van HellSing on 9/6/2010 at 21:08
Quote Posted by Ostriig
Cheers dude! It's actually those little text bits that I'm most curious about, are they in English or Polish?
English. They're so small though I doubt they would be readable even with a good quality scan. I'll be transcribing what I can get from them tomorrow.
DDL on 9/6/2010 at 21:16
Quote:
flying vehicle resembling the mechanical bird from Ghost in the Shell: Innocence
Whereas by 2052 they'll be back to helicopters. Maybe mechanical birds don't stealth well?
Quote:
instead of putting combat bots into crates for transport, clever engineers have devised a sort of transformer - suddenly the box sprouts legs, a minigun and a rocket launching cannon.
But by 2052 they'll decide that "ED209 only shite" and "dalek-esque with machineguns and almost zero ground clearance" is better?
Quote:
a hundred fictious companies were created, with their own logos and typography, and this includes weapons manufacturers. Looking at a rifle, the player will see who made it, and may later find containers with the same logo and think "hey, I had a piece made by them". This pertains to everything: cars, phones, TV sets, clothes.
All of which will be unknown within 27 years?
I know you can explain away some things with "economic collapse", but
A) it's not really a collapse, it's a combination of disease, revolution and MJ12 manipulation (the BIG collapse is post-DX)
B) you can't explain away everything, and some of the above is equivalent to people going "oh noes the economy!" and suddenly ditching all their blu-rays, tivos and ipads and going back to watching VHS videos while playing on their neo-geos. And NEVER MENTIONING ANYTHING MORE ADVANCED EVER AGAIN.
Which would be odd.:erg:
EDIT: also, bear in mind that MJ12 started work on nanoaugs at pretty much the same time as all this is happening, so they really
will have to play up the disadvantages of mech tech extensively, or why would a massive secret organisation bother? If everyone mech-ed is pimp and uber, why try to make vastly more expensive but subtler aug tech?
van HellSing on 9/6/2010 at 21:31
Quote Posted by DDL
Whereas by 2052 they'll be back to helicopters
And now we're using planes though we already invented helicopters. What's up with that?
Seriously though, they exaggerated a lot with the comparison. The craft is most certainly the same small VTOL you can see in some of the pics.
About the logos - seriously? Just because DX had shitty textures that wouldn't allow putting logos on guns, the new game shouldn't do that either?
DDL on 9/6/2010 at 21:42
They could've put them in the descriptions...reading the descrips, in fact, it looks like the DX peeps went to a reasonable extent to NOT make anything identifiably affiliated with a company of any kind (though admittedly in IW they had MAKO, which made basically everything). Hell, even cans of Nuke have "The can is blank except for the phrase 'PRODUCT PLACEMENT HERE.' It is unclear whether this is a name or an invitation." as the description.
Note that I am not saying creating all these companies and logos and shit is a BAD thing. Hell no, I think it's a great idea. Making a believable world is awesome. This particular believable world simply doesn't fit into the established DX timeline very well though (if at all).
If viewed as "unique IP", this game is doing all kinds of things right.
If viewed as "A Deus Ex prequel", this game is doing all kinds of things right, but in entirely the wrong way.
van HellSing on 9/6/2010 at 21:47
Hey, you're right! Awesome find! :D
Briareos H on 9/6/2010 at 21:54
quite frankly the continuity with the silly Deus Ex storyline is the least of my concerns. The complete lack of subtlety in gameplay and design (not talking about plot) is much more worrying and this article does nothing to help the feeling.
Ostriig on 9/6/2010 at 22:04
Quote Posted by van HellSing
English. They're so small though I doubt they would be readable even with a good quality scan. I'll be transcribing what I can get from them tomorrow.
Thanks! Yeah, it's not a lot of text, so it's probably easier to just type it if you don't have a scanner handy.
Quote Posted by DDL
Whereas by 2052 they'll be back to helicopters. Maybe mechanical birds don't stealth well?
[...]
Or a more comfy excuse would be that maybe that's all UNATCO thought JC would need at the time. Kinda what vH also replied to this point. To give you another parallel, I don't remember seeing any buses in the original DX - is that to say that there are no buses in 2052 in the DX universe, or is it simply that there just didn't happen to be any in the areas we visited?
And to be honest, that "mechanical bird" looks like simple cross between a Harrier jetfighter and a (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-22_Osprey) V-22 Osprey helicopter-plane hybrid. Not all that sci-fi if you ask me.
The robots indeed seem more advanced than you'd expect from a prequel, but not to the point where it goes blatantly against the fiction. Even if they didn't work the economic depression angle to fit it in, I still don't see it wrecking the fiction for me because these ones can turn into a cube and the ones from 20 years later can't.
As for the companies and labels, I'm really confused that you'd object to that. They're trying to make a richer, more compelling environment for the setting, what's wrong with that? It's not following the scope of the original, it's actively improving upon it. Works for me.
I don't know, I'm sorry, but I think it's just nitpicking at this point. As long as the tech is
reasonably in sync with the timeline, I really don't think they should shy from taking some minor liberties and deliver a more compelling and comprehensive experience just for the sake of keeping with the original design right down to the colour of the labels on Forty bottles. It's not like they put teleportation and star cruisers in there, it's all still
fairly in keeping with the setting's tech development. I think there's plenty of deviation to discuss with the
gameplay, but the setting strikes me as easy enough to roll with in the context of the timeline, and straight out exciting on its own.
P.S. Almost forgot, mech augs vs. nanites - making stuff more subtle
is a significant advantage. Incredibly so. Not only does it make it easier to blend in, since public disapproval of mechs is something DX3 makes a point of, supposedly, but also on a simple marketing level: if you're military, or a security guard, what sort of technical augmentation do you think you'd more readily subject yourself to?
chris the cynic on 9/6/2010 at 22:34
Quote Posted by Ostriig
Okay, I totally agree that they're
stretching the fiction, but which of the pieces we've been shown so far are so implausible for a DX prequel that you can't let them slide? Seriously, it's not the original DX setting, but this
is a different timeframe and I just don't see what aspects of it couldn't be reconciled with the original over a buffer period of 25 years.
How about this one?
In Deus Ex there are three kinds of augmented humans mech augs, nano augs, and physiopharmaceutical augs. That last kind, which the MiBs and WiBs were examples of, was created by MJ12 for specific reasons described in writing in Deus Ex.
The reasons were simple, nano augmentation was unpredictable, mechanical augmentation resulted in a nonstandard appearance that couldn't be covered up with clothing, and they wanted a way to augment agents that didn't have either of those problems.
To repeat that, the reason that Agent Sherman, who was given the job of running UNATCO from when Manderley was removed until Simons took over, agent Hela, who led the raid against Silhouette, and Adept 34501, who watched over the Templar cathedral, and every other Man or Woman in Black you encounter in Deus Ex existed was because, 25 years after Human Revolution, MJ12 did not have the technology to create mech arms you could throw a coat over and look normal.
If MJ12 had had twenty five years to build on mech augs that could be hidden under clothing those characters wouldn't exist, or at the very least wouldn't exist in the way they are portrayed in Deus Ex.
That's about as straightforward as you can get. Deus Ex said mechs of a certain type didn't exist and some fairly major things were done as a result of their non-existance, Human Revolution stars a mech of that type.
-
As it turns out this is also one of the decisions we know most about. The art director addressed the topic directly. He said they wanted Adam look like he could "go out for dinner at the Rit-Carlton" and that "the sleeveless look made Adam look like a douche."
Now, I know this is heretical in the entire entertainment industry, but my feeling is that maybe if your main character is supposed to be a member of a group that makes people afraid and repulsed at a glance he shouldn't look like Casanova.
Maybe the price of having your main character being part of a not-quite-human group that people lothe is that he looks like a douche. And if the existing setting says he can't hide it, maybe you could run with that and deal with the idea that your main character is always stuck looking a way that isn't perfect and is never able to avoid showing the fact that he is one of
them.
chris the cynic on 9/6/2010 at 23:06
Quote Posted by Ostriig
P.S. Almost forgot, mech augs vs. nanites - making stuff more subtle
is a significant advantage. Incredibly so. Not only does it make it easier to blend in, since public disapproval of mechs is something DX3 makes a point of, supposedly, but also on a simple marketing level: if you're military, or a security guard, what sort of technical augmentation do you think you'd more readily subject yourself to?
It looks like we crossed posts. Anyway, I thought this might be worth addressing somewhat. What I'm saying here isn't about HR so much as your specific post.
Nano augmentation is described as a viral process, Gray Death is the result if you aren't lucky enough to have same gaps in your the immune system as the Dentons.
One of the books you can find in Deus Ex is an MJ12 document about nano augmentation, it opens with the words, "... recent human trials and subsequent mortality studies have demonstrated that nano-augmenting of baseline human physiology is not without hazards".
If someone said to you, "We can put something in you that reproduces viraly which will change the cells of every major tissue in your body, which we only know what we know about because of the
mortality studies we have done on those we did this to before," would you be jumping up and down saying, "Do it to me, do it to me!"
I'm not saying nano augmentation as described in Deus Ex isn't an incredible technology, because it is. I'm just not sure that, in light of AJ, there's quite as much of a gap in utility as you describe.
MJ12 had to turn to a breeding program to create someone they could do it to without a lot of trouble (Simons, for example, isn't exactly subtle) then they cloned him. The big gain they got out of that was that JC and Paul could blend in where mech augs couldn't.
If they can make most people into someone like Adam who can throw on a coat and look pretty damned normal (and "go out for dinner at the Rit-Carlton") I'm not sure that the difference is what it was before HR was added to the setting. Adam's ability to blend doesn't seem half bad.
