Kisaru1000 Nah. I mean the yellowness was a bit garish at times for me, but it gave HR a cool, unique aesthetic. From what I've seen of MD so far it looks like the visuals are less stylized, so that sucks a little.
Woah shit I didnt even know you could shoot open locked doors. See this the shit I love about this game I have watched 10 different people playing this game on YT and have learned something new every single time. That is what I love about this series.
Heck, in the first game, you could destroy doors with Police Batons or the Dragon's Tooth if your Low-Tech skill was high enough. You could destroy even more if you got that one Augmentation involving Strength to Level 2. A fun franchise, for sure. I just love exploring the levels and finding all sorts of goodies and secrets in them. Plus, getting better augmentations, of course.
Great gameplay, bad narrative elements, tbh this game reminds me of Phantom Pain, freedom to approach the level how you want, but a disappointing story. What do you think Ethos?
What??? So you play games for gameplay? So story means fuckall if the gameplay is good? So I assume the graphics and video effects don't mean anything, cause if I wanted that I'd watch a movie, and I'd read a book for a good plot. Great video games have both, games like the Witcher 3, The Last of Us, Chrono Trigger and etc.
So you play games for gameplay ONLY? interesting, it's your opinion and I respect, but I honestly prefer decent gameplay with a good story than a amazing gameplay with a really bad story, my opinion of course
Great review - really helped nail my conflicting feelings regarding the strengths of the gameplay and the absolute mess of a narrative on display here. On my second playthrough I'm finding it so confusing how much more attention seemed to be paid to the side missions than the main ones. It's seriously night and day.
What is it with recent stealth games having top-tier mechanics, depth, and level design, but underwhelming/poorly-thought-out narratives? -Dishonored -MGSV -Deus Ex: Mankind Divided
There isn't anything wrong with the "narrative" or the story of this game. Majority of people here who is "going crazy" about it have not played the Deus Ex series and +Super Bunnyhop seem to have no idea of the Deus Ex history and how things played out previously. ...and lets say even if it is, what kind of people are you where you'd only play games that suits your own narrative/agenda/views?
MGSV has the excuse of insane corporate meddling and the fact that Kojima most likely didn't even want to make it (remember: MGS2 was supposed to be the last Metal Gear game Kojima was going to work on and he was already running out of fucks by MGS4). The others, I dunno.
Dishonored's story is fine. Not a masterpiece, but it didn't pretend to be one. There are no major holes or stupidities in the plot. It's just a relatively simple and unremarkable story, but it gets the job done.
3:54 THAT'S AMAZING. Like legitimately, the AI being able to react like that to other AI instead of immediately going after you is such a wonderful thing.
In Human Revolution I cheated on subsequent playthroughs to give myself unlimited augmentation energy, but played on the highest difficulty. The game was much more enjoyable that way. I'm inclined to start this one over before I get much further into it and do the same. Because I really don't understand how I'm able to leap five metres into the air and carry fridges around at will, but turning on enhanced vision for five seconds somehow weakens me so much I can no longer punch a guy.
Could you clarify a little further? Am I assuming you're referring to the PC version? I picked up the PS4 copy for this one due to some uncertainty surrounding the port I was seeing...
For HR there's a mod that lets you access a bunch of cheats and a level select mode and stuff. I haven't found cheats for the new game so far, still looking for a trainer. On a console you're probably out of luck in any case :/
Yeah, thanks. I figured it was for the PC. Hopefully by the time I pick the GOTY version on Steam they'll have that figured out. I'll go through unassisted for the PS4 version for the time being. I need to replay HR, I never did the DLC or revamped boss fights in the Directors Cut. I've got it in my Steam library, so I'll look for that trainer. Thanks again!
SuperTurbineTech The Missing Link DLC is pretty good! You can really see they were much more comfortable with their tools when they made it, after they'd finished the main game. This is the debug menu mod I used for Human Revolution -- not sure which is the most recent version : forums.eidosgames.com/showthread.php?t=121245 moddb.com/games/deus-ex-3/addons/no-intro-debug-menu-map-selector-directors-cut
tl;dr Wait for the Director's Cut. Human Revolution benefitted a ton from one, so the same should apply here. Remember people, don't buy AAA games on launch. You only set yourself up for disappointment.
I bought it and loved it, all while supporting this great franchise. Not buying games like that on launch will only lead to further monopolization of shit and casual series like cod or bf
thats why i wait till its discounted on steam 6 months to a year later maybe sooner if i hear good things about it im barely playing human revolution right now and having a blast so far
Buying shit that is launched in a poor state on the other hand keeps showing developers and publishers that they can keep pushing their products in such a condition.
Not true. The fact that there are a lot of publisher who poop out unfinished AAA games (Activision, Ubisoft, EA) doesn't mean that other companies do the same. Lots of times you already know what youre getting into and yeah, pre orders suck and people shouldn't do so EXCEPT with companies that have a good track record. I expected Deus Ex to finished and good. I also expect the same from Naughty Dog, Rockstar, CDPR, Bioware, etc.
Aww I just watched a whole video about some game or something I don't even know and you don't see any of his strong powerful arms at all ): Why did you mislead me like this man?
11:17 is why I love George so much. He can see and point out similar themes in completly different games with completly different worlds and aknowledges why some people would think it's a far stretch even tho it's perfectly possible and fair.
D Birt well me neither, i'm just weirded out by the huge dissonance between the story of HR and this game. It's pretty heavily stated in HR that you need to be wealthy to afford augs and their maintenance. It's rich moguls pushing augs into society and it's working because non-augmented people are poor and they have no power. So how the hell it could possibly be spun around?
Actually, DXHR establishes that people from various economic strata get augmented. There were "war amps" -- veterans who were maimed in the line of duty and got augmentations to restore functionality (presumably on the government's dime), people who resorted to loan sharks or cheap back alley chop shops for augs to try to get a leg up, people who had augmentations literally forced upon them (the prostitutes in Hengsha), and line employees who had their augmentations paid for by their employers (e.g. the Panchea project). Also, it's a bit oversimplified to say that rich moguls were pushing augs in DX:HR. Yes, augmentation was more popular among the rich, and a lot of those folks were pushing a transhumanist agenda. David Sarif was the clearest example of this kind of person. He was rich, wanted to get richer, but wanted to do it by bringing augmentation to the masses, a la Henry Ford. However, the main media outlet you're exposed to in the game, Picus, had an anti-augmentation slant. The Illuminati's agenda isn't really pro- or anti-augmentation. To them the augmentation debate was a means to an end, and that end was control. They certainly wanted augs for themselves and their super soldiers, but they didn't want the masses having access to augmentations unless it somehow enhanced their control over them (via control chips, neuropozyne dependence and UN regulations).
As a hardcore fan of cyberpunk I totally get you. I don't like the easy racism plot that they've tried to go for. Leaving aside that that isn't how racism works... Just look not only at deus ex but at any great cyberpunk: It's never about that. In an essentially anticapitalistic genre in nature, cybernetics are what you take when you want to listen to the elites that want you to be more employable, and fuck, I think everyone can tell the difference between a prosthetic limb for an amputee and a weaponized person. Just reread the manifestos of Silhouette in the original Deus Ex and try to tell me this fits in the same continuity.
It honestly has far more in common with disability discrimination. People having their prosthetic limbs torn off and being beaten to death with them actually happens. This game could have addressed an often overlooked issue that ties in much more closely to its material but chose to take the easy route of racism instead.
People defending this game's writing are idiots It's like they didn't even watch the video Things having explanations doesn't make them good, or even acceptable
Supposedly Square Enix was going to make Mankind Divided as a trilogy of smaller games, which would explain the clunkiness of the plot. A combination of public outcry and poor feedback from their previous efforts to chop up their games *CoughCoughHitmanCough* convinced them that people don't like having to wait for the rest of the game to come out, so they pushed Edios to sew it all back together in time for launch, and Edios wasn't quite able to pull it all the way off. Still, I hope to pick this game up, soon. I LOVED Human Revolution, and from a gameplay perspective Mankind Divided seems like a perfect sequel to it. You idea that we might get a director's cut gives me more hope, BunnyHop; maybe with another year or two of development, Edios can knit the plot together a bit better and finish trying to make up for Square Enix's poor decision-making.
Also some of forced written racism coming from the police is really cringe. Personally I don't find the whole racism angle to being too much of a stretch. I mean when you look at how powerful augmented people can be, it kinda reminds me how the people in X-Men reacted to mutants. I kinda wish they showed both sides and handled the story allot better. I actually think it's kinda more of a jumbled mess than Human Revolution. They take hot-button topics that most games don't cover, but they don't actally explore it. I haven't finished the game yet, but I wouldn't be surprised if one of the characters spews the cliche line "people fear what they don't understand".
I wonder if it is because of the current situation in real life with all the racial tensions but... Did everyone forget how Human Revolution already had people showing heavy prejudice against augmented people? I recall on one sidequest a certain NPC wouldn't stop calling Jensen slurs like robot, Jensen himself finds himself victim of discrimination at his own apartment building, from what I hear in Mankind Divided, all those things from the previous title finally built up into their boiling point.
Eh, Canadian Gamer I still feel this was the intended result, after all, every one of these prequel games is going to lead into the first Deus Ex, where the world is at it's lowest point, the theme just got an unfortunate timing with the real life events, and some very dumb excecutive meddling trying to reference it just to come off as relevant
Clemens Cohn Yeah, but I still think it would've been handled allot better. Like the writing from some of the cops for example. I wish I remembered this one exact line which was just terrible. I mean it wouldn't be that hard to do this right. Just show both sides, naturals have a legit reasons to be afraid of augs, and you can understand how the Augmented feel because they are treated less than human. And not every augmented person have whaa Jensen has. I just kinda find it hard to believe all Augs are treated like shit. When I think most would just be augmented due to disabilities. Like a leg or an arm, not military grade Augments. Cops have more legit reasons to check you all the time, everyone else, not so sure.
Okay, kind of funny. As an infantryman, sprinting up stairs, results in the thought of "must go fast.... Please don't trip" Wich results in the action of subconscious slowing to ensure completion of the task of sprinting up stairs.
Well, sounds a bit like the 'cake or icing' conundrum I had with MGSV. The 'cake' is the core gameplay loop and the 'icing' being the polish, narrative, set-pieces, etc. In V's case the cake - the core act of sneaking around short-sighted guards with some added growth and management - had never been better, but without satisfactory icing - shit bosses, a narrative filled with lowlights - it really brought the game down below Snake Eater. And this sounds the same. Wonderfully tight core mechanics let down by a poorly handled story and a lack of polish. I still have to finish even the original game, however, so maybe by the time I get round to this there *will* be that Director's Cut.
Don't forget MGSV's lack of difficulty mode. Also the guards are pretty stupid and easy to get past if you learn how to abuse their weaknesses (like how if they notice you while you're running you can just dive and they won't even investigate or how smoke grenades completely destroy them).
"Difficulty modes" are stupid anyway, games with a single difficulty nail the challenge vs. frustration problem much better every time. MGS 5 has options like reflex mode, and it lets you dinamically choose which objectives to go for and which to ignore, what equipment to use, and your playstyle in general. It gradualy introduces elements that bring difficulty to each playstyle, and at the end of a mission, it'll say to you "Ok so you got the mantis codename, that means you played a certain way. There's these many other codenames." My only (slight) problem with its difficulty was the ranking system, which felt like it was made for a much simpler game and somehow matched with the wrong one. The best way to maximize your ranking was to just ignore 90% of the nuances of each mission.
+Jerónimo Palavidini I actually agree, one difficulty (with maybe a new game + or something like that) is better but MGSV is too easy. It should be a crime to use reflex mode because it turns the game from easy to completely mindless. Now, if it had difficulty modes I'd actually be able to choose a tougher one and have fun but the game is honestly too easy. Even if it gets harder than where I am (I got to like mission 15) it's already too boring and repetitive and I know the story isn't any good so I just gave up.
ReviewRapeUSA If you've only gotten to around mission 15, I'd say almost none of the elements that make it tricky later on have been introduced yet. They get equipment and behavior changes to counter pretty much every "dominant strategy", so unless you're completely closed-minded as a player, you're pretty much guaranteed to try different things. Also of note, even though I agree the game was easy, the multiplayer and online events fucking kick my ass. Not MGO, I mean the base invasions.
most of the augs dont have those superhuman augmentations obviously you do because your some sort of secret agent with access to military grade augmentations but most of the normal augs didnt choose to be augmented and are now slaves to high medical bills and addicted to meds for life because of it pretty much like debt slavery
I'm not familiar with Deus Ex's story, but this theme makes me think of X-Men. The anti-mutant sentiment in that universe feels pretty authentic, and I think a key difference (aside from execution, which is much more specific) is that "muties" don't buy their way into their powers, they don't even choose to be different. They're just born that way.
Right, I feel like the people making this argument are very much in line with those same people within the narrative. Just because i have a robotic arm doesn't mean i could afford the one with lazer cannons, let alone one that functions well. That said, because there are people who can, it creates a negative perception, very much like the mutants in X-men, who didn't ask to be what they are, but feared for what they could choose to be. I think the issue could be resolved iv there were some form of explanation on the wealth aspect, like augs are cheap, but the wealthy get the good ones. Then that creates the scenario in the game where either the rich or maybe just a junkie with some drug money can get something pretty dangerous, but a guy who just wants to walk again can't, and normal people can never truly know which is which.
In a setting where, at any moment, a baby could be born with the ability to create a black hole that will suck the world into itself and destroy everything we know, extreme caution and prejudice would be an entirely sensible survival strategy. Senator Kelly was right. Genetic screenings for everyone, no babies without a license, unregulated pregnancies must be terminated immediately. It's the only choice.
Yeah there's a lot of graphical effects you simply can't pull off on console hardware. This is one of the few games that chose to use those in the PC version
The base PS4 has a GPU that’s as powerfull as a 550 TI (i think, prob wrong on that). I’m not suprised to see games run worse or look worse on it then on PC
One minor point. A lot of the people in the universe had no choice but to be augmented. Hr is littered with texts and npc's talking about people being forced to and being sponsored by companies to have augments. Go have a wander and talk to the prostitutes and you will hear them complaining about being forced to have the procedures done by their pimps or else.
> Go have a wander and talk to the prostitutes and you will hear them complaining about being forced to have the procedures done by their pimps or else. Pretty sure there was a whole side quest about that in HR.
Neuropozyne is also a major point of the plot. Augmented Humans are addicted to the substance. It's what makes Versalife one of the major corporation in later games, as they are the only one manufacturing the drug. George is either more biased than the tower of Pisa, or suffering from heavy ADD. Can't tell.
From what Jim Sterling and a few other sources have reported a while back, Deus Ex : MD is only 1/3 of what it was supposed to be originally. It got chopped up into multiple parts as part of Squeenix's push to make all their games episodic and sequelized to the extreme. Granted, that 1/3 of the game was then padded and expanded upon, but the chopping would potentially account for the narrative and pacing issues the game has, with the developer scrambling to make a portion of the game function as a standalone product...
It's great cause it upsets everyone regardless of political affiliation. People for BLM see it as trivializing a (in their view) real issue, while people against BLM see it as trying to glorify a (in their view) toxic movement.
I think the narrative issues this game has and how it seems to have a feel of being rushed out are a testament of how much of a panic Square Enix went into when the new generation of consoles launch, there were rumors that Mankind Divided was going to be released with the same episodic format as Hitman, there was even word Just Cause 3 was re-developed multiple times because SE couldn't make up their mind on it. To be honest, I was worried the entire game overall was going to suffer when you said "but", but if the narrative structure of this game is the only thing that actually suffered, then it means this game is preety much a treat, weaker story compared to human revolution, but with even better gameplay. I quite frankly could care less about the real world references, the allegories of racism might fall flat, but at the same time... Who cares, my opinion and the seriousness of the real life events Deus Ex is referencing haven't become any less serious just becuase this videogame decided to make an allusion to them, it's not going to magically erase their importance in today's society, the same way something like the call of duty series doesn't really do much to hurt or trivialize real life warfare, because these games are meant for mature audiences, and as a mature audience, we are supposed to be smart enough to handle these things properly.
Your outro is pretty much what I'm waiting for with this game. I'm waiting for all the DLC to come out, and then a GOTY or Director's Cut edition. That's the Mankind Divided that I'll buy. Because what I'm hearing is that there are a lot of holes left in this game that seem like they're just waiting for the DLC to slide right in. And, so, if the total package isn't available yet, why should I buy it now?
This is a similar reason for why it becomes increasingly hard to take the struggles of the X-Men as a serious allegory. It's a fun series when executed right, and is a great way for making younger readers/audiences aware of racism and prejudice (that was certainly the case for me). But when played too straight, the entire conceit of the franchise starts to fall apart in a big way. It's perfectly rational to be afraid of and want to keep tabs on an entire group of people born with powers that could potentially wipe out all life on the planet. It's not really comparable to people being discriminated against because of their race, religion, or who they want to bone. Their stories work best as Mutiesploitation soap operas where they fight killer robots, alien empires, disgruntled mutants, and assassins that run murderous theme parks; try to inject too much reality and it's message is actually cheapened.
George glossed over several aspects of how Augs were first ghetto-tized in Human Revolution. The TL;DR version is that companies forced their workers to get augmented to be more efficient, which drove away Naturals as competition and because of the price for augments they were given loans. Add on top of that the medical anti-rejection drugs needed to survive and the political pressure before AND after the Aug Incident and the metaphor works as an issue of classicism or prejudice itself. (I really wish they didn't call it racism those two times.)
I now want to see you take on Invisible War and Thief 2014. My opinion of those games is what it is, but it would be interesting to see your analysis and angle.
Hey George, great video- just one point of disagreement/clarification. You mentioned how its strange that the rich who got augmentations are the ones hurdle into ghettos, but that's actually not the case. The ones in the ghettos are the lower/middle class citizens who had the get augments for work (like Malik or the prostitutes in Human Revolution) or injury related reasons, and yeah some probably did get them because they wanted it- but the wealthy characters or those in high positions are NOT the ones in Golem City. David Sarif and Bob Page for example are both augmented, yet they seem to be fine. Talos Rucker is said to have "bought" his way into Golem if you listen to the dialogue which makes sense because as a doctor, he has a respected position in society and wouldn't be bothered about it either. Its mainly the lower classes, especially those who can't get access to licenses that are forced in ghettos.
George, I don't know if you read these comments but if you do, I just wanted to thank you for providing quality content every week. I'm sure it can't be easy to finish entire video games with the completionist attitude you bring to them, edit swathes of footage down to ten minutes and finish writing and recording a stellar script. At a time when...other issues...are considered vastly more important than inherent quality, you, sir, are a breath of fresh air. Keep making these videos.
Despite the simple plot and the horrible 2 choice mechanic this game is by far one of the best one I've ever played and I can't understand why I love it so much
A lot of peoples uses this tactic to say terrible/retarded things. It's like "I'm know I'm wrong, but let me give you my opinion anyway". Jesus loves you too, for example.
Great analysis as usual. As a suggestion: I would really love to hear about the game's balance. For instance, in Deus Ex Human Revolution, you could get all the relevant guns and almost all the upgrades on the Detroit level (which was like the second level of the game) which (for me) made the game only really interesting in the very beginning. I call this the lack of balance (I might be using the wrong term , but anyway). In STALKER, for instance, the "balance" was perfect: you improved your guns and artifacts until the very end of the game, and every time you got a new gun it really felt like a huge improvement.
It really depends on the game, STALKER is all about disempowering the player and making him vulnerable, and Deus Ex in the other hand is about player experimentation and finding a way to solve a problem, the game giving you all of the weapons at the beginning is the devs stating their intentions saying: " We want you to choose your arsenal and and only you can do that, we gave you the tools, now enter that locked building, either by destroying the main door, killing the guards or by saying you are a VIP the guards letting you in without blood spilling or by entering through the roof undetected, oh, you have a sniper rifle? put that to use, or force a glitch and do it in a way the devs didnt know about"
So we went from really good social commentary to extremely lazy social commentary. I'm sticking to my principle of not touching a modern Square Enix game with a stick
+Deveroth What? The original game had a lot of conversations and settings devoted to exploring different societies, organizations, and classes' perspectives on ideal government. There's even a philosophical layer to the nature of judging and needing to be judged looming over all of the game's ideas (take the Mopheus AI conversation for example). All of this culminates in an ending where you choose 1 of 3 endings based on your past decisions and encounters with various characters, settings, and organizations -- and each of these endings are a reflection of how you think people should be governed. The entire game is pretty much an essay on perfect government and the nature of human worship; if anything, it has the most nuanced reflection on the real world of all the games and doesn't rely on a single analogy or commentary to hold its bones together.
***** I see flawed allegories as a way to describe the character rather than how logic is used. Flawed allegories are generally fallacies, something you can attribute to almost anything that doesn't have any actual consistent and definitive data related to it. Personally, it just show how they see the world rather than indicating reality, cause all they can attribute to anything is general knowledge that has more variable than can be calculated to any point. But that's just me.
+cloak211 Nuanced? Besides economical inequality and effects of degenerated capitalism (which are actually explored in nuanced way) there is no nuance in first Deus Ex. Its entire social commentary and other loosely connected with each other philosophies rely on philosophical debates which are pretty much talking at the player and are blinking at the player "look its not your typical video game story nr 123234", there's no nuance in that. All of endings aren't based on your decisions, any decision you made in the game doesn't carry any weight to the endings (much like in other Deus Exes). I love this game but let's not glorify it for something it is not.
The "why are people with expensive augs poor" thing is kinda explained in one of the loading screens - after the Aug Incident, neuropozyne was in short supply and, as a result, expensive. Those with augs were forced to spend more and more money to avoid the withdrawal effects. Plus, after the Incident, I could see people being fired from their jobs and such because they have augs - race is a protected class in the US IRL (and probably in the Deus Ex universe as well), but are augmentations a protected class?
Funny true anecdote: So i was playing this game and wanted to get on a roof... but it was a tad too high to jump on even from a crate. So i was pondering the problem for a bit, when my cat meowed, demanding my attention as it jumped from the couch onto the open living room door.... so i opened a door in game, jumped on that from the crate and then onto the rooftop. Then i thanked my cat for giving me the hint.
Soooo.... I should Wait for the DX edition that's bound to come out in a year or two for half the price with all the DLC and a more cohesive plot? I can live with that.
It's crazy, there was so much attention to detail given to this game on so many levels. Every apartment you break into has interesting emails to read, the side missions are interesting, the comments the cops make when you pass them by, even the salesman at the tech shop will make smart ass remarks after you break to his shop, something like "I hope to see you again, if not in person then at least in our security feed" or if you knock his henchmen out, he'll wait for the next time you visit him and start telling his men: "you're always napping on the job, doppie...". You have all this amazing attention to details invested into the world and making it feel lived in but you have half the missions that you had in Human Revolution. The End came out of nowhere in this game. I didn't even know I was playing the last mission when I was doing it because it was so short. Also, they focused way too much on this non-sense out there conspiracy battle of the Augs vs Illuminati and very little on the social division elements. Sure when we walked the streets they called us clank but how cool would it have been to do something about that beyond going all GTA on those cops: some missions to stick to the Prague cops and expose corruption, broke into some politicians office to find some dirt for SAMA (yes I know there was Picus mission that had something similar but it would have been cool to have more of these), had the option to choose not arrest Ruker but to warn him to get the fuck out of there instead (the game could still have killed him if they didn't want to branch the story but in a different place), side missions where you fight police oppression while you're in the Aug ghetto, missions to smuggle Neuropazine to the ghetto, you didn't even have an option to let the augs out of their street prison cages at the end of the game, Jensen could have participated in escorting the refugees through the sewers in the underground railroad that SAMA was talking about (yes, I know there was a little thing where we got the SAMA reporters out of the empty police station but it could have been alot more expansive). There was a murder investigation that the game had you start but never finish (a potential romance thread with one of the witnesses that by the way is abducted with no mission to even attempt to find her). In your other video about Hitman that German guy explained DXMK's poor sales figures on the theory that no one wants to play a stealth game. I would argue that this game didn't do well because people can tell when they were sold an unfinished game and reviewer can relate that fact to potential buyers. When I saw what this Deus Ex was going to be about and saw those awesome cinematic trailers about social unrest, families being torn apart, I was ready to buy it at full price when it came out if the game delivered on its promises. But the game didn't deliver on its promises, it delivered something waterred down and incomplete and when I saw the reviews I concluded that and I decided that I was not willing to pay anything beyond a deep Steam discount. So I bought it for 20$ instead of 60$ (which again, I would have paid for a complete game). I think alot of people must have done this and that's what SqE is seeing in their sales figures.
There were pieces of info out in the web months before launch that Mankind Divided was intended to be a much bigger game and suddenly chopped into a trilogy by order of Squenix since they wanted their very own Mass Effect. Now that the game has come out, and some things just feel missing, those rumors kinda make sense now
+Bubber Ducky i've had no problems with the gameplay of Human Revolution. But i am more a hybrid type player. some stealth and some shooting. so from my perspective there is no real improvement as far as i can see at the moment. But i can understand your point.
***** Fallout 3/Los Vegas/Deus Ex weren't RPGs, they were shooters(which as I recall, you can choose between third or first-person, but they're still shooters).
***** how was New Vegas an RPG? How viable is a run done completely without guns, and how many playstyles are there of that, versus how many playstyles there is with guns? If I can't shoot the broad side of a barn in an FPS, can you recommend Fallout New Vegas to me with a straight face, with a simple yes or no?
Fun Fact: Reuben "Rube" Goldberg was a cartoonist in the 1920's who created a character named Professor Lucifer Gorgonzola Butts. I have no fun facts about the "Rude Goldberg" mentioned in the video.
1:56: Wait, did I hear that right? 1:56: Yes I did, you just said "rude" Goldberg machines. That's hilarious. My nickpicking aside, this is an excellent video.
This is hands down the best review of this game on youtube. Very well made overall concept, talking about issues nobody else did (the sprinting...jesus!) and still perfectly explained why it is still a very good game worth playing. Thank you! Subscribed.
Well, that's a shame. I was hoping they'd hit the thematic elements further, even more than Human Revolution did. Makes me wonder if there were new writers or they were encouraged to be edgy and topical. Not once while playing Human Revolution did I think "oh my god that's so true, I've seen and experienced this sort of thing in real life, it's just like all the..." blah blah blah Mankind Divided seems really hamfisted, it's trying to be edgy and current and shove the fact that this sort of thing happens in real life down your throat.... I GET ENOUGH OF THAT ON SOCIAL MEDIA AND THE NEWS THANK YOU. All I wanted was another Human Revolution style narrative. More philosophical. I play games to get away from the fucking awful shit I see in real life. Being creative with it doesn't mean you make the themes inapplicable to real life. Brave New World, Lord of the Flies, Bladerunner, and all that shit doesn't trip over itself to tie into current events and they're all the better for it. You can have meaningful themes and philosophy without this mechanical apartheid, aug lives matter, social justice warrior bullshit. It only serves to obfuscate the true meaning because no one actually knows what that shit is. If you just make a story and show themes like they are instead of piggybacking on specific, hard to define things, it becomes more meaningful to a greater number of people. I hope this made sense. I love you all.
I think part of the issue is that the connections between Human Revolution and Mankind Divided are fleshed out in a novel, a novella, and a comic. It reminds me of what they did with World of Warcraft's Catalysm expansion, you just sort of show up and everything is crazy but the meat of the story is in a book that most people will never touch. That doesn't excuse the in-gameplay story (or really anything) but it at least gives you an option to know what's going on. Human Revolution also has a supplemental "prequel" book that had much less to do with the game or really anything to do with Adam Jensen that was written by the same author as the one for MD called Icarus Effect. It's a pretty solid book for the most part, and the main character is the same as the one from the horrible mobile game turned PC port Deus Ex: The Fall. The thing is that you can completely skip Icarus Effect and all you're losing out on is some tiny bit of information about the people who ultimately become the bosses of Human Revolution.
To me, both recent Deus Ex games were cringey exposition dumps, narratively. So I don't really get how Human Revolution is being held up as some sort of bastion of the series' great storytelling, by comparison. At least in Mankind Divided they fixed the voice acting and smoothed out some other rough edges to make it all go down a little smoother. I play these games for the style, setting and gameplay. I take the story as a sort of futuristic abstraction. Not something I should be dissecting and poring over constantly while I play.
Absolutely agree with you however i think they did a lot better than all other recent rpgs so that might have something to do with it? Because a lot of the narrrative actually is hinted at? idk i feel like most games just given up entirly on narrative and single player and either squeeze it into "expieriences" abbandoning all gameplay elements with it. Or making them gameplay first (which is fine by me) and loosing a bit or a lot of storytelling in the process. They are not blending in so well anymore maybe? Don't have a solution for this either though, maybe it's a lack of direction or a heavy focus to put the game out good so it will sell well, single player games are so rare these days anyway.
Florian W For me, The Witcher 3 is the most recent shining example of handling narrative in an open world/RPG setting, But it's not like that game is perfect. There are a lot of gameplay issues there. I just think in reality it's super difficult to give a "complete" gaming experience. Whether it's time or budget or creative issues, there are certain limitations that keep most games from being as fully-realized as I'm sure most developers/gamers hoped they could be, In the case of Deus Ex, there are just so many moving parts. Combining all these different elements - insane amounts of player choice, rich/dynamic gameplay, a (semi) open world setting, and a very complex and changing narrative - must be an immensely difficult task. Maybe they bit off a little more than they could chew in some areas. In any case, I'm pleased with the final result. I think it's a really good game, despite the issues a lot of ppl seem to be having with the narrative.
I don't think there's any story you should declare sacrosanct from criticism. Someone explaining why the recent Deus Ex's have a cringey story is just as valid as saying "eh I saw holes in the plot, so I don't care." In the end he prioritized the gameplay in his review anyway. But if there were a point in the last game where I thought the same way you did and quit caring, it'd be the magical hobo who asked you for 40s in Detroit.
Broreale I was not in any way saying the story should be free of criticism. He can review any game any way he likes. He's very good at it. I was just giving my thoughts on his critiques of this particular game, and the Deus Ex series as a whole. So I'm pretty sure you misread my intent.
13:26 "The game begins like there's some piece of opening chapter, like a comic book or DLC that never came out is filling in the gaps that were missing" Because there is. Deus Ex Universe: Black Light (interquel, follows Jensen after waking up in Alaska, explains how he got found by Task Force 29, referenced in the intro - the book in Jensen's secret stash - and the System Rift DLC) Deus Ex Universe: Hard Line (a novella that came with the Collector's Edition; explains how Alex Vega met Adam Jensen and Ivan Berk, the bomber from the beginning of the game) Deus Ex Universe: Children's Crusade (shows Adam's first mission with TF29, sets up Nathaniel Brown's "Human Restoration Act") Deus Ex Universe: The Dawning Darkness (one-shot comicbook; explains how Arun Singh went undercover with the Jinn and set up the arms deal that TF29 crashes in the opening) You were right on the money, SBH.
The fact that they even go so far as to draw such a close comparison to Black Lives Matter like they did here is just careless. Regardless of whether or not you support the people behind the _real_ world cause in all of this, it will soon become irrelevant; thus bringing the narrative of Mankind Divided down with it, which is damned shame. I think more than ever these days, it's important to deliver stories that players/audiences have never seen before. It can be a difficult feat at times, as with any creative endeavour but when a game as high caliber and celebrated as a Deus Ex game is released, a certain level of excellence is expected on pretty much all fronts and as Bunny boy has mentioned here, the series has set such a reasonably high bar for narrative that it's hard not to feel cheated by such a haphazard inclusion of a cause that doesn't hold any real merit to begin with. I think what I'm truly getting at here is; at the end of he day, I just want to escape the headaches of the real world when immersed in a world that heavily leans on themes and civilisations that _can't_ yet be achieved today... instead of be reminded of _why_ I tried to temporarily escape the world I live in to begin with.
Your review is very nuanced, when all I was looking for is someone to confirm my biases about it. I'm sure disgruntled Joseph will make up for all the confusion you've cause me.
Man, it's a real shame about the story. I didn't like the focus of HR's "transhumanism" stuff as I don't think it was well thought out, and it looks like that MD takes it to the next level. I much prefer if that stuff were to stay in the background like in the first DX, and focus more on conspiracies instead like DX1 did; I feel that a much more compelling plot can come out of it, because I feel that having "Augs being oppressed" isn't really as compelling or interesting to me as the main theme, and also personally, it makes it less "believable" to me. Like, yeah the first game had augs and nano augs, but it wasn't the focus. It was more of a focus on real world shit that felt relevant, and while there are obvious parallels to the whole racism here in the real world.... I don't think it is as compelling as DX1's whole thing with terrorism and the government/powerful people doing shady shit like making the grey death so they can make a profit and kill off the poor, insignificant people. I think I'll definitely enjoy the game a shitload regardless because I think that, while I do play DX for a blend of a bit of both "A and B", A does definitely take priority for me, but a good story is my motivation to keep playing it, not just good gameplay.... In the meantime, I'm just going to keep replaying DX1 with the excellent GMDX mod and replay DXHR w/ the Director's Cut before I pick up MD. Great video.
***** Wow, really? I've been keeping an eye on it on Moddb, I have 8.0 installed right now. Haven't heard of 9.0 being in development, because I thought that 8.0 might have been the last major leap, but we'll see I guess.
Did you notice, much like the shooting range fitting but not fitting in it’s game placement, the DLC had the same issue? Or how you said the game seemed to just “start” without a real build up beginning? Well that’s because all the DLC was pulled from the game and tweaked a little bit a couple of *WEEKS* prior to release. The game was supposed to start with a Jensen narrative for a few minutes about the aug incident, Sariff Industries collapse, and his taking a job with Interpol, who immediately assigned him to work T-29, infiltrating from the inside of a jail. “A criminal Past” scene for an hour or so, then a cut to the shrink, and was supposed to be broken up into a few segments with him chatting with her through your actual gameplay, at least that’s the way one of the designers explained it to me. Square admitted the DLC was pulled because people did not want a 50-90 hour game anymore, and if they did they would buy the expansions or DLC, so like the microtransactions, Eidos Montreal did not have a clue until the final cut was turned in. They thought all the dlc was integrated into the story, and they would make a couple more, or just move straight to a sequel. The final boss was by far my easiest fight, and that was my other big issue with the game. There was 1 boss fight. That’s it. And it was astonishingly easy if you had invisibility or were tolerableat stealth. You literally needed to lose him once, and if you disable the robots and turret which are on the same terminal 6 seconds away, just use your vision to see where he is, creep closer like he’s a regular guard, stun gun/tesla him and do a takedown. Then run back through the kitchen where Miller is and head right into the room to save the delegates as well. I found so much stun gun ammo, and used takedowns so often, I broke down almost all the weapons I found the first half of the game, except to buy the praxis kits and tranq darts/stun gun ammo, so I had 50 Biocells when I walked into the final fight, 50 hypostims, 75 tesla shots (fully upgraded so 4 targets per), dual takedown without becoming visible etc (they said there are 20 praxis kits to find, but I only found 15, and I spent about 80 hours on my first playthrough. I looked everywhere, and only killed 3 people until my last trip to the last spot in Prague as the police and robots were bugging me. I took the turrets from the subway and carried them around to let them shoot everything for me, it was a blast. So, the lack of meaningful dlc and less interesting missions bc they were supposed to be played in the damn game really took a lot away from the game imo. It made it feel a bit disjointed. Starting with criminal past would have made so much more sense, then the missing link or whatever on your 2nd trip to Prague, then the last one with the last part of Criminal Past in the final act, it would have given the traitor reveal (who did not have to be revealed in CP, just hinted at) seem so much cooler, vindicating the player with an “I knew that it was her!” Square Enix made so many mistakes, from the augment my preorder, to useless micros (neither of which hurt the game so fans should have chilled), but the story pull, then announcing “you guys didn’t buy it, and we said it cost 35 million, but it really cost 70 million, so we are icing the franchise to work on a couple Marvel titles.”, well that hurts sales even more. It could have been a great game. A solid 90-92 “Wow!!! That was unreal” title. Instead, it was was an excellent 82 or 83 for *’me*. It was my favorite game of 2016, as it was just so close so many times. Utelek was great. The crazy machine god chick quest. The aug serial killer, the few trips to the bank etc, absolutely fantastic. Then we fall on the bosses being a horde of police, robots and turrets and it’s like “Ok, I go from extracting Dominic and ghost the mission by throwing him off a balcony into leaves and locking him in a storage unit, to this? Seriously? Awesome game, cheap as heck for all the content now ($15 usd for a Steam Key at cdkeys dot com, who is legit, and buys their keys in bulk through Steam, so devs still get their cut). I advise anyone who has not played it to do so ASAP, as it really is that good. Shoot, just adding two more real boss fights in or putting the dlc back in the game where it belonged would jump the game to a 90 in my subjective opinion
I feel like the rich people being crippled could have easily been addressed while also working into the themes of Deus Ex in general: Government regulation of Neuropozyne following the Aug Incident. Doesn't matter how much money you have if you have to blow it all hoarding the only injection keeping you from becoming a spasming heap of flesh and carbon fiber. Add in that the game itself confirms VersaLife is the only company manufacturing the drug, and there are multiple NPCs that require Neuropozyne in order to do certain things, and I have to wonder if that was an idea being kicked around at some point during development.
i knew what part i disliked the most in mankind divided when i first heard about the game. Transhumanism as standin for racism is pretty legit, but the way they handle it in mankind divided is completely backwards and ridiculous. Real world transhumanism's maybe biggest moral gripe is that the augmented people WILL become the literal master race as soon as augs are viable option. It was even set up in DX:HR subtly but pretty heavily. Yet they somehow turned around because contrived bullshit reason x. It makes no sense in lore, or in real world issue. Oh well, maybe it would have been TOO controversial and edgy to depict Jensen as a ss-officer allegory...
Do you forget about the low class workers forced into augs? Prostitutes forced the get augs? How the augs turned them into drug addicts? The trailer showing them suffering in the slums because they don't have access to the drugs? How Jenson was one of a handful of people who could even handle military grade augs? Seriously what the hell are you talking about?
This review is one of the best I have seen for this game, and mirrors my thoughts nearly exactly (Good gameplay, lacking narrative consistency, and the other misc). I have been impressed with your reviews until now as well, but this was on another level to me. Just wanted to let you know :)
they really made the gameplay waaaay better and i can see me playing through multipe times but the story is rather weak sadly but over all its a very gud game
+Alucard3362 What I've always demanded from any Deus Ex has been a good narrative. If I wan't stealth gameplay instead, I'll play Dishonored. If I'm told that a restaurant has a great selection of wines, arrive and find they have no wine but serve great steaks, I'll still be disappointed. I didn't come for the stakes.
Games like Deus Ex make me feel like I'm Die Hard 1 era John McClane. Which is to say that I constantly feel like I'm stumbling through everything and just barely finding paths that only kind of work. It's actually very thrilling.
that's a great review. I think I'll hang on till the DLCs are out and hopefully, the main story abrupt end maybe taken care of. Dem microtransactions thou....
this game is a master class in game design but the narrative is a fuckin mess.i like some of the side stories and moral dilemmas but man this game feels disjointed
If you felt that there was something missing from the beginning of the narrative, it's because there's a book that was released just about a week ago that explains everything going in. Whether it was to streamline the story to make room for more gameplay and better pacing or not is up in the air, but that book is neccesary.
All I pictured was some sci-fi God being from nowhere... though I did feel those cityscapes while o more polished really did remind me of the cityblocks in the original Deus Ex.
I think there's a bit of a misconception about augs in the DX world in this video. Not every augmented person was upper class (though there were plenty that were) and not all of them had Super Combat Enhancer Powers like Jensen. Many individuals had gotten augmentations due to things like accidents and were damn near forced into poverty. Remember that Detroit side quest in Human Resources where you find out a Sarif employee was smuggling out Neuropozyne and selling it on the streets? He tells Jensen that he did it because of the fact that the people who needed it the most couldn't afford the sky-high costs and he opted to be chaotic good and sell it on the black market, even though he's risking his job. Another example would be the lady who owed Tong money because she needed augmentations to break into the highly competitive and heavily strong barrier-of-entry industry of being a broker because, you guessed it, all the rich kids can afford augments and could easily fall upwards to cozy positions whereas she had to cut a shady deal with the Triads. There were also hints at augs stealin' muh jobs, like the one bit in Hengshua where you help the prostitutes who's being forced to get augments because that's what their patrons want more (and she tells her boss that they should get augmented so they can fuck themselves). This makes sense as augmented individuals have slightly enhanced abilities than normal humans. So tl;dr: while there were plenty of augmented individuals who were very wealthy and had great amounts of power (both in the physical sense and in the sense of power as control), many individuals you encounter don't share those qualities, so it isn't a massive stretch to see augmented individuals relegated to slums and living in squalor since there were plenty of them close to it and it's not like you can't, say, strip someone's money from them. Still, I haven't played MD and this may or may not properly explain the allegories used (which I do think is really hamfisted) but I felt it was worth understanding this.
Good points. The reason Deus Ex was so memorable & earned so many accolades was because it was such a tight story. The gameplay was also very innovative for the time, but what made it stand out was that cyberpunk is extremely cool & relevant. These newer iterations have a cyberpunk aesthetic, & entirely-corporate sensibilities. This, combined w/ respected game critics constantly saying dumb shit like "gameplay is king," means there's impetus not just within production, but also from consumers, to ditch what was actually powerful about the franchise & instead focus on making a boring Metal Gear knock-off.
You mention a difficulty in keeping the energy bar full. From what I understand in other reviews this game has microtransactions. Is one of them for items to help refill that bar? I don't like that the subject wasn't brought up at all in this review, but if (and I'm asking if) it impacts a mechanic like that then it really should have been as that is exactly the kind of problem fee to play produces. Still should have been brought up..
I recently completed MD, cause it was on sale during the summer sale. In my opinion, the story had so much potential and a lot of build up. I didn't know who Alejandra was, and who this Janus was either. I wanted to learn who the Juggernaut Collective was, the fact that this big brawny augmented dude started leading the Augs to a dark path of violence and revenge. I wanted to see what would happen to the world when the streets of prague would be overrun by augmented terrorists. I wanted to take down this group of illuminati figures that kept meeting in the NSN. Man I even wanted to see the "love interest" that was between either Adam and Alejandra, or Adam and Aria, where choosing to help Interpol instead of the Juggernaut Collective would result in Alex resenting you. I can't even explain how cool the idea of an "aug ghetto" was, but how disappointed I was when it was actually a really unexplorable place. Compared to Hengsha in Human Revolution; the idea of the rich having an upper level of city, quite literally, was something I had never thought or seen before. What I got instead? Some guy attacked a train station, made it look like augmented people, I found out who it was, the leader of the peaceful protest died for some reason. Then I followed some big augmented dude to a research facility who then found me, and stabbed me with his heroin. I was supposed to die, but I didn't (miraculously!), then I came back to prague, found that the entire place is under curfew. Then I went to London, found that the security was acting weird, informed my teammates and supervisor, found my supervisor almost dead, saved the non-augmented citizens, killed the big dude (who's name I still don't remember cause of how little explanation there was about him), and then everyone clapped. Then I went home, and a week later some girl that seems like she should be Adam's girlfriend, but doesn't have enough character development for me to actually care who she is, talks with me and I told her "this is only the beginning." And that was it. So much build up, so many chances, no satisfaction. I found that this game introduced so many characters and ideas and plots, but never actually built on top of them. Who are the Dvali? Who is the Juggernaut Collective? How was JC formed? Who is Janus? Where did Alejandra come from, and why do we know her? Who's Miller? Who is Viktor, and why should I care about him if I killed him so quickly? What about the "Ascension" ritual that was taking place? Are there more? It still was fun, I give it a 3/5.
I just got to the Gas Station in the first game and omg, seeing you hack the laser trip wire at the end there just sent shivers up my spine. I still completely hate the third person stealthing in this game. It just screams Metal Gear or more accurately, "look console players, even YOU can love Deus Ex now" just gimme a lean function.
I don'T see aproblem with augs being the oppressed class. Even in Human Revolution most of them were impoverished or criminals, they couldn't afford their medicine and sometimes didn't even have a choice not to get augmented. And Jensen with his fancy weapons and gadgets is pretty much an exception to most of the augs, who use augmentation as kind of prosthetics and maybe are sometimes slightly stronger or faster....
The Augs living in Golem city weren't the ones that were rich and powerful, they were people who got augments to do their jobs, like heavy lifting and such.
I practically fangirl over this series, but I totally see where you're coming from. The narrative honestly felt so disparate and low stakes that it kind of became an afterthought as I focused on exploring every little nook and cranny of the world and turning Jensen's apartment into a weapon storage facility (you can never have enough Combat Rifles and Smoke Grenades). I normally favor gameplay quite a bit over story so it didn't bother me, but I can see it being a big issue for a game that has a legacy of strong narrative. I even feel like Human Revolution felt more "Deus Ex"y than this game. The stakes felt a lot higher since you were uncovering massive corporate conspiracies vs a terrorist attack or two and there were more "oh snap" moments that really made things interesting. I also felt the characters were done better in HR. Sarif, Malik, and Pritchard are far more interesting and memorable than Miller, Chikane, or McCready could ever be. The entire story feels like it would be better suited as a series of side missions following one plot, not the main thread.
wasn't there a video about hitting ai in the head with objects? did I miss a video before deletion or am I confusing it with another channel? I'm positive it was super bunnyhop, I wouldn't have been so interested otherwise. too bad if I missed it.
...Is it weird that I actually kinda miss the gold/yellow filter aesthetic from Human Revolution?
You're not alone.
Also the amazing soundtrack!
I'm sure someone will make a mod in the near future, then we'll get our precious piss filter back.
Kisaru1000 Nah. I mean the yellowness was a bit garish at times for me, but it gave HR a cool, unique aesthetic. From what I've seen of MD so far it looks like the visuals are less stylized, so that sucks a little.
It's an artistic decision, but I do know what you mean
Woah shit I didnt even know you could shoot open locked doors. See this the shit I love about this game I have watched 10 different people playing this game on YT and have learned something new every single time. That is what I love about this series.
Heck, in the first game, you could destroy doors with Police Batons or the Dragon's Tooth if your Low-Tech skill was high enough.
You could destroy even more if you got that one Augmentation involving Strength to Level 2.
A fun franchise, for sure. I just love exploring the levels and finding all sorts of goodies and secrets in them. Plus, getting better augmentations, of course.
Great gameplay, bad narrative elements, tbh this game reminds me of Phantom Pain, freedom to approach the level how you want, but a disappointing story. What do you think Ethos?
I think its a sin to compare this great game to the pile of shit that is mgsv
What??? So you play games for gameplay? So story means fuckall if the gameplay is good? So I assume the graphics and video effects don't mean anything, cause if I wanted that I'd watch a movie, and I'd read a book for a good plot. Great video games have both, games like the Witcher 3, The Last of Us, Chrono Trigger and etc.
So you play games for gameplay ONLY? interesting, it's your opinion and I respect, but I honestly prefer decent gameplay with a good story than a amazing gameplay with a really bad story, my opinion of course
Great review - really helped nail my conflicting feelings regarding the strengths of the gameplay and the absolute mess of a narrative on display here. On my second playthrough I'm finding it so confusing how much more attention seemed to be paid to the side missions than the main ones. It's seriously night and day.
What is it with recent stealth games having top-tier mechanics, depth, and level design, but underwhelming/poorly-thought-out narratives?
-Dishonored
-MGSV
-Deus Ex: Mankind Divided
Nailed it.
There isn't anything wrong with the "narrative" or the story of this game. Majority of people here who is "going crazy" about it have not played the Deus Ex series and +Super Bunnyhop seem to have no idea of the Deus Ex history and how things played out previously.
...and lets say even if it is, what kind of people are you where you'd only play games that suits your own narrative/agenda/views?
MGSV has the excuse of insane corporate meddling and the fact that Kojima most likely didn't even want to make it (remember: MGS2 was supposed to be the last Metal Gear game Kojima was going to work on and he was already running out of fucks by MGS4). The others, I dunno.
***** System Shock 2?
Dishonored's story is fine. Not a masterpiece, but it didn't pretend to be one. There are no major holes or stupidities in the plot. It's just a relatively simple and unremarkable story, but it gets the job done.
3:54 THAT'S AMAZING.
Like legitimately, the AI being able to react like that to other AI instead of immediately going after you is such a wonderful thing.
In Human Revolution I cheated on subsequent playthroughs to give myself unlimited augmentation energy, but played on the highest difficulty. The game was much more enjoyable that way.
I'm inclined to start this one over before I get much further into it and do the same. Because I really don't understand how I'm able to leap five metres into the air and carry fridges around at will, but turning on enhanced vision for five seconds somehow weakens me so much I can no longer punch a guy.
that actually sounds really cool. I might try that
Could you clarify a little further? Am I assuming you're referring to the PC version? I picked up the PS4 copy for this one due to some uncertainty surrounding the port I was seeing...
For HR there's a mod that lets you access a bunch of cheats and a level select mode and stuff.
I haven't found cheats for the new game so far, still looking for a trainer. On a console you're probably out of luck in any case :/
Yeah, thanks. I figured it was for the PC. Hopefully by the time I pick the GOTY version on Steam they'll have that figured out. I'll go through unassisted for the PS4 version for the time being.
I need to replay HR, I never did the DLC or revamped boss fights in the Directors Cut. I've got it in my Steam library, so I'll look for that trainer.
Thanks again!
SuperTurbineTech
The Missing Link DLC is pretty good! You can really see they were much more comfortable with their tools when they made it, after they'd finished the main game.
This is the debug menu mod I used for Human Revolution -- not sure which is the most recent version :
forums.eidosgames.com/showthread.php?t=121245
moddb.com/games/deus-ex-3/addons/no-intro-debug-menu-map-selector-directors-cut
tl;dr Wait for the Director's Cut. Human Revolution benefitted a ton from one, so the same should apply here.
Remember people, don't buy AAA games on launch. You only set yourself up for disappointment.
I bought it and loved it, all while supporting this great franchise. Not buying games like that on launch will only lead to further monopolization of shit and casual series like cod or bf
thats why i wait till its discounted on steam 6 months to a year later maybe sooner if i hear good things about it im barely playing human revolution right now and having a blast so far
Buying shit that is launched in a poor state on the other hand keeps showing developers and publishers that they can keep pushing their products in such a condition.
Not true. The fact that there are a lot of publisher who poop out unfinished AAA games (Activision, Ubisoft, EA) doesn't mean that other companies do the same.
Lots of times you already know what youre getting into and yeah, pre orders suck and people shouldn't do so EXCEPT with companies that have a good track record. I expected Deus Ex to finished and good. I also expect the same from Naughty Dog, Rockstar, CDPR, Bioware, etc.
This is the only reasonable post here.
I want George to hold me close in his strong powerful arms.
Don't we all
I'm imagining how hard he would crack up if you whispered, "Tell me about the rabbits again, George." (Too morbid/dark?)
What's the timecode for the arms? I dunno if I want to sit through all of this shit, just let me skip to those arms!
Aww I just watched a whole video about some game or something I don't even know and you don't see any of his strong powerful arms at all ): Why did you mislead me like this man?
Guess I'll just have to get my fix at 1:12 in the Pokemon GO video.
11:17 is why I love George so much. He can see and point out similar themes in completly different games with completly different worlds and aknowledges why some people would think it's a far stretch even tho it's perfectly possible and fair.
Also comic tone perfect.
I thought everyone considered Deus Ex The Fall to be the worst game in the series.
Right? I hope he just pretended that it doesn't exist.
Never heard of it.
It was a shitty mobile port, most of us have forgotten about it's existence.
A game even more invisible than Invisible War
LOLOLOLOL
I'll give the Deus Ex UN credit. they deiced to discrimate against a group of people and they chose those with super powers. that takes balls
Lets discriminate against the people that can kill us without breaking a sweat!! Yeah!!
not the mention those people are the rich and powerful elite of the world. The people who run the UN...
Niko Virta I haven't played a he game yet does it ever touch the rich augments treated differently
D Birt well me neither, i'm just weirded out by the huge dissonance between the story of HR and this game. It's pretty heavily stated in HR that you need to be wealthy to afford augs and their maintenance. It's rich moguls pushing augs into society and it's working because non-augmented people are poor and they have no power. So how the hell it could possibly be spun around?
Actually, DXHR establishes that people from various economic strata get augmented.
There were "war amps" -- veterans who were maimed in the line of duty and got augmentations to restore functionality (presumably on the government's dime), people who resorted to loan sharks or cheap back alley chop shops for augs to try to get a leg up, people who had augmentations literally forced upon them (the prostitutes in Hengsha), and line employees who had their augmentations paid for by their employers (e.g. the Panchea project).
Also, it's a bit oversimplified to say that rich moguls were pushing augs in DX:HR.
Yes, augmentation was more popular among the rich, and a lot of those folks were pushing a transhumanist agenda. David Sarif was the clearest example of this kind of person. He was rich, wanted to get richer, but wanted to do it by bringing augmentation to the masses, a la Henry Ford.
However, the main media outlet you're exposed to in the game, Picus, had an anti-augmentation slant. The Illuminati's agenda isn't really pro- or anti-augmentation. To them the augmentation debate was a means to an end, and that end was control. They certainly wanted augs for themselves and their super soldiers, but they didn't want the masses having access to augmentations unless it somehow enhanced their control over them (via control chips, neuropozyne dependence and UN regulations).
As a hardcore fan of cyberpunk I totally get you. I don't like the easy racism plot that they've tried to go for. Leaving aside that that isn't how racism works... Just look not only at deus ex but at any great cyberpunk: It's never about that. In an essentially anticapitalistic genre in nature, cybernetics are what you take when you want to listen to the elites that want you to be more employable, and fuck, I think everyone can tell the difference between a prosthetic limb for an amputee and a weaponized person. Just reread the manifestos of Silhouette in the original Deus Ex and try to tell me this fits in the same continuity.
I agree with you, but the people in the game has a reason to hate all with augments. Since the "incident" had everyone with implants go nuts and kill.
It honestly has far more in common with disability discrimination. People having their prosthetic limbs torn off and being beaten to death with them actually happens. This game could have addressed an often overlooked issue that ties in much more closely to its material but chose to take the easy route of racism instead.
+GhostofPhoenix So you're saying Jensen should have had a takedown where he rips off people's limbs and beats them to death. I agree.
People defending this game's writing are idiots
It's like they didn't even watch the video
Things having explanations doesn't make them good, or even acceptable
Clemens Cohn Except nobody was spreading misinformation
A BOMB.
IN THE KRUSTY KRAB?!
Must be the Year of the Vulture.
What a shame
OmnYfie
......'s cool.
Exactly what I thought of when he said the voice acting in MD was "unenthusiastic". I thought it was fantastic, especially compared to the original.
You know it's gonna be a good Bunnyhop Deus Ex video when it starts with the UNATCO theme!
Supposedly Square Enix was going to make Mankind Divided as a trilogy of smaller games, which would explain the clunkiness of the plot. A combination of public outcry and poor feedback from their previous efforts to chop up their games *CoughCoughHitmanCough* convinced them that people don't like having to wait for the rest of the game to come out, so they pushed Edios to sew it all back together in time for launch, and Edios wasn't quite able to pull it all the way off.
Still, I hope to pick this game up, soon. I LOVED Human Revolution, and from a gameplay perspective Mankind Divided seems like a perfect sequel to it. You idea that we might get a director's cut gives me more hope, BunnyHop; maybe with another year or two of development, Edios can knit the plot together a bit better and finish trying to make up for Square Enix's poor decision-making.
Also some of forced written racism coming from the police is really cringe. Personally I don't find the whole racism angle to being too much of a stretch. I mean when you look at how powerful augmented people can be, it kinda reminds me how the people in X-Men reacted to mutants. I kinda wish they showed both sides and handled the story allot better. I actually think it's kinda more of a jumbled mess than Human Revolution. They take hot-button topics that most games don't cover, but they don't actally explore it. I haven't finished the game yet, but I wouldn't be surprised if one of the characters spews the cliche line "people fear what they don't understand".
I wonder if it is because of the current situation in real life with all the racial tensions but... Did everyone forget how Human Revolution already had people showing heavy prejudice against augmented people? I recall on one sidequest a certain NPC wouldn't stop calling Jensen slurs like robot, Jensen himself finds himself victim of discrimination at his own apartment building, from what I hear in Mankind Divided, all those things from the previous title finally built up into their boiling point.
***** Well yeah sure, but it was very mini squeal compared to Mankind Divided. Now it's extremely exaggerated.
Eh, Canadian Gamer I still feel this was the intended result, after all, every one of these prequel games is going to lead into the first Deus Ex, where the world is at it's lowest point, the theme just got an unfortunate timing with the real life events, and some very dumb excecutive meddling trying to reference it just to come off as relevant
Clemens Cohn Yeah, but I still think it would've been handled allot better. Like the writing from some of the cops for example. I wish I remembered this one exact line which was just terrible. I mean it wouldn't be that hard to do this right. Just show both sides, naturals have a legit reasons to be afraid of augs, and you can understand how the Augmented feel because they are treated less than human. And not every augmented person have whaa Jensen has. I just kinda find it hard to believe all Augs are treated like shit. When I think most would just be augmented due to disabilities. Like a leg or an arm, not military grade Augments. Cops have more legit reasons to check you all the time, everyone else, not so sure.
Yeah, I guess you just have to go into the 1960s USA mindset when it comes to aug racism in this game.
Okay, kind of funny. As an infantryman, sprinting up stairs, results in the thought of "must go fast.... Please don't trip" Wich results in the action of subconscious slowing to ensure completion of the task of sprinting up stairs.
Well, sounds a bit like the 'cake or icing' conundrum I had with MGSV. The 'cake' is the core gameplay loop and the 'icing' being the polish, narrative, set-pieces, etc. In V's case the cake - the core act of sneaking around short-sighted guards with some added growth and management - had never been better, but without satisfactory icing - shit bosses, a narrative filled with lowlights - it really brought the game down below Snake Eater. And this sounds the same. Wonderfully tight core mechanics let down by a poorly handled story and a lack of polish.
I still have to finish even the original game, however, so maybe by the time I get round to this there *will* be that Director's Cut.
Don't forget MGSV's lack of difficulty mode. Also the guards are pretty stupid and easy to get past if you learn how to abuse their weaknesses (like how if they notice you while you're running you can just dive and they won't even investigate or how smoke grenades completely destroy them).
"Difficulty modes" are stupid anyway, games with a single difficulty nail the challenge vs. frustration problem much better every time. MGS 5 has options like reflex mode, and it lets you dinamically choose which objectives to go for and which to ignore, what equipment to use, and your playstyle in general. It gradualy introduces elements that bring difficulty to each playstyle, and at the end of a mission, it'll say to you "Ok so you got the mantis codename, that means you played a certain way. There's these many other codenames."
My only (slight) problem with its difficulty was the ranking system, which felt like it was made for a much simpler game and somehow matched with the wrong one. The best way to maximize your ranking was to just ignore 90% of the nuances of each mission.
+Jerónimo Palavidini I actually agree, one difficulty (with maybe a new game + or something like that) is better but MGSV is too easy. It should be a crime to use reflex mode because it turns the game from easy to completely mindless. Now, if it had difficulty modes I'd actually be able to choose a tougher one and have fun but the game is honestly too easy. Even if it gets harder than where I am (I got to like mission 15) it's already too boring and repetitive and I know the story isn't any good so I just gave up.
+ReviewRapeUSA The AI in this game is even worse . I hid behind a desk and shot guards and took them down and they never killed me.
ReviewRapeUSA If you've only gotten to around mission 15, I'd say almost none of the elements that make it tricky later on have been introduced yet. They get equipment and behavior changes to counter pretty much every "dominant strategy", so unless you're completely closed-minded as a player, you're pretty much guaranteed to try different things. Also of note, even though I agree the game was easy, the multiplayer and online events fucking kick my ass. Not MGO, I mean the base invasions.
Woe us rich people, wow to us who can afford to be superhumans and shoot the wings off a fly.
ya, when the cops break in your door, kick you into a ghetto and make it hard to get your meds....
most of the augs dont have those superhuman augmentations obviously you do because your some sort of secret agent with access to military grade augmentations but most of the normal augs didnt choose to be augmented and are now slaves to high medical bills and addicted to meds for life because of it pretty much like debt slavery
I'm not familiar with Deus Ex's story, but this theme makes me think of X-Men. The anti-mutant sentiment in that universe feels pretty authentic, and I think a key difference (aside from execution, which is much more specific) is that "muties" don't buy their way into their powers, they don't even choose to be different. They're just born that way.
Right, I feel like the people making this argument are very much in line with those same people within the narrative. Just because i have a robotic arm doesn't mean i could afford the one with lazer cannons, let alone one that functions well. That said, because there are people who can, it creates a negative perception, very much like the mutants in X-men, who didn't ask to be what they are, but feared for what they could choose to be. I think the issue could be resolved iv there were some form of explanation on the wealth aspect, like augs are cheap, but the wealthy get the good ones. Then that creates the scenario in the game where either the rich or maybe just a junkie with some drug money can get something pretty dangerous, but a guy who just wants to walk again can't, and normal people can never truly know which is which.
In a setting where, at any moment, a baby could be born with the ability to create a black hole that will suck the world into itself and destroy everything we know, extreme caution and prejudice would be an entirely sensible survival strategy.
Senator Kelly was right. Genetic screenings for everyone, no babies without a license, unregulated pregnancies must be terminated immediately. It's the only choice.
Jesus it looks SO MUCH better on PC than PS4 wtf wow.
Really, I played it on PS4 PRO and there is not a noticable difference.
Yeah there's a lot of graphical effects you simply can't pull off on console hardware. This is one of the few games that chose to use those in the PC version
The base PS4 has a GPU that’s as powerfull as a 550 TI (i think, prob wrong on that). I’m not suprised to see games run worse or look worse on it then on PC
One minor point. A lot of the people in the universe had no choice but to be augmented. Hr is littered with texts and npc's talking about people being forced to and being sponsored by companies to have augments. Go have a wander and talk to the prostitutes and you will hear them complaining about being forced to have the procedures done by their pimps or else.
> Go have a wander and talk to the prostitutes and you will hear them complaining about being forced to have the procedures done by their pimps or else.
Pretty sure there was a whole side quest about that in HR.
+ThePreciseClimber I'm just gonna ignore the oppression certain augs already had in HR because its more fun being negative.
Neuropozyne is also a major point of the plot. Augmented Humans are addicted to the substance. It's what makes Versalife one of the major corporation in later games, as they are the only one manufacturing the drug. George is either more biased than the tower of Pisa, or suffering from heavy ADD. Can't tell.
From what Jim Sterling and a few other sources have reported a while back, Deus Ex : MD is only 1/3 of what it was supposed to be originally. It got chopped up into multiple parts as part of Squeenix's push to make all their games episodic and sequelized to the extreme. Granted, that 1/3 of the game was then padded and expanded upon, but the chopping would potentially account for the narrative and pacing issues the game has, with the developer scrambling to make a portion of the game function as a standalone product...
Jim Sterling loved the game and gave it 9/10.
Yes, he did. I'm not saying it's a bad game either. But even Jim acknowledged the issues with the narrative.
Sounds like I will be waiting for the Director's Cut Edition.
Invisible Warfare? ☺️
NUKE-U-LAR
COMPARISHON
great... now he's given the next cod idea to Activision.
REVIEW OVER. SHUT IT DOWN.
AUG LIVES MATTER... Oh god the cringe
the lives of a minority dying in the streets is "cringe"? I mean, it made me groan since it dates this game. but whatever
Yes cause it's retarded, as fuck.
+TooMuchStarbucks what, the phrase or the cause?
It's great cause it upsets everyone regardless of political affiliation.
People for BLM see it as trivializing a (in their view) real issue, while people against BLM see it as trying to glorify a (in their view) toxic movement.
Please tell me that's not a real quote from the game
Dude that was not a weird example. The Majora's Mask comparison was perfect.
Great review like always man!
I think the narrative issues this game has and how it seems to have a feel of being rushed out are a testament of how much of a panic Square Enix went into when the new generation of consoles launch, there were rumors that Mankind Divided was going to be released with the same episodic format as Hitman, there was even word Just Cause 3 was re-developed multiple times because SE couldn't make up their mind on it.
To be honest, I was worried the entire game overall was going to suffer when you said "but", but if the narrative structure of this game is the only thing that actually suffered, then it means this game is preety much a treat, weaker story compared to human revolution, but with even better gameplay.
I quite frankly could care less about the real world references, the allegories of racism might fall flat, but at the same time... Who cares, my opinion and the seriousness of the real life events Deus Ex is referencing haven't become any less serious just becuase this videogame decided to make an allusion to them, it's not going to magically erase their importance in today's society, the same way something like the call of duty series doesn't really do much to hurt or trivialize real life warfare, because these games are meant for mature audiences, and as a mature audience, we are supposed to be smart enough to handle these things properly.
#PREACH
I think your last paragraph was really well put. I agree.
Your outro is pretty much what I'm waiting for with this game. I'm waiting for all the DLC to come out, and then a GOTY or Director's Cut edition. That's the Mankind Divided that I'll buy. Because what I'm hearing is that there are a lot of holes left in this game that seem like they're just waiting for the DLC to slide right in. And, so, if the total package isn't available yet, why should I buy it now?
"We need to make a political statement for the new Deus Ex, whats it going to be about?"
"Maybe, racism?"
"Racism what?"
"It's bad"
"That's deep"
This is a similar reason for why it becomes increasingly hard to take the struggles of the X-Men as a serious allegory.
It's a fun series when executed right, and is a great way for making younger readers/audiences aware of racism and prejudice (that was certainly the case for me). But when played too straight, the entire conceit of the franchise starts to fall apart in a big way.
It's perfectly rational to be afraid of and want to keep tabs on an entire group of people born with powers that could potentially wipe out all life on the planet. It's not really comparable to people being discriminated against because of their race, religion, or who they want to bone.
Their stories work best as Mutiesploitation soap operas where they fight killer robots, alien empires, disgruntled mutants, and assassins that run murderous theme parks; try to inject too much reality and it's message is actually cheapened.
George glossed over several aspects of how Augs were first ghetto-tized in Human Revolution.
The TL;DR version is that companies forced their workers to get augmented to be more efficient, which drove away Naturals as competition and because of the price for augments they were given loans. Add on top of that the medical anti-rejection drugs needed to survive and the political pressure before AND after the Aug Incident and the metaphor works as an issue of classicism or prejudice itself. (I really wish they didn't call it racism those two times.)
Is the game this dark, or was the video just kinda rendered that way?
it's not dark at all compared to the original
I now want to see you take on Invisible War and Thief 2014. My opinion of those games is what it is, but it would be interesting to see your analysis and angle.
"He-man Revolution"
That really should have been the name of the game.
Hey George, great video- just one point of disagreement/clarification. You mentioned how its strange that the rich who got augmentations are the ones hurdle into ghettos, but that's actually not the case. The ones in the ghettos are the lower/middle class citizens who had the get augments for work (like Malik or the prostitutes in Human Revolution) or injury related reasons, and yeah some probably did get them because they wanted it- but the wealthy characters or those in high positions are NOT the ones in Golem City. David Sarif and Bob Page for example are both augmented, yet they seem to be fine. Talos Rucker is said to have "bought" his way into Golem if you listen to the dialogue which makes sense because as a doctor, he has a respected position in society and wouldn't be bothered about it either. Its mainly the lower classes, especially those who can't get access to licenses that are forced in ghettos.
No bad DX game? Did you not play the fall?
George, I don't know if you read these comments but if you do, I just wanted to thank you for providing quality content every week. I'm sure it can't be easy to finish entire video games with the completionist attitude you bring to them, edit swathes of footage down to ten minutes and finish writing and recording a stellar script. At a time when...other issues...are considered vastly more important than inherent quality, you, sir, are a breath of fresh air. Keep making these videos.
Despite the simple plot and the horrible 2 choice mechanic this game is by far one of the best one I've ever played and I can't understand why I love it so much
I could listen to George's "I love you" on a loop for hours.
did you lose a bet where you have to put the words "I love you" into all of your videos or somthing?
No, he just loves you.
A lot of peoples uses this tactic to say terrible/retarded things. It's like "I'm know I'm wrong, but let me give you my opinion anyway". Jesus loves you too, for example.
Oh and nice review George, I enjoy listening to your thoughts on games since you go rather nicely in depth.
Great analysis as usual. As a suggestion: I would really love to hear about the game's balance. For instance, in Deus Ex Human Revolution, you could get all the relevant guns and almost all the upgrades on the Detroit level (which was like the second level of the game) which (for me) made the game only really interesting in the very beginning. I call this the lack of balance (I might be using the wrong term , but anyway). In STALKER, for instance, the "balance" was perfect: you improved your guns and artifacts until the very end of the game, and every time you got a new gun it really felt like a huge improvement.
It really depends on the game, STALKER is all about disempowering the player and making him vulnerable, and Deus Ex in the other hand is about player experimentation and finding a way to solve a problem, the game giving you all of the weapons at the beginning is the devs stating their intentions saying: " We want you to choose your arsenal and and only you can do that, we gave you the tools, now enter that locked building, either by destroying the main door, killing the guards or by saying you are a VIP the guards letting you in without blood spilling or by entering through the roof undetected, oh, you have a sniper rifle? put that to use, or force a glitch and do it in a way the devs didnt know about"
FYI day after release of the game, was published novel Deus Ex: Black Light written by James Swallow, which fill the 2 year gap between HR and MD.
So we went from really good social commentary to extremely lazy social commentary.
I'm sticking to my principle of not touching a modern Square Enix game with a stick
The social commentary in HR was just as shallow and aimless as it is here. Just wasn't as sensitive a topic.
+Deveroth What? The original game had a lot of conversations and settings devoted to exploring different societies, organizations, and classes' perspectives on ideal government. There's even a philosophical layer to the nature of judging and needing to be judged looming over all of the game's ideas (take the Mopheus AI conversation for example). All of this culminates in an ending where you choose 1 of 3 endings based on your past decisions and encounters with various characters, settings, and organizations -- and each of these endings are a reflection of how you think people should be governed. The entire game is pretty much an essay on perfect government and the nature of human worship; if anything, it has the most nuanced reflection on the real world of all the games and doesn't rely on a single analogy or commentary to hold its bones together.
What do you consider good social commentary?
*****
I see flawed allegories as a way to describe the character rather than how logic is used. Flawed allegories are generally fallacies, something you can attribute to almost anything that doesn't have any actual consistent and definitive data related to it.
Personally, it just show how they see the world rather than indicating reality, cause all they can attribute to anything is general knowledge that has more variable than can be calculated to any point. But that's just me.
+cloak211 Nuanced? Besides economical inequality and effects of degenerated capitalism (which are actually explored in nuanced way) there is no nuance in first Deus Ex. Its entire social commentary and other loosely connected with each other philosophies rely on philosophical debates which are pretty much talking at the player and are blinking at the player "look its not your typical video game story nr 123234", there's no nuance in that. All of endings aren't based on your decisions, any decision you made in the game doesn't carry any weight to the endings (much like in other Deus Exes). I love this game but let's not glorify it for something it is not.
The "why are people with expensive augs poor" thing is kinda explained in one of the loading screens - after the Aug Incident, neuropozyne was in short supply and, as a result, expensive. Those with augs were forced to spend more and more money to avoid the withdrawal effects.
Plus, after the Incident, I could see people being fired from their jobs and such because they have augs - race is a protected class in the US IRL (and probably in the Deus Ex universe as well), but are augmentations a protected class?
Funny true anecdote: So i was playing this game and wanted to get on a roof... but it was a tad too high to jump on even from a crate. So i was pondering the problem for a bit, when my cat meowed, demanding my attention as it jumped from the couch onto the open living room door.... so i opened a door in game, jumped on that from the crate and then onto the rooftop. Then i thanked my cat for giving me the hint.
Which Goldberg are you referring to?
Rube Goldberg. but he kept insisting the guy was rude.
Ty
Goldberg the WCW wrestler who could be considered rude because he always spat on the floor on his way to the ring, obviously.
I scrolled down for that comment.
I remembered even the Megaman Zero games dealt with humans/robotpeople hatred, even in gaming, this type of plot is ancient.
Soooo.... I should Wait for the DX edition that's bound to come out in a year or two for half the price with all the DLC and a more cohesive plot? I can live with that.
It's crazy, there was so much attention to detail given to this game on so many levels. Every apartment you break into has interesting emails to read, the side missions are interesting, the comments the cops make when you pass them by, even the salesman at the tech shop will make smart ass remarks after you break to his shop, something like "I hope to see you again, if not in person then at least in our security feed" or if you knock his henchmen out, he'll wait for the next time you visit him and start telling his men: "you're always napping on the job, doppie...". You have all this amazing attention to details invested into the world and making it feel lived in but you have half the missions that you had in Human Revolution. The End came out of nowhere in this game. I didn't even know I was playing the last mission when I was doing it because it was so short. Also, they focused way too much on this non-sense out there conspiracy battle of the Augs vs Illuminati and very little on the social division elements. Sure when we walked the streets they called us clank but how cool would it have been to do something about that beyond going all GTA on those cops: some missions to stick to the Prague cops and expose corruption, broke into some politicians office to find some dirt for SAMA (yes I know there was Picus mission that had something similar but it would have been cool to have more of these), had the option to choose not arrest Ruker but to warn him to get the fuck out of there instead (the game could still have killed him if they didn't want to branch the story but in a different place), side missions where you fight police oppression while you're in the Aug ghetto, missions to smuggle Neuropazine to the ghetto, you didn't even have an option to let the augs out of their street prison cages at the end of the game, Jensen could have participated in escorting the refugees through the sewers in the underground railroad that SAMA was talking about (yes, I know there was a little thing where we got the SAMA reporters out of the empty police station but it could have been alot more expansive). There was a murder investigation that the game had you start but never finish (a potential romance thread with one of the witnesses that by the way is abducted with no mission to even attempt to find her). In your other video about Hitman that German guy explained DXMK's poor sales figures on the theory that no one wants to play a stealth game. I would argue that this game didn't do well because people can tell when they were sold an unfinished game and reviewer can relate that fact to potential buyers. When I saw what this Deus Ex was going to be about and saw those awesome cinematic trailers about social unrest, families being torn apart, I was ready to buy it at full price when it came out if the game delivered on its promises. But the game didn't deliver on its promises, it delivered something waterred down and incomplete and when I saw the reviews I concluded that and I decided that I was not willing to pay anything beyond a deep Steam discount. So I bought it for 20$ instead of 60$ (which again, I would have paid for a complete game). I think alot of people must have done this and that's what SqE is seeing in their sales figures.
Deus Ex: MANKIND DIVIDED - 2016
CYBERPUNK 2077 - 2077
There were pieces of info out in the web months before launch that Mankind Divided was intended to be a much bigger game and suddenly chopped into a trilogy by order of Squenix since they wanted their very own Mass Effect.
Now that the game has come out, and some things just feel missing, those rumors kinda make sense now
Oh no.Seems to me they did the "Fallout 4 thing" to Deus Ex...
OK then they did only half "the Fallout 4 thing" to Deus Ex
But still seems enough to me. Already bought it but did not have time to play yet.
+Bubber Ducky
i've had no problems with the gameplay of Human Revolution. But i am more a hybrid type player. some stealth and some shooting. so from my perspective there is no real improvement as far as i can see at the moment.
But i can understand your point.
whats the "Fallout 4 thing"?
***** Fallout 3/Los Vegas/Deus Ex weren't RPGs, they were shooters(which as I recall, you can choose between third or first-person, but they're still shooters).
***** how was New Vegas an RPG? How viable is a run done completely without guns, and how many playstyles are there of that, versus how many playstyles there is with guns? If I can't shoot the broad side of a barn in an FPS, can you recommend Fallout New Vegas to me with a straight face, with a simple yes or no?
Oh my God those first few bars of the UNATCO base theme at the start of the video: instant goosebumps.
Fun Fact: Reuben "Rube" Goldberg was a cartoonist in the 1920's who created a character named Professor Lucifer Gorgonzola Butts.
I have no fun facts about the "Rude Goldberg" mentioned in the video.
"Invisible Warfare"
Prepare for 10,000 more comments pointing that out.
1:56: Wait, did I hear that right?
1:56: Yes I did, you just said "rude" Goldberg machines. That's hilarious.
My nickpicking aside, this is an excellent video.
Call of Duty: Invisible Warfare
This is hands down the best review of this game on youtube. Very well made overall concept, talking about issues nobody else did (the sprinting...jesus!) and still perfectly explained why it is still a very good game worth playing. Thank you! Subscribed.
Well, that's a shame.
I was hoping they'd hit the thematic elements further, even more than Human Revolution did. Makes me wonder if there were new writers or they were encouraged to be edgy and topical.
Not once while playing Human Revolution did I think "oh my god that's so true, I've seen and experienced this sort of thing in real life, it's just like all the..." blah blah blah
Mankind Divided seems really hamfisted, it's trying to be edgy and current and shove the fact that this sort of thing happens in real life down your throat.... I GET ENOUGH OF THAT ON SOCIAL MEDIA AND THE NEWS THANK YOU.
All I wanted was another Human Revolution style narrative. More philosophical. I play games to get away from the fucking awful shit I see in real life. Being creative with it doesn't mean you make the themes inapplicable to real life.
Brave New World, Lord of the Flies, Bladerunner, and all that shit doesn't trip over itself to tie into current events and they're all the better for it.
You can have meaningful themes and philosophy without this mechanical apartheid, aug lives matter, social justice warrior bullshit. It only serves to obfuscate the true meaning because no one actually knows what that shit is. If you just make a story and show themes like they are instead of piggybacking on specific, hard to define things, it becomes more meaningful to a greater number of people.
I hope this made sense. I love you all.
I think part of the issue is that the connections between Human Revolution and Mankind Divided are fleshed out in a novel, a novella, and a comic. It reminds me of what they did with World of Warcraft's Catalysm expansion, you just sort of show up and everything is crazy but the meat of the story is in a book that most people will never touch. That doesn't excuse the in-gameplay story (or really anything) but it at least gives you an option to know what's going on.
Human Revolution also has a supplemental "prequel" book that had much less to do with the game or really anything to do with Adam Jensen that was written by the same author as the one for MD called Icarus Effect. It's a pretty solid book for the most part, and the main character is the same as the one from the horrible mobile game turned PC port Deus Ex: The Fall. The thing is that you can completely skip Icarus Effect and all you're losing out on is some tiny bit of information about the people who ultimately become the bosses of Human Revolution.
To me, both recent Deus Ex games were cringey exposition dumps, narratively. So I don't really get how Human Revolution is being held up as some sort of bastion of the series' great storytelling, by comparison. At least in Mankind Divided they fixed the voice acting and smoothed out some other rough edges to make it all go down a little smoother.
I play these games for the style, setting and gameplay. I take the story as a sort of futuristic abstraction. Not something I should be dissecting and poring over constantly while I play.
How it was meant to be played IMO
Absolutely agree with you however i think they did a lot better than all other recent rpgs so that might have something to do with it? Because a lot of the narrrative actually is hinted at? idk i feel like most games just given up entirly on narrative and single player and either squeeze it into "expieriences" abbandoning all gameplay elements with it. Or making them gameplay first (which is fine by me) and loosing a bit or a lot of storytelling in the process. They are not blending in so well anymore maybe?
Don't have a solution for this either though, maybe it's a lack of direction or a heavy focus to put the game out good so it will sell well, single player games are so rare these days anyway.
Florian W For me, The Witcher 3 is the most recent shining example of handling narrative in an open world/RPG setting, But it's not like that game is perfect. There are a lot of gameplay issues there.
I just think in reality it's super difficult to give a "complete" gaming experience. Whether it's time or budget or creative issues, there are certain limitations that keep most games from being as fully-realized as I'm sure most developers/gamers hoped they could be,
In the case of Deus Ex, there are just so many moving parts. Combining all these different elements - insane amounts of player choice, rich/dynamic gameplay, a (semi) open world setting, and a very complex and changing narrative - must be an immensely difficult task. Maybe they bit off a little more than they could chew in some areas.
In any case, I'm pleased with the final result. I think it's a really good game, despite the issues a lot of ppl seem to be having with the narrative.
I don't think there's any story you should declare sacrosanct from criticism. Someone explaining why the recent Deus Ex's have a cringey story is just as valid as saying "eh I saw holes in the plot, so I don't care." In the end he prioritized the gameplay in his review anyway.
But if there were a point in the last game where I thought the same way you did and quit caring, it'd be the magical hobo who asked you for 40s in Detroit.
Broreale I was not in any way saying the story should be free of criticism. He can review any game any way he likes. He's very good at it. I was just giving my thoughts on his critiques of this particular game, and the Deus Ex series as a whole. So I'm pretty sure you misread my intent.
13:26
"The game begins like there's some piece of opening chapter, like a comic book or DLC that never came out is filling in the gaps that were missing"
Because there is.
Deus Ex Universe: Black Light (interquel, follows Jensen after waking up in Alaska, explains how he got found by Task Force 29, referenced in the intro - the book in Jensen's secret stash - and the System Rift DLC)
Deus Ex Universe: Hard Line (a novella that came with the Collector's Edition; explains how Alex Vega met Adam Jensen and Ivan Berk, the bomber from the beginning of the game)
Deus Ex Universe: Children's Crusade (shows Adam's first mission with TF29, sets up Nathaniel Brown's "Human Restoration Act")
Deus Ex Universe: The Dawning Darkness (one-shot comicbook; explains how Arun Singh went undercover with the Jinn and set up the arms deal that TF29 crashes in the opening)
You were right on the money, SBH.
engaging gameplay with paper thing, lackluster plot
Is this metal gear solid V all over again?
The fact that they even go so far as to draw such a close comparison to Black Lives Matter like they did here is just careless.
Regardless of whether or not you support the people behind the _real_ world cause in all of this, it will soon become irrelevant; thus bringing the narrative of Mankind Divided down with it, which is damned shame. I think more than ever these days, it's important to deliver stories that players/audiences have never seen before. It can be a difficult feat at times, as with any creative endeavour but when a game as high caliber and celebrated as a Deus Ex game is released, a certain level of excellence is expected on pretty much all fronts and as Bunny boy has mentioned here, the series has set such a reasonably high bar for narrative that it's hard not to feel cheated by such a haphazard inclusion of a cause that doesn't hold any real merit to begin with. I think what I'm truly getting at here is; at the end of he day, I just want to escape the headaches of the real world when immersed in a world that heavily leans on themes and civilisations that _can't_ yet be achieved today... instead of be reminded of _why_ I tried to temporarily escape the world I live in to begin with.
Your review is very nuanced, when all I was looking for is someone to confirm my biases about it. I'm sure disgruntled Joseph will make up for all the confusion you've cause me.
Man, it's a real shame about the story. I didn't like the focus of HR's "transhumanism" stuff as I don't think it was well thought out, and it looks like that MD takes it to the next level.
I much prefer if that stuff were to stay in the background like in the first DX, and focus more on conspiracies instead like DX1 did; I feel that a much more compelling plot can come out of it, because I feel that having "Augs being oppressed" isn't really as compelling or interesting to me as the main theme, and also personally, it makes it less "believable" to me.
Like, yeah the first game had augs and nano augs, but it wasn't the focus. It was more of a focus on real world shit that felt relevant, and while there are obvious parallels to the whole racism here in the real world.... I don't think it is as compelling as DX1's whole thing with terrorism and the government/powerful people doing shady shit like making the grey death so they can make a profit and kill off the poor, insignificant people.
I think I'll definitely enjoy the game a shitload regardless because I think that, while I do play DX for a blend of a bit of both "A and B", A does definitely take priority for me, but a good story is my motivation to keep playing it, not just good gameplay.... In the meantime, I'm just going to keep replaying DX1 with the excellent GMDX mod and replay DXHR w/ the Director's Cut before I pick up MD. Great video.
***** Wow, really? I've been keeping an eye on it on Moddb, I have 8.0 installed right now. Haven't heard of 9.0 being in development, because I thought that 8.0 might have been the last major leap, but we'll see I guess.
Gmdx looks awesome. does it include new vision and hdtp because I already have those and dont want to uninstall
Did you notice, much like the shooting range fitting but not fitting in it’s game placement, the DLC had the same issue? Or how you said the game seemed to just “start” without a real build up beginning? Well that’s because all the DLC was pulled from the game and tweaked a little bit a couple of *WEEKS* prior to release.
The game was supposed to start with a Jensen narrative for a few minutes about the aug incident, Sariff Industries collapse, and his taking a job with Interpol, who immediately assigned him to work T-29, infiltrating from the inside of a jail. “A criminal Past” scene for an hour or so, then a cut to the shrink, and was supposed to be broken up into a few segments with him chatting with her through your actual gameplay, at least that’s the way one of the designers explained it to me.
Square admitted the DLC was pulled because people did not want a 50-90 hour game anymore, and if they did they would buy the expansions or DLC, so like the microtransactions, Eidos Montreal did not have a clue until the final cut was turned in. They thought all the dlc was integrated into the story, and they would make a couple more, or just move straight to a sequel.
The final boss was by far my easiest fight, and that was my other big issue with the game. There was 1 boss fight. That’s it. And it was astonishingly easy if you had invisibility or were tolerableat stealth. You literally needed to lose him once, and if you disable the robots and turret which are on the same terminal 6 seconds away, just use your vision to see where he is, creep closer like he’s a regular guard, stun gun/tesla him and do a takedown. Then run back through the kitchen where Miller is and head right into the room to save the delegates as well.
I found so much stun gun ammo, and used takedowns so often, I broke down almost all the weapons I found the first half of the game, except to buy the praxis kits and tranq darts/stun gun ammo, so I had 50 Biocells when I walked into the final fight, 50 hypostims, 75 tesla shots (fully upgraded so 4 targets per), dual takedown without becoming visible etc (they said there are 20 praxis kits to find, but I only found 15, and I spent about 80 hours on my first playthrough. I looked everywhere, and only killed 3 people until my last trip to the last spot in Prague as the police and robots were bugging me. I took the turrets from the subway and carried them around to let them shoot everything for me, it was a blast.
So, the lack of meaningful dlc and less interesting missions bc they were supposed to be played in the damn game really took a lot away from the game imo. It made it feel a bit disjointed. Starting with criminal past would have made so much more sense, then the missing link or whatever on your 2nd trip to Prague, then the last one with the last part of Criminal Past in the final act, it would have given the traitor reveal (who did not have to be revealed in CP, just hinted at) seem so much cooler, vindicating the player with an “I knew that it was her!”
Square Enix made so many mistakes, from the augment my preorder, to useless micros (neither of which hurt the game so fans should have chilled), but the story pull, then announcing “you guys didn’t buy it, and we said it cost 35 million, but it really cost 70 million, so we are icing the franchise to work on a couple Marvel titles.”, well that hurts sales even more.
It could have been a great game. A solid 90-92 “Wow!!! That was unreal” title. Instead, it was was an excellent 82 or 83 for *’me*. It was my favorite game of 2016, as it was just so close so many times.
Utelek was great. The crazy machine god chick quest. The aug serial killer, the few trips to the bank etc, absolutely fantastic. Then we fall on the bosses being a horde of police, robots and turrets and it’s like “Ok, I go from extracting Dominic and ghost the mission by throwing him off a balcony into leaves and locking him in a storage unit, to this? Seriously?
Awesome game, cheap as heck for all the content now ($15 usd for a Steam Key at cdkeys dot com, who is legit, and buys their keys in bulk through Steam, so devs still get their cut). I advise anyone who has not played it to do so ASAP, as it really is that good.
Shoot, just adding two more real boss fights in or putting the dlc back in the game where it belonged would jump the game to a 90 in my subjective opinion
Aparteed?
'Daywoos Ex', and 'Makina' also.
Dude Sex
"Makina" is the correct pronunciation.
Nuke U Lar
Cackaphony
I feel like the rich people being crippled could have easily been addressed while also working into the themes of Deus Ex in general: Government regulation of Neuropozyne following the Aug Incident. Doesn't matter how much money you have if you have to blow it all hoarding the only injection keeping you from becoming a spasming heap of flesh and carbon fiber. Add in that the game itself confirms VersaLife is the only company manufacturing the drug, and there are multiple NPCs that require Neuropozyne in order to do certain things, and I have to wonder if that was an idea being kicked around at some point during development.
Dude... that firing range tutorial is completely optional
"The throat" is written on one of those green signs right before you enter that area.
i knew what part i disliked the most in mankind divided when i first heard about the game. Transhumanism as standin for racism is pretty legit, but the way they handle it in mankind divided is completely backwards and ridiculous. Real world transhumanism's maybe biggest moral gripe is that the augmented people WILL become the literal master race as soon as augs are viable option. It was even set up in DX:HR subtly but pretty heavily. Yet they somehow turned around because contrived bullshit reason x. It makes no sense in lore, or in real world issue. Oh well, maybe it would have been TOO controversial and edgy to depict Jensen as a ss-officer allegory...
Do you forget about the low class workers forced into augs? Prostitutes forced the get augs? How the augs turned them into drug addicts? The trailer showing them suffering in the slums because they don't have access to the drugs? How Jenson was one of a handful of people who could even handle military grade augs? Seriously what the hell are you talking about?
It kinda does make sense in the lore because augs had to disappear pretty quickly for some reason because they weren't around in the original game.
There were pedestrians with augs in the original game.
Thanatos388 and what are you talking about?
+Zach C they were around.
Not common though since everyone was desperately poor
This review is one of the best I have seen for this game, and mirrors my thoughts nearly exactly (Good gameplay, lacking narrative consistency, and the other misc). I have been impressed with your reviews until now as well, but this was on another level to me. Just wanted to let you know :)
they really made the gameplay waaaay better and i can see me playing through multipe times but the story is rather weak sadly but over all its a very gud game
Deus Ex with bad story is like Crysis with bad graphics, No Man's Sky with bad hype, or Battlefield with bad multiplayer.
crysis with bad graphics would have nothing, here, we have a great gameplay and a decent story, therefore your argument is invalid.
+Alucard3362 its like metal gear with bad story
there, I helped
+Alucard3362
What I've always demanded from any Deus Ex has been a good narrative. If I wan't stealth gameplay instead, I'll play Dishonored. If I'm told that a restaurant has a great selection of wines, arrive and find they have no wine but serve great steaks, I'll still be disappointed. I didn't come for the stakes.
Your forgot to add "for me" then in your first comment.
Games like Deus Ex make me feel like I'm Die Hard 1 era John McClane. Which is to say that I constantly feel like I'm stumbling through everything and just barely finding paths that only kind of work. It's actually very thrilling.
What a shame...
That music at the start sounds like a unique version of the Unatco theme. I can't find it anywhere, does anyone else know the source?
>racism
god how boring.
that's a great review. I think I'll hang on till the DLCs are out and hopefully, the main story abrupt end maybe taken care of. Dem microtransactions thou....
this game is a master class in game design but the narrative is a fuckin mess.i like some of the side stories and moral dilemmas but man this game feels disjointed
If you felt that there was something missing from the beginning of the narrative, it's because there's a book that was released just about a week ago that explains everything going in. Whether it was to streamline the story to make room for more gameplay and better pacing or not is up in the air, but that book is neccesary.
All I pictured was some sci-fi God being from nowhere... though I did feel those cityscapes while o more polished really did remind me of the cityblocks in the original Deus Ex.
I think there's a bit of a misconception about augs in the DX world in this video.
Not every augmented person was upper class (though there were plenty that were) and not all of them had Super Combat Enhancer Powers like Jensen.
Many individuals had gotten augmentations due to things like accidents and were damn near forced into poverty. Remember that Detroit side quest in Human Resources where you find out a Sarif employee was smuggling out Neuropozyne and selling it on the streets? He tells Jensen that he did it because of the fact that the people who needed it the most couldn't afford the sky-high costs and he opted to be chaotic good and sell it on the black market, even though he's risking his job. Another example would be the lady who owed Tong money because she needed augmentations to break into the highly competitive and heavily strong barrier-of-entry industry of being a broker because, you guessed it, all the rich kids can afford augments and could easily fall upwards to cozy positions whereas she had to cut a shady deal with the Triads.
There were also hints at augs stealin' muh jobs, like the one bit in Hengshua where you help the prostitutes who's being forced to get augments because that's what their patrons want more (and she tells her boss that they should get augmented so they can fuck themselves). This makes sense as augmented individuals have slightly enhanced abilities than normal humans.
So tl;dr: while there were plenty of augmented individuals who were very wealthy and had great amounts of power (both in the physical sense and in the sense of power as control), many individuals you encounter don't share those qualities, so it isn't a massive stretch to see augmented individuals relegated to slums and living in squalor since there were plenty of them close to it and it's not like you can't, say, strip someone's money from them. Still, I haven't played MD and this may or may not properly explain the allegories used (which I do think is really hamfisted) but I felt it was worth understanding this.
Good points. The reason Deus Ex was so memorable & earned so many accolades was because it was such a tight story. The gameplay was also very innovative for the time, but what made it stand out was that cyberpunk is extremely cool & relevant.
These newer iterations have a cyberpunk aesthetic, & entirely-corporate sensibilities. This, combined w/ respected game critics constantly saying dumb shit like "gameplay is king," means there's impetus not just within production, but also from consumers, to ditch what was actually powerful about the franchise & instead focus on making a boring Metal Gear knock-off.
There actually IS a comic, 5 issues, that tells of Jensen's first mission with the team. That DID come out over the last few months, via Titan Comics.
You should do reviews more often, George. They are really great!
You mention a difficulty in keeping the energy bar full. From what I understand in other reviews this game has microtransactions. Is one of them for items to help refill that bar? I don't like that the subject wasn't brought up at all in this review, but if (and I'm asking if) it impacts a mechanic like that then it really should have been as that is exactly the kind of problem fee to play produces. Still should have been brought up..
*Invisible War
*Rube Goldberg
*Apartheid
We love you too, George.
Everything after 2 minutes may as well be static as I imagine building a "Rude Goldberg Machine"...
I recently completed MD, cause it was on sale during the summer sale. In my opinion, the story had so much potential and a lot of build up. I didn't know who Alejandra was, and who this Janus was either. I wanted to learn who the Juggernaut Collective was, the fact that this big brawny augmented dude started leading the Augs to a dark path of violence and revenge. I wanted to see what would happen to the world when the streets of prague would be overrun by augmented terrorists. I wanted to take down this group of illuminati figures that kept meeting in the NSN. Man I even wanted to see the "love interest" that was between either Adam and Alejandra, or Adam and Aria, where choosing to help Interpol instead of the Juggernaut Collective would result in Alex resenting you. I can't even explain how cool the idea of an "aug ghetto" was, but how disappointed I was when it was actually a really unexplorable place. Compared to Hengsha in Human Revolution; the idea of the rich having an upper level of city, quite literally, was something I had never thought or seen before.
What I got instead? Some guy attacked a train station, made it look like augmented people, I found out who it was, the leader of the peaceful protest died for some reason. Then I followed some big augmented dude to a research facility who then found me, and stabbed me with his heroin. I was supposed to die, but I didn't (miraculously!), then I came back to prague, found that the entire place is under curfew. Then I went to London, found that the security was acting weird, informed my teammates and supervisor, found my supervisor almost dead, saved the non-augmented citizens, killed the big dude (who's name I still don't remember cause of how little explanation there was about him), and then everyone clapped. Then I went home, and a week later some girl that seems like she should be Adam's girlfriend, but doesn't have enough character development for me to actually care who she is, talks with me and I told her "this is only the beginning." And that was it. So much build up, so many chances, no satisfaction.
I found that this game introduced so many characters and ideas and plots, but never actually built on top of them. Who are the Dvali? Who is the Juggernaut Collective? How was JC formed? Who is Janus? Where did Alejandra come from, and why do we know her? Who's Miller? Who is Viktor, and why should I care about him if I killed him so quickly? What about the "Ascension" ritual that was taking place? Are there more?
It still was fun, I give it a 3/5.
I just got to the Gas Station in the first game and omg, seeing you hack the laser trip wire at the end there just sent shivers up my spine. I still completely hate the third person stealthing in this game. It just screams Metal Gear or more accurately, "look console players, even YOU can love Deus Ex now" just gimme a lean function.
Can I just say, George might be one of the smartest youtuber who talks about games. At least for me, he is.
I wish they could remove the button prompt that’s always there to tell you how to move along a corner. All I want is cover prompt.
I don'T see aproblem with augs being the oppressed class. Even in Human Revolution most of them were impoverished or criminals, they couldn't afford their medicine and sometimes didn't even have a choice not to get augmented. And Jensen with his fancy weapons and gadgets is pretty much an exception to most of the augs, who use augmentation as kind of prosthetics and maybe are sometimes slightly stronger or faster....
No mention of the singleplayer microtransactions?
What about the microtransactions?
The Augs living in Golem city weren't the ones that were rich and powerful, they were people who got augments to do their jobs, like heavy lifting and such.
I practically fangirl over this series, but I totally see where you're coming from. The narrative honestly felt so disparate and low stakes that it kind of became an afterthought as I focused on exploring every little nook and cranny of the world and turning Jensen's apartment into a weapon storage facility (you can never have enough Combat Rifles and Smoke Grenades). I normally favor gameplay quite a bit over story so it didn't bother me, but I can see it being a big issue for a game that has a legacy of strong narrative.
I even feel like Human Revolution felt more "Deus Ex"y than this game. The stakes felt a lot higher since you were uncovering massive corporate conspiracies vs a terrorist attack or two and there were more "oh snap" moments that really made things interesting. I also felt the characters were done better in HR. Sarif, Malik, and Pritchard are far more interesting and memorable than Miller, Chikane, or McCready could ever be. The entire story feels like it would be better suited as a series of side missions following one plot, not the main thread.
wasn't there a video about hitting ai in the head with objects? did I miss a video before deletion or am I confusing it with another channel? I'm positive it was super bunnyhop, I wouldn't have been so interested otherwise. too bad if I missed it.
No your right it was by superbunnyhop for some reason he deleted it though.
"Invisible Warfare." Bunny, you are killing me here. Please stop.
I can't take this kind of abuse on every single video.