I actually bought the digital version of this game so I wouldn't have the excuse of not feeling like finding/inserting the disc to finish it this black friday weekend.
“I used to draw, hard to admit that I used to draw...”
I think it’s one of my favorite games, but I also get some of the complaints. Some of them are silly. I’ve successfully speedrun the game in about 4 hours with very few abilities but the game definitely has 100+ hours of content to it. People that say you can beat the story in 4 hours as a criticism are, I feel, either missing or ignoring a lot of what the game has to offer.
I do think it’s fine to criticize the amount of story as one aspect of the game, but to vilify the whole game for it doesn’t really make sense to me because there’s just so much to do and see and frankly I think the game was desfigned for explorers/discoverers. Not to mention that I feel all the ancillary stuff that you can find adds to the story, even if it isn’t directly necessary. Deus Ex is constantly engaging in worldbuilding. It’s fine to criticize that but not to dismiss it or ignore it and say the game is content-less.
Ultimately, I think it’s a really fun, really well-built game.
I really loved Mankind Divided. I absolutely understand the complaints that other folks have, but I think it did some things really well (I thought the Prague hub was a masterpiece, for example), and purely subjectively it just really worked for me in a DeusExy way.
I will say, though, that it definitely felt like Human Revolution was a "We won't get another shot at a Deus Ex, throw everything that's even remotely Deus Ex in there! Globe-trotting, China, a U.S. city that's been battered and has homeless people around trashcan-fires, Tracer Tong!" and then Mankind Divided was "Hey, we were successful last time and have the trust of a major studio! Let's take our time and slow-roll this, make the whole game set primarily around one city, cover the span of just a few days, and focus on a fairly localized threat." In my mind, that last part would make it really tragic if they never get a shot at making another Deus Ex.
Oh, and I can respect that resources are limited and the next Deus Ex has to sit on the back-burner, but maybe let's not make it another 5 years until the next game. I feel like this franchise is a bit niche, and I don't know that it can reliably lay dormant and then rise again to mass success.
Also the story does suffer a bit from knowing that Manderley , Everett , Page and DeBeers cant be hurt or dealt with until Deus Ex 1. I still would love for the last game in Adam's story to show the rise of M12 and lead straight into the first game. Would also love for a remake of the first game.
I think it’s one of my favorite games, but I also get some of the complaints. Some of them are silly. I’ve successfully speedrun the game in about 4 hours with very few abilities but the game definitely has 100+ hours of content to it. People that say you can beat the story in 4 hours as a criticism are, I feel, either missing or ignoring a lot of what the game has to offer.
I do think it’s fine to criticize the amount of story as one aspect of the game, but to vilify the whole game for it doesn’t really make sense to me because there’s just so much to do and see and frankly I think the game was desfigned for explorers/discoverers. Not to mention that I feel all the ancillary stuff that you can find adds to the story, even if it isn’t directly necessary. Deus Ex is constantly engaging in worldbuilding. It’s fine to criticize that but not to dismiss it or ignore it and say the game is content-less.
Ultimately, I think it’s a really fun, really well-built game.
I think Deus Ex, like, say, Skyrim, is something that either clicks with you or doesn't.
Like, yeah, I could make a beeline from one plot point to another and finish the game in a few hours. But, dammit, there are apartments to break into and emails to read. And, for me, a lot of the appeal of these kinds of games is living in a pretty much completely realized space. I spent more time looking at the futuristic interior decorating of future apartheid Prague than I did just about anything else.
But, I freely admit I'm likely weird when it comes to games. I care more about immersion, experience, and narrative than I do about mechanics (unless they get in the way of the former) or graphics (ditto). As an 80s kid (actually born in 1980), the promise of living digital worlds was what excited me the most as a kid, so the games that do that well are the games I tend to enjoy the most. It's why something like Destiny leaves me cold... for all its gameplay polish, it's very obviously a treadmill, and something like that cannot hold my attention for long.
Yeah, there's a lot to in the game. I think I explored broke into most of the apartments in the city before I even got to the point of talking to the resistance guy and I stopped there because I kind of got bogged down with looting everything in the complex without killing or knocking out a single person... though you guys said it wouldn't change the dialogue if I knocked everyone out to properly explore so when I start up again, I'm just going to do that.
“I used to draw, hard to admit that I used to draw...”
I really loved Mankind Divided. I absolutely understand the complaints that other folks have, but I think it did some things really well (I thought the Prague hub was a masterpiece, for example), and purely subjectively it just really worked for me in a DeusExy way.
I will say, though, that it definitely felt like Human Revolution was a "We won't get another shot at a Deus Ex, throw everything that's even remotely Deus Ex in there! Globe-trotting, China, a U.S. city that's been battered and has homeless people around trashcan-fires, Tracer Tong!" and then Mankind Divided was "Hey, we were successful last time and have the trust of a major studio! Let's take our time and slow-roll this, make the whole game set primarily around one city, cover the span of just a few days, and focus on a fairly localized threat." In my mind, that last part would make it really tragic if they never get a shot at making another Deus Ex.
Oh, and I can respect that resources are limited and the next Deus Ex has to sit on the back-burner, but maybe let's not make it another 5 years until the next game. I feel like this franchise is a bit niche, and I don't know that it can reliably lay dormant and then rise again to mass success.
Also the story does suffer a bit from knowing that Manderley , Everett , Page and DeBeers cant be hurt or dealt with until Deus Ex 1. I still would love for the last game in Adam's story to show the rise of M12 and lead straight into the first game. Would also love for a remake of the first game.
When HR was coming out, I thought it was a mistake to build it in-continuity with the original Deus Ex. I thought they should have just made an alternate-world Deus Ex that used the same themes, conspiracy theories (as those are just our real-world conspiracy theories), and overall feel, but had a completely separate storyline/setting/characters that wouldn't be burdened by the original game. I still kind of think that, to be honest.
I will admit, though, that I got an absolute fanboy thrill seeing DeBeers and Page and all those characters in Mankind Divided.
A few weeks ago, I finally beat Mankind Divided after stopping almost a year ago right before, unbeknownst to me, the last level. I mainly stopped because I was enjoying the game so much I didn't want it to end. To me Deus Ex is a game where I knock out every enemy in a level, find every way through a level, loot everything, hack everything, and end up with a play through nearing 75 hours. Prague was such a fantastic city that I loved exploring every nook and cranny of. I broke into every single building and apartment I could, nearly all of them well before I knew they were tied to any mission or sidequest. I also like to get the maximum amount of XP I can, hoard it, and only unlock skills if I absolutely have to. Getting through the game using the bare minimum of augments and none that are gun/deadly combat related. In some sense that's making it harder on myself and not using the cool tech Jensen has, but I guess I like getting through everything with basic stealth, making use of cover, vision cones, and non-lethal combat.
I could always use more Deus Ex but I don’t think Adams story has more then one game left. After that I would like for them to remake the first game , introduce a new generation to the Denton brothers . That said what to do with Adam and Eliza? No idea how to give them a satisfying conclusion. Adam almost certainly has to die but as a rogue A.I Eliza is a huge loose thread.
I could always use more Deus Ex but I don’t think Adams story has more then one game left. After that I would like for them to remake the first game , introduce a new generation to the Denton brothers . That said what to do with Adam and Eliza? No idea how to give them a satisfying conclusion. Adam almost certainly has to die but as a rogue A.I Eliza is a huge loose thread.
Prequel territory by its nature only has so much room in it. A remake of the original could be good. So would stuff after and just ignore Invisible War since it's a rebooted franchise anyway.
mastertheheroProfessional Video Editor & Book AuthorRegistered Userregular
I think I'd want a different team if they were going to remake the original Deus Ex. As much as I enjoyed Human Revolution, Mankind Divided was a step backward and no matter how "open world" they pretended the game was, it was extremely limited and linear. Sure there were like 5 different ways you could enter one building but they weren't 5 interesting ways to enter the building. It was, do you want to enter from a rooftop vent? Or do you want to enter from a cracked wall? Or do you want to enter by stacking a refrigerator on top of some crates?
Rarely did they have any options where you could persuade a guard to let you in or you could do an event which would clear out the guards in an area.
Also, I was extremely disappointed that when I killed everyone in the Dvali crime family, the game still played out the same way. But the worst offense was definitely the Mankind: Divided story. Complete and utter trash. The first one wasn't Shakespeare but at least you had a better sense of what was going on and who the villains were. So not only did Mankind Divided have a boring, small-ass Prague (which only got better after the Red Light District), it also failed to tell anything compelling. I agree with a previous poster, Adam's story is definitely done. They need a new writing team and definitely a new game engine so that they could do something interesting with a living world rather than these small, superficial diorama worlds.
Yeah, it's fair to say Mankind Divided made pretty significant advancements in overall gameplay, while also acknowledging that, narratively speaking, it's a lateral move at best.
The gunplay and stealth are unquestionably better, from minor adjustments in physics and gunplay to AI behavior and complexity; augmented enemies in normal combat is fairly novel for the series. Going back through on New Game Plus is actually a lot of fun, since there were still augs to activate, and thus still reason to explore and level up. By the end you become this unstoppable wrecking ball, able to decimate entire squads of bad guys just with your augs. It generally feels good in these types of games to plow through an area after holding back, but it felt great here. And I'd argue the final mission is a rare positive use of an unseen timer, where the pressure is clearly on but it's not made explicit how much time you have to screw around.
For me, it's mostly the story where it falters. Playing Jensen again could've worked, but TF29 just isn't as personally interesting as the Sarif team and the idea of being a Juggernaut mole never really complicates things. There's DLC about the backstory behind the station bomber, a character we see for a fraction of a second, while the Illuminati basically don't exist outside of the beginning and ending cutscenes. Later on stuff just happens to keep the plot moving, like
some random civilian escaping TF29 custody and getting Jensen's infolink frequency, while the bombmaker is getting ready to have a digital-age mass suicide for reasons I honestly can't remember.
I'd hoped that the plot problems of Human Revolution were going to be addressed in the sequel, but if anything they only seemed to be exacerbated.
And honestly, I really like the two other DLCs, System Rift and Criminal Past. The former reintroduces Pritchard for some genuinely great back-and-forth between them, while also having a plot hook that finally puts Jensen on the Illuminati's trail. The latter is more character and situation focused, but has some clever twists and forces you to scrounge and use your resources carefully. You get depowered at the start, and it's entirely possible to complete the mission without ever getting your augs back online. Frankly, it feels awesome to pull it off, a reminder that Jensen was damn good at his job well before his operation.
Mankind Divided is still a fine game overall, and if they do ever revisit it with DLC I'll definitely take a look. Signs of good and sometimes great writing are here and there, and I'd play a whole spinoff based around the wacky adventures of Samizdat. Unfortunately it feels like they built up Prague to compensate for the game being half of what it should have been. A less-recognized part of what made Deus Ex great was that long, sweeping adventure: you had time to make friends, develop relationships, encounter enemies multiple times, and progress closer to the heart of the conspiracy. MD is dense, but comparatively small, and I think it suffers for it. More apartments to loot doesn't compare to, say, clashing with Walton Simons, or calling out Bill Taggart on TV.
Yeah, I'm not holding my breath even with augmented lungs
I can see where he's coming from, because if I'm remembering correctly the announcement they had pivoted away from Deus Ex came very soon after it was announced Square Enix had gotten the license to make Marvel games.
Yeah, I'm not holding my breath even with augmented lungs
I can see where he's coming from, because if I'm remembering correctly the announcement they had pivoted away from Deus Ex came very soon after it was announced Square Enix had gotten the license to make Marvel games.
He says as much.
"I can't really go into specific numbers," Matsuda tells us, "but I can say we're dedicating considerable development resources to them, especially out of the Western studios."
MD was solid, but felt a bit smaller than HR. It was pretty obviously a prologue for what was supposed to come. The computer hacking/email reading was on point, though, which, I mean, if you’re not breaking into other people’s apartments and going through their stuff, why are you even playing?
I liked divided not as much as hr but I thought it was a nice solid game.
Yeah, I can understand why a lot of people were disappointed, but for me at least, I thought it was pretty good. Prague is a great Deus Ex city and I thought the new augs they added were pretty neat. A lot of what I enjoy about Deus Ex games is wandering around in the environments and finding stuff, and it was a pretty good game for that. A lot of people say the game's plot and levels start feeling pretty rushed after about the halfway point, which I get, but it wasn't a huge issue for me.
But hr had the same problem hence why we only went to picus in Montreal and never went to the upper level of Hengsha. At this point I will take whatever I can get as I really really want to see the conclusion of Jensen’s story.
Posts
I do think it’s fine to criticize the amount of story as one aspect of the game, but to vilify the whole game for it doesn’t really make sense to me because there’s just so much to do and see and frankly I think the game was desfigned for explorers/discoverers. Not to mention that I feel all the ancillary stuff that you can find adds to the story, even if it isn’t directly necessary. Deus Ex is constantly engaging in worldbuilding. It’s fine to criticize that but not to dismiss it or ignore it and say the game is content-less.
Ultimately, I think it’s a really fun, really well-built game.
Also the story does suffer a bit from knowing that Manderley , Everett , Page and DeBeers cant be hurt or dealt with until Deus Ex 1. I still would love for the last game in Adam's story to show the rise of M12 and lead straight into the first game. Would also love for a remake of the first game.
I think Deus Ex, like, say, Skyrim, is something that either clicks with you or doesn't.
Like, yeah, I could make a beeline from one plot point to another and finish the game in a few hours. But, dammit, there are apartments to break into and emails to read. And, for me, a lot of the appeal of these kinds of games is living in a pretty much completely realized space. I spent more time looking at the futuristic interior decorating of future apartheid Prague than I did just about anything else.
But, I freely admit I'm likely weird when it comes to games. I care more about immersion, experience, and narrative than I do about mechanics (unless they get in the way of the former) or graphics (ditto). As an 80s kid (actually born in 1980), the promise of living digital worlds was what excited me the most as a kid, so the games that do that well are the games I tend to enjoy the most. It's why something like Destiny leaves me cold... for all its gameplay polish, it's very obviously a treadmill, and something like that cannot hold my attention for long.
I will admit, though, that I got an absolute fanboy thrill seeing DeBeers and Page and all those characters in Mankind Divided.
And yet potentially still on-brand
"We have never said anything about discontinuing that title but for some reason that's the rumour out on the market," Matsuda tells GI.biz.
http://www.pcgamer.com/we-have-never-said-anything-about-discontinuing-that-title-says-yosuke-matsuda-on-the-future-of-deus-ex
Prequel territory by its nature only has so much room in it. A remake of the original could be good. So would stuff after and just ignore Invisible War since it's a rebooted franchise anyway.
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Rarely did they have any options where you could persuade a guard to let you in or you could do an event which would clear out the guards in an area.
Also, I was extremely disappointed that when I killed everyone in the Dvali crime family, the game still played out the same way. But the worst offense was definitely the Mankind: Divided story. Complete and utter trash. The first one wasn't Shakespeare but at least you had a better sense of what was going on and who the villains were. So not only did Mankind Divided have a boring, small-ass Prague (which only got better after the Red Light District), it also failed to tell anything compelling. I agree with a previous poster, Adam's story is definitely done. They need a new writing team and definitely a new game engine so that they could do something interesting with a living world rather than these small, superficial diorama worlds.
The gunplay and stealth are unquestionably better, from minor adjustments in physics and gunplay to AI behavior and complexity; augmented enemies in normal combat is fairly novel for the series. Going back through on New Game Plus is actually a lot of fun, since there were still augs to activate, and thus still reason to explore and level up. By the end you become this unstoppable wrecking ball, able to decimate entire squads of bad guys just with your augs. It generally feels good in these types of games to plow through an area after holding back, but it felt great here. And I'd argue the final mission is a rare positive use of an unseen timer, where the pressure is clearly on but it's not made explicit how much time you have to screw around.
For me, it's mostly the story where it falters. Playing Jensen again could've worked, but TF29 just isn't as personally interesting as the Sarif team and the idea of being a Juggernaut mole never really complicates things. There's DLC about the backstory behind the station bomber, a character we see for a fraction of a second, while the Illuminati basically don't exist outside of the beginning and ending cutscenes. Later on stuff just happens to keep the plot moving, like
And honestly, I really like the two other DLCs, System Rift and Criminal Past. The former reintroduces Pritchard for some genuinely great back-and-forth between them, while also having a plot hook that finally puts Jensen on the Illuminati's trail. The latter is more character and situation focused, but has some clever twists and forces you to scrounge and use your resources carefully. You get depowered at the start, and it's entirely possible to complete the mission without ever getting your augs back online. Frankly, it feels awesome to pull it off, a reminder that Jensen was damn good at his job well before his operation.
Mankind Divided is still a fine game overall, and if they do ever revisit it with DLC I'll definitely take a look. Signs of good and sometimes great writing are here and there, and I'd play a whole spinoff based around the wacky adventures of Samizdat. Unfortunately it feels like they built up Prague to compensate for the game being half of what it should have been. A less-recognized part of what made Deus Ex great was that long, sweeping adventure: you had time to make friends, develop relationships, encounter enemies multiple times, and progress closer to the heart of the conspiracy. MD is dense, but comparatively small, and I think it suffers for it. More apartments to loot doesn't compare to, say, clashing with Walton Simons, or calling out Bill Taggart on TV.
Now playing: Teardown and Baldur's Gate 3 (co-op)
Sunday Spotlight: Horror Tales: The Wine
Yeah, I'm not holding my breath even with augmented lungs
Shitty Tumblr:lighthouse1138.tumblr.com
I can see where he's coming from, because if I'm remembering correctly the announcement they had pivoted away from Deus Ex came very soon after it was announced Square Enix had gotten the license to make Marvel games.
He says as much.
Source
https://segmentnext.com/2018/05/05/deus-ex-franchise-is-not-dead-according-to-eidos-montreal/
No hard confirmation, but looks like they do plan to make more games. Hopefully that means the Jensen arc will get a proper conclusion.
Shitty Tumblr:lighthouse1138.tumblr.com