Deus Ex: Mankind Divided - Setting and storytelling

is anyone playing it?

I preordered, played for a while and have mixed feelings...

Basically,

• I have hard time taking the whole idea "oppression of augmented people" thing seriously - cybernetic limbs cost a lot, so it shouldn't exactly be augumentation segregation and cyborg in slums.
• The game in general has a "theme park" feeling about it. A lot of things don't happen until you get into range where you can witness them, which is obvious. It even includes enemies on patrol - they don't patrol until you get close to them, at which point they "wake up", and start walking around.
• The world seems less futuristic and less like "deus ex" comapred to previous titles...

I'm thinking at this point that Ghost in the Shell and Shadowrun were better at portraying futuristic society with cyborgs. In Shadowrun implants/augumentations were almost a must in high society. In Ghost in the shell there was that interesting moment, where government tried to pass a proposal where military cyborgs were considered to be a property of government (instead of "personell" - because expensive military hardware has high maintenance cost and require special facilities).

Thoughts?

 

Shouldn't you post this on their forums: http://forums.eu.square-enix.com/forumdisplay.php?f=408 ? What you noticed is not working well might be unintended.

 

I don't think so.

Most likely the only thing I"ll get on their forums is bunch of kids/fans trying to convince me that I'm evil because I didn't like new deus ex.

Here there might be a decent discussion about storytelling. Basically, it seems to be the same problem as in divine divinity: dragon commander, where people tried too hard to drag real world political issues into the game.

 

Haven't played it yet, but I'm not surprised by what people are saying about the theme. I wasn't a fan of how HR handled transhumanism. It's framing of the theme was basically from the perspective of a mother concerned for how her child has to live dependent on drugs and face being bullied for being different. Their primary assumption was that most people didn't want the augments. It's less of a jump then that the superior species would/could somehow become the lowest caste.


Might be time for me to re-watch GitS.

 

I'm all for using games as a platform for discussing real social/political issues. In theory. In practice, I'm not sure if I've ever seen it handled properly.

The GTA series is famous for taking a position on certain cultural issues, but it's often undermined by its own immature humor and the actual game's mechanics. The one sticking out in my mind is from GTA IV, where the bullshark testosterone guy is incredibly homophobic outwardly, but is suggested to be gay himself. Meanwhile, however, flamboyant men in cutoff shorts and halter tops skate the boardwalk, lisping their colorful lines of dialog that adolescents alone would probably find funny.

In the case of Deus Ex, though (I haven't played MD yet, but rather enjoyed HR, despite not finding the story all that compelling), this particular theme -- that augments are a lesser caste -- sounds directly in conflict with what the player feels and experiences. As Adam, players are superhuman. They know they're not second-class citizens, nor are they treated like one (my guess).

For a game to really drive home the point of what an oppressed sect of society goes through, the player themselves would have to be a victim of the treatment. Even better, have experienced it from the other side first. Again, I don't think this works with the suggestion they're making that being augmented is undesirable (who among us wouldn't want cyborg super powers?!), so it'd have to be flipped: the augments are at the top of the chain, and unaugmented people are left behind. Since the augments are expensive, it would be a classic case of haves-and-have-nots.

Bit of a trope, sure, but I think there's a reason why that formula is used frequently. It makes sense, and it's effective. Sometimes there's a reason no one's taken the other road...

 

I actually pre-ordered this as well, against my better judgement. For some reason, whenever I pre-order something, it ends up being disappointing in some way and I feel like an idiot for pre-ordering. I haven't played this title at all yet, but your post makes me feel a little less bad about that. I felt like Human Revolution, while having nice graphics and interesting gameplay, really didn't improve upon much from the first game. The mechanics were way too dumbed down and the changes to the Augmentation system didn't suit the game really and ended up making replay a lot less tempting.

I think Alex Jensen is a boring protagonist with a boring history and a boring mission. That is to say, all of these "deep" human concepts they're pushing have been explored before, and better.

You brought up Ghost in the Shell earlier and I can't agree more that they did a better job of drawing the line between augmented human and "natural" human. It also went much deeper into the human condition and what it means to be an actual person.

The new Deus Ex games seem to just scratch the surface with this stuff. I wouldn't really have a problem with that if the game weren't so insistent upon its own "thought provocation." That's really all for the first game though, as I haven't played this one yet I'm not sure if that issue still exists.

If you do end up finishing it though, please let us know your thoughts. I'll definitely end up playing it anyway, but it would be nice to know what I'm in for.

 

Sounds like you have a preconcieved idea of what it should be like, but it isn't.

Human Revolution did a good job of explaining the whole aug industry thing, so if the sequel includes more people being aug'd then it makes sense and fits in the game's universe.

 

Don't hold your breath on that - it looks like this is a long game. Not a witcher 3 long, but slow-paced. Easily can take over a week or even several - depending on amount of free time.

I played all the other deus ex games.

This one feels different, as if story quality suddenly dropped couple of notches - towards the "silly" territory.
That's the problem. The world suddenly feel different and less futuristic too.

 

I guess it's one of those things where a basic element of the premise/setting needs you to suspend your disbelief. If it does interesting things with it afterwards and everything else seems plausible within the setting it establishes it might be interesting.

Maybe they needed it to be that way to explore other aspects of transhumanism.

I have to agree on it not looking that great though. Not sure what's bothering me yet, but it looks a bit... Dull?

 

Well, the world could feel less futuristic if it fits the direction of the story. I was under the impression from watching gameplay that the story was a huge part of the game. Kind of a bummer if it's not delivering that. I really liked digging around into the story of HR.

Just to be fair, IMO the HR game really did have a huge story chunks that were very optional, so maybe they just have more horizontal options for the story rather than a linear experience? Only really holds weight if that's the case and sub-par story isn't a common complaint, though.

 

Yeah. Also Prague sorta reminds me of Witcher 3 cities sometimes. Or half-life games - you know with all those older style houses. Doesn't exactly match futuristic cyberpunk visuals of older games.

I think that

^^^ If they did something like this or maybe even let the player start from the blank state (let the player make a customized character), the result could've been more interesting.

Basically, few weeks ago I've been discussing older deus ex and said that maybe those series could make a good movie like Ghost in The Shell. The Mankind Divided doesn't give me this kind of feeling.

Anyway, maybe it'll get better later. It is not a bad purchase, as far as I can tell, not something I'd refund. So I'll finish it, eventually.

 

I got a chance to play this briefly last night, and I really had a half-life feel vibe going on in Prague. I'm personally interested to see where the story goes past Prague. While it isn't the most futuristic city, it is also one we haven't explored in past games (If my memory serves me right), which is refreshing to me personally. After the events of Human Revolution I can also understand Adam wanting to place himself away from the cybernetic hubs you see in the past games. As the game progresses I hope we get to see some of the old areas like Boston and Japan which I'm sure will hold a much stronger sense of futuristic visuals.

On the flip side, the place that you meet your mechanic gives me extreme visuals of more of the dirty cyberpunk you see in Gibson's writing and with Shadowrun settings. So I loved that bit. Plus his mechanic has a little Polycount tribute on his jacket if you look close enough.

 

Hmm, damn. I haven't played the older ones but really loved Human Revolution. If you'd just compare it to that, is it much worse?

 

Not sure yet.
I didn't really like the beginning, but It seems to be slowly getting better over time. More like deus ex.

 

What other games have you pre-ordered? So we can stray away - and not waste any time. Too many games to play to waste time on disappointing ones.

 

It does seem to missing that certain something that the original and HR had. But I've only finished the tutorial mission so perhaps it improves.

 

Haha, I actually don't pre-order very often. The last game I pre-ordered was Fallout 4, and I actually went a step beyond and got the Season Pass for all the DLC. I started off really liking Fallout 4, but when I got to the conclusion of the story I literally turned off the game and never went back. I haven't even looked at the two DLC they released for it.

I ALMOST pre-ordered No Man's Sky after seeing a few feature videos, but figured I'd wait till the review. Thank heavens for small miracles.

 

I've been playing it, and I agree it's kind of boring, but I've never had a high opinion of Square Enix so that didn't surprise me much. I like the "theme park" description, that really nails it. The first time I saw a guard wander off, I thought, "Oh crap, they move around a lot." The second time I saw it, I thought, "Oh crap, they're just pop-up targets on triggers."

I did think the "dry run" tutorial mode was an interesting new take on tutorial presentation.

I'm reserving judgement on whether it feels futuristic or not. HR was all over the map on that, and I'm expecting this one to follow a similar design.

I do think the "aug oppression" thing is kind of silly, but I don't much personally care for (or about) social-hand-wringing as it is, so I find it easy to ignore. Besides, oppressed or not, it's hard to buy into the idea that all these people would be hacking off their limbs to install these gaudy replacements which don't seem to actually do anything useful, on the whole. Really no part of the storyline (both HR and MD) stands up to any serious scrutiny so I try not to overthink it.

As a die-hard fan of the original (can't even begin to guess how many play-throughs I've done, I'd pay an unreasonable price for a new-assets Xbone reboot), I am extremely happy they seem to take the non-violent options much more seriously than the "generic shooter" mindset in HR. It's a very interesting way of significantly altering the exact same scenarios, though meat-grinder scenes like the sandstorm in the opener aren't especially fun this way.

I also appreciated the 12-minute intro recap of HR. I had actually forgotten just how much was in HR, and it was better intro to Deus Ex for my wife than our original plan of her watching me re-play HR.

 

Which Deus Ex do ya'll suggest for someone who has never played a game in the series? Which one is the best?
I seem to remember one in particular being "cream of the crop" getting talked up a lot in the media - although - my gaming enjoyment/likes aren't always in line with media hype.

 

If you've never played one in the series before, I'd suggest Human Revolution first, then the first game if you enjoy that and want a bit more. I love the first game but it's a janky little baby sometimes so it helps to ease in to the series.

 

The first one.

As for which to player first, you could play Human Revolution or the original in either order (and those are the only two you need to play). Their gameplay is pretty different. The first is definitely a pre-Splinter Cell stealth game that openly shows it's RPG roots, so expect it to take some getting used to.

 

First one.

Spoiler

Second game is odd and plenty of people didn't like it. (Although it did allow player to pick protagonist's gender)

Human Revolution tries to capture the spirit of the original, but doesn't exactly get there. (It is still good)

 

I just hope this new one isn't full of HR-style tedious (and buggy!) boss fights every 30 minutes.

Last night I experimented with throwing things as distractions to the guards-on-rails. Sad to report their reactions are as unconvincing as the trigger-patrol behavior. Even the patrolling of the guards who actually move without triggers appears to be 100% scripted.

Oh the other annoyance about guards -- I can choke out a dude only 100 feet from another guard and as long as I'm out of that trigger zone they ignore it completely. I did that by accident (the other guard didn't really stand out from the background) and was sort of disappointed, though I'd already noted the trigger zone thing so it wasn't too surprising.

I have also read there is a LOT of side-mission material that gets permanently closed off based on decisions you make. I have a bad feeling this may not scream "replay" to me, so that's likely to become a disappointment.

neginfinity's screen shot makes me want to blow off the rest of the day figuring out how to get the original to run under Win10.

 

I'd expect gog version to work on win10

 

Welllllll... I guess I'm not working on my game this weekend.

 

Thanks guys.
There is a steam pack with original, HR and two others which seem to be not very popular in the series. Price seems reasonable for 2 solid games - though Ill check on gog for price comparison.

 

Regarding the fact that they're vilifying people who have augmentations--consider the fact that in the first game, the "augmentations" are nanotechnology, not mechanical. With HR (possibly in the first game, I've not played enough to know how that game depicts the past), they put a large focus on mechanical augmentations. For the Jensen games to remain canon, they have to move away from mechanical augmentations to align with the future that the original Deus Ex presented.

 

I believe they moved away from "hanzers" (they were called hanzers, not augs) because nanotech agents simply completely outclassed them. They also added "phlebotonium", I mean neuropozine to explain why mechanical augumentation "is bad".

 

But they explained the reason for moving to nanotech augs in the original. All the old agents were mechanical and everyone hated JC for being swank as S***.

 

Fair enough. I never managed to get very far in the first game so I must have missed that.

Edit: As far as the game's examination of philosophical concepts and all that, I feel it has the same problem as Watch Dogs--it presents them, but it doesn't really do anything with them. Ultimately these are games, and thus they often forego focusing on these topics for action (and regarding comparisons, I feel that because of this it's not really fair to make one-to-one comparisons to films or books--the game has to do something else, so the writing has to accommodate that). I will say, however, that their depiction of the police was certainly very, very interesting. Not something I agree with but it was rather unique.

 

Finished it (without killing anybody), probably won't be replaying.

Feels a bit shorter than Human Revolution. Definitely feels shorter than original Deus Ex.

Still feels like a theme park, all the way till the end. Most of the time I could see only a backdrop and obstacles, not a world with people. In many cases those are fun/nice looking decorations, though, but there's almost never an illusion illusion that an ncp is a person.

First mission and first location do a disservice to the game, it gets better later.

Some side missions are great, and feel the way Deus Ex should. Can't exactly say the same about main plot missions. Have impression that the game would've been much beter if they didn't get distracted by the whole "augs are people too" nonsense - the theme of "oppression of augs" feels like a farce most of the time.

The ending is very strange and doesn't feel like an ending of a deus ex game. Although HR had that

Spoiler

"press a button to see an ending"

thing that looked like a joke, some of the endings were interesting. This one handles endings very differently.

I think I should probably stop grabbing those newer games that concentrate on graphics too much. I mean this:

Spoiler

Is a great artwork, lots of effort and looks nice too, but in the long term primary impact of this kind of level of detail is increasing loading times and not making story more exciting (for me, anyway).

The game also made me think that at some point in addition to fragment, vertex and geometry shaders we'll also need a texture shader to implement highly compressed semi-procedural textures as a mix of code and data.

 

Not sure I follow, how is that any different from a frag shader today?

 

Fragment shader processes data in screen space.

With "texture shader" you would have fragment shader that defines appearance of a material and a texture shader that defines data for a texture assigned to the material, meaning a sampler/texture could have swappable "program" assigned to it. Something like:

Code (csharp):

1.  
2. float4 texShader(in float4 uv){
3. ....
4. }
5.  

Meaning you could, for example, define basic shader that defines basic appearance of a meterial on screen, then plug into it a usual texture, a texture with a detail map, a texture that is designed to, say, render svg, and a completely procedural texture. The material shader itself wouldn't change, and could be used with texture shader written by someone else.

It makes sense, I think. You could also think of it as of a swappable subroutine, except the subroutine is geared towards provided texture data.

Speaking of which, I think OpenGL had this kind of idea, meaning you could split shader into parts and compile them individually, the problem is that those parts needed to be linked, and could not easily swapped.

 

Basically a frag shader pointed at a render target, no?

https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Graphics.SetRenderTarget.html

 

No. A shader function that can be replaced at runtime (as a shader/material parameter) and serves as a texture.

 

he more or less wants substance, but as its own integrated thing into the shader system. Substance is just a procedural way to create textures, that if used with engine plugins, lets you adjust arguments of the texture in real time as well.

 

IMO the best cyberpunk games where System Shock 1/2 and Syndicate/Syndicate Wars. This modern Deus Ex feels very mainstream to me. That Jensen dude looks like Neo and have a voice of a drunkard. Cyberpunk is dead. It was cool in the 80s and 90s but now it's not relevant anymore.

 

Says the guy with the 80s/90s avatar.