Deus Ex : Mankind Divided

Games
609

The Illuminati as the baddies are pretty nebulous menace. They are bad and want to rule the world… and that’s why they want to make augmented suffer and turn the rest against them, because they were somehow hindering their plans? It’s the key point of the plot and it’s badly handled. Why wouldn’t augmented people be as easily manipulated as the rest of the world??

Apart of the game being played in an alternate dimensions where 20% of the human population were missing arms or legs by accidents or illness.

610

I agree, the bad guys in this game are very strange and don’t seem to have much purpose. They are little more than mustachio-twirlers. No explanations given for their actions make any sense at all.

I imagine they decided on this antiaug-racism parallel up front and it so dominated their thinking they were willing to warp everything about the game world to justify all these Jim Crow analogies.

611

It’s not that the augs are in their way or that they particularly want them to suffer, it’s that they are a convenient scapegoat and distraction from their real power bids.

612

IMO, It’s hard for them to be a scapegoat given that no one knows about Illuminati/Majestic12 in the first place, there are only like a few dozen people in the world who are ‘in the know’.

613

That doesn’t make sense. People don’t need to know the Illuminati exist in order to support Illuminati moves out of drummed up fear over “aug terrorists”, or be focused on the aug “problem” while the Illuminati do something low profile that they might otherwise object to. And while I wouldn’t argue that false flag terrorist attacks are a policy tool IRL at the moment, using hot button issues as distractions or justifications for unrelated political moves is absolutely a common strategy.

614

That’s an interesting take. I haven’t completely worked out whether I agree with it or whether those are the right terms. It’s definitely something I’ve noticed that contributes to the blandness of mainstream videogames. There’s so much attention paid to making sure every approach is equally valid and available. Whether it’s player expression or some other term, developers are so worried that players might not be able to express themselves in whichever method they’ve chosen from the handful of options carefully presented to them. “Choose your approach (my lord)!” It’s no longer about presenting a problem to be solved, where of course some problems can’t be solved by the approach you’d prefer to take.

I guess it sells so I’m not blaming anyone. Just talking about why over-engineered games don’t always work for me.

615

The more I think about MD, the more I’m disappointed with it. This goes doubly so now that I played through HR again recently. HR, for all of its faults, was the work of a new studio desperate to display their chops. It sprawled luxuriously. MD’s Prague was just this little Fisher-Price playground in comparison, more of a Ubisoft “check it off the list” design than anything Deus Ex.

Of course, neither of them matched the batshit-crazy, Art Bell conspiracy glorious mess that was the original DE.

616

And glorious it was, with aliens, MJ12, the Illuminati, and all. All it needed was Delta Green and Great Old Ones and it would have been perfect.

617

This game is really overstaying its welcome. I think it’s because of all the relatively pointless filler in the open world hub in combination with a relatively bland storytelling that takes itself just a little too seriously. And location variety is pretty bad overall.

I’m now on my last mission and I’m forcing myself to progress from room to room and just hoping the level ends soon. Ugh.

618

I haven’t played it in over a week, so it doesn’t bode well for me. Maybe I should try to this weekend to get some closure - either decide to continue or officially shelve it.

619

I finally started playing and I am liking it so far. Getting huge kick out of all the czech stuff like hearing the hymn on the radio, undestanding what everybody is saying and all the references :D
Some of the czech is hilariously broken which is a shame, but at least it is funny.
But it is awesome to be exploring a Prague in an AAA game filled with so much detail. I just love these types of games. And the writing has been good enough for me so far.

My issues would be mostly technical for now - the controller sensitivity is weird with unpleasant deadzones and I dislike that there is no headbob. And also tons of stuff gets unsubtitled which is just bizzare. The TV broadcasts for example, why not subtitle it? Poor hearing impaired and people who have trouble with languages in this game.

620

It also comes down to how much you want to explore. I stuck my nose everywhere and the constant backtracking clearly got to me eventually (as evident from my previous post).

Anyway, final thoughts on the game (warning, spoilers ahead):

Open world parts are a mistake. I realize that they’re sticking with the vision of the original which also had them but I think they were handled much better there, as well as in DXHR. Prague completely kills the flow of the game, all 3 times.

The enemy factions are not menacing enough. Half the game your ‘enemies’ are cops and the other half goes to the ill equipped scapegoats. Only in the final moments of the game do you get to fight a splinter faction but honestly, they don’t seem to have all that much power. I really missed the oppressive feel that I got from the first game after the big plot twist.

The player gets too many cool gadgets to play with. The cloak is so insanely overpowered in this game that I really can’t understand how it got greenlit in the first place. You can move right in front of enemy’s nose, hack keypads or computers that they’re looking at, etc. It’s a cheap gimmick that puts a huge damper on the whole stealth experience.

Level design is excellent and I suspect that a player needs to play on ironman to really appreciate this aspect of the game. There are so many routes through the buildings and they cover pretty much every playstyle available.

Game balance is both good and bad at the same time. It’s clear that it’s balanced for people who explore maybe 60-70% of the content so if you’re like me and stick your nose everywhere, hack every PC and keypad and rummage through people’s belongings while you’re in their apartments then you will have too much credits, praxis kits, ammunition, biocells and health kits. On the other hand, on ironman you have to weigh the risks and sometimes forego exploration in favor of a safer path to the objective so it makes for a more balanced experience.

Overall a very solid game that I think stealth purists will scoff at, but one that provides a somewhat unique experience (ironman) for this game format. I think Thief (the new one) is the only one that offered the same?

I’m gonna take a break from the game for a while and then likely give ironman a shot - and update this thread with my thoughts on that of course :)

edit: Two more things I’d like to add:

  1. Hacking minigame is flawed. The chance based system (with jacked up values for detection, let’s face it) severely devalues the praxis investment into hacking trees.

  2. The story is very mediocre overall. If they decide to continue making games in this universe I hope they catch up with the story of the original soon because they really need better central plot material.

621

Yeah, they made a few changes to hacking compared to the system in HR that I really didn’t care for, all of which massively increased the likelihood of detection (for example, spam nodes used to be standard in terms of detection and nukes were silent). Back in that game once you were fully upgraded on hacking you didn’t have much to fear from any but the highest rated systems. Now you can easily trip the system on your first hack on even the lowest security terminals with even the highest hacking ratings and simply not have enough time to complete. I ended up using multitools much more than my hacking upgrades would warrant simply not to have to deal with the minigame.

622

One thing I forgot to mention, at the end of the game with the side quest of your mystery Augs… are you a clone of the original Adam Jensen or something weird like that? It seems you don’t have the original aug with serial numbers from Sarif, and some data of your memory seems wrong in comparison with what David Sarif says. But it’s something left for whatever next game comes.

623

Criminal Past DLC mission coming on Feb 23rd.

https://www.deusex.com/agegate?goto=/news/deus-ex-mankind-divided-criminal-past

[quote]Today, Square Enix and Eidos-Montréal announced that Adam Jensen is back in Deus Ex: Mankind Divided – A Criminal Past, along with both an old acquaintance in Delara Auzenne, and new characters. The second Story DLC will provide players with more insight into the lore of the Deus Ex Universe, allowing them to experience one of Adam Jensen’s first missions for TF29, set some time before the events of Deus Ex: Mankind Divided.

In Deus Ex: Mankind Divided – A Criminal Past, Jensen is transferred deep into a hostile, high-security prison for augmented felons. His mission: track down and retrieve sensitive information from a fellow undercover agent who has gone dark. Success will help the fight against terror around the world, but Jensen will need to confront a darker side to his role before the day is done.[/quote]

624

Fail. I wanted the desert aug city they foreshadowed, as a gameplay hub.

625

Huh. So Jensen really did get his augmented vision from a slam doc for a package of menthol Kools.

626

Total fail here for me. I don’t really care about short, stand alone missions. If the DLC were part of the game, I’d love them and buy them in a heartbeat as I loves my DE. But stand alone missions have no attraction for me at all.

627

Yeah, I wonder at people who make story-driven RPGs and then think it’s a good idea to sell side quests that are disconnected from the main story.

It would be a hard sell for me in any event, but the kind of expansion that adds seamless “future” material after the original ending and maybe mixes in a bit of other stuff along the way to encourage replay has some appeal.

Going to the main menu and clicking on some option and finding a clone of the character (or worse, a different build entirely) warped to some dungeon area is much less attractive. I might not play that even if it was a free download.

628

This, x1000. Fallout 4 DLC, for example, adds stuff that extends the original game, for a new play through or an existing one. This type of DLC (DownLoadable Crap?) is worse than useless, because not only does it not integrate well it breaks the whole structure of the game, making it less of a world experience and more of a theme park/scenario. Ugh.