Deus Ex Deus Ex: Mankind Divided

[J1M]

I would like to see a new DX game that incorporates real-world (politically neutral) conspiracies. Also, the robo race war stuff is too goofy to be playing through.

 

[Paul_cz]

Last i heard, EIDOS Montreal was moved into another shitty project instead of Deus Ex after the Avengers game.

That project is Guardians of the Galaxy and it is coming out in two days.

 

[Fenix]

I would like to see a new DX game that incorporates real-world (politically neutral) conspiracies. Also, the robo race war stuff is too goofy to be playing through.

Sadly I think it's impossible today.
Back then it was made by people who grown up in times of freedom - freedom as possible - but today society formatted to compliance to obedience, it simply can not born people who could be brave enough to touch this stuff.

 

[Lacrymas]

They have to somehow make the events lead to what state the world is in at the start of Deus Ex 1. Grey death, Silhouette, the bombing of Liberty Island, and all that jazz. I'm not sure if Adam is the right protagonist for the job, though. He seems like a random bloke who gets thrown into whatever shenanigans happen to occur around him in both games. The only thing he needs to do is give tissue samples in order to create the Denton brothers. At least that's all he is set up for in the first two games.

 

[J1M]

They have to somehow make the events lead to what state the world is in at the start of Deus Ex 1. Grey death, Silhouette, the bombing of Liberty Island, and all that jazz. I'm not sure if Adam is the right protagonist for the job, though. He seems like a random bloke who gets thrown into whatever shenanigans happen to occur around him in both games. The only thing he needs to do is give tissue samples in order to create the Denton brothers. At least that's all he is set up for in the first two games.

Wrong.

They didn't need to create a prequel.

They didn't need to take the few references to an Aug race war in DX literally.

They didn't need to have the player at the center of those events.

There are all sorts of alternatives to ground the story after a decade-long gap between games. Perhaps the laziest is the best: after a certain number of decades, the world has recovered from the collapse and again reached a level of society closely resembling that of today. Pull forward any tech that is central to the plot you want and hand wave the rest away as something that was lost in the collapse.

 

[True Ukrainian]

Square had great hopes for the DX property, creating the DX Universe effectively placing it close to the level of FF. However the sub properties never did all that well and DXMD under performed, causing square to have second thoughts.

 

[TemplarGR]

Square had great hopes for the DX property, creating the DX Universe effectively placing it close to the level of FF. However the sub properties never did all that well and DXMD under performed, causing square to have second thoughts.

Problem with mature franchises like Deux Ex, is that they require a certain level of gamer to appreciate. Kids/most teens and weeaboos are not the target audience for these games. So such games need a different approach. An adult gamer will not rush to buy inferior spin offs on different platforms like Android just because they like a franchise. We are not Final Fantasy fanbois who just drool over naked breast Sephiroth like the typical square fangirls.

Mankind Divided in particular failed mostly because of bad timing. It happened to release during a period when there was a lot of negative energy involved in the media and the internet regarding AAA games and people were beginning to become fed up with AAA shenanigans, plus prominent gamer pundits like Jim Sterling and the like found a way to pretend to be anti-industry in slamming every single microtransaction as teh evil. So Square did some microtransaction-y shit with MD and there was a flood of bad press and bad word of mouth. It didn't help that Mankind Divided was badly optimized at release and it was like Crysis in the way that its top hardware settings weren't really feasible with the vast majority of hardware of its time. It was the perfect storm for it to fail. Though it didn't really fail, it did sell enough to make a profit in the end.

People were trying really hard to find reasons to hate Mankind Divided and were jumping on the hate bandwagon. The most common complaints you can find on shit like Metacritic for example, are the sequel bait ending and the real money purchase Praxis points. That's about it. I can understand that MD didn't resolve all plot points and thus left people on a cliffhanger and this can suck, but is it a legitimate complaint when fanbois drooled over Mass Effect 2 and called it GOTY while it did the same fucking thing? MD was intended to have a sequel, it was planned and it was public knowledge. So why complain that much? As for real money Praxis points, who gives a fuck? The game wasn't stingy with Praxis points and if you did a completionist playthrough you got more than enough. you could then play a new game + and acquire the rest, MD was a really replayable game anyway.

That is why we can't have nice things in the video game industry. There are always fucking imbeciles who complain about tiny details while missing the forest for the trees.

 

[Teut Busnet]

Square had great hopes for the DX property, creating the DX Universe effectively placing it close to the level of FF. However the sub properties never did all that well and DXMD under performed, causing square to have second thoughts.

People were trying really hard to find reasons to hate Mankind Divided and were jumping on the hate bandwagon. The most common complaints you can find on shit like Metacritic for example, are the sequel bait ending and the real money purchase Praxis points. That's about it. I can understand that MD didn't resolve all plot points and thus left people on a cliffhanger and this can suck, but is it a legitimate complaint when fanbois drooled over Mass Effect 2 and called it GOTY while it did the same fucking thing? MD was intended to have a sequel, it was planned and it was public knowledge. So why complain that much? As for real money Praxis points, who gives a fuck? The game wasn't stingy with Praxis points and if you did a completionist playthrough you got more than enough. you could then play a new game + and acquire the rest, MD was a really replayable game anyway.

That is why we can't have nice things in the video game industry. There are always fucking imbeciles who complain about tiny details while missing the forest for the trees.

Nonsense.

• The backlash started when Square announced exclusive missions as pre-order bonus. Different tiers as well. 'Augment your experience' or something like that. They later backtracked because of the outrage, but the first domino had fallen.
  
• Nobody could know that you could get enough praxis points and other stuff during game without buying them for real money - and that was likely because the decision was made too late for Eidos to balance it 'correctly'.
• The ending was criticised because the story haden't moved forward a lot by the time you fought 'absurdly muscular dude' and stopped when it just seemed to get going - nothing you could say about ME 2.

Are you trolling? Probably.


As for 'low' sales: if Square thought DX would sell like Zelda, Skyrim or FIFA - that's on them. They apparently had '' expectations for Tomb Raider as well. Maybe to trick shareholders, I can't imagine they actually thought it was realistic.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

best thing to do with deus ex is to let it rest for another 15-20 years and hope people aren't as insane so it can be revived
anything that can be construed as remotely political will get them raked over the coals, which happened to DXMD

 

[Falksi]

Mankind Divided failed for a lot of reasons, but one of them was because it was a fucking boring game to actually play, nowhere near as good as the 00's original, and nowhere near as good as it's predecessor either.

For me the decision to try and create an "open world" early game, and set the whole thing on the sunny streets of Prague, just killed any real cyberpunk vibe. It felt more "Potatopunk" than cyberpunk.

 

[True Ukrainian]

Prague was a great setting but overused. It's the only DX to have just one major hub.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

You get to experience Prague the way it was meant to be experienced: crawling through ventilation shafts.

 

[Lacrymas]

Wrong.

They didn't need to create a prequel.

They didn't need to take the few references to an Aug race war in DX literally.

They didn't need to have the player at the center of those events.

There are all sorts of alternatives to ground the story after a decade-long gap between games. Perhaps the laziest is the best: after a certain number of decades, the world has recovered from the collapse and again reached a level of society closely resembling that of today. Pull forward any tech that is central to the plot you want and hand wave the rest away as something that was lost in the collapse.

They didn't need to, but they did. They also planned for Jensen to be a trilogy and gave us hints that he is the genetic blueprint for the Denton brothers. They could handwave that away, sure, but Jensen as a protagonist still stays. Maybe. I was just going to write how we can't play a neuropozyn-dependent PC, but now that I think about it that might be the best they could do. There are basically 2 overarching themes in the nu-Deus Exes that go unexplored - the control of media (especially news media) and neuropozyn dependency. These two are great foundations for a cyberpunk story.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

the control of media (especially news media)

there is no way this will ever get addressed

 

[vortex]

Prague was a great setting but overused. It's the only DX to have just one major hub.

I actually didn't like Prague at all. First mission I set as active required me to run through all Prague, wait about 10 minutes of 3 loading screens to get in the mission area. It was very daunting experience really.

 

[TemplarGR]

• The backlash started when Square announced exclusive missions as pre-order bonus. Different tiers as well. 'Augment your experience' or something like that. They later backtracked because of the outrage, but the first domino had fallen.

• Nobody could know that you could get enough praxis points and other stuff during game without buying them for real money - and that was likely because the decision was made too late for Eidos to balance it 'correctly'.

Yeah, and that is the issue when the morons who couldn't know that they could get enough praxis during gameplay without real money, went online and badmouthed the game giving it bad press so it didn't sell. Without having played that game. And "professional morons" did that for cool credits.

The ending was criticised because the story haden't moved forward a lot by the time you fought 'absurdly muscular dude' and stopped when it just seemed to get going - nothing you could say about ME 2.

Oh really, look, we have an ultra-moron here, who has obviously never played ME 2, comment on it.... So tell me, idiot, how did the story progressed in ME2 relatively to the rest of the trilogy? You literally did nothing other than beating the collectors, an enemy that didn't exist in the original and was created just for ME2. In the end you beat an unfinished human like reaper and.... How did the story actually progressed? It didn't. Same way as MD. But you butthurt faggots only cried for MD....

Are you trolling? Probably.

No, i am not trolling, you are just a retard.

Mankind Divided failed for a lot of reasons, but one of them was because it was a fucking boring game to actually play, nowhere near as good as the 00's original, and nowhere near as good as it's predecessor either.

MD is the best of the franchise. The original is GARBAGE. It was an 8/10 game at best for 2000 standards. Try playing it today without severe modification, it is totally unplayable. Total garbage.

 

[infidel]

Problem with mature franchises like Deux Ex, is that they require a certain level of gamer to appreciate.

Don't forget a certain level of writing is required to explore these so-called mature themes. None of the writing in nu-DX is anywhere near what Pacotti, Grossman & Co have produced (iirc from the Gamasutra post-mortem and various interviews, the dialogues between random NPCs were done by the persons responsible for the levels, not always by the writers). I'll just shill the only book of Pacotti's that I've read here (yeah, I'm too lazy to read books):

It's about how everything including human bodies and minds can be copied at the end of 30th century. The main crime that exists is unauthorized copies of yourself. The protag is a cop detective that went undercover and disappeared. So they've cloned him ("instantiated a copy") to find out what happened to the original. The catch is that by law only one copy is allowed to exist at the same time. So he will live only until the end of the investigation. It's undeniably Pacotti style, very measured, with rich vocabulary and dialogue (remember the joke about DX how every barman just starts arguing about the dangers of capitalism? :D). Everything is well thought through and makes you ponder about the described society, and I totally recommend it.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

the idea that deus ex requires a certain level of maturity is bullshit, you can play all the games just by telling people to go fuck themselves and shooting everyone

 

[Herumor]

Útulek Complex was a wasted opportunity. Cyberpunk Kowloon city, and you get to explore the smallest fraction of it, and only for one main story mission.

 

[Falksi]

MD is the best of the franchise. The original is GARBAGE. It was an 8/10 game at best for 2000 standards. Try playing it today without severe modification, it is totally unplayable. Total garbage.

The only MD which is the best, is the Megadrive Nintendoboy.

 

[Teut Busnet]

• The backlash started when Square announced exclusive missions as pre-order bonus. Different tiers as well. 'Augment your experience' or something like that. They later backtracked because of the outrage, but the first domino had fallen.

• Nobody could know that you could get enough praxis points and other stuff during game without buying them for real money - and that was likely because the decision was made too late for Eidos to balance it 'correctly'.

Yeah, and that is the issue when the morons who couldn't know that they could get enough praxis during gameplay without real money, went online and badmouthed the game giving it bad press so it didn't sell. Without having played that game. And "professional morons" did that for cool credits.

Offering gameplay advantages for real money in an ingame shop of your triple A priced game is scummy and worthy of criticism, regardless of how many players 'need' it or find it useful.

Since you also called the original DX 'garbage', I'm convinced you just want to farm 'retadred' ratings, so whatever.

 

[Atlantico]

Offering gameplay advantages for real money in an ingame shop of your triple A priced game is scummy and worthy of criticism, regardless of how many players 'need' it or find it usefull.

I completely agree, and the addition of these RMTs and the subsequent shelving of the franchise, are rather convincing arguments that Square is a company run by incompetents.

Having played the game, the fact is that this RMT actually doesn't offer any gameplay advantage, because you're swimming in Praxis points the entire game. It's like buying extra butter with your butter.

That means management didn't know or care whether this made any sense, they were just ticking a box.

I wasn't immune to this and delayed my purchase of DXMD for at least two years, the whole thing left a bad taste in my mouth and I wasn't excited throwing my cash at these money grubbing MBA shitheads.

That being said, the game is actually pretty good, IMO. Prague is definitely a questionable hub, I wonder why they picked that city... perhaps it was supposed to be exotic to the target audience, because the location didn't really serve any purpose as far as I remember. The problem with Prague is that it isn't really good at reflecting the soulless megacorporation aesthetic we'd like to see in a game like this.

I don't know what city would have been best, but Prague is just too nice and inviting.

The game felt short as well, it's ending felt like a proper middle of the game for Deus Ex. It's still not a short game, but another major hub would have elevated the game.

I know it was supposed to have a sequel, but the ending felt arbitrary. Yes you do kill the guy who basically started the plot of the game, so it does make sense, but in a DX game it should then bring you deeper into the rabbit hole. You think you've finished your mission, but it only reveals how deep the rot goes.

It feels like they could have gone all out and made an epic DX game, but again: it looks like management thought otherwise.

One of the things that I feel is overlooked, when it comes to the lukewarm reception of the game, is the first mission. It feels more Call of Duty than Deus Ex. You're in the Middle-East, hunting terrorists in a half-finished building complex. That mission was such a strange choice and looking at the rest of the game, seems even more disconnected.

There are so many bizarre decisions, which kind of sink this game in the minds of DX fans, for no good reason. It is a good game, the best since the original, IMO and well worth playing despite its many, many flaws and odd choices. I can't hate on this game, because despite everything, it's the closest we've ever gotten to the original Deus Ex.

 

[Harry Easter]

I would like to see a new DX game that incorporates real-world (politically neutral) conspiracies. Also, the robo race war stuff is too goofy to be playing through.

The games are about the rich screwing over everybody else. I think you can't be very neutral about greedy pieces of shit destroying everything. Hard to say "but at least they give me jobs" with a straight face, while they dispose killerviruses, dismantle human rights and just buy everyone with blood money.

 

[demoman]

MD is the best of the franchise. The original is GARBAGE. It was an 8/10 game at best for 2000 standards. Try playing it today without severe modification, it is totally unplayable. Total garbage.

Hey, look at you proudly waving that Dumbfuck! profile subtitle for all to see!

As for the others agree with most of you on what is bad about MD (microtransactions, optimziation, claustrophobic city) but I did enjoy it more than HR. I liked both the story as well as Jensen's personality more.

Bonus for anyone with time, this video has many good points about why HR was really dumb at times, take a peek if you are into video essays (this guy's other videos about deus ex as well as other games are good too imo)

 

[Teut Busnet]

Offering gameplay advantages for real money in an ingame shop of your triple A priced game is scummy and worthy of criticism, regardless of how many players 'need' it or find it usefull.

One of the things that I feel is overlooked, when it comes to the lukewarm reception of the game, is the first mission. It feels more Call of Duty than Deus Ex. You're in the Middle-East, hunting terrorists in a half-finished building complex. That mission was such a strange choice and looking at the rest of the game, seems even more disconnected..

That's a good point, yes. I never realized it that much, but now that you mention it - it feels like an entry fee you have to pay, before you can get to the open, fun part.

I always had similar feelings about Irenicus' dungeon - not bad, but you rather want to get it done quickly so you can enjoy the game.