RoSoDude
Arcane
- Joined
- Oct 1, 2016
- Messages
- 730
Over the last year I've been made aware of the larger narrative that the game hints at moving towards but was ultimately canned when the game was cut down to bring it to market (whether it's due to Square Enix fuckery or Eidos Montreal mismanagement is up to you). And if you'll indulge me as a huge Deus Ex nerd for a bit, it actually looked like it could have been pretty great.
There are two major plot threads that are teased during the game which never come to fruition. The less obvious (but not as wild) one is about weather manipulation and geo-engineering by the Illuminati. According to the Deus Ex Bible, which summarizes a lot of the background lore for the first game, the American West Coast is destabilized in 2030 by a massive earthquake which turns Los Angeles into Arizona Bay and cripples the United State's economy, leading to attempted secessions by many states and allowing FEMA to declare a state of emergency and seize military control over the US. Mankind Divided sprinkles many clues throughout the game about geo-engineering conspiracies which would dovetail nicely with this lore, from magazines hinting at tectonic weaponry and connections with HAARP research (conveniently located in Alaska where Jensen was revived) and the cover-up of the ionospheric manipulation arrays that caused the Cista Airlines 451 crash which was instead blamed on aug terrorists, to the Illuminati geo-bombs that would be capable of causing the 2030 earthquake one year later. The Illuminati motive would be to use false flag aug terrorist attacks as a vector for further control over civilian populations as well as to distract from their efforts to sow unrest and cripple key nations with natural disasters. I'm somewhat convinced that these weren't just notes to flesh out the conspiracy lore of the game, too -- the GARM facility which feels like a pointless inclusion in the actual narrative was itself a geological research facility, and numerous unresolved plot threads point to a planned mission at the the Roccasecca Beach Versalife facility off the coast of San Fransisco, the source of the Gray Death precursor in the Orchid (likely involving Megan Reed) and a future break-in is to be framed on the Augmented Rights Coalition. In theory, this location could have been central to some discovery about the nature of the Illuminati's geo-engineering plans, similar to JC's discovery that Versalife was manufacturing both the virus and the cure in Hong Kong.
However, I'll admit that this is really just speculation, and it's hard to say how much of those examples were supposed to be legitimate foreshadowing vs. details to flesh out the world. By contrast, I can say with 95% confidence that the actual big plot twist of the game was going to be the reveal that the Adam Jensen you play in Mankind Divided is actually a clone of the one you played in Human Revolution. There's an enormous wealth of evidence in favor of this theory, some of it oblique and some of it incontrovertible. The theory goes:
I would be shocked if the original intention was to leave this all as sequel bait, because the actual ending is so abrupt, low-stakes, and nonsensical (not to mention that it actually leaves little in the way of direct conflict to motivate a sequel, since the events of the game tally up to some arbitrary conclusions on the state of aug regulation and the possible death of a character who ultimately had low plot significance). Instead, we were left with a plot that stayed within the confines of the counter-terrorist bounds of the first act of Deus Ex played straight, with barely any development of the plot hooks that could shift the story into a higher gear. Even if they made a sequel, I don't see how they could salvage things where they left them -- the theories are probably better than reality at this point.
...Nu-DX gameplay is compromised anyway, not a colossal loss.
There are two major plot threads that are teased during the game which never come to fruition. The less obvious (but not as wild) one is about weather manipulation and geo-engineering by the Illuminati. According to the Deus Ex Bible, which summarizes a lot of the background lore for the first game, the American West Coast is destabilized in 2030 by a massive earthquake which turns Los Angeles into Arizona Bay and cripples the United State's economy, leading to attempted secessions by many states and allowing FEMA to declare a state of emergency and seize military control over the US. Mankind Divided sprinkles many clues throughout the game about geo-engineering conspiracies which would dovetail nicely with this lore, from magazines hinting at tectonic weaponry and connections with HAARP research (conveniently located in Alaska where Jensen was revived) and the cover-up of the ionospheric manipulation arrays that caused the Cista Airlines 451 crash which was instead blamed on aug terrorists, to the Illuminati geo-bombs that would be capable of causing the 2030 earthquake one year later. The Illuminati motive would be to use false flag aug terrorist attacks as a vector for further control over civilian populations as well as to distract from their efforts to sow unrest and cripple key nations with natural disasters. I'm somewhat convinced that these weren't just notes to flesh out the conspiracy lore of the game, too -- the GARM facility which feels like a pointless inclusion in the actual narrative was itself a geological research facility, and numerous unresolved plot threads point to a planned mission at the the Roccasecca Beach Versalife facility off the coast of San Fransisco, the source of the Gray Death precursor in the Orchid (likely involving Megan Reed) and a future break-in is to be framed on the Augmented Rights Coalition. In theory, this location could have been central to some discovery about the nature of the Illuminati's geo-engineering plans, similar to JC's discovery that Versalife was manufacturing both the virus and the cure in Hong Kong.
However, I'll admit that this is really just speculation, and it's hard to say how much of those examples were supposed to be legitimate foreshadowing vs. details to flesh out the world. By contrast, I can say with 95% confidence that the actual big plot twist of the game was going to be the reveal that the Adam Jensen you play in Mankind Divided is actually a clone of the one you played in Human Revolution. There's an enormous wealth of evidence in favor of this theory, some of it oblique and some of it incontrovertible. The theory goes:
- Adam Jensen woke up one year after the Aug Incident in a facility in Alaska where, he later discovered, he had a new set of augmentations installed by Victor Orlov. During this time he never appeared on any survivor logs, despite Sarif's comments that his aug serial numbers would have been easy to track and identify when he was recovered.
- This is because the Adam Jensen that woke up in Alaska was actually a clone of Adam who was fitted with the previous Adam's augmentations and implanted with a (likely altered) set of memories.
- In keeping with the original Deus Ex lore, this need not be a rapidly grown clone of Jensen, but rather a clone that dated back to the original White Helix Labs experiments which made him immune to rejection syndrome.
- The fact that there is a clone of Jensen is indisputable fact -- there is a copy of Jensen's body in the Versalife vault in the Palisade bank with scars indicating the removal of his augmentations, corroborating the idea that this is not a backup Jensen but in fact the original. An NPC in Prague also makes an enigmatic reference to this: "It is you in the box. In the dark. That's where they have kept you."
- Memory implant technology is well-established in the Harvester sidequest, where a small segment of a serial killer's "neural code" intended to treat a personality disorder caused echoes of the implanted identity to consume the patient. With the full "neural code" transferred to the clone, the new Adam Jensen would possess all of the memories and self-identity of the original. Futhermore, Dr. Orlov was involved in the Harvester patient's memory transfer and was responsible for their new combat augmentations mirroring Jensen's.
- In addition to recapping the previous game's events and allowing the player to express their opinion on them, the purpose of Delara's psychological evaluation of Adam before he goes to Golem City was to confirm successful acceptance of his implanted memories, and she later remarks that Adam is "remarkably stable" in the end credits. The new clone is some form of Illuminati sleeper cell, who I hypothesize would have had some role in Majestic 12's coup against the Illuminati.
- There are many clues to the Adam Jensen in MD not being the same Adam Jensen in HR. Most notable is the Eliza Cassan sidequest, where she states that Jensen is "not consistent with our memories of [him]", and that "The nature of [his] discrepancy is unclear, even to her", among other cryptic clues to Adam not being the same Adam as in HR, just as Eliza is not the same Eliza.
- The title screen image depicting two tesselated silhouettes of Jensen facing one another is a retroactively obvious motif on Adam's split identity, which makes "Mankind Divided" a phrase with a double meaning.
I would be shocked if the original intention was to leave this all as sequel bait, because the actual ending is so abrupt, low-stakes, and nonsensical (not to mention that it actually leaves little in the way of direct conflict to motivate a sequel, since the events of the game tally up to some arbitrary conclusions on the state of aug regulation and the possible death of a character who ultimately had low plot significance). Instead, we were left with a plot that stayed within the confines of the counter-terrorist bounds of the first act of Deus Ex played straight, with barely any development of the plot hooks that could shift the story into a higher gear. Even if they made a sequel, I don't see how they could salvage things where they left them -- the theories are probably better than reality at this point.
...Nu-DX gameplay is compromised anyway, not a colossal loss.
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