The world is changing. Technological advancements
bring us to new frontiers where we donât always know whatâs in store for us over
the horizon. An excess of data, contained within our pockets and accessed within seconds
has lead to information overload with the lines between fact and fiction becoming ever
harder to ascertain. And societal divides, both old and new, play out in repeating circles
getting more and more entrenched and leaving a society thatâs fractured. This is the
world we live in, and in the brave new world of tomorrow, what is the answer to uncertainty,
misinformation and division? Who can you trust? How do you find answers? And what can you
believe in? This is what Deus Ex is about. The series
is a paranoid look at our future, which examines society, and humanityâs changing role within
it, with, at times, more insight than you may be comfortable with. It paints its picture
of dystopia in dark, cynical brush strokes that can sometimes be a little wild, but yet
still often manage to stay relatable. In fact in certain aspects the first game has bordered
on being prophetic and most of the themes of this series have only increased in relevance
as times gone by. But Deus Ex is also noteworthy for its commitment to open ended, player driven
gameplay. Blending first person roleplaying with immersive sim design, the series has
championed player choices that have tangible mechanical impacts on the playerâs experience,
with level design that rewards exploration and systems that allow for varied and emergent
solutions to the many problems you encounter. In these aspects the first Deus Ex in particular
remains an industry gold standard, and all of its successors have attempted to stay true
to this core design philosophy, with varying levels of success. The series also shows a
shifting of focus that reflects broader industry changes, and more than a few examples of questionable
management of a franchise that may have deserved better. The future of Deus Ex is currently
unknown but its past at least provides plenty to talk about. This video will look at every
Deus Ex game released to date, while focusing on the different ways theyâve tackled the
themes of the series, and the evolution of their core gameplay. These are topics I have
a lot to say about, and some of this might not be what you expect. So join me on this
globetrotting, decade-spanning adventure as we step into this world of secret societies,
technological troubles and conspiracy theories. Be warned, this video will have spoilers for
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if youâre interested, and otherwise letâs get on with the video. When Deus Ex released in 2000 there werenât
any other games like it. 20 years later thatâs still mostly true. Thereâs a great quote
which sums this game up from game director and industry titan, Warren Specter about his
thoughts before release. "If people get that you can fight, sneak or talk we're gonna rule the world. "If people compare our combat to half life, we're dead. "If people compare our sneaking to Thief, we're dead. "And if people compare our roleplaying elements to Baldur's Gate, we're dead." It was the way Deus Ex combined elements from different
genres that made it stand out so much, but while it may have taken aspects from a diverse
range of genres, at its heart there was always a clear and consistent driving force of creating
player freedom. For inspiration, Specter cites the first time he played a Dungeons and Dragons
campaign, as well as his experience playing Thief: The Dark Project, where he got stuck
during one particular stealth section, which made him want to create a similar experience
where stealth was just one option of many and where if a player got stuck trying one
approach they could just change to another. This is reflected clearly in the finished
game. Deus Ex features big open levels but there are always multiple routes through them,
with different skills and items that can be taken advantage of, and non conventional options
many players wonât even be aware of. Before you actually get to that though youâll need
to go through character creation. You canât change much about your name or appearance
here which gives an early indication that Deus Ex might not be as focused on being an
rpg as other games in the genre. This is okay because its strength comes from how it combines
its various aspects, and if that means its light on some elements player might expect
in a role playing game, it still more than makes up for this in other ways.
This does mean however that youâll always play as JC Denton, who is a man with opinions.
In conversations the player has little input and Denton may express himself in ways you
wouldnât, displaying an outlook on the world you may not agree with. This allows conversations
to be more direct and serve a specific purpose in the narrative, but thatâs not the reason
why Iâm mentioning this. Itâs because over time many people have come to think of
an rpg as being about player choice, and the first things that come to most peopleâs
minds when they think about player choice is usually character creation, dialogue choices,
and being able to define parts of the player characters personality.
And thatâs fair enough, thereâs certainly nothing wrong with these things, but Deus
Ex has basic character creation, few meaningful dialogue choices and no freedom to define
Dentonâs personality⌠and yet itâs still a game focused entirely on player choice.
Itâs because of this that Deus Ex acts as a great example to show how player choice
can be about more than what people usually think of and this is a large part of the reason
for why this game is so important. Traditional roleplaying games have always had a large
focus placed on player expression, with the main thing that makes them stand out being
the amount of freedom that a format constrained only by player imagination can provide. Role
playing video games however have often struggled to replicate this, even if theyâve been
successful in other ways, and really the games that may have come closest arenât rpgs at
all but rather immersive sims. If you donât know what immersive sims are,
theyâre a genre of video games even more poorly defined than rpgs, and this video doesnât
really seem the place to try and rectify that. As far as I can tell however, what really
makes a game an immersive sim is being able to pick up unimportant objects and turn on
bathroom taps for no reason. There may be other qualities games of this genre share
but these two seem to be the most important. I must admit part of me has always wondered
why picking up random crap and wasting water are so significant to the genre, but I guess
the obvious answer is likely correct: Interacting with the environment is more immersive, and
snide as I may be, I have to admit that I do often find myself interacting with objects
for no actual reason quite frequently. Hell it was the first thing I did on this playthrough
and the moment where Paul ran up to me, and there I was just playing with this bag of
trash Iâd just found made me feel surprisingly guilty. [JC: I thought you were in Hong
Kong]. Interacting with objects does tend to serve
a purpose in immersive sim games however and Deus Ex is no exception. They can be used
to create sound to get a guards attention, or stacked on top of each other to create
platforms to climb on, or just moved to the side to uncover hidden routes. A big part
of immersive sims is emergent gameplay. This is when youâre given a range of tools and
then left to find solutions to problems on your own. Moveable objects are one such tool
in Deus Ex. Others include the players augmentations, which are like upgrades for the players body
that have a range of beneficial effects, as well as the players skills, which can allow
you to open locks, bypass security systems and hack into computers. Then there are items
in your inventory, which, in addition to a large variety of weapons, can contain items
that allow you to survive toxic environments, or go invisible, or breathe underwater. Then
there is the most obvious tool, good old fashioned violence, which can be useful on both npcs
and any objects you may take a particular dislike to. And for the more refined amongst
us, thereâs also stealth and non lethal methods of incapacitation. The end result
is every problem does have multiple solutions, and while this still might not quite match
the absolute freedom of traditional role playing experiences, itâs still a lot closer to
this than most games. To illustrate all this letâs look at one
of the very first problems the player might run into, finding your way into the enemy
base on the first mission. In your way stands a formidable opponent: an unyielding shaped
mass of reinforced steel⌠itâs a door, thereâs a locked door in the way. To combat
this mighty foe you can use a couple lockpicks to open it that way, or hack into a nearby
computer terminal if you have your computer skill high enough, or find a datapad that
has a password for the terminal if you lack that skill, or meet with an npc informant
in another part of the map to get the key directly that way. You can also go in guns
blazing and weaken an enemy npc near the door and then wait for them to get scared and retreat,
hopefully opening the door for you on their way. Or you can go for the locked door non-lethal
approach, leaving the poor innocent inanimate object exactly how it is and instead find
a stack of crates in another part of the map to climb up instead. And hell maybe thereâs
other ways inside as well that Iâm not aware of, I donât know, Iâm not creative. The
point is you have options; you just have to get out there and find them.
Itâs this commitment to giving the player options that makes Deus Ex work so well but
this wouldnât mean very much without being supported by good level design. Unlike a certain
American President Deus Ex tends to favor a rather hands off approach. Itâs usually
happy to just tell players what their objective is and then leave it up to them to work out
how to achieve this. Itâs worth repeating that Deus Exâs levels are big and open but
you have no quest markers or minimap to guide you. In some areas youâre given a map of
some kind or some satellite images to help you orient yourself. These maps arenât perfect
representations of the in game environment however like you may see in modern games.
Instead theyâre images of an actual map, which means the players position isnât marked
and they often only provide limited information. This in itself is pretty cool. Itâs a lot
more immersive to have to look at an actual map and try to work out where you are and
where to go, than to just have a magic gps system to track your every move and sign post
your destination. What makes this really work however is that because you donât know exactly
where to go or how best to get there, the game forces you to explore.
Other games, including some within this same series, will reward exploration in various
ways. This might be through giving you experience points, or having collectible items and so
on. Deus Ex also gives you bonus skill points, and has very useful items for you to find,
but the thing I want to really stress here is that exploration is necessary. Itâs not
just something optional that youâre rewarded for doing; itâs how you play the game. Exploration
is the only way to find where to go and what to do. Having so little guidance might sound
frustrating, particularly for players more used to modern games, but the great thing
about how Deus Ex is designed is that because there are always multiple routes through levels
and a variety of solutions to problems, getting stuck becomes increasingly unlikely. If you
donât know what to do or where to go you just need to keep exploring and then when
you do find something that works through this exploration itâs a lot more rewarding than
simply following a quest marker or minimap. Deus Ex also isnât overly generous with
the items it gives you, which forces you to make choices that actually matter. You can
customize your character through skills, which are increased through skill points you acquire
from completing objectives, as well as through augmentations, which are found as augmentation
canisters in game, and can be upgraded through another findable item. Augmentations are cybernetic
upgrades which enhance JC Dentonâs physical characteristics, or allow you to use new abilities
like invisibility or health regeneration. Thereâs a grand total of 20 augmentations,
however each augmentation canister contains two different augments, of which you can only
equip one, forcing you make decisions based on which upgrade sounds more useful to you.
For skills there are 11 options, some of which are more focused on your combat ability where
as others assist you in non combat ways. 11 isnât an especially large number and some
of these are also less valuable than others, like poor swimming which everyone likes to
pick on for being bad and rightfully so as you can get an in game item called a rebreather
that makes investing points into swimming fairly redundant. Augmentations can also feel
a little hit or miss, which is to be expected although I do think the game would have benefited
a lot from making certain augments function as passive abilities. As it is, every augment
has to be toggled on and off and will consume energy when active. The amount is often low,
but for several augments this just feels unnecessary. Like for the power re-circulator augment,
which reduces the energy cost of all other augments. Even this needs to be activated,
which means you have to spend energy to toggle on an augment that reduces energy of other
augments. So every time you want to use an augment you need to toggle on the energy saver
augment first, which just feels like extra unneeded button pressing, and leaves you forever
paranoid about whether you left your energy saver augment on by mistake.
As for the non combat skills, each one is made to feel very useful because of the games
approach to level design, but the player also isnât punished for not investing in these
skills because of the specific way they work. To open a lock or bypass an electronic device
you need a lockpick or a multitool respectively and the difficulty of the lock or device will
determine how many lockpicks or multitools it requires. By increasing your lockpicking
or electronics skill, you increase your effectiveness with these items, and so will need to use
less of them to open stuff. This means even if you donât invest in these skills, youâre
still not locked out of accessing the things they open; youâll just need to spend more
items to do so. This creates a degree of resource management where youâll have to decide what
things may be worth accessing, but it also ensures that lockpicks and multitools remain
valuable for the games duration as the more you have, the more stuff youâll be able
to access and, potentially, the more skillpoints youâll free up to be able to invest into
other things. Overall this approach works great although
the same canât be said for hacking, which by contrast, requires no consumable item to
use, and one skill point in computers is also enough to hack every computer in the game.
This provides far too much reward for too little investment, while also making the passwords
and login details that can be found by searching the environment feel rather redundant and
the game would be improved if hacking was closer to the other two mentioned skills.
Still for the most part, the way Deus Ex uses its augments and skills to create choices
and offer new paths through its levels is very good. The result is a game where player
freedom and exploration are baked into the core design, as opposed to being tacked on
as after thoughts, and this leads to a gameplay experience that is both rewarding and very
replayable. There arenât many games that can match Deus Ex in this regard but this
is only half of the reason people view this game so fondly. The rest has to do with the
narrative, so letâs talk story. The year is⌠not actually known. Later games
would clarify that this is 2052 but Deus Ex itself never tells you and I think thatâs
the right choice. As soon as you know the exact year a futuristic setting is meant to
be you nearly always start to pick away at its details in your mind. You question the
likelihood that this specific thing is possible in this specific time frame, and the more
time that passes, and the clearer the differences between fiction and reality become, the worse
this problem can be. I mean for an example look no further than Deus Ex Human Revolution,
which takes place in 2027. This is now only 7 years away instead of 18, and it seems pretty
obvious that this isnât what the future will look like. After all, there isnât much
time left to develop advanced augments or a universal gold filter over everything. But
the first game doesnât have this problem and it comes across as much more timeless
and grounded as result. So for now at least, pretend that the year isnât known and doesnât
matter. All thatâs relevant is that this is the future, and it sucks.
The opening cutscene will inform you that people are rioting as a new plague is spreading
amongst the population. In the current year this sounds eerily familiar, but donât worry;
the men in charge have a solution. Huh I think I prefer the whole âstay home,
save livesâ and âwear a maskâ message of my own government, and I guess thatâs
how you know things are really bad in this future, because it starts to make the present
day and present day governments look good by comparison. Still Iâm sure the player
will save the day. Enter JC Denton, a newly trained UNATCO agent, enhanced with cutting
edge nanotechnology that allows his body to far surpass normal human capabilities. UNATCO
stands for the United Nations Anti-Terrorist Coalition. In this future the power and influence
of the UN has continued to grow, but so has unrest.
The first mission in game tasks you with infiltrating a decaying statue of liberty to intercept
a terrorist group who have set up base within. The symbolism here is pretty obvious but I
think itâs effective all the same. Anyway you find out the statue of liberty was actually
destroyed in a separate terrorist attack a year earlier, and from this you might be wondering
just how common terrorist attacks are in this futuristic land of the free. The answer seems
to be that theyâre pretty common and if you talk to people in the bars and on the
streets youâll soon see why. The public arenât very happy and there are good reasons
for that. Things were bad before the plague but now theyâre even worse and thereâs
some pretty strange ideas going around about whoâs to blame.
Your first real exposure to this is the terrorist leader in the statue of liberty. To save some
time, yes, he has plenty. Falling corporation tax and self employment rates, corporate and
government consolidation, Rockefellers and Rothschilds. He almost starts to sound like
heâs talking a lot of sense until you remember heâs a terrorist. You might also hear people
claim that the plague spreading across the world, known as the gray death, is manmade,
and that the government and UNATCO are using their power to ensure only the elite will
receive a vaccine. Itâs a worrying idea but conspiracy theories often are. Still nothing
you need to worry about⌠for now. As well as the setting, the first mission
will also introduce you to Deus Exâs gameplay. If youâre expecting a traditional first
person shooter you might be disappointed, because even if you can shoot in first person,
someone forgot to tell the aiming reticule whatâs going on, and so youâll have to
wait⌠quite a long time, for it to shrink enough for your bullets to reliably go where
you want them to. This can be improved by increasing your weapon skills but Deus Ex
will never be very satisfying if you view it purely as an fps. Youâre lack of effectiveness
in combat does give you a pretty good incentive to try out stealth however, while also forcing
you to think about you approach to each combat encounter. Anyway your ability with firearms
might be limited by your low skill level but there are always weapons that require less
finesse. And if you really want to go in guns blazing, itâs still an option.
However for those who havenât forgotten to take their ADHD medication this morning,
youâll probably want to at least make selective use of stealth. There are no necessary skills
for stealth, so itâs an option that will always be available to you, although it can
be made more effective with augments. Stealth does have a few problems in Deus Ex, which
are largely due to the player not being sure whether enemies can see them or not. Most
stealth games would have some kind of indicator to provide the player with this information
but in Deus Ex youâre left to guess and it mostly comes down to how far away you are.
In the first level you can walk under street lamps and as long as enemies arenât too
close they wonât have any awareness youâre there. Stealth gets harder once you head into
more enclosed spaces, and if you really want to make your way through the game undetected
youâll probably have to develop an intimate familiarity with your quicksave key. Brute
forcing your way through the game on the back of quicksaving and quickloading isnât very
satisfying and can remove a lot of the tension that a stealth game should have, although
being allowed to quicksave at any time does at least have the advantage of allowing player
experimentation. Despite these problems, I do enjoy the stealth
in Deus Ex but itâs hard to deny that this games core gameplay can, overall, be a little
janky. The AI donât always seem to display a high degree of intelligence either, and
I suppose while weâre admitting more obvious flaws it also has to be said that Deus Exâs
presentation hasnât aged that gracefully. Even in the year 2000 it wasnât the best
looking game on the market, and 20 years later its early 3D graphics havenât got any better.
The environments might be big but theyâre also lacking in detail, overly boxy and often
rather empty. Animations also tend to be quite awkward and up close npc models look downright
awful, which is a shame because the presentation during dialogue is actually surprisingly well
done, with good use of varied camera angles and smooth transitions in and out of conversations.
Voice acting also isnât that bad as long as you accept that the level of quality may
not be very consistent and you donât mind Dentonâs iconic deadpan delivery.
Still even if its presentation and gunplay can make Deus Ex hard to get into, if you
stick with it youâll soon see the games strong points. For now though letâs get
back to the story. With the terrorist threat dealt with on Liberty Island, JC returns to
the UNATCO headquarters, which is conveniently located⌠right next door, but this aside,
itâs an interesting location that youâll be in and out of a few times. Here you can
speak to some of your coworkers to find out a bit more information about the setting.
Thereâs a decent amount of reactivity through this, with both your boss and the UNATCO quartermaster
regularly commenting on the way the player has or has not completed objectives, and they
even give extra rewards if they agree with your actions.
Once youâre done with seeing the sights and being told off for entering the womanâs
bathroom, youâll be sent back out to deal with the same terrorist group, who have stolen
a shipment of gray death vaccine that youâre now tasked with recovering. This will take
you to the games first hub area, Hellâs Kitchen New York, and here the game opens
up a bit more with the addition of some side quests and a larger area to explore. As you
continue to track down the vaccine shipment youâll cross paths several times with your
brother Paul who, likewise, is a cyberneticaly enhanced UNATCO agent. However just before
you finally intercept the vaccine shipment, along with one of the terrorist groupâs
main financers, a man named Lebedev, Paul confronts you and reveals that heâs a double
agent and is now working for the terrorists. He tells you that the terrorists are actually
in the right, and that itâs the government and UNATCO preventing the populace from receiving
that vaccine. After this bombshell Paul takes off leaving
you to wonder whoâs telling the truth and whether youâre doing the right thing, but
you still have a mission to complete. You continue onwards and interrogate Lebedev in
hopes to uncover more pieces of the picture but another UNATCO agent named Anna arrives
and instead orders you to kill him. What you do next is up to you, although Deus Ex doesnât
present this as a big morale choice. Thereâs no branching dialogue option telling you this
choice matters or to think carefully about your actions. In fact the game doesnât even
acknowledge you have a choice, it just lets you act how you want. If you donât follow
your orders, Anna will eventually step in and take actions into her own hands, so whether
by your hand or Annaâs, Lebedev will die either way, except he wonât⌠because you
can also chose to attack Anna here. If you do this Lebedev will survive and itâll also
prevent you from having to fight Anna later in the game, but a lot of people wonât even
realize this is an option. This is a great moment of choice and consequence,
specifically because, unlike so many other games, this choice isnât framed in an overly
deliberate way and so its impact is all the more effective. Thereâs several other examples
of choices like this in Deus Ex, which can change the fate of your brother and your trusty
pilot and this is the way Deus Exâs story handles player agency, by taking the same
hands off approach as its gameplay and once more rewarding player experimentation and
people who think for themselves. Continuing with the story, JC returns to UNATCO
headquarters where he learns that he and Paul have 24 hour kill switches implanted within
them as part of their augmentations. Paulâs kill switch is activated as a response to
his defection, which leads JC to betray his orders and so his kill switch gets activated
too. During this section JC gets taken prisoner and will have to escape the same UNATCO base
that was formerly your headquarters. Here you can try to convince some of your former
colleges to come with you and its interesting seeing peopleâs different responses and
the logic behind their actions. After escaping you then travel to Hong Kong as JC looks for
a hacker named Tracer Tong who can help disable the kill switch. In Hong Kong the story takes
a bit of a detour and the pacing suffers as a result, but the location itself is excellent.
Hong Kong is another hub area like Hellâs Kitchen, but itâs bigger, looks better,
and offers much more to explore. These moments of non-combat exploration make for a nice
change in terms of gameplay, and the busyness of Hong Kong also makes it feel much more
lived in than any other location in game. In Hong Kong, Tracer Tong deactivates JCâs
kill switch and tasks you with infiltrating Versalife, who are a multinational biotech
corporation whose headquarters are located nearby. The Versalife headquarters might be
my favorite section in the game because while so many of the places you infiltrate are similar
looking military bases where every inhabitant you encounter shoots you on sight, Versalife
HQ instead lets you start exploring this location as a civilian whoâs just visiting this facility,
which gives it a completely different feel and opens up new methods of advancement.
At Versalife JC discovers that the gray death is indeed man made and his focus now shifts
to stopping the group behind it. This leads you to Paris where you search for and eventually
meet with the Illuminati, who were once a powerful group of men and woman who sought
to rule the world in secret, but are now a shadow of their former selves after one member,
the trillionaire businessman Bob Page, seen previously in the gameâs opening, betrayed
the group to form a new organization called Majestic 12. Through money and blackmail Page
grew his power, positioning men within important organizations and ultimately creating the
gray death to further control the worldâs population. In your quest to stop Page and majestic 12 youâre taken through a number of military
bases, with the game ultimately culminating in area 51. Along the way JC is helped by
a mysterious figure known as Deadalus, whoâs revealed to be a powerful AI that was originally
developed by the Illuminati to aid humanity. In response to this Page releases his own
advanced AI, named Icarus, which he developed as a malevolent counterpart to Daedulus. When
the AIâs come into contact with each other however the two merge, forming a new, even
more powerful AI named Helios. At Area 51 Page tries to merge himself with Helios to
become a human-AI hybrid of immense power that can rule the world, which is revealed
to have been Pageâs real objective all along. JC stops Page, with the story ultimately ending
on a choice of who to side with. The Illuminati ask JC to join them as a member so together
they can once more rule the world from the shadows and maintain global order. Tracer
Tong asks JC to destroy Helios and disable all global communications, which would plunge
the world into a new technological dark age and return civilization to a simpler time.
Lastly Helios asks JC to merge himself with the AI in place of Page, so that together
they can create a new consciousness that can rule the world as a benevolent human-AI dictator.
The choice is ultimately up to you, and itâs not easy to know who to put your trust in.
I like how this game concludes, but the narrative of Deus Ex is often as its best in some of
its smaller conversations, where JC speaks to the worldâs inhabitants about ideology
and events. At its core however this is still a story about conspiracy theories. The writers
of Deus Ex looked to real life for inspiration, and so incorporated a wild range of different
real life conspiracies that were given credence and mixed together to form their very own
cyberpunk dystopia of tomorrow. It has to be said that when I said wild, I meant it,
and really thatâs one of the narratives biggest flaws. As you get further into the
game it can start to feel a little like Deus Ex is overdosing on conspiracies theories
to the point where the setting starts to lose some of its groundedness and believability.
There are, after all, little grey aliens in this game, which donât add anything to the
story but might take something away from it. In this way Deus Ex can feel guilty of not
taking itself as seriously as players might want it to, and while this doesnât ruin
the narrative, it still seems a bit of a shame because thereâs more to this story than
crazy conspiracies. You see even though the conspiracies seen
in Deus Ex are a little farfetched, the fears theyâre based on arenât and this is what
makes the story good. The first real conversation in the game, with the terrorist leader on
Liberty Island, talks about issues like the reduced rate of taxes paid by corporations
and how this leads to corporate consolidation and the disempowerment of the rest of the
population⌠and thatâs not the crazed machinations of a deluded mind. Reductions
in taxes paid by corporations is a sensible talking point that can be found in many political
conversations taking place today and arguably is an issue thatâs even more relevant now
than it was in the year 2000. This isnât even a left versus right issue either; skepticism
about globalization and the role of corporations can clearly be seen on both sides of the political
divide. It may manifest in different ways but a lot of the base level concerns are the
same. If you take a step back and look at this game
in more general terms youâll see that behind a lot of the conversations in Deus Ex, and
a lot of the conspiracy theories that inspired it, lie simple concerns over power. Secret
societies, sinister corporations, compromised governments, misleading media, abuse of new
technologies⌠the common thread between these is pretty obvious. It all relates to
the disempowerment of the general populace in a changing world and the fear and anxiety
this produces. And this is something thatâs easy to see outside of Deus Ex as well.
The truth is that you, as a normal human being in the 21st century, donât have much power.
You are a very small individual who has found yourself in a very big world. Not everything
in this world is as it should be and you canât do much about that. As for the power you do
have, guess what? Itâs shrinking. Youâre no longer one important individual in a small
tight knit community; youâre a meaningless dot in a sea of billions. The issues that
matter cross language barriers and national borders and are far too big to ever be something
you can make a meaningful difference to by yourself. As for your position in this world,
itâs entirely predicated on governments, mass media and corporations but you have no
capacity to ever hold such entities accountable. All you really can do is go online and scream
into the void, adding more white noise to the incessant buzz that has long since decided
it cares little for who makes the most sense, favoring only those who scream the loudest.
Globalization and technological advancement are only accelerating these processes, making
you smaller and smaller as the world gets bigger, so whatever the future does have in
store for us none of this is going to change. And how could that not worry you. The future
means uncertainty and thatâs never been something humans have dealt well with. We
like to know, we craze answers and so we find them, on conspiracy forums or in youtube videos,
or in ideologies and politicians that tell us what to think, and it doesnât matter
what they say or if theyâre accurate, as long as they give us something to believe
in. And so, with humanityâs need for answers, and all this fear and anxiety bubbling away
beneath societies surface, it makes sense that someoneâs going to end up taking advantage
of that. That someone probably isnât the illuminati, and it might be ridiculous to
think that it is. But the fear behind such an idea⌠isnât ridiculous at all.
Thereâs a clear message behind Deus Ex and itâs not that conspiracy theories are good
or true, nor is it that corporations are bad, or governments are bad, or the rich are bad,
or science is bad and anything else like this. Itâs simply to be skeptical of power, and
thatâs not a bad message to have. You have to remember that skepticism goes both ways.
A conspiracy theorist isnât being skeptical if there skepticism is limited to only one
direction and just because Deus Ex features conspiracy theories doesnât mean it endorses
them. Thereâs really nothing wrong with fictional portrayals of conspiracies, providing
that the work of fiction isnât trying to claim to be anything more than this and Deus
Ex has little grey aliens running around, so itâs pretty obvious that this isnât
the case. And yet this game does manage to say something meaningful about our world and
the future, and thatâs something I can respect. Deus Ex uses unproven conspiracies to explore
very real concerns, and the result is something thatâs managed to stay surprisingly relevant
to this day, which might be why so many rate this game as highly as they do. Of course
the great game design certainly doesnât hurt things either and itâs not hard to
see why this game is considered a classic. Itâs a shame then that none of its sequels
would ever be able to do both of these things quite so well, but that didnât stop them
from trying. Deus Ex was a clear critical and commercial
success, leading developer Ion Storm to soon begin work on a sequel. Series creator Warren
Spector would take a step back from his previous role as director, but many members of the
original team returned and in 2003 Deus Ex Invisible War released to positive reviews.
Many fans of the original game however werenât so generous. Of the four mainline Deus Ex
games, Invisible War has a reputation for being the worst, and itâs a reputation I
think it deserves. A lot of its problems result from the seriesâ move from PC only to Xbox.
Invisible War shows a large amount of consolisation compared to its predecessor which makes many
aspects of its design and gameplay seem like a downgrade. For the majority of the development
team, including game director Harvey Smith, this was their first time designing for console
and subsequent interviews have confirmed that this was something the team struggled with.
The story of the first game also didnât leave any obvious direction about where to
go next and the ideas Invisible War does add feel like they lack much of what made the
original Deus Ex so memorable. Still in many ways Invisible War is a very similar game
and by looking at whatâs now worse despite how much stayed the same, you can see which
parts of the first games formulae might have matted more than the developers anticipated.
The most obvious of which is the level design. If the original was big and open, Invisible
War is instead small and constricted. Large multi layered bases have been replaced with
a world made entirely of narrow corridors. Even the cities are made of corridors, and
this isnât the result of a stylistic choice or some metaphor for a future populace trapped
by their maze like urban existence. No, instead the reason is much more mundane: itâs because
the game needed to run on the xboxâs more limited hardware.
This also meant there was significant change to the UI, like how your hot bars are now
arranged in strange circular design that takes up much more screen space than is necessary.
The inventoryâs also been changed from the more-than-functional grid system of the last
game into just 12 slots, which means all items are now considered the same size so a pack
of cigarettes now takes up as much space in your backpack as a sniper rifle. Annoyingly
this makes your already small inventory even smaller, which is made worse by a persistent
bug that can stop items from stacking correctly, limiting you even further. Still if you really
want to see bad UI design just look at how Invisible War displays your objectives, which
for some reason are shown individually, forcing you to slowly scroll through each objective
one at a time to try to access the specific information you actually need. Thereâs so
much wasted space here when they could have probably fit all this information on screen
at once if they actually tried. Still despite the price paid by the interface,
by 2003 standards, Invisible War was at least quite a nice looking game. It had advanced
lighting effects, much improved character models, and even some pretty nice ragdolls
physics so you can play around with the bodies of those you kill like a bored sociopathic
house cat. The downside though is that the environments have been scaled down considerably
and this tradeoff just isnât worth it. The result is that Invisible Wars levels might
look better but theyâre not as immersive, and exploration was hit even harder. Even
though Invisible War makes many attempts to retain its predecessors philosophy of multiple
approaches and player freedom, the reality is that smaller levels means fewer options
to explore and experiment, and what divergent pathways you do find feel less meaningful
because, regardless of the exact path you take, thereâs nearly always a sense that
theyâll just take you to the same destination now. Some areas of the game are better than
others in this regard but overall itâs a clear step down.
The console focused level design also means that youâll be running into loading screens
with an alarming regularity. This can make moving through the games small cities surprisingly
disjointed and time consuming, as every few feet you run into more sections of loading.
Itâs also annoying how the game brings up an âare you sure?â box every time you
try to change area. This isnât an important decision in my life and I donât need some
extra time to think about it. I clicked the door because I want to go through it and Iâd
appreciate it if the game could just do us both a favor and take me at my word.
As for the exploration itself its still further diminished by the way the games mechanics
have been streamlined. For starters skills have been removed. Nothing was added to replace
them so this previous way to differentiate your character and personalize your playstyle
is just gone. As for the in game resources needed to navigate the environment: lockpicks
and multitools have been combined so now multitools work for everything, which is less satisfying
as it feels like youâre always using the same item for every problem. Multitools themselves
are given out quite generously, particularly once you get to Cairo, which is about a third
of the way through the game, where for reasons I donât understand thereâs just a huge
pile of multitools on the floor in the middle of the Mosque. So from this point onwards
youâll never be short on multitools again and I donât understand why these multitools
are even here in the first place and whether or not this is a bug but it sure seems different
to the first game where these types of items remained valuable for your entire playthrough.
Other resources like health restoration items and energy cells are also too common and even
on the hardest difficulty youâll get far more of these than you can ever realistically
use. One of the most valuable items you could find in the previous game where augmentation
canisters but now Invisible War makes nearly all augmentations available during the games
opening, instead of making the player acquire them as you progress through the game. Augmentation
upgrade items do make a return, but just like most other items, youâll come by them too
frequently as Invisible War likes to give them out as if theyâre cheap candy at Christmas.
These items are the only real progression system left in the game now skill points are
no longer a thing, but as soon as I got to Germany, which is around the half way mark,
I found Iâd finished upgrading every augment I had. I feel I should point out that I didnât go out of my way to find these items so thereâs
probably plenty Iâd missed and yet I still effectively had enough to be completely finished
with them when the game was only half way done. This is like getting to max level in
a game by the mid way point, which doesnât exactly make the subsequent upgrade items
you find feel very meaningful. Thereâs a broader point I want to make with all the
examples Iâve just mentioned though, which is that all of these items previously acted
as rewards for exploration, and so by devaluing these things Invisible War also ensures that
exploration itself become less valuable as well. The one item you may find yourself in short supply of is ammo. For some reason ammo has
been changed to be universal, meaning thereâs only one type of ammo you pick up which is
used for every weapon in game. As ammo is scarce and some weapons burn through it quicker
than other, this encourages you to use a smaller variety of weapons. Invisible Wars obsession
with corridors also doesnât lend itself well to rewarding weapon variety as a sniper
rifle isnât much use if you never find yourself at long range, and while Iâm back to complaining
about the corridors again I also feel itâs worth pointing out that these environments
donât make for very exciting shooting galleries. You could say the first games large open environments
werenât much better in this regard, and youâd be right, but with so much of its
mechanics stripped down or streamlined, Invisible War ends up reliant on its core gunplay to
at least be better than the low bar of its predecessor. And to its credit it, it probably
is. The aiming reticuleâs no longer a reluctant participant to the gameplay making the basic
act of shooting enemies a bit closer to what you might expect from an fps, and thereâs
still a range of different weapons that can be modified so if the only thing you do care
about is shooting your way through a level then Invisible War probably meets your needs
better than the first Deus Ex. But at the same time if all you wanted was a pure fps
thereâs no need to play a Deus Ex game in the first place and as soon as you start to
compare Invisible War to other fps games of the same era it starts to seem lacking. This
is because enemies are bullet sponges, their AI is light on common sense, weapons arenât
very weighty and you donât even need to reload in this game.
Another important part of the first Deus Exâs gameplay that had room for improvement was
stealth, but in this area Invisible War barely even tries. To start with your means of incapacitating
foes without being detected is even more lacking than it was last game. Head shots donât
kill in one and trying to take down foes in melee is unreliable. There is a solution though,
which is the cloaking augmentation. Unlike in the first game, where this was only attainable
quite late on, In Invisible War you get this augmentation, along with most others, right
at the opening section, and Invisible War reduces the energy requirements to use this
augmentation while also making energy in general easier to come by. You also had to make a
choice in the last game whether to install a cloaking augment that was only effective
against humans, or only effective against mechanical enemies, meaning you could never
rely solely on cloaking to get past everything. Now though thatâs no longer the case so
the cloaking augment works in all situations. Finally, in the last game you still had to
be careful when cloaked about making noise. In Invisible War though you can make as much
noise as you like, and you can even take it further by bumping straight into enemies and
they still wonât know youâre there. So after all these changes, itâs probably
no surprise to learn that the cloaking augmentation is completely overpowered, and you can, if
you chose, use cloaking to run through most levels in game without any real problems if
thatâs how you want to play. In the first Deus Ex stealth is a valuable tool at your
disposal that youâre rewarded for taking advantage of. In Invisible War stealth is
borderline useless without the cloaking augment, and with this augment its completely broken
to the point where you can just bypass large sections of the game. So in terms of gameplay,
Invisible War is similar but worse, and while some of this can be blamed on the shift to
console and the limitations that came with this, other parts are just bad design, which
leaves the story with a lot of work to do to make this a worthy sequel.
Invisible War opens with a cutscene that shows much more impressive visuals than anything
in the first game but thatâs about the only good thing about it. In this cinematic a terrorist
uses a nanite bomb to blow up the city of Chicago. The first time I saw this I had no
idea what was actually happening. It looked like everything was being turned to stone,
and after googgling nanite bomb, and finding out this isnât actually a real thing, Iâve
decided to blame my lack of understanding on the game. More importantly this cutscene
establishes the tone of the story and setting, and while the first game offered a mostly
grounded vision of near future dystopia, thatâs all pretty much went out the window now and
instead Invisible War takes an approach thatâs closer to a pulpy sci-fi adventure.
I want to point out here that the Aliens are back and now they also talk to you and play
a much larger role in the story⌠even though that role isnât at all necessary. Iâm
not going to mention this again as Iâd rather just get it out the way now but I do want
to make it clear that the presence of Aliens is stupid and if I see even one alien apologist
in the comments section of this video Iâm going to be very disappointed in you.
Anyway Invisible War is set 20 years after the previous game and you play as Alex D,
another augmented human who will later turn out to be a clone of JC Denton. Alex was previously
under taking training at an elite academy in Chicago before the terrorist attack forced
him to flee. Alex is rocking that early 2000âs boyband look which doesnât do him any favors,
and really Alex gets more shit than he deserves for his spiky gelled hair, I mean hey we all
went through the early 2000âs no judgment here, but dated as his design might be, I
think the reason everyone focuses so much on his hairdo is probably because itâs the
most noteworthy thing about him. His personality is bland, and I donât want to overly romanticize
JC, but youâll soon be missing his deadpan delivery because at least he had some semblance
of an identifiable personality. If dialogue allowed more room to roleplay maybe this would
make sense but it doesnât and so Alex just seems weak.
Anyway, like it or not, Alex is who youâre stuck with, and after traveling from Chicago
to Seattle before the games opening, he finds his new academy attacked by a terrorist group
for the second time this week. The group responsible is the Knights Templars, who are a vaguely
fascist organization that consider all bioaugmentation to be evil and see augmented individuals as
impure. Factions play a much larger role in this game than the first Deus Ex and once
you escape the academy and move into the city of Seattle proper, youâll be introduced
to the other two main groups: The first of which are The World Trade Organization, who
have become the acting de facto government body and seem to protect the status quo, and
the other is The Order, a widespread religious group who have somehow managed to replace
and combine all organized religions and yet donât seem to have much of an ideology.
They talk a bit about ânatural balanceâ and that augmentation use might be bad and
that capitalism and corporations might also be bad, but theyâre vague on details and
it would be hard to blame anyone who just sees any of these three factions as generic
and shallow. There is one other group who are more interesting
which is The Omar. This heavily augmented group of cyborgs just seem to want to trade
illegal weaponry, but their mysteriousness adds some degree of intrigue and thatâs
more than can be said about any of the other groups. Itâs unfortunate then that The Omar
donât feature more often leaving them seeming as poorly developed as the others. Still poor
as these factions might be, the story will still frequently ask you to make choices between
them, none of which have any real impact on the narrative as right up until very ending
you can still work for which ever group you chose regardless of your previous actions.
This shift in focus towards factions isnât a bad thing in itself but the factions themselves
donât feel strong enough to make this approach work. This change does provide more regular
narrative choice than the first game, but the choices are also more conventional now.
Generally I tended to just side with the WTO but more by process of elimination than any
actual feeling of allegiance. I suppose it has only been 20 years since the last game
and everything looks way more futuristic and less fucked up now so maybe the WTO are doing
something right. But really the others just donât seem like very viable options as the
Knight Templers will always hate you for being augmented and the vagueness of the order just
make them seem like a cult. Still no matter what you do youâll be caught
up in the growing conflict between the WTO, the Order and the knights Templars, which
will take you from Seattle to Cairo to Germany. These hub areas have a greater focus on side
content than the last games, and while their visual design isnât especially impressive,
itâs still nice to be able to explore these areas and see a bit more about what normal
life is like in this setting. The side quests arenât great and the logic behind why Alex
is getting involved with them can be shaky, but at least the side quest chain with the
rival coffee shops and with the AI idol do provide some narrative pay off if you see
them through to their end. As for the main story, events lead Alex to
investigate the group behind his training academy who are called ApostleCorp. This eventually
leads Alex to Germany where he meets the ApostleCorp leader, Tracer Tong, who wants Alex to go
to Antarctica to find JC Denton. Before Alex can do this he finds out that the World Trade
Organization and The Order are actually both puppet organizations that are being controlled
by the Illuminati who have been deliberately engineering a fake conflict between the two
groups as part of their plan to control the populace. You go to Antarctica and revive
JC and around about now you might be wondering which of the last games endings was cannon.
They were pretty different and this detail obviously matters but the answer to that question
is⌠all of them? So, somehow after the events of last game the illuminati regained power,
JC merged with Helios and a global economic and technological set back occurred known
as the collapse. I donât think trying to make all three endings
canon was the right solution to the writerâs problem of which ending do we chose, but I
have to admit there is something I respect about the audacity of this all, where the
writers have just tried to brute force all three endings and pretend that this all makes
perfect sense, and it almost does. Anyway after you save JC he explains his plan about
merging himself with all of humanity using biomods to create what he calls a perfect
democracy. The final location in the game is liberty island where you get to explore
the old UNATCO base, and where Alex must decide whether to side with JC and ApostleCorp, or
the Illuminati who want to run the world themselves, or the Knights Templarâs who want to end
all biomodification. You can also choose to work with the Omar to kill all the other factions
which ends up turning the world into a desolate wasteland dominated by the Omar.
These four options feel a little bit like a retread of the previous games ending choice.
You can once more side with either the illuminati, or put your faith in the JC-AI hybrid, or
take an extreme anti technology option. As the Illuminatiâs persistent manipulations
doesnât present them in a very positive light, and the knight templars violent extremism
seems even worse, this doesnât make the final choice especially compelling and Iâm
pretty sure almost every player will just side with JC here as a result. His idea of
a perfect democracy sure sounds better than anything else being promised and thatâs
before accounting for the playerâs likely loyalty to him as a result of the last game.
I do like that you can chose to not side with any group and try to kill them all instead
by working with the Omar but the Omar themselves donât provide any argument for why you should
support them. As a group they represent a transhumanist option through their use of
technology to surpass human limitations but this isnât communicated much in game as
pretty much all your interaction with them just revolves around their black market activities.
As for Illuminati, the twist that they actually control both the WTO and The Order does at
least explain why each group seems so generic, but this still leaves the question of how
they managed to do this in the first place. It doesnât sound like an easy task to replace
all world religions and governments, particularly as twenty years ago the Illuminati were all
but destroyed, and yet the question of how the Illuminati did this is left largely unexplored
despite this arguably being the most interesting thing about them. Then thereâs the Knights
Templars, whose extremism barely makes them worth mentioning. An anti augmentation group
could have worked but they would need to be toned down several degrees if the player was
meant to consider siding with them or giving much credence to their ideology.
Another issue with this ending is how some parts of it contradict what we see in the
previous game. The Helios ending in the first Deus Ex was about JC merging with Helios to
rule the world as a super powerful human-ai dictator. Yet now choosing this path is about
merging with all of humanity to create some connected consciousness to form a perfect
democracy. And the ideological difference between a democracy and a dictatorship seems
pretty significant. Then you have Tracer Tong, who previously wanted to destroy all advanced
technology and plunge the world into a new dark age, but now wants you to help JC merge
with all of humanity to create a single shared consciousness. Characters can change but this
still doesnât seem very consistent and if the story had to feature JC, Paul and Tong
I think it would have been much better if each of these returning characters presented
their own distinct option for the player to consider. This way people wouldnât just
end up siding with the returning characters they know and like, and it may have also forced
the writers to take a less black and white approach. Instead Invisible Wars story ends up feeling like it has a few good ideas but has very
little to say about them and I find it hard to not see it as a disappointing follow up
to a much better previous game. Itâs also a lot shorter, being about half the length
of the first Deus Ex with less than half the replayability. The most positive thing you
can say about this game is that just because its worse doesnât mean itâs bad, and this
is true. Invisible War is by no means a terrible game. It shares many of the positive qualities
of the game that inspired it; they just shine far less brightly this time round. Still I
find it hard to be positive about a sequel where the best you can say about it is that
itâs similar but worse and, really, Iâd rather have a game that tries to do its own
thing even if that means it wonât always be successful. And as it turned out, the next
developers who would tackle this series seemed to agree. After Invisible War multiple attempts were
made to develop a sequel but Ion Storm eventually shut down in 2005. Parent company Eidos Interactive
would go on to be purchased by Square Enix, with the series being continued by the newly
formed studio Eidos Montreal. The result was Deus Ex Human Revolution which released in
2011 to critical and commercial success. It was Eidos Montrealâs first game and the
development team was formed almost entirely of newcomers to the series but much about
this game would stay true to those that came before. Not everything though.
Were Invisible War was a faithful if ultimately more forgettable follow up, Human Revolution
felt more like a reimagining. Set 25 years before the first game, it used its status
as a prequel to provide itself with greater creative freedom in how it would approach
this universe. While in terms of gameplay this meant it would be a modernization of
the same Deux Ex formulae of the first game, stylistically Human Revolution would be something
else entirely. It should be acknowledged that there are a number of older fans of the series
who did not appreciate the direction Eidos Montreal went with this games visuals but
Iâm not one of them. In truth, I think new art style is great.
I love the simple but striking colour palate, with its heavy reliance on blacks and golds
giving the game a mood thatâs hard to pin down: Sometimes warm and inviting, but other
times ostentatious and decadent or metallic and uncaring. I love the overly designed fashion
choices, with their intricate renaissance themed detailing and unconventional geometry.
And I love the urban environments, as unrealistically achievable in such a time frame as they might
be. In short, I love the aesthetics of this world,
even if theyâre not in line with the first game. And maybe, in some ways, even because
of this. Iâve never been much of a fan of sequels that are just content to do the same
as what came before, riding their predecessors coattails to avoid facing the accountability
of originality. And as sensible as many of the arguments levied against this gameâs
visuals may be, you wonât be hearing them from me. Hell, I even like the gold filter
that so many people complained about. So much so that I actually modded the directorâs
cut version of the game, which normally has the filter removed, just to add it back in.
And that brings me to something else worth addressing: there is both a directorâs cut
and an original version of this game and each has their own problems. If you donât own
the game you wonât have to worry about which version to buy because you donât have a
choice, the directorâs cut is the only one available. However, the directorâs cut is
a port of the Wii U version of the game, which means the graphics arenât actually improved
in any significant way, plus it has some bugs that apparently werenât present before,
and the original games gold filter has been removed and the lighting altered. The directorâs
cut does bring slightly improved boss fights and the automatic integration of the DLC but
even this might have a downside because the DLC takes place towards the end of the main
story and thereâs no way to avoid this lengthy interruption for anyone that doesnât want
to do it, which may be the case if youâre replaying the game and donât want this optional
extra content. Meanwhile if you owned the original game and
were happy to stick with it but still wanted to play the DLC youâd be out of luck again
because thereâs no way to purchase the DLC for the original game anymore, meaning your
forced to buy the whole game again through the directorâs cut to play the DLC that
way. This whole situation is a bit of a mess and something like this shouldnât happen
in the first place. A directorâs cut should be an objective improvement on the original
and if itâs not it shouldnât even be released. Meanwhile options to buy DLC should be added
to online stores so that people who purchased your game when it first came out arenât
excluded from content theyâd be otherwise willing to pay for. As for the gold filter
itself, this is exactly the type of feature players should have been able to toggle on
and off in the options in the first place. Yet not only did the original make a mistake
by not giving players this option to turn it off, the directorâs cut then makes the
same mistake by not giving players the option to turn it back on. This will all tie into
a broader question later about the management of the series, but for now letâs get back
to the actual game. Alongside the visuals there was also a change
in focus for the narrative. Where the first two games were mostly concerned with secret
societies and government agencies, with the rest of society being pushed more into the
background, Human Revolution instead does the opposite, with the new focus placed firmly
on society and its response to the recently pioneered technology known as augmentations.
The secret societies are still here, but you wonât be seeing them as much anymore and
I think this shift in focus works quite well as the ethics and consequences of augmentation
is an issue that allows plenty room for exploration. In some ways this new focus on technology
can make Human Revolution seem more sci-fi than the first game, despite being set 25
years earlier, although there are other ways it comes across as more grounded, like the
absence of little grey aliens and a toning down of the present day conspiracies.
Surprisingly, gameplay is probably what changed the least although this is still a game released
more than ten years after the first and thatâs clearly evident in the design. Despite this,
Human Revolution might end up feeling like less of a casualisation of the series than
the last game was. A lot of features youâd expect to return do, including thankfully
the grid based inventory and different ammunition types. Thereâs still no skill system but
augmentations are back, with plenty of options to choose from, and the level design is closer
to the original in terms of complexity. Of course, being closer doesnât make it its
equal, and the first game is still the clear winner on the basis of number of options available
and freedom given to the player. But Human Revolution is a clear step up from Invisible
War, and even if the environments are simpler than the first game they at least try to make
up for this by looking a lot better and featuring a greater amount of detail and variety.
One issue that returns is how Human Revolution handles hacking. Where the first Deus Ex made
locks, computers and electronics all distinct things, Human Revolution instead has everything
handled by hacking. To hack something thereâs a reasonably involved mini-game which looks
like this. The mini-game isnât something I want to go into in too much detail, because
overall itâs not bad despite the reliance on rng. I do feel its worth pointing out however
that youâll be hacking things so often that if you donât like this minigame then youâll
damn sure get pretty sick of it. Also when you fail several times youâre locked out
for 30 seconds, which is just a waste of time. Either give failure a real consequence, like
setting off an enemy alarm or permanently locking you out of hacking something, or let
me retry right away. Forcing players to wait 30 seconds achieves nothing except for being
an annoyance. It reminds me of how in the first Deus Ex
when you restore your energy at a robot it only restores 75%. For the other 25% you have
to wait an extra 60 seconds for the robot to recharge so you can use it again. And Iâd
just like to ask, whose idea was this? Seriously, I want a name; 60 seconds adds up and too
much of my life has been spent waiting on this stupid robot to hurry the fuck up and
recharge the rest of my energy. Anyway the hacking minigame in Human Revolution
itself is generally fine, itâs just this game has the same problem that the first Deus
Ex had which is that hacking still makes the in game codes you find a little pointless.
You can chose not to level hacking up, but so much in the game is hackable that I think
increasing your hacking rating ends up seeming like one of the most valuable augments there
is, and after increasing this youâll never need an in game code again. Finding codes
through searching the environment was a good part of the series so itâs a shame hacking
once more makes it often irrelevant, and hacking even gives you greater exp reward than inputting
the code manually, meaning even if you do find a code you may prefer to hack an object
anyway. The next game does add an exp reward for using codes, so at least its only this
game where you punished for not hacking, but I still think it may have been better if the
exp reward was removed and hacking was made to require something, like an easy to attain
consumable akin to the first games lockpicks and multitools. This would reduce the amount
of hacking in game so the quantity of hacking isnât quite so overwhelming, while turning
whether to hack something or not into a more meaningful decision rather than just being
the players automatic response to every hackable object they find.
As for your other augmentations, despite looking like a lot many are just connected to hacking
so the overall amount of choice isnât quite as impressive as it may first appear, but
I still think Human Revolution manages to have enough different options to allow players
to customize their build in meaningful ways. Augments can loosely be split into three different
categories, combat, stealth and hacking and, at least for the most of the game, players
wonât be able to get everything they want, forcing them to consider what abilities matter
for their playstyle. Something many people complained about, particularly at the time
of release, was the presence of boss fights. They argued, often quite loudly, that featuring
combat focused boss fights in a game that let you chose to play a non combat focused
character was unfair. This is something I disagree with completely.
The point of introducing choices, whether in character building or otherwise, is to
create consequences. The consequence of creating a non combat focused character is that sometimes
you might be forced into a combat scenario, and then youâll be at a disadvantage. This
is choice and consequence working as intended, and itâs not like there arenât positive
consequences to non combat characters to offset this. Negative consequences themselves arenât
bad game design, theyâre a necessary part of the system, and the idea that giving players
choices should mean the game always caters to their selections is ridiculous. As for
the actual concept of boss fights being something players take issue with, the first game had
them too and I donât see whatâs wrong with them returning. The fights themselves
arenât anything special in Human Revolution, but they certainly arenât bad enough to
justify the hate they received, and when augmentation upgrades are given out a bit too freely anyway,
these boss fights actually end up serving a useful purpose by making a greater number
of augmentations feel valuable. As for the core gameplay, modernization does
have some advantages like improved shooting. The cover system feels like a sign of the
era this game was developed in where cover systems where the hot new trend, but as cover
systems go it does the its job well enough and thankfully enemies have been given high
enough damage and a short enough delay in their aim time to make shooting your way through
every encounter still a challenge. This is important because it stays true to the original
game and provides an incentive for players to try stealth. Enemy competency also helps
the game stay grounded, meaning it comes off as more tactical shooter than pure power fantasy.
As for stealth itself, you now have a minimap which, even with no other upgrades, provides
more information about enemy movements than before meaning sneaking your way through levels
without abusing quicksaving is more manageable. Enemies are less visually impaired than before,
so using stealth isnât overly easy. But the downside to using the minimap like this
is that it doesnât make for very exciting gameplay when the player gets so much information
by staring at a little box in the corner of their screen and your reliance on this can
feel cheap. You can also take enemies down silently in melee now with a single button
press. The animations for these takedowns look good but you might find pausing to watch
them so frequently breaks the flow of the gameplay.
Takedowns in Human Revolution cost energy, which limits the frequency you can perform
them but the energy system itself has also changed. You still spend energy to use certain
augments, with a takedown costing one bar, but your first bar of energy now recharges
over time. This forces you to space out your takedowns and augment usage but having only
one bar of energy recharge feels like poor design. For starters it artificially slows
you down by forcing you wait in cover for your energy to recharge, which isnât very
interesting. It also means that once more the cloaking augment is a little too strong
as even if it can only be used for a short time, as long as donât mind waiting for
your energy to recharge you can still hop unseen from one bit of cover to the next which,
while an improvement on Invisible War, still makes navigating levels this way overly simple.
Another problem with only having one bar recharge is that it makes upgrading your total energy
through augmentations completely pointless as no matter what your maximum energy is,
your effective energy in most situations will still be limited to the first bar. It would
have been better if Human Revolution had committed to either having all energy recharge, or no
energy recharge with no energy cost for takedowns. Both of these would require balance adjustments,
but the current system of only one bar recharging feels arbitrary and introduces its own problems
anyway. Still for the most part both combat and stealth work well. Human Revolution may
still be a bit too easy though but the reason for this is something else entirely.
A big part of the first Deus Ex was exploration. Thatâs still the case this time round, but
in sticking with modern game tradition, Human Revolution introduces both quest markers and
a fully detailed map. The combination of which is overkill. Thereâs one mission towards
the end of the game where quest markers are disabled as a result of an enemy jammer in
the area. Taking out the enemy jammer is an optional objective alongside your main objective
of finding some scientists who are held in different parts of the enemy complex. If you
do take out the jammer youâll get quest markers for the scientists, but ignore the
jammer and youâll have to carefully explore this place on your own. You can look at your
main map to try to work out where the scientists may be held and plan out your route between
areas, but most importantly, you will explore, because you have to.
This is the best section in the game in my opinion and itâs what the seriesâ gameplay
should be, but you wouldnât even experience this if you donât ignore the optional objective
or get lucky enough not to find it. Modern games have embraced minimaps and quest markers
but they donât work as well in a game thatâs meant to focus on exploration. Human Revolution
still has interesting levels with multiple paths through them but yet it wants to hold
your hand the entire time when really most players are old enough to tackle such things
on their own. You can turn objective markers off in the options, although theyâre still
on in the games hardest difficulty by default and many players either wonât realize they
can be turned off in the first place, or wonât realize the game might be more enjoyable if
they do so. Thereâs also times where quest markers can be useful, particularly for some
less important side quests in hub areas where you might be walking back and forth quite
a lot, and even if Human Revolution allows you to turn quest markers off that doesnât
mean itâs designed to still give you all the information you need to do so without
occasional moments of frustration. Still as it is by default, quest markers hinder the
game from reaching its full potential by pointing you in the exact direction you need to go
when finding this out should be part of the fun. Itâs really the combination of quest markers and the detailed map that make it too much
though. With these two tools you donât just see where to go, you often see exactly how
to get there as well, and despite having larger levels, the first Deus Ex was still just fine
without either. The approach I think Human Revolution should have taken is to use situational
implementation of these tools. For objectives where your character should know how to reach
them, like returning to an npc who gave you a side quest a little while earlier, then
it makes sense that this is knowledge the players character should have so why not have
a quest marker. But for information that thereâs no way your character would know, like where
is an item in an enemy military base youâre infiltrating, then there shouldnât be a
marker and players should have to find this out themselves. This could benefit gameplay
while also being more immersive and preventing frustration in areas of less importance where
markers could remain. And the game could take the exact same approach with its map.
This way you can give players a fully detailed map when it makes sense, but not in areas
it doesnât, which could be beneficial for the same reason as selectively removing quest
markers, while also providing a bit of variety by changing up what information the player
has access to. You could even have maps act as an additional reward for exploration in
certain areas by making players start the area with no map and then be able to find
one through something like security terminals. This could be explained in game by these terminals
having the building lay out on them which your character could then upload through their
augmentations. And you could even do the same for quest markers by making them show up if
players learn key information, like maybe by overhearing npc conversations, and this
way players who do get lost have an increased chance to find extra information that could
in return allow them to find where to go, so the chance of anyone actually getting stuck
for a long time is lowered. This might all sound a little overly ambitious
but really I donât think it is and in a game thatâs meant to prioritize player freedom
and exploration, the effort this would take would be worth it in my opinion. Ultimately
Human Revolution, and the later follow up Mankind Divided, have a difficulty setting
called âgive me Deus Exâ, but I donât think they quite do this and this is why.
Despite this the gameplay ingredients needed for a great Deus Ex game are all here and
the end result does come very close, but Eidos Montreal have lost a little bit of what made
the original so great in their attempt to modernize the series. There are things Human
Revolution does better than the first game, like its shooting, enemy AI, the visual variety
of its environments or the much more interesting hub areas, and thereâs also a lot more to
like about the story this time round than the last effort.
As for that story, it begins⌠with a trailer. I mean it doesnât really but it probably
should because this cinematic trailer is a better introduction to the narrative than
the actual opening and it shows an important part of the main character that the rest of
the game often forgets. That character is Adam Jensen, a man with a distractingly pointy
chin whose voice is so gravely it could give Christians Baleâs Batman a run for his money.
Jensen is the head of security at Sarif industries, a leading biotech company on the cusp of a
breakthrough that would allow a new type of body augmentation where recipients are no
longer reliant on an expensive anti-rejection drug called Neuropzyne. But before this research
can be completed a group of augmented soldiers attack Sarif Industries, killing the team
of scientists involved in this research, including Jensens girlfriend, and leaving Jensen himself
near death. The CEO of the company, David Sarif then saves
Jensenâs life through heavy augmentation, transforming him into a half-machine super
solider. The narrative of Human Revolution is about augmentation. In this world this
is a relatively new advancement, and the game explores the ethics and impacts of this new
technological frontier, which is why I mentioned the cinematic trailer. Jensen himself is a
great conduit to explore these issues, in part because he [never asked for this quote],
but also because in the gameâs opening he fails at his job, and at protecting himself
and the person he cares most about, because he wasnât augmented and went up against
an opposition that was. He then finds himself in the strange position of not just having
his life saved, but through this becoming a tool of the corporation who saved him.
This is a great premise. In just this opening the player is shown the advantages of augmentation
and some of the risks that come with it. Thereâs a lot that could be explored through Jensens
role in this story, which is why I like the cinematic trailer so much. In it we get a
rare glimpse into what this character is experiencing. We see his recurring dream where he finds
himself as Icarus flying to close the the sun, which reflects his fears on augmentation,
and we also see the difficulty he has adjusting to his new body by the way he accidentally
breaks a whisky glass, in an act where his unfamiliarity with his own body causes him
to fail at something normally so simple, which also highlights his super human strength as
if to sign post its potential danger. Itâs not a bad trailer and I canât help
but think thereâs a great story waiting to be told here about an individual whoâs
thrust into a new body in a new world as they struggle with ethical and societal implications
of what this means to them. Thatâs not what Human Revolution is though. Make no mistake;
this game is all about augmentation, perhaps to the point where it takes it too far. Everywhere
you go in this world it feels like augmentations are the only thing anyone cares about. Theyâre
in every news story and readable piece of side content, theyâre the topic of conversations
you over hear on the street, and theyâre the main storyâs main focus. It gets to
the point where itâs a bit much and it can feel like youâre being hit over the head
by a message you were already well aware of. I remember when I first got to Jensenâs
apartment building where I overheard a conversation between his neighbors who were discussing
their relationship problems, and I thought to myself how strange it was to hear someone
in this game finally talk about a subject other than augmentation. And then it turned
out the reason for their argument was that the woman cheated on the man because she quote
âwanted to be reminded of what it was like to be with someone normalâ, so even this
was all about augments. And that was the point where Human Revolutions obsession with augmentation
really started to feel like it was undermining the authenticity of the setting in my eyes.
Itâs one thing to want to explore a particular topic in your game; itâs another to do so
to such a degree that the setting starts to feel like its being reduced to a single subject.
And there are other problems with how this game tackles augmentation as well but weâll
get to that later. To continue with the story, once Jensen recovers
and returns to work for Sarif industries heâs sent in to deal with a group of anti-augmentation
extremists, which leads him onto the trail of the mysterious group responsible for the
original attack. Jensen follows this trail from Detroit to the newly built Chinese mega
city of Hengsha, where he learns that the attack is connected to a powerful organization
that control global interests from the shadows. During this, anti-augmentation riots break
out across the globe. Jensen continues to unpick at this conspiracy, uncovering certain
details about his own past, as well as knowledge that the scientist who were kidnapped in the
gameâs opening who were previously presumed dead are in fact alive. Jensen rescues them
but before he can finally confront the group responsible, the world is thrown into chaos
when a man named Hugh Darrow, a billionaire philanthropist known as âthe father of augmentationâ
for the role he played in their development, emits a signal during a live television broadcast
which makes every augmented individual with a recently installed biochip, enter into a
murderous frenzy. Hugh Darrow was once a believer in an augmented
future who saw his invention as something that could help the less fortunate, but he
since became disillusioned due in large part to the way he saw his technology evolve into
a tool for the powerful to spread their influence. The group behind the attack at the start of
the game, that the player has spent all this time pursuing, is the Illuminati. Darrow is
aware of the Illuminati and heâs not wrong about what theyâre doing. In fact you can
find several allusions to both the Illuminatiâs questionable methodology as well details featured
in other games in the series, including information about the creation of the gray death, the
development of the killswitch that will later be installed into augmented individuals, and
the epilogue even mentions a âproject Dâ, which surely refers to the creation of JC
and other Dentonâs and implies this was made possible by the use of Jensenâs genetic
code, a detail that may have been more surprising if the writers didnât name him Adam.
Anyway the Illuminati are the main antagonists of this story, and yet it was a man acting
against them who ultimately does something truly terrible. The signal making everyone
insane part of this story feels a little farfetched but the rest of it is generally very well
told. Thereâs a lot of detail this summary has emitted, but for the most part Human Revolution
is an engaging conspiracy thriller with good presentation that makes it easy to get invested
in. Itâs the way this story handles its themes and ending that ultimately let it down
however. Human Revolution is about augmentation. It
explores transhumanist questions about right and wrong, power and control, change and resistance,
and this is a great subject for the series, but Human Revolution doesnât quite do it
justice. I think the biggest problem with how augmentation is handled in this game is
that itâs displayed in such a video game centric way: as if the reason augmentations
are important is because they make for really sweet power ups that you can use to beat people
up. But really the great thing about augmentations isnât that you can get swords installed
in your arms. In fact, outside of some very rare circumstances, being better at fighting
people or infiltrating top secret enemy bases isnât a major part of most peopleâs lives.
Which begs the questions of one â why do so many people even care about augmentation
to the point theyâre willing to riot? And two â why are people choosing to get augmented
in the first place? I mean I can understand why someone might
want to enhance their physical capabilities. If you asked me if Iâd like super powers
the answer would probably be yes. I mean, I donât need super powers or anything but
I guess they couldnât hurt. Unless to get those super powers I had to have my limbs
surgically removed. That might hurt quite a lot, and suddenly faced with that prospect,
those unnecessary super powers donât seem quite so appealing. And thatâs before considering
the high price of installation, which is made even worse by the need to keep taking the
expensive immunosuppressant Neuropzyne. And the fact thereâs a possibility of something
going wrong, which is pretty common with new technology, and does end up being exactly
what happens in game. And with all these factors taken into consideration it ends up hard to
see what the appeal of augmentations are unless youâre someone already unlucky enough to
have a physical disability. Hidden swords installed in your arms might make for a neat
party trick, but they hardly seem worth the downsides. But maybe augmentation is meant to be more as Jensen is so focused on getting down to
business and busting global conspiracies that than this. Thereâs one side quest in this
game where you go to collect a debt from a woman who went to the triad to fund her brain
augmentation. She says she needed the augment to be able to compete at her job as a financial
broker, and that most other brokers come from rich families so they buy augmentations to
get an edge in the business world. This conversation frames augments as a way for the rich to get
richer, which would explain why some people are so against augmentation, because of the
unfair advantage to those that can afford it which disadvantages everyone else. This
side quest also shows a side to augments outside of combat ability, which is otherwise never
expanded upon and never even seen by the player except for Jensenâs social enhancer augment.
So this side quest does suggest why augments are so important, and yet this is just a couple
lines of optional dialogue. For the rest of the game I donât recall the topic of augments
effecting employability, or augmentations benefiting the rich ever featuring again.
And so there is a side to this technology that clearly matters but the game barely touches
upon it, and as it is the widespread adoption of augmentations doesnât feel like itâs
really justified. The end result is that the exploration of augmentation as a transhumanist
issue doesnât feel very deep. This subject also could have been examined through looking
at Jensen himself but despite the tone set by the trailer, Jensen receives little actual
development and the impact of augmentation on his own life is never made a focus.
Of course this is an rpg so there should be room for the player to determine how Jensen
acts, which there is. There are many more dialogue choices in this game than the last
two, and theyâre handled quite well with clever UI design which shows both a short
version of your response while also letting you see the exact wording so you always know
what youâre choosing. But despite this the game doesnât really try to allow the player
to express much of their own opinion on augmentation there isnât any room left for introspection.
There is one exception to this which is the ending. In true Deus Ex fashion, Human Revolution ends with a choice. After stopping Darrow
and shutting down the signal, Jensen must decide what to broadcast to the world. His
options are to broadcast the truth, which will turn humanity against augmentation, or
blame an anti-augmentation group called Humanity Front for the signal, at the request of David
Sarif, which will allow augmentation technology to continue to develop, or instead to broadcast
an excuse about contaminated Neuropzyne at the request of the Illuminati to further their
control. There is one other option, which is to avoid choosing by committing suicide
so that no one can spin the story. This doesnât make much sense because committing suicide
doesnât actually prevent someone else from spinning the story, and surely you can avoid
making a choice by just not making a choice, why does suicide even need to be included?
Itâs like the worldâs worst package deal, for limited time only take the âavoid making
a choiceâ option and weâll throw in a free side of kill yourself, all for no extra
charge. There are other problems with this ending
as well though. Firstly this choice is just about which button to press, and I mean that
literally, there are actual buttons to press in game. This makes the choice seem lazy and
tacked on, which it is, and even in the first game this was handled better by having different
gameplay sections for each choice so it at least seemed less liking picking A B or C
from a list. Then there are the end cutscenes themselves, where Jensen monologues over some
imagery which, while not terrible, still seems like a clear missed opportunity when the game
could have ended with the actual broadcast. I mean thatâs what we are choosing here,
what to broadcast to the world, so why not end it by showing what the rest of the world
is meant to be seeing? Then thereâs the problem with how the game
is asking you to choose a consequence, not an action. Decisions in games should be about
what to do. The consequence of that decision should be unknown. You may be able to guess
what the consequence will be, but that should still just be a guess. Human Revolution instead
tells you the consequence of each action, and asks you to chose based on that. So instead
of framing this choice as whether to tell the world the truth, or blame it on the anti
augmentation group, or broadcast the illuminatiâs made up excuse, itâs instead framed as whether
to turn everyone against augmentation, or manipulate people into being pro augmentation,
or just protect the status quo. What makes this so jarring is that if given
the choice between telling the world the truth and hiding the truth, I think most people
would opt for the truth. But if given a choice between turning the world pro or anti augmentation
most would chose pro. And yet telling the truth, and turning the world against augmentation
are treated as the exact same. This doesnât even make much sense to me. I wouldnât expect
the consequence of exposing the truth about the Illuminati and Darrowâs actions to be
that the world becomes anti-augmentation. Iâd expect it would make the world anti-Illuminati
and anti-Darrow, and while Iâm not saying itâs not possible that the truth turns people
away from augments, itâs still very strange to be told to make a choice this way because
the game tells you the consequence but the consequence doesnât match my interpretation
of the choice. There are other ways Human Revolution actually
does choice well: Thereâs lots of reactivity to some of the decisions you make during the
story, there are several persuasion events, which might be too easy but still feel like
a good effort to do something more with dialogue speech checks, and thereâs even some hidden
choices reminiscent of the first game, like about how your actions during a particular
gameplay section can save your pilots life. But the ending choice itself was a real disappointment
and itâs a shame that this low point is the last thing playerâs will experience.
And so, to sum it all up, the end choice was bad, the themes werenât done justice, and
yet I still think the overall story was pretty good and the gameplay even better. Human Revolution
was a much superior game than Invisible War in my eyes, even if it was a bigger departure
from the original. When it comes to the gameplay, a lot of effort was made to stay true to the
philosophy of the series, but itâs in the attempt to modernize the first game that part
of its magic ultimately gets lost, although I am willing to admit that modernization does
have some benefits. And, when it comes to the story, Human Revolution did succeed at
delivering a new and interesting look at this world that left plenty of room for its themes
to be explored further by a sequel. And that is what happened⌠sort of.
Before we get to that however I do want to at least mention Deus Ex The Fall, a mobile
spin off entry to the series that was later ported to PC and is by no means worthy of
its own section in this video. The Fall is quite impressive, if viewed solely as a 2013
mobile take on Deus Ex. Otherwise its thoroughly forgettable. In terms of gameplay, itâs
a simplified version of Human Revolution that maybe isnât quite so simplified so as to
lose all enjoyableness but isnât far off. In terms of story, The Fall is set just before
Human Revolution and focuses on the tyrants, the group of augmented soldiers who attacked
Sarif industries at the start of the last game. Really for a game like this itâs up
to the story to redeem it and make playing it feel worthwhile, but that doesnât happen
and itâs not even because the story is bad, itâs because this game is completely unfinished.
The Fall is only around 4 hours long, and as soon as the storyâs been set up and the
characters introduced, it ends. It doesnât contain an actual ending either, you just
get in a helicopter to go to the next location and then the credits start rolling. Obviously
more sequels must have been planned but that was not to be, maybe because nobody wanted
a mobile Deus Ex game in the first place, which begs the question of why anyone actually
thought this was a good idea. Deus Ex The Fall is a bad game, and while unnecessary
spin offs arenât exclusive to the Deus Ex series, this wonât be the only questionable
decision made with the series as weâll soon see. With Human Revolution Eidos Montreal had created
a great foundation to build on and the sequel, Mankind Divided, would certainly build on
parts of it. Released in 2016 this follow up features some of the best and worst parts
of the entire series. Its strongest aspect is its expanded hub area, that far surpasses
anything seen yet in size, depth and detail, but in other ways the flaws of Human Revolution
remain. Mankind Dividedâs handling of its themes might be even less successful than
last time around, while the main storyâs conclusion leaves many unanswered questions
that are made worse by the unanswered question hanging over the seriesâ actual future.
But weâll get to that. For now, welcome to Prague. Itâs 2029, two
years since a man named Hugh Darrow tried to bring the world to its knees in an event
now referred to as âthe incidentâ, and while Darrow may have failed to go all the
way, the rest of humanity has nevertheless seen fit to meet him in the middle. In the
wake of the chaos that came when the augmented populace of the world lost control of body
and mind, society has responded with new discrimination and hatred, leaving no uncertainty over what
the title of this game is referring to. Just as Human Revolution allowed its focus on augmentation
to dominate the setting, so too does Mankind Divided except augmentation is now no longer
about transhumanism and the impact of technology but is instead just a metaphor for racism.
I used the word âjustâ back then not because racism itself is a topic I think video games
need to avoid, but instead because I wanted to make it clear that those previous things
that augmentation allowed the exploration of are no longer a part of this narrative.
Really this is a game about racism, not augmentation and the role of augmentation is to simply
be a stand in for race. Mankind Divided does feature technology but it has no interest
in at looking at racism through the lens of technology, or looking at technology through
the lens of racism. Instead discrimination based on augmentation is used as a substitute
for race and almost every part of this game is designed to focus on this single issue.
Itâs what the main story is about, what most of the side quests are about, what most
of the readable documents you find are about, what the structure of the world is about,
what the smaller environmental details are about and what side characters personalities
are about. You may have noticed one thing I didnât mention there is gameplay, but
thatâs about the only exception, as once more from a gameplay perspective augmentations
are awesome. They allow you to carry out your video game centric objectives which much more
effectiveness than a normal person ever could, which creates a clear disconnect between narrative
and gameplay as every part of Mankind Divided is about how bad it is to be augmented except
for what the player does in the game which is the opposite.
There is one exception to this which is when you take the train. You do this a lot in Mankind
Divided as the train is required to travel to different areas but the train itself is
segregated. This might sound a little heavy handed, and it is and so is the rest of the
game, but the great thing about how this is handled is that where you board the train
is completely up to you. The first time you use the train you probably wonât even realize
you can board on different carriages and so will end up in the non-augmented section by
mistake. You then have to wait through a loading screen where the other passengers all look
at you with suspicion and fear, as you wonder what everyoneâs problem is. And then itâs
only after you get off the train and are confronted by an official who reprimands you for using
the wrong section that you realize why everyone was looking at you that way in the first place.
And then now when you look around the train station again youâll finally realize that
the platform is split into normal and augmented areas, and that you were meant to board at
the other section. This is great for several reasons. Firstly
it reinforces how arbitrary the divide between groups is by the way you donât even notice
it until youâre confronted. Secondly, it does a better job at allowing the player to
experience discrimination than anything else I can think of in a video game. Thirdly, this
still allows elements of player choice. Itâs up to you which section of the train you get
on. If you want to rebel against the system by getting on at the wrong part of the platform
you can still do that, or you can decide to save yourself the hassle of speaking to the
officer every time you travel by getting on with all the other peoples with augments.
The choice is left up to you and at no point does the game tell you what to do or how you
should think about this. And lastly, the final reason why this works so well is it does all
this completely naturally just by allowing the player to play the game. When most games
want to preach a certain message to their audience it feels like youâre being preached
to, which is bad for multiple reasons. But this small part of Mankind Divided achieves
what it tries to perfectly and it deserves a lot of credit for that.
Unfortunately, thereâs nothing else positive to say about Mankind Dividedâs racism allegory,
and a lot of that can be said against it. Like how silly the games made up terminology
is. Augmented individuals are referred to as clanks. Calling someone a clank doesnât
sounds threatening or hateful, its sounds childish. Also Iâm pretty sure augmented
individuals donât clank anyway, I mean I sure donât seem to be making much noise
when I walk right up to enemies unheard on my perfectly silent augmented legs. Then there
are the slogans in game, like âa wrench is a tool, not a human beingâ. But how is
a wrench similar to someone with a mechanical prosthetic. I mean, sure this slogan is meant
to be insensitive and offensive, which I guess it is, but itâs also stupid and I find it
hard to believe this is something people actually say in this world. The way non-augmented people
are referred to as naturals is a little better. Naturals is a loaded term as it implies augmentation
is unnatural and I can just about buy the idea that people might use this language,
but it still feels very heavy handed to hear it all the time and see it used in an official
capacity. Then thereâs the issue of how extreme the
discrimination is. This is a world where augmented individuals are being rounded up and put into
huge ghettos, where cops arenât interested in investigating a murder of someone if theyâre
augmented because they care so little about an augmented life, where many businesses have
banned augmented people from entering their premises, and where the United Nations is
about to pass a piece of legislation to force all augmented individuals to have a control
chip inserted into them to ensure augs will always be subservient. Maybe Iâm too much
of an optimist but really I find the degree of discrimination here hard to believe when
this world is only a few years distant from our own. This is Nazi Germany 2.0 and everyoneâs
just okay with that, but why? The answer to this in game is that itâs
the result of the Illuminati, but how have the Illuminati convinced the global population,
in just two years, that racism is best thing since sliced bread. Keep in mind the most
anti-augmentation ending of the last game was to broadcast the truth, which included
mention of the role of the Illuminati. I know the aug incident still happened, and people
are going to be more concerned about regulation and restrictions afterwards but thereâs
a long way from that to pure hate. This event was also the result of a piece of technology
going wrong, so I would have thought the anger that followed would be directed at the creators
and manufacturers. If in the future many people use self driving cars, and one day they suddenly
all go out of control leading to considerable loss of life, people would be very angry.
But wouldnât that anger be directed at the ones who developed these cars and sold the
cars and told everyone theyâre safe, not the drivers who chose to trust them?
Iâm not saying itâs not possible for everyone to now hate people with augments. People can
be manipulated and large group cans adopt bad beliefs, but the question of âhow this
happenedâ needs to be answered better in game for this situation to be believable in
my eyes. That question also seems like a more interesting focus for the narrative. I think
âhow are people manipulated into being racistâ is a better subject to explore than âwhat
are the consequences of everyone being racistâ. People already know the answer to the later
and that question of how still allows you to explore issues surrounding discrimination,
while also better connecting to the seriesâ actual themes of power and manipulation. We
do get glimpses of this during the main story but itâs not much and it doesnât address
the question of how the world got to this point in the first place.
There are also problems with the allegory itself: In Human Revolution the augmented
were the richer members of society as augmentation is an expensive procedure which also requires
further cost by way of the regular immunosuppressantâs people have to take. Being rich and choosing
to get your body augmented is not the same as being born with a certain colour of skin
or any other characteristic people donât have an input over. This meant many found
the equivalence that Mankind Divided made between race and augmentation to be offensive.
There was even a whole mini controversy before the game was released were journalists were
angry over the use of the term âmechanical apartheidâ for this reason, and while I
donât agree that using the term mechanical apartheid is necessarily a problem, the allegory
itself does seem flawed for this general reason. A more accurate fit than augmentation and
race, would be augmentation and dislike of the 1%. The augmented members of society could
be seen as the new bourgeoisie who are hated by normal people for both their financial
and technological privilege, as well as the now obvious risk they pose to society following
the aug incident. For inspiration the writers could look to the discord that followed in
the wake of the 2008 recession, except ramp it up to a far greater extreme. The game could
then explore what happens when a large amount of tension exists between a majority with
less power, and the more wealthy augmented elite. This comparison is a much a better
fit and it also returns the series to being about exploring potential questions of the
future, as opposed to just being a racism metaphor that has more to say about our past.
Obviously I understand why the game didnât go this route. Itâs because this would become
a complicated subject full of shades of grey that asks difficult question, whereas a racism
allegory is simple and morally black and white, no pun intended. Still the way Mankind Divided
tackles this subject ends up feeling shallow. This game has nothing to say outside of something
everyone already knew, which is that racism is bad. Metaphors for racism arenât anything
new in fiction, but this one isnât very good and when you make so much of the game
about this that ends up being a problem. Anyway there is more to Mankind Divided than
this and having now talked at length about the biggest issue I have with the game we
may as well move on to something more positive, like its most impressive feature, which is
the city itself. Prague, Prague, beautiful Prague. I could probably spend as long praising
this location as I did complaining about the racism allegory. I mean, I wonât, but I
could because man this city is great. Somehow Eidos Montreal have managed to maintain the
heavily stylized approach of the last game while managing to address the biggest criticism
of the visuals, which is that they werenât very grounded. The result is this area manages
to capture the best of both worlds, being visually diverse and creative but still very
realistic. The blending of old buildings with modern technology looks great and honestly
this is exactly how I expect the future to actually look.
Still Prague has more going for it than this. Hub areas have featured in every Deus Ex game,
with the role they play growing with each entry. Mankind Divided is no exception but
Eidos Montreal have went above and beyond this time round to expand on everything good
about these previous areas. There is a lot to explore here and many ways to do so. The
city is full of secrets; its streets are densely packed with many buildings to enter and pieces
of environmental storytelling to uncover. Some locations really require you to think
about how to access them and you can spend hours just exploring and immersing yourself
in the world the developers have so skillfully created. When it comes to level of detail
and density of things to find and see, there arenât many games I can think of that come
close to this. Of course, this isnât really the Deus Ex
experience of the original game but it still has many similarities like the focus on exploration,
multiple paths and rewards for players who think outside the box. Prague also has some
restricted areas which youâll find yourself moving in and out of meaning the more active
parts of the gameplay, like combat and stealth, arenât just divorced from this part of the
game but are instead interwoven. Itâs a very effective approach to world design and
Mankind Divided also has some great side quests which further take advantage of this rich
and very well realized environment. In other ways Mankind Divided is a similar
game to Human Revolution but there are some minor improvements. Like to the cover system,
which now allows you to move from one piece of cover to the next more smoothly. Or in
the number of augments available, which has been increased quite a bit, although not all
of the new additions are especially useful. Or to the stealth system, which gives better
warning for when the player is about to be seen, making the still omniscient minimap
a little over the top. Then there are some beneficial balance changes, like to persuasion
events which are now more likely to fail. The last game was designed to be too forgiving
meaning if you picked options at random then your success was still mathematically very
likely, but now failure feels tuned to where it should be giving these persuasion events
the tension they should have had in the first place. Still more noteworthy might be what hasnât improved, like the level design of story sections
where the game still insists on holding the players hand the whole time. As impressive
as Prague is to explore, nowhere else in the game comes close to it in size or complexity
and a lot of the other areas you do go to feel a bit too short and safe. One part of
the series I enjoy the most is carefully infiltrating large enemy bases but with the new emphasis
on the hub area this has been somewhat forgotten and when you do leave Prague for story reasons
the game seems to put more focus on being cinematic and keeping the plot moving, rather
than on letting the player sneak or stab their way through complicated environments. If this
is the trade off we get for the better hub area then maybe itâs worth it but Iâm
not sure the game canât feature both. There are some new minor annoyances this time around
as well, like how selling items at vendors takes far too many clicks, or how the loading
screen when you travel by train is excessively long, but really in terms of gameplay Mankind
Divided is Human Revolution with a bigger and better hub area.
As for the main story, you once more play as Adam Jensen who is now working for an anti-terrorist
division of Interpol called task force 29, while also working in secret with a group
called the Juggernaut Collective to try to track down and expose the Illuminati. Tension
between the augmented and non augmented populace are continuing to rise and when a bomb goes
off at a train station in Prague, Jensen is tasked with investigating it. Not content
to just follow orders anymore, Jensen listens in to a conversation his boss at task force
29 has with his superiors where he learns that several terrorist attacks, including
the bomb at the station, are going to be blamed on a pro-aug group called the Augmented Rights
Coalition or ARC. Jensen is then sent to a large, densely packed aug containment ghetto
called Golem City to investigate Talos Rucker, ARCâs leader. Golem is a great location
that I wish you could explore further. Itâs clearly inspired by the real life Kowloon
Walled City, and if you donât know what that is look it up, itâs a rabbit
hole worth going down. In fact, someone should tell Fredric Knudson to make a video on it.
Anyway, in not-Kowloon City you work your way to Rucker but he then dies in a mysterious
way after confirming he was not involved in the attacks. Rucker is replaced by an absolute
unit of a man named Victor Marchenko who pushes ARC towards militancy as the death of Rucker
causes augmented unrest to deepen. As Jensen investigates further he learns that Marchenko
is an Illuminati agent who is planning to use a biological weapon at an event where
a group of influential individuals are meeting to discuss their opposition of a new illuminati
backed UN law. The law will enforce strict measures on augmented individuals around the
globe, which the Illuminati are trying to get passed as a means to further their power.
Jensen ultimately stops Marchenko in Mankind Dividedâs one and only boss fight, although
the exact fate of the lobbyists will be determined by your actions in the final mission.
Just as with Human Revolution, there are details to this story that Iâve skipped over and
the quality of storytelling remains very good. The dialogue is well written, there are important
choices which have consequences further along in the game, and the cutscenes are no longer
rendered at a distracting low resolution like in the last game. However, even ignoring the
topic of augmentation racism, there are still two problems I have with this narrative. The
first is that the Illuminati arenât very effective antagonists. This is mostly because
you know exactly who they are and how theyâre going to end up. Mankind Divided seems to
want to be a mysterious thriller about this sinister secret society, but the mystery itself
is already spoiled. This remove all the suspense a good mystery relies on, while also making
the Illuminati feel very unthreatening for whatâs meant to be such a powerful and enigmatic
group. I canât help but compare the Illuminati
to The Patriots from Metal Gear Solid, who play a similar role in that series, and to
summarize my thoughts on the comparison, everything about The Patriots was better, for the first
three metal gear solid games at least, because it turns out mysterious groups work a lot
better when they have some actual mystery to them. The Illuminati in Mankind Divided
seem like a bit of a joke. They come across as a few guys sitting around a table twirling
their metaphorical mustaches while thinking of what dastardly plan to do next. Which brings
me to another problem I have this time around, which is that the Illuminati seem pretty evil.
They always seemed questionable, but their dubious morality came from their secrecy and
desire to control, not from their blatantly evil actions. Yet now theyâre committing
terrorist attacks all over the world while trying to tear society apart and set up an
almost genocide against the augmented population. I always assumed the Illuminati were a powerful
group of people who tried to act in the worldâs best interest and just arrogantly saw themselves
as the ones most capable of ruling. Not a group with no concept of right and wrong who
are willing to do anything just to increase their influence. I mean, in all three of the
other Deus Ex game we were given the option to join them, and while this never seemed
good, it never seemed truly evil. But now thatâs changed, which makes this setting
much more black and white when the series should be about shades of grey. Still maybe
the Illuminati are just represented poorly in this game and everything will make more
sense when we find out more about their plan in the next⌠oh.
Yeah and I guess thatâs brings us to the final problem. This story isnât very finished.
And itâs not just the overarching story about of the Illuminati; Mankind Divided introduces
a number of plot threads that donât find resolution. There are questions raised about
the mysterious circumstance surrounding Jensen immediately following the last games ending,
as well as about the implications of illuminati agents within task force 27, or the identity
of Juggernaut Collective leader Janus, or what will happen to the UN resolution on augmented
rights now the latest illuminati scheme didnât succeed, and, for Jensen as well, also over
who are the Illuminati and what do they actually want. And some of these arenât just unanswered
questions; theyâre actively teased throughout the game in a way that suggests answers are
on the way. Mankind Divided received a lot of criticism
for its abrupt ending. Originally, everyone suspected that this might be a cynical ploy
to sell the real ending as dlc but that didnât happen. In the one substantial piece of DLC
we did get, a criminal past, itâs actually set before the main game as you go undercover
as Jensen at an augmented prison complex. This dlc is really good, which is why I wrote
this awkward segway to at least mention it. The prison complex is big, exploration is
a lot of fun as, at least initially, you have to blend in as a prisoner while working out
for yourself how best to proceed with your investigation, and the loss of your augments
introduces some much needed challenge to freshen up the gameplay. Still all this DLC really
achieved was to remind people of the potential Mankind Dividedâs systems have, and this
is ultimately the last thing we got from the series.
Mankind Divided was a really good game brought down by its poorly handled themes, a weak
overall antagonist and an ending that wasnât very satisfying. As someone who does enjoy
optional content, I donât really see this game as being unfinished or lacking in content.
The main story can be completed quickly but the overall amount of content on offer is
roughly in line with any other Deus Ex game. The lack of resolution to the overarching
plot also doesnât seem like some Achilles heel either in my opinion. Instead it makes
the game feel more like a middle part of a trilogy that was given the job of playing
for time before the big finale, and it is a bit worse than it could have been as a result,
but its by no means irredeemable. Thereâs also one other thing I did really
like about Mankind Dividedâs narrative, which is the added emphasis on themes of truth
and paranoia, something thatâs been a key feature of the series since its inception
and is a necessary part of the Deus Ex experience in my eyes. Human Revolution did leave you
guessing about certain things, particularly about whether you can trust you employer David
Sarif, but the focus was so firmly on technology that other themes of the series seemed a little
lost as a result. Mankind Divided rectifies this oversight though and it does it with
style. As a double agent Jensen is both trying to work out who he himself can and cannot
trust, while also worrying about keeping his own illicit activity hidden.
Thereâs a point where a side character confronts you and accuses you of snooping around, and
even if this is a scripted event which always happens, it still felt impactful to me because
I had been snooping around in the task force headquarters, excessively, and now here I
am being called out on something I didnât think would ever be acknowledged. This kind
of paranoia also manifests within the main narrative by giving the player regular choices
about how much information to reveal to your boss, as well as the way it leaves you guessing
over the identity of the illuminatiâs mole within the organization, which you can pick
away at yourself through optional conversations, and it sure makes your coworkers less likeable
when you wonder if maybe theyâre not just an asshole but are also your enemy. Even the
Juggernaut collectives leader Janus and your main contact within the group, Alex, donât
seem void of suspicion, and thereâs nothing like being forced to second guess everyone
and everything to accurately represent the unseen threat that a super secret group like
the Illuminati are meant to represent. This is in many ways what I want from a Deus
Ex storyline, and I also love the tone set by Mankind Dividedâs version of end slides.
In place of a typical narrator or main character monologue, this game instead opts for simple
newscast, which will recap both the main events of the story and optional side quests you
may have got involved with. Except every single one of these things thatâs reported on has
been distorted to the point where the truth is hardly recognizable. All your actions so
far are twisted and spun into a web of lies to serve the group youâve been trying to
oppose. Itâs a reminder that the problems of this world are still out there, and that
the real enemy canât just be defeated in a simple boss fight. But itâs also a reminder
of how small you are. Of how your borderline super human heroics are still pretty insignificant
in the grand scheme of things, and how your supposed victory is only one small battle
in a war your still rapidly losing. Most of all though, itâs a promise of more to come,
a message that this story will be continued⌠Except Iâm not sure it actually will. With four games released across 16 years many
parts of this series has changed but its core design philosophy has mostly managed to stay
the same. Deus Ex is a series about open ended design, player choice, emergent solutions,
freedom to explore, and the merging of immersive sim and rpg. The original Deus Ex feels like
a grand relic from a different age yet thereâs still so much to appreciate about how this
game is designed, and most of the things it does so well modern video games barely even
try. Invisible War was a clear step down, but Human
Revolution and Mankind Divided show that a modern take on a game like this can still
be done and that thereâs still an audience out there willing to buy it. Whether that
audience is big enough however is a different question. One of the reasons this series is
on ice right now is because Mankind Divided didnât meet Square Enixâs ambitious sales
targets. When you consider the fact that this game didnât sell all that badly, you have
to wonder how realistic Squareâs targets were, and while Mankind Divided proudly shows
off its big budget and cinematic qualities, Iâm not really sure these things were that
necessary in the first place. Deus Ex isnât Halo or Uncharted and itâs never going to
have that level of mass appeal, but as a medium budget experience Iâm sure thereâs still
a large enough audience out there that will continue to support this series if the games
retain the features that matter the most. But really thatâs on Square Enix and their
decisions with this series havenât always seemed the best choice. Mankind Divided was
also criticized for featuring microtransactions and part of the main game was removed to be
sold as preorder exclusive dlc. Many people also believe that part of the reason this
game left quite so many unanswered questions was because it was rushed out the door before
it was ready. The technical problems at launch also support this, and the future of Deus
Ex under Square Enix doesnât exactly inspire much confidence even if future games were
guaranteed, which theyâre not... but I hope we get more Deus Ex anyway.
It wonât be much a of a surprise which game in this series I think is best, but I donât
think the gulf between the original game and its modern day successors is as vast as it
might seem. When you accept the fact that a modern, big budget version of Deus Ex must
make some sacrifices, Human Revolution and Mankind Divided end up seeming like great
efforts that stay true to much of what matters about the original, and the only really important
thing that seems missing is a narrative that manages to successfully integrate the series
themes to say something meaningful about our world and future.
The original Deus Ex did this by using irrational conspiracies to explore rational fears, and
as a result its narrative still feels relevant to this day. In the years since its release
many events have happened that make its bleak vision of the future seem closer than we might
like. 9/11 brought a war on terror against something we didnât even know we were meant
to be terrified of a year earlier, the 2008 recession brought new questions of global
economic stability and accountability, the Snowdon/NSA wikileaks showed that powerful
individuals spying on the rest of the population isnât as implausible as we might hope, and
the covid-19 epidemic is still currently revealing the deep vulnerability that can occur when
factors outside our control disrupt our modern way of life. Deus Ex is an exploration of
the future that uses the anxiety and uncertainty of the present to create a dark reflection
of our world, and exploring such things through creative mediums is something that matters.
As does continuing the design philosophy of this series, which many people enjoy but yet
is seen so rarely in other games. And thatâs why itâs so disappointing that
another Deus Ex game might never be released. Eidos Montrealâs games showed lots of potential
and seemed to be building to an even better conclusion, and that truly amazing modern
Deus Ex game that fans were waiting for still feels like itâs possible. But whether weâll
ever get to find out if that really is the case remains to be seen. The world is changing.
The future is unknown. But honestly I hope it contains more Deus Ex games. Itâd give
us something to do at least, while we sit inside in lockdown as the world crumbles around
us. I mean I can think of worse ways to spend the end times. A huge thank you to all of my patrons for the continued support which has allowed me to
make this video. These are genuinely uncertain times and you support means a hell of a lot
to me. Iâm not sure when the next entire series retrospective will be, but the topic
will be decided again by patreon vote so look forward to that. Anyway Iâm glad I finally
got this video finished. And just in time for Cyberpunk, perfect timing, honestly couldnât
be better if I planned it⌠wait what, it was delayed again. But what am I meant to
do now for a whole extra month? Oh well, maybe itâs time to start working
on that other video Iâve been putting off. So until next time.
I'm still salty about how Square Enix butchered Mankind Divided, and then had the gall to be disappointed in it as if the franchise itself was underperforming.
After doing all this:
Pre order scandal (augment your pre order) that soured people on the game
Microtransactions in a single player, full priced, game
Cutting game content and adding it in as DLC (a vital part of the story was put separately)
Finishing on a cliffhanger
Finishing after only one boss at what was obviously the end of the Act 1 of the story
Only having 2 hubs in the game (nothing like Hengsha either from Human Revolution which was very different from the first hub).
Also speaking about not asking for things, no one asked for "Breach Mode". Such a waste of time, just there to shove more microtransactions. Sure there was potential, but I'm 99% sure that anyone buying a Deus Ex would rather have more of the campaign.
It just annoys me so much because the gameplay itself and the word was incredible and I can't help but think what the future could have held if Square didn't hamstring it at every opportunity. Oh well, they can enjoy how bad their mediocre Avengers game is doing.
Still can't believe they canned the third game for that mediocre Marvel's Avenger game. I liked Mankind Divided even though the story was short. Its world wasn't unnecessarily open world, it was closed and packed with great detail and I think it did the night life in a cyberpunk genre very well. If it were to come back again, it needs better writers. The game design is already pretty cool. If someone could write a story on par with HR, it'd be fine by me.
Damn! Until now, I can't get over the fact that the third game was canned for the abomination that is the GaaS Avengers game. SE, you really messed it up.
Gonna be honest, haven't watched it yet but I absolutely love this 'long-form' kind of content. Don't have the courage to play the second game but I played the other three. Thanks for sharing !
The best breakdown of Deus Ex from a narrative and thematic point of view I've found is a Let's Play slash lecture series by Bobbin Threadbare. Each video has a very long and well researched real world lesson on history, philosophy, science, conspiracy theories, sci-fi novels that inspired the game, and so on. It's not the whole Deus Ex series, but he did do the same with Human Revolution.
At times Threadbare could be very sure of himself (past tense because I don't know if he's mellowed out since then), so if you don't agree with a particular stance taken, that can be grating, but it's consistently a fascinating deep dive into the network of ideas that inform Deus Ex.
Avengers bombing after Mankind Divided and the third Adam Jensen game were both sacrificed for it made my goddamn week, not gonna lie. I hope Eidos Montreael are freed now and can go back to this series because it's one of my favorite franchises ever and it deserves to resolve its story.
If you liked this video, you might also want to check out Ross's Game Dungeon reviews of both Deus Ex, Deus Ex: Invisible War, and Deus Ex: Human Revolution.