Melan on 22/4/2015 at 16:21
Conspiracy theories are powerful because they are modern folklore many people believe in. Substituting fictional alternatives is less interesting because you lose the groundedness, the feeling of tackling something that has been there all the time on late night TV, in the ramblings of supposed fringe lunatics and chain e-mails, except suddenly, all those paranoid fantasies become validated.
There are multiple games' worth of good modern conspiracy theories in the financial crisis, the rise of one percenter global oligarchies, the shock doctrine, the TTIP, terrorism, GMOs, the deliberate destabilisation of states by superpowers, birth certificates, the ongoing militarisation of police forces, and yes, Obamacare, they just need to be told well. Deus Ex was a game that went there and did it. After all, what is all the FEMA stuff but the fear that Hillary Clinton will take away your guns and throw you into the GULAG? Today, you have modern surveillance states that really collect and analyse everything you post online (including this one), and that's just things they have all but admitted doing. Not to mention Hillary is running for president, again.
Cyborg rights are also somewhat interesting, but the real thing is finding out MJ12 has a secret base right below your city block and it is putting stuff into your drinking water.
Dev_Anj on 22/4/2015 at 16:55
To me the whole appeal of conspiracies is the idea that there's something beyond the surface details, and that there's a mystery which I can uncover through my efforts, be it exploring around or thinking on several clues for a bit. My reaction upon finding the MJ12 base in the sewer wasn't, "Oh, these people want to take over the world, everything ever said is a lie.", it was more like, "Huh, what are all these armoured soldiers doing here? What business they had with Ford Schick? Why do they even need all this weaponry and security? I need to keep an eye for clues, something isn't right."
catbarf on 22/4/2015 at 23:27
Quote Posted by faetal
Also, what's left?
Would have sucked playing a game where you get to the bottom of 9/11 false flag, fake moon landings, chemtrails, HAARP and Obama's birth certificate.
Honestly, I think you could probably make a compelling plot out of just the presence of Greys in DX and IW.
But really, it's not the conspiracies themselves that are important so much as tone. It doesn't have to be chemtrails and Area 51, Deus Ex has a pretty solid style in its globetrotting-secret-agent-versus-shadowy-governments theme. Human Revolution to me seemed less 'rogue agent unraveling the conspiracy' and more 'cyborg detective tracks down crime', with the augmentation conspiracy almost a sidenote to the saving Megan plotline.
Give me another game where I don't know what's true or who to trust. That's the original game in a nutshell and it's where the sequels failed, IMO.
Fallen+Keeper on 23/4/2015 at 03:39
It's also the lack of subtlety in exposition of incriminating details. In HR most of the time I already knew what was going to happen, who was to blame and who was the bad guy thanks to the details provided by the game, but still Jensen was completely clueless and acted surprised every time that an obvious twist was exposed. The worst case were the emails full of "I want to control the world, give me bodies, I'm the bad guy" kind of stuff signed by [spoiler]Hugh Darrow[/spoiler] And yet in the end Jenses was like [spoiler]Wait, Darrow is behind all of this?[/spoiler] What a fuck nob.
I felt very detached from the character, something that didn't happen with JC in 2000 when I played the original for the first time.
Pyrian on 23/4/2015 at 03:54
Quote Posted by Fallen+Keeper
I felt very detached from the character, something that didn't happen with JC in 2000 when I played the original for the first time.
Maybe the difference was you? DX1 introduces Bob Page and Walton Simons as power-mad villains in the
opening cinematic and then introduces Walton Simons - complete with his famously recognizable voice - as your boss's boss in the
tutorial. The guy at the end of the first level adequately explains the ambrosia plot. Heaven forbid you do any hacking in UNATCO HQ; you can read Manderley's incriminating e-mails right under his nose and he just tells you to stop messing around.
And when Paul finally confronts you with the patently obvious, JC has the gall to argue with him.
faetal on 23/4/2015 at 06:29
Quote Posted by catbarf
Give me another game where I don't know what's true or who to trust.
Texas hold 'em.
Thirith on 23/4/2015 at 07:15
Not that I think it'd happen, but instead of focusing too much on the conspiracies, which tend to be interchangeable anyway, I'd like a story that's a bit more John LeCarré, focusing on personal stories of trust and betrayal within the conspiratorial framework. Shady people turning against you is much less interesting than the people you know and trust suddenly turning out to be someone altogether different. This would also make the different sides in the conspiracy more compelling: it's not just about ideas (which tend to be fairly abstract), it's also about you, your beliefs and your relationships in a much more immediate way. In addition, it would add resonance to fights, if the characters you're fighting against are actually friends and people you care about.
Fallen+Keeper on 23/4/2015 at 10:54
Quote Posted by Pyrian
Maybe the difference was you? DX1 introduces Bob Page and Walton Simons as power-mad villains in the
opening cinematic and then introduces Walton Simons - complete with his famously recognizable voice - as your boss's boss in the
tutorial. The guy at the end of the first level adequately explains the ambrosia plot. Heaven forbid you do any hacking in UNATCO HQ; you can read Manderley's incriminating e-mails right under his nose and he just tells you to stop messing around.
And when Paul finally confronts you with the patently obvious, JC has the gall to argue with him.
Maybe, but HR blatantly puts all this info before your eyes, as most of it is not even protected by any password. God forbids if you miss any "it was you!" kind of info. In DX, if you didn't develop your hacking skills, you might have skipped a lot of conspiracy bits.
heywood on 23/4/2015 at 11:40
So it was pretty easily to guess that Darrow was going to become a major character in the end game, probably the main antagonist, probably Illuminatus, and that the story was going to wrap up in Panchaea. What wasn't obvious was that Darrow was going to be mad, and all the augmented people were going to turn into zombies, and his main reason for doing it is simple jealousy. I didn't see that coming, for the simple reason that it's stupid. It suddenly went from interesting conspiracy/thriller plot to a bad James Bond plot.
I also expected them to make more out of the Hyron project. It's a one of a kind quantum supercomputer with human drones connected into it in a hive mind, and it's only role in the game is as a simplistic security system in the final boss battle that does nothing more than open a couple doors and spin a few generic turrets on a ring. What a waste of potential.
Fallen+Keeper on 23/4/2015 at 12:34
I thought that "jealousy" was just one of the possible accusations you can throw at Darrow, which, depending on the randomization of his answers, might or might not be true. In my recent playthrough he didn't give an impression of being jealous, he really believed he made a mistake and decided to wipe it out at the cost of millions of human lives. Being an illuminati he thought he had that right, which is the culmination of one of the most important themes of the game: the conspirators decide the fate of the entire human race without being accountable. I felt that "kill them all" was the right ending for that playthrough.
