Deus Ex: Human Revolution is FINE, And Here's Why

[crickets chirping] [clicking] [exciting music] ♪ ♪ [HBOMB] In June 2000, Ion Storm released "Deus Ex." "Deus Ex" is one of the best games ever made. It's engaging, free-form game play, and complex storytelling quickly cemented it as one of the true classics of the medium. ♪ ♪ So the developer went bankrupt. [booming, VHS tape clicks] If that line sounds familiar to you, get used to it. Like, 12 more videos are gonna start this way. Eidos Interactive-- the game's publisher-- was the 51% shareholder in Ion Storm so when the company closed its doors and the creators quit or got let go, the "Deus Ex" intellectual property didn't belong to any of the people who-- you know--made it, but to a bunch of executives at a publishing company. Then Eidos Interactive's parent company, also named Eidos (which made researching this very confusing) got bought and merged with another game publisher, Sales Curve Interactive. Then they hit major financial trouble and realized they need to make games to survive and opened a new development studio in Canada which began development on the next "Deus Ex" game. While that was happening, things were going great at SCi. Just kidding. It went so bad, the CEO got fired. To get a fresh start, they renamed the company to Eidos. Hold on a second! Then they got bought again, this time by Square Enix. Square Enix said they were going to leave Eidos to themselves then changed their mind and forceably merged the company with their European branch, and oh, my God, isn't the game industry so normal and fine? While all of that was happening, the team at Eidos Montreal had to somehow make a video game. The making-of documentary for this new Deus Ex game begins with a bunch of talk about how great it is to work with Eidos from French-Canadian developers wearing T-shirts with the Eidos branding. [STEPHANE] Eidos has a very rich IP portfolio. I mean, their--their projects are just great. Their IPs are very rich. [HBOMB] Partway through, Eidos disappears from the story completely because they stopped existing and they suddenly had completely different bosses. Being owned by Square Enix came with some benefits, though. They got to reference "Final Fantasy" a few times. One of the bosses--a big guy with a gun for an arm-- got to be named Barrett. They put a poster on some character's walls for a "Final Fantasy XXVII." You know, 'cause it's the future. It's cute. So it wasn't all bad. Just kidding. It was bad. The executives at Square Enix weren't going to let them do this. They didn't want to risk damaging the "Final Fantasy" brand any more than "Kingdom Hearts" already-- the team at Eidos Montreal had to argue their way up the corporate chain of the business that just bought them all the way up to Yoichi Wada-- the president and director of the entire company-- to get permission to put a funny poster in the background of their game. "Deus Ex" used to be a series that criticized the bizarre machinations of corporations so big no one knows who they're working for, where intellectual property and brand management mattered more than people, a world where one company can own half your childhood. A system governed more by tax incentives and corporate subsidies than people. It asked important questions about the future of mankind, about who wielded power over others, and what their interests really were-- a story sometimes so accurate in its guesses, it seems less fictitious now than ever. But then many years and corporate acquisitions later comes "Deus Ex: Human Revolution," the game that dares to ask the question, "What if we had robot arms?" [Alexander Brandon's "Main Title"] ♪ ♪ [upbeat music] "Deus Ex: Human Revolution" is pretty good. It's fun. Yeah. I have a tendency to make videos about things I either really love or really hate so just to clear up any potential confusion here, this game is fine. Good job, guys. I'm about to spend, uh-- oh, my God-- complaining about it, but I need to say, this was the first game by a new studio and it was being made while they were being bought out by Square Enix by a team that had never previously worked on any games even remotely like "Deus Ex." I might not think the game is perfect, but it is a genuine achievement that it's this good. So why am I talking about it, then? That's a good question. Me? Well, here's the thing. The original "Deus Ex" belongs to a special sub-genre of games named the "immersive sim." In a sentence, immersive sims are games that feel just that little bit more like worlds you're taking part in. They prioritized the player's freedom to choose how to solve problems and then dealing with the consequences of those choices and being able to find creative and unexpected solutions, often ones the developers themselves hadn't thought of by being built in a way that could respond well to player creativity. There's a lot of different ways you can define an immersive sim, but there's only one real one. Can you solve a problem intended to be solved with a gun by stacking a bunch of boxes and going over it? In the late '90s and early 2000s, immersive sims were coming out fairly often and people still look back fondly on many of those games, but then almost overnight, they disappeared. An entire genre of games basically died out for years. But a couple of years back, we started to get more of them again, and they're amazing and beautiful and a lot like the games that people remember. "Human Revolution" is a fascinating orphan of history. It came out between the two golden ages of the immersive sim, when this type of game wasn't considered popular or profitable enough, so while they were making it, the team made a lot of changes to try and make it a bit like other games people liked at the time, trying to streamline it and make it more accessible for a console audience. I'll give you three guesses why they decided the game needed third-person cover shooting. And at the time of release, people seemed happy with those compromises, but the thing about immersive sims is, they were already great and didn't need changing. Recent games like the new "Prey" have proven immersive sims barely need to change at all from how they were 20 years ago to be amazing at what they're trying to do. So when the "Human Revolution" team decided the "Deus Ex" formula was broken, all their fixes actually made it less like what makes these games great. So today in this year's self therapy session masquerading as a video game analysis, I'll be trying to get to the bottom of what happened to "Deus Ex" to see what we can learn about how or how not to modernize a classic. because there's a lot more at stake here than just one beloved franchise. After doing some digging into the lineage of the intellectual property rights of some of my favorite franchises, I discovered Square Enix might not just be rebooting-slash-remaking- slash-beating the dead horses of the "Deus Ex," "Tomb Raider," and "Thief" properties. No, a much more important franchise lives under their jurisdiction. One of the most important and meaningful stories in gaming history. I'm speaking, of course, about "Gex." The "Gex" trilogy sold millions of copies and arguably saved the world, but there hasn't been a new "Gex" since 1999, and due to Crystal Dynamics' acquisition by Eidos in 1998, Square Enix's 2009 acquisition of the company that bought Eidos and renamed itself to Eidos means it's only a matter of time before Squenix puts someone to work reviving the sleeping god in their possession. So for all our sakes... It's worth seeing if we can learn from other attempts to revive old franchises and come up with some general pointers. "Gex" and "Deus Ex" form a symbiot circle. What happens to one of them will affect the other. You must understand this. So we have to do this for "Gex." If we're not careful, he'll be in the next "Kingdom Hearts" and kiss Goofy and society will fucking crumble. [computer beeping] A really good test of role-playing games is how quickly players get to do that. In "Deus Ex" you press new game and then you're making a character. Then there's an opening cutscene and bam, you're at your first mission, the iconic and impressively open-ended Liberty Island level. A huge part of why this game still works so well is how instantaneously it makes you feel like you're playing it your own way. You've only just decided your character's starting abilities and already you're being told to put them to use how you see fit to capture the NSF leader holed up in the Statue of Liberty. Within literally seconds of starting the game, you're being asked to pick a new weapon by a character whose appearance changes based on what your character looks like because he's your brother. That's a pretty freeing way to start a game, giving players a bunch of choices and already reacting to one they made in the character creation screen. But this type of opening isn't unique to "Deus Ex," though. It's a staple of the genre. In--I dunno--"Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines," you make a character, cutscene, funny tutorial that you can skip, welcome to Santa Monica. It's just like it is in real life. The high watermark here, of course, is "Fallout: New Vegas," instantly plopping the character you just made in the world with next to no limits where to go and what to do. Putting the player in the driver's seat as quickly as possible creates a sense of agency which is pivotal in games that prioritize making choices and playing a role. Role-playing games. What a conce-- ["Metal Gear Solid" alert sound] [rock music] [character screams] [man] ♪ Gotta get up-- ♪ [HBOMB] In "Deus Ex: Human Revolution," I was a bit worried when I realized there wasn't anything like a character creation screen, but hey, I'm old. Maybe those are outdated now. I did do a little cringe when I saw the highest difficulty was called "Give Me Deus Ex," though. Sure, tell me to have high expectations. That hasn't ruined my life before. [dramatic music] [BOB] Is everything in place? [VOICE] Almost. [BOB] What do you mean, almost? [HBOMB] The game begins with the weekly Illuminati Zoom conference where they ominously discuss their plans while trying to change the default profile picture. Apart from one teeny, tiny, massive problem, I really like this opening. I especially like how short it pretends to be. The intro ends, and bam, you are Adam Jensen, head of security at Sarif Industries. Oh, it's really thematic, if you think about it, You see, Adam is a clever reference to "Seinfeld." [GEORGE] Remember my friend Adam from Detroit? [JERRY] Yeah, the guy with the-- [JC] Augmented. [JC screaming] [Jonathan Wolff's "Seinfeld"] [HBOMB] I do like that it zooms in on his head to start the game. I'm glad someone's repping the classics. Wow, that was pretty quick. It's time to begin the first level and start playing the game-- nope. You see, the problem with the original "Deus Ex" was you didn't spend 20 minutes watching JC Denton waddle around his office making small talk first. The opening cutscene is far from over. The top scientist at Sarif Industries is Adam's ex-girlfriend, but they're still pretty close. You can tell because they decided to pose her like a teenage anime school girl. [MEGAN] And I thought women were the ones who kept men waiting. [HBOMB laughing] Gender! The introduction isn't one minute of ominous, interesting dialogue followed by game play. It's followed by many minutes of walking and talking, meaningless techno babble-- [MEGAN] But the increased neuropeptides coming from the pidot cluster-- [HBOMB] That actually happens twice. [MAN] I'm thinking the glial tissue breakdown we noticed after splicing in the repressive protein might be the cause. [HBOMB] Oh, yeah. This is great. [MAN] Cytometer-- [MEGAN] We might get a more accurate reading that confirms-- [HBOMB humming] Then you get to watch a weapons demonstration, argue with your coworkers in the elevator... [inhales sharply] Watch the planes go by, and listen to your boss tell you how important all that stuff was for the future of the human race before they realized they're losing you, so, uh--uh, a terrorist attack happens! There we go! Oh, boy! A call to action! Now we can finally start the ga-- the unskippable tutorial for how to play the game. We need to make sure you know how to crouch, move boxes around, use vents, and take cover. Click on enemies to shoot them. Okay, now do it a few more times just in case. Okay, well, at least it's over and now we all know how to play, so now we can start the ga-- watch another cutscene. Adam gets knackered by some bastards. Then the bad man shoots him into a hospital where the game transitions into a really cool opening sequence. Adam has most of his body replaced with mechanical parts and the music swells and, ah, yeah. It's a really cool opening. And now finally after the opening cutscene and the walk and talk and all this setup and a tutorial and another cutscene, the game can start. Here he is! Here's our boy! Oh, man, they're doing it again! Yeah! Finally you can play the ga-- start a sequence where Adam comes back into work to get his heads-up display fixed by the IT guy on his way to the first mission. Only then can you go to the helipad and after another cutscene you have a conversation in the aircraft with your boss about the mission you're headed into and get to pick a weapon. The first real choice in the game. As a reminder, you're making the same choice literally five seconds into the original "Deus Ex." [JC] Give me the GEP gun. [PAUL] The GEP gun might be useful. [enemy screaming] [beeping] [ALEX] That might have been over the line, JC. [HBOMB] I kind of wanted to know how fast the intro could go if you were going as fast as possible and skipping everything, but when I tried that, I hit a little snag. How quickly can you give me "Deus Ex?" Come on. Let's do it. [HARRY] ♪ What if I'm late ♪ ♪ Got a big date ♪ [clicking] [HBOMB stammering] Come on! [WOMAN] Warning Thi-- [HBOMB] Okay, right. Oh, you're kidding me! You can't even skip it? I went for a piss while I was recording the intro of the Director's Cut and there was still, like, two minutes left of this. I should have bothered to wash my hands! Uh, fun fact. The "Human Revolution" speed running community have a shared save file that starts right after the walk-and-talk because-- holy shit-- can you imagine having to sit through that every time? [clicking] Oh, my God. I can't even close the game to stop the experiment. It just goes to this screen. You can't even open the menu! Alt, F4? Okay, you can at least quit that way. [clicks] [techno music fades] [clicking] [giggles] It crashed. It's fucking crashed. Now, I get what they're going for. Games with a more linear cinematic intent like "Red Dead Redemption" or "The Last Of Us" or even "Half-Life" bring you into the narrative by slowly building to their game play like this, but for RPGs with a focus on player freedom and choice, this is the opposite of what you should do. The player doesn't feel like they're taking part in the story when they can barely control where Adam aims his head for most of his big introduction. For games like "Deus Ex," which "Human Revolution" says it's trying to give people, you want the player to have a sense of control as soon as possible. Once it's over, though, everything really picks up, so it's not that big a deal, but if it's not a big deal, then why did I waste so much time complaining about it? Well, first of all, leave me alone. It's my video. I can do what I want. And then secondly I think this choice reflects a pretty serious misunderstanding about what makes these games fun to play. You see, this is an exact mistake the original game almost made, too. See? I'm going somewhere with this. Please subscribe. They originally planned to begin with meeting all of your coworkers in your base, talking to everyone, a lot of exposition and setup and introductions-- basically a lot of busy work that wouldn't be that fun to do first thing the instant you hit "New Game." Before there was an attack on UNATCO HQ that necessitated going into action. In other words, they had the same idea as the people who made "Human Revolution," but they later realized it would be better if they started with game play and deliberately switched the order. This introduces a minor weird plot thing. You arrive on an island to deal with a terrorist attack and it's right next to where your new base happens to be. This would have made slightly more sense when you started at the base and went out when they attacked headquarters which is how it seemed to work in original footage from betas of the game, but it was worth it to make this change because the player feels like a part of the story now, which is, you know, the goal of role-playing games. You don't feel like a part of the story by watching the character do things. You feel that way by getting to do things as the character, and there's a big difference there. I don't like giving direct advice like I know the exact correct way to make a game, but guys, start the game here. Start at the thing or in the plane on the way to the thing. The next game, "Mankind Divided," did exactly that. You start on the plane. I mean, it had three more opening sequences after it, for some reason. More importantly than any of this, though, we need to circle back to the most fascinating part of this whole thing. "Deus Ex: Human Revolution" recreated an exact problem the original game almost had and then fixed during development. I think we need to explore how something like that can happen, right? [computer beeping] [tense music] So, the development of "Human Revolution" was a bit of a mess. I mean, first off, this was a new studio making their first game. You can't just snap your fingers and open a new 350-person development studio overnight. You have to build that, you know? And in this case, literally. When the studio opened, the building they planned to make their offices wasn't even finished being built. [STEPHANE] These guys left everything to come to a brand new studio with not even a-- permanent offices yet. [HBOMB] Building a new studio can't be easy. Now, you're clever, so you're probably wondering why so many game companies open studios in Montreal. I'm sure French Canadians make for excellent game designers, but the answer is money. Here's the annual cost of hiring a video game programmer in various major cities. San Francisco: $119,404. Austin, where "Deus Ex" was developed: $91,161. Vancouver: $78,500. Toronto's almost at $78,000. They're getting there. Montreal: $72,335. Montreal with government tax credit: $45,209. Up to 37.5% of the cost of your employees' salaries are effectively given back to you by the province. Look, all I'm saying is, I can telepathically predict where companies will open their next game studio. [LEADER] Don't believe me? It's all in the numbers. What, were Eidos supposed to open a new studio in Texas again? The biggest game studio headquartered in Texas now is, I think, Gearbox, right? And guess where they're opening their new studio! Come to work at Gearbox Quebec! They don't pay very well, but they promise really good bonuses. I mean, they promise them. Eidos Montreal also had to deal with the fact that they're the Canadian branch of a company that doesn't exist. They got acquired by another company while they were trying to make their first game. That's got to make the development process a little more complicated. [STEPHANE] It's, uh--it's, uh, two years or more of development. You never know how it's gonna turn out. [booming] [HBOMB] It's easy to see why some aspects of the process got misplaced. Okay, I don't wanna make any more excuses for the developers. It's starting to feel a bit condescending. Let's talk about some of the choices the developers made about how to design this game. In a hugely informative Game Developers Conference talk about the development of "Human Revolution," game play director Francois Lapikas-- sorry if I'm pronouncing that wrong. My Kebequa--Kwabeccy? Kebeh-- My Canadian French isn't great-- says during pre-production, the team planned the entire game and all of its features and mechanics in advance and then stuck to that plan throughout development executing all of it with very few changes. [FRANCOIS] Uh, we did not redo systems. Uh, we did not rethink the game. We just went full-speed ahead. We knew exactly what we wanted this game to be, what we wanted the player to feel. [HBOMB] Having a plan makes sense but traditionally in game development, plans change over time as you see your game ideas in action and iterate and make changes. "Human Revolution's" main design team wrote all their initial ideas on huge sheets of paper and then stuck them to the walls and followed them religiously. [FRANCOIS] Everything I've shown you so far, we put on huge sheets of paper which we papered the walls over with. [HBOMB] Before they'd actually made the game, had a chance to see how it felt to play, or test things out, they'd already decided how almost everything was going to be. [FRANCOIS] So by having it, uh, on walls, every single morning when we came in, we saw exactly what we needed to do. They were so important in fact that when we moved to our, uh, final offices, it's the first thing we put up. [HBOMB] By the end, the team had made a game that was absolutely brilliant. On paper. When I say "Human Revolution" feels like the first few ideas a bunch of guys had in a brainstorming session right at the start of development, that's because it is the first few ideas a bunch of guys had in a brainstorming session right at the start of devel-- [wildly flapping tongue] Basically the whole ga-- [laughing] [FRANCOIS] Blueprint was a way for us to chart the whole game in advance. Just to show you, this is, uh, half of the blueprint. [HBOMB] Basically the whole game had been planned out on spreadsheets before they discovered, you know, some of it is boring and time-consuming, and then they realized they'd forgotten to plan half the stuff that needed to be there and had to add major components to the game at the last minute and everybody hated them. Lapikas apologizes directly in his talk for the boss fights. [FRANCOIS] They were a big part of the game and we should have put more efforts in them, so truly sorry about that. [HBOMB[ While I was watching this talk, I was beginning to write a joke in my notebook, like, "I guess no one wrote about the boss fights on the walls." But it turns out that actually happened. [FRANCOIS] Remember the direction sheets I was talking about at the beginning. We didn't have one for boss fights. We kind of forgot about it. Because we didn't have these direction sheets, we didn't really know what we were doing with boss fights. [HBOMB] Game development is a complicated process where initial ideas you had in a vacuum months ago might turn out not to work in practice. Just as a comparison, the team behind the original "Deus Ex" threw away half of their design document part way through. [Warren] We ended up with-- are you sitting down? 500 pages of documentation. Yeah. No one read it. Um... [audience laughing] [HBOMB] Warren Spector, the director of the first game, is really open about how much rethinking needed to be done to make the game what it is even though they thought they knew everything they needed at the end of pre-production. [HBOMB] The year "Deus Ex" came out, he wrote a retrospective for "Gamasutra" which incidentally changed its name to "Game Developer" while I was writing this video, which was confusing, and part of it covers just how much of their ideas got thrown out or replaced. [SHAUN narrating] [Warren] We were open to change. Be open to change. Anybody who tells you that, you know-- that when you get to the end of pre-production, "You've got a script and nothing changes," has never made a game, right? [FRANCOIS] Blueprint was a way for us to chart the whole game in advance. [HBOMB] On the one hand, you have a game that appears to have been designed pretty intensively before they'd even made any of it, and on the other you have a team months from release who realized there's a problem and go, "Wait, hold on a second." [HARVEY] Like, me and Warren and Chris would-- would sit in a room and fight like cats and dogs It's just kinda weird that you introduce some of these characters, you interact with them a little bit, and then they're just gone. He shows up in mission one, he shows up in mission two, he shows up in mission four, and then you never hear from him again. What happened to that guy? And it was a powerful question because it was one of the basics of storytelling that we as video game designers weren't yet applying, and so we went back. [HBOMB] I'm sure I could wrap this point up here in a neat little bow and say something like, "The real test of a creative work "isn't having a lot of good ideas. "It's understanding when you have to change them to make them work." But then you have to ask, "Why would anyone be so rigid about pre-production and unwilling to rethink things like this? Well, because they have to be. Think about how much game development has changed since the '90s. If someone had a better idea about a mechanic or wanted to rewrite the opening or redo some dialogue or swap the first two levels, it wasn't too much work, and crucially, not that much work was wasted. It's pretty easy to steer a canoe. Larger ships, however, are notoriously difficult to steer even when you see the problem in time. You know, like in that movie. Uh, "Speed 2?" Games are vastly more expensive to make now, need scores of programmers, artists, animators, directors, producers designers, writers. Companies need organizational-- wait, I have more. Production assistants, general managers, composers, sound designers, mocap artists, the entire second company you farmed out the boss fights to, not to mention voice actors you have to call back in to do more work if you need to change anything big, and incidentally, one of "Human Revolution's" other really big problems exists completely because they didn't want to have to call back a voice actor. [ELIAS] I never asked for this. [HBOMB] Things do need to be planned that much more in advance and stuck to pretty strictly if all these folks are gonna manage to come together to produce something that works at all. If someone on the team thought the opening kinda sucked and needed some reworking-- and I'm willing to bet several of them did-- what were they gonna do? Cut out millions of dollars of work? Remove all that content you made and have to make even more? Tell the higher ups you blew a ton of time and money and need more of it? They had to fight all the way to the top to get a fucking poster in here. Do you think they're gonna get that far asking them for the time to redo something this big? Now, I'm not strictly saying they wanted to fix the opening and couldn't. There's no way of knowing for certain unless someone who worked at Eidos Montreal wants to go on record. Please E-mail me. I'm just saying that in the AAA landscape that has sprouted as gaming became one of the biggest industries on the planet, you have so much less room to change and improve once you realize a guy disappears after mission four. And guess what? A guy literally does disappear after mission four. We'll get to that later. "Human Revolution" has many of the exact problems the original "Deus Ex" team have described their game having before they had the chance to go back and fix it. It just didn't get the polish and rethinking that made "Deus Ex" one quite so special, and this leads to much bigger problems than a boring opening. If you asked me what was the most important thing about these games-- and you're watching this video so implicitly you are asking me-- I'd say it's giving the player agency. Giving them the freedom to make their own choices. Most of "Human Revolution's" biggest issues spring from a misunderstanding of what this actually means. Instead of giving players meaningful choices to make as Adam Jensen, lots of the game is about watching Adam Jensen make his own choices without the player's control. [computer beeping] [upbeat piano music] During the first level of the manufacturing plant, while you're making your way through or past the gang that has occupied it, there are hostages you can try to save and there's also a climactic stand-off with Zeke Sanders-- the ring leader-- who has a hostage at gunpoint. You can trigger a shootout where he kills the hostage and then attacks you, but if you're quick enough, you can take him out first and the hostage survives. You can also just let him go. This will cause the hostage to be killed in the crossfire during his escape, but you can actually talk him into letting her go and just walking out. One of the hostages you can save earlier is this woman's husband. If you saved both of them, they feel indebted to you and tell you to catch up with them later at their place. [MAN] You're a true hero, man. I'll find some way to repay this. - I swear. - [HBOMB] If you do, they give you the address of an arms dealer and get him to give you a discount. This is a really neat little side story that ties into the player's actions. The discount isn't even that useful, for reasons we'll explore later, and these characters don't do anything else afterwards, but you don't need any wider effects than that for this to work. [WOMAN] I can never thank you enough for what you did. [HBOMB] The fun here comes from feeling briefly that you're tangibly involved in two tiny little digital lives-- that the things you're doing and how you do them can make a difference. This side quest is genuinely really nice. [VHS tape pauses] However, it's also the best you're getting. When it comes to the main story-- the thing you're focusing on for most of the game-- the player has little to no freedom or control. You get to choose the in-flight meal, but the plane's on auto pilot and oh, no, a metaphor for the direction the story's taking. The actual story of the manufacturing plant level is about Adam walking in on a hacker going after the company's sensitive data, and I say Adam here, not the player, because once you reach the door, you're forced to watch him immediately get seen by the hacker and watch him get hacked by a double hacker and then fail to stop the hacker shooting himself. [MAN] Help me! [gunshot] [tense music] [HBOMB] This is an important story moment they thought would be really cool, you see? So the player's ability to interact with it needed to take a backseat. You don't get to decide what to do about the hacker. You get to watch a movie. [ADAM] Patch me to Sarif. Now. [computer beeping] [machine whirring] [HBOMB] Oh, yeah! This is great! This could have been an engaging game play sequence. The player could have been able to knock them out using stealth or grab them before they manage to shoot themselves and only get this outcome if they were too slow and failed to stop them. You know, like that thing they do a few minutes later. Just do this but for the part of the story that actually matters. This would give the player a sense of direct interaction with the major events of the plot. The story wouldn't even need to change too much. Sure, this character dying here probably seems too important at first glance since the next quest involves breaking into the morgue of a police station to recover his brain computer from his body, but what if even if you knocked him out-- [blow lands] He mysteriously turned up dead in police custody? This would actually enhance the sense of a conspiracy while also making the player feel like they were involved in it. Instead of being, "How dare the police not give "my tech start-up complete access to a corpse they just recovered five minutes ago," it would be, "Holy shit, they're in on it. "They killed him! "We can't let them get away with this! Ooh!" Hang on. Can we just talk about the design of this room for a second? It's built so you can see the hacker when you come in through the frosted glass, but you can't, like, distract him or come in through another route or shoot him through the glass or get his attention in any way. You just have to watch him playing this animation until you trigger the cutscene by going through the door. You can even see there's another way in but you can't get over this stuff to get behind him. What's kind of insulting is they put an invisible wall here so you can't climb over it when you can climb over the stuff that's the same height right next to it. It's like they went out of their way to make it as obvious as possible that you have no choice except to come in through this room this one way and trigger the cutscene. Instead of giving you a reasonable amount of control, the game makes increasingly awkward attempts to make you feel like you're making more choices than you actually are. After the stand-off, the cops have alternate lines of dialogue for almost every specific big thing that happened at the factory. If Sanders got away, if you killed him, if you saved the hostages or not, they all instantly know and have thoughts about every major thing you just did. [MAN] Diffusing that bomb was some quick work. You should get a commendation. [HBOMB] You have no idea how quickly I diffused the bomb. You weren't there! [MAN] God damn! [thudding] [bangs] [MAN] Nice job securing the plant. I wouldn't have thought a security guard could handle this. [HBOMB] Doesn't even stop trying to kick the door down to tell me what he thinks about how I handled things. What a pro. When you get back to Sarif headquarters, everyone else reacts to your choices, too, in a way that starts to feel stilted and artificial, like they're breathing down your neck trying to make you feel noticed. [MAN] Talk's all over the office, Mr. J. You really took care of those Purity First assholes. [MAN] How'd you take 'em down without killing 'em? [HBOMB] Almost everyone at your job already has something to say. [WOMAN] How did that monster get away from you? [WOMAN] You saved the hostages, didn't you, Jensen? [MAN] Apparently there wasn't much bloodshed, thanks to you. [HBOMB] Pritchard has one of two dialogue lines based on how many guys you killed at the plant. [PRITCHARD] Well, well. If it isn't Attila the Hun fresh from the killing fields. [HBOMB] But if you killed very few people, he says this. [PRITCHARD] Well, if it isn't Mahatma Ghandi himself come to honor us all with his life-preserving presence. [HBOMB] Now, this is cute, accounting for the player's choices like this, but this one line is all that changes. In fact, even if you haven't killed anyone in the game yet, his next line is still this. [PRITCHARD] Stick to kicking down doors and shooting people, Jensen, and stop trying to do my job. [HBOMB] Someone wrote Pritchard to treat Jensen like a serial killer, then realized they should probably account for the possibility the player hasn't killed anyone and add in precisely one alternative line and moved on. I get the desire to make your home base feel like it's reacting to the player's choices. It's a really good idea on paper, and you know those guys loved paper. [laughs] Good one. But if you execute it poorly, it doesn't feel like characters reacting to things another character did. It feels like writers scrambling to find ways to make you feel involved in a story. [MAN] Jensen, is it true Sanders acted surprised when he heard about the hacker? [HBOMB] Uh, buddy, that just happened. I just got back right now. Who told you this? D--Did you read the script? Luckily, this problem solves itself. After the early levels, the player has so little control over what happens that NPCs run out of things to react to you doing. Either that or even the writers realized how weird it would be if the people at your Detroit headquarters were like, "Hey Adam, way to steal that key card from that brothel in China!" The game has another way of creating the illusion of choice, though. Many sequences have dialogue choices. These feel like choices because, well, they are, technically. But what the game doesn't tell you is these choices do nothing. [FARIDAH] So, how's it feel? - Being augmented? - [ADAM] Excuse me? [HBOMB] The main character Jensen interacts with in the game is Faridah Malik, Sarif Industries' pilot. When you leave for the first level, she asks how you feel about coming back into work. When you get back to her afterwards, she asks for your take on the events of the mission, and as soon as you land, she asks you how you feel about being augmented. You get a lot of opportunities to choose what to say to Malik. Getting to make the choices is nice, but none of this does anything. Malik maybe gets annoyed in reply to the thing you just said, but it doesn't have any wider effect. These choices aren't here to give you control over a relationship with a character. There' here to make you feel like you have that kind of control. The game just briefly pretends to be "Mass Effect" sometimes but with hexagons instead of a wheel. [ADAM] I think people should stop asking me so many questions. [HBOMB] Then about two minutes later, the player is asked by someone else how he feels about being augmented. [WOMAN] How do you handle all of this? [HBOMB] It's the "pretend players are making choices" trick so nice they used it twice. This time is special, though, because he says the line. [tense music] [beeps] [ADAM] I never asked for this. [ALL] Yay! [HBOMB] People were waiting with bated breath to see if Adam says the line from the trailer. I'm so glad they put it in there. A bunch of other stuff in the trailers didn't. [HBOMB] That's the most political thing Adam Jensen says. I want to play the game this was a trailer for. Oh, sweet. It's the cursed trailer version of this scene. This face haunts my nightmares. In many RPGs, how you talk to other characters affects how they feel about you, impacts the story, or comes back up in some way, you know? What if I told you that at no point do any dialogue choices you ever make affect anything other than the character's immediate reaction? There's a part where you can optionally help her unravel the death of one of her best friends and catch the real killer. What affect does this have on your relationship? She goes, "Thanks," and you never hear about it again. What if-- for example-- Adam could be a real piece of shit to his pilot and she stopped being friendly with him, or didn't ask for his help later, or straight up refused to work with him and he got assigned a worse pilot who didn't make small talk for the rest of the game? Instead you get to pick angry, happy, or ambivalent, and she goes, "Okay." And the game continues like nothing happened. Your pilot will still be your friend and still ask for your help in a later side quest no matter how you treat her. Even when you technically have a choice, it only accentuates how little control you're being given. [ADAM] So what do you want me to do, boss? [HBOMB] Take the mission to break into a police station morgue and find the hacker's delicious brain chips. You get this mission via your boss literally ordering you to do it. [DAVID] Get over to the station and find a way inside. Contact me when you've gotten a hold of it. [HBOMB] But this is a modern RPG with dialogue options, so you're given the option of saying, "Hey, you're ordering me to do a really big crime here, right?" [ADAM] What you're asking me to do, it's not exactly legal. [DAVID] No, it isn't. You got a problem with that? [HBOMB] You can make Adam say he's not happy about-- you know-- robbing a police station, but the response is, "Too bad! That's the game! Idiot!" - [ADAM] Yes, but-- - [DAVID] But nothing. So get goin'. [HBOMB] The creators wanted to do a mission where you have to get into a police station. That's fine and you have a lot of options for how to do that, but games which use dialogue like this usually offer different outcomes for making different choices. If this was "Mass Effect" or "Fallout," you could talk your boss into trying a different approach for getting the information he needs. Or alternatively you could just not offer the illusion of a choice. If Adam had just said of his own accord, "I don't like it but I see how it's the only option," and moved on, it wouldn't have been a problem. JC spoke for himself all the time. You're making the limits of the player's role in the story really obvious when their big choice in dialogue amounts to how willingly their character agrees to commit a crime. Adam Jensen is an ex-cop who doesn't play by the rules. Whether he likes it or not. Instead of you getting to make the choices, there's another character in the story making them for you: Cutscene Jensen. At numerous points, Adam either does something very stupid without you having a choice because the plot demands it, or worse-- he does something really cool. It would have been to actually play. There's one sequence later where the player plants a bomb on a desk. Luckily, they built the desk with a large glowing spot for in case someone needs to plant a bomb. They do those at Ikea now. Now, this is a setup to a potentially thrilling game play sequence where the player has to escape the explosion in time or find cover and capitalize on the distraction caused by the explosion, but instead, it cuts to a video of Jensen doing it. [beeping] [ADAM] Shit! [beeping] [HBOMB] I'm not gonna lie, though. This does look really fun and tense. [groaning] It would have been really fun to play it. [booming] [ADAM groans] [glass clinking] [HBOMB] The cutscene continues for another, like, minute and a half as Jensen hides from the guards and then he decides to hide in a shipping container, finds a cryogenic pod in the shipping container, and then decides to just climb into it for some reason. This is how you find out this pod exists, by the way. He just finds it and gets in it, and then he wakes up on a secret base a few days later. Oh. Well... That's cool. Couldn't the objective for the player have been to trigger that explosion and then get into the pod themselves? Like, that could have been a really fun mission. We just get to watch our guy have fun. Like, what? A pretty standard rule of games is that if something cool happens in the story, the player should get to do it. Warren Spector-- the director of "Deus Ex--" did a post-mortem on the game at GDC a few years back, and somewhat jokingly listed the Ten Commandments he had when he was developing the game, and one of them was to let players do the cool stuff. [WARREN] If something is cool, don't even think about letting an NPC do it. Players do the cool stuff. NPCs watch the player do the cool stuff. [HBOMB] I like to describe the first "Deus Ex" as surprisingly linear. Since the player is always the one doing the important things with no cutscenes doing it for them, you always feel like the driving force of the story even though technically you're just completing an objective someone gave you. So when all the most pivotal moments in the game consist of Adam doing the cool stuff while you watch-- which occasionally pauses to ask you if you'd like to do something else before forcing you anyway-- you start to feel like a non-player character in the game that you're playing. Some of "Human Revolution's" potentially best playable moments take the form of heavily-compressed 720p video files. After making his way to the CEO of the corporation that might have murdered his coworkers and loved ones, a cutscene plays where she tries to shoot him and he disarms her. Then there's some back and forth and a few seconds later he turns his back on her and give her the opportunity to trick him and lock him out of the room and send, like, 12 guys after him. [ZHAO] Men never fail to underestimate women. [HBOMB laughing] Gender! You spend hours getting to the executive suite of this corporation. You put in all this work, and then Cutscene Jensen just-- oops! [WARREN] Situations where the player has no chance to react, uh, in the "Deus Ex" world are bad. [ADAM] Shit! [booming] [HBOMB] You can't have contrived developments like this without seriously affecting the player's sense they have any say in the story. This segment is especially easy to recognize as a problem because it has a beat-for-beat equivalent in "Deus Ex" one, meaning we can directly compare the two. When JC Denton goes after his game's female CEO of a large Chinese biotech corporation which seems to be part of the conspiracy-- wow, they just copied that, didn't they? The character welcomes you in and tells you a fairly compelling story about being friends with your brother and which faction is responsible for the current problems. You have to figure out what to do next with that information. If you believe her and follow her objective, she goes into hiding and the job she gives you turns out to be basically a trap to kill you. Yeah, breaking into a Hong Kong police station looking for evidence they supposedly covered up-- that's not a recipe for getting exploded. The player gets to actively decide whether to trust her. If they did, they have to have a lightsaber fight with her when they run into her again because this game is so cool. [whirring] [MAGGIE] Time to die, J-- [blow lands] [screaming] [HBOMB] Or they can snoop around some more in her apartment and find the entire secret base in her home, or they can just, like, shoot her. Like, right away. Or snipe her from another building without ever talking to her. Throw a bomb through her window. [MAGGIE screams] [HBOMB] I just want to observe for a second that in the original "Deus Ex" breaking into a police station is a trap to try to kill you that was meant to sound so ridiculous you realize you're being tricked and choose to do something else, but in "Human Revolution," it's the only option you have to progress the story and you cannot say no. Players being able to make choices and express themselves would get in the way of the amazing movie the creators wished they were making. Spoilers: they want this character to be the final boss so you have no choice but to sit and watch Adam delay the plot by ten more hours. This problem bleeds into the game play. While there's often a degree of choice in how you solve problems, the consequences of your choices are meaningless because the story wasn't designed to account for them. You can recover the neural hub from the police station by, well, annihilating it. You don't have to bother with talking your way in by absolving a cop of the guilt of the child he killed, or sneaking in via the side entrance or the roof or the sewers. You can also go in guns blazing. Make a real hog roast of a building full of human beings and the cops interrogating them, too. This is a refreshing, "New Vegas-esque" level of freedom to be given in how to dea with a situation. 100% coolest level in the game in terms of player freedom. I mean, look how many cops you can kill. How could it possibly be a bad level? [MAN shouts] [MAN groans] [HBOMB laughing] This fucking clown car office. What the fuck is this? What, were they guarding this vent? The problem with this level is the effect these choices have. Or rather, should have. Like, this would be a big deal, right? We were just caught on camera killing a lot of people. This is one of the top ten mass shootings in America. This week. Our face should be on the news. We'd be a wanted man. Sarif Industries would have to fire us and issue a public apology for giving us both the arms and the arms to do it with. The debate on if augmentations should be legal would shift a bit. I'm not an expert on video game story telling, but something should happen as a result of this, right? [ADAM] Boss, I got the neuro hub. [HBOMB] What happens is nothing. Everything's fine. This never comes up. You come back to Detroit later in the game and there's no wanted posters. The cops are friendly. Nothing has happened. But then what if you learned to like the taste of bacon and keep going? What if you continue to fight cops in the street, blow up their mechs, snipe them, explode them, just fucking go to town on an entire police force? You wanna know what happens then? When you get done with a quest in a convention center, on your way out, a cop approaches you with a side quest to help the police. [MAN] Adam, I need you to trust me on this. You gotta help me find Jacob. [HBOMB] They need help stopping a terrorist who hates cops. No, they're talking about someone else. You get offered this quest when you leave the convention center even if you have killed every cop you've ever seen so far in the game. They're really short staffed because of the riots which is why they need outside help from an ex-cop. The fact Adam is a big reason why they're short staffed doesn't cost him the job, apparently. Just think about that! You can do an actual mass murder and get deputized by the survivors to catch a psychopath with a fraction of your body count. The game feels almost embarrassed about it, too. Since accounting for how each player dealt with the police station would have required a lot of work, on your second visit to Detroit, the police station is completely closed and you can't even go in. There's no two ways around it. This is cheating. They're dodging the responsibility of doing anything with the choices they gave the player. The best you get is if you do tenderize the gammon warehouse, a newspaper in the next level says, "Massacre at police station," or something. This newspaper is so easy to miss, I didn't get any footage of it during this play through. So if you blink, you miss the consequences of going to war with the Detroit PD. The effects of your choices fade away once you make them. Look. Nature is healing. The cops are right back patrolling the streets I killed their buddies in. You see those guns on the ground? Those are the guns the guys I killed on my way in dropped when I murdered them. The game treats the player's choices about violence extremely weirdly, forgiving you for even the most extreme acts of terror-- [booming] [all groaning] But also making sure you can't play the game truly peacefully, either. I mean, let me just read you one of the game's achievements. [clears throat] [Alexander Brandon's "Main Title"] ♪ ♪ [WOMAN screaming] ♪ ♪ [men groaning] [WOMAN shouting] ♪ ♪ [men shouting] ♪ ♪ [WOMAN gasping] [unsettling music] ♪ ♪ [MAN exhales] ♪ ♪ [HBOMB] Now, it might just be me, but the standards for pacifism have really slip-- wait, that guy's still alive! Get him! [both shouting] It's important to stress here that "Deus Ex" never did anything like this. Technically speaking, it only had cutscenes when you got into a plane and were traveling to the next level, and I guess the endings, too. Everything else was either game play or dialogue. At no point does JC Denton do something of his own accord. He's the player's avatar. He's meant to be an expression of your choices. Meanwhile, no matter how peaceful you make Adam Jensen behave, there's still going to be a cutscene where he tries to shoot a woman in the chest. [ZHAO screaming] [HBOMB] Pacifist! There's a bit of a disconnect here in terms of how much control the player has, is what I'm saying. It's always insulting to not have a choice in something or be congratulated for not doing something that you literally have to do, but what's even worse is when a game tells you you're going to be given a choice and then just forgets. There's one incredibly strange part where the second boss character, Rihanna, is heavily injured from the fight and Jensen is asked if he will help her. [WOMAN] Her life signs are fading. Will you save her? [ADAM] I'll think about it. [HBOMB] But then she just quietly dies and is a corpse once the cutscene is over. [dog barking] There was a dog barking. Apparently in an early draft of the game, the player got to decide if they killed bosses after defeating them and then they decided not to or weren't able to add this mechanic for whatever reason. [MARY] Initially we had wanted to have the final blow for the bosses was up to the player to decide whether he was gonna do it or not. And we never did change the lines. [HBOMB] After the next boss fight, the guy's like, "Ugh, finish it," because he's a badass. That's his character, right? And Jensen's like, "Not until you tell me what I need to know." And then he dies anyway, like, a second later. You can smell the point in the cutscene where a moral choice would have gone and then, well, they kind of lost that in the process of their production. I think that's a diplomatic way of saying they didn't finish the game. This lack of control over the story to the extent players are being told they're going to get some choices which they are then not given makes the story start to feel flat and like you're not really taking part in it. Now, to be clear, the game isn't completely devoid of branching story choices. At one point near the end, you get shot down, and if you don't kill a couple guys, the pilot is killed. It's intended as a reference to the original where your pilot can also die, but in "Deus Ex," it's an excuse for investigation and subterfuge. You have to find the corpse of a mechanic and wonder what's up with that. Notice the weird guy also dressed as a mechanic? [ODD MECHANIC] I fixed her right up for you. [HBOMB] And kill him or report him to his boss. [JC] That mechanic was an impostor. [JACK] Oh, my God! JC, a bomb! [JC] A bomb! [HBOMB] You can completely miss all of this if you're not paying attention and if you do miss it, hours and hours later on the last level, your pilot's copter explodes and you don't really know why. This is part of the subtle beauty of the original. The game doesn't make it clear how much control you have sometimes. So when this happens, you get to wonder if you could have saved him. There's tons of minor ways the story can change that some players don't even know about and only find out about on forums years later. This isn't quite as special when it's shoot all of these guys or your pilot dies now. Also the way the game accounts for her death just sucks. If you save her she later heroically flies in to knock out some guys and save the scientists you rescued, but if she dies, obviously this means she doesn't turn up so there's some serious story implications for the survival of these scientis--just kidding. An aircraft is on the landing pad now for no reason, and they fly it out. What? They could have made Faridah Malik's death have interesting consequences and they just don't! They just don't! There is one really good story choice in the game, though. [WOMAN] See you soon, Mr. Jensen. [ADAM grunts] [HBOMB] Partway through you start having minor glitches and it becomes clear it's affecting other augmented people, too. You all have them at once, even. - [MAN shouts] - [MAN grunts] [HBOMB] I like how it's done, too, these minor mutual freak outs where everyone gets injured and confused. This is some pretty neat storytelling, actually. [beeping] Uh, well, it's still pretty good. Anyway, you get a side objective to replace the defective chip causing this. If you go to a clinic, the game goes, "Are you sure you wanna do this?" As if to say, "Hey, you're making a big choice here," and for once, you are. If you get the replacement then in a later level before a boss fight, the lady from before flips a switch and you have to fight the boss with your screen all fuzzy. Wow, my choices affected the story. If you think this is the smartest thing in the game, I'm very sorry to tell you that you are correct. It is. There's another little way the plot can kind of branch, actually. If you wait around at your HQ before going to the first mission, your boss yells at you to get to the helipad. - [DAVID] The helipad! - [HBOMB] And eventually, the hostages you could have saved in that mission are dead before you get there. [DAVID] Christ, Adam, while you were strolling around the offices, the situation got worse. [HBOMB] Wait a second, though. The game just dropped me in a new level full of people to talk to and then yelled at me to ignore all of it to get to the mission as fast as I can? Yeah, I really have the sense that time is of the essence in "Human Revolution." [door hisses] [ADAM] Oh, my God. Did you ever think about how, like, the myth of Icarus is about trans humanism? Like, with the wings? [MEGAN] No, I didn't. A--Adam, that's-- that's really stupid. [ADAM] You see? This is why we broke up. I still can't believe you don't like "Ghost in the Shell." [MAN] Oh, my God. Are you guys talking about "Ghost in the Shell?" That is one of the most important movies ever made. I cannot wait to see it. [HBOMB] This is a game that just made you unskippably go on a walking tour of a floor of this building. They took their sweet fucking time. Why can't I? [MEGAN] I mean, the guy's name is Batou-- the French word for boat. And he owns a boat? [stammers] Come on. [ADAM] We don't know he owns the boat. - [MAN] Oh, shit! - [ADAM] That's not in the Wiki. [HBOMB] This game does not get to say, "Hey, we're on the clock here," after slapping you in the face with this opening. Fuck you if you think this is clever. [laughs] Sorry. NO, that's a joke. This is pretty clever, but for that to be one of the few times the story is affected by your choices is just insulting. I think the worst thing about all this is how promising it manages to be about its characters and choices at times. There's a blueprint in here for a fantastic story with all kinds of little choices like this one. The couple that you can save at the manufacturing plant are a great example, too, but I especially like the way Zeke Sanders is used, not because the pre-rendered cutscene is just that cool and badass but because eventually the cutscene ends and you get to be involved in the story. If you knock him out he's in the police station talking about how he'll be out soon anyway because he has powerful friends. [ZEKE] I won't be here long. [HBOMB] If you killed him, he's in the morgue next to the guy whose neural hub you need. If you let him go he later contacts you and gives you some information in return, like he feels like he owes you one. [ZEKE] My debt is paid. [HBOMB] It's really neat how different your relationship with this one guy can get based on what you did. Way later in the game if he survived all this, he's a hostile NPC during the mission to go after a guy who it turns out-- surprise twist-- is actually his brother. Sanders'? Sanders's? Ezekiel's impact on the story is minimal after the first encounter. He could die right here so they can't make him too important but he's what you really want to see from a game like this. Characters who react to your choices and feel like their own pieces of a larger world. I hate to say it but very few other characters are as well thought out as this. Take his brother I just mentioned. Isaias Sandoval is a high-ranking member of a different, non-terroristy anti-augmentation group You meet him a few levels in and you can argue with him about augmentations although none of it affects the story at all. It's just optional dialogue. Later he shows up in a recording interacting with the guys who shot you and killed-slash-kidnapped your friends. - [ADAM] I know this guy. [HBOMB] When you get to Sandoval, he tells you what he knows, then tries to shoot you. But if you found out his location by publicly implicating him in the conspiracy in front of his boss, his boss basically pins everything on him so instead, once you get here, he's distraught and decides to kill himself as penance for his crimes, which he feels genuine guilt over. You get the chance to try to talk him down over the course of a deeply engaging conversation, and for a few minutes, everything about this game really works. Sandoval feels like a character with a real inner life who we have to speak to like a person and we're only having this conversation in the first place because of the effects of another choice we made. This is a perfectly sculpted piece of a really good game. It's one of the reasons why this game is worth talking about because it's disheartening that the game is missing the rest of the pieces. Firstly, this character isn't someone you got to deal with in any particularly meaningful way beforehand. You met him once for five seconds half a game ago. Instead of being the culmination of a relationship between two characters, it's just a really resonant moment in the middle of a story that's become a bit of a mess, which you had little to no say in. And worse: now the game is done with him, he instantly exits the story, and is never seen again. Sandoval already told you everything you need to know in the cutscene before this standoff so if you talk him down or if he kills himself or if you talk him down and then kill him for fun, or if none of this happened and this room was just a fight-- [bonk] Ow! It doesn't change anything. The story is not affected in any way by any of these outcomes. This character's survival-- especially considering you can convince him to turn on the other conspirators and come out with the truth should have interesting plot implications. His death or survival should have had an impact on what sort of ending you get. Oh, God. Don't get me start-- but once you're done, he just sits there. His part in the story is completed now. [Isaias] You don't need to wait with me, Mr. Jensen I will not resist my fate when it arrives. [HBOB] Yeah, get out of here. I need to sit here for a week so I don't have a chance to introduce consequences to the plot. [HARVEY] It's just kind of weird that you introduce some of these characters, you interact with them a little bit, and then you never hear from them again. What happened to that guy? [HBOMB] It's so easy to imagine how much better the game could have handled its characters and choices. Like, what if your attitude towards augmentations in the previous meeting affected how Sandoval treated you once you found him? Like, if you seemed amenable to anti-augmentation arguments, he saw you as a potential friend here and trusted you with the information because he figured you'd do the right thing with it. What if-- just a thought-- how you treated his brother the last three times you ran into him affected his feelings about you? The fact you literally shot his brother to death or let him go during an armed stand-off somehow never comes up. What if turning him against his boss had some really cool or meaningful consequence so the player feels like they really did something? Like, I'm not saying the story has to branch in some huge way, but do something. Maybe he gives you the key to his gun cabinet and it's full of weapon upgrades, or those grenades he apparently had on him. Literally the only difference is a newspaper says something different and I guess you get more experience points for talking him down. This is especially weird because "Deus Ex" had a knack for remembering things you did and having them come up later. The first level of this game also had a hostage to save, one of many direct parallels between the games, and whether you bothered to save him or not affects how he feels about you for the rest of the game. [GUNTHER] I have seen that he knows the procedure of a good offensive. I will not forget a favor. [HBOMB] Even when he becomes a boss fight, he'll still have a grudging respect for you. [GUNTHER] I regret that only once we worked together. [HBOMB] You can walk in on a guy asking a doctor for maintenance advice and learn he has the same augmentations as you. The fact you did this comes up 20 hours later when you fight him. [HBOMB] All I'm saying is it would have been nice if Sandoval acknowledged something as important as whether I killed his brother or not. That's not too much to ask, is it? This whole cutscene I was waiting for him to say something, but no. The game cares so little for how this scene works out that no matter what happens, one second later, Adam makes an identical phone call. I see you! [ADAM] Pritchard, get this. The GPLs are still transmitting. Sandoval switched them to a lower frequency. [SANDOVAL] Take the gun. You win. [ADAM] Pritchard, get this. [SANDOVAL] Forgive me. [gunshot] [thuds] - [ADAM] Pritchard, get this. - [HBOMB] Hey Pritchard, a guy just killed himself right in front of me. Anyway, check this out. Couldn't you at least have got a few different takes? Oh, Sandoval. You could have been so cool. But once I leave this room, you cease to exist. Goodnight, sweet prince, and may flights of angels-- oh, that actually kill-- oh, Jesus. Getting to make more choices like this would have vastly improved the experience. I hate that we didn't get a game full of stuff like Zeke Sanders, but after a few hours, it becomes clear the player is less of a participant and more a chauffeur transporting Cutscene Jensen between opportunities to trip over his own dick. [ADAM] Women never fail to underestimate men. [HBOMB laughs] Gende-- this is how a cyberpunk game about our trans humanist future addresses gender. Men do be shopping. [chuckling] For augmentations. As the story makes it increasingly clear, the person playing it is only tangentially involved, people stop paying attention. You don't have any say in what's happening, so what's the point? That's Cutscene Jensen's problem. The problem the player has to deal with is the sweeping and often misguided changes to the original's game play. [beeping] [tense music] [footsteps clopping] [all speaking at once] [MAN screaming] [HBOMB] "Deus Ex" is a tremendously important game in the history of the medium. One of if not the best of all time. Hold on, let me-- [keyboard clacking] There we go. Many designers on all types of games cite it as a direct inspiration for their own work, but it's been over 20 years now. Is "Deus Ex" really as good as everyone rememb-- yes. Yes, it is. Shut the fuck up. There's a good reason why there's a decades-old in-joke that every time you mention it, someone will reinstall it. In-jokes are what people call memes when they're funny. It's the ultimate example of a game that's more than the sum of its parts. That phrase gets thrown around a lot by by game critics trying to punch up their reviews with fancy words but this is the rare time when it's actually true. In post-mortems and retrospectives, Warren Spector is delightfully open about how--right down to the wire, mere months from release-- the game just wasn't fun. [WARREN] By September, 1999, we were done, except we weren't. The game was not good enough. It wasn't ready to ship. [HBOMB] "Deus Ex" was made out of so many individual components that had to not just work well, but work well together that it was a huge mess right up until it suddenly became a beautiful web of interlocking systems. [WARREN] So we had real people come in and play the game. I called that particular milestone the, "Wow, these missions suck," milestone. Uh, we had a lot-- a lot of work to do. [HBOMB] This is why this game's formula is hard to recreate and even harder to improve on. So many moving parts have to work with each other. Even if a change sounds good or even is good in some contexts, since every change affects the way all the systems relate to each other, it can still result in a worse game. [WARREN] And immersive sims come together very late and all of your little game systems and rules are all working together magically to produce this-- this amazing experience. [HBOMB] The creators of "Human Revolution" made a lot of big changes to these core mechanics. Lapikas's talk contains a segment where he summarizes the "Human Revolution" team's collective criticisms of the original. [FRANCOIS] I'm about to say some negative things about the best PC game of all times. [HBOMB] Now, see here, buddy! Okay, but seriously, it's really good to take an especially critical look at a game even if it's as beloved as the original. You know, if you seriously want to improve on "Deus Ex," this is how you start. The issue is what they decided were problems and how they fixed them. The game was designed specifically for the PS3 and Xbox 360 with a separate company entirely handling the PC port. The creators appear to be trying to streamline down the "Deus Ex-"perience for console players, removing many mechanics they feared wouldn't appeal to people who don't like complicated RPGs. Lapikas says they didn't dumb it down in his talk but I think we get to be the judge of that. So obviously the first thing we should look at is the first thing that happens in the game: character creation. Not "Human Revolution's" character creation, of course, because, uh, there isn't any. [beeping] [upbeat music] In true RPG fashion, "Deus Ex" slaps you in the face with a spreadsheet before you can start playing. [beep] Ow, my brain! At least the default name isn't None this time. Everyone calls you JC, but that's just the character's code name. You can enter a real name and it comes up in a few places here and there. [MAN] You Denton? [HBOMB] and even though it's a little clunky, it's always fun to be making meaningful choices as soon as you begin. There's no 45-minute openings and tutorials to get through first The tutorial's actually a separate thing you can skip entirely, and for the year 2000, being able to choose your ethnicity was pretty cool. It was so nice to finally find a game that represented my skin type. Throughout the game, you acquired more skill points and could level up more at any time through the menu. It's a very rewarding system to engage with, but you know, it's a lot of looking at numbers, thinking, making fun decisions-- you know, boring nerd stuff. In Lapikas's critical summary, he calls "Deus Ex" a "heavy management kind of game." Oh, no, what if the gamers see a character creation screen? They might instantly decide the game is bad and go back to "Gears of War." We better make it simpler just in case. So character creation is out, but the team were actually very smart about how they went about this. They still realized the importance of getting to make choices about the character and that sense of growth and development, and they found a way to make that still happen because in the first game you were also developing in a much more engaging way at the same time. Throughout the world, you were finding augmentation canisters which provided special, unique upgrades to the player's abilities on a completely separate screen from the skill point one. So the team made a pretty clever streamlining decision and combined these two systems into one. [booming] Now you do all your upgrading on one menu and instead of acquiring, managing, and spending thousands of points, you get updates by spending Praxis Points, which are either found in the world or given to you every time you gain enough experience. If your goal is to simplify character progression, this is a really obvious and smart choice. It's less complicated and more direct. You spend a point on a thing and now you can do the thing. Whee. A lot of the more boring skills have been removed. Swimming? Get outta here! Adam doesn't do any swimming in the entire game. They streamlined the game so well there aren't even any streams. But overall I'd say all of this is pretty good. Well, it's definitely simpler, at least. But to simplify a mechanic means removing something from it, and that means you risk removing what made the thing you're simplifying fun in the first place. You can always improve on an old design but sometimes it worked that way for a reason, because here's the thing about augmentation canisters. You didn't just get to pick an augmentation when you found one. Each canister had two specific abilities in it and you could only choose one of them. In any given play through, you only got up to half the abilities you could have. You were building a unique character who couldn't have everything. In "Human Revolution," you're just picking them from a list and you can get all of them if you have enough points. By the end of the game, everyone's JC Denton was a little bit different. Everyone's Adam Jensen is exactly the same. He just gets there in a slightly different order. I wanna take a moment to appreciate the original game's augmentation system, because while the experience point stuff was a turn off to some people, the augs were a thing of beauty. You see, since each canister had only two augmentations in it and you could only choose one, the player was being given an extremely engaging choice. Hey, do you want to run faster or run silently? Because it's a choice between just two things, it's elegant and clear and hard to get anxious about which choice to make. You just have to decide which you want more. It's a binary choice. It's literally the simplest kind of choice there is. When you get a Praxis Point in "Human Evolution," the game says, "Great. "Please pick one of 30 things to spend it on "in a huge menu full of sub-menus. "And by the way, you can't get half of them because you actually needed two points." For a huge portion of players, the very first experience with the augmentation system is finding the first point, opening a menu, and spending several minutes reading all the things they could do with it, realizing they need two to get anything good, and they have to close the menu down again and carry on playing until they find another. Worse, this extreme amount of things to choose from causes a kind of decision anxiety which never happened in the original where there's much more simple choices. You know how tons of people play "Human Revolution?" They don't spend their points. They hoard them until they find a hole they need the slow fall power to get down or a wall they wanna punch or another thing that needs an augmentation to progress and spend the points right then and there. So you're not really building a character anymore. You're paying a toll once you hit a section that needs a certain skill. The design of the system is misleading about how complicated it is. This clip is of me spending 45 seconds looking for an augmentation I wanted. You know, the one that lets you take down two guys at once in physical combat using your arms? Where would that power be? The arm sub-menu? Correct, it should be there, but it's actually here in the back augmentations. It has a special sub-menu just to itself for no reason. And just to really fuck with you, the take down one person augmentation is in the arm sub-menu, and you start with this one already unlocked. Wh--why is this here? What are you trying to do to me? Ow, my brain! Wait, and Carrying Capacity's in the arm sub-menu, but you're not holding everything in your arms all day! You're carrying it on your back! Put it on the back augmenta-- So if the objective was to simplify character progression, I don't think they achieved it nearly as well as they'd hoped. In practice--or should I say, "In Praxi--" this system removes the best things about the system it's based on in the name of a simplicity that wasn't actually achieved. You also have to wait a while before you can do any character building whatsoever. The game tries to make sure you only get a second praxis after the standoff at the very end of the level. And this was done deliberately to hide another problem. The conversation enhancer augmentation costs two points and lets you make additional choices in dialogue based on the other character's soy levels. [ADAM] I'll kill you. It's nice to have more options but it tells you which answer will work using colored lights, turning social engagements into "Simon Says." In longer conversations, it vomits even more UI onto your screen which disrupts the experience. The Sanders standoff is much less tense with all this stuff everywhere telling you how to win. Anyway, if you play the first level in a really meticulous way, you can get two praxis points before meeting Sanders, If you spend them on the conversation enhancer, the game does a strange thing. It only throws some of the stuff it's supposed to and it doesn't give you any more dialogue options. You can't see his alpha, beta, or omega levels. Shit, he's a Sigma male! Jensen, get out of there! You see, in the original plan for the game you weren't able to just open a menu and unlock augmentations at any time. You had to go to a clinic to get them installed. This worked as world-building, but also sucked. Imagine finding something you need an augmentation for, then having to go to the doctor to get it and come all the way back. Later in development the system was changed to how it works now, which was a clear improvement. However, the rest of the game had already been designed around the original system, and you don't go to a clinic until the first mission is over, so the level was made assuming players don't have any augmentations-- for example, the conversation enhancer. Zeke's voice actor already recorded all his lines before this change was made meaning there was no way his character could react to the enhancer with new dialogue. So to avoid too many players noticing, they deliberately paced the game's progression really slowly. [MARY] And at the time that we wrote it, we didn't even have the concept of--of praxis kits. You had to go to the limb clinic to get operated on. So I think that's why we decided not to have it initially in this conversation, because we knew you wouldn't have had a chance to get it yet. [JEAN-FRANCOIS] Exactly. [HBOMB] So character progression for entire hours of the game is almost nonexistent because they had to avoid a scenario they hadn't planned for, and the saddest thing about this is, the developers are obviously painfully aware of all this. [JEAN-FRANCOIS] At the beginning of the game, the pacing to get augmentations is too slow. [radio hisses] [HBOMB] This is one of the reasons why modern big games production pipelines are often so rigid, in case you were interested. When you chart an entire game in advance and then change your mind about how something works, you risk breaking all the stuff that was made assuming the game worked differently. This is an explanation but not really an excuse. They could have just made the social enhancer unlock later or cost three points and make it so players could get two a bit sooner, or hey, maybe write and record a few more lines for one of the best characters in this thing? That would have been really cool, but also a lot more work for the extreme edge case of players picking this augmentation. Cumulatively, the new augmentation system massively affects the feel of the entire surrounding game. In "Deus Ex" the augmentation canisters were unique, specific objects. If you didn't find the canister with the augmentation you wanted in it, you never got it. This made exploring really fun because unique stuff you wanted could be hidden here, and finding one felt great. It was a new set of possibilities. The entire world was more engaging. Do you know how I found out there was a cloaking device in "Deus Ex?" I hacked into a secret lab's storage chamber and stole their augmentations and one of them was a cloaking device. It felt like a discovery-- a reward for engaging with the world and looking around and paying attention, and then you have a cool thing for the whole game that feels good to use because it feels like you earned it. In "Human Revolution," the cloaking device is staring at you in the augmentation sub-menu as soon as you open it for the first time and you can unlock it whenever you want for two praxis points. Is that as fun an experience? A thing I love about games like "Deus Ex" and "New Vegas" is the sense they're full of secrets and new things to find. A corner of an abandoned vault might have a one-of-a-kind gun in it. A safe in a terrorist hideout has a speed enhancement in it. When you find it, it doesn't just feel cool. It makes you want to find and open every safe in the world to see what else is in them. What if instead of all of this unique, special stuff you tangibly found it was just a stack of money you could spend buying those things in a sub-menu or at a store? It's not fun exploring a world whose most high-value reward for exploring is a floppy disk that gives you a point you already have six of but won't spend yet because you have to save them in case it turns out you need something. I guarantee you a lot of players miss some pretty easy-to-find praxis points because looking for them was boring. Oh, there's a praxis point in this elevator shaft. What an adventure. It's not game-ruining that it works this way. It just makes everything a lot less fun than it could have been, and why? In the name of making it a bit simpler? "Human Revolution" is definitely slightly more welcoming this way. A spreadsheet doesn't appear when you hit "New Game," and at no point do you need to remember to open a menu to spend experience points and discover you've forgotten to do so for hours and have thousands of them now, but this simplicity comes at the expense of being able to make unique and personal decisions about your character and their role in the world. The original was far from perfect, but many of the complications are what made it fun, and taking those things out isn't necessarily an improvement. That said, they tried to improve some aspects of the game by adding more to them, and that isn't always a good idea, either. One of the first criticisms on Lapikas's list is that hacking is completely passive. So now we need to explore what he means by that. Oh, no! [beeping] [tense music] In the original game, to hack a computer, you move your mouse over to the hacking device and press the "Hack" button. For more tutorials like this, please consider subscribing. Then you wait, and by wait, I mean wait ten actual human seconds. Have a sip of coffee. Watch the cute little "Matrix" animation. Ah. Oh, it's called the ICE Breaker. That's cute. That's a common cyberpunk term when it comes to hacking. It originates from, uh, Billy Jibson's "Neurotic Munste--" oh, I'm in. [beeping] I mean-- [clears throat] [raspy voice] I'm in. Sorr--sorry, I said it wrong. Then you have the remaining time on your hack-o-meter to use the device and close out of it before the alarm goes off. But wait a second! Hacking is pressing a button and waiting for everything you want to hack for the whole game? That sounds boring. Gamers won't like that. I don't think they have any patience because I don't respect them. Whoa, whoa. Slow down, Caucasian architect looking at blueprints. You'd better take a seat, buddy, and listen to my points abo-- oh, thank you. You see, the hacking itself is only one piece of the puzzle. While you're trying to manipulate this device, people can see you trying to hack it, often people you might not want seeing you like guards or the terrorists you're hiding from or genetically engineered space aliens. Your vision is blacked out while you're in this screen, so if you didn't check the coast was clear, the time it takes to hack is risky. [beeping] [JC shouts] [screaming] [HBOMB] Despite being literally just sitting and waiting, it's strangely tense. You committed to this. Was that a good idea? Sure, if the game was just a hacking simulator, it would be terrible and not have much game play, but when you're sitting there exposed in a building full of guys who are looking for you, hearing the camera right behind you moving back and forth, watching that meter slowly tick down, it's exciting. Hacking is also a skill so when you level it up, it gets much faster and you can do more things with computers you've hacked. This means investing more in hacking and watching it go increasingly quickly and become more useful feels inherently rewarding. You feel more powerful in a very direct way. More importantly, hacking is always optional. If you didn't like the hacking, you literally never had to do it. If you were untrained in computers, you couldn't hack at all. You didn't even have the ICE Breaker. The fact it's an active choice and a skill you invest in and the wait creates tension means hacking isn't really passive. It just might sound like it in a designer's head when they aren't considering everything else around it. The problem with treating hacking as passive is that every developer tries to make it less passive in the exact same way. How, you ask? With a fucking mini game. [quirky music] Oh, my God! "Bioshock," no! If I wanted to play this bloody pipe game, I've got, like, 50 choices to pick from on Newgrounds.com! What are you doing, Bethesda? You lock hacking behind a skill and then make me play an annoying mini game every time I want to use that skill anyway? Come on, "Prey!" You're a really good example of a modern take on this type of game! Wh--why would you do this to me? I have a lot of problems with "Mass Effect," but chief among them is someone decided the story would only be sufficiently epic if the Commander Shepard took frequent breaks to play cylindrical "Frogger!" [buzzing] [clicking] [clicks] You don't even know what this game is, do you? You and me, we're friends, right? So I can trust you with this. I have the pet theory that all hacking mini games are bad, even when they're good. [laughing] I can't wait to justify this! Some of these mini games are kind of fun to do, especially the one in "Brigand: Oaxaca." I couldn't resist not telling you what it was. My problem is that when you have to do them a lot, they start to really distract from the game you want to actually be playing. This isn't a recent trend that started after "Deus Ex." It's a constant in gaming history that "Deus Ex" avoided. Many of the game's developers used to work at Looking Glass Studios, the company that produced "System Shock One" and "Two." 1999's "System Shock 2" has a hacking mini game in it and it's a fine mini game, but the problem is, it isn't fine 100 times. "System Shock 2" is only a ground-breaking survival horror RPG set on a cool space station some of the time. A lot of the time, "System Shock 2" is a simplistic puzzle game you play in the corner of your screen. Hacking mini games were already a thing in 1999 and they were already pretty clearly not the best idea. The "Deus Ex" team didn't forget to add a hacking mini game. They chose not to make hacking a repetitive chore. Every one of these mini games wastes way, way more of your precious human time on Earth than "Deus Ex" ever did. By the end of any of these games, you're begging to be able to just press a button and wait a few seconds to hack something. [beeping] Holy shit. Holy shit. Th--they made it so there's no hacking mini-- oh, my God! I love this game! "Human Revolution's" developers were making a prequel to the game that got it right, which is why it's such a shame they decided the original's hacking was a mistake that needed fixing. [beeps] [beeping] This is fine. I--it's just a lot of clicking on stuff. But hey, you feel more active, right? [beeps] You're clicking on stuff. [beeps] That's game play! [WOMAN] Access granted. [beeps] [HBOMB] Hacking also grants experience points which means-- oh no-- if you're trying to get as many experience points as possible, that means even when you have the password to a computer, you'll be hacking it anyway. Have fun, completionists. The smart thing to do would be to just give players the same experience points for if they knew the password. "Mankind Divided" actually does this. Thanks, guys. Now I don't have to play as much of the same fucking mini game because they didn't change it! In his talk, Lapikas says during development this mini game was feature complete in under two weeks. [FRANCOIS] It took two weeks before anything else in the game--I think two years before we shipped, hacking was done and we were playing it. [HBOMB] If you've played this game all the way through, it is genuinely possible you've spent more time playing the hacking mini game than any of the developers did making it. Not that that's really a bad thing, though. Mini games are at risk of being a sunk cost feature. You could easily waste ages trying to make this slightly more fun and I'm glad they spent the time elsewhere. My point is they should have put even less time into it and not made it. A slide in Lapikas's presentation describes the hacking philosophy which outlines the need to create tension and make the player feel more active, but there's one extra thing on the list that's really troubling. Hacking must be central to the game's progression at some key moments in the game. Oh, no. So remember when I said in "Deus Ex" even if you hated the hacking, it was optional? Turns out that was a mistake, too! Hacking is now mandatory! The player sometimes has no alternative solutions but to play this mini game, and I'm genuinely not sure why. Were they that proud of it? Why take away the player's ability to choose how to progress? Being mandatory actually makes the hacking worse, too, because now the developers have to account for the possibility players were really bad at hacking or hadn't put any of their skill points into the ability to hack higher level terminals, which means all the mandatory ones are incredibly low-level and easy, so sure, this means if you hate hacking, it's never challenging when you're forced to do it, but it also means players who put their points into hacking are never tested on any of the important terminals of the game. There's a section partway through where the player has to hack the computer of that master hacker from before. I love computers! This computer belongs to the guy who brain-jacked someone and made them jack their brain right in front of you. He's so advanced, the biggest tech company in the world hired him to do it. He's had a secret backdoor into your company's computers for, like, a year. However, this master hacker's computer is plot-important, so it's level one and easy to get into, and his computer's covered in the extra hacking viruses to help you out just in case. There isn't even a password you can find if you explore or search other areas. You have to hack. Also, sure, the Forever Alone meme. That'll age well. You'll notice I said "meme" and not "in-joke." What if this master hacker's computer was really high level and if you hadn't invested in hacking you needed to go on a cool side quest to learn the password or explore his apartment to find it, or what if you just couldn't get into it and had to follow up on other leads to find the hacker? You want players to feel like they gained something from specializing, not that they wasted their time. In the original, there's a section where you need to acquire the password to a computer and it's deep in a basement full of lasers and traps and explosives and turrets, but if you invested in hacking, you can just hack the computer. Giving the player choices based on what sort of character they've made is kind of the whole point of RPGs. If the game was either a forced search for a password in a basement or a forced hacking sequence, it would lose a lot of its value as game play. But no! You see, hacking must be central to the game's progression. Why, though? The game does reward you for investing in hacking sometimes. Off the beaten track are high-level terminals that lead to extra stuff, and in missions there's often security equipment that let you turn off cameras, commandeer turrets, and even combat robots when the level designers remember to put them in. I think it feels a bit less special that everyone else is doing half the hacking you do anyway but it still works out to be pretty fun. One of my favorite things to do in "Human Revolution" is if you have the ability to hack turrets and the strength upgrade, you can pick up turrets and carry them around while they destroy everyone in your path. It's fantastic. It feels amazing being rewarded for combining these two abilities. This stuff is great. The part of this transaction I don't like is how many times I had to play competitive join-the-dots to get here. It's not just that the hacking is a huge waste of time. It's that they deliberately made their game more of a waste of time than the original with the specific intent of making the player feel like they're doing more, and yeah, you are doing more, but more busy work does not equal more fun, and this idea has gone unquestioned for so long that it was a genuine shock when the recent "Deathloop" removed it. Or when "Bioshock 2" removed it and added a separate weapon that triggered a different mini game that was shorter and simpler and actually impacted the game play if you did it well. Is it just me or is "Bioshock 2" the best one by a really wide margin? Like, it's not even close. All right, all right. I have to stop. My heart can't take it. The hacking chapter is over. We're safe. We're alive. It's gone. Let's move to yellower pastures. [beeping] [JC] A smart lock pick is always handy. [HBOMB] The original game also had mechanics for lock picking to deal with locks and electronics for bypassing other devices that can't be hacked like power boxes and stuff, but hey, if you squint, they're a bit passive, too, aren't they? You just sit there and use your item on them. How did the "Human Revolution" team update these mechanics? They replaced them with the fucking hacking mini game! [shocking music] That's right! There's three times as much hacking as you thought there was going to be! To get into people's houses, you don't need to find, you know, a fucking key, like how doors work! You hack the convenient terminal in front of everybody's door or if you're lucky you can find the code for it somewhere. The concept of keys doesn't exist in the world of "Human Revolution." Now, that's streamlining. In the original, hacking, lock picking, and electronics were all separate skills you could invest in with different effects on the world. All of this being the same mini game makes it all feel like you're doing the same thing over and over, and it all feels like that because you are. Using a multi-tool that's tied into your proficiency with a skill to turn off the laser grid, that's cool but what if instead it was a mini game that took 24 seconds to do? Oh, yeah. I'd love that. Just squeeze that right into my mouth. Actually, no. We're not playing that in fast forward. You're watching all of this with me. [pages flipping] I've got a magazine here. Man, there's a full page ad here for Mark Kermode's film review. I like that guy. I disagree with him, like, 90% of the time but I'll know if I'll like a movie based on what he says, so I think that makes him a good critic, right? - [WOMAN] Access granted. [HBOMB] Oh, it's over. Now, go watch that 150 times and then tell me that this is good. Quite a few more people have the achievement for hacking 50 devices than for beating the second boss a bit past the halfway point. I can't help but wonder if the hacking is a factor in why people stopped playing. Apparently one company manufactures everybody's locks now. That must be where the Illuminati get all the money for their secret science bases. Based on how you played it, "Deus Ex" was a lot of different things to a lot of people. Now a bunch of it is unavoidably hacking for everyone and that is worse. None of this stuff is a deal breaker, of course. The game's still pretty good. I just think it really sucks how many choices have been actively removed from the game, but that's not what the developers were focused on. By their own admission, they focused on the combat. [beeping] [tense music] The first thing most people notice about the original "Deus Ex" is that shooting is fairly complicated and weird. Weapons are pretty powerful, head shots with almost any weapon are lethal, but they require skill point investments to use properly. At lower levels, they reload slower, are less effective, and take ages to aim. This kind of odd aiming system wasn't an accident. This was deliberately added onto the Unreal Tournament engine. Yeah, it's not a very good first-person shooter, but it's also not trying to be one. It's trying to be an RPG where shooting is a skill you have to invest in. Combat being something difficult to execute is an important part of the design. I'll explain what I mean by referring to another famous immersive sim, "Thief." "Thief" is a stealth game but you can pull out a sword if you want and there's a pretty in-depth sword fighting system in there, but as soon as you fight more than one person at once or an undead warrior or a wizard, you're basically dead. The point is combat is a bad situation you should avoid. [MAN cackling] [blow lands] [MAN screams] [HBOMB] "Thief's" sneaking is fun because you know you're dead if you get seen by a bunch of people. On the higher difficulties, killing someone gives you a game over. It wouldn't be as fun if you could cut six people's heads off in five seconds once a fight started and oh, what's this "Dishonored" footage doing here? Warren Spector worked at Looking Glass while they were making "Thief" and remembers being annoyed he couldn't just fight enemies if he wanted and in his talk he actually describes learning this exact lesson. [WARREN] I came to a place that was just too hard for me to sneak and I asked the team, "Just make me tough enough that I can fight my way past these guards because I'm getting killed every time." And they said no. "If we made the player character strong enough to fight, no one would ever sneak," and the idea of the game was to sneak, and they're probably right. For "Thief" that was probably the right decision to make. [HBOMB] He describes "Deus Ex" as a game trying to be a bit more balanced than "Thief." [WARREN] I made a vow right then that I was gonna make a game that let you fight or sneak, uh, as you chose. [HBOMB] It wants to let you do combat if you want to and make it satisfying to win but also retain the fun of avoiding it if you can by making combat something that's hard if you're not invested in it. This means sneaking or using exploration or talking to people or hacking the enemy's robots and letting them mess them up for you is rewarding. [WARREN] Right--right before we shipped, I put my head down on my desk and I just said, "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." [HBOMB] For the "Human Revolution" team, modernizing the combat was their highest priority. Lapikas's talk has a chart showing what they spend the most time and resources on. [FRANCOIS] As we decided that combat would be where we would put most of our time, energy, and resources-- [HBOMB] They knew they could handily outdo the original on combat, so they really put their minds to it, and the combat in "Human Revolution" is really good. Bullets hurt a lot so fights are punishing when you get hit, and they're satisfying to win because you almost died. I thought I would hate that they added cover shooting to "Deus Ex" but it's executed really well. Whee. There's no huge gauntlets. Every shootout is its own landscape with enemies trying to flank and flush you out with grenades once the fight starts. There's none of the busy work you get in with other shooters where you just, like, kill a lot of people so you have something to do on your way to the next level. When you do fight, the fight is unique and specific to that area and the type of and amount of enemies. That said, there is one aspect of the combat that's not very good. Let's talk about melee. "Deus Ex" had a wide variety of lethal and non-lethal choices for hand-to-hand combat, from police batons to riot prods, knives, and crowbars, then when you got to China you could find a sword and have a flipping sword which was cool. And later you found a gosh darn lightsaber. Well, a sword made out of tiny nano-machines arranging in the shape of a sword, but look at it. "Human Revolution" streamlined melee weapons by removing them. No, really. There's no melee weapons in "Deus Ex" anymore. You can't pull out a stick and swing it at someone. It's all guns, all the time. It's like me at the gym. There's baseball bats lying around but hell if anyone uses them. No one can even pick it up. That shit must be heavy. [booming] Grenades can't even move it. Instead, you perform melee combat by pressing a button and if you have enough energy, a cinematic plays depicting Jensen taking the person out lethally or non-lethally based on whether you held the button down. They simplified the melee combat so much, they moved it out of the game and into a cutscene. Cutscene Jensen rides again. He gets to have fun with his arm swords. And you don't. - [MAN grunts] [HBOMB] It's an incredibly clunky thing to have to do every time you do close-range combat. Some of these look pretty fun the first few times but like with hacking, it's not fun the many times you end up doing it in the game. [SIMON & GARFUNKEL] ♪ Hello darkness-- ♪ [HBOMB] It's utterly flow-breaking. Just let me hit someone with a stick, dammit. The idea you're doing this every time instead of ever being able to do something as simple as whip out a crowbar is mind baffling. I meant to say boggling. Boggling. I just realized what a great word that is. The take downs cost a full bar of energy to use and can't be used unless you use a consumable item or the bar recovers, which means I get to quote my favorite line from a game review ever. "That's right. Your knife requires ammo." [MAN] That's right. Your knife requires ammo. [HBOMB] Melee combat costing ammunition is a mechanic from "Vampire Rain," a game almost universally recognized as one of the worst ever. A perfect place to draw inspiration from for your new "Deus Ex" game. Here's how melee combat works in "Deus Ex now." [repeated buzzing] [MAN] I'm gonna find-- [grunts] [bone snapping] [grunts] [HBOMB] When it comes to the shooting-- which is all that's left-- the RPG mechanics of the original have been completely removed. Adam has perfect aim with almost every weapon at the start of the game, especially if you use the sights, and while there are augmentations that reduce recoil, the recoil you start with is pretty easy to handle, and this is good. It means combat is more a test of the player's skill than their character's stats, and for something as visceral as a shoot-out, I think that works. Come on, man. Don't tell me this doesn't look fun. Do not tell me this doesn't look fun. I have been lied to before and I am sick of the posers and fakers. [booming] [beeping] [tense music] [men shouting] [MAN] Someone there? [HBOMB] The original game's stealth was okay. You could lean around corners which sounds stealthy but it didn't seem to help you avoid being caught. [TERRORIS] I think we've got an intruder. [HBOMB] The big thing was enemies were really good at hearing any nearby noise that wasn't crouch walking extremely slowly. [fan humming] [beeping] [TROOP] Someone's there. I can hear you. [HBOMB] It never clicked how exactly the game wanted you to be stealthy. The stealthy weapons weren't too useful, either. The tranquilizer crossbow was silent but enemies were still alerted for the many seconds it took for them to go unconscious. [tense music] [whooshes] [JC screams] [HBOMB] Melee from stealth sometimes knocked enemies out and sometimes merely hurt them and then alerted them to you. - [MAN grunts] - [HBOMB] The stun prod seemed to base its effectiveness on how it was feeling that evening. This was one thing that was desperate for an overhaul. Now's a good time to tell you several of this game's developers had previously worked on "Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory," one of the best stealth games-- and games--of all time, including Francois Lapikas, making him a literal heroic genius. I'm not normally a pure stealth guy. I try until I get seen and then I start blasting. I'm the sort of person "Dishonored" was made for. I hope that joke earlier didn't mislead you. I love that game. Seriously. But "Human Revolution" is at its most fun when you take the stealth as seriously as you can. The "Thief" games and even "Splinter Cell" start to bore me after a while when I try that, but here everything's at its most tense and careful while never being too slow or trial or error, and I just criticized the take downs, but you know what? They're super reliable for stealth. If you haven't been seen, the take down is silent and stealthy and there's no chance of it not knocking out the enemy like you thought it would. This is kinda how "Chaos Theory" worked, using take downs instead of typical melee. [blow lands] [MAN grunts] [HBOMB] It was always an instant kill or knock out. You just had to get in close enough to do it which explains why they did it the way they did here. Sam Fisher's sleepy slappers didn't need ammunition, though, and the take down wasn't a long animation that took away your control, but at least the game's weird melee system starts to make sense when you consider the creators' design chops. And what delicious chops they were. God, this is such a good game. I'm so happy I got to bring this up. [stealthy music] The A.I. in "Human Revolution" is really fun to hide from in almost exactly the same way "Chaos Theory" was. They'll hear you if you run and see you immediately if you're out in the open, but if you're crouch walking, you pretty reliably can't be heard, and you can even get away with falling a short distance now. You can hide in enemies' peripheral vision in ways that are maybe a little unrealistic but feel great to get away with. The third-person cover mode functions as a perfected version of the original's peeking. It's kind of hilarious that they literally went on record that combat was the most important thing but while they were at it they just casually tossed in one of the best stealth experiences this side of "Dishonored." But the developers had designed themselves into a corner. They'd made a game that featured a fantastic stealth experience and then given players a bunch of guns, removed the limitations on shooting that made it less viable in the original, and then bolted third-person shooting cover mechanics onto their first-person game just to make sure you could shoot people any way you wanted. Remember what I said about games like "Deus Ex" being sums of parts? You can't make a game like "Deus Ex" more like a shooter without inevitably making it less like "Deus Ex." The balance of which mechanics you rely on to survive has shifted. Shooting has become the most viable solution to most problems when in the original it was the least viable solution, and that made it fun to avoid or to really lean into and get good at. You could spend a long time memorizing these patrols, learning to meticulously sneak between cover, put all your augmentation points into cloaking or running silently, and have to be very careful whenever you need to come back through this room because they're all still here, or you can click on four guys and not have to worry about them ever again. [warbling horn playing] ♪ ♪ Since shooting people is extremely simple and fun, it becomes the dominant strategy-- the thing you're incentivized to do to solve your problems. This threatens to ruin all of the other mechanics. Why use stealth when everyone's dead and the fights that happen when people see you are fun? Why bother hacking a terminal to turn off cameras or turn turrets against their owners when you shot all the owners when you came in? Who are the cameras even gonna send after me when they see me? Everybody's dead, Dave. But you'll notice I said "threatens" there because the developers were clever and they noticed this possibility, too, during play testing. They'd worked really hard designing fairly complex levels with multiple paths and solutions and then testers clicked on the bad men until they died and walked to the next objective. [FRANCOIS] It was a total failure. Play test showed us that people were just gunning everything and they weren't thinking. It was just a huge frag-fest. [HBOMB] So to fix this, they came up with a really clever solution. [beeping] [upbeat music] Sure, shooting would solve everything, but to correct for it, the game is astonishingly stingy with ammo. Ammunition pick-ups you can find lying around in levels usually amount to a handful of bullets a piece and for more specialized weapons like the tranquilizer rifle, you're lucky to find two or three, which is accurate. I only keep a couple of tranquilizer darts in my office, too. Enemies have been meticulously designed to be almost a waste of bullets if you try fighting them like in a normal shooter. They drop their weapons which have a couple bullets in them and sometimes there's a few more on their bodies. If you're not being really precise with your shots, you can easily end with less ammo than you started. This was a super smart choice. It means there's much more pressure to make your shots count or--more importantly-- to avoid wasting bullets fighting in the first place. This tremendously alters how the player relates to the world. Sure, you could just shoot all these guys like I said before, but that would actually make your life harder in the next fight. See what I mean? Scarcity resources re-contextualizes what would otherwise be a fairly simple situation. Sure, you can take a bunch of guys out with a grenade, but you have, like, two grenades. You might need those. The end result is like playing a fairly simple cover shooter while being lightly choked from behind by a game designer. Even when it's straightforward, it's still a little tense, and that's what makes it fun. Adam Jensen is a deadly shadow on the battlefield who can dish it out but only in small portions and if he's not careful, he won't have room for desert. I'm not kidding how seriously these guys took the balancing of resources. In Lapikas's talk, he shows photographs of huge bulletin boards they made to track all the weapons, ammunition, and items the player could find in the levels. [FRANCOIS] We used these balance boards to get a sense of everything that was in the game. This is about half the boards we had. We had six in total. [HBOMB] And tried to make sure they were never too powerful-- never had enough stuff-- so a big fight would always cost them. [FRANCOIS] During play test people would complain. They would say, "Well, I don't have enough ammo to kill everybody," and-- but then again that's exactly what we wanted. [HBOMB] Chris Rock was right. Sometimes what you need is bullet control. So the core experience works out really well. There's this fantastic primary loop of carefully avoiding enemies, stealthily taking out the ones you can with take downs or silenced weapons to preserve ammo, hoping to thin the crowd before a big fight starts, building up enough ammunition that you can afford to get in fights when you do get caught, the occasional inevitable explosions of violence, and the careful picking clean of the bodies at the end. There's a rhythm to it that feels excellent. If you want an FPS RPG whose FPS component is some genuinely good shooting that doesn't invalidate stealth and hacking and other alternative solutions, "Human Revolution" is basically the game for you. However, as "Deus Ex" used to like pointing out, these choices have consequences. Say you like the tranquilizer rifle. It's silent and non-lethal and has a decent range. It has basically no weaknesses except it's a bit slow. So in a normal game, the bullets would be expensive but that would be your choice to make, right? Well, not here because if you can buy all the tranq rifle rounds you want, the game would be too easy. Instead the local weapon store will sell you five packs of two. And those ten darts will have to last you a while because the other store in Detroit doesn't sell any. You'll have to go all the way to China to find someone else willing to sell these to you. This is a good choice. Giving the player too much ammo for the best weapon would ruin the tension and make things way too easy. But on a simpler level, it's incredibly annoying to not be allowed to buy ammo for the weapon you like to use. This is one of the trade offs this design has to make. It works but in a way that might be a little bit annoying for some types of player who thought they could spend the money they were saving on things they wanted or expected one of the two weapons they can fit in their inventory to have enough ammo available to make it useful. There are also limb clinics where you can buy praxis points. So, I mean, if you want more, you can look around for more credits to buy more and maybe sell the weapons and ammo you aren't using, right? You know, like a fun video game would do, if it wanted to give you interesting decisions to make? The billboard says no! Limb clinics will sell you two praxis points! The scarcity starts to feel really weird if you think too hard about it or try to circumvent it. What's that? You think you can get the upper hand by knocking out a bunch of well-armed policemen with assault rifles and get a couple more bullets to get an edge at the start of the game? Nice try. Those cops aren't carrying any ammo on them, and their guns had three bullets in them. No, not each. Between both of them. In a fight, NPCs have infinite bullets. The game keeps track of how many shots they've fired not so it can give you their remaining ammo so avoiding fighting and taking them out gives you a bigger reward, but to keep track of when they need to reload. I dunno. This is starting to feel a little bit artificial. Lots of areas have weapons lying around sort of as props populating some of the pretty sparse office and apartment areas. Almost all of these have exactly one bullet in them. There's something extremely disconcerting about a world full of people who keep a gun on their desk with one bullet in it. This sort of thing starts to really affect how exploration feels. Remember, these guys had a big billboard on the wall keeping track of every bullet in the game after seeing what play testers did when they gave them too much. So if you're exploring every nook and cranny, opening every locker, looking in bathrooms and behind boxes and so on, there will be rewards for exploring but the billboard said if you get too much stuff, it won't be tense anymore. So the main reward is going to be, like, five more bullets. The game will throw a massive room full of, like, 50 lockers at you and there'll be, like, four pick-ups in total amounting to one full clip of ammo for one gun and a third of a clip for another and maybe a grenade, and the lockers only open halfway so you gotta really peek in there to make sure you see everything. Oh, and because it's this game, none of the lockers are locked because locks don't exist anymore. Even the most daring heists in the game start to feel kind of pointless. In the Detroit level, you can break into the armory of a police station. A police station armory. An American police station armory. I've seen their budgets. That sounds like pay dirt. [WOMAN] Access granted. [computer beeping] [HBOMB] Prepare for the cornucopia. I hope you're ready for two stun grenades and a template that can turn one of them into a mine and an assault rifle with 15 bullets to go with it. That's less than a full clip of rifle ammo. Is that a clip or a magazine? I don't know and I'm too hopped up on all this sweet loot to care. Oh, boy, a shotgun and five shells to go with it, and a completely new gun that stuns enemies briefly that you don't have room for and four shots for it if you could. Oh, and a rate-of-fire upgrade so you can fire the bullets you don't have faster. You can really feel how contrived the scar-cities-- scar-cities? Scarcity? I don't even know how to say-- like they put all these ammo pick-ups on the table so it feels like you're getting a big hoard of stuff but it's actually just several small boxes with two and three bullets in them. Think about why they deliberately did that for a second. They could have just put one box with 15 bullets in it next to the gun but then players would understand how little stuff they were being given for this. If I gave you five Quality Streets and not even any green triangles, you'd think I was ruining Christmas, but if I gave it to you in the form of two boxes, for a few minutes, I'd be the best uncle ever. I get to write these off as a business expense now. Knowing now what the reward for this adventure was, let's all go watch the hacking mini game I had to do to get this. [MAN] This is what you get for abandoning-- [HBOMB chuckles] No, I'm serious. I'm doing it again. There's actually a couple of NPC guards who are, like, talking about how cool the peps is in the whole way of the police station and when you get it you get four shots for it and it kind of sucks. It sucks so bad it doesn't even come back in the sequel. They make it like a-- an augmentation or something. I didn't pick up the peps here but I did hoard all the ammo I could over the course of the whole game so I got a good 15 shots in the last level. Okay, I'm done with my peps talk. I promise I won't do this again. I always thought it was strange how Sandoval sadly and slowly takes out a revolver and the implication is pretty clear, right? We know what he's planning. But then he also takes out a single bullet to put in the gun. First of, Sandy, it's this game. The gun already had one bullet in it. But if you talk him down, he puts the gun on the desk and you can pick it up, and of course it has one bullet in it, and if he does shoot himself, you can still pick up the gun, but of course it doesn't have-- five? Five bullets? Fuck this fucking game! It's not just having too many bullets that would make you overpowered. It's having weapons that are too powerful in general. The game has two really powerful weapons: the laser rifle and the plasma rifle. Both of these weapons deal immense amounts of damage really quickly and can melt any enemy practically instantly. [MAN shouting] [HBOMB] The laser rifle can even shoot through walls allowing you to kill the final boss the second the fight starts from behind her bulletproof glass, which is pretty clever. Giving these to the player would make combat far too easy and once again ruin the game's tension. Even giving them next to no ammo, it'd still make the weapon ridiculous in fights. So how did they balance these weapons? The first time you find the laser rifle is behind Tong during your second visit to China very close to the end of the game. This gives you roughly two levels to use it against regular enemies before the last level which is against basically zombies who don't even have guns and are easy to deal with with any weapon. [MAN shouting] [tense music] ♪ ♪ [shouting] [both shouting] Just let me finish. Just let me finish! [HBOMB] Oh, boy, I'm so glad they gave me the laser rifle in time for this. The plasma rifle can be first found being wielded by the third boss, which is fine. You know, getting a cool weapon off a boss is a fun reward. Unfortunately, he's also the last actual fucking enemy you fight in the entire game. After fighting him you go right to the zombie level. - [MAN] Ah, he's got a gun! - [MAN] You don't scare me. You're not even there! Get away! - Go! - [MAN] I didn't want this! [MAN shouting] [MAN shouts] [HBOMB] So essentially, they balanced these weapons by giving them to you when the game is over. It seems like they designed these weapons much earlier on, then did the play testing, and realized how much their reliance on combat broke the game's feel and they had to lean on scarcity and went, "Well, we made these. We should put them somewhere and put them right at the end." So, hey, they're in the game so you can say there's a bunch of weapons in there. [JEAN-FRANCOIS] I would say without going too specific in the numbers, I would say we're around 20 or so, uh, different, uh--uh, weapons. [JONATHAN] That's a great number. [HBOMB] This is kind of true if you add all the weapons, including the ones you don't get to use until the last five minutes, and count grenades as weapons. There's 20 weapons in "Human Revolution." The game's launch trailer features a shot of Jensen using the plasma rifle against a security robot in a much earlier section of the game during the first visit to China, hours and hours before the player ever gets one. I'm not saying, like, "This game's launch trailer lied to me." It's more that I think these comments and bits of pre-release footage are a fascinating look into the kinds of tough design choices that come up during game development. This next thing's been stuck in my craw for literally a full decade. In an interview with Eurogamer, the game's director Jean-Francois Dugas made a really enlightening statement, and I'm not saying that sarcastically. It genuinely is. I've obsessed about it for ten years. What is wrong with me? [MAN narrating] [DAN speaking in a French accent] Sorry. [clears throat] [DAN narrating] [HBOMB] You can see why this is such a meaningful statement, right? I'm sure Dugas wouldn't say that while intending for the rifle to be something you get lying against a wall right before the last couple of levels. We're going full speculation ops here. I could be reading way too much into this, but it sounds like in the nearly a year between this interview and the release of the game the design got altered. Maybe the laser rifle was balanced by making it a reward for some difficult challenge like a daring heist in a police station or something, but then they did more play testing and noticed that even when the weapon was hard to get and had limited ammo it ruined the entire feel of the game. Stealth, conservation of resources, hell, even the basic flow of combat gets irrevocably changed when a player gets the shoot-through-walls instant-murder beam. So they must have made the tough decision of turning it into an extremely late game weapon so at the very least it couldn't mess with the rest of the game's pace. This points to just how devoted they were to making the central mechanics feel good. It's obviously really important for the game that it's not incredibly easy to defeat enemies. They designed several powerful weapons that were fun to play with but then cut them out of most of the game in the name of making sure the core game play could live its best life. Unfortunately-- and it pains me to do this-- after all this time going into detail about some really clever design choices, we now have to talk about how they kind of ruined them. [electric guitar music] [beeping] ♪ ♪ You know how I've been really hitting you over the head with how important scarcity was? Well, in his talk, Lapikas was also doing that. [FRANCOIS] "Deus Ex" is a game about scarcity of resources. [HBOMB] Oh, that's why I keep pronouncing it like that. [FRANCOIS] If we give you everything, you're not gonna think anymore. You're just gonna go and use the simple route. [HBOMB] It's fun for players to be rewarded for their choices or to be made to deal with problems caused by them. The original does this, too. Not to the same degree with ammunition but because you needed lock picks, multitools, augmentation canisters, med kits, skill points, and other useful items to progress, you're always hurting for something. And speaking of hurting, even damage was part of this puzzle. JC Denton had locational limb damage, a bit like in "Fallout." Damaged limbs affected his aiming and his movement. If you broke your legs, you had to crawl around to find a med kit. This meant combat was extremely tense. You had to manage its effects on your body. Med kits didn't just bring back health. They had to be used on a specific body part to mitigate the effects of the damage. Without med kits and the skill that makes them more effective, you are in trouble, and the robots that healed you for free were few and far between. This meant combat and taking damage in general had genuine stakes to it. [TROOP] Denton Hey it's Denton. [all screaming] [HBOMB] Oh. Lucky there's a clinic nearby. [DOCTOR] Have you looked at any other options? Euthanasia is one sure way to relieve suffering. [HBOMB] "Human Revolution" removed locational limb damage completely and replaced it with a simple health bar, which isn't the worst idea, and I know that because then they had the worst idea and went a step further and removed damage. If you haven't been shot for a few seconds, your health just comes back. It seems like when they were looking at other popular shooters of the day for inspiration for how to improve "Deus Ex's" combat, some wires got crossed and they borrowed their regenerating health mechanics, too. Mechanics which are great for combat-centric action shooters and terrible for ones where getting shot is supposed to matter. One of the most important facets of combat in "Deus Ex--" the consequences of combat-- is just gone. If you got shot in a fight in "Deus Ex" it was an extra complication you had to deal with. It didn't just go away. It was an added incentive to make smarter choices than getting into a straight shootout. Even if you killed everyone first, if they shot you it was a problem you still had to deal with. It made the janky combat fun to put stats in so that you did well in it or to avoid completely using stealth or explosives. Regenerating health messes with the core concept of choices having consequences. Now once everyone's dead, your health will come back while you're checking their bodies. You'd think a game that wanted to instill tension about survival and make combat's effects matter for example by making said bodies have two bullets on them would avoid misusing regeneration mechanics like this. "Human Revolution's" combat doesn't get to be as engaging as it easily could have been because of this boneheaded idea. The choice to remove consequences from combat cuts off the game's potential at its knees, something you also can't do anymore. If you really want to balance combat against stealth and hacking and other alternative solutions, maybe make taking damage a problem. You could basically flip a switch, turn off regenerating health, and instantly make the entire game a much more fascinating puzzle. Make all of its combat that much more engaging, more of an obstacle. Since all of its effects would become cumulative, so many more players would be making fun decisions about how to engage in them or how to avoid them, and healing items would matter again, which they don't in "Human Revolution" because your health returns to maximum on its own! Why do you even have these in here? Oh, they put you slightly over your maximum health. Great. These items would have value in a world where you didn't just get all your health back. Jesus Chri-- this affects energy, too. In the original and "Invisible War," you required energy to use augmentations. This made energy cells into a valuable resource, and it's clear in this game that someone had their head screwed on properly and wanted them to be like that here, too, because there's candy bars everywhere that refill one or more batteries of energy, but whoever that genius was, someone bashed his head in and went to work in his clothes and decided to make energy also refill on its own. The candy's useful if you want to do multiple take downs in quick succession or really like using the cloaking device for long periods, but the fact you have practically infinite energy as long as you're willing to wait a second means there's no real economy to using augmentations. The health and energy pickups feel like vestigial remains of a much more engaging version of this game where these things mattered. I think this stuff is a bit of a shame but bear in mind, it's not that bad. The core experience still works really well so far. Sure, the scarcity can be a little annoying. The police forgot to bring bullets to a hostage situation or out on patrol or back at base. Your boss can only afford to give you one gun. He's a millionaire but the store would only sell him seven darts for the tranquilizer gun you asked for. And two of the coolest guns in the game don't fucking exist Oh, but thanks to my acts of heroism, I have a very slight discount on those stun gun darts I can buy literally six of. Yeah, that really helps. Thank you! But at least the intended effect works. You're making careful choices. You're having fun. Then you find a rocket launcher hidden in gang territory with two rockets. If you're in a fight with a large group or a big robot, this can change everything, but you can only fit it in your inventory if you throw a bunch of other stuff away. This is a great little decision to offer the player In a game like this. You have to make a tactical decision and become even weaker in regular fights in the hopes of having an edge in a big one. Moments like this are the secret to what makes these games fun, feeling confronted with possibilities and what to do about them. If there's a key "Deus Ex" thing you have to nail, it's this. Does the player feel a little bit nervous when they find a cool weapon they don't have room for? Then a level or so later, you're sneaking into a secret base and there's a huge robot in the way. Normally you'd be in trouble here and have to run and hide but because of the consequences of your cool decision, you don't have to. This is your reward for good planning. [booming] [MAN] Man down! [tense music] ♪ ♪ [beeping] [booming] [HBOMB] Choice and consequences. That's the beating heart of "Deus Ex." Well, it should be. You see, I lied. I didn't use this rocket launcher I found. I got this one from right here sitting right next to the fucking robot. The developers almost made a game with decisions and consequences, and then they didn't. They made a game that hand holds you through every obstacle. Robots are also easily destroyed by EMP grenades. Having to save your EMP grenades for tough situations would make them really rewarding to use, wouldn't it? But what if people forgot to bring any and wanted to use one on the robot? So they put one directly in front of you as soon as you enter the room. This fucking sucks. There's no other way of saying it. They fucked up. It's obviously really important for the game that it's not incredibly easy to defeat enemies. [FRANCOIS] If we give you everything, you're not gonna think anymore. [booming in slow motion] [HBOMB] Not only is this room just not a challenge, you gain access to a means of instantly killing this robot the literal, actual moment you enter the room with the robot. In this instant, players will realize their choices don't matter. If you saved that rocket launcher, you wasted your time, effort, and inventory space. You were a sucker who thought they were going to experience some kind of reward or punishment for your decision-making, but you never will. This goes on for the entire game. The next time you fight these robots, the rocket launcher's right fucking there. The EMP grenades are right there. People complained about the boss fights being just shooting-focused and therefore a problem for players who focused on stealth, but that's just not true. Every boss fight takes place in an ocean of weapons and ammo so the player can't possibly get stuck. All the stuff I said was fun is still fun, but the most important moments-- the peaks of the mountain of risk and reward-- have been eliminated. Mommy bird chewed your dinner for you! Open wide! If you're going to give me the solution to any interesting problem the instant I enter the room, you might has well have made this a cutscene, too. [WOMAN] Hangar doors unlocked. [ROBOT] Activate self-destruct sequence. [booming] [HBOMB] Let me give you an example of how this is supposed to work. [MAN] "Resident Evil 4." [HBOMB] In "Resident Evil 4," you can find a rocket launcher. Just one, though. Additional launchers cost a ton of the cash you could have spent upgrading your weapons. So while they were powerful and let you practically skip bosses, they required a meaningful sacrifice by the player, throwing all that money away, and to even carry a launcher, you gave up a ton of space for one shot that was gone once you used it. Even looking at the rocket launcher in my inventory gives me tingles, and staring at it in the store is tantalizing because it's a choice with meaningful consequences that doesn't condescend to the player's intelligence by giving them one anyway the instant they walk into a room with a boss. You might also notice that your health doesn't regenerate in "Resident Evil," either, because that would be fucking stupid, wouldn't it? "Deus Ex" worked along a similar principle. The GEP gun was a huge inventory hog. You had to leave so many useful items lying where you found them and know you'd be in trouble if you needed a rebreather or some stealth camo, but it made fighting mechs a breeze and in a pinch it saved you a few lock picks. That trade-off was so satisfying. I'm trying to imagine a version of this game where they just put a GEP gun on the floor near every major enemy, but I don't really need to imagine it, now do I? To make a "Deus Ex" game where whenever you face a tough enemy the means of killing it is right next to it, and if it even manages to hurt you that health just comes back, you have completely removed the choices, consequences, and even most of the difficulty from your game. There's a version of "Human Revolution" that's truly incredible, where it doesn't pull any of its punches, where saving a rocket launcher made a huge difference, where coping with the loss of resources once you use them was interesting, where getting shot actually hurt, and they almost made that game, and it's really kinda sad that they made a just okay one instead because they compromised their own design in the moments it mattered most, they made a game about scarcity of resources, and then got scared not everyone would like that and over-corrected in the other direction. Playing "Human Revolution" is an exercise in learning in real time why "Deus Ex" was a more management kind of game and why simplifying everything about an experience that's fun because it's a bit complicated is bad. Oh, it's so rewarding you can stealth your way over to this panel and hack it and disable the robots. Wow! There's alternative solutions to the-- they fucking give you a grenade that kills them instantly! It's incredibly fun to get to plan ahead and decide what's important to you, and most importantly, actually see these choices play out for better or for worse. Nothing in "Human Revolution" is ever important. All the edges have been sanded off. It's a smooth and palatable pebble that isn't particularly disagreeable but slides out the other end completely undigested. You have failed to make a game about scarcity of resources if you put all those resources next to the things you need them for. At that point you've made a game about how thinking was a waste of time. As soon as you realize you're going to be handed the solution to the problem once you encounter it, the depth of the experience drains away before your very eyes, and to do this after removing a bunch of the weapons means the game is so much more dull and devoid of stuff to play with than it could have been in service to a scarcity that went out the window the instant the player actually needed anything. No, if you want to play with cool weapons, you need to have pre-ordered the game in 2011. No, that's not a joke. That's an order. Get a time machine, call your local GameStop-- [beeping] [tense] Another slight wrinkle in the developers' attempts to balance their game was the fact that-- [hissing, tape clicking] [Ben Morfitt's "Nate's Theme" playing slowly] ♪ ♪ [hissing, tape clicks] [intense rock music] If you pre-ordered "Human Revolution" from GameStop or GAME, Gamestation, or HMV in the UK-- [dog barks] [record scratches] You got the "Explosive Mission Pack." [repeated booming] This pack lets the player start with a new type of grenade-- remote explosives that detonate when you hold the grenade button down after throwing them, and a bonus mission towards the end of the game that rewards you with a new weapon. [echoing] But that's not all! If the player bought the game from Amazon, Best Buy, or Walmart, they got the "Tactical Enhancement Pack!" With this pack, players start with two new weapons-- a double-barreled shotgun and a silenced sniper rifle. If you were wondering why you couldn't use a silencer upgrade on the sniper rifle, it's not because that would be an unbalanced weapon and the designers knew better. It's because you didn't buy the game from Walmart! The executives at Square Enix are killing us! Their hands are around our soft, Quebeci necks! We're dying! Help us! Please! [hissing] This pack also lets you start the game with a ton of extra money which is the funniest possible thing to give people when they have a limited amount of things they're allowed to buy. What the fuck? [MAN] I'll try to be, uh, as, uh, specific as I can, meaning that I won't say too much, uh, because the marketing guys over there are watching over me. - [MAN] They're right here. - [MAN laughing] And I feel the--the pressure of, uh, being careful about what I say. [HBOMB] These bonuses eventually became purchasable as DLC. After a few months they effectively became micro transactions. The "Explosive Mission Pack" also gives the player an automatic unlocking device which you can use to skip a single hacking mini game. This gives me the opportunity to joke that "Human Revolution's" hacking is so bad, people paid actual money to skip it. The pack's extra level is a crime against "Deus Ex" canon, which is worse than most actual crimes. It's a mission to rescue Tong's son who has been kidnapped by the bad guys. Tong's son is Tracer Tong, one of the main characters from the first game. It's pretty shitty they made the thing that's probably the most related to the original plot into a fucking pre-order bonus. Really milking the people who cared about "Deus Ex." As thanks for saving his son, Tong gives you the grenade launcher-- a powerful and fun weapon you have two levels left to use. [WARREN] This is genius right here. As the player-- the player gets better, make the game harder. [booming] [MAN shouting] [HBOMB] The trailer for this pre-order bonus uses footage of the weapons in levels you can never use it in because you get it so late. I wouldn't go as far as to call this false advertising. Who cares? But it's funny the most powerful weapons are consistently given to you after all the best spots to use them. Fun fact: I was born and raised in West Yorkshire, which is my way of saying when this game came out, I was extremely poor. I only got to play it because a French friend of mine who really loved "Deus Ex" had pre-ordered it because he wanted that DLC and I think a statue of Adam Jensen that came with some versions of the game, and then because he was a game critic or worked at a related company or something, he got given a free copy he didn't need and he gave it to me. So if you're watching this, thanks, Thomas. I wouldn't have got to play this game for years otherwise. I'm glad I finally have the opportunity to thank you in the middle of a YouTube video a decade later. Pre-order bonuses and the micro transactions they later became are bad for everyone. They're bad for players. They're bad for developers getting made to do things they know are bad for the game, and then having to listen to people like me whining about it like it's their fault. The only people who benefit are the people this makes money for, which means it's probably not going away anytime soon, but at some point, you know, games have to make money. It is a business. Would you like to augment your pre-order? [beeping] [tense orchestral music] ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ The boss fights are bad. Anyway. [beeping] [calm techno music] The level design of immersive sims is one of the most important parts. You can have all the cool guns and augmentations in the world, but if that world doesn't create fun opportunities for using them, then those tools are going to waste, like the instant pot in the back of your cupboard right now. You also have to find ways of making the player engage with the levels, for example, by giving rewards for bothering to explore. [WARREN] You want constant rewards to drive players onward, okay? You have to reward players regularly. [HBOMB] It's a bit of a disappointment in this department. Half the stuff you'd normally be searching for in a "Deus Ex" game isn't there to find because scarcity was too important to give you too many big rewards and there are no longer multi tools or lock picks to find because the newfound omnipresence of hacking has replaced the need for them. The main thing you'll find when you're exploring is a couple of bullets, a meager amount of credits which you can't spend on anything, oh, and how can I forget dozens upon dozens of energy bars which you don't need because the first battery refills on its own? And since-- like we covered earlier-- praxis points are a kind of boring upgrade system, there are no truly nice surprises that incentivize further exploration. You barely find anything in a police station armory. You're not gonna find much in the back alleys of Detroit or Hengsha. What is here feels a little too similar to the original for its own good. At a certain point it starts to feel like a half-hearted remake. Like, even in shockingly small details, like how you and your pilot get intercepted on your way to China, or how your pilot can optionally die, or how the first mission ends with you deciding whether or not to let a terrorist leader live and as soon as you make that choice the cops instantly arrive and all the enemies in the level evaporate and get replaced by cops, or how you fight exactly three augmented bosses throughout the game; a big guy, a small lady, and a guy who can turn invisible and wields a plasma rifle, or the way the game's three main locations are an American city, a Chinese city, and a French city, although "Human Revolution" sets its French part in Montreal for what I assume are tax reasons, and the city environment itself got cut, so Montreal is just a large office building you land on and then leave. For the record, in the Q&A section of his GDC talk, Lapikas got asked if he thought the generally good reception of "Human Revolution" was partially down to them directly recreating a lot of the original stuff. [MAN] It follows the original "Deus Ex," uh, almost act-for-act, story beat for story beat. I'm wondering how much you feel that contributed to the acceptance of it. [FRANCOIS] First off I'd like to react to your comment, that, uh, the game follows the first game beat by beat. It might be true. It wasn't our intention. It's not how we designed the game. It's not how it was written. So, uh, if that's the case, it's a coincidence. [HBOMB] I don't know if it's better or worse the game is like this by accident but that's what the game is like. So I don't know what to tell you. It's not a huge deal that they're similar. It's the same series so similarities are welcome if anything, but a problem with-- accidentally or otherwise-- making your levels a lot like the originals is it makes what's missing stick out like a giant robot sitting next to the weapon that instantly kills it. Liberty Island is a famously amazing level. It's an entire open island with two different docks, people to talk to to get a key to get inside if you want-- [BUM] About time you [bleep]. A sunken freighter full of stuff to find, and of course an entire building leading up into the Statue of Liberty. This level design is ultimately why "Deus Ex" is so fantastic. It feels like an entire physical space you can handle how you want. Liberty Island is 12 different levels, depending on how someone plays it. "Human Revolution's" levels are largely a straight line that sometimes opens out into a larger box you can be a little more creative in which funnels right back into another straight line. The first mission-- the parallel with Liberty Island-- is a straight shot from the drop-off point on a rooftop to a pickup on another rooftop, featuring bottlenecks in the form of corridors and elevators that you're required to use to progress with zero alternatives. Compare and contrast the level of freedom here. The Statue of Liberty has several ways in from different angles including just climbing over half the level. To get into the warehouse, you can go in through the front door or climb up on top of the entrance and go in through a vent just above the front door which comes out into the other side of the same room. It takes about five seconds to walk over here if you come in from the front entrance. There is no rear entrance and there's no way over this part of the level by getting on the plant's roof and finding another entryway. It's immediately clear how much less freedom the player has. There are choices in how to navigate but they don't lead anywhere particularly new or different. The only way to progress is to traverse the level mostly linearly, but occasionally you get to decide which side of the room you do it in. The smoking gun betraying the closed-off nature of the levels is the fact none of the windows work. In "Deus Ex One," if a building has a window, you can break the window and jump out. Bang, you just invented a new exit. In many of "Human Revolution's" buildings, most of the windows are actually painted on and you can't get out through them in any way. In an actual immersive sim, this would be a way in and out of the building. That's what makes it immersive. It feels like a building in a world. This is just a rectangular corridor with windows used to imply a complicated outside world you never get to interact with. Look at Jensen's apartment for a second. The modern graphics definitely make it look cooler than the original. I love the "Blade Runner" light shaft thing with the blinds. But in the original game's apartment, you don't need to come in through the front door. You can climb up a fire escape and come in through the window. Jensen's apartment is designed to reference the original. It's got a cute stash of loot hidden in a similar way but it doesn't seem to understand the actual game play value of the original apartment's design. The only way out is to get to the elevator, ride it down, then walk out through the front door. The windows are just for show. I've heard so much praise for this game over the years, how it's one of the best immersive sims-- a real successor to "Deus Ex," but for all the genuine improvements and understandable mechanical changes, the levels you're doing it in are restrictive and dull. So much of the game is effectively a linear path which leads to an elevator to the next linear path. Seriously, there are so many areas whose main objective is to get to an elevator. There's a part in Hengsha where you do a whole level to get to an elevator and then while you're in the elevator, Pritchard calls you to give you your next objective. [ADAM] Pritchard, I'm in an elevator leading to the Pangu. [PRITCHARD] Look for a second elevator once you're there. [HBOMB] The game is so fond of making elevators the path to the next area that there is not one, not two, but five sequences where you go on a really long, slow elevator ride and if you're lucky, something interesting is happening out the window or a character calls you on the phone. Seriously, you just sit in an elevator for a full minute for no reason multiple times. Once would be fine to build tension before a big boss fight or something, but it's near constant. You ride two different elevators in the unskippable opening sequence alone. [drum roll] [multiple explosions] Hey, guys, you know what feels even more passive than hacking? Standing in an elevator! There's a sequence where the objective is to trigger an elevator and then hide from or fight enemies until it gets to you to pick you up. Since combat is pretty easy especially if you hack the turret-- enemies don't know how to handle turrets in the slightest. It's really weird. Everyone dies in the first five seconds and you're just sitting there during what was meant to be a tense struggle for survival. [distant alarms blaring] [beeping] [PRITCHARD] The funicular is halfway there, Jensen. [radio hisses] [tense music] ♪ ♪ [HBOMB] ♪ Ooh wah ♪ ♪ ♪ [PRITCHARD] Your ride is there, Jensen. Get moving. [radio hisses] [HBOMB] And in case you were wondering, yes, you do then ride the same elevator back down to where it came from. [chuckling] [humming "Main Title"] I've heard the excuse this is a way of disguising loading between areas, but many of them last much longer than any of the actual loading screens take, and several of them lead directly into a loading screen anyway, so don't give me any of that gubbins. It's boring, overly-compartmentalized level design however you slice it, and excuses don't make elevators fun. I don't think I've ever said gubbins out loud before. That just came out of me. I think the reason they made them like this was for dramatic effect. When you sit in an elevator to upper Hengsha for 30 actual seconds and come out and suddenly you're at the top of a high rise building overlooking a new environment-- one you never get to actually visit-- you feel like you did a lot more than walk down a linear corridor to an elevator. Twice. Look what an expansive world we're in. The objective of this level: to get to the data core room by getting to the elevator. Then you're given a cutscene where your objective changes to confronting Zhao Yun Ru, the CEO from before, to have that cutscene. You confront her by getting to another elevator to her penthouse. This elevator trip takes a full minute. [elevator humming] [unsettling music] This is only the third longest eleva-- The current "Human Revolution" speed run by Rampancy is 37 minutes long. Eight and a half minutes of the run is spent in an elevator. Uncomfortably close to a quarter of this speed run is sitting and waiting, and this is the best case scenario. This guy does cool shit like skip waiting for that one elevator by shoving himself through the door. In fact, most of the run's cleverest tricks involve finding ways to avoid having to wait in an elevator even longer. The time wasted here isn't even the real problem. Where the original game's levels were usually large outdoor spaces with multiple ways in and out of the buildings with objectives in them encouraging player creativity and freedom of choice, "Human Revolution" is wandering between elevators with ornate windows overlooking the kinds of environment you'd actually want to be playing in. The level design still has some choice in it and occasionally the kinds of freedom you'd really want like the police station, which is great, and offers a fantastic range of choices for how to deal with it, but a majority of the game is strangely compartmentalized. Constrained. A thin tube funneling you to the next important cutscene. I know I'm venting a lot about those cutscenes, but this gives me an excellent opportunity to segue into this game's problem with vents. [bicycle horn honking] Okay, in this sequence I've shown you a few times before, there's four guys making patrols around this area, more guys off in the side holes, and a doorway leading ahead to the next part of the level, but this area that's harder to get to unseen is the room the hostages are in. Once you get inside, you're locked in by a trap and have to frantically disarm the bomb by hacking it or learning the password or just smashing the tubes which is a hilarious thing to discover you can do. This is a great sequence. Getting into this room and saving the hostages is the first level's optional challenging secondary objective, and the people who designed the stealth system and guard patrols act like it. It's much harder to stealth your way in here than the critical path. I mean, if you shoot all the guys, it's easy and bullshit, but you can see how the stealth was designed to be fun. So you can do all of that-- all that fun learning the patrols and carefully navigating-- or you can go in the vent next to the entrance of the room which leads directly into the room with the hostages. Now, this first one kind of works. It's a reward for exploration. You have to find the vent hidden behind a box so if you're doing this it means you chose to look around a little more and get a sense of your surroundings. I'm not a big fan of how the vent is a definitive solution to the problem, though. In "Deus Ex," vents were, like, vents. You could use them to your advantage but they never took you directly from the start of the room to the place you needed to go to win. In the subway, for example, to free the hostages using stealth, you had to find a vent and then meticulously crawl through an entire ventilation system and come out of the right one so you wouldn't get seen instantly. The vents were part of the challenge, not the solution. In this game, more often than not, vents take you directly past the problem. You could deal with the guys in the next area using stealth or combat, or you can go in the vent next to where you came in that takes you past them! You could--oh, fucking hell, guys! You see the vent here before you even see the thing the vent takes you past! You could deal with this turret and landmine on the wall and camera which'll set off the alarms, or go over here and hack the camera-- you know, the intended challenge of the room. The point of this room is to show you the value of hacking. Or you could get in the vent that leads directly behind all of it and just walk past. If being able to kill everyone easily hurt the game's design, being able to just get in a vent and go past all of it fucking executes it behind the woodshed. Look, maybe I'm smarter than the average gang of anti-augmentation terrorists, but whoever set this shit up must have seen the vent, right? Wait a second! Why didn't the hostages just go in the vent? Just leave through the vent! What the fuck are you doing? This is how-- and I'm going to make a conservative estimate-- 85,000% of the game's levels work. There's this one level in Hengsha where the bad guys have locked down an apartment complex and you have to get inside to get to the hacker's computer I mentioned before. Now, the front entrance is blocked off so you either have to get into a big fight right away or maybe you can go all the way around the side and up a ladder and then you can sneakily take out a few guys and use stealth from there. Wow, multiple paths. This level's pretty good. The developers are trying to reward you for thinking logically about the 3D spa-- or there's a vent right here. This vent takes you inside the complex and into a well-guarded area with some interesting points of cover. This area could be a really cool stealth experie-- oh, my God, I can't believe you found another vent! You're such a good boy! This vent takes you to the upper ground level you could have had a fun time sneaking to where you can easily just walk to the elevator to the top floor without being seen. On the top floor you-- holy shit! I haven't even left the elevator! Fucking come on, guys! This vent takes you past all the guards to directly next to the computer you need to access. This is the absolute bottom of the downward spiral that starts when you try to make a game like "Deus Ex" simpler. You make this how exploration works. And if you go in the other side-- the alternative way in I mentioned-- you know where it leads? To a vent. The vent takes you up the same elevator shaft to a vent that comes out next to the other vent. This is anti-level design. You're literally skipping most of the levels that were designed. I've basically just ruined the game for you. Once you realize that's how they're using vents, you can't stop seeing it. If you fail the dialogue challenge to get an audience with Tong, you have to come back and try again to find out what he knows, but don't worry, pal, because-- and I bet this'll be a surprise to you-- there's a vent next to his office and it triggers a cutscene where you learn the same information anyway. This is the quest design equivalent of putting a rocket launcher next to all the hard enemies. You could talk Taggart into telling you where Sandoval is or--you'll never guess. You'll never fucking guess. You'll never fucking guess! The vent drops you directly into his office next to the computer with the information on it. No thinking required. The main challenge in this level is staying awake. [PRITCHARD] About time. What happened? You get stuck in an air duct on the way over? [HBOMB] Ha, ha, yeah, good one. Fuck off, Pritchard. If you think this is a good example of "Deus Ex" level design, you need to stop settling for less in life before it's too late. You matter, and you deserve better than this. Every vent in "Human Revolution--" including ones in maximum security buildings that lead right to their important shit-- is yours to open for free because locks don't exist anymore and locking a vent using a keypad would look really silly. Some of the level designers even realized they'd made the vents too easy a solution and started trying to hide them which doesn't work because, you know, they glow, so they started trying to block them using heavy objects so you at least need an augmentation to get to them. Look how hard they had to work to get around the fact they couldn't just lock the vents. Why was the game built like this? I don't know. Maybe the designers had fond memories of solving problems using vents in other immersive sims and concluded that vents equal good game design, but the point was to make a world feel interconnected like a real place would be and make players who took the time to look around feel rewarded for their ingenuity or attention to detail. Vents weren't the only kind of secret in "Deus Ex." There were secrets hidden all over the place. Buttons hidden behind innocuous objects that unlock treasure troves of stuff, or maybe the pinball machine you've seen over half a dozen of already activates a secret door if you play with this one. These two are both in the same level, even. After this happens you'll be checking every pinball machine in the rest of the world just in case. There is nothing remotely like this in "Human Revolution," except for one specific thing. This stuffed animal activates the secret door into the hacker's man cave, but it's not used to discover a secret. The cave is already visible because the bad guys blew a wall down. This makes for some really cool environmental storytelling, though. The mercs couldn't find the way of opening the secret entrance so they had to redecorate. It's funny, but serious question: why aren't there any actual secrets like this in the game? There isn't anything even remotely as cool as the pinball machine. Instead, potential explorers get to say, "I wonder what's in this room? Oh, it's a vent." Every few minutes. This is the vent room. Everyone has one of these in the future. It's horribly inefficient but the powerful vent lobby won't let us change the laws. The hacker's apartment is really good at demonstrating the blandness of the new, simpler level design because it's another accidental knock-off of a level from "Deus Ex One," this time Maggie Chow's apartment in Hong Kong. As soon as you look at it, the difference is clear. You're not forced to hack a computer, for one, but you also have more choices for how to deal with the situation. Taking the elevator or sneaking into the shaft aren't the only entrances. You can get in from the roof entrance or, you know, blow open the skylight and get in that way. You can also get in by platforming from neighboring buildings that are easier to get into and aren't guarded by mechs, and once you're done, you can leave by literally jumping off the roof or out the window and using your cyber legs to land without dying. This feels like an apartment in a real skyline full of other buildings. This feels like a corridor with a nice background outside some unbreakable windows. But, hey, lookie here! There's a balcony out there! Oh, and what's this? A skylight, just like Maggie Chow's apartment, but you can't do anything with them. This level has none of what made the original level truly open-ended and free. The skylight and balcony are just for show. You come in and out of this whole area through one of two entryways which are next to each other. Sophie's Choice: a vent or an elevator. No, wait, there's actually a super secret way in. If you stack boxes and have the high jump power, you can get into this higher level of the shaft above the vent. It leads to another vent. It comes out right next to the other vents in the elevator. [echoing] Level design! The design is so ridiculously oversimplified that it actually messes with the story and quests the game is trying to use the levels for. In the Hengsha level, for example, to progress to the next mission, you have to get into the employee entrance of Tai Yong Medical, but the entrance is--guess what? The only building in the universe that isn't locked using the same fucking keypad, so you can't hack it. The developers realized players could just leave the hub and go to the next level if they knew where to go so they had to reinvent the concept of the key. Once the player learns that's where they have to go, they're sent on a quest to find a Tai Yong Medical key card to get in here. However, because the world map is so empty, and there aren't that many places to explore, most players found it already by accident several hours ago. [ADAM] Well, what do you know, Windmill? I've already got an employee card. [HBOMB] You begin the Hengsha level right outside this hotel, and since most players explore the thing put right in front of them, they go inside. When inside, you find one of the game's four side quests, so it's good they made it easy to find. The key card it'll turn out you need in a few hours is just sitting on a table nearby. Less than a minute's walk from the start of the level, you have already accidentally skipped part of it. There's even a special dialogue between Jensen and Malik for picking it up before you know you'll need it for anything. [ADAM] Tell me something, Malik. You think a smart card with a Tai Yong Medical logo on it will come in handy in this town? [FARIDAH] Maybe. Why you asking? [ADAM] No reason. Just thinkin' ahead. [radio clicks] [HBOMB] Hey, looks like I've accidentally beaten a later quest by walking into the building next to where you dropped me off, Malik. Whoops! Who takes their company key card out of their wallet and puts it on the fucking coffee table like that? What the fuck is this? Now, I love the idea of being sent on a quest to find a key card which you could have found way earlier. That's great, but levels this simplistic mean you aren't actually finding it early if you're big on exploring. You're finding it immediately within minutes of starting if you take a passing interest in your surroundings. Now, let's add one extra layer of silliness to this because before you find out you need that key card, your mission requires you to get to Tong in the Hive. To get into the Hive, you need to talk your way in or bribe the guy at the door or somehow gain access to someone's membership card. The membership card is one floor down in the same building with the other key card. [FARIDAH] Why are you asking? [ADAM] No reason. Just thinkin' ahead. [radio hisses] [bag opening] [HBOMB] A shockingly huge amount of players are going to find these items long before they even know what they do. That's not clever sequence breaking. That's a very poorly-designed sequence. Oh, but if you don't find the membership card and don't have the money to get in, no problem! There's a fucking vent around the back leading right insi-- the more enclosed levels mean a lot of the game's augmentations and abilities aren't as fun as they easily could have been. In "Deus Ex," having the ability to fall a large distance without dying changed the shape of the world for you. Rooftops were now exits that prevented having to deal with enemies you'd have run into taking the normal way down. "Human Revolution's" slow fall power would work the same way except for the fact that levels aren't designed as interesting 3D spaces, so only a select few places offer this type of situation. So instead to make the augmentation more useful than the design can properly accommodate, long falls are added specifically for players to have something to do with that power, like this elevator shaft in Detroit. The game is going, "Look, "one specific place for you to use your powers. You're so creative!" Instead of making a world where creative players naturally benefited from this ability. There is an example of the kind of free form use of a building's height as an entrance in the game, though. Unfortunately, it's in a cutscene. Belltower break into the Alice Garden Pods through the ceiling once you bring the key card to the hacker. NPCs get to have more fun with your powers than you do. You can only enter and leave this entire pod hotel through the front door. There is no alternative way in. This is because they want you to be unable to leave when these guys drop in and block off the exit forcing you to leave through-- you guessed it-- a series of linear corridors with vents skipping any of the difficult parts leading to a new back exit which only now opened up. The experience you do have is pretty fun for what it is. Sure, but this simply isn't how "Deus Ex" levels should work. [ADAM grunting] [booming] [distant voices] [MAN] Keep looking! Someone must be there. [tense music] [HBOMB echoing] Emergent game play! My problem with this design is it doesn't let players be clever by themselves. It's contingent on a game designer giving you something clever to do with it. If they forget to come up with some which they often do, you're shit out of luck, buddy boy. Without tall buildings with rooftop entrances and exits apart from literally one in the warehouses--I didn't forget. Don't be a pedant. The Icarus landing system is reduced from a fantastic addition to the player's arsenal to a slightly faster alternative to taking the ladder down certain drops and only slightly faster because the falling animation is slow and annoying. The other big augmentation that gets wasted here is the ability to punch through certain walls. This power's a really interesting idea, opening up new paths by cutting through destructible parts of the level, but it only gets to be fun in practice if the developers come up with interesting ways of using it. It feels like they made a lot of the levels and then went, "Oh, shit," and tried to add a bunch of punchable walls at the last second so players who got it feel like they can do something with it. Wait! What's this window showing if the room is that small? What is going on here? I could be wrong but I have a sneaking suspicion this wall was added a bit late. You wanna know a cool thing about doors in "Deus Ex?" Wow, "Deus Ex" is such a cool game, I'm about to enjoy telling you how doors work. Doors weren't just a thing you could access by finding keys or learning the code to a key pad or by hacking the computer it was hooked up to or by learning the password some other way, or by picking them, they were also physical, actual doors which means you could just destroy them. [buzzing] [beeping and buzzing] [rumbling] The rocket launcher is nature's lock pick. That's so many options and being able to just break the door is believable and adds to the feeling of this being a real place. You can destroy doors in "Human Revolution" if you have a grenade or a lot of bullets though the scarcity of resources makes this a bit of a waste. The mechanic is implemented horribly. Locked doors don't show you how much health they have or even indicate they can be damaged until they suddenly shatter into dust. [gunshots] [pitched down] Emergent game play! You can see a door's health once it's unlocked, as in once you can just open it and its health is totally irrelevant. You can also break open vents which--let me remind you-- are literally never locked making it pointless to ever do so. I bet most people didn't even notice you could do this because who cares? It never serves any purpose. Something I thought was really funny was apartments in China have these sliding doors and you can break them open easily. They're flimsy, you know? But when they're open, they become invincible. [ADAM grunts] [booming] This doesn't massively affect the game play but it goes a long way in showing how little thought went into what used to be a really good mechanic. Tons of things which were breakable in the original can't be now. Safes are indestructible so you have to know the code or hack. And the many storage units in the game are immune to damage as well. This reduces the player's available options in addition to making it impossible to even know if anything is destructible because most of the time it isn't. The first time I tried to blow down a locked door, the grenade straight up didn't work for some reason, and since I had no way of knowing that was an unrelated glitch, I assumed locked doors couldn't be destroyed for ages until I tried again just to double check while I was writing the script for this video. You know what would have been useful? Showing the player the health of locked objects or even saying when something's indestructible. There's a little game you could have taken inspiration from that did this. It's called "Deus Ex." They just forgot to make half the stuff in the game respond to damage. Lockers--something players might want to be able to open a bunch of all at once by throwing a grenade into a room to at least save the trouble of manually opening and peeking around the horrible door of every single one are also indestructible. One of the most fun things in "Deus Ex" was running low on picks and seeing how many lockers you could open with your spare GEP rockets in Vandenberg without evaporating the office cat. There's something immensely funny and satisfying about tossing a grenade into a room and turning it into a festival of loot. This isn't a nitpick. This is a fundamental component of "Deus Ex's" player freedom and immersion that just doesn't work. You know, even when "Invisible War" was being "Invisible War," you could still reliably blow things open with explosives. It wasn't a crapshoot whether the developers had bothered to make something break open like it should. "Deus Ex's" worst moments were when you had no clever alternatives to the more obvious choices, like when a grate you could pick couldn't be destroyed by other means, but this is just how "Human Revolution" works. You need the lift heavy objects ability to move the vending machine to get into this vent. You could say it's a venting machine. [booming] But, hey, maybe you could use some creativity and destroy the machine with a grenade. [booming] Vending machines are literally indestructible. Didn't you know? The best you can hope for is the physics blowing it clear of the vent, but for that to happen the physics would have to work. Goodbye! [comical springing noise] [ALL] Meanwhile! [beeping] [booming] [HBOMB] "Deus Ex" made almost everything breakable. Plants, boxes, bodies-- [clanging] [JOHN] Well, okay. [HBOMB] Trash sometimes spawns rats in it when you destroy it because it's New York City, baby! Smash all the vases and beakers on the floor you want. Take this, globalists! [clattering] The game certainly is much nicer-looking than the earlier games. Humans don't look like age of mythology Prometheans with faces painted on them, for one, but just generally everything is so much more beautiful. I mean, look at these ceilings. At least a year of the game's development probably went into these. Holy cow, bro! I love this! Top ten ceilings in history, right behind the Sistine Chapel and another clever-sounding thing. But when it comes to interaction-- you know, the game part of this game-- almost every prop or object is invincible set dressing. These beakers, bulletproof. This Chinese food, immortal. This glass table, absorbing nearby humans to gain their power. The world feels so static and it makes you feel even less like you're really interacting with it. Lapikas claims this is a selling point, too. Look at this. What? [HBOMB] Are you telling me your game is better because you can't throw plants at people? This is cyber bullying! I've seen people say this game has amazing emergent game play. Like, "Oh, wow, you can break open "destructible walls if you don't have the wall punching ability." Yeah, that's nice. Although, if you don't have that ability, destructible walls don't noticeably glow so it's hard to find many of them without already having the ability at which point you're not going to waste grenades or ammunition on a wall you can just punch down. Actually, the punchable wall augmentation opens up a bunch of extra questions. You can smash down concrete walls if they're slightly cracked but you can't use this ability to punch open locked doors? You can't just break whatever locking mechanism is keeping this flimsy door shut with your mega fists? "Chaos Theory" had a lock picking mini game that got a bit dull the way hacking mini games did here and that was on top of the hacking mini game they also had, but the designers also gave you the ability to loudly break the lock and open it instantly. [door creaking] People who heard the noise or saw the broken lock would know someone was here but if you don't wanna pick that lock, you don't have to. Picking it became a choice, one which felt more professional and stealthy. Wouldn't it be cool if that augmentation also let you smash the locks off doors and make a ton of noise or risk setting off a security system or something? It would be really cool to have an ability like that at your disposal and I'm shocked the people who made a game that literally did this didn't think of it. It would automatically give you a lot more to do with this power and save on having to think of more places to put punchable walls, which they were really running low on towards the end. Something else really bugs me about these levels. I spent a long time trying to put my finger on it, but it turns out the answer was floating right in front of my face the entire time, so I'm not sure how I missed it. Oh, did you think I forgot about the quest markers? How could I? How could anyone? Quest markers are annoying when they're off in the corner, but it turns out it could have been worse. They could have been unconstrained. They could have just--no! No, leave me alone! They didn't seem to consider how it would look if you had multiple side quests happening at once, or if you were at a stage in a side quest with multiple objectives, because hoo-boy, does that door need me to know every side quest and individual component each side quest has is outside it! There's one side quest where you have to neutralize an entire apartment full of gangsters. Now, they're localized to a single small apartment so you only need one quest marker for that, right? [epic classical music] I have genuinely died in this game because I couldn't see a guy behind a pile of his buddies' quest markers. Yeah, so the game is a little desperate to make sure players don't miss what they're supposed to be doing to the point that it's pretty distracting, ironically. They expect you to toggle off the markers for quests that you aren't doing at the exact moment, and yeah, sure, this helps for that if you don't mind doing one thing at a time, but the real issue is making a game which has a method of pointing the player directly towards their required destination inspires really lazy design because now the levels don't have to make sense to players as they navigate because they've got a thing telling them where to go. If you've played the game you'll know that even though the markers are really distracting, you have to leave them on because there's no other way of finding these quests. Detroit is an unintuitive area to explore. It's a ton of very similar streets connecting to other very similar streets and when it's not those streets, it's identical apartment buildings, which, granted, is realistic to most urban cities, but that's not how games ought to work. New York in "Deus Ex" had character and presence. It was designed to be experienced by a player who didn't have it memorized or know exactly where to go. You enter and you're like, "Where am I?" And you look around and you know where you are because every part of the level looks different and things are really well sign-posted, literally in some cases. I love the place everyone calls the "Ton Hotel" is really the Hilton Hotel but the sign's broken. It's memorable and makes the hotel into an obvious landmark you can use to navigate. If you have to find Adam Jensen's apartment off in the corner of the map without quest markers telling you exactly where it is, you're screwed. If you try to stop and get your bearings by looking around, you'll never get anywhere. Detroit is a maze you need a GPS to traverse. Quests are not designed to be doable with the markers turned off. You'd have to manually check every single back alley to find the specific one with the guy you need to talk to for the current quest, especially when the guy has moved since the last time you talked to him for no reason. Conversely--I was feeling clever when I wrote this sentence-- this also means the player is never expected or challenged to pay attention. "Deus Ex" has an optional secret base in the sewers the first time you get to New York that's a clever setup for some of the future plot. Finding it requires looking around yourself or talking to a character you meet in another optional area and hearing him mention the base in the sewers and choosing to check it out. Nothing gets plopped on your screen, no arrow on your mini map. Just good old-fashioned detective work. You feel like a spy on the trail of a conspiracy, and on a deeper level, your objective is to find a generator the terrorists have hidden. Finding it is the point. Asking around, exploring, bothering to check out side content and meet other characters who might come in handy later. You can get on the rooftops of buildings and physically see the building the NSF are clearly trying to defend. This is the point of this section. It's why the game feels so free and personal despite being-- at it's heart-- pretty linear. "DXHR" feels exactly as linear as it is. In every single moment, it is telling you exactly where you're going next, and you're following it. When you have to do the equivalent quest-- shutting down a signal the bad guys are generating-- you know precisely where it is at all times. There is no mystery. No search. Prichard gives you a quest marker and you walk to it. Hell, you could have just got your pilot to drop you off right there and save you the trouble. And when you do turn it off, she actually does turn up to take you to the next area, which is a little insulting. I'm sure there's a plot contrivance, but in the original game the point was that you didn't know exactly where it was, so you didn't feel like you had your time wasted when an aircraft came to pick you up after you found it. Quest markers are not an alternative to level design. There are a few brief sections in the game where they're switched off so the game has to be designed to make the player do their own thinking and exploring and the game's fun factor instantly skyrockets. There's a base where your signal is jammed or whatever so you have to manually find the scientists you're looking for, and it's easily the best level in the game to navigate. Each of the buildings has a completely different shape and feel, unique designs and visual cues, the outside area is built so it's easy to know where you are relative to everything-- it's really cool. Five minutes in you find the signal jammer and turn it off and the game is bullshit again. Now you know exactly where to go and suddenly you're not really exploring anymore. This is the one section in the game where turning off the quest markers actually works really well so at least it's a good time if you keep the markers turned off. It kinda sucks that almost every game that heavily relies on these markers inevitably has a tiny really cool segment that turns them off where the level design has to account for them being turned off and everything gets so much better. Instead of being an interesting take on the central mechanics, it ends up being a brief foray into better mechanics you don't get anywhere else, and now the player knows exactly what they're missing the rest of the time. There's an oversight in the PC version that's kind of funny but also prevents the markers from at least getting better with age. The game was designed to look good at 720p on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. When Nixxes were creating the PC port-- and God bless them. Otherwise they did a fantastic job-- someone made the UI not scale with resolution. This means at higher resolutions like 1080p, 1440p, and 4K if you're an idiot who owns a 4K screen, the UI gets increasingly harder to see and read, but for some God-forsaken reason, the objective markers-- and only the objective markers-- do scale. So even though everything else is so small people watching this video on their phone won't be able to read the in-game subtitles-- don't blame me. That's just how the game looks at 1440p-- the quest markers are still blasting your head off and messing with the visuals of an otherwise still beautiful game. [gunshot] Incidentally, if you get the chip replacement, the glitchy health bar and ammo counter you get during the boss battle are scaled so you can briefly see just how readable the game could have been. You know how older video game cities were always a lot smaller than a real city would be because of hardware limitations or what have you? It turns out that was a blessing in disguise. New York, Hong Kong, and Paris felt big but not so big that getting around was annoying. Because you know what's not that fun? Trying to get around a big city on foot. [MAN coughs] [distant vehicle rumbling] [MAN] Hey. Don't even think about... [MAN] What's up, dude? You lost or something? [HBOMB] The new realistically big Detroit and Hengsha levels have tons of places that serve no actual game play purpose whatsoever but the level has to be big because cities are big. The game does create a very nice sense of mood with this, though. The designers came up with hundreds of brands and logos to populate their future with. There's some genuine creativity on display here, but these levels aren't used in ways that benefit from this. You aren't milling around the cool environment, making small talk with locals, having unique encounters as you traverse the hustle and bustle of the city. It's window dressing as you follow a quest marker to the places the game play happens. JC Denton's walk speed wasn't super fast by the first-person shooter standards of the time but the small and dense levels packed with stuff to do and secrets to find made the pace feel brisk. Adam feels significantly slower than JC, especially in the much larger cities. You can sprint for two seconds-- that's not a joke. Two seconds--and then it has to recharge. [panting erratically] [breathing heavily] [panting erratically] They made running shit on purpose so you have more stuff to put praxis points into. I mean, it's not a surprise he's going so slow if he's carrying so much stuff everywhere in his arms. "Pathalogic" made you walk for hours deliberately as a form of punishment for the player. The game was trying to hurt you and make you question what you were doing with your time. "Human Revolution" is trying to be a fun cyberpunk action RPG so I don't think they should be aiming for the same effect. The atmosphere and art design deserve some credit here, though. This is some of the most impressive really boring walking back and forth between objectives I've done in my life and I'm an expert on those. This is one of the best realized worlds in the history of video games. A decade later the graphics hold up incredibly well because good visual design just doesn't age, but you're traversing it to do the same hacking mini game every five feet to unlock safes with a negligible amount of money in them which you can't even spend because the store only had ten of the bullets you want. This is why this game is so difficult to analyze without going way overboard and making an unwatchably long video. All the pieces of an excellent game are right here. They even made the skylight you could have got in through in a better version of the game, but they don't stick the landing. Instead, the game is merely fine. The stealth is fun, the combat is good, and the levels are okay, but don't encourage creativity, and it's easy to get bored because the game never asks that much of you. I joked before about people quitting because of the hacking mini game but more seriously, it's probably because halfway through, there aren't even many new levels to keep things fresh. You instead go to Detroit and Hengsha all over again with even less to see this time. The first visits to these locations have an okay amount of side quests-- about as many as the original did for it's city-type locations. The second visit to Detroit has one side quest with a second one if you completed another side quest during the first visit. And I mean fully completed. If you forgot to read the three E-mails you got sent at the end of the first half of the quest before you left for China hours ago, you can never start the second half once you get back. The second visit to China is so devoid of new material the game lies and says there are more side missions than there actually are. There's two; one from this guy and one from this lady, but the game pretends there's a third quest. The other quest-- "A Matter of Discretion--" is given to you by another character. It's to talk to this lady who then gives you the second quest. [WOMAN] Are you the man Mr. Darrow sent? [HBOMB] A guy calls you on the telephone and gives you the quest to get the other quest so it feels like you're doing more quests. There are some really ambitious ideas for a cyberpunk world in here saddled with an engine and hardware generation that didn't match that ambition. The simplified levels remind me a lot of the PS2 version of the original game-- [buzzing] Which was good but a bit more stripped down and missing the expansiveness and complexity that made the PC version quite so special. I'd compare the level design to "Invisible War's," but even I'm not that mean. Actually, no. "Invisible War" put enemies in the vents to punish you for thinking they were an easy solution, so its level design is objectively better. - Next chapter. - [CHAIRMAN] Goodbye. [groans] [ALEX] I talked to the chairman. We discussed regime change for New Cairo. [beeping] [exciting music] [HBOMB] The story of the original "Deus Ex" was a complete mess. In a good way, though. It's part of what makes it amazing, but it's also why making another one is like trying to solve the trolley problem while trapped inside the trolley. It was set in 2052 in a world that's very different from ours. Or was different in the year 2000. Many of the game's scariest predictions turned out to be true. My favorite games keep doing that. [MAN] Let it spill over to the schools and churches. Let the bodies pile up in the streets. [HBOMB] There's a dozen factions with their own agendas all fighting for supremacy, uneasy alliances, ancient organizations, revolutionary groups, secret bases underneath secret bases, corporate conspiracies, and even greasels. [animal snarling] [JC screams] [bones snapping] [HBOMB] Despite discussing important ideas like the value of democracy and the human need to feel witnessed by a god and how the rich have manipulated the system so workers pay more in taxes than their boss, the writing still manages to be fun. [all screaming] [HBOMB] "Deus Ex" knows that a world where every conspiracy turned out to be true would be a little bit silly. [HBOMB] So instead of pretending to be the darkest and most seriousest story ever, it's more like an "X-Files" box set: raising some important ideas and themes but with a sense of humor about it. [JC] That makes me one ugly son of a bitch. [HBOMB] The game has multiple endings, all three of which have different implications for the future of the world. You can let things continue as normal but with a slightly more benevolent dictatorship in place run by you and that guy who loves betraying people, but I'm sure it'll all work about fin--wait. That's not a good-sounding "Paradise Lost" quote. Oh, shit. Are we the baddies? Or you can shut off all advanced information technology and plunge the world into a new dark age where YouTubers have to provide something of value to society, or you can fuse with an advanced A.I. and become a kind of all-knowing god from the machine. Hey, look. It's the title. But now the question is, how the hell do you make another one of these? Do you decide on one ending being canon and hope for the best? Do you ask for a player's save file and try to react to their choices and retcon all the big ones because you can't be bothered? Or do you embody the spirit of "Deus Ex's" madness and push it even further and put jet boosters on the trolley? [screams] No! Enter "Deus Ex: Invisible War," the game equivalent of trying to replace sleep with your ADHD medication. Which ending is canon? All of them! At once! JC Denton fused with an advance A.I. and became a god-like hyper intelligent super being, but also all the technology in the world shut off which kind of messed with his plans, but also the fucking Illuminati are still running around, but als--there's even more greasles now! [PLAYER groans] [HBOMB] Set 20 years after the most confusing day in the world, "Invisible War" tries to follow up on the original with intriguing new perspectives and ironic twists and tries to tell a new story of its own with new characters while it's at it. Then those two things smash into each other and create the most fascinating mess of a story ever conceived. It's less "X-Files" box set and more trying to figure out the plot of "X-Files" from "Fox Mulder Best Moments Compilation #11." [FOX screams] [HBOMB] How is this in part 11? This is at least a number four. I love this game. Is it good? I don't know but it's definitely the most. This game has four radically different endings that each permanently alter the world even more than the original's did ranging from wiping out almost all life to uniting human consciousness in a new way of being. So, one question. How do you make a sequel to this? If someone asks you to make "Deus Ex 3" as it was tentatively titled in its early teasers, they're trying to trick you into destroying your career. So, what do you do? You make a prequel. Oh, no! Prequels can be great, but they often have to carry a lot of excess baggage. This is all the stuff we didn't need to see to enjoy the original, so seeing it is by definition kind of unnecessary. "You know his name. You know his methods. And this February..." You learn that at some point he started doing those things. Holy shit, this movie's fucking terrible! And in interactive media, this can be even worse because now your interaction is being limited by what's supposed to happen next. [gunshot] [MAN] You've changed the future! You've created a time paradox! [HBOMB] Okay, in context, that's kind of meant as a joke. Uh, let's do a real example. "S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl" began with the Marked One on the battle bus with the quest to down Strelok at the Tilted Towers. Whether he succeeded in his quest or if he merely got showered with money to death was based on your actions. Then "S.T.A.L.K.E.R." got a prequel. "Clear Sky" has many problems, one of them being it's the successor to a game with a lot of endings and some big twists which itself has no real twists and can only end one way, and then "Shadow of Chernobyl" happens. You spend ten to 30 hours helping the Marked One catch his bus. People who played it know what I'm talking about. Honestly, I could talk for hours about how you-- [door closes] No, Rachel, I won't let you stop me this time! The people need to know! Is that a TASER? [electric sparking] [uplifting guitar music] [electric sparking] So, yeah, prequels are something you generally want to avoid unless you've got a really good idea for it. [John Williams' "Star Wars (Main Title)"] But as we've established, Eidos Montreal didn't really have much of a choice. They're kind of between a rock and a hard place here. I mean, I guess they could do a reboot, but rebooting the franchise kind of isn't ideal, either. You really should never do one of those, Eidos Montreal. Oh, no! Given that all of the options were kind of bad, it does beg the question, "Why make a "Deus Ex" game at all apart from brand recognition? Well, it might shock you, but the answer is brand recognition. Did you ever wonder why the next "Prey" was called "Prey" and not-- I dunno-- "New Space Game" even though it's nothing like "Prey?" God, these names are confusing. It's because the money men at Bethesda or Eido--Square Enix aren't going to spend millions of dollars and years of dev time on an ambitious, risk-taking original idea unless it's got a vaguely bankable name. [MAN] We already had in mind the kind of game we were making and then Bethesda said, "Hey, what about using this name?" [HBOMB] Hey, why don't you call it "Prey," guys? We killed the company that was making the original "Prey 2" even though it was basically finished because they wouldn't let us buy them. That's a true story! Look it up! So now we have this name lying around. "Prey 2017's" great. Don't get me wrong. And the devs had a lot of creative freedom with it, except for the name. [MAN] That game had to be "Prey" somehow. [HBOMB] This is why at least in the AAA gaming space original big budget games are surprisingly rare but you can expect endless sequels, prequels, reboots, and remasters of popular existing properties until you're cold in your grave. What have you done? Why does he look-- [laughing] Because when you're talking years of work and tens of millions of state subsidized Canadian fun bucks you need to provide at least some proof of a return on investment, and the best way to do that is to be called "Famous Thing, colon, More Shit." Maybe none of this is true and the creators really wanted to specifically make the next "Deus Ex" game, but if that's the case, I think it was a poor choice. You see, now you have to design your game around dodging the complaints of losers who care about the "Deus Ex" timeline. Losers like me. Prepare to be destroyed. What I'm getting at is the story is trying to be unique and original but also very self conscious about looking like it definitely will lead into "Deus Ex" maybe someday. This approach damages both the game's ability to relate to the other games and its ability to tell the original story it clearly desperately wants to. Before you can even explore the story that is here, you have to excavate it from under a pile of distracting references to the original. For example, JC Denton's boss Joseph Manderley is referenced, like, a dozen times throughout the plot like he's a major player directly involved with the important stuff you're dealing with. [HBOMB] Like, this guy's so important, he's getting name dropped in the pre-rendered cutscenes by bosses. What would an ordinary player think this is setting up? [MAN] You the Home Sec guy I was ordered to wait for? Tell Manderley I didn't get the memo until I was halfway through the autopsy. [HBOMB] Maybe the story that you're playing, right? [ADAM] Someone in the government-- a man named Manderley-- ordered that especially appointed medical examiner perform the autopsy. [HBOMB] So you think, "I get it. "This guy's a big deal. Maybe we meet or even fight him later?" No, they eventually just stop mentioning him. If you were trying to figure out what was up with Manderley or find him, you were wasting your time. This isn't part of the story. This was the game's attempt to tie itself into the series more, but they've gone about it in a way that makes the actual story you're trying to follow really annoying because it's full of stuff you think you're supposed to pay attention to that turns out to be fan service and doesn't go anywhere. I'm sure they were trying to be subtle about it so their own story had room to breathe. In fact, here's Mary DeMarle saying that. [MARY] Well, the good thing about doing the prequel is that if you haven't played the game before, you don't have to worry about it. You don't have to suddenly become, like, "Oh, what's going on?" Um-- [HBOMB] I think she had the right idea here. This was a story that first and foremost needed to work on its own merits, but there is frankly too much "Deus Ex One" stuff in here for that to happen. The first thing you see in the game in the opening is this guy, Bob Page, the antagonist of "Deus Ex One," and also the first guy you see in the opening of that game, too. You need to know Bob Page is behind this for some reason, even though he never appears in the actual game. He turns up after the credits. [WOMAN] I'm looking forward to seeing the hybrid project up close, Mr. Page. [BOB] But, please. Call me Bob. [HBOMB] This shot in the post credits scene is reused from the opening, too. I don't know whether to be annoyed how lazy this was or glad they didn't waste too much effort on something so unnecessary. People who are playing this first-- and for a lot of people this was their introduction to the series--will spend the entire game wondering who the hell that guy the intro focused on was, and they will never get an answer. I love when my first experience of a series is a bunch of shit I can't possibly understand. There's a bit during the walk and talk a few minutes later where a guy drops a reference to Page Industries and this one's kinda cute. Players who knew what Page Industries was would get it and players who didn't could write it off as world-building and office banter. This subtlety would have worked really well but you've already blown past subtle references to Bob Page when you began the game with a minute and a half intro starring Bob Page, even though he's not even in the game! I'm a little Paged out, buddy! The opening, ending, and quite a lot in between is an extended reminder of a different story you could be playing instead. People who know who Lucius DeBeers is aren't gonna clap their hands like a circus seal when they see his name turn up, and people who don't are gonna wonder why they keep reading E-mails about people they don't know who don't turn up in the story. All these problems come to a head in--where else-- the pre-order DLC. If you got the "Explosive Mission Pack--" [rapid booming] At one point you literally take a break from the story you're playing to help rescue a main character you've never met before to help them get onto a boat to the place they need to be 20 years later. The most relevant interaction Adam Jensen has with the plot of "Deus Ex One" is to help a guy catch his bus. During the escape sequence with the bomb, you see him get on his boat, the Tracer. Wow, how long did that take you? But rescuing Tong was pre-order content a majority of players didn't get to do, and since this cutscene is pre-rendered and happens the same way no matter what, there isn't an alternative version for if you didn't get the rescue Tong mission. So most players' experience of this element of the story is some guy they've never seen before turns up for five seconds, waves at Adam like you're supposed to know who he is, and people who haven't played the original are left asking-- [ADAM] Wait, who are you? [TONG] Guess you should have pre-ordered from GameStop! [laughing] [HBOMB] I feel bad making this criticism because for the reasons we've explored, it's not like they had much of a choice in making their project have to also work as a prequel. So criticizing how they handled it is just kicking someone while they're down, which in Quebec I think they would call a, uh, folks pass. But "Deus Ex" is one of the best stories in the history of gaming, and "Human Revolution" isn't doing its own story any favors by reminding fans of the much better story they actually liked. So when the story isn't trying to shoehorn in confusing and unnecessary references to the first game, what is the story of this one actually about? [beeping] [quirky music] Sorry, there's a typo there. [keyboard clacks] Now, since it's a video game, we're grading on a really weirdly-shaped curve here. They won an award for the writing at the Canadian Video Game Awards that year, beating out other games like "Assassin's Creed: Revelations" and "Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine." Wow, what stiff competition. This game's story is not great but also much, much better than most other video games by such a wide margin it feels wrong criticizing it too hard. The performances are fantastic. Well, mostly. [DAVID] Helipad! [HBOMB] Someone's not coming back for the sequel. And there's some solid comedy in there, too. There's a fantastic part where you're supposed to tell a code phrase to a guy and you can just get it wrong on purpose. [ADAM] Something, something, death and taxes, Confucius. [MAN] What? Wait, that-- that's not it at all. [ADAM] Does it matter? [MAN] You were supposed to say, "Death and life have their determined appointments." Then I say, "Riches and honors depend upon Heaven." [ADAM] Okay. Death and life have their determined appointments. [MAN] Riches and ho-- oh, never mind! [HBOMB] You don't even fail the mission for doing this. It's just cool. And there's some neat setup and payoff like, "Oh, see this guy showing his arm off to the camera to make sure you see it?" That arm is gonna turn out to be important three quarters of the game from now. There's nothing wrong with the writing in, say, the cutscenes, even if they take away some player control. The issue is that all of this writing is happening around a badly-written central plot. "Deus Ex: Human Revolution" is centrally about the issue of augmentation and whether it's good or not. [MARY] "Deus Ex: Human Revolution" centers, uh, around the use of mechanical augmentations and how this technology has spread through the world and how it is affecting the world. [HBOMB] It's not that the world is full of stuff but the main focus is augmentation. It's that the world is full of people discussing augmentation and nothing else unless they're referencing "Deus Ex One." Almost everyone in the universe of "Human Revolution" has an opinion about whether having robot arms is good or the death nail of the human soul. [WOMAN] W--What's all the fuss about this augmentation technology? [MAN] What are you lookin' at, pal? Scanning me with those metal eyes of yours? [MAN] No offense but, uh, if it were up to me, this place would have a no aug policy. [WOMAN] Hope you enjoy those fancy hands of yours, 'cause in less than a year, they'll be worthless. [HBOMB] The wrote mechanical insistence on covering one and only one topic makes the world strangely uncanny. [WOMAN] Have you seen the neuro enhancements they're coming up with these days? How far are they gonna go? [video game beeping] [HBOMB] In his apartment building, Adam Jensen overhears a fight in another room. A man has caught his wife cheating. It's tense and upsetting and for a brief moment it feels like you're in a world with a bunch of different stories happening in it. Then it turns out she cheated because they're both augmented. [WOMAN] I guess I wanted to be reminded of what it was like to be with someone normal! [MAN] You were the one who wanted us to get enhanced! Now you're saying we're not normal anymore! Well, I'll try not to touch you too much often with my cold, dead, metal hand, okay? [HBOMB] I'm sad about my metal hand. Ah! That's the story in a nutshell. Granted, it's not quite as iconic as, "I never asked for this." Purity First motivations are that they don't like augmentations because they pollute the human body. They hate them for this vague reason so much they're willing to break into buildings, take hostages, kill them with gas, and so on. They dress evocative of Christian monks with the prayer rope and everything and wear a band over their arms with their group's logo on it. Wow, I wonder what this is meant to remind people of? [HBOMB] "He called me a bigot, so I murdered him." You see, when you zoom in really closely on one aspect of your setting, you obscure the big picture in ways that make it less interesting than if it was part of the whole. Take Detroit, the city the American portions of the game are set in. Detroit, historically, is a city that was once prosperous, then went through a major decline as a result of the auto industry shipping most of the work to places that didn't have strong unions so they could pay them less. People in poorer countries-- and eventually robots in poorer countries-- make the cars they used to make in Detroit. There was also redlining, which effectively denied black Detroiters the opportunities afforded by stable home ownership or being able to open new businesses of their own which helps to ensure the economy had even less chance of recovering. And the thing is, the economic effects of historic racism don't go away overnight. When we invent cures for cancer or improved human body parts that don't get sick or let us run faster or jump higher or think harder, people from economically disadvantaged groups will have the least access. The rich will be building themselves better and the poor will not. Meanwhile, if augmentation becomes necessary for certain jobs like, say, truck drivers can get their brains augmented so they can drive all night without traditional need for sleep, that might become the expected norm for the job. People might only hire drivers who don't need breaks to sleep. Wage slavery would take on even more physical connotations. You could make a game about that idea. And this stuff is discussed at least briefly during the game. Several homeless NPCs talk about how they lost their jobs for refusing to be augmented, and several other NPCs have serious job anxiety or remark on how rich Adam must be to be so augmented. [WOMAN] Listen, just because you have money doesn't make you better than me. [HBOMB] The Hengsha level has a whole side quest covering sex workers being forcibly augmented not just to serve clients but because it means they won't be able to quit without losing access to the anti-rejection drugs you have to take for life once you get an augmentation. "Human Revolution" strays dangerously close to making actual real social commentary here. In the last level, lots of the construction workers have tools where their arms would be. I'm gonna go ahead and call this body horror. This is what the future might do to working people, but did you see how deep I had to dig to pull out that point just now? This game is supposed to be about human augmentation and its effect on the world, but I had to talk about specific random NPCs and the one side quest that really went into it and stare at random enemies in the last level to find some kind of relevant observation. If anything about this game's story is lacking, it's how it's swimming in an ocean of meaningful questions and points but the actual plot blows past it all to be about terrorists who hate augs and aug lovers, and the bad men who kidnapped your girlfriend. Let's take another look at some of Purity First's literature they leave strewn around the office they broke into. This stuff about physical limitations being human and not changing the body is just bullshit. These fuckers are against pacemakers. They don't have a valuable point to make here, and that's okay. Purity First are deliberately written and presented in the game as misguided radicals which isn't necessarily a bad choice, but it does mean this group doesn't have anything interesting to say. The NSF are a great faction in the first game because their perspective is genuinely interesting, at least partially valid, and everything their leaders say is just fucking true. There's a reason every line this guy speaks is iconic. You switch sides and work with these guys partway through and it works here because they were never presented as the dumbest boys in the world. But, yeah, sure, hearing aids are immoral. Nice one, buddy. Say hi to Ted in prison for me. But here's the real shitter, right? In between these two statements is a really interesting one. This one actually reaches for an important point. It comes close to saying what a lot of people say right now about modern technology like electric cars or self-driving cars or space rockets, namely that even if they work, they're not the thing humanity needs right now, and wasting resources on them at a time like this while so many real problems go unsolved is a tragedy history won't look back on kindly, if there even are any historians left in 50 years. Purity First could easily have been written as a principled faction and represented a tangible perspective but instead any of their justifiable motivations are relegated to the back page of a PDF, and they're shooting people for calling them racist. You could have--for example-- made them a group with a cohesive ideology. Like, what if they were anti-augmentation specifically because they saw the impact it would have on working people who couldn't afford them, or who would be expected to get them to keep their jobs? What if they weren't even anti-augmentation per se and this break-in was a cover to steal for people who need access to augmentations but can't afford them? Zeke Sanders is established as a veteran. He belongs to a group that maybe could do with access to replacement limbs. There were so many compelling ways of writing this group but instead they went with the Nazi sash-wearing purity terrorist gang. [HBOMB] I don't like augmentations because I'm the bad guy! Ah! Even though there's plenty of room to discuss augmentation in a nuanced way, it's instead often used as a stand-in for other real world issues. There's newspaper articles about how an augmented black woman has had to deal with bigotry not just for her race but now also for being augmented. First racism and now robot arms. People are coming up with special new slurs for augmented people. Mechs, clanks, cogs, chrome boy. - Chrome boy? - [MAN] Chrome boy. [HBOMB] Chrome boy. Hanzers? They put more creativity into clever new terms for cyber racism than they did into actually talking about the issues that would really come into play if human augmentation becomes available. It feels a bit like they're adding augmentation on top of these other things like racism, abortion, drug abuse, or prostitution in order to bring additional depth to their central theme. It's a little gross at times. You don't need an abortion poster to make trans humanism look like a topical idea. I just think this is unnecessary and crass. The Hengsha side quest deserves special attention here. The idea of forcing sex workers to need an anti-rejection drug is a little too close to one-to-one substitution for a real problem: sex workers being addicted often forcefully to drugs as a means of control. Like, making it so the drug they need is because of an augmentation is just crowbarring your silly sci-fi concept into an already existing real problem. The game isn't using this sequence as a way of saying anything about the sex industry beyond that it's bad that trafficking happens which, okay, glad we're on the same page. And it's not saying anything about augmentation except that I guess it might add to an already existing form of exploitation. It's here so you can punch three guys and save a lady and she can go, "Wow, you saved me," and then she evaporates. We fade to black and she ceases to exist. Did we just solve sex trafficking? And we have to talk a little about how prostitution is used in the game. Sex workers are a large presence in both main hubs and it feels like this was done to make a point about how bad things are getting. Like, the writers wanted to write a dystopian future and their minds instantly went to, "There's a lot of prostitutes everywhere." I'm curious if the writers spoke to any sex workers and asked them how they felt about being used as a signifier for societal collapse. This problem is bigger than "Human Revolution," obviously. Prostitutes-- and more specifically Asian robo prostitutes-- have been a fixture of cyberpunk fiction since its inception. These stories have always leaned on combining the mystery of future technology with the exoticism of foreign cultures. We certainly shouldn't interrogate the Orientalism inherent in that trope. [ADAM] Hey Malik, drop me off at the cyber brothel, please. I need to look for key cards. The game is ham-fisted in how it talks about augmentations because when it comes down to it, the central question it decided to focus on-- whether we should legislate human augmentation or not-- just isn't as complicated as it might have seemed when they came up with it. Putting aside the questions about what it means to be human, the more tangible questions on the topic are a bit simpler. For example, if companies started developing prosthetic arms that can shoot explosives and kill everyone in an immediate radius, should there be regulations on who can have those? [ADAM grunts] [HBOMB] Uh, yeah! They should probably ban the war crime blaster before the NRA decide it's every toddler's God-given right to bear robot arms. In this footage I was trying to turn invisible and accidentally hit the button right next to it and fat fingered my way into 12 consecutive life sentences. [booming] Pause the video and leave a comment if you think the government shouldn't regulate this. In order to make the question seem more complicated, the game draws zero distinction between this and the types of theoretical augmentation we can all agree are great. Advanced prosthetics that recreate actual sensory information the way a hand would enabling people who have lost limbs to completely replace them. Fully-functioning eye replacements. Things like that would be magical for a lot of people. The anti-augmentation groups are written to hate those, too. [ISAIAS] Too much power can make you do terrible things, Mr. Jensen. [HBOMB] Zeke Sanders ripped out his prosthetic eye because he hates augmentations that much. They're against all augmentations for pseudo-philosophical reasons to do with changing to core of humanity. We can save people from illnesses, amputation, disfigurement, disability, but at what cost? Ooh! [ADAM] Augmentations help a lot of people, doc. Handicapped, war vets. [ISAIAS] Yes, but at what cost? [HBOMB] I bet you thought I was joking, didn't you? No, they actually say that. Now, statistically, almost half the people watching this are wearing glasses or contact lenses like me. Many of you are watching this on the phone they also use whenever they need to check for information on almost any topic. We've already been supplementing our bodies and minds with technology for so long we've almost forgotten we're doing it. By surpassing our human limits, we're destroying our humanity, defeating the purpose of life. Oh, my God! You're totally right! We need to rid the world of people who supplement their bodies with--are those glasses? [gunfire] So, your options in "Human Revolution" are between these jokers who are anti-medicine because, ooh, what if life-saving surgery takes away some of your soul? Several of which turn out to be the fucking Illuminati, and we can't let the government shut us down, Adam! Break into a police station for me! Also don't forget we installed the secret explosion nightmare cannon in your body! Check this shit out! Yee-haw! The pro-regulation groups have to be written to be extremely stupid and working for the bad guys because otherwise there's no contest. The issue is made all-or-nothing. Corporations manufacturing conceals carry buster swords versus big government trying to ban--what, the concept of prosthesis? Because that's the only way to turn the central focus of the game into something resembling a debate. "Human Revolution" feels like its heart is in the right place but it's afraid to say too much so instead you get this really weak stuff like, "Uh, hey, maybe the military industrial complex is bad. [muffled booming] [ADAM] You're right. The teacher would just love having one of those things. [HBOMB] Yeah, if you think about it, making weapons isn't as good for the world as making medicine. Wow! Later when riots start happening in Detroit-- the riots are about augmentation of course-- the police have a police version of the robot you were fighting before. That's kinda cool. There's a point being made here by the reuse of an enemy from other parts of the game. You're literally seeing an enemy but on the side of the cops. I mean, they got this idea from the original "Deus Ex" when you started seeing rebranded versions of mechs you'd seen before, but still. The game is saying, "Hey, maybe it's bad the police have tanks." They're arresting tons of people in the street, too, but this is set dressing for the fact a riot is happening because people don't like augmentation. The commentary isn't, "Boy, "the police really are making "a bad situation worse by taking to the streets with automatic shotguns and fucking Tachikomas." The commentary is, "Wow, things are really heating up "about this augmentation thing, huh? "The cops really have their hands full with all these crazy rioters!" The game respects the cops so much you get hired to help them out during the same level where they're arresting everyone using a rocket mech. You can see what I mean, right? This is okay as far as writing for a video game goes, but terrible as far as writing a story goes. It really doesn't help that it feels like a few key steps of the story got cut out due to time limitations. In the second to last level, it's established that all the major characters from the plot can't be contacted because they're currently en route to a sea base in the middle of the Arctic Ocean. This travel time is important. Jensen then encounters Zhao Yun Ru-- the lady who tricked him earlier-- who introduces the boss fight with the bio chip reveal, then it turns out Jensen needs to get to the Arctic Ocean base everyone else went to to stop the conspiracy happening there now at which point it conveniently turns out there's a special person person-sized rocket here which could launch him to the other side of the world faster than anyone's ever traveled anywhere on Earth before. So he goes there, and Zhao Yun Ru's there already! She got here before you and she's the final boss! Uh, hang on a second! How did you get here? Was there a second rocket stashed away somewhere? Can you give me the cliff notes on what is happening here? No wonder the last level takes place in a giant hole. Presumably in an earlier draft there was a level or two between these creating a time gap where it was plausible for Zhao Yun Ru to get to the middle or the Arctic Ocean. When you land in the ocean in the cutscene, you just spawn on a landing pad next to all these helicopters where I assume you were going to get dropped off for a sensible reason in an earlier draft of the story. Or maybe they just didn't care to explain this. I mean, Jensen doesn't even look for her before he leaves. She fucks up Jensen's augmentations, walks off screen, and he forgets she exists. Men never fail to forget where women are in physical space. Instead of building to some larger question, it builds towards a comical, over-the-top video game zombie movie climax. The big reveal of the plot is that the Illuminati are figuring out a way to control people using their augmentations. Then one of them goes rogue and presses a button that makes everyone with an augmentation go insane. He does this to make a point about augmentations being bad. Adam Jensen who didn't get the replacement chip or did but got an injection of nano machines so he's fine--that's the explanation they give-- saves the day by flying to ground zero and turning it off. This is a waste of the potentially realistic and interesting ways you could have taken this story. Instead of seriously exploring the problems with centralization or authorities like governments having control over your life, it settles for the much less deep question, "Would it be bad if the Illuminati "hacked your grandmother's hip replacement and made her into a killing machine?" And the answer to that question, shockingly enough, is yeah, that would be quite bad! But that's not science fiction or cyber punk or trans humanism or discussing the implications of future technology. That's just stupid. You haven't told a story about power and control. You wrote a cartoon about how bad it would be if there was a big button that killed everyone. You're not presenting a nuanced issue here. You can most easily identify the core problems with the story telling and how the game reuses ideas that were in the original but in the complete opposite way. Okay, so in "Deus Ex," one of the big things about the Illuminati and their offshoot MJ12 is they're super pretentious. No one names their A.I. algorithms Morpheus or Daedalus unless they like the smell of their own farts. Like, MJ12's organizational structure and clearance levels are types of angel arranged in order of closeness to the throne of God, with the top one being literally God-clearance and the one below it being Seraphic, like as in Seraphim. The founder of MJ12 is writing Bible fan fiction and casting himself as God. This isn't just a piece of lore or meant to sound cool. This is a joke. Bob Page-- the guy who started MJ12-- doesn't really understand the teachings of the Illuminati and thinks he's a genius, so to sound clever, he named the structure of his organization around stuff he thought sounded deep. Seraphic? Wow! I'm so smart! I'm a philosopher! I'm fucking Pla-too! Page named the special A.I. he wanted to use to take over the world Icarus. This is a joke. He's trying to sound cool and it's really silly. Like "New Vegas" with its Caesar cosplayer, "Deus Ex" is making fun of how stupid it is to try to sound clever by making surface references to stuff people think is deep. Cue "Human Revolution," which bases a shit ton of its imagery around the myth of Icarus because it sounds deep. [tense music] ♪ ♪ [mechanical parts whirring] [ADAM] I never asked for this [all cheering] [HBOMB] Augmentation is like Icarus's wax wings and the sun represents, uh, augmentation turning out to be bad. Look, I don't mean any offense to people who thought this was clever when this trailer came out. Demographically speaking, you were 15. I'm merely giving you the opportunity to consider that this might just look smart while not actually saying anything remotely relevant or useful about the world we live in, and this shit is omnipresent throughout the game. The first Icarus thing you see is the very first thing you see in the game. The slow fall augmentation is called the Icarus Landing System. There's a book you can read in the game called "Building Wings." The game's title theme on the soundtrack is called "Icarus," of course. The tie-in novel for the game was named "Deus Ex: Icarus Effect," and then the tie-in novel had a tie-in game for phones and later the PC called "Deus Ex: The Fall," because, you know, Icarus falling into the sea, which happens to the character in the game, too. That sounds familiar. Oh, wait, because it also happens to Adam. Both in the game and then afterwards in the ending. He falls into the sea again then. In this world, everyone is Icarus, drowning in the sea of this symbolism. "The Fall" was gonna have a slightly subtler title to begin with. According to unused images in the game's files, they were gonna call it "Icarus Rising." And, like, I hope I'm not the first person to point this out for you, but Serif Industries' logo is just a fucking wing, and Tai Yong Medical-- their antagonist-- their levels are all sun-themed. Look. The sun is coming from both sides of the room at once because it's like they're bathed in the sun. You know, Icarus's natural enemy or something. Tai Yong is named that because that's the Chinese phrase for "the sun." They wanted to continue their sun-Icarus metaphor so they Googled "the sun" in Chinese. Sarif is a deliberate pun on Seraphim. "Deus Ex" literally made a joke about people who think referencing the seraphim is clever. This is the shit Bob Page would come up with if you made him write a "Deus Ex" game. Even the man responsible explains his motivations using a hackneyed Icarus metaphor. [HUGH] I prefer to think of myself as Daedalus, watching helplessly as his child crashes into the sea. [HBOMB] Darrow is currently looking into an ocean we just crashed into as part of a previous unrelated flying too close to the sun crashing into the ocean metaphor. [HUGH] Watching helplessly as his child crashes into the sea. [HBOMB] Read a second Greek myth. I'm begging you! Why do we build the wall? I think the moment I knew the game was gonna be really misguided was when one of the trailers flashed through a bunch of generic "we are smart" imagery and Renaissance stuff, and one of the things that flashes up is a sign saying, "We don't let augmented people in here." Like, okay. Segregation. You're making a game about segregation-- a real thing that is horrible-- and you're also making a game about the cyber Renaissance and how cool it is to reference the myth of Icarus. We flew too close to the big yong, and you know what that means. [ADAM screaming] [HBOMB] Apartheid. It sucks because, like, how many other games take their stories seriously enough that a main character says something like, "Hey, it's weird we spend most of our time inventing weapons for the government, right?" I want to love any game that takes that step, but when that's the only step it takes, and the other clever thing he says was only in the trailer, and the rest of the story is preoccupied with stuff the original game made fun of for being pretentious as shit, I gotta say I don't think it's out of place to expect a little more. Please, sir, can I have some more delicious sauce? [MAN] Those elements mixed together is definitely like a sauce. [HBOMB] The story being this simplistic makes the okay-to-mediocre game play feel so much worse. Even when the original was being annoying or awkward to play, you were a few minutes away from a truly fascinating conversation you couldn't get anywhere else. If you didn't like an aspect of the original's story, a lot more stuff was going on. Like the hacking mini game, if you think the augmentation stuff in "Human Revolution" is dumb, you can't escape it. It's everywhere at every moment right up until the plot manages to drag itself over the finish line. [beeping] [rock music] "Human Revolution's" endings are what would happen if a fart could die. After defeating the final boss once she plugs herself into a super computer powered by screaming women-- if that seems like it came out of left field, that's because it did-- you get to pick how the game ends. Now, the original game was criticized for how the endings weren't based on your choices throughout their story or their wider consequences, but instead on what you chose to do in the final level. Each of the endings had its own unique set of objectives, but still it means only the last 20 minutes of the game affect how the story ends. The creators of "Human Revolution" decided to give players something to really complain about. Now you pick an ending from one of three buttons at a computer which decides who gets blamed for augmented people turning into zombies for 40 minutes. There's also a fourth button which destroys the entire ocean facility meaning no one has any idea what really happened and everyone on the facility including Adam dies. You don't get to see what actually happens when you press any button, though. The ending cinematics are just shots of actual protests and shit. Tinted yellow, obviously. Can't let this actual news footage of real police brutality ruin your visual aesthetic, bro. Big Bro! This oil spill footage wasn't deep enough So we made it cyber. [ADAM] Think about it. [HBOMB] Adam shoots the shit about life, the universe, and everything, and the credits roll. Then you get a post credits scene where Adam's ex-girlfriend talks to Bob Page and the game cuts to a title screen and the original "Deus Ex" theme starts playing, as if to say, "Do you get it?" [Alexander Brandon's "Main Title"] Yes, I did get it. That was what you were referencing. Thank you. These endings have been criticized to hell and back already but what I find fascinating about that is how their extreme badness rescued the game from more hard-hitting criticism. People complain about the endings and then don't have room to talk about the incomprehensible final boss who-- just to make it clear-- I still don't know how to beat. The "you win" cinematic just seems to play on its own eventually. Or how the last level just throws the whole game play structure out the window, the second half's complete lack of almost any side quests, and the fact you haven't made a single impactive choice in the game except how long you dawdle in your office and whether to fall for an obvious trap. The endings being this memorably bad has almost done the game a service. Hey, uh, designers, if you're making a game and you're worried it's a bit mediocre, have the endings be complete shit. Just nosedive it at the last possible second. People will think your game is decent and just let down by the endings and forget they spent half of it in a vent looking for the next forced hacking mini game. All that said, at least "Human Revolution" has endings. "Mankind Divided" just ends by-- ["Main Theme" played on a tiny stringed instrument] [KAT] It doesn't go that low. [HBOMB] Oh, you're kidding me. So that's "Deus Ex: Human Revolution," a really decent game with a pretty flawed story and vastly simplified mechanics and design from its predecessor in the hope a streamlined experience would appeal to more people than the original, and to be sure, it did. It sold and reviewed really well, and it deserved to. If it didn't come with the baggage and expectations of being a "Deus Ex" game, I'd call it an okay but extremely promising first game from a new studio, and broadly speaking, I think "Mankind Divided" delivered on many of those promises five years later. You can even pick up and throw plants now! Hey, guys! You seein' this? [gunfire] [MAN shouting] [HBOMB] Why did no one tell me about this? [MAN groans] [HBOMB] "Mankind Divided's" quality is a story for another video but for now it's worth asking, "Hey, "it's been another five years. Where's the sequel to 'Mankind Divided?'" Where's "MD2," if you will. Well, "Deus Ex's" corporate masters are treating it about as well as they always have. This version of "Deus Ex" has been effectively abandoned. So we saw Eidos Montreal work on the next "Tomb Raider" and help out on the "Avengers" game and make that "Guardians of the Galaxy" thing. Several of the "Deus Ex" teams core membership quit en masse and went off to another studio a few years back. This includes our old friend Francois Lapikas whose LinkedIn lists him as game director for almost four years on a canceled project code named "MD2." I wonder what that might have been? Immersive sims are hard to make and really expensive if you want to compete with other AAA games. Despite selling pretty well, "Mankind Divided" didn't set the world on fire the way it needed to to justify continued sequels. It's possible to make a game tons of people like but not enough to play all the way to the end and whose sequel they might not even bother with even if they have fond memories of the previous one. I only started playing "Mankind Divided" in preparation for this video because I lost interest in the series after liking "Human Revolution" okay but not being that into seeing more of the same, and many of my friends who remember liking "Human Revolution" way more than me still haven't got around to playing it, either. What's the hold up? Perhaps the gamble of making a simpler, more generally marketable experience didn't pay off quite as well as it seemed. Maybe it's possible to make something thousands of people like but don't necessarily love. At least not enough to come back for more. "Human Revolution" definitely has its die hard fans, and that's cool, but a lot of its players simply liked it and then stopped halfway through to play something else and never came back. Sure, making health systems more like "Call of Duty" or adding cover mechanics to make it more like "Gears of War" might sound like a positive selling point on a slide show in a meeting, but the people who love those games already have a game that does them better than "Human Revolution" did, and people who actually liked "Deus Ex's" complexity don't get that in "Human Revolution." So who would come back for more of this? That's definitely not the whole story. Square Enix and Eidos Montreal's management certainly squandered all the goodwill the developers had rightfully earned with their pre-order bullshit and in-game micro transactions bullshit and the free-to-play game glued to the side of a game people already paid money for, but when it comes down to it, as good as "Human Revolution" was, the one thing it wasn't was a sequel seller. Who's on the edge of their seats to find out what happens next after endings like these? Also, you know, it's a prequel. We kinda know what happens next. "Deus Ex" was once a game people love so much, a company decided it was worth making another one many years later. Do people love "Human Revolution" the same way, or do they simply like it? I think that if "Human Revolution" had come out two years after the original "Deus Ex" on a slightly updated version of the original's engine, people would instantly see what's lacking about it, dismiss it as a mediocre imitator that didn't really understand what makes the original work. It would have been hated for the crime of failing to be as good as the best video game ever made. I wonder if that's common in gaming culture. But it didn't come out two years later. It came out a decade later in a market that hadn't seen anything like it for a long time. It was a relief a game even a bit like "Deus Ex" could still get made. It was a breath of fresh air to the 2011 game industry. It's just that when you compare it with the games it's trying to be like, it doesn't hold up quite so well. The quality of other recent immersive sims including "Mankind Divided" demonstrates the true classics of the genre are as good as they are because they dedicate themselves to doing what they do well. The first "Deus Ex" was a niche game-- a weird, complicated experience for a certain type of nerd. Us nerds loved it and it sold pretty well though not super amazingly. I'm pretty sure "Human Revolution" outsold it. But many developers working today are openly inspired by the first "Deus Ex." I'm genuinely curious how many developers are specifically inspired "by Human Revolution" instead. [digital whooshing] [techno music fades] So where do we put this guy on my list of every video game ranked in order of objective value? It's weird how no one thought to make one of these before. With heavy heart I have no choice but to put this game on the very bottom of the list. There. As of the time of this video, "Deus Ex: Human Revolution" is the worst game ever made. Oh, I forgot to add "Fallout 3." The second worst game ever made. But hey, "DXHR" fans. Try not to think of it that way. Try and think of it as the third best game. Maybe it'll even work out better than the next "Gex," "Gex," "Gex," "Gex!" Sadly, it seems Square Enix are looking for fresh victims. In December last year while I was deep in the making of this video and had already written a bunch of jokes for the conclusion about what lessons Square Enix needs to learn in time for the new "Gex" game-- I had a really good joke about making sure Gex doesn't ride any elevators. Trust me. Squenix went out and filed a new trademark for the "Gex" IP, making the intended joke of this video no longer a joke. They killed "Thief," they killed "Deus Ex," and they think they can take on a third. Let me be the first to say, "Good luck, guys." When you come at the king, you better not miss, and if Gex has to do a single fucking hacking mini game-- [tense music] ♪ ♪ [upbeat music] ♪ ♪ Hey, thanks for watching. I'm sorry. At the end of another long video, I promised I wouldn't make a video any longer than I already had. It's really embarrassing that I keep making things way longer. I tried. I really tried. I cut out a whole 15 minutes about the history of mirrors in video games and made it a bonus video for patrons in the hopes of getting the length under control and it just kept growing. Thanks to all my patrons for allowing me to survive while making this. In case you're wondering, no, this isn't my normal recording setup. I'm actually visiting my producer on my way to a wedding and it turns out that she has put some foam up in her closet so I'm just recording here for now. If any of the voice over sounds bad, it's her fault, and in case you asked, yes, these are the clothes I intend to wear for the wedding. I didn't bring any smart clothes to wear for recording the live action part of this video, and I forgot to bring shoes so hopefully no one looks at my feet. [chuckling] Don't know why I brought that up. I went to Birmingham for a different wedding, like, four years ago and my car got broken into and my nice shoes were stolen and I never got replacements. ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ I've actually tried to make a video about "Deus Ex: Human Revolution" every year and a half. I've, like, restarted since 2016. It was, like, the second long video I wanted to make and I just kept giving up because the video script ballooned to a length where I was like, "This is unwatchable." And I only finished it this time because I just accepted I have to make a video that's too long to get this thing out of my brain and move on with my life, and now I'm finally free and I can move on to other things, which is lovely. So... The next game I want to review is the "Deus Ex: Human Revolution - Director's Cut." And that is not a joke. [inhales] And I'm scared. I'm scared about what is happening to me.

Channel: hbomberguy

Views: 4,123,446

Keywords:

Id: bgJazjz9ZsA

Length: 213min 33sec (12813 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 05 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/MrLev]

Re: the story and themes chapter: The lore behind how augmentations came about, the first augmented people who had it done after losing limbs in accidents, and who then had a competitive advantage under capitalism for manual work, and so caused legal fights over the lower parts of society wanting to be electively upgraded so they didn't lose their manual labour jobs... why the heck was it mostly in dry newspaper articles and tiny snippets of conversation? That concept of "body horror as a result of capitalism" gripped me and I still think about it sometimes! It's been in several games, but in DE:HR it really hit me as something incredibly plausable.

Also, as an aside, fun fact; did you know, in our current timeline we already have people who got bionic eyes from a company that then went bankrupt and the eyes are now starting to shut down and just randomly return people to blindness in the middle of their day? No, really! https://spectrum.ieee.org/bionic-eye-obsolete

[u/Runelt99]

Goddamnit, just as I'm about to go sleeep

[u/AssDemolisher9000]

what if we kissed while watching the hbomberguy movie 🥺🥺🥺

[u/GraafBerengeur]

Aaaah! Aaah!! AAAAAAAAAAAAH!

[u/cutchyacokov]

OMG OMG OMG. ferret_rave.gif

edit: I searched for "ferret rave" and couldn't find anything appropriate. : (

[u/nicksam123]

I won't lie, I consider DE:HR one of my favourite games of all time. But sounds like when you compare it to the original (which I haven't played) it falls short. I did feel called out since I originally played it when I was 15 so maybe its worth replaying after all those years later. Or at the very least trying the OG

[u/Viking_Swan]

I am hard of hearing, I can mostly hear, but I rely on captions to fully understand when people are talking. The captions for this video bounce from the bottom of the screen to the top so much I had to switch to the autogenerated captions to actually read them. I get that he was probably trying to let us read the in game captions, but if that was the case then captions should have remained at the top, and not jumped around from top to bottom in a way that made them unusable.

[u/Miller-MGD]

lays out Immersive Sim timeline. Bioshock not listed
Bioshock: Guess I’ll go fuck myself then.

[u/Rustymag]

That crazy man did it!