The Deus Ex: Human Revolution Thread: Director's Cut™

[Dreaad]

I played it in a whatever happens, happens way. So most of the time in most missions sooner or later I was detected. Rather than reloading I just dealt with it, sometimes killing people became necessary, sometimes I could run and hide and continue pacifist approach. I think I got ghost once... during start of the game, infiltrating that gang zone after police station.

 

[circ]

VTOL is short for vertical take-off and landing that I remember. Basically it's an airplane that can land like a chopper - like the Harrier and Osprey or whatever it's called.

 

[baturinsky]

They are minority. For example, would you see the Highland Park mercs oblivious of what they're doing. And especially Belltower fucks. They're mercs for hire. They do shit for highest bidder as is said in the game itself. They deserve to die. It was their choice to be immoral deuches. They have to deal with the consequences. I'm going through the china district for the second time, killing those fucks out of sheer enjoyment now, even though i know they could have been avoided.

Many of those immoral deuches probably would rationalise that their victims deserve it too.

 

[Gnidrologist]

oh, muh relativism
how unexpected from a soviet worshiper

 

[Infinitron]

GnidAworlogist

 

[Multiple Sarcasm]

They're mercs for hire. They do shit for highest bidder as is said in the game itself. They deserve to die. It was their choice to be immoral deuches. They have to deal with the consequences. I'm going through the china district for the second time, killing those fucks out of sheer enjoyment now, even though i know they could have been avoided.

killing out of sheer enjoyment

I believe that a lot of people deserve to be harmed.

What about people who kill for pleasure?

 

[Gnidrologist]

They should be praised as of Codex morale codex, paragraph 2.3.4.


Yea, k, get what you're saying. Mercs are mercs, they're in just for the money and often don't even know what they're fighting for, but do you really believe that the hired guns in that FEMA compound were oblivious? Don't think so. Most of the guys in the chinese lab level with the chinese bitch queen on the top were probably in the dark, because of all the Picus propaganda so i killed almost no one there, except for the final showdown, of course. I had no intention to play it quietly. There was no reason nor fun in that.

 

[Cadmus]

I just finished the game over the weekend. It felt mostly like VtMB with good shooting. I never got far in the original Deus Ex even though I tried playing it like 5 times - it always bored me to death.
I was expecting this game to be a popamole shiet and while there was lots of mole-popping, I was pleasantly surprised by some of the details, the nice gunplay, interesting story, the atmosphere and the hacking minigame that didn't suck cock.
I will write some impressions later when I have the time but overall I liked the game.

btw I killed all the survivors at the end - Sarif, Taggart and the cripple dude, shot all the cameras in their rooms and killed all the witnesses. Don't seem like it had any effect on the game...?

 

[pippin]

I think you have karma based endings, but in the end it's just a press a button to get an ending thing.

 

[Multidirectional]

So basically the sole difference is piss filter? I saw the comparison on tube and can't decide form my self which is better. Without the filter everything seems too greyish, but with it everything's a bit too bright.

I don't agree with complaints about the filter, it actually fits the art style.
Also, pointless to worry about extra xp from hacking or non-lethal approach, it's inconsequential in the long run. I did a mostly pacifist run with lots of hacking and a full combat character while hacking only important things. In both runs I ended up with a lot more praxis points than I actually needed for my build. Everyone should just play it the fun way without xp sperging.

 

[Gnidrologist]

Ditto.

 

[Gnidrologist]

One thing to add. With my Rambo-Jensen run i did everything much quicker, less painless and with less save-scumming. Because i allowed myself to kill everything that stands in my way. Given that perks you need to do this effectively are much less than, when you tryhard some gamist class aka ''silent assassin'' type shit in Hitman series, it becomes quite obvious why the XP system was made that way. It's sawyeritis vulgaris. Shit design, but not something that can be easily cured from rpg genre in general, because on the other end of the stick would be those, who complain that certain ways of playing the game are overpowered and others gimped. Didn't feel any of that, when comparing my ''mostly stealth'' with ''mostly shoot'' run in HR.

 

[Popiel]

Finished it yesterday for the first time. Yeah, well. Nothing to write home about, a decent, mediocre...ish game. I managed a full pacifist run, achievement even popped up. Probably the best moment in the game was when I laughed some when I found a poster in one of the rooms...

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

Finished it yesterday for the first time. Yeah, well. Nothing to write home about, a decent, mediocre...ish game. I managed a full pacifist run, achievement even popped up. Probably the best moment in the game was when I laughed some when I found a poster in one of the rooms...

The poster is hilarious because it took over 5 years from the release of Deus Ex: Human Revolution for Final Fantasy XV, which was already under production, to be completed. At the rate SquareEnix is going, they'll be lucky to have finished FF XVIII by 2026, when Human Revolution takes place.

 

[Popiel]

Yep, mayhap, I was more like Good God there is so much more of this shit ahead of us...

 

[GentlemanCthulhu]

Decided to play Deus in the Shell (Human Rev) again after 5 years but quickly realized that was a mistake. The writing in this game is just... garbage - it's so contrived that it ruins the otherwise great gameplay. There's no other way to put it. This universe's central conflict (augs vs naties) is just dumb and absurd. Not only does the game fail to provide good reasoning behind why such a large portion of the population would be against augmentations - to the point that there would be riots in the streets - it also fails to explain the scope it deals with. HR is a prequel to the original DX. In that game, very few people have augmentations, and all of those are/were either in high-level military positions or else use augmentations as prosthetics since they lost their original limbs/organs. In HR, highly expensive and eclectic augmentations are so widespread that even lowlife scum can afford them. I understand what the writers were going for, they are using all this as an analogy for racial clashes, but it just doesn't work. The main argument, that augs will become a sort of master race that takes away jobs and resources from natties is stupid due to the reasoning provided above, and that if you take a look at a list of most common jobs, there's very little augmentations can do to grant any sort of advantage on a nattie.

Other than that, the moment-to-moment writing is also dumb. Consider the following scenario:

Adam Jensen, the security chief of Sarif Industries is approached by an employee (let's call him A). He confesses that he has been stealing a highly valuable drug from the labs under threat and blackmail from another employee (let's call him B). A asks Jense for help regarding the matter. In the real world, a real chief of security would apprehend both employees and push the matter to the higher-ups like human resources, the bosses, and potentially even the police. In HR, not only does Jensen agree to employee A's plea for retrieving the blackmail so they can bury the whole affair, but he also agrees to employee B's demand that he would take out two rival drug dealers in return for the blackmail footage. In other words, the writers of this game believe that the chief of security's role in a biotech company is to fight gangwars so its low/mid-level employees are able to get away with their theft of company property.

It's all like that. It's all garbage. I could take *any* quest in this game and expose its absurdity. There's not a single one where the internal logic of the writing holds up.

I uninstalled the game.

 

[MpuMngwana]

The poster is hilarious because it took over 5 years from the release of Deus Ex: Human Revolution for Final Fantasy XV, which was already under production, to be completed. At the rate SquareEnix is going, they'll be lucky to have finished FF XVIII by 2026, when Human Revolution takes place.

Yes, but getting ffxvii around the time we can make Jensen-tier cyborgs in real life sounds about right

 

[turkishronin]

Not only does the game fail to provide good reasoning behind why such a large portion of the population would be against augmentations

idk about you but I think cutting off your arm to replace it with a piece of metal is quite cringe

 

[Silly Germans]

Decided to play Deus in the Shell (Human Rev) again after 5 years but quickly realized that was a mistake. The writing in this game is just... garbage - it's so contrived that it ruins the otherwise great gameplay. There's no other way to put it. This universe's central conflict (augs vs naties) is just dumb and absurd. Not only does the game fail to provide good reasoning behind why such a large portion of the population would be against augmentations - to the point that there would be riots in the streets - it also fails to explain the scope it deals with. HR is a prequel to the original DX. In that game, very few people have augmentations, and all of those are/were either in high-level military positions or else use augmentations as prosthetics since they lost their original limbs/organs. In HR, highly expensive and eclectic augmentations are so widespread that even lowlife scum can afford them. I understand what the writers were going for, they are using all this as an analogy for racial clashes, but it just doesn't work. The main argument, that augs will become a sort of master race that takes away jobs and resources from natties is stupid due to the reasoning provided above, and that if you take a look at a list of most common jobs, there's very little augmentations can do to grant any sort of advantage on a nattie.

Other than that, the moment-to-moment writing is also dumb. Consider the following scenario:

Adam Jensen, the security chief of Sarif Industries is approached by an employee (let's call him A). He confesses that he has been stealing a highly valuable drug from the labs under threat and blackmail from another employee (let's call him B). A asks Jense for help regarding the matter. In the real world, a real chief of security would apprehend both employees and push the matter to the higher-ups like human resources, the bosses, and potentially even the police. In HR, not only does Jensen agree to employee A's plea for retrieving the blackmail so they can bury the whole affair, but he also agrees to employee B's demand that he would take out two rival drug dealers in return for the blackmail footage. In other words, the writers of this game believe that the chief of security's role in a biotech company is to fight gangwars so its low/mid-level employees are able to get away with their theft of company property.

It's all like that. It's all garbage. I could take *any* quest in this game and expose its absurdity. There's not a single one where the internal logic of the writing holds up.

I uninstalled the game.

That goes for pretty much all rpgs that are out there. I don't think i know a single one that is logically consistent. It is just easier to spot here since
the world seems to work very much like our own. I have the same problem with many games and it can ruin them for oneself but DE:HR didn't strike
me as especially bad in that regard.

 

[Lacrymas]

Not only does the game fail to provide good reasoning behind why such a large portion of the population would be against augmentations - to the point that there would be riots in the streets - it also fails to explain the scope it deals with.

Really? It's unbelievable that people would be antsy about this? Outside of "terking our jerbs" (I don't see a job that wouldn't benefit from augmentations in some form) and being just plain better than a non-augmented human, there's also the "it's against nature/God" argument. You want to tell me people aren't convinced by that "argument"? Just look irl at the abortion debate, the non-straights, "GMOs", some anti-science arguments, etc. Widespread augmentations like in Human Revolution are much more prominent and non-abstract, so people who are gullible enough to fall for that argument are going to have their panties in a twist a lot more fervently. If you retort with "but it's not logical", that's not the point, none of these things are logical and humans don't always operate based on logic alone.

Human Revolution's narrative problem is that it doesn't deal with the actual problems it brings up - withholding of knowledge, glamorization of news personalities, healthcare, and the dissemination of media. I'd say transhumanism too, the game might pretend it has some debate on the matter, but in reality it has 2 feet firmly placed in the pro-augmentation camp due to Jensen being able to solve all the problems he encounters while being augmented, even against his will. There is no doubt that Jensen is better at everything he does after he gets augmented, we feel that in the gameplay too. We start out with zero augments, being only vaguely aware where our enemies are, and getting gutted by a guy with augments, to being able to see where our opponents are at every step, being able to regenerate health, and knocking out people with a punch to the face (you can't do that before you get augmented, I tried). And that's only our starting get-up.

It also doesn't have much to do with the original Deus Ex tbh, the events of this game don't gel well with it, especially with how slick and non-obtrusive augmentations look, while looking like a freak with metal prosthetics was a huge deal for at least Gunther in the original.

 

[GentlemanCthulhu]

idk about you but I think cutting off your arm to replace it with a piece of metal is quite cringe

Really? It's unbelievable that people would be antsy about this? Outside of "terking our jerbs" (I don't see a job that wouldn't benefit from augmentations in some form) and being just plain better than a non-augmented human, there's also the "it's against nature/God" argument. You want to tell me people aren't convinced by that "argument"? Just look irl at the abortion debate, the non-straights, "GMOs", some anti-science arguments, etc. Widespread augmentations like in Human Revolution are much more prominent and non-abstract, so people who are gullible enough to fall for that argument are going to have their panties in a twist a lot more fervently. If you retort with "but it's not logical", that's not the point, none of these things are logical and humans don't always operate based on logic alone.

Human Revolution's narrative problem is that it doesn't deal with the actual problems it brings up - withholding of knowledge, glamorization of news personalities, healthcare, and the dissemination of media. I'd say transhumanism too, the game might pretend it has some debate on the matter, but in reality it has 2 feet firmly placed in the pro-augmentation camp due to Jensen being able to solve all the problems he encounters while being augmented, even against his will. There is no doubt that Jensen is better at everything he does after he gets augmented, we feel that in the gameplay too. We start out with zero augments, being only vaguely aware where our enemies are, and getting gutted by a guy with augments, to being able to see where our opponents are at every step, being able to regenerate health, and knocking out people with a punch to the face (you can't do that before you get augmented, I tried). And that's only our starting get-up.

It also doesn't have much to do with the original Deus Ex tbh, the events of this game don't gel well with it, especially with how slick and non-obtrusive augmentations look, while looking like a freak with metal prosthetics was a huge deal for at least Gunther in the original.

I think both of you dismiss the issue of scale here. The plot fails to justify how augmentation becomes prevalent enough to be a problem. I mentioned in my initial comment that only a tiny minority of people in the original DX have augmentations, and the majority of those people did not have an alternative. So sure it's cringy, and some people will be unhappy (creationist/anti-abortion types etc), but you'd even expect those people to see the value of prosthetic/augmented limbs. This is not a good antithesis for my initial point which i will rephrase: the logistics of augmentations in HR is completely nonsensical. The economics just don't work out. How is it that every hood rat has augmented limbs? Why is there enough augmented people to realistically threaten natties to begin with?

We don't disagree on any substantial point here. It comes down to the plot being entirely one-tracked and unable to justify its premise.

 

[Lacrymas]

I'd say that doesn't really matter much. Like I said, it doesn't gel well with the original Deus Ex. Augmentations are indeed supposed to be a new thing, yet they are super widespread. It would've been much more interesting had they been in their early stages and super experimental. It would also make more sense in the context of the Deus Ex timeline. But that's what we got. Augmentations are simply widespread, end of discussion, it doesn't make everything fall apart. That comes later when they couldn't figure out what to do with it.

 

[GentlemanCthulhu]

I'd say that doesn't really matter much. Like I said, it doesn't gel well with the original Deus Ex. Augmentations are indeed supposed to be a new thing, yet they are super widespread. It would've been much more interesting had they been in their early stages and super experimental. It would also make more sense in the context of the Deus Ex timeline. But that's what we got. Augmentations are simply widespread, end of discussion, it doesn't make everything fall apart. That comes later when they couldn't figure out what to do with it.

I do think it does considering that the game is a direct prequel. The thing is for them to be able to "do anything with [the plot]" they first have to justify the existence of the central conflict. They fail to do that. If it's just meant to be taken for granted, then the player will have no reason to care, and the writers won't have any grounds to build on. The setting being nonsensical in the first place is in my opinion the reason why the plot fails to develop properly.

It's a jumbled mess of contrivances and bending backwards to accommodate for internal inconsistencies... because I guess nobody on the Eidos team could write or cared or heck, was even well read enough to understand the issues.

 

[Lacrymas]

I don't accept any Deus Ex game outside of the original as canon anyway ;d You can't make them fit together even if you tried, so whatever.

 

[GentlemanCthulhu]

I'd say that doesn't really matter much. Like I said, it doesn't gel well with the original Deus Ex. Augmentations are indeed supposed to be a new thing, yet they are super widespread. It would've been much more interesting had they been in their early stages and super experimental. It would also make more sense in the context of the Deus Ex timeline. But that's what we got. Augmentations are simply widespread, end of discussion, it doesn't make everything fall apart. That comes later when they couldn't figure out what to do with it.

Honestly the first DX is in my opinion one of the most internally consistent plots out there.