henke on 31/3/2014 at 12:34

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With a name like that it makes me worried it might be some kinda MMO. :erg:

moar sp dx plz

DDL on 3/4/2014 at 11:07

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They really do seem to be taking the franchise in an odd direction. They're obsessed with the whole "mech augs vs non-auged people" schism, that was only really alluded to mildly in the original DX, as a kinda vague "mechs suffer social ostracism" trope. Augmentation wasn't really even the focus of the original game, it's was more justification for letting you do cool stuff (without the above social ostracism) while you uncovered crazy multilevel conspiracies (which more or less WERE the focus).

Ok, invisible war had more overt "augs vs non-augs" stuff, but that was more of a 'people opposed to a semi-divine computer/person hybrid forcibly infecting everyone with nanotech' rather than "hey man, you gots to get augs to get ahead, maaan" (also invisible war was a bit of a mess).

It's odd. Also, orange.

Having said that, DX MMO would be funny.

"LFG -NO AQUALUNG NUBS"

DDL on 7/4/2014 at 11:29

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I dunno, I find the way it seems to pervade everything to be a little distracting. It's like the entire world is divided into AUGS vs NO AUGS and this is all anyone talks about, ever. Turn on the news? AUGS N STUFF (plus small amount of foreshadowing).

I can't actually think of an equivalent social issue that would so polarize the populace, nor polarize them so...evenly. You could almost make a case for the unaugmented being in a sort of "we're the 99%" situation (social underclass etc), except fucking everyone's got augs. Gangbangers have augs. Street cleaners have augs. Secretaries have augs. It doesn't really work as a conceit (to me, at least): I can't see why people wouldn't get augmented if it's that cheap and advantageous, but I also can't see why it should be that advantageous, since bionic arms and legs are pretty pointless for anything other than manual jobs.
Unless of course you make the argument that a lot of the augmentation is brain-side stuff like improved social interactions and so on (and there was a side-mission along those lines, plus the social aug)....but then all of that is essentially invisible, and arguably is dependent on this fact (not a lot of use having a social interaction aug if everyone knows you've got it).

There doesn't really seem to be a coherent basis for the sort of pan-social, pan-economical schism they've constructed. I can't really see how the situation -as it stands at the outset- could be arrived at. You've got a situation where maybe 50% of the population are walking around with superlegs and shit, yet people are still debating (to the exclusion of all else) whether this is something that should be outlawed or not.

Contrast with DX1, where the beauty of it was that it was more or less indistinguishable from a slightly shittier world circa 1999-2000, with just enough small differences to make it stand out (the future is more of the same, but with soyfood). Mechanical augmentations are just evolved variations on medical prosthetics, so mechs are basically either amputees of some sort or current/former military, and both are rare, but just common enough for social stigma to make sense.

It gives it a much more concrete basis to work from, so the crazy conspiracy stuff, while still crazy, at least seems to slot into a fairly plausible world.

I mean, yes, the conspiracy stuff is silly, and I'll give you the "very 90s" aspect, certainly....but to me it still holds together better even as an anachronism than the HR mech/antimech societal division.

heywood on 12/4/2014 at 19:07

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The schism was engineered by the Illuminati.

The augs vs. no-augs debate in Human Revolution was kind of like UNATCO vs. NSF in Deus Ex or the Order vs. WTO in Invisible War, in that these were the superficial conflicts being played out in public which are used to introduce the story but they aren't really what the games are about. You could argue that all three games over-sell their cover stories through NPC dialogue; recall that all anybody ever talks about at the beginning of Deus Ex is terrorism and the plague. But I wasn't bothered by it and it reminds me of how the mainstream media works in real life, over-reporting one story at a time and spinning everything into a false debate between political parties.

The central story in Human Revolution was about the Illuminati and the tools they use to rule, focusing mainly on how they introduced and use augmentation technology as power tool for controlling society, how they initially maintain their control over the technology through Neuropozyne and LIMB clinics. And as they start to lose control over it and then Sarif's discovery threatens to free the technology, they first resort to propaganda tools like religion and control over the media to turn the public against it, and then put out a control chip with a doomsday device. As a prequel to Deus Ex, it also sets up the fall and factionalization of the Illuminati. Even though it doesn't roll out the X-Files tropes like Deus Ex did, it's still mostly a story about Illuminati conspiracy.