Deus Ex: Mankind Divided

Deus Ex Go coming this summer!

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Edit 2: Breach has been announced. VR mode in MD.

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edited 8th Jun '16 8:41:45 AM by LordofLore

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edited 8th Jun '16 9:04:49 AM by LordofLore

Glad to see Sarif is back.

Wait, is that Malik's bird (or at least a digital reconstruction of it) at 3:35 of the Ripper trailer?

Similar, different tail number. This one doesn't have boobee as its number :-P

Interview.

Not so sure about Sarif's new VA - but apparently the original VA had some form of controversy, which means he now doesn't work with SE or something

As for the augmented apartheid, apologies for not responding sooner - I'm not so sure how apparent in game it is that it was CAUSED by a central chip, or if it was just "malfunctioning augs" - so I'd agree that it's a fear reaction against people who are seen to be radically superior from a mechanical standpoint. However, the counter point is that these people are easily limited - by neuropozyne.

That said, fear tends to influence ugly acts, so it wouldn't matter that a lot of the augmented are actually disabled people (amputees, cancer survivors, etc) who have just been given very advanced prosthetic enhancements. For the most part. But if the total number of dead is as specified in the trailer, that would be a good point for any simmering resentment to boil over.

Humans (As a large social group) seem to like to have people to look down on; or to pull down those who have succeeded, often because they themselves are suffering (Brexit is a case in point, from one perspective #POLITICS!) and they feel that society leaves them behind - so seeing a subset of society that has enabled itself and pushed the boundary then get yanked down would probably satisfy a visceral element of the wider society. I'm looking forward to seeing how the game explores this. There was always that sense that the augmented, being people who have overcome hardship (Physical etc) and done well were resented by others who couldn't afford cosmetic augmentation or were at the bottom of the pile anyway and had no way to enable themselves.

Cannot wait now! Playing through HR again - tried DX 1 on Steam big picture and... it's serviceable. Not ideal and the augmentation keys are a pain to map. Also stealth on a controller is a pain in that engine.

Apparently Sarif's original VA appeared in a conspiracy parody video that was immediately subject to Poe's Law. However, he apparently claims to be a targeted individual, which makes things even more confusing as to his mental state.

edited 18th Jul '16 6:33:18 AM by LordofLore

PC Gamer article on Mankind Divided with an interesting tidbit on the new experimental augs.

They require another set of conventional augs to be locked out in order to be usable.

Had trouble pronouncing the game title? Fear no more!

You guys seriously need to spontaneously change English's written form into phonetic version It would make your lives easier and my headaches less common

Don't blame us, blame the British :P

The English Language is actually pretty smart IMO, since it's root-word based, meaning that when you read something you get an ok idea of both the meaning of the word and how it's pronounced.

Also, no-one would buy the game if it said Day-oos Eks on the box :P

My Dad likes to pronounce it "Dos Equis", like the type of beer.

The game has managed to get itself in trouble again, this time over an "Aug Lives Matter" placard in a piece of concept art for the game.

While I don't think Eidos Montreal genuinely had malice with the use of the slogan, it still shows how important context is. Like the "mechanical apartheid" term, it's extremely difficult to convey what sort of situation ingame would lead to such a call as depicted in the art without including a whole lot of context. Which a piece of concept art on its own decidedly lacks. Sure, we have some idea due to watching every trailer and every bit of gameplay that's been released so far, but your average social media user might not. Your newspaper or magazine reader might not. Your TV or movie viewer might not. That lack of context can result in it backfiring big time.

And then there's the whole issue of appropriating the name of a movement that has been extremely successful in highlighting the racial inequalities that exist in America today. That movement has successfully smoked out a lot of bigots who are willing to go to any length to rationalise police brutality against minorities, perpetuate governmental policies and societal beliefs that ensure structural discrimination against minorities, and run what is effectively the real world version of Picus News (remember, Picus isn't just a TV network and news site, it runs forums for all kinds of interests too, video gaming included) to convince them of the truthfulness of their cause and fool the credulous into joining their cause. Remember that the bigots' online presence was first marked by a movement convinced that games that touched upon real world issues were infringing on their "freedom of speech" and "indoctrinating" the young with their "warped" ideologies, instead of providing them with a hefty dose of gore and titillation. The fact that many of the bigots would be apologists for apartheid as well is not coincidental. Not only does the use of the name raise the issue of sensitivity, that's also painting a huge crosshair on their backs if the bigots find that the game's opinion on its in-universe social issues is not one of their liking.

I recall a comment by Hideo Kojima noting that if he botched the treatment of the themes he intended to include in Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, his career would be finished. I get the feeling that this is especially the case for Eidos Montreal now.

edited 3rd Aug '16 10:10:53 AM by Krieger22

Another major problem with appropriating currently in-use slogans is that they tend to make it kind of anvillicious, or potentially strawman-ish. For example, if I have Emperor Palpatine declare quotes from politicians I don't like, then I've just reduced my political opponents to Space Nazis-this isn't going to win many arguments.

But it makes some sense, particularly if you distance yourself from the media trumpeting. The anti-aug prejudice is pretty much tarring all the people of a certain subset with the same brush due to actions that were pretty much engineered by someone else - to quote John Ehrlichman, Nixon's advisor:

"We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be (...) black, but by getting the public to associate the (...) blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing [heroin] heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."

And what did Darrow do in DXHR?

Yeah, I don't think it's hard to guess the context for this. The game isn't implying that the Black Lives Matter movement is unequivocally right or wrong—the aug debate is too gray for that. They're just saying that enough augs are getting killed by police that people feel like they're being targeted specifically. It's just another sign of the divide.

I do agree with Protagonist that using current political slogans can be problematic, though. It just has a whole lot of baggage attached that it probably would have been better to avoid.

It's probably just bad marketing, but Square/Eidos's rather poor responses to this is turning me off this game.

Though in all likelihood, the game will probably sidestep the debate just like the previous game did by having both sides be Illuminati puppets.

edited 3rd Aug '16 2:46:30 PM by lrrose

It's all Eidos. SE has no control over their marketing due to IIRC one of the developers arguing that they know the west better. SE just sends money and gives them time in streams etc.

edited 3rd Aug '16 3:06:55 PM by LordofLore

Frankly, I don't know what the hell they were thinking when they decided to use that slogan. BLM is a group that has faced and continues to face a terrifying amount of pushback and controversy - casually appropriating their slogan for the sake of promoting a video game? I'm not even exaggerating when I say that I think that's a pretty shitty thing to do.

I mean, that slogan is about black people being murdered by police officers. "Mechanical apartheid" was already bad enough. We get it, Eidos, you're culturally relevant - but be more respectful.

Yeah, that's the problem with political debates and conspiracies. Conspiracies almost invariably terminate political debate by either making them non-existant ("both sides actually work for the same faction") or strawmanning one side (as seen in the example below).

For example, many "freedom vs. security" 'debates' in fiction will make it so the "terrorists" that cause the debate are actually plants by the security faction in order to legitimize a power grab (in fact, Deus Ex does this as well). Aside from the unfortunate implications that this has (it's like saying "you should oppose the PATRIOT act because Bush caused 9/11"), this also effectively kills any debate. It removes any negative aspects the "freedom" faction might have (terrorists don't exist, so increasing "freedom" doesn't pose any real threat) and any positive aspects of the "security" faction.