Deus Ex Deus Ex: Mankind Divided

[Ninjerk]

2027 – Human Revolution
2027 – The Fall
2029 – Mankind Divided
2031 – Fractured But Whole
2033 – Loaded Augmentation
2035 – Gunther: Early Years
...
more iterations
...
2052 – Deus Ex
2072 – Invisible War

I hope this franchise dies.

[P]icture a prequel centered on Gunther's descent into monsterhood. Start with a well meaning field agent with the deck stacked against him. End with an echo of a man, steeped in blood, pleading for a clean slate.

...

Laputan Machine is about [a] suicidal freefall: a series of choices between bad and worse, how a man's moral compass is broken by way of desperate self-preservation.

The game starts with a fully human Gunther Hermann on his first major field op. It is a disaster, a bloodbath, the wounded Gunther barely escaping with his life. While convalescing he is talked into receiving his first mechanical augmentation.

At first he is elated; the young agent is given a bulwark against mortality, an easy upgrade to dramatically increased operational fitness, the player behind him given a seemingly familiar route to more mayhem (shadows ofSyndicate's classic agent upgrade system, pictured right).
But here also begins the central conflict/negative feedback loop of the game: balancing Gunther's mental stability/grasp on humanity with the dehumanizing necessity of mechanical augmentation. (Perhaps implemented something like the "sanity" system of Lovecraftian horror games.)

The player is in Gunther's shoes: ultraviolence by way of mechanical augmentations is the easy way out, but also the road to lost humanity. Do you take the increasingly difficult moral high road, or does Gunther give in to the machine?

Someone has already done the concept for you.

Upon release, Laputan Machine earns a Metacritic score of 69/100.
It slowly builds a following from Deus Ex fans, but many critics and gamers are off-put by the frank, "un-fun" depiction of violence and gore; the game's themes are judged too heavy handed, the story too much of a downer. Who wants to get their nose rubbed in the violence they're complicit to?

(There's also a Flatlander Woman concept at http://designreboot.blogspot.com/2009/10/design-reboot-flatlander-woman.html )

 

[ThoseDeafMutes]

Gunther is almost a joke character in DX1, I can only imagine how much bitching and moaning there would be about such a self serious, Heart of Darkness / Spec Ops: The Line type game coming out about him.

 

[vean]

So apparently the game uses steam cloud saves or something. Steam cloud saves have a hard limit of 1gb. Even if you turn off cloud saves it still enforces the limit, so you can only have 50-75 saves.

And it fails silently. Once you're over the limit it still shows the saving icon, but no save is created.

 

[Azrael the cat]

Mind you, for all their faults in writing and tone, the two recent Deus Exs have their strengths as well. I've barely started doing the quests, because I spent the past 2 nights (well, the few hours I have as gaming time, anyway) enjoying the fuck out of robbing the Pallasade Bank.

No doubt it has quest/story Tayla for the player to go there later, but i suspect it works better the way I encountered it - walking into the massive bank and already thinking about robbing it otherwise there wouldn't by the core feature required for a lead character in a Deus Ex game, ie GTA-levels of psychopathic kleptomania interspersed with strange outbreaks of pacifism, depending on whether or not you think the games moral reactivity is 'watching'.

Then you speak to the guy at the front desk, and get given a lengthy breakdown of just how awesome their security measures are, and that you can't just sneak/airvent your way to the top - there are executive swipecards, safecodes, human monitored security systems who will ask for your id number, bots in the walls, etc. His dialogue is obviously designed to goad you into robbing the shit out of the place. And - having taken the advice not to get cloak if you want to enjoy stealth - it's a really satisfyingly designed 'level' in that respect.

Not that it's actually challenging - stealth never is in Deus Ex games, especially the original, it's the best way to play but it scratches a very different itch to games that are challenging. Satisfying is a better word - that feeling of tinkering around, probing for vulnerabilities, finding where the terminal is to let you hack all the security measures that the front desk guy was boasting about and watching as he and his colleagues get ripped to shreds by their own bots and turrets, sh so you can rifle through their corpses for the vault codes in peace.

Plenty of ways you can approach it, while also designed so that you can't do the full building using only one tactic - eg critical areas that can't be reached by vent crawling, areas with lasers to catch cloak, turning the bots and turrets on the security staff means that there's no longer a veritable army of them, but there's still 'normal' numbers of guards on the third floor that will survive and they can see you from the balcony when you're on the lower floors if you aren't careful.

Whoever designed the bank did an excellent job.

 

[Black]

Gunther is almost a joke character in DX1, I can only imagine how much bitching and moaning there would be about such a self serious, Heart of Darkness / Spec Ops: The Line type game coming out about him.

Gunther is a commentary on how hard it is for Germans who can't serve their superiors well.

 

[an Administrator]

Is there really an "Aug Lives Matter" thing in the game?!
Might as well they could have added augmented gangs with "#AugLife" written on their shirts.

 

[Metro]

I can almost guarantee you there will be a Gunther/Anna DLC by the time this is all over.

 

[an Administrator]

"Gunther: Skullgun divided"

 

[Ninjerk]

"Gunther: Skullgun divided"

 

[undecaf]

"Gunther: Skullgun d- Fuck this I'm outta here.

 

[Infinitron]

 

[imweasel]

Finally finished the game. It took me 50 hours for a complete playthrough. I think about 25 hours for the main quest + side quests and another 25 hours just derping around and exploring Prague (the latter is pretty much a waste of time).

• The story picks up after the bank heist (about half way through the game) but overall the writing is really shallow as are most of the new characters; Janus is pretty much the only exception. Alex Vega, Jim Miller (your gay boss) and Duncan MacReady are so lame, boring and underdeveloped that I just want to Jensen punch them in the face. Repeatedly. The most interesting NPCs were returning ones, but they hardly got any screen time. The immediate villain is also pretty boring and generic. It isn't all bad though, some of the plot events are pretty cool and it will be interesting to see how the story arc unfolds.
• The areas/locations are beautifully designed and full of detail. I often stop and look around just to admire them (I think I spent like 20 to 30 minutes just checking out Jensen's apartment at the beginning of the game). Kudos to the art team.
• Gameplay has improved but it doesn't feel as smooth as in HR. The single mega hub in Prague is too big for my preference, I wouldn't be surprised if the next installment is a full blown "open world" game or something.

Deus Ex: 9.5
Human Revolution: 9
Mankind Divided: 7.5
Invisible War: 5
The Fall: lol

 

[Daedalos]

People really did expect to get the back story to Page Industries, the illuminati, VersaLife, beginnings of the grey death, more about Janus, instead we got an elaborate melodramatic story about metaphorical racism in the form of augs vs normies, which wasn't really central to any deus ex game so far. Transhumanism is.

I understand if people feel trolled.

But rest assured, we will get all the aforementioned in DLCs ;D

 

[imweasel]

People really did expect to get the back story to Page Industries, the illuminati, VersaLife, beginnings of the grey death, more about Janus

It seems that the next game or story DLCs will delve much deeper into this, as it was referenced quite often towards the end of the game.

instead we got an elaborate melodramatic story about metaphorical racism in the form of augs vs normies, which wasn't really central to any deus ex game so far. Transhumanism is.

Yep.

The augs vs. normies stuff is really overdone in MD and not very interesting either.

 

[Fairfax]

People really did expect to get the back story to Page Industries, the illuminati, VersaLife, beginnings of the grey death, more about Janus, instead we got an elaborate melodramatic story about metaphorical racism in the form of augs vs normies, which wasn't really central to any deus ex game so far. Transhumanism is.

I understand if people feel trolled.

But rest assured, we will get all the aforementioned in DLCs ;D

The backstories of important characters from later on shouldn't be so important to the narrative. These backstories should be secondary to the main story, which should stand on its own as HR's did, otherwise you enter Star Wars prequel territory.

 

[Deleted member 7219]

Finally finished the game. It took me 50 hours for a complete playthrough. I think about 25 hours for the main quest + side quests and another 25 hours just derping around and exploring Prague (the latter is pretty much a waste of time).

• The story picks up after the bank heist (about half way through the game) but overall the writing is really shallow as are most of the new characters; Janus is pretty much the only exception. Alex Vega, Jim Miller (your gay boss) and Duncan MacReady are so lame, boring and underdeveloped that I just want to Jensen punch them in the face. Repeatedly. The most interesting NPCs were returning ones, but they hardly got any screen time. The immediate villain is also pretty boring and generic. It isn't all bad though, some of the plot events are pretty cool and it will be interesting to see how the story arc unfolds.
• The areas/locations are beautifully designed and full of detail. I often stop and look around just to admire them (I think I spent like 20 to 30 minutes just checking out Jensen's apartment at the beginning of the game). Kudos to the art team.
• Gameplay has improved but it doesn't feel as smooth as in HR. The single mega hub in Prague is too big for my preference, I wouldn't be surprised if the next installment is a full blown "open world" game or something.

Deus Ex: 9.5
Human Revolution: 9
Mankind Divided: 7.5
Invisible War: 5
The Fall: lol

That's a fair review. I don't necessarily agree with every point, but I agree the overall plot of the game is good - it is frustrating how good it was, because if it had another 10 hours it really could have turned into something amazing.

 

[Carrion]

People really did expect to get the back story to Page Industries, the illuminati, VersaLife, beginnings of the grey death

Why would you want that? It's not like that stuff needs a backstory, and I'd rather have Eidos Montreal detach themselves as much from Deus Ex as possible storywise. They're pretty much two completely different universes already.

instead we got an elaborate melodramatic story about metaphorical racism in the form of augs vs normies, which wasn't really central to any deus ex game so far. Transhumanism is.

Human Revolution already was a huge departure from Deus Ex thematically. The problem isn't that the "metaphorical racism" is a non-DX idea, because we're talking about a sequel to a non-DX game. The problem is that it's just a rather stupid and contrived allegory that doesn't make all that much sense to begin with.

 

[Infinitron]

The adventure will not be complete until we see a grizzled old Adam Jensen cuddling baby JC Denton

 

[ThoseDeafMutes]

The adventure will not be complete until we see a grizzled old Adam Jensen cuddling baby JC Denton

JC was born in March 2029 so Jensen wouldn't be an old man. Paul was 2018 so I'm curious as to how the whole Adam-has-super-aug-genes thing is going to tie in, Paul was supposedly chosen for his body not rejecting foreign material too.

 

[The Dutch Ghost]

JC was born in March 2029 so Jensen wouldn't be an old man. Paul was 2018 so I'm curious as to how the whole Adam-has-super-aug-genes thing is going to tie in, Paul was supposedly chosen for his body not rejecting foreign material too.

Wasn't JC suppose to be a clone of Paul Denton?

 

[ThoseDeafMutes]

JC was born in March 2029 so Jensen wouldn't be an old man. Paul was 2018 so I'm curious as to how the whole Adam-has-super-aug-genes thing is going to tie in, Paul was supposedly chosen for his body not rejecting foreign material too.

Wasn't JC suppose to be a clone of Paul Denton?

Yes. I'm assuming they'll somehow incorporate Adam's special genes into JC or some crap.

 

[Genma:TheDestroyer]

Sadly, Square Enix it seems, was so pleased with HR's success that they have decided to hack Mankind Divided into an incomplete product with the intent of drip-feeding it back to us. Allegedly, not only do they have plans to sell back parts of MD's missing campaign via DLC, but there is a third, maybe even fourth game in the works too, carved from the missing second and third chapters of this one no doubt. Expandalones in this case, with probably more DLC on top of that.*Jim Sterling mentioned this on last week's Podquisition.

This was developed during that weird period where episodic games were catching on and several companies jumped on the 'games as a service' bandwagon. Square Enix was one of them and it was only about halfway through that they realized how fucking stupid it all sounded. You can blame some of the editing problems and zig-zagging story on that. It faced some of the same problems as Suicide Squad.

 

[Jick Magger]

Started playing this on and off since last week. Just left Golem City for the first time, and I'd say this' been a mixed bag overall. Find the gameplay, hub and level design to be an improvement over HR, though I find the aug swapping and jumping to still be pretty awkward. Prague is beautifully designed, as was Golem City. Pretty much all the new characters are really shallow and boring, and you don't really interact enough with any of them to really give a shit about them.

And yeah, you can tell the developers were really passionate and dedicated to giving the game a social message, but their approach to it has the subtlety of a brick to the face, and as a result it comes across as extremely obnoxious and preachy, not to mention the fact that it doesn't really fit the tone of a Deus Ex game.

 

[DeepOcean]

That part of that fake sociology professor with the name of Doctor Christianson spewing bullshit about the need of separation of classes on the TV was retard beyond the belief, to complete the completely distorted charicature, he even talks "What SJWs need to understand...". Boy, it was like some retard librul writer wished to mock people that are against the rapefugees but becauase there aren't smelly rapefugee muslim on this game, the guy talks so much nonsense about nothing, something about the need of the separation of classes that doesn't make any sense. Actually, the whole aug vs. normies thing is bizarre, if all augs around the world go crazy right at the same time just after everyone getting a new chip from a certain company, the result wouldn't be the creation of a bizarre division of augs vs. non augs but everybody questioning this company and wanting it burn to the ground, Illuminati or not. Instead Tai Wong Medical just gets bigger.

Sorry, Deus Ex, the original, had this kind of non sense with the Grey Death but the equivalent of Mankind Divided would be if Versalife sent a bottle of grey death to everyone around the world as a christimas gift with everyone dying right afterwards right after taking a drink, conspiration is supposedly something a little more subtle than that. The whole premise doesn't make much sense, you could play the "The illuminati have all the power of the media!" card but I could just answer that my suspension of disbelief has limits that are directly correlated with my intelligence.

The writers were so fucking desperate for all this to be "socialy relevant" that they forgot to make it to make sense first.

 

[ThoseDeafMutes]

And yeah, you can tell the developers were really passionate and dedicated to giving the game a social message, but their approach to it has the subtlety of a brick to the face, and as a result it comes across as extremely obnoxious and preachy, not to mention the fact that it doesn't really fit the tone of a Deus Ex game.

What's interesting is that people are criticizing it for giving too much voice to the other side - i.e. for what some perceive as a "both sides are equally bad" message because the oppressed class may or may not have resorted to terrorism, while the game was simultaneously using BLM slogans. IMO it was a major mistake to invite comparison to Black Lives Matter because the situation and movements in the game are really not similar on any level. It's probably got the most similarities with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, then with some added overtones of Apartheid and Jim Crow laws. The ARC feels like it's halfway to become a PLO/Hamas style organization.