heywood on 1/5/2018 at 10:48
Yeah, there is a map of Prague
Thirith on 7/5/2018 at 06:54
In the meantime I've played on a few hours and definitely feel more at home in the game. As with Human Revolution I wish it was more fun to navigate the environments with Adam (IMO a light version of Mirror's Edge-style parkour would fit the augmentation premise) and I'm not a huge fan of the Prague hub, mainly because it never feels like a real place, but I enjoyed the hour or two I spent at the bank (the Samizdat side mission) and Golem City is a great environment. There've also been a couple of characters that were more interesting, although I still think that the writing is one of the game's main weaknesses.
While they're completely different games, I wonder if a game like Mankind Divided would benefit from the kind of NPCs that Rockstar puts in its games. Sure, the AI of Los Santos' inhabitants is pretty thin, but as a backdrop for your interactions they are varied and convincing, definitely much more so than the static NPCs hanging around Prague. If the place felt more real, more alive, my interactions in the world would feel more meaningful too.
heywood on 7/5/2018 at 13:47
I think maybe they tried to stuff too much in one place. Deus Ex levels have always been static, but exploring Prague feels more like strolling through a menagerie than Hong King or Hengsha. Everything is just that much more obviously staged waiting for the player's interaction.
Another thing is that Prague is not a very nice place to hang out in Mankind Divided. I know they made it that way on purpose, in case you might have thought that living under apartheid would be fun. But it turns out that exploring a bleak city full of unlikable, mostly grumpy characters isn't that memorable.
Thirith on 7/5/2018 at 14:34
To be fair, I think that few games other than the Rockstar/Ubisoft-style open worlds feel even somewhat alive - but you'd think that almost 20 years after Deus Ex their locations would feel less static than they do. It feels like less of an issue with Golem City, but on the whole I'd like more effort put into places that are supposed to feel alive in general.
PigLick on 7/5/2018 at 14:35
and the subway stations were really annoying
Sulphur on 16/12/2018 at 09:42
I recently completed MD because, well, reasons? Anyway, I liked that the ultra textures had less obvious compression, and there's a lot of love that's been put into the advertising campaigns and modernist design dropped into Prague's architecture.
I'm not gonna go over the criticisms everyone had, the main campaign was clearly weaker than the side quests, and the apartheid through-line wasn't a great idea. What, in fact, is there to say about apartheid apart from 'it's a bad thing'? That it pushes people to extremes they would normally never consider? That the oppressed would use extremism as justification for their own treatment? All been done. What could have been done better was drawing some nuance out of it for a more human main story, and it's surprising they failed here considering a lot of the side quests go out of their way to do exactly that. Which is a bit of an organising issue here, because if you split Deus Ex into its central topics of transhumanism/technology, conspiracy, governments and shadow groups, there's a neat demarcation to where all the mind-numbing conspiracy dialogue went in MD: mostly, right into the main quest.
You can't have the idea of shadow governments and conspiracies and the public spectre of apartheid competing in the same narrative bracket without being spectacularly nimble about it, and even if you were a nimble writer, if you had any sort of survival instinct, you'd only prod at it with a very long stick. It's not a coincidence that the more interesting stories were told in the side quests, computer logs, and tragic little tableaux, divorced from the Illuminati and the Templars.
And the bigger issue is, how do you address mechanical apartheid without examining its effect on the populations that were the first to experience apartheid? You'd think they'd have something to say about the sudden increase in signage that harks back to dimmer times in South Africa/the US's histories.
Anyway, I think the idea that Jensen is actually a clone is definitely on the money, because there are too many blanks and unresolved threads around it, plus all the hints that Sarif and TF29's double agent psychiatrist dropped, and it sets up the third entry for the big segue into Deus Ex's world with the Illuminati and Page & co. If we get a third entry - and we should - there's going to be more than a few things to wrap up there.
As a game, MD was pretty good. I got all the Deus Ex I wanted out of it. Sure, there could have been more hubs and more unpredictable design (I'm a simple man; like Gordon Freeman, if you give me a vent, I will fold myself into it), but Prague was fine. I enjoyed lolloping around its byways and carving my way through like a scalpel slicing into the anatomy of something impressive yet ugly and festering at the same time. Or maybe the more accurate analogy is that when you play a game like this, you're a free-roaming infection, knocking out an immune system. A time-lapsed top-down view of the maps in my playthroughs would show electronics shutting down, bodies crumpling into sleepy heaps, and crates being flung aside to expose entryways into the circulatory system that is building ventilation. Make no bones about it, this isn't emergent design - like Hitman, this is puzzlebox design. But when it's this good at challenging and empowering you, I'm not going to complain about it. Sure, the AI is primitive at best, but I've never played Deus Ex to be challenged by its combat.
Also, I have to say that one of the highlights of both HR and MD is how well-versed they are with corporatespeak. I've seen e-mails like the one fruit per person guidance from HR, the security logs, the managerial warning recommendations, and the stupid inter-office e-mail flirting that everyone knows about. Half of the e-mails are excuses to spell out passwords or locker numbers (which is the one area this diverges from reality), but the other half make me grin at how accurate they are in capturing the specific and the banal - it's almost satire, and it's almost not.
And that leads me to infer something: the writers at EM - you know, the guys who fashioned these inter-corporate espionage yarns - have intimate experience with how the corporate layer works, and spend a lot of time daydreaming about systematically taking it down. They've managed to weave that with gusto into a game series about transhumanism and technology and conspiracies, and their publisher hasn't batted an eye at their making Jensen - i.e., you, the player - an agent of corporate subversion.
Or, to complete my analogy from two paragraphs ago, you're also their transmission vector. It's kind of remarkable.
Aja on 23/12/2018 at 23:10
I've got it in my queue, but all of these comments kind of make me not want to play it. I liked Human Revolution fine, but with the integrated expansion pack it was too long, and I quit before finishing it. Some reviewers said Prague was a well-realized and interesting world to explore, but I'm not getting that impression here. And I didn't particularly enjoy the exploration aspects of the previous games either; they didn't feel like living worlds. I might finally cross MD from my list.
heywood on 1/1/2019 at 22:03
Excellent post Sulphur.
Puzzlebox design isn't a term I heard before applied to video games, but I get what you mean. I think emergent gameplay was more present in the original Deus Ex because many of the levels were pretty wide open, with more than just two or three possible paths, and the systems were exploitable so you could creatively solve some problems in a way the designers never anticipated. There was much less of that in Invisible War. The levels were small, so there were often just two paths: go the direct way or through the vents & utility tunnels. There were a few places where you had more freedom, like the entrance to Mako ballistics and Liberty Island, but not many. Human Revolution opened things up again somewhat, especially in places like Derelict Row. But most of the time I felt like I was just choosing between one of the approaches the designers had carefully crafted for me, rather than making up my own way. Same with Mankind Divided. Some open levels, but a lot of just choosing between the direct path vs. stealth path. I'm not complaining though, because both paths were generally well designed, and you didn't have to be a late-game über-Jensen to take the direct path without getting your ass handed to you on GMDX difficulty.
For Aja - If you liked Human Revolution, then you will probably like Mankind Divided as well. The core gameplay is nearly the same, but with a bunch of little refinements over HR. There are new augs and weapons, of course. And the weapons are better balanced. Combat is now a viable option early in the game. Stealth is still rewarded through the XP bonuses, but unlike HR you can start to run & gun from pretty early on if you want to. The main reason why I didn't like this game as much as HR is the writing/story. It seems more like a side story or fan-fic than a major episode. It wasn't thought provoking and didn't help pull me into the game. So if you liked previous DX games for the grandiose "uncover the conspiracies" plots and the themes they explored along the way, you'll be disappointed with MD. But if you liked them for the gameplay, you'll probably like MD.
Re: living world. The design of Prague seems to be inspired by Warren Spector's idea of a one city block RPG. It is richly detailed and densely packed with quests, things to see, loot, NPCs staged for quest purposes, and scripted events to stumble into. The first hour I spent there, I got some sense of a living world. But the more I explored it, the more it feels like some kind of interactive theme park. With all the side quests and "points of interest", I think the devs went a bit out of their way to make sure you don't miss anything they put in there.
There's also somewhat of an inherent conflict between trying to make a living world and trying to make a compact, super-dense RPG. RPGs are all about questing, and the more you try to make the world feel alive and reactive, the harder it is to avoid broken quests.
Sulphur on 6/1/2019 at 15:52
Thanks heywood! Yeah, the EM Deus Ex games aren't designed with systemic emergence in mind, more of a streamlined set of paths and fixed options that aren't 'breakable' in the classic Deus Ex sense, hence the comparison to Hitman and puzzlebox design. I didn't see the 'city block' aspect of the design until you mentioned it, and it makes perfect sense in retrospect. MD's not quite halfway to the ideal Spector had in mind, but it's heartening to realise they were trying for it at least.
lowenz on 9/2/2019 at 00:32
The [SPOILER]clone theory[/SPOILER] explains the start menu screen too (the one with 2 jensen faces looking one at another) :p