Invisible War is a perfectly fine shooter but the linearity and the fact it's straight scifi or Post-Cyberpunk means a lot of people think it really strayed from the original games' roots. I absolutely love the Templars as villains, though.
And I cannot even post on this series without thinking how pissed we may never see the third Adam Jensen game.
Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.Surprisingly, I am more often than I am not.
Deus Ex is a popular franchise, even now. Invisible War didn't kill it, Mankind Divided while Divisive still has plenty of positive for it, you know save a few things.
Clearly we'll see a eventual sequel barring some other turn of events. However don't expect the sequel soon, it will still be a bit.
Given that the current marquee project at Eidos Montreal is that Avengers game, I doubt they'd have any reason to hype Deus Ex instead - it is still a niche IP, critically acclaimed or not.
I have disagreed with her a lot, but comparing her to republicans and propagandists of dictatorships is really low. - An idiotFYI for all of you who have Playstation Plus: you can obtain Deus Ex: Mankind Divided for FREE this month simply by being a member.
I know the game gets a lot of flak, but trust me, most of those complaints are just folks having much too high expectations, or a nostalgia filter with the settings on a wee bit too high.
Wait, people are actually complaining about the game, not just the online store, the forgettable breach mode and the whole cut content debacle ?
Cause I picked up the game last year and it was smashing good. so many good moments. And man those sidequests.
edited 8th Jan '18 9:10:01 AM by Yumil
"when you stare too long into the abyss, Xehanort takes advantage of the distraction to break into your house and steal all your shit."Yeah the overall plot was uninteresting and bland, that's a given. But that aside, I really have no major complaints about the game. Maybe the way they make you wait almost to the end of the game to have you new augs works with no drawbacks even though you can get the itme that removes those restrictions in the first two hours of game, but that's mostly it.
"when you stare too long into the abyss, Xehanort takes advantage of the distraction to break into your house and steal all your shit."
True, you can get the item early on. But you can't actually install it until much, much later.
But yeah, the story was pretty weak. We learned some more about the Illuminati's organization, but beyond that the plot added little beyond showing how prejudiced and asshole-ish the world has become towards augs.
I get the feeling the developers probably wanted to expand the story further with DLC, because there were several loose ends within Prague that seemed like they may lead somewhere else in the world, but were sadly never followed up upon - most likely due to the game not doing as well either commercially or critically.
Did we? I mean, Jensen learned new things about the Illuminati, but most of it was stuff the players already knew (That Manderley and Bob Page both work for it?). I guess there's the surprise bit at the end Regarding the psych but it's not like that's thought us much.
Honestly, I've always been a bit interested in how much I "should" know at this point. So, I've played the original Deus Ex, I'm one of the folks who knows who Bob Page is, who's Morgan Everett, etc. I know what'll happen later, and what's in Mankind Divided doesn't really tell me much more about them. The Illuminati's "current" plan can be interesting in its own right, but so far what's been done has mainly served to make me think: "Huh, this past clashes a bit with the original game". Not a major problem, I think, but that's prequels for you.
Then I have friends who've played Human Revolution but not the earlier games. They don't know who Page or Everett are. They only really know that Page has a cool voicenote and opened Human Revolution. But to them, the presence of these characters doesn't really do much for them, precisely because they have little idea who they are. They're shadowy Illuminati guys, what more do they need to know? Should I tell them? Ideally the game's story should kind of work for both groups in different ways, but I feel like right now it just sort of ends up weird for both groups (in different ways).
Obviously the gameplay's still fun and the plot's not bad or anything, aside from feeling a bit incomplete, but it's odd.
edited 8th Jan '18 11:56:50 PM by Lavaeolus
At this point, it's probably better that the Jensen timeline branch off and become it's own thing. That annoying discrepancy in tech levels (why are they still using CRT monitors in 2050?!) is becoming more and more implausible, especially with all of the fancy machinery that exists globally by 2025.
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Honestly, I've said that since the beginning. The biggest problem with HR/MD being prequels isn't the tech level, it's from a narrative standpoint: Janus and Jensen are going to fail. It's a foregone conclusion, because we know by DE Majestic 12 takes over, and the Illuminati is shattered by them, not by some resistance group. And any Jensen game is going to keep spinning its wheels because there's a status quo to be maintained. HR already ended with the world set up to be in the state for DE to happen (Augmentations limited, Versalife working on their nanoplague project)
It wouldn't be so bad if the Jensen game were going in a different direction, but the primary Antagonists are all people who appear in Deus Ex, so there's not much room for satisfying developments that won't feel like what we got in MD - thwarting what ultimately turns out to be just minor scheme of the Illuminati at a time.
edited 9th Jan '18 6:40:38 AM by Ghilz
And that's arguably why the prequels are cyberpunk - the overwhelming corporate power and how despite you being an impactful presence, you don't overthrow the giant megacorp. You don't destroy the big boss. Jensen is capable against his aug peers (and some of this is due to engine limitations)
Remeber, JC can vault higher, swing a sword to shred crates and hack remotely without having to have his limbs sliced away.
Nano augs have the advantage in that they haven't had to make the compromise. A revamp of the Original to show JC being a stupidly more efficient agent would be good. But honestly, DX was a product of its time.
MKD I am playing again and it's wonderful. The plot is too small I feel, but there's something apt about that - Jensen arguably is now just a pawn; he isn't a key prototype, or a linchpin in the plan. JC was - he was a prototype for Page; the template to create the merged singularity being.
Part of why Mankind Divided ended up as is may be due to a design philosophy held by Warren Specter. He held that it was more important to build a small, but highly dense yet interactive world, rather than some huge but scarcely used space. And it does indeed show in MD, once you start discovering how many little secrets Prague has. Almost every shop you can enter has more than one hidden cache and a backstory, which connects it to another part of the city. One example are the mobsters; if you poke around in their den and find the right computer, you'll find of list of "customers" indebted to them, along with some notes hinting at why those people ended up in such a predicament. Several names are actually NP Cs, which you might recognize from around the city. Just by merely wandering around, you'll bump into a questline or two, Bethseda-style.
Yet... people complained that Prague was too small, too limited. They wanted a bigger, more epic city with several kilometers of urban sprawl to explore, some folks even wishing it was more like the City of Los Santos from GTA V. Talk about missing the point, and your own genre.
A prime contrast to his intention would be No Man's Sky (especially during it's initial release): you have a virtually a limitless galaxy to explore, but the planets are strangely all inhabited already with small outposts, have monuments and other random items scattered about, and pull from the same limited set of randomly combined items. And that's probably what would've happened had they gone for a bigger city: more empty areas with nothing more than cosmetic visuals, and most of the action being focused around the main hubs, such as Jensen's apartment or his job.
His mile wide but an inch deep philosophy?
Satellite Reign comes close - you get a city, but it's HUGELY interconnected. Not as much individual NPC fluff but it's got good systems.
And yes, the audience seemed to not "get" DX - but apparently there's a bit more push back against these big open, interconnected games (Prey didn't sell well and Dishonoured 2 hasn't set the world alight) - the gaming audience wanted more of these but it turns out they actually don't.
I love Prague - i haven't progressed the story much just because I'm enjoying scrambling around the rooftops. It's one of the reasons I like The Division as well - the exploration element. The missions and plot there are dull, but the world is interesting.
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Just going through the game again and yeah, Prague is so amazing with its stories. Absolutely fantastic. The game is short but DENSE. I do find SOME of the choices a bit arbitrary Give a pocket secretary to Miller or Vega... why not just... copy the data, or WRITE IT DOWN? It's 5 lines! - or even the choice between Allison and the bank - why can't you get some other Agents to hold the fort at the Church / delay? The fact Nomad, an ageing watchmaker, gives two INTERPOL agents "the slip" may be why - they're just terrible.
I really hope, going by Square Enix's recent commitments (Saying DX isn't in their current release map) that we will see something cropping up.

Am I alone in liking IW, but not being able to get into any other Deus Ex games?
The original game I found too archaic and with clunky controls, and all I remember from my attempt at playing HR was that I gave up after entering a room somewhere in the beginning where everyone kept shooting at me with no way to fight back.
Meanwhile, I already replayed the game 3 times in the past few weeks and I don't yet feel tired of the game. I enjoy the simplified gameplay mechanics and smaller locations, since it makes everything a lot easier to grasp and manage. I enjoy the overall easyness of the game, since I like easy games in general. I like being able to use specific combinations of augmentations to sneak around and hack everything. I like having the choice of either using up multitools to open doors and containers, or using some outside the box tactic to destroy the lock. And I like the sci-fi aesthetic that the game employs.
Now, of course, I'm not blind to the game's shortcomings. The story is so devoid of a clear goal and motivation that even now I can't remember why you're supposed to go from Cairo to Trier at one point. Most characters are largely forgettable. Everyone is animated in a very stilted way and suffers a lot from the Mass Effect: Andromeda syndrome, in that the faces are expressionless and the eyes are often devoid of any shadows, producing that distinct Uncanny Valley look. The ending is underwhelming no matter which side you choose. And while I don't think unified ammo is the worst thing in the world, what truly makes it bad is that you can only carry a limited amount of ammo ON TOP of all weapons using the same type of ammo.
However, the good parts are enough for me to overlook the game's shortcomings.