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Deus Ex: Mankind Divided


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1428435040-deus-ex-mankind-divided-scree

 

GameInformer article: http://www.gameinformer.com/b/news/archive/2015/04/07/may-cover-revealed-deus-ex-mankind-divided-568435.aspx

 

Some specific info (pinched from http://www.reddit.com/r/Deusex/comments/31s5ja/deus_ex_info_leak_xpost_rcantkillprogress):

  • It is a continuation of Human Revolution, the protagonist is still Adam Jensen
  • None of HR endings will be canonical, so instead of Faridah Malik we will be delivered to the mission by the new pilot - Alias Checkan (can't translate it properly)
  • Now side missions will affect the playthrough.
  • AI will be way harder than in HR.
  • Adam, in addition to scanning enemies through the walls, will be able to search them for ammo and electronics.
  • The game will have the new Hacker implant. You will be able to hack computers and the turrets on distance.
  • New ability: Adam will be able to shoot his blade.
  • The game will be available on Xbox One, PS4 and PC.

Interesting, but according to at least one person on that reddit thread, despite having the option to save her, Faridah Malik's death will apparently now be considered canon for the sake of the new game. If that's true... motherfuckers.

Edited by Atomic
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They could have and should have gone with an entirely different protagonist, but they expended too much money on turning Jensen into a brand, and now they can't let him go.

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Come the time of peril, did the ground gape, and did the dead rest unquiet 'gainst us. Our bands of iron and hammers of stone prevailed not, and some did doubt the Builder's plan. But the seals held strong, and the few did triumph, and the doubters were lain into the foundations of the new sanctum. -- Collected letters of the Smith-in-Exile, Civitas Approved

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  • It is a continuation of Human Revolution, the protagonist is still Adam Jensen

Nice. They seem to learn from the previous DX failure.

 

  • None of HR endings will be canonical [...]

Oh - no they didn't.

I don't care if they don't pick "my ending" - but please: Stay inside the bounds of the game. No "All three were true" (or "None were true"). That just screws up everything.

There are DX:HR endings you can use as a base for a new game, without breaking a successor.

 

Interesting, but according to at least one person on that reddit thread, despite having the option to save her, Faridah Malik's death will apparently now be considered canon for the sake of the new game. If that's true... motherfuckers.

But that they write as canon?

That bastards!

 

Well, let's see if they can pull it off again, the first one was good enough. (So good I really had hopes for Thief 4 from the same studio).

I just hope they get rid of the XP for disposing of enemies a specific way.

 

They could have and should have gone with an entirely different protagonist, but they expended too much money on turning Jensen into a brand, and now they can't let him go.

I like it. I haven't had good experience with changing protagonists, there always is something good missing, I can't think of many where it happened, but those I think of had more bland protagonists than the previous game.

(And to be honest: Alex D. would have never had a chance against "My" J.C.)

 

Interesting to look forward to it. But to save me, I won't get my hopes up till something good is delivered. With a little hope they expand city hubs.

Edited by DeusXIncognita
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Even if they just use the same engine with updated textures AND HAVE MUCH LONGER PLAYTIME I would be happy with that as I enjoyed DX:HR and the DLC.

They didn't fix the Director's Cut yet.....we still badly in need of a second patch.

Task is not so much to see what no one has yet seen but to think what nobody has yet thought about that which everybody see. - E.S.

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Not at all! I'm not even being picky, just suggesting that the storyline for RAGE was as much as the setting needed and that the one for DE:HR was far, far less than the context demanded.

 

I honestly think that the merits of story delivery are dependent on the genre. I rate narrative qualities and devices as per their context in the given game, movie, book, whatever. RAGE, Borderlands, Wasteland, Fallout 3 onwards, they're all a similar kind of setting. They're kooky, post-apocalyptic settings which reflect the degrading sanity of their inhabitants. The way I see it, you won't end up with a traditional story in any setting like this that is either ultraviolent or Suda 51 in tone. Fallout 3's main story fails because it tries to be too serious. You get Liam Neeson in to play an earnest man in the same universe as some of the shit you encounter in the Wasteland and the dissonance just throws credibility and immersion out of the window. Were you to do a similarly serious story for RAGE, Borderlands, Wasteland, whatever, you'd have a serious clash with the aesthetic and general feel of each game's universe. Because of that, all of their stories do fit, and they all suit the settings, RAGE included. It skirts the border between zany humor and too-serious-for-the-setting drama, but ultimately ends up fitting the context and succeeding. The style they went with doesn't agree with complex storylines: they'd have to go far more towards The Walking Dead/This War of Mine kinds of serious human drama for story delivery to ever really come into it.

 

Deus Ex HR, meanwhile, takes on an incredibly complex philosophical, existential debate and goes nowhere with it. The universe fits the story, but the story doesn't fit the quandary. The whole idea of it was to question what it means to be human, and to question if replacing parts of us changes our identity as a species. It sticks you at the tipping point, where it's come to a head and people start taking up positions on either side of the fence. It basically asks whether it's the next logical step for mankind's advancement (and if the people up in arms are no different to those who refused to integrate after the Industrial Revolution) or what we're doing is wrong, if we should be playing God (badoomtish) or if it's just not conducive to survival. So that in itself is a wonderful story, it's seriously open to so many moral dilemmas that you could propose to the player. How do they tackle it? They don't. They use tropes from different genres and never really address the augmented elephant in the room.

 

At what point do the player's actions (not meaningless conversation options) force them to choose a side? You could do all sorts of in-game stuff, making the player choose what to do as this hulking, gravel-dispensing cyborg, but instead you just do other stuff, such as beating people up, hacking terminals... uh... beating more people up... eating candy bars, hacking some more terminals, so on. Like, I dunno, have a non-augmented kid beating up an augmented one who refuses to use his hulk smash to break the bully's spine. Let Jensen intervene however the player wants. The side quests are just regular RPG help-a-buddy quests but you do it with robotic enhancements. In terms of gameplay, nothing comes even close to addressing the debate that the whole thing is based on. You simply start human, get beaten up, then the beardy old Englishman behind it all has a mid-life crisis and finally addresses the question of whether or not it's right to augment people, then goes back on his word when you say like 3 sentences. Then there's a woman who takes the whole thing too far and "look at what horrors can be achieved through augmentation whoooo spooooky". Then you quite literally press a button on the Choose-Your-Ending machine in a room behind her and everything you've done so far is referred to vaguely in a cutscene that says "I could've used my sick ninja blades to decapitate more dudes but I held back and just punched them off instead".

 

The whole moral quandary makes for a captivating setting, but its presence in the game itself is minimal. There is no story, or rather there are like three stories that don't mesh and that have the effort of one storyline's construction spread among them all. Mey-gan gets kidnapped, so you have a boring old save-the-girl story. When you rescue her she barely acknowledges your existence and then fucks off in a VTOL. Great. She was the primary focus for 2/3 of the game and that's all the pay-out you get. Then Hugh Darrow goes nuts so you play that remaining third of the game, sprinting around if you're playing non-lethal and mowing down innocents if you aren't. Holed up around the place are businessmen who conveniently all represent opposing views on the augmentation conundrum. Said businessmen all try to convince you that their use of augmentations is the best one because they all want to make money and at the end of the day none of them were your friends at all. Oh, also they're about 1/3 of the illuminati, yeah, that's the third one. So you've got an old cliché for 2/3 of the game's duration that amounts to nix, then the Hugh Darrow mental breakdown that happens and is resolved almost immediately, then you kill a sane and successful member of the illuminati who in a moment of madness thought it would be smart to hook herself up to a futuristic car battery in order to become a super computer. It had so much potential as a moody exploration of the nature of man but ultimately was decimated into fetch quests, a damsel in distress and a mad villain or two.

 

tl;dr

They take this wonderful concept full of what-ifs and potential moral dilemmas and instead just create a futuristic setting with rad robots. Gameplay consists of fetch quests and the narrative never tackles the actual elements of the debate, but rather makes the player aware of them and then ends the game. The storyline that they did go with is uninspired and really choppy. They try to fit three storylines into a can made for one, one being a crappy save-the-girl plot, another being two wealthy, successful people spontaneously going crazy with power (one being talked down from it moments later despite apparent years of internal turmoil about it) and a third one being that they were all part of the illuminati all along because the previous games were about the illuminati so they felt they had to cram it in here too. It's lazy, it's confused, it's rushed and, worst of all, it delves into exciting, almost-virgin video game narrative territory and says "oh, hi, sorry, don't mind me, just passing through."

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[...] DX:HR Story Criticism [...]

To me, its different. That game delivers a story to the involved player, where you think about the problems arising from such things in the real world, where you think about the position of your character - He is already augmented, how can I be against it? But they did fit me with a augment for covert bombings, and were building that for the army.

Many, many more points in the story (and previous DX Stories) bring up dilemmas and things to think about. Thats what I really like.

 

In DX Games its often not so much that the player shapes the story, but that the story shapes the player.

And in the end you can choose to what conclusion it brings you.

 

 

There could be more morally interesting scenes going on, thats true.

More choosing "smaller" sides would be nice too, or bigger ones with which you have to stick for a while.

And I would definitly love it if you could play on for a while after taking a possibly world altering decision, but I fear thats too big an investment (imagine 4 different worlds to shape for one game) that big companies will do / allow that nowadays.

 

 

But in the end, its really interesting at what point you land at the end. What decision have you come to?

Is the truth important enough to you to just let it out?

Is your employer who was always at your side worth it to be at his side?

Do you decide for the world, to support or hinder cybertechnology, based on what you found out?

Do you want to play illuminati, and bring down one side with lies, while bringing the other up?

Or do you just take down the knowledge of the incidence with everyone else here, because you think nobody should know of it?

 

So much to think about.

Still, more smaller decisions would be wonderful.

 

 

Megan, for example, wouldn't have done another step after what I found out in the hunt after the missing scientists, and then meeting her

 

 

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Not at all! I'm not even being picky, just suggesting that the storyline for RAGE was as much as the setting needed and that the one for DE:HR was far, far less than the context demanded.

 

Seriously? I think DE:HR was far ahead of other games in terms of story, and the way it's been told. Just as the original game. At least i haven't played a game which had such a demanding story in the last 10 years or so. Even praised (in that regard) titles like Dishonored can't keep up with it IMO.

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To me, its different. That game delivers a story to the involved player, where you think about the problems arising from such things in the real world, where you think about the position of your character

Sure, but it wasn't only the lack of little things that got to me. I picked up on the little scenarios just because it is, first and foremost, a vidya game. It did try to connect to the whole Deus Ex debate in cutscenes, but only ever by acknowledging its existence, acknowledging the varying arguments put into it, and using it as a backdrop for a wonderfully realised near-future world. I excuse it based on the fact that the world design is visually astounding (though Detroit is tiny and Hengsha confuses the map) and that it's generally a fun game, though an easy one.

 

I think your point is that their acknowledgement of the concept of man-made gods made you think on it a bit. That's cool, it probably will do, but conversely it's what irritated me, because it should be the game that does that: it needed to play with the idea more than just introduce a concept to you and let you do your own thing with it. I was sat there my first time, having this internal debate about the pros, cons, rights and wrongs of turning everybody into super humans. It hit me that Jensen is intended to be the proof that it's possible, and that they have the technology to replace a body with machines, rather than just limbs and organs with prosthetics. It started that little what-if thing in me that most cyberpunk titles do. Then I got more frustrated as the game went on, because I had all these neat ideas that could have easily been put into the game one way or the other, and ultimately it struck me that they just didn't care for the concept that much. They paid their dues to it every now and then, but I was sat there thinking of this and that of my own accord. They wanted to make an actiony stealthy RPG hybrid thing with crafting and player progression, and set it in a cool universe with cool robots and the illuminati. They put Deus Ex in the name and barely bothered with the notion itself. They just said "some people like augmentation, some think it's unnatural", then cut to riots and Hugh Darrow just starting to touch on it before the game shuffles you on to the ending. You're made aware of Sarif, who's for it, Darrow who is overwhelmed by the power he unlocked, and Taggart, who is supposedly against it but who knows with that type of person. It takes this really interesting, complex idea and then whittles it down to binary opposition for and against it, and never really lets the player make their opinion known in the game world until you're there pushing a button for or against it at the very end.

Seriously? I think DE:HR was far ahead of other games in terms of story, and the way it's been told.

I thought that too, when I was wrapped up in the atmosphere of it. It's a constant stream of dialogue, conversation options and atmosphere, but when I was done I realised it actually said very little about its core concept and was, in and of itself, a hostage rescue story with robots. It needed less "No John I am the illuminati" and more "this is Eliza Cassan and I just blew your mind, Son." The Cassan thing got me really thinking, it was awesome, but it's the only thing in the game that more subtly addressed it. You were sat there like "but people would know, I mean I suppose an infallible robot is better than a person, but what if..." and it was great. It needed far more of that, far more "I never asked for this" and way fewer mad sick cyborg fights. We got to see a whole lot of rockets and swords and stuff integrated into people's bodies, but it needed to question things that would have an impact on society. Things like the news being automated, people using social enhancement augmentations to seduce people and to get a pay rise at work. Interesting stuff that opened up all new avenues for social reform and opportunities for exploring them, not just "they said it was for good and then they put rockets on them, and rockets are bad, yo."

Edited by Airship Ballet
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The dumbest part about none of the endings being canon is that having multiple endings didn't even add anything to the previous game. It was all mashed up in the last second. So they gained nothing then and screwed the new game.

 

The trailer looks cool and all, but I see no gameplay. That always bothers me. And what's with all the fighting? judging by the trailer alone, feels like I'm going to play a Batman game or something, I was almost seeing the blue icon on the enemy's head telling me to counter the attack.

 

Here's hoping for a good game with no boss fights.

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Fair enough Airship, tbh, i can't even finally judge that, because i only played like 2/3 of the game and never finished it. What i especially liked about it is that they got the protagonists neutrality right, and the fraction's weren't played out against each other. I mean, you could sense some conspiracy like in the original part, but like in the original, most of it was cloudy, and you never could really be sure until you get more info, and more of the story was revealed. And the story telling with the info pads, and the emails you find on computers, and you got through the tv media i found really nicely tailored. I guess after i nursed my GTA addiction with the new part in the next weeks, i'll give the directors cut of DE:HR a go again, maybe this time i'll get through the end. :)

 

And +1 for no boss fights. Please Square Enix. :D Edit: Arf... just googled and saw that Squeare Enix announced that the boss fights should become "Much better". Oh well... hopefully that holds true.

Edited by chakkman
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The trailer looks a bit silly to me. And the whole thing is identical to the previous game. It looks more like an expansion pack then a proper sequel. And I guess having a huge, augmented villain with a phony accent is now a tradition.

 

It's only a model...

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I agree with Airship Ballet.

 

 

The game started really well. There were plenty of little vignettes casting a somewhat gray light on the whole augmentation thing - the neuropozyne addicts, the wife who loathed her augmented husband, people quarreling in the street. Subquests highlighted dangers and opportunities of cybernetics and the main plot followed the tribulations of the maimed security specialist who was turned into a killing machine against his will. It was pretty great until after the first visit in China.

 

Then the main plot gradually started to lose coherence, like a lot of content has been cut. The riots, featured so prominently in the trailer, happen offscreen in the game. The Illuminati somehow are able to affect all augmentation through their satellites, including Sarif-produced ones, and force thousands of LIMB clinics to install a backdoor without anyone noticing. If they are able to control cybernetics so thoroughly, why would they need to fear Megan's discovery? It was pretty clear at this point they don't need neuropozyne addiction to control this technology.

 

It went even worse after completely unsatisfying reunion with Megan, where Adam manages to be angry for whole two seconds before getting out. The whole pro-augmentation vs anti-augmentation rhetorics doesn't work well, because the latter is represented by a genocidal sore loser who flipped off because he couldn't get a cyberleg and a stooge for the people who caused everything in the first place and were antagonists through most of the game. The woman from Hengsha who couldn't afford an implant, yet absolutely had to get one to be competitive on the job market did more to convince me about dangers of cybernetics than Darrow and Taggart managed to do through the entire game. And the result of the chosen ending are pretty stupid - somehow telling the truth causes humanity to abandon technology altogether?

 

It doesn't help that Adam through the entire game barely shows a shred of emotion and is comically inept in the cutscenes. He's a former SWAT, but still manages to get outsmarted by a middle-aged CEO who gropes him, pushes him away and sprints to the panic room.

 

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It doesn't help that Adam through the entire game barely shows a shred of emotion and is comically inept in the cutscenes.

It's a shame that they fixed that exploit at the beginning of the fight with Namir. You used to be able to use a takedown and end it immediately if you sprinted up to him at the start before he disappeared. It was hilarious, Jensen getting his ass kicked in the cutscene, then just flooring Namir a second later and jumping to the cutscene with him really messed up. It's a good point though: Jensen is supposed to act as the empty vessel into which the player pours their character through conversation choices and the like, as in Dragon Age and whatnot. He acts in a consistent manner in cutscenes though, with an easily identifiable personality of his own, which is something that prevents him ever really reflecting the player's attitude towards the augmentation conundrum. He acts tough and apathetic, which really clashes with any earnest conversation options you choose that have him show genuine care in Elias Toufexis' ridiculous voice. They seem to have already made up their mind as to what kind of person Jensen is, but still allow you to choose kind options that have him say soppy stuff. It's hard to get around though: to achieve a genuine tabula rasa of a playable character, I imagine they'd have to be silent or unassuming to the nth degree.

Edited by Airship Ballet
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The trailer looks a bit silly to me. And the whole thing is identical to the previous game. It looks more like an expansion pack then a proper sequel. And I guess having a huge, augmented villain with a phony accent is now a tradition.

 

No problem with "More of the Same" if the quality level is high enough.

 

But they MUST fix the Director's Cut with a second patch, damn Eidos!

Edited by lowenz

Task is not so much to see what no one has yet seen but to think what nobody has yet thought about that which everybody see. - E.S.

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Human Revolution had a very strong visual identity and the excuse for it was this whole 'new renaissance' idea. And because the game was successful they now wont change a single bit. As a result I have an impression that I already played it. They could at least swap orange with pink and triangles with circles, or something. But yeah, I enjoyed HR so I will buy this one too I guess.

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It's only a model...

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