Deus Ex Franchise - Immersive Sims

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Maniacal Foreigner said:
What was so bad about MD? I hear some fans say it was pretty good and it's a shame we never got a follow-up, and others say it was abysmal dogshit. Haven't played it, so I don't know what to think.
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Honestly it's meh. The story goes nowhere. Its plays the same as human revolution. Its tries but it never gets as good as the original or as bad as Invisible War.
 
Maniacal Foreigner said:
What was so bad about MD? I hear some fans say it was pretty good and it's a shame we never got a follow-up, and others say it was abysmal dogshit. Haven't played it, so I don't know what to think.
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The story tilts hard into this really jarring apartheid-BLM analogy with the poor oppressed mech-augs, which didn't fit either the world nor the usual themes of Deus Ex very well or at all frankly. And as has been often complained about, it's an incomplete story at that; imagine if in DX1 the credits started rolling when you return from LaGuardia to UNATCO HQ for the penultimate time, and you'll have a good approximation of where Squeenix decided to end the game & why that decision sucks donkey dick. Gameplay-wise, as has been said before it's nothing terribly exceptional or innovative if you've played HR before.
 
Maniacal Foreigner said:
What was so bad about MD? I hear some fans say it was pretty good and it's a shame we never got a follow-up, and others say it was abysmal dogshit. Haven't played it, so I don't know what to think.
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There's no scale, there aren't really any stakes, the characters are mostly bad, the people you work for are stupid, and as mentioned above, the story is piss and ends abruptly.
Prague is a decently sized hub but it's the only hub. Golem City is actually really cool and almost makes playing the first part of the game worth it just to experience it. I even did the penguin prince haul. GARM is stupid and I can't believe it's in the game when so much is missing. It really is like only a third of a game.
I actually think it plays pretty good but it's just an updated version of HR. I do like its augments better tho.
A Criminal Past is pretty alright. It does the Missing Link thing better than TML (not a high bar).
 
Don't forget MD also runs like shit on PC. There is one graphic option that makes the game run a lot better when turned off (I forgot which one...), but it still has some pretty heavy frame drops.
 
Chuckwagon said:
Gameplay-wise, as has been said before it's nothing terribly exceptional or innovative if you've played HR before.
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But I really enjoyed the gameplay of HR so that sounds like a win to me that they didn't bother to "innovate" or "improve" it to the point of ruining it.
 
I know this question will set people off, but, assuming no jeets, trannies, or faggots were involved in its creation, would a remake of the original DX be worthwhile at this point?
 
Flexo said:
But I really enjoyed the gameplay of HR so that sounds like a win to me that they didn't bother to "innovate" or "improve" it to the point of ruining it.
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Oh sure, I didn't intend that to be a deal-breaker. (And anyone who played DX1, then Invisible War, must be well aware that drastic gameplay 'innovations' do not necessarily translate to a good thing in this series, quite the opposite even.) If you liked HR's gameplay you will almost certainly enjoy MD's. But it being almost the same also means a lot of the flaws in HR's gameplay are carried over as well (ex. knocking out enemies getting you more XP than just killing them even though it's not a challenge to do so, the way it is in DX1 where your only option for ranged takedowns is the crossbow & it's definitely not instantaneous like the tranq rifle is, making a lethal playthrough pretty objectively worse than a non-lethal one).
WarrenZHarding said:
I know this question will set people off, but, assuming no jeets, trannies, or faggots were involved in its creation, would a remake of the original DX be worthwhile at this point?
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I guess I could get behind a remaster or limited remake that strictly sticks to updating the graphics and incorporating fixes/alterations & QoL changes already made by various mods to make the gameplay less clunky (things like being able to use duplicate aug canisters to upgrade an augmentation you already have, so there's now actually a reason to pick those up & have them take up inventory space until the next time you find a medbot). Though under no circumstance should they fuck with the story (ESPECIALLY not the story as I don't believe there is any modern studio that would be able or willing to write a story so simultaneously frighteningly based & nuanced), the soundtrack, hell even the voice acting has a certain memetic charm to it.
 
Chuckwagon said:
I guess I could get behind a remaster or limited remake that strictly sticks to updating the graphics and incorporating fixes/alterations & QoL changes already made by various mods to make the gameplay less clunky (things like being able to use duplicate aug canisters to upgrade an augmentation you already have, so there's now actually a reason to pick those up & have them take up inventory space until the next time you find a medbot). Though under no circumstance should they fuck with the story (ESPECIALLY not the story as I don't believe there is any modern studio that would be able or willing to write a story so simultaneously frighteningly based & nuanced), the soundtrack, hell even the voice acting has a certain memetic charm to it.
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You could not write that story today, mostly because of how depressingly prescient so much of it was. Shit, you had people treating Corona-chan like it was the Gray Death. "Why contain it? Let it spill over into the schools and in the churches. Let the bodies pile up in the streets. In the end they'll beg us to save them" was the MO of the Left that whole time.
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"Its not just Europe they plan to unify."
 
Snekposter said:
You could not write that story today, mostly because of how depressingly prescient so much of it was. Shit, you had people treating Corona-chan like it was the Gray Death. "Why contain it? Let it spill over into the schools and in the churches. Let the bodies pile up in the streets. In the end they'll beg us to save them" was the MO of the Left that whole time.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=zStn70Ot4r0https://youtube.com/watch?v=46oDDnE1Z6oView attachment 7936145
"Its not just Europe they plan to unify."
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Oh I didn't just mean the prophetic elements that are pretty in-your-face like the Gray Death, but also a lot of the more understated world-building bits that you could pick up in conversation (either directly or by overhearing NPCs chatting among themselves) or by reading the in-game documents. The entire American front of the global conflict, after all, pits an atheistic and materialistic globalist technocracy (MJ12 is specifically noted to be secular & Bob Page to have not cared for the Illuminati's spiritual & mystical exercises by Stanton Dowd) controlling a UN proto-army on top of the official American gov't vs. a militia originating from the Inland Northwest (known to be much more conservative than the coast IRL), specifically founded to fight gun confiscation & whose hard core is composed of backwoods religious fanatics & traditionalist-minded American nationalists (you can overhear an NSF trooper with a Southern accent shit-talking JoJo Fine for being a nigger who wears earrings on Liberty Island, and the crazed ex-NSF bum who sells you sniper ammo on your return to Battery Park is an overt Christian zealot who likes to rant about how the NSF are God's army)...and the former are unambiguously the bad guys.

IMO that's already fairly impressive for 2000, a long time before the Internet atheist crowd had worn out their welcome & become terribly cringe while, in turn, many active Internet users of the time were definitely less than sympathetic towards religion generally or Christianity specifically; it was also a time when being left-leaning and having libertarian views, relating to the Internet and otherwise (ex. on guns), were not essentially mutually exclusive the way they are today. Nowadays you wouldn't be able to find such writing outside of games which are designed specifically to appeal to the sensibilities of the dreaded chuds, and basically can't write such a world period if you work for any well-known studio.
 
WarrenZHarding said:
I know this question will set people off, but, assuming no jeets, trannies, or faggots were involved in its creation, would a remake of the original DX be worthwhile at this point?
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Not possible today. The game would be cancelled day 1 and the writers fired. Hell, Wareen Spector himself now says the game is conspiracy-theorist drivel... Even though it was right on everything, minus having JC becoming a cyber-god to save us.

Plus I don't know if there are Western devs competent at coding, without using Unreal Derpgine 5 or Unity, preferably.😔
 
WarrenZHarding said:
I know this question will set people off, but, assuming no jeets, trannies, or faggots were involved in its creation, would a remake of the original DX be worthwhile at this point?
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Pointless. All Deus Ex needs is a QOL update or remaster so it can run as intended on modern systems without issue, no modding necessary. Nightdive could do it, but they might make gameplay alterations of which I don't like (it's a 25-year-old game, leave the sanctity of it alone).
nosex.webp
 
WarrenZHarding said:
I know this question will set people off, but, assuming no jeets, trannies, or faggots were involved in its creation, would a remake of the original DX be worthwhile at this point?
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Assuming no jeets, trannies, or faggots were involved in its creation
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It's like asking that if dogs can talk, what would they say to you lol

Honestly a non-pozzed DX would require selling off the rights of DX from Square Enix.


A remake would also probably be even harder to pull off nowadays because today, a lot of the cyberpunk mainstays of a supposedly-neutral government combined with subversive conspiratorial goals is gone at this point- it's all publicly subversive at this point, while half of the schizoid conspiracies in the past have been more or less confirmed true. Majestic 12 could publicly literally announce they'd want to control the world (for equality and environmental reasons), and half the world would applaud that fact.

It worked for Blade Runner to retcon a diverging timeline for its sequels because of the huge gap between the first and second entries (to the point that the USSR/Atari no longer exist), but DX is too recent to be able to believably do that. I mean, we are already approaching 2027 and instead of augmentation we have rampant troonism instead. UNATCO would probably post a pride logo on its Facebook page every June if it existed in real life lol
 
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jje100010001 said:
A remake would also probably be even harder to pull off nowadays because today, a lot of the cyberpunk mainstays of a supposedly-neutral government combined with subversive conspiratorial goals is gone at this point- it's all publicly subversive at this point, while half of the schizoid conspiracies in the past have been more or less confirmed true. Majestic 12 could publicly literally announce they'd want to control the world (for equality and environmental reasons), and half the world would applaud that fact.
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Don't forget that bit about the evil pharma-corp being responsible both for the plague AND the cure. That would be considered conspiracy talk and not allowed today, lest the chuds end up being right.
You could also have Bob Page be a nigresss and therefore be untouchable... If it wasn't for the fact that nowadays EVERY tycoon-themed villain is a dumb Musk clone, even when it doesn't make any sense (such as that game that blamed Musk for contaminating the atmosphere with his toxic electric engines, derp).

jje100010001 said:
UNATCO would probably post a pride logo on its Facebook page every June if it existed in real life lol
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The secretary would become a "totally strong woman who needs no man!" type, while the boss would still be a shady, elderly white male who stays in the shadows.
 
Snekposter said:
You could not write that story today, mostly because of how depressingly prescient so much of it was. Shit, you had people treating Corona-chan like it was the Gray Death. "Why contain it? Let it spill over into the schools and in the churches. Let the bodies pile up in the streets. In the end they'll beg us to save them" was the MO of the Left that whole time.
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"If someone made Deus Ex today it might be perceived as a documentary. I wouldn't make Deus Ex again as it was in 2000 when it could be read as a believable fantasy."
-Warren Spector, 2024
 
I think another thing DX's story & characterization nailed which modern writers (for vidya and most other things in general) wouldn't be able to replicate was the nuance. While UNATCO was eventually revealed to be the bad guy and had warning signs as early as Liberty Island, all of the UNATCO troops you meet are nothing but friendly & supportive to JC, they'll like you better if you kill tons of NSF but even if you don't they won't give you a hard time, at worst they'll grouse about your apparent naivete or worry that your peaceful ways could get them killed (which are actually fair criticisms in the context of a ferocious counterinsurgency campaign).

You can read an email about exactly one UNATCO atrocity (a trooper prodding an already-downed terrorist with his prod so many times that the latter ended up hospitalized with 3rd degree burns) if you hack Jaime's computer but you'll never actually see UNATCO troops being pointlessly cruel to civilians or even the NSF in-game. By & large, and the game does a very good job of creating the impression that although the higher-ups (Manderley, the mech-aug veteran agents) and a few other elements (Tech Sgt. Kaplan & Shannon the bathroom lady) are corrupt and/or evil, most of UNATCO are - in Sam Carter's words - '24-karat gold' who genuinely believe they're doing the right thing and treat everyone who isn't an obvious enemy kindly. You're still going to have to fight them because they unknowingly serve a much more evil cause than the terrorists they oppose, but they are the furthest thing from the retarded cartoony supervillains or political strawmen with shallow motivations that the bad guys in way too many modern works (including pretty much anything made by overt leftists) are written to be nowadays.

On the other side, as I've said before the NSF are also treated fairly, with some humanizing moments (you can learn, for example, that the hostage situations they set up were due to them being inexperienced, in over their heads & panicking under the pressure of UNATCO's counterattack; in the Mole Tunnels the other NSF troops actually surrender and turn friendly if you get to their commander first; the guy Simons threatens has a family & friends he clearly loves dearly, etc.) and a lot of truth to their cause. Silhouette turns out to be mostly frightened civilians hiding in a bunker who have no chance in a straight up fight with MJ12, and while Chad Dumier in this game was a Situationist-type leftist revolutionary wannabe, most of his followers & sympathizers aren't - they just want to get MJ12's boot off their throats more than anything, you can even overhear two of them shittalk his philosophy in the nightclub. Fuck, this game even has a character who will pitch an actually decent case for moderate authoritarianism at one point, something I'd normally only expect from media no newer than Legend of the Galactic Heroes.


Funny enough, other than MJ12 I think the only faction in DX1 to be depicted as unambiguously bad (though not 'villainous' in the sense that you have to work with them to progress the story) are the Triads, who are both shown to be & spoken of as an absolute terror to Hong Kong - fucking with teahouses to shake them down for protection money, endangering civilians with their gang war, killing each other in retarded public battles (check out the Canal Road Tunnel before you meet Tracer Tong for a good example), and trafficking sex slaves (such as the Lucky Money girls) alongside drugs & technological goods. Except for JoJo Fine, even the NYC gangs by comparison are too funny & pathetically retarded to really hate. But even this serves the purpose of balancing the narrative scales, showing you that while MJ12 is 1000% evil & deserves to be destroyed, some of the people on your side are absolute niggers as well and that there's definitely concrete, comprehensible drawbacks to even the best elements of Tong's ending (when you plunge the world into anarchy and creating a huge power vacuum, some who will fill that vacuum are going to be scumbags whose tyranny is only less bad than MJ12's because they can't reach as many people).

All of the above are nuances you would never get out of 99.99% of modern writers, in the game industry or elsewhere.

jje100010001 said:
Majestic 12 could publicly literally announce they'd want to control the world (for equality and environmental reasons), and half the world would applaud that fact.

I mean, we are already approaching 2027 and instead of augmentation we have rampant troonism instead. UNATCO would probably post a pride logo on its Facebook page every June if it existed in real life lol
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Newcomer 42 said:
Don't forget that bit about the evil pharma-corp being responsible both for the plague AND the cure. That would be considered conspiracy talk and not allowed today, lest the chuds end up being right.
You could also have Bob Page be a nigresss and therefore be untouchable... If it wasn't for the fact that nowadays EVERY tycoon-themed villain is a dumb Musk clone, even when it doesn't make any sense (such as that game that blamed Musk for contaminating the atmosphere with his toxic electric engines, derp).


The secretary would become a "totally strong woman who needs no man!" type, while the boss would still be a shady, elderly white male who stays in the shadows.
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These, for example, are good arguments as to why if (God forbid) DX1 were remade today, you just know MJ12 & UNATCO would realistically be rewritten to be the good guys and the game's whole script would just be an unironic reading of the propaganda they put out in the original (but with extra faggotry). The NSF would be written without any humanity, they & the rest of the resistance would just be the reactionary bitter clingers to their guns & religion who stand in the way of the Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communist future who you would unironically be expected to kill with a smile on your face.

For that matter, UNATCO would be rewritten to be a Bolshevik death squad but presented as the heroes. Morgan Everett would be a pale & stale male villain to contrast with the heroic visionary Roberta Page, who in turn would be a literal tranny niggerfaggot (hilariously, Mankind Divided implies he actually is gay at least; a document says he married his 'long-term partner', and anyone who grew up in the '90s or early 2000s should remember that that's one way of referring to someone's buttbuddy instead of boyfriend/girlfriend before coming out of the closet became cool). They'd be averse to showing you anything truly gritty, like the rooms full of Gray Death victims in the NY clinic or the flooded Hong Kong tunnel, because that goes against the Tumblr comfy culture they grew up with. (If by some miracle the remake was written by terminally online chuds instead, I guess there could be a danger of the opposite case where UNATCO gets demonized too much and the writing is Tom Kratman-esque in that all the baddies become over-the-top child raping degenerates with zero redeeming virtue or nuance, but that seems far less likely and not just because such writers would never get hired at any terminally pozzed modern studio.)

Tl;dr things like Dragon Age: The Failguard demonstrate that we are simply well past the time when videogame writers, and writers in general, seem in the least bit able or willing to write their ideological opponents as human beings; to study & understand their ideology on even a basic level; or to put much effort into subtle storytelling & worldbuilding details instead of beating the player over the head with 'THIS GUY IS BAD AND HERE'S WHY' hammers, and the result always fucking blows, again and again and again.
 
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WarrenZHarding said:
I know this question will set people off, but, assuming no jeets, trannies, or faggots were involved in its creation, would a remake of the original DX be worthwhile at this point?
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I would be up for it simply so it would reach a wider audience. It is one of if not the greatest games of all time, more people should play it.

If this were ever to happen I would hope they make two versions of the same game. One purist version where it's the same game we know and love, and one extended cut where we get cut content like staying allied with UNATCO and playing as female JC Denton and all that.
 
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