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Don't know how you can say that when the game is made up to a large degree of characters, places, scenes that are obviously analogous to those in Deus Ex. That's more than an "occasional nod", it's a significant factor in the game's framework.
Unless you want to define it so "the themes are different == not a tribute".
Well, for me the central themes are more important than superficial similarities like "you visit an Asian city", "you fight an augmented Russian woman", or "people comment on you going to the women's bathroom", but I guess it's a matter of taste where you want to draw the line. Deus Ex is obviously one of the many influences of Human Revolution, but story-wise not necessarily even the biggest one.
I think the Accursed Farms guy said that Squeenix's DE should have been a new franchise and I believe he's right. The games look and feel more like Ghost in the Shell than Deus Ex, really.
Agreed. You get the feeling that being trapped in the shell of a "Deus Ex prequel" is mostly just a burden, something that prevents the developers from going the full distance with their vision. Whether this is for better or for worse is hard to tell.
The thing that bothers me is that everything is dead serious in the Squeenix games. Deus Ex (and even Invisible War) had many instances of very low key and subtle comedy. In fact, you could say the premise behind the game is almost like a joke: what if the tinfoil hat people are right? Said joke went over Squeenix's heads and they ended up trying to make real political statemens about stuff that's poorly translated from today's politics into this uncanny valley future.
Mankin Divided plays like a better looking version of some early 2000 era shooter like Metal Gear or Winback - move in, take cover, shoot, move on, choose between air duct or corridor, rinse and repeat... but without the story hooks and character development that made Human Revolution good. Game crashed after the introduction level and I haven't bothered to load it up since.
Putting aside the issue of 'is it a real Deus Ex' (about as fruitful as 'what is a crpg?'), what strikes me is how HR and md are held back every time they feel the need to link to the original game via the illuminati etc. The illuminati concept doesn't work in the setting, as it goes for realism over' comic book serious', and the best writing in HR (the far better written off the new games) works when its focusing on the personal qualities and flaws of the individual titans of industry, whereas the ties with the original game keep pulling them back into a setting where the characters are standins for broader ideals/philosophies.
Plus the new games put augmentation front and centre of everything. In the original game it was important (and the downside of human-mechanisation ie what happens to the guys that become obsolete tech, was the basis for Gunther's arc), but also only one of several technologies all being pursued to see which works out the best - military robots (funny how that one was conspiracy theory stuff then, and banal truth today), genetic engineering, mechanised suits, the MiB program etc.
I agree with Hoaxmetal
I'm halfway into Mankind Divided and the conspiracy angle is way too weak.
Seeing Jensen trying to convince an innocent man into surrendering to a corrupt UN authority is the epitome of fake choices.
He knows that order to take him in is bullshit, yet he does it anyway for the cinematic integrity of the game.
And at the end of it all, the success/failure of persuasion didn't matter cause the said man was assassinated immediately after the conversation concludes.
Well done.
That's how Lebedev would've been handled in the original game by Eidos team.
I agree with Hoaxmetal
I'm halfway into Mankind Divided and the conspiracy angle is way too weak.
Seeing Jensen trying to convince an innocent man into surrendering to a corrupt UN authority is the epitome of fake choices.
He knows that order to take him in is bullshit, yet he does it anyway for the cinematic integrity of the game.
And at the end of it all, the success/failure of persuasion didn't matter cause the said man was assassinated immediately after the conversation concludes.
Well done.
That's how Lebedev would've been handled in the original game by Eidos team.
HR did that stuff a lot better, largely because there was a lot more 'off to the side' interactivity. Minor characters who you could kill on first meeting, or could keep running into 3-4 times over the game. Little chain reactions, never in the main quests, but regardless of whether it was 'Deux Ex' or not, it was obvious that HR had some serious 'love' put into it. You could slap a different franchise title on it, and it would probably be even better, because it's clear that you had a committed team, where even the bad decisions (the piss-yellow filter) were brave decisions made for thought-out reasons, instead of just following a formula. I didn't get that feeling from MD.
I've clocked nine hours into Mankind Divided, and the stuff I've seen so far might actually be better than Human Revolution, objectively speaking. The writing has some big problems, but it improves considerably every time it abandons the "Aug racism" angle, or focuses on those issues on a more personal and believeable level ("Aug ghettos" are retarded, but an augmented guy who went momentarily crazy because of the events of HR and never managed to come to terms with it or even understand it is a different matter entirely). Human Revolution's writing did have its own issues too, if not quite as bad — the Augs vs. Naturals conflict was pretty dumb and implausible already in the first game, and many of its characters had weird motivations or shallow personalities. I like Prague more than either of the big hubs of HR, and the improved level design is a big step forward. I'm enjoying it, even though I've barely even got started with the main quest.
It's just disappointing how safe it all is. Human Revolution looked like absolute shit when all those early gameplay trailers started appearing with their explosive cinematic wall-punching action, so when the actual game came out, it was a pleasant surprise that it was actually pretty good — a compromise between old and new, for sure, but with enough good elements to make it very enjoyable. Mankind Divided is disappointing because there were actually some expectations for it, yet at its core it's exactly the same. They could've easily pushed things a bit further had they wanted to, like toned down the cinematics and made it into a proper first-person game for starters. Unfortunately the base gameplay remains the same, except for a bunch of new abilities that will undoubtedly be broken as fuck once you invest into them, and it still feels like a game full of compromises. That pretty much kills your enthusiasm for whatever future the series might have, as you know that it has probably already reached its potential.
Mankind Divided is certainly a flawed gem, but I did enjoy ignoring the plot and sneaking into places you wouldn't normally have access to until much later. It is like a vastly expanded version of Paris from the first game.
Very much agree that they are slow-playing the conspiracy angle way too much. Deus Ex has you uncovering several major conspiracies in a single game. The new games seem to think spreading a single conspiracy across multiple games is enough. It isn't.
(Not exactly true, but each game needs more elements like Eliza's true nature in DE:HR.)
Mankind Divided is certainly a flawed gem, but I did enjoy ignoring the plot and sneaking into places you wouldn't normally have access to until much later. It is like a vastly expanded version of Paris from the first game.
Very much agree that they are slow-playing the conspiracy angle way too much. Deus Ex has you uncovering several major conspiracies in a single game. The new games seem to think spreading a single conspiracy across multiple games is enough. It isn't.
(Not exactly true, but each game needs more elements like Eliza's true nature in DE:HR.)
I agree with the 'accessing stuff that you wouldn't normally get to until much later if you just ignore the plot and sneak around breaking shit', and in general better level design (but the Pod Gardens ambush remains the level design highlight for me despite the actual layout being very simple - it just integrates with the aug mechanics so well, by throwing a bunch of enemies who are way too powerful for you to fight front-on at that point without a full combat build, while allowing multiple escape tactics and forcing you to come up with them quickly and on the fly - using the icarus landing ability to flee by leaping off the balcony past several floors of enemies, then cloaking for a few seconds to get to a position where I could stealth out was very satisfying because it felt so organic).
My multiple breakins/murdersprees (usually by hacking the robots/turrets and having them kill everyone before re-emerging) in the Bank every return to Prague, and finding out that
there's a series of corporate vaults under the bank with tons of loot and powerful items, one of which you go to via plot (with opportunity to then access the others if you have the codes/keycards), which are accessible from the start by exploring the vents from the bank carpark
were probably my two favourite parts of MD.
One mechanic I missed from HR was the functionality of the 'heavy weaponry' and aiming/stability augs, where even if you stealth-killed and picked up the powerful guns from the guys that ambush you in pod gardens, you can't really make use of the gun without having invested in combat skills (otherwise its spread is too bad, accuracy shit etc). I never got that feeling of tradeoff in MD - you could have a powerful weapon and make use of it, without investing in combat.
Edit: just remembered why that happens. Not only is there no equivalent of the 'fucking powerful and will kill you really fast, but it's not much good to you without pumping the weapon stability/aim augs' weapon, but you have those augs automatically maxed from the START (even after the end intro mission strips you down). There's literally no 'low combat ability' build on the game, unless you actively choose to disable those augs in order to get earlier access to the 'experimental augs' (and there's no reason to do that, it's made clear that you will get unrestricted access later, and you can get all the gameplay-changing ones like the blink ability by trading off the most obviously useless ones, so it's not like you're missing out on content by leaving the others until you get unrestricted access to the new augs).
Even if you did chooses to disable them (and I'm not sure you can, they might be excluded) the weapons aren't designed around it - there's no 'heavy automatic rifle' equivalent. Tradeoffs for sniping are better thought out though - if you want a silent option, you're stuck with either the tranq rifle (with its delay before enemy collapses, when they can alert others) or a scoped and silenced combat rifle (which lowers the stopping power of an already modest weapon), until you get the lancer (mid-game if you explore like fuck, otherwise it's quite late). But there's powerful 'noisy' options from the start, including the sniper rifle and a powerful single shot rifle that's a good compromise if you don't want to use inventory space on a dedicated sniping weapon. The 'noise v power' trade-off feels better than in MD where you only have the two options (and - I hate to say it - better than original game in that regard, where a scoped pistol can achieve all your sniping needs, and the sniper rifle itself is quickly combined with a silencer that the AI can't handle. No complaints about the 'target-lock rocket launcher sniping' though - that had all the right kind of hilariously fun overpowered-ness, and arrives around the time that the game goes full superhero mode, with you taking out small armies of terrified enemies while they shit themselves about fighting some mechanised supersoldier).
Bought it 2 days ago because of the discount (Digital Deluxe edition). Finished it in 39 hrs. Was going to ignore the moronic story, characters and the shit ending (equivalent of ending a game at Chapter-1), but then the game decided to piss me off even more with the unskippable 30+ minutes of credits.
Alt+Tabbed, wrote a negative steam review. Fuckers.
Also, ended the whole game with inventory filled with shitload of items. Used a silenced shotgun (to use EMP ammo against turrets), stun gun and tranquilizer rifle only. There was no challenge. Even at medium, first DeusEx was challenging.
Anyway, I need to squeeze more playtime out of this game to make my money worth. Will play the DLC and NewGame+ and see how it goes. Shit game.
Bought it 2 days ago because of the discount (Digital Deluxe edition). Finished it in 39 hrs. Was going to ignore the moronic story, characters and the shit ending (equivalent of ending a game at Chapter-1), but then the game decided to piss me off even more with the unskippable 30+ minutes of credits.
Alt+Tabbed, wrote a negative steam review. Fuckers.
Also, ended the whole game with inventory filled with shitload of items. Used a silenced shotgun (to use EMP ammo against turrets), stun gun and tranquilizer rifle only. There was no challenge. Even at medium, first DeusEx was challenging.
Anyway, I need to squeeze more playtime out of this game to make my money worth. Will play the DLC and NewGame+ and see how it goes. Shit game.
For the last 10 years or so you haven't been able to find a challenge on anything lower than "hard" difficulty unless you have less than two opposable thumbs. But I'm sure you knew that.
1) Really don't want to defend this half-game, but people who compare anti-aug or pro-aug sentiments to BLM should just make a step back, look at this thing as a whole and try to disentangle their (warranted or unwarranted) concerns about real-life BLM and this thing. Actually, they tried (and that's why SJW viciously attacked the developers of DXMD) to show this problem from all sides and demonstrate that all arguments are equally flawed (as in 'it's better not to start such conflicts, as no one would come clean of it). For example, it's self-evident that augs and augmented people can be dangerous for the others and themselves, but many of them had no choice in becoming augmented (manual workers needed it to be competitive, others would have died without them). And on the other hand, they are still people, and dehumanizing them won't lead to anything good in general.
2) If you think Picus 'interviews' are retarded, you haven't watched CNN recently or any Ukrainian TV channels. Eliza is actually better than most of 'journalists' from there. There's even a mention of 'fake news' and why it's important to fight them in Picus emails and Eliza voicecasts somewhere in the game, well before the real mass media made an issue out of it.
3) One conspiracy ? There's many, it's just they are not really shoved into your throat, like in many contemporary games
- Main quest, Palisade vaults mails, as well as Harvester quests make you wonder if Adam Jensen is a fake, a clone (created by Page/Reed for his/their own agenda of undermining de Beers crew / wiping out loose ends) with implanted memories, or something else
- If you looked closely at the tables in the meth labs, you'd see that this shit was actually made by VersaLife and the chemists just diluted it and added some 'flavour'. It could be Gray Death, it could be diluted Orchid, it could be entirely something else, who knows.
- you contribute to creating NSF by helping Samizdat
- probably other things that I already forgot.
Main problems of this game, as far as it goes, in my opinion, are not really plot related, but gameplay related (easy to get everything you need if you explore enough) and Sqeenix related (game cut in half)
1) Really don't want to defend this half-game, but people who compare anti-aug or pro-aug sentiments to BLM should just make a step back, look at this thing as a whole and try to disentangle their (warranted or unwarranted) concerns about real-life BLM and this thing.
IMO, what always hurt that controversy as presented in nu-DX was the artificial nature of the problem as they depicted it.
In DX:HR, a game that was supposedly less than 2 decades away (albeit in a parallel history) they introduced augs as something ubiquitous, something suddenly everyone - and apparently even the poor - wanted and could get. Then they threw the Neuropozyne motif at it in an artificial way to paint augs as something potentially problematic and dangerous to their users.
A much more logical and plausible approach would have been to present augs as something rare and expensive that only enforced an existing division in society - those who could afford it had an potentially tremendous competitive edge, the poor would get even poorer due to less jobs.
Maybe some would feel driven to use black-market or faulty low-quality augs to shorten that gap with potentially catastrophic (for them) results - if you buy a cheap old smartphone and it breaks that's bad luck, if the same happens to your replacement legs you're fucked.
In a way that was, I believe, what they wanted to show, but they put the whole issue from the feet on its head.
Maybe it had dawned to them at some point that the neuropozyne approach wasn't so great after all and they came up with the mind-control-chip "Aug-Incident" - which is however yet another rather artificial addition to the augs-vs-naturals debate.
And of course, since nuances are not one of their biggest strength, the result is a full-blown apartheid regime, with apparently no interest at all in discovering the reasons behind it (and potentially preventing similar incidents in the future, other than by using the most outlandish solutions short of killing all augs right away).
So, in summary, using the augs-vs-naturals debate as presented in nu-DX as a metaphor for real-world conflicts falls short due to the artificial and overblown presentation of it.
Again, I repeat - do not compare the real life situation and this hypothetical, it's completely different and irrelevant to each other. Look at it with an open mind, without any preconceived notions, so to say. I did not feel that the game was biased in either way, both augs (like Marchenko) and non-augs (take any cop on the streets of Prague) are disgusting.
Well, you don't get it, but it's a real problem that has real-life roots - one of the main problems with the BCIs in the modern neuroscience is that they either don't last very long (because of inflammation they cause) or are very crude and inefficient. Also, till this very moment there was no noninvasive way of direct interpretation of brain activity (although progress in the field of deep learning and manifold neural networks makes it possible to decipher neural signals on the fly without a supercomputer attached to your brain), so the only way to make cybernetic prosthetics possible is to figure out a way to suppress that reaction. Neuropozyne is completely believable in that context. Also, what's wrong with the 'cheap base technology, expensive consumables / technical service' strategy? Many tech companies work like that, especially in fields where everything is monopolized.
A much more logical and plausible approach would have been to present augs as something rare and expensive that only enforced an existing division in society
It's a game and a science fiction flick - they posit a situation and try to model how people would behave in such a scenario. Do you throw fits where something is 'unrealistic' in the sci-fi movies? Many, dare i say, shallow people do, and it's disgusting (most of the criticism aimed at both the Odyssey 2001 and the Sunshine is precisely this). It's no different from SJWs demanding POCs and other irrelevant people/phenomena to be represented in inappropriate historical contexts.
Maybe some would feel driven to use black-market or faulty low-quality augs to shorten that gap with potentially catastrophic (for them) results - if you buy a cheap old smartphone and it breaks that's bad luck, if the same happens to your replacement legs you're fucked.
if you played both games you'd know that the main article of black market trade is not the augs (which simply would be 'prohibited' from civilian use), but the drug which allows them going. No drug - augs are useless or dangerous for their owners, no matter legal or not.
Maybe it had dawned to them at some point that the neuropozyne approach wasn't so great after all and they came up with the mind-control-chip "Aug-Incident" - which is however yet another rather artificial addition to the augs-vs-naturals debate.
Incident, if you remember HR, was created by Darrow ostensibly so that Illuminati won't be able to control mankind through these chips (and their main function was, according to the ingame MSM and the Sarif scientists which were working on them, to limit augs so that they won't be able to exceed typical human physical or mental capacities). Of course, apart from all this, Darrow was also a small-minded, jealous man who could not see people using his inventions while he had to use a crutch because he was not compatible with the aug tech.
And of course, since nuances are not one of their biggest strength, the result is a full-blown apartheid regime, with apparently no interest at all in discovering the reasons behind it (and potentially preventing similar incidents in the future, other than by using the most outlandish solutions short of killing all augs right away).
I don't think game offers any solutions or reasons (as it's probably right, otherwise it'd be, as you claim, propaganda for one side), it just presents the situation and allows to choose for yourself (within certain limits, like inevitable death of Talos Rucker, as someone already said)
The "Aug incident" in HR always felt like a non-sequitur to me, like they weren't sure how to make the conflict escalate in a believeable manner, so they included a God event that allowed them to get to the point they wanted to for the second game, or just have high enough stakes for the endgame. In a way it made all of their previous build-up for the Augs vs. Naturals division pointless, as it was like having a lengthy training montage in Rocky that ends with a shot of his opponent getting killed by a meteorite. It was necessary, though, because the conflict never made that much sense in the first place. On one hand they tried to show that being an Aug sucks with the constant need for expensive Neuropozyne for the rest of your life, Jensen "never asking for it", the black market stuff relating to augmentations and so on, and that was the good part of the story. At the same time they portrayed Augs as some privileged minority that takes all the jobs and has all the influence, but that seemed far-fetched in several ways. How many people would actually be willing to cut off their limbs or insert metal into their skulls to become better at their work, even if they had the money to spare? How much would one even benefit from augmentations in his daily job, and would it really be worth it? It seems like it'd only be advantageous if you're doing some demanding physical labour (few people seem to have CASIE augs, for example), and a few perverts wanting for augmented prostitutes wouldn't really change that. Why would people be rioting over a blind man being able to see again, or a cripple regaining the ability to walk? You'd have to be absolutely desperate to take augmentations in order to climb the career ladder, and if you were already at the top, you'd still probably want to think quite a bit before cutting off your arm as a fashion statement or something. The set-up was never believeable to begin with.
On the other hand, Augs going crazy all over the world and going on a murder spree... Yeah, that would definitely result in some serious shit. Augs would probably be shunned and feared, some new laws and regulations would be set, surveillance might be increased, and so on. It might lead to some pretty unpleasant shit for augmented people, like the horrors of drowning in red tape to make sure you're not wearing some dangerous hardware. Still, if the Augs in Human Revolution formed a wealthy upper class, they wouldn't suddenly turn into an oppressed underclass. They'd still have the money, the connections and at least some of their influence. The whole apartheid thing is an attempt to draw an analogy to a real-world phenomenon, but the different elements are hardly analogous with each other, which undermines the whole thing.
Already selling for $15 on consoles. Dishonored 2 is $30 on PC and that's barely a month or so old. AAA seems to be crashing hard these days.
Re: storyline. You don't even need that 'aug incident.' Human nature is to distrust and fear the alien. Add in a healthy dose of jealousy over augs being superior at physical/skill/mental jobs because of whatever their implants are and the post is sufficiently stirred. We live in world where Trump became President because whitey is mad about who-knows-what? Some retards think the US was ACTUALLY in danger of adopting Sharia law. People are easily manipulated even without any kind of galvanizing event.
Not that simple. The game presented augmented people at times both as an incipient elite and as an extorted working class. The augmentations are a device for the writers to commentate on a wide variety of things.
Well yes, that's what I said - you can't directly compare it as it doesn't really fit.
Neuropozyne is completely believable in that context. Also, what's wrong with the 'cheap base technology, expensive consumables / technical service' strategy? Many tech companies work like that, especially in fields where everything is monopolized.
That might work with a comparatively cheap smartphone or for industrial/professional hardware not targeted at private use, but personal augmentations that on top of expensive high-tech products also surely include complicated implantation procedures and prolonged hospitalization? I don't know...
Considering that even in the first game a lot of the poor apparently are augmented people that fell on hard times (as opposed to naturals who lost their job to the supposedly superior augs), both sides seem rather bad at making financial judgments.
It's a game and a science fiction flick - they posit a situation and try to model how people would behave in such a scenario. Do you throw fits where something is 'unrealistic' in the sci-fi movies? Many, dare i say, shallow people do, and it's disgusting (most of the criticism aimed at both the Odyssey 2001 and the Sunshine is precisely this). It's no different from SJWs demanding POCs and other irrelevant people/phenomena to be represented in inappropriate historical contexts.
I'm shallow? That hurt mu feelz...
I'm not talking realism, I'm talking plausibility. This is were nu-DX imo fails - at least for me, since I have a hard time imagining that the world of DX:HR/MD would come to pass within such a short time frame - even when I accept that in the DX universe, science made a couple of breakthroughs in the early 2000s that our world missed.
This is also true when I compare it to the world depicted in the original DX, which interestingly feels much less futuristic in comparison (and this more than just a result of the technical shortcomings of DX1).
if you played both games you'd know that the main article of black market trade is not the augs (which simply would be 'prohibited' from civilian use), but the drug which allows them going. No drug - augs are useless or dangerous for their owners, no matter legal or not.
Why would people be rioting over a blind man being able to see again, or a cripple regaining the ability to walk? You'd have to be absolutely desperate to take augmentations in order to climb the career ladder, and if you were already at the top, you'd still probably want to think quite a bit before cutting off your arm as a fashion statement or something. The set-up was never believeable to begin with.
What one would be willing to do for one's career depends also on the risks involved and the potential gains, I guess, but in the DX-universe interestingly enough a lot of white collar office jobs seem to rely heavily on augmented legs and arms.
This is another example where they failed at plausibility and nuance.
If Belltower mercs, special forces or some military personal are augmented, it's much more plausible than with some random journalist or secretary.
Infinitron said:
Not that simple. The game presented augmented people at times both as an incipient elite and as an extorted working class. The augmentations are a device for the writers to commentate on a wide variety of things.
Which is also part of the problem - they created a big hodgepodge of different ideas but failed to throw out motives that din't work to focus on some parts of it.
Sometimes it seems as if they had something to say, but didn't exactly know what or how.
Not that simple. The game presented augmented people at times both as an incipient elite and as an extorted working class. The augmentations are a device for the writers to commentate on a wide variety of things.
Re: storyline. You don't even need that 'aug incident.' Human nature is to distrust and fear the alien. Add in a healthy dose of jealousy over augs being superior at physical/skill/mental jobs because of whatever their implants are and the post is sufficiently stirred.
On the contrary, I think you'd need something really extreme to happen for the Average Joe to get passionate about anything nowadays. People may be voting for Trump, but they are still voting.
That might work with a comparatively cheap smartphone or for industrial/professional hardware not targeted at private use, but personal augmentations that on top of expensive high-tech products also surely include complicated implantation procedures and prolonged hospitalization? I don't know...
What i tried to say is that the numericals and price tags are irrelevant (and very subjective - for my mother, basically anything above shit-tier and not in the flash sales bin is 'too expensive'), costs can be hidden, shifted or heavily subsidized (most types of anti-cancer and anti-HIV medicines cost a fortune, but people get them for free or with huge discount at the expense of government). We were, as far as i understood, talking about the premise, not it's 'financial' (don't know how to put it) feasibility.
I'm shallow? That hurt mu feelz...
I'm not talking realism, I'm talking plausibility. This is were nu-DX imo fails - at least for me, since I have a hard time imagining that the world of DX:HR/MD would come to pass within such a short time frame - even when I accept that in the DX universe, science made a couple of breakthroughs in the early 2000s that our world missed.
Well, it's just I am actually following the progress in the field of BCIs and neuroprothetics very closely for the last 6 years and i can say it's really, really fast. Check what Miguel Nicolelis, John Donoghue and Gregoire Courtine (not sure if I wrote that correctly, damn frenchies) did in the last few years, your mind would be blown off. Pretty sure we'd reach or even exceed what DXHR portrayed by 2027.
If you read their mails (or maybe senior Tong himself tells it, don't remember exactly), this harvester business is just a free bonus to the fact that they dispose of bodies for the Bell Tower / TYM, and that re-selling augs is not that profitable. Furthermore, in game news narrative strongly hints at the fact that most biotech companies are failing, while VersaLife (who supplies most of the drug) is booming. Again, preconceptions.
holy fuck what a shitty game.
prague is retarded, never seen this much backtracking in a single game and i finished wizardry 8. the game starts with the most retarded roadblock in history, then follows with a map split in half for no reason other than console hardware limitations. fuck this shit, it's 2017, "hardware limitations" my fucking ass. last time i've been as angry with a game it's been with infinite biocock. damn you hrmd, this is quite an achievement!
characters are entirely forgettable, in fact during the forced credits i read the voice actors and often said out loud "and who the fuck would this character be?", the story is completely uninteresting, the conspiracy is on par with "mcdonald's and burger king are owned by the same company" level of "and i should give a fuck because?", mission maps are good (despite the 3m long tunnels and people 3m away not giving a fuck if i go one-punch-man on a wall) but the thought of having to return to prague was dreadful. placing the only two vendors through a series of ladders and corridors, very far away from the quicktravel points is either idiocy or sadism.
and then, when it was seemingly starting to become interesting, when the answers came near... "you unlocked new game +" and everything you'll need to know (and that you mostly already know if you played deus ex) will be seen in the next episode because fuck you that's why.
it went from mediocre to abysmal in a matter of seconds.
Bought it 2 days ago because of the discount (Digital Deluxe edition). Finished it in 39 hrs. Was going to ignore the moronic story, characters and the shit ending (equivalent of ending a game at Chapter-1), but then the game decided to piss me off even more with the unskippable 30+ minutes of credits.
Alt+Tabbed, wrote a negative steam review. Fuckers.
Also, ended the whole game with inventory filled with shitload of items. Used a silenced shotgun (to use EMP ammo against turrets), stun gun and tranquilizer rifle only. There was no challenge. Even at medium, first DeusEx was challenging.
Anyway, I need to squeeze more playtime out of this game to make my money worth. Will play the DLC and NewGame+ and see how it goes. Shit game.
Finished it. Took me 35 hours on Give Me Deus Ex, although I didn't bother checkng out every apartment or hacking every terminal or anything like that. I'd say that for about two thirds of the way I liked it better than Human Revolution. It kind of lost me at the start with the unconvincing premise, and it kind of lost me again towards the end when the main story failed to pick up any kind of steam, but I actually liked that it was relatively low-key, a small story in a long chain of events largely focused around a single location. The quality of the story is another matter, though...
The strengths and flaws are largely same as in Human Revolution, from the piss-poor XP system and poorly balanced augmentations to the awesome button takedowns and overused cinematics, so rather than going through all that I'll just say how I think it compares to its predecessor.
The things I really liked, or thought were better than in Human Revolution:
- The level design is better. Not as much as it could've been, but enough to make a difference. There are still those convenient vents that allow you to get past the tough spots. There are still no big outdoor areas in the vein of Liberty Island or Vandenberg. Hell, there's not even an equivalent of the Singapore base from Human Revolution. The bigger main quest areas are still rather straightforward, as in you start from one end of a rather wide corridor and find your way to the other end. Still, it feels like the levels are built from larger blocks this time, and most importantly the different "paths" through the levels aren't as obvious this time around.
- The art style is better. No piss filter, for starters. Aside from that, the game is visually a bit more grounded than HR was, and for the most part it doesn't look like it wants to be anime anymore. There are still triangles and hexagons everywhere, and it's still a bit too futuristic in places for my tastes, but it's not as extravagant as the last game. People dress up more like actual people and less like supermodels on a catwalk. Prague looks very nice, and even though it does have its futuristic elements, there's still plenty of old left in it. It also has a lot more personality than either of the big hubs of HR, which were very generic in comparison.
- The side quests range from pretty good to excellent. My favorites were probably
the murder investigation, the quest where you need to kidnap the guy from the Dvali apartments without raising an alarm, and the one where you go on a crash course with Morgan Everett's men while trying to help the "real" Eliza Cassan,
but pretty much all of them are more interesting than the main quest.
- I liked the whole detective / double agent angle, although I wish they'd have taken it a bit further and given you a bit more agency in it.
- There's some nice reactivity, and it's maybe slightly more natural than in Human Revolution. No one calls you a murderer for taking out an armed terrorist that threatens to put a bullet through a hostage's brain, for instance. In one mission I tried to sneak past a bunch of cops non-lethally, got spotted and then made a James Bond exit using smoke bombs and various augmentations. I didn't kill anyone (unless some poor cop was caught by friendly fire), but I still got an earful from my boss who got word from the police about an "augmented terrorist" causing havoc around a crime scene. It's fluff, of course, but there are also a couple of potentially tough choices that apparently impact the ending.
The things I didn't like, or thought were worse than in Human Revolution:
- The main quest is obviously very underwhelming. Like I said earlier, I don’t mind that it’s a smaller story. I don’t even necessarily mind that some threads are left hanging in the air for sequels to expand upon. I could even live with a dumb premise if it was executed very well. Unfortunately the plot just comes off as a disjointed mess, full of ideas that aren’t explored properly and elements that are introduced only to be quickly forgotten afterwards. It doesn’t seem to fully know what it even wants to be about, and it holds no hooks nor mysteries to keep it interesting. It isn't helped by the fact that all of the characters are so underdeveloped. It still has it's moments, but as a whole it sucks.
- The game's very easy. Throughout the whole game you feel like you're over-equipped for whatever you're doing. I don't want to limit myself too much of first playthroughs, so I tried to use a bit of everything. When infiltrating or facing not-outright-evil enemies, I went in non-lethal and sneaky, but I wasn't afraid to spill some blood if shit hit the fan. In the end, I had to really go looking for situations where I'd have a reason to kill someone. There are very few actually though spots in the game, even compared to Human Revolution. You can unlock the most important augmentations right away, and the experimental augs seem just overkill. Going non-lethal should be the hardest way to play the game, but nope, it's (still) the easiest.
- One part of the game is so disappointing that it deserves a special mention. When you leave Prague for the second time
and go to the G.A.R.M. facility, there's a promise of a really cool big infiltration mission. Promisingly enough you're dropped off outside a large complex. Maybe you'll get to choose how to go in? Maybe you'll finally be able to make good use of your sniper rifle? Maybe this will be the part of the game that puts all of your skills to a test?
Unfortunately, here's how it goes:
You walk fifteen seconds in a snowy corridor until you come to a door. Youuse your Smart Vision aug to check that no one's behind the door. You open the door. You get instantly cutscene-captured by a group of thugs that were apparently waiting for you right there. You're "killed" in a cutscene, except that no one bothers to check whether you're dead or not. They dump your body somewhere and are even nice enough to let you keep all your equipment. Then you escape the base which consists of three rooms (admittedly big rooms, but still), and that's it.
The only question is: why? There's no reason you couldn't just go in, grab what you were looking for and then escape. The only answer I can think of was that they wanted to give a bit more screentime to the main bad guy, but even then it was a pretty terrible way of doing it.
- What happened to the dialogue challenges? Those were one of the best things about HR, yet they barely even exist in this game. Bummer.
As a whole it's alright. It does feel like a smaller game than HR was, but I don't know if the amount of content is really any lower (it probably took me longer to finish MD than HR), it's more about the formulaic structure and the lackluster plot that never really gets going. I don't know if MD is better than HR, but I don't really consider it worse either, just more flawed and more disappointing because it took so few risks and did so little to fix the shortcomings of its predecessor.
The only question is: why? There's no reason you couldn't just go in, grab what you were looking for and then escape. The only answer I can think of was that they wanted to give a bit more screentime to the main bad guy, but even then it was a pretty terrible way of doing it.
actually i found more of them (not that it's much, hr had 4 or 5 tops) and i've been surprised when a character told me "i'm an experienced cop, don't try to pull that social aug on me". highest point of the game.
speaks volume.
