next year and that should spark interest in another Deus Ex. I hope.
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Oct 19, 2019 22:24
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Lemon-Lime posted:New Deus Ex was supposed to be a trilogy, until MD sold merely "well" instead of SquEnix's completely, insanely over-estimated projections, so they shitcanned the third game. It sold less than Human Revolution by a good amount, it was objectively a disappointment. For once gamers were actually able to successfully boycott a game in protest of the new microtransactions and DLC, and they got exactly what they wanted.
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Oct 19, 2019 22:38
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Raygereio posted:Have there been any rumors about a third Jensen-Deus Ex game that got cancelled? Because overall the game had a "middle-part-of-an-unplanned-trilogy" vibe to it. It's not the first time this happened either. The game, Project Snowblind, was supposed to be the fourth in the original series. That one at least found it's own legs and became something else.
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Oct 20, 2019 01:50
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Has anyone here played Human Revolution for the Wii U? I was flipping through my game collection earlier and was surprised to find that I own a copy when I thought that I just had the PC version. I think that it was the last version made, and I didn't know if there were any interesting additions and/or hardware gimmicks.
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Oct 20, 2019 04:08
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chaosapiant posted:First time I beat MD I rubbed my penis on my monitor and then flew out my second story window in the shape of a bat. It was weird. Huh. I thought that was just me. Also I don't care if there's a sequel to Mankind Divided because for reasons discussed earlier in this thread I think while the recent DXs are decent games they fail as additions to the Deus Ex world. Arkane, please, step up.
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Oct 20, 2019 04:46
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Neurosis posted:Huh. I thought that was just me. I think that Human Revolution was about as good a Deus Ex sequel/prequel you could ask for but I agree that the story and setting is basically completely tapped dry at this point and it's better for everyone to just move on and make new games with new stories and settings that are inspired by Deus Ex but not beholden to the canon and timeframe that almost 20 years of games have built up and filled out. As much of a Mankind Divided apologist as I am I still feel that bringing Jensen back was a mistake and is kind of the cornerstone for all the issues that the game has with being a calculated attempt at franchise-building and setting up future sequels/multimedia tie-ins in The Deus Ex Universe (which shut down last year, further cementing that their plans for this series are dead and buried) rather than just taking the opportunity to tell a new story in the time between Human Revolution and the start of the first game.   Considering that we're only 8 years away from Human Revolution's setting of 2027 and the original Deus Ex's setting was 2052 we're already at the point where it's barely even futuristic sci-fi anymore. The way that Metal Gear Solid handled it (MGS4 wound up being set in 2014 because thanks to how long it took to make each game they basically ran out of buffer between the far-flung futuristic date the started with and the current day) was by setting entries in the past but I don't really see how that could work for this franchise. https://twitter.com/KinoFabino/status/1186051348493733888
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Oct 21, 2019 00:14
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Sleeveless posted:As much of a Mankind Divided apologist as I am I still feel that bringing Jensen back was a mistake and is kind of the cornerstone for all the issues that the game has with being a calculated attempt at franchise-building and setting up future sequels/multimedia tie-ins in The Deus Ex Universe It's probably true now that I think about it. People here (and in other places) complain about the story not being finished. And I can see it when you talk about Jensen's personal story. It was finished in DXHR and here we get some promise of it being reignited, mostly in sidequests. But he's a grumpy neutral guy who somehow doesn't have strong feelings about the whole augmentation problem which went from "segregate people with glasses, those unnatural freaks" of HR to "maybe we should be careful around people who can instantly switch into a zombie mode". He's like a Witcher without a main quest, he's just doing his job. Really even HR was very different from original games in story and atmosphere. Yeah, original game happened after the economic collapse so the world looks like poo poo, but HR was often more futuristic than Invisible War. It also seems to be shy of its legacy of every conspiracy theory being true. Even Illuminati guy seems to be ashamed he's in a secret world government, it's such a silly cliche! And you don't have effective Alex Jones personalities talking about how rich are 1% of the population but commit 50% of economic crimes which was there in Deus Ex together with artificial plague, three major conspiracies, aliens and a lot of other stuff. HR felt very narrow-focused, it's all about augmentations, and it's not explained properly apart from being a natural xenophobic reaction. Does the economy transform and I lose my job as a loader cause a lot of guys to replace their arms and spine with metal? I understand that it mirrors the early industrial revolution and even the Renaissance fashion supports it (which, by the way, was great - they managed to create a consistent style, only it's strange that Chinese homeless guys do fit in with this style. They probably overdid it). But it failes to explain how anyone outside the high-class specialists will be affected by augmentations which cost a lot. Anyway, it all would be fine if each game in the series would deal with its own issues. And with Prague as a setting, it looked like they were going that way. It's an old European city, not an industrial megapolis. It could talk about the transformation of the world from the point of view of the ancient economic core of the world. You have traces of that with Samizdat and Caucasian mafia which is mirroring Soviet Block days, so you might think it goes for Orwellian future and information control. But no, it's still all about augmentations. And its real-world parallels are still weak: it's one thing hating people for their genetics or origin and the other for their body modifications (probably acquired because of medical needs) and the fact that those modifications can turn people into zombies. They tried to turn this franchise into a character-based one but even Something like Assassins Creed series has more differences between games in Ezio trilogy than this one, and much more personality.
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Oct 21, 2019 09:05
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Yeah, Jensen in MD is the first time in the series that a protagonist is reused, and it's completely unnecessary. You can tell the writers struggled to make the plot work with everything that happened before, hell, they even gave Jensen a soft reboot, ability-wise but also memory/personality-wise, and they even hint at him being a clone or somehow altered. DX1, IW, and HR all had a protagonist that had something really special (JC: first true nano-aug agent along with Paul, Alex: clone of JC, the savior of mankind, Jensen: the first human to accept all augs without problems), but those revelations came really late in the story of the games, and the story did not center around it. It's cool that each protagonist story is intrinsically linked to the main plot (and that's also neat from a conspiracy-theory perspective, everyone is out to get me and I'm special!), and that's a thing that's sorely lacking in MD. There's no plot related reason a random member of TF29 with some cool augs couldn't be the player character in MD.
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Oct 21, 2019 09:43
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I feel like an incredibly obvious answer is that if they wanted to focus on the metaphor of augmented people as second-class citizens in Mankind Divided they could have had a protagonist who was a member of an actual minority group and wasn't operating from a position of privilege and security in the way that Jensen was. As much as people poo poo on The Fall, playing as an augmented agent who had defected and gone rogue and was having to live off the grid was at least different and procuring black market Neuropozene for you and your partner were the source of the majority of quests in that game just because you were struggling to survive off the grid. I could easily see them doing something similar with, say, an Indian immigrant in Prague who is kicked off some security force in the aftermath of the first game's events and starts the game living in a quarantine zone doing odd jobs for other augs and whatever other forces might be probing around for help in that area trying to get Neuropozene and eventually getting clearance to other areas or finding hidden entrances based on which sides they work for.
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Oct 21, 2019 21:32
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Indeed, the horrible discrimination of having to board a separate metro wagon beeing the only sign of discrimination was laughable.
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Oct 21, 2019 21:40
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ilitarist posted:Indeed, the horrible discrimination of having to board a separate metro wagon beeing the only sign of discrimination was laughable.
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Oct 21, 2019 21:45
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ilitarist posted:Indeed, the horrible discrimination of having to board a separate metro wagon beeing the only sign of discrimination was laughable. Which game did you play? There was a literal ghetto, people desperately trying to get fake passports and an underground railroad run by crooks to get people out before the pogrom.
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Oct 22, 2019 02:03
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sebmojo posted:Which game did you play? There was a literal ghetto, people desperately trying to get fake passports and an underground railroad run by crooks to get people out before the pogrom. The entire plot of the game is also about stopping a conspiracy to assassinate a political figure who opposes The Illuminati's goal to create a mass apartheid state too and like you said, most of the side quests have you perform illegal activities to help augmented people escape from Prague. I have issues with the augs = minorities angle like anyone else but to say there is no sign of discrimination in the game is kind of dumb.
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Oct 22, 2019 06:57
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Most of the criticism of MD I read seems to be from people not paying attention to the game like, at all. It's weird. I wonder if it's because you could easily skip so much of the game if you just blew straight through the story missions?
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Oct 22, 2019 07:09
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sebmojo posted:Which game did you play? There was a literal ghetto, people desperately trying to get fake passports and an underground railroad run by crooks to get people out before the pogrom. At what point is this actually mechanically reflected in a way that impacts Jensen's ability to move around and shoot/punch bad guys? The argument isn't "there was no oppression in the game," it's "writing a game ostensibly about oppression then making the protagonist someone who never feels that oppression in any way because they're a super secret special boy is not good writing."
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Oct 22, 2019 07:34
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You are a literal superman, and a cop. Why should day to day oppression that affects normal people affect you? But the pogrom is coming and it's plain that you'll be swept up in it, or it least it was to me. It only doesn't affect you if you ignore half the game. I mean they could have had the cops shoot you if you went the wrong way, but that would have just been another fight.
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Oct 22, 2019 07:41
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Or they could have had you play someone who wasn't a superhuman cop. You know, the argument that was made 8 posts ago.
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Oct 22, 2019 07:52
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I guess, but I had no trouble empathizing with the other augs having a lovely time. Idk if there's a good example of a power fantasy game that makes its players feel powerless while still being fun? I mean actually, now I think of it: I'd argue MD did do that. I remember feeling both insanely powerful, but also helpless because the storm was coming and I couldn't stop it no matter how many racist cops I stabbed with my armblades.
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Oct 22, 2019 07:58
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sebmojo posted:Which game did you play? There was a literal ghetto, people desperately trying to get fake passports and an underground railroad run by crooks to get people out before the pogrom. We were talking about discrimination that affects the player character and how it would be much more interesting to play anyone who isn't augmented James Bond.
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Oct 22, 2019 09:31
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ilitarist posted:We were talking about discrimination that affects the player character and how it would be much more interesting to play anyone who isn't augmented James Bond. Are there examples of the sort of game you're talking about? Deus Ex is literally you are augmented james bond, the game.
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Oct 22, 2019 10:33
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Deus Ex is a lot of things, and you spend most of the first game as a fugitive hiding from the law (there's a short episode when you're attacked by the police in Prague but IIRC they have nothing against you personally). As for the discrimination - even the Witcher series did similar thing much better. You play as a superhero but people are constantly trying to cheat you and a lot of people just don't like you and are openly hostile because of who you are. In story it means that you're half way between dominating humans and repressed minorities, knowing they might come next for you. Jensen in Deus Ex is as alien as they come yet he's above all of those problems: his genetics make him not care about sustaining the augmentations and his job makes him immune to discrimination.
ilitarist fucked around with this message at 10:47 on Oct 22, 2019 |
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Oct 22, 2019 10:43
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ilitarist posted:Deus Ex is a lot of things, and you spend most of the first game as a fugitive hiding from the law (there's a short episode when you're attacked by the police in Prague but IIRC they have nothing against you personally). As for the discrimination - even the Witcher series did similar thing much better. You play as a superhero but people are constantly trying to cheat you and a lot of people just don't like you and are openly hostile because of who you are. In story it means that you're half way between dominating humans and repressed minorities, knowing they might come next for you. Jensen in Deus Ex is as alien as they come yet he's above all of those problems: his genetics make him not care about sustaining the augmentations and his job makes him immune to discrimination. do you feel threatened or genuinely discriminated against at any point in either of those? I didn't, perhaps you did. I definitely felt the weight of oppression in MD, though even if it wasn't directed at me in any meaningful way.
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Oct 22, 2019 10:50
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Video games usually are escapist power fantasies. You can play as a member of a disenfranchised group, but you'll be a hero with the potential to overcome all adversity anyway.
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Oct 22, 2019 11:04
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Yes, constantly. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDjqbkXyhWc&t=117s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4TtCYAMF9A Apart from things like that, you have quests specifically about dealing with people attacking another witcher cause they didn't want to pay, or when pogroms start guards tell Geralt that he's next and so on and so on. The worst thing you get in MD is being called clank or some other invented slur.
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Oct 22, 2019 11:11
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