Deus Ex Deus Ex: Mankind Divided Pre-Release Thread

[Gerrard]

Even if DX was all blue and grey it would make sense because all of it takes place at night.

 

[CyberP]

It is worth beating some more as it is returning. Shallow garbage.

 

[undecaf]

The piss filter is (and was in HR) the least of the game's possible and probable issues. It's been given way too much attention than it actually deserves.

 

[Zombra]

It is an artistic theme NOT grounded in reality.

Thank you. Why do so many always assume that every game is supposed to be photorealistic?

 

[CyberP]

It is an artistic theme NOT grounded in reality.

Thank you. Why do so many always assume that every game is supposed to be photorealistic?

But Deus Ex is meant to be grounded in reality, to some extent. And in the case of other games, overdoing color themes in such a way is just boring. Thankfully it is quite a rare occurrence in the case of our beloved classics. In fact I can't think of any.

 

[tuluse]

Even if DX was all blue and grey it would make sense because all of it takes place at night.

Nights aren't really blue outside of movies.

 

[zwanzig_zwoelf]

I don't see HR art style as an issue, but I played it with luminosity set to the minimum because higher settings hurt my eyes.
Deus Ex: Invisible War was more focused on purple color, and it looked pretty good. I gotta admit that it looks really good even today, especially if you apply the texture pack.

 

[CyberP]

Even if DX was all blue and grey it would make sense because all of it takes place at night.

Nights aren't really blue outside of movies.

It doesn't matter because Deus Ex doesn't use overbearing color themes. The only maps with heavily-present colored lighting are the outdoor Paris maps, and even then this is meant to be restricted to the light emitted by street lamps. The game has great visual variety and somewhat logical lighting.

Edit: Hong Kong too has heavily-present colored lighting, but it uses a wide variety of colors based on the light source (advertisement signs and such).

"Deus Ex: Invisible War was more focused on purple color, and it looked pretty good"

Purple used in moderation. Very sparingly, in fact. About all I remember being purple was the black market aug cannisters and the main menu background.
HR is a unique little butterfly in that the art director thought it would be a good idea to piss all over the majority of everything the player sees. In HR's interpretation of the future even advertisers agree everything should be pissy (look at Alfon's picture of the Sarif HQ, you can see two+ separate advertisements using the same color themes).

 

[zwanzig_zwoelf]

"Deus Ex: Invisible War was more focused on purple color, and it looked pretty good"

Purple used in moderation. Very sparingly, in fact. About all I remember being purple was the black market aug cannisters and the main menu background.
HR is a unique little butterfly in that the art director thought it would be a good idea to piss all over the majority of everything the player sees. In HR's interpretation of the future even advertisers agree everything should be pissy (look at Alfon's picture of the Sarif HQ, you can see two+ separate advertisements using the same color themes).

Not really, purple/blue was all over the place for the most part.

But the tone was pretty low, so it didn't stand out that much.

 

[Spectacle]

Here, I have fixed the game for the Codex:

That looks, ... awesome actually, like a background image from one of those '80s Japanese computer games that nobody in the west heard of until recently.

 

[CyberP]

I remember a lot of blue. Definitely the dominant color but still used in moderation in comparison to HR. I don't remember much purple but I'll take your word for it. IW doesn't really count anyway.

 

[Gerrard]

Nights aren't really blue outside of movies.

Human eyes are most sensitive to blue light in low-light conditions. So yes, they are.

 

[zwanzig_zwoelf]

I remember a lot of blue. Definitely the dominant color but still used in moderation in comparison to HR. I don't remember much purple but I'll take your word for it. IW doesn't really count anyway.

How so? Invisible War was different and less complex than original DX, but I enjoyed the fuck out of it, right before I played the original game.
It's not as good as the original, but if you stop comparing it, it's a decent game. Way better than Project: Snowblind anyway.

 

[CyberP]

I remember a lot of blue. Definitely the dominant color but still used in moderation in comparison to HR. I don't remember much purple but I'll take your word for it. IW doesn't really count anyway.

How so? Invisible War was different and less complex than original DX, but I enjoyed the fuck out of it, right before I played the original game.
It's not as good as the original, but if you stop comparing it, it's a decent game. Way better than Project: Snowblind anyway.

Agreed in all respects, but when looking to improve upon the Deus Ex formula there isn't much to take from IW. Nor HR for that matter. The majority of my inspiration came from DX1 and the other classics such as Thief, Underworld/Arx and System Shock anyhow.

Project Snowblind was so dull, one of the worst shooters I've ever played. Who were the devs, let us see...Crystal Dynamics.

Edit: well I didn't enjoy the fuck out of IW, having played DX1 first, but I still found it enjoyable. the game certainly does hold up visually too, but that's about it. Another minor thing I like is the bleep and bloop sound effects of the UI/HUD/Infolink. No idea why.

 

[Infinitron]

http://www.gameinformer.com/b/featu...-hidden-world-of-deus-ex-mankind-divided.aspx

Art Director Shows Us The Hidden World Of Deus Ex: Mankind Divided



During our last day at Eidos Montreal, we sat down with Martin Dubeau, the art director for Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. We sorted through the screens and pieces of concept art that we’d be getting for our magazine and online coverage, and he provided context for everything we were seeing. Rather than let his insights go to waste, we’re sharing them with you today. Read on for additional details on the environments, people, and symbolism that you might not otherwise have known from simply looking at the pictures.

I wrote a bit about Victor Marchenko before (pictured above), in a feature that touched on the game’s power players. There’s a lot going on with him beyond his involvement in the Augmented Rights Coalition. Looking at him, you can immediately tell that he’s been through a lot – that huge mechanical arm is hard to overlook. While Dubeau and the rest of the team are reluctant to delve too deeply into his story at this point, he did provide some interesting high-level details.

“We wanted to create someone who looked like a worker first, and who lives in the ghetto,” Dubeau says of the character. “That’s why he has this huge arm. Maybe he could have been someone who worked on something hard, like breaking brick – that was the idea.”

In addition to the arm, Marchenko has augmentations on his face that also make him stand apart from the crowd. He lost an eye as the result of an accident – possibly the same incident that forced him to replace his arm – and its high-tech replacement definitely gives him an advantage. “He can have many add-ons to it, so he can see further and better than anybody, because he has three cameras now instead of one eye,” Dubeau explains. “Imagine that he can see in more than three dimensions – it’s more than three dimensions, because if you see something with your two eyes, you never see the third depth because it’s not aligned with your eyes. But if we could have three eyes we would have a better sense of dimension. He has a super view on his camera with sensors between them.”

Marchenko is a mysterious presence in the game, and in protagonist Adam Jensen’s life. Regardless of the ARC member’s true intensions, you can be that he has all eyes on our hero. Take note of a low-tech detail you may have missed: He has an old coat wrapped around his neck like a cape.

Note: Click on the images to see larger versions.



Rucker's Office
Everyone has a boss, and in this case Marchenko’s is a man named Dr. Talos Rucker. I covered Rucker in the same power-player feature, but Dubeau gave us more information to chew on. As an augmented person, he has a stake in the augmented-rights movement. According to Dubeau, the former medical doctor was burned in a volcanic eruption while working in Africa, in an accident that killed his wife. “If you look in his apartment, you can find a lot of hints about his backstory and what happened,” Dubeau says. “He has half of his face burned, and he decided to keep that part of himself without any augmentations. But his arms were definitely redone completely.” Half of Rucker’s rib cage was also broken, which required extensive reconstruction.

SPOILER AHEAD:

Spoiler

Even though he’s the dominant portion of this image, there are some other details you may have missed. “You’ll notice that there’s a sunset at the end of the map,” Dubeau says. “What I wanted to do as a metaphor was when Rucker dies in the game, it’s like if the sunset linked to the renaissance is just dying at the same time – so this golden era is finishing. After that part of the game, you will never come back to something as clear as it was at this moment.”

Golem City
The early portion of the game is set in a striking location called Utulek Station, which is nicknamed Golem City. It’s essentially a prison camp for augmented people, following the tragic aug incident at the end of Human Revolution. It’s also the home base for ARC. Dubeau says he and his team took inspiration in part from Kowloon Walled City, as well as corporate housing.

Dubeau says he was curious about what living in such a large structure would be like. “It would be interesting to do something where we never see the end of it,” he says. “When you’re inside of it, you don’t know if you’re at the bottom, if you’re at the upper side – you never know where you are in this huge labyrinth. Except for one shot in the game, we never show the border of it, really. You never know where it stops and where it starts. You never know the size of it. At one point we thought maybe it would be too small, so we started to build a ghetto around the ghetto, with small houses in front of it, and we have kilometers of people that have been put into the ghetto but they have no space anymore, so they just construct their tents or small houses anywhere they can.”



Inside the city
This shot of the oppression that augmented people face in Golem City is a great starting point for several different subjects. First, of course, there’s the imagery and coloring itself. “At the beginning it’s super dark in the map, more blueish, and the more you advance into the map, the more renaissance we wanted to bring,” Dubeau notes, referring to Deus Ex’s theme of the cyber renaissance. “Renaissance for me in that map is what you cannot remove from an augmented person. You will never remove it from him. If you put them all together, they reconstruct their world as it was before. They reconstruct their world in that cubical world – that was the idea.”

Although the game is set nearly 15 years from now, Deus Ex’s art team works to ensure that they’re presenting a heightened, but grounded version of the future. And according to Dubeau, that’s trickier than it might sound. “The hardest challenge is not inventing everything,” he says. “When we have new concept artists, and people who can invent in the game, they always try to invent Star Trek or Star Wars things. It’s really, really hard to keep them closer to our reality. It’s not that easy.”

He points to a computer mouse as an example. “If I’m telling you to design that mouse in 10 years, you will try to do something with a glove or something like that. But it won’t be that far. When I have new people here, I give them an exercise – the mouse is a good example. I ask them to just do a history of the mouse – where it was 30 years ago, 20 years ago, 10 years ago, now, and now extrapolate where it is in 15 years, just to understand that it’s not that exponential. Imagine when we have to do a car. Someone said that in 2000 we would have flying cars everywhere just 40 years ago. But we still have this reflex in concept. It’s always like that.” Dubeau says he can spot things that are out of place in Deus Ex’s world almost immediately.

I talked to the game’s narrative director, Mary DeMarle, about why people get augmented in a previous feature. I asked Dubeau to explain why people in that world stick to traditional human forms when replacing lost limbs – even if they’re exaggerated versions like Marchenko’s massive arm. Why not go completely wild and have a dozen fingers? “I think in the short term, people want to look as much like people as they can,” he replied. “Even now, you can have a new limb, but they don’t want to put 2 million fingers on it. Even when you see someone with a hook, it looks weird, like, ‘Oh, he has a handicap.’ I think for the next 20, 30 years people will try to stay closer to other people. They don’t want to be too different.” Not a bad call, considering just what being different can get you in Deus Ex.

Ffs, spoilers at this stage, really?

 

[CyberP]

"Although the game is set nearly 15 years from now, Deus Ex’s art team works to ensure that they’re presenting a heightened, but grounded version of the future"

Good. More like this image please. It certainly looks like things have been toned down and diversified a little.

 

[Modron]

Good. More like this image please. It certainly looks like things have been toned down and diversified a little.

Looks too much like a Mass Effect 3 area replete with linear section full of chest high cover.

 

[CyberP]

Visually it pleases me.

At least you can jump, ignore the cover system and there looks to be a little bit of verticality. God I hate Mass Effect's level design. HR's wasn't exceptionally better but like everything else in that game it was "good for what it is". Good level design is so rare these days.

Edit:

It is an artistic theme NOT grounded in reality.

Thank you. Why do so many always assume that every game is supposed to be photorealistic?

Here is a series of images that quite clearly show DX took a photo-realistic approach.

 

[Infinitron]

http://www.gameinformer.com/b/featu...ng-a-better-deus-ex-with-mankind-divided.aspx

Building A Better Deus Ex With Mankind Divided

The original Deus Ex is one of the most beloved PC games of all time, so the team at Eidos Montreal had a lot to live up to with their first entry in the series, Deus Ex: Human Revolution. Now the stakes feel higher for the follow up, Mankind Divided.

Executive game director Jean-François Dugas explains what made Deus Ex such an important landmark in gaming, and how Deus Ex: Mankind Divided improves upon its predecessor in everything from boss fights to production values – bringing the cyberpunk experience to the next level.

Warning: Contains spoilers for Deus Ex: Human Revolution

And an older video:

 

[svvvs]

So we be able to meet Beth DuClare?

 

[CyberP]

"So, where are we taking Deus Ex? Well hopefully if we did our job well it's to bring Deus Ex to the next level in term of realization; make it more shiny...[proceeds to talk about the very minor flaws of HR and other misguided nonsense]"

Sigh. I don't want to be negative anymore, I never wanted to be at all, but popamole gonna pop. Just another good for what it is experience.
Time to initiate a media blackout I think, and maybe come release it will be a pleasant surprise.

Gotta love the guy's phonetics and pronunciations; "What it means to be yuman?".

 

[zwanzig_zwoelf]

"So, where are we taking Deus Ex? Well hopefully if we did our job well it's to bring Deus Ex to the next level in term of realization; make it more shiny...[proceeds to talk about the very minor flaws of HR and other misguided nonsense]"

Sigh. I don't want to be negative anymore, I never wanted to be at all, but popamole gonna pop. Just another good for what it is experience.
Time to initiate a media blackout I think, and maybe come release it will be a pleasant surprise.

Gotta love the guy's phonetics and pronunciations; "What it means to be yuman?".

So, no more anger towards my skepticism and general fooling around on Eidos forums? That's no fun.

 

[CyberP]

So, no more anger towards my skepticism and general fooling around on Eidos forums? That's no fun.

I just don't find your methods to be practical, but it doesn't seem any method is. What can we do? Bitching on forums doesn't seem to achieve anything, nor does making mods showing how to actually give anyone an evolved Deus Ex (in some respects) is done. All good things must come to an end. It could always be worse. It could always be Thi4f or any of the other great number of absolutely raped franchises out there. Eidos Montreal's Deus Ex is at least worth a purchase, lucky we got that I guess.

 

[zwanzig_zwoelf]

So, no more anger towards my skepticism and general fooling around on Eidos forums? That's no fun.

I just don't find your methods to be practical, but it doesn't seem any method is. What can we do? Bitching on forums doesn't seem to achieve anything, nor does making mods showing how to actually give anyone an evolved Deus Ex (in some respects) is done. All good things must come to an end. It could always be worse. It could always be Thi4f or any of the other great number of absolutely raped franchises out there. Eidos Montreal's Deus Ex is at least worth a purchase, lucky we got that I guess.

But it's fun when fans are naive enough to think that anyone from EM gives a shit and jump on everyone who proposes something different or radical (homosexual romances, gay bars, etc).

 

[tuluse]

I just don't find your methods to be practical, but it doesn't seem any method is. What can we do? Bitching on forums doesn't seem to achieve anything, nor does making mods showing how to actually give anyone an evolved Deus Ex (in some respects) is done. All good things must come to an end. It could always be worse. It could always be Thi4f or any of the other great number of absolutely raped franchises out there. Eidos Montreal's Deus Ex is at least worth a purchase, lucky we got that I guess.

You complain relentlessly on internet forums about how modern games are worse than the classics and eventually after about 15 years someone will listen and try to make a game in the old way. However, since they're out of practice, it will be mediocre, but give hope for the future—which will probably be crushed.