Bucky Seifert on 12/2/2017 at 17:10
Quote Posted by Starker
Oof -- the flashbacks...
[video=youtube;k5WJmGtHeoU]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5WJmGtHeoU[/video]
To be fair, the man can tell a story better than he can write it.
rachel on 14/2/2017 at 19:31
Quote Posted by froghawk
As for the rest, that's again just how I felt about HR. Deus Ex had a ton of themes going on in its plot, and the new games have been relentlessly focusing on the transhuman element. There were virtually no mechanical augs in the original Deus Ex - do we even meet more than two? And yet we're supposed that the entire world was pretty much defined around them prior to that game?
Off the top of my head there's a barmaid in Hell's Kitchen, possibly another guy in Hong Kong but I'm not sure. I haven't played in a while, I might have my augs bartenders mixed up with
Neuromancer... They certainly aren't around much.
heywood on 14/2/2017 at 21:16
Jordan Shea is the one in the Underworld Tavern. She's ex-UNATCO. The only mechanical augs NOT from UNATCO that I can remember are Smuggler, Rock, and that drug dealer in Paris. I think somebody said JoJo is supposed to be augmented as well, but it's not obvious.
In Human Revolution, the world is full of mechanical augs. But then there is the aug incident, the end to commercial augmentation, banishment of the augmented, and suggestions that the Illuminati wants to round up all the augmented in one place so they can wipe them out. Assuming that happens before the start of Deus Ex, there wouldn't be many augmented people left around. And it would be understandable why Gunther and Anna feel stigmatized. So it kind of fits together.
I think that making the prequels focus on mechanical augmentation is a lot more interesting than sticking with the back story that Deus Ex had according to the DX bible, which was full of disease and natural disasters. It's just that Mankind Divided took things too far and focused only on mechanical augmentation while dropping the other interesting themes.
henke on 15/2/2017 at 07:05
Quote Posted by froghawk
So, great... they chopped the game in half and now won't give us the 2nd half because sales tanked due to their fuckery.
I just finished DXMD last night, and having read this sentence before I started it I was expecting more of a cliffhanger ending, but they wrapped it up pretty well I thought. It felt well paced and all the major issues and baddies the story set up got dealt with by the end. Sure, there's still powerful, ominous badguys looming in the shadows, but this being a prequel that stuff will naturally never be
completely resolved, until DX1. What I'm saying is, it didn't feel like half a game, either plotwise or lengthwise(23h for me).
Though of course I'm ticked off that we won't be seeing part 3 any time soon.
rachel on 15/2/2017 at 20:15
Same here. My main beef about the game is the limited amount of locations compared to the previous installments, I got frustrated the first time I got back to Prague after GARP, I started to get really sick of the place... But apart from that, overall it did tell kind of a complete story and I never once felt the game had been cut in half or at all.
So while I was certainly hoping for a third game, especially after the mid-credits teaser, MD always felt standalone to me. Shame to see SE drop the franchise like this. :(
[edit: and cheers for the precision heywood :)]
froghawk on 15/2/2017 at 23:20
Well, you two are alone in that - most people who played it felt differently. This was designed as the middle of a trilogy - it's impossible to argue otherwise. Just look at the side quests - the mystery augs, the hyron project, the harvester, the missing agent - none of these quests has a proper ending. And that's just the side quests - when even half the side quests end abruptly, it was clearly chopped in half. Not to mention that there's barely a conspiracy to uncover. The final baddie is clearly a nobody in the big scheme of this plot. To say that everything was resolved is to reduce the story to guy blows up a train station under orders. Said guy unleashes another terrorist plot, so you take him down, but never get to his bosses.
And yeah, lengthwise, it was absolutely fine, but the main plot was spread very thin. The side quests were fantastic, aside from the lack of resolution, but I don't feel the same level of attachment to the memory of playing this game as with HR, because there really was no plot or conspiracy to get deeply drawn into. The level design is the best the series has ever seen, but there was no substance in it.
The other games in the series left room for a sequel while telling a story of their own. This game did not have a story of its own.
Pyrian on 15/2/2017 at 23:42
Quote Posted by froghawk
The other games in the series left room for a sequel...
They really didn't. The sequels always end up basically fudging the previous endings, because having wildly-divergent optional endings is just not a sequel-friendly practice.
froghawk on 16/2/2017 at 02:48
Ok, fair. Then maybe what I should have said is... DX games shouldn't try to leave room for a sequel in any way