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Deus Ex Deus Ex: Mankind Divided

AW8

Arcane
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Mar 1, 2013
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Location
North of Poland
Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire
Recently upgraded my computer and finally played this game. I liked it a lot.

I loved the level design. In a lot of areas I saw two routes to get past enemies and took the sneaky one, and when I got over I found the exit of a third route which I'd missed.
Prague is probably my favourite DX hub, it's large, with lots of routes and full of stuff. I spent hours just breaking into houses and searching for secrets and interconnecting passages. When I got the Jump Height and Dash augs I found the many upper story apartments which I had't seen until then, they were a joy to raid.
I loved the new augs, HR was really poor in activated augs. Mechanics-wise, I found the game to be an evolution of its predecessor, everything just felt smoother and wider.

Story-wise, the game is mediocre. They have a solid ground of the aug apartheid and police state to build on, but it never really goes anywhere and the ending comes abruptly. The characters are forgettable and most didn't feel like they had a role in the story.

Vega felt forced and pointless. Did she even do anything except act as an on-demand cloaked sounding board for Jensen?
Janus is all setup with no payoff. It's hard to care about the Illuminati plotting to take him down when I have no idea what it is.
I don't know what Marchenko's goals were. Which is a bit alarming since he's the last boss of the game. I know he worked for Bob Page, knowingly or not. But I have no clue why he was against ARC and Brown. What would he personally stand to gain from letting the anti-aug regulation go through?

Most of the TF29 guys felt like they were lacking content.
Aria wants to be sent into the field and... that's it.
Chang had about 15% of the screentime of Alex Jacobson or Pritchard and is thus forgetable.
Why did Smiley exist as a character, seeing as he's only used for one mission?
Mac barely appears in the entire game.
At least Delara, the evil psychiatrist, had a mission for you.

Some of the choices felt like they mattered, some didn't. I don't think I would have been able to save Miller if I hadn't prioritized looking into VersaLife. I got Singh re-established undercover but unfortunately I didn't notice any gameplay effect from it. Both Rucker and Vega commented on my pacifist ways which was nice. Rucker dying from poisoning after the speech boss fight with him left a sour taste.

I hope Eidos Montreal gets to make a third DX game and not only Marvel stuff.

I'm gonna move on to the DLC missions, and then I'm thinking of another playthrough, less completionist this time. At the start of the game I was hurting for supplies and felt vulnerable, but I found that exploring Prague and completing all the missions gave me so much experience and loot that I became overpowered for the latter half of the game. I'm going to focus on combat instead of stealth and take the other choices on my second playthrough. The coppers are gonna get it, we GTA now.
 

Rev

Arcane
Joined
Feb 13, 2016
Messages
1,180
Yeah, the story and characters were mediocre, but everything else was better than Human Revolution, especially level design, augs and gunplay.
Overall it's a good game that suffered from cuts and some dumb ideas (the useless Breach mode) probably decided by the higher-ups in Square Enix, hopefully with all the discounts it's been in it will sell enough to warrant a third game by Eidos Montreal some years from now.
 

AW8

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Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire
When I was introduced to the experimental augs and system stability, I was pleasantly surprised. In order to use the new augs, you have to disable an existing aug, making it a choice between augs like in the original Deus Ex. There's even a third choice - taking experimental augs without disabling old ones, but get an unstable system and negative effects as a result. Brilliant!

Only that's not how it works at all. I took several experimental augs and overclocked to 250% capacity, and the only effects were an occasional distortion effect on the HUD and worried calls to Koller. I assumed the real negative effect had bugged out and I kept playing.
Today I looked up how it works. You need to overclock to 450% capacity, which requires 7 activated experimental augs (which is the total number of vanilla experimental augs, an eight experimental aug for crafting is added as DLC) for the real bad effect to happen. When you've unlocked your seventh one, Jensen's system will overload and a random augmentation will be permanently disabled.

How incredibly random and dumb. Why did they even bother to implement this into the game?

 

DeepOcean

Arcane
Joined
Nov 8, 2012
Messages
7,394
This implementation is so amateurish in terms of game design that you wonder who the fuck is making the decisions on Eidos Montreal and if they know any shit.
 

LESS T_T

Arcane
Joined
Oct 5, 2012
Messages
13,582
Codex 2014


In this 2017 GDC talk, Eidos-Montreal's Clemence Maurer explains how the city of Prague was recreated in Deus Ex: Mankind Divided to reward players for exploring its furtherst nooks and crannies.
 

Paul_cz

Arcane
Joined
Jan 26, 2014
Messages
1,996
Loved the Prague hub, probably my favourite from all DX games. It was definitely the densest. The return from Golem City into nightly Prague was particularly impressive. Huge Vampire Bloodlines vibes.


Still pissed they canceled the third game.
 

Azalin

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Mar 16, 2011
Messages
7,305
If you liked Human Revolution you will like this one too,if not then this one won't change your mind since they are very similar
 

Paul_cz

Arcane
Joined
Jan 26, 2014
Messages
1,996
Is the game any good?

it has great atmosphere, sense of place, level design, side missions, well tuned gameplay with plenty branching

But it also has dumb cinematic takedowns that freeze time (like in HR) and overrealiance on cinematicness, somewhat mediocre main story.

But I loved it for the most part. Golem City and nightly Prague are worth experiencing.
 

Ivan

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California
can anyone attest to the quality of the DLC. I've heard mixed reports that the Prison DLC is darn good/ on par with the first game's Boat DLC
 

Rev

Arcane
Joined
Feb 13, 2016
Messages
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can anyone attest to the quality of the DLC. I've heard mixed reports that the Prison DLC is darn good/ on par with the first game's Boat DLC
If you've liked the base game, you'll like the DLCs too.
They both have a very good level design (the bank in the first DLC is probably a bit better, tho) and they're not too short either: it took me about 10 hours to finish both of them.
 

Ivan

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California
So after a dozen of hours of playtime here are some of my thoughts:

-I don't think having a massive hub suits Deus Ex, particularly when a lot of it is fluff that doesn't take advantage of your abilities (stores, apartments, etc)
-difficulty NEEDS to be tied to inventory, resources, and obstacles. I have no idea why ONE multitool trumps ANY obstacle, be it a Level 1 lock or a Level 5. I don't get why a single round from a pistol incapacitates the cool, intimidating Aug Cyberbot dudes.
-character models look fantastic, though severely hampered by poor animation (lip syncinc, idle dialogue animations)
-the real meaty levels are well designed, a shame that the game is so goddamn easy. i wish you were FORCED to find YOUR solution based on your build. it's only after I clear an area of enemies that I go back to dissect the level and find all of its nooks and crannies
 

Ivan

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California
Final thoughts:

Environmental Detail - The game is absolutely packed with detail, so much that even my 1080GTX can't hold a perfect 60FPS. Character models look great, but the animations leave much to be desired, especially the stilted dialogue animations. Also, you will see the same male/female models copy and pasted not just for the pedestrian NPCs, but for the side-quest givers as well.

Loot: Resources are so prevalent in the environment that they make merchants redundant.

Exploration - It's fun but much of it is vapid and ultimately unrewarding: seldom does breaking into apartments or store basements lead to side-quests or unique loot. However, I do appreciate that the game respects your curiosity and exploratory inclinations. Anecfore: There's an area (theater) in the game that I decided to explore as part of a different mission, and I was surprised how large and complex it was. I uncovered the vents, I punched through the weak walls, and didn't find much. However, an hour or two later I was sent to that same location as part of a mission, and sure the guards were restocked, but the environment was as I had left it. That was pretty neat-o.

Level Design - My greatest disappoint with Mankind Divided is how tenuous the skill progression is. No matter how you play, you will become a jack of all trades. It's a great shame too, because the game does an admirable job of providing you various ways of navigating its environments. The only time you really have to commit to a particular style of play is only truly relevant during the opening hours. It's apalling that all of the skills cost the same across the board and it really doesn't take long before you have all of the skills that you want.

Summation: skill progression is far too lenient to enforce a particular style of play, and it's a shame since the title has the level design to support it. the hub based setting is a bold move that I would like to see carried into the future with more thought put into fleshing out the more pedestrian areas (apartments, stores).


Things I would like to see as a player/fan of classic/new Deus Ex:
-enemies impervious to stun (must be stealthed around or killed)
-obstacles that cost more than ONE (yes, "1") multitool to overcome
-a much, much, much smaller STARTING inventory
-much higher priced skill costs
-I would like there to be two forms of stealth takedowns: a longer, but quieter, choke AND a faster, but much louder, takedown that can alert guards
-(this will never happen, but I think it would remedy my gripe against Mankind Divided's progression) I want to see the "overclocking" feature overhauled. I would like for there to be a system in place whereby you can only have a certain number/combination of agumentations enabled at any given time. this could be tied to the difficulty you're playing in. think of them as loadouts, you spend your skill points to unlock Augs and need to equip them strategically. Assuming the next title will be hub-based, it would give players a great reason to return to the Doc. when out on missions, the player could choose to deactivate an aug to enable a new one (that he's saved skill points for) and not be able to re-configure without returning "home" to the doc. Of course this won't happen, since the game actually has a quest where the overclocking restriction is COMPLETELY lifted. what a shame.

Thoughts?
 

LESS T_T

Arcane
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Messages
13,582
Codex 2014
http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articl...matsuda-on-growing-square-enixs-global-empire

Matsuda is also quick to quash premature reports of Deus Ex's demise: "We have never said anything about discontinuing that title but for some reason that's the rumour out on the market.

"What I can say is Eidos Montreal has always developed Deus Ex, and the issue is we do not have limitless resources. We have several big titles that we work with and that's partly a factor in what our line-up looks like. Of course, it would be ideal if we could work on all of them all of the time, but the fact of the matter is some titles have to wait their turn. The reason there isn't a Deus Ex right now is just a product of our development line-up because there are other titles we are working on."

He went on to add that Deus Ex is also a "very important franchise" for the publisher, highlighting its unique position in Square Enix's portfolio as a first-person title, and added: "We are already internally discussing and exploring what we want do with the next instalment of it."

While Matsuda didn't address Thief specifically, the stealth series is also developed at Eidos Montreal so is no doubt in the same position at Deus Ex. This is in no small part because Eidos Montreal is one of several studios working on Square Enix's multi-year, multi-game partnership with Marvel Studios.

We already know Crystal Dynamics has also been assigned to this, currently developing an Avengers game, but the impression is that many of the publisher's studios have some if not all of their teams devoted to Marvel.

"I can't really go into specific numbers," Matsuda tells us, "but I can say we're dedicating considerable development resources to them, especially out of the Western studios."

Marvel is one of the biggest brands in entertainment right now, but while the Hollywood giant is able to churn out multiple superhero flicks per year it will be a much longer wait before we see the fruits of its Square Enix partnership. Is the Japanese publisher not concerned that by the time its products are ready for release, the public will have grown bored of superhero outings? Certainly with the number of films planned from just Marvel and DC alone, it's easy to imagine cinemagoers tiring of the formula.

"There would be nothing we could do at all if that was the view we took," Matsuda says. "That's not just a factor in the gaming industry, this is something that's true about the entertainment industry in general. At any rate, we intend to do our best.

"I believe that the level of the game that we're developing right now, as far as I have seen, is amazing and you'll be seeing news about it going forward. I make a point of regularly checking on the build, and to me it looks amazing."
 

Spectacle

Arcane
Patron
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May 25, 2006
Messages
8,363
Squeenix seems to be a company staffed by BROs, always honorable in their dealings even if they don't always make the best development or business decisions.
 

LESS T_T

Arcane
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Oct 5, 2012
Messages
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Codex 2014
Well I think he would say almost the same thing if asked about Thief: "We have never said anything about discontinuing that title", "very important franchise" (probably in less optimistic tone, yeah.)
 

Metro

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Aug 27, 2009
Messages
27,792
They got caught in a not-so-cleverly-disguised sham of milking the Desu Ex-u reboot for multiple sequels. There's no reason Mankind Divided shouldn't have covered the entire Illuminati arc other than them wanting to spin three or four games out of it. And when neanderthals like the average modern (console) gamer can sniff that out -- you're up shit creek.
 

DeepOcean

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Nov 8, 2012
Messages
7,394
I wouldn't mind another game like Mankind Divided, it was a better game than Prey, Bioshock or Dishonored 2 on pretty much all important aspects, better than any other modern "immersive shooter", Prague was really well done, one of the few modern games to actually remind me of that Bloodlines vibe of exploring RPG hubs on first person on a well made enviroment.

It is a pity, they let the B team, composed of Assassin Creed faggots to make Thief and even if they are serious this time, the end result would be another neutered stealth game like Dishonored that I would pass.
 

Ivan

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Location
California
Its progression system is far too lenient for my taste. It completely neutered the otherwise solid level design.
 

LESS T_T

Arcane
Joined
Oct 5, 2012
Messages
13,582
Codex 2014
http://www.gameinformer.com/b/news/...deus-ex-switching-focus-to-online-titles.aspx

Eidos-Montréal, Developers Of Deus Ex, Switching Focus To Online Titles

Eidos-Montréal, the studio behind the Tomb Raider reboot and the modern Deus Ex franchise, released a statement on their website announcing a change in focus to online play.

Announced today, studio head David Anfossi released a new vision statement for the Canadian studio. Anfossi wrote "At Eidos-Montréal, we’re constantly working towards creating innovative and exciting experiences for gamers everywhere. In turn, we are placing an added emphasis on the online experiences in our games, striving to continually provide players with content that is memorable and impactful. Through the inherent interactivity of online play, our universes will have the chance to thrive both now and into the future. To achieve this, we are building the teams and tools capable of supporting our ambitions."

This change comes as a shock from the Square-Enix studio who had only recently released Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. Shortly after that game's release, Square-Enix and Eidos-Montréal announced that the studio was partnering with Marvel to create multiple video games based on the Avengers.

It was assumed that the Marvel deal was going to occupy the studio's resources for most of the future.

Square-Enix's CEO as recently as a few weeks ago mentioned that Deus Ex was not dead, though it is unclear if the studio's new focus is connected to that statement.

:deadtroll:
 

The Dutch Ghost

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May 26, 2016
Messages
681
Welp there goes any chance for a sequel/second half of Mankind Divided unless Eidos/Square wants it to be a fully online title (which is actually possible, give yourself some time to shudder about that idea)

I know hindsight is always 20/20 but seeing how Square's plans for a Deus Ex series turned out I think they should just have had Eidos make a single very good prequel game that contains everything they want to tell rather than doing the "ol trilogy" game that so many other developers and publishers are going for but which always turn out to be disastrous or average.
They always tell in articles and interviews how they have a storyline planned out for three games but when it comes to it it is often just a mishmash of plot points they have to continue from the previous game (thus legitimizing this as the second chapter in the trilogy) and what they make up during development.

I wish a lot of the triple A developers and publishers would accept that they are not brilliant story writers and that they are not capable of writing great epics or involving personal stories that are stretched out over multiple games
 

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