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Deus Ex: Mankind Divided - Return of Grumpy Chiselarms

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The new Deus Ex is out on Tuesday 23rd August.

 

Adam Jensen returns and potters about Prague while doing some cyber shit and some digital things.

 

 

Graham Smith writing for Rock, Paper, Shotgun says "There still aren’t that many games like Deus Ex around and Deus Ex: Mankind Divided is an excellent game like Deus Ex." Some of the reviews have mentioned that the marketing campaign that tried to parallel the Black Lives Matter movement is not really in the game all that much. That's a relief.

 

Aaaand...

 

There is an additional mode called Breach that is being scored by Ed Harrison, who also did the music for the Source engine mod NeoTokyo from a few years ago. The mod was decent but the music was top notch.

 

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Reviews I've read so far sound like a good to very good game, although not really groundbreaking. That's about as good as I could have anticipated, so I'm excited to play the game, tempered with being concerned about their weird deaf marketing the last few weeks before launch.

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I'm less then surprised that it sounds like the game is pretty solid except the uninteresting story given the lead writer (I believe) going on about how 'Aug Lives Matter" is not meant to be commentary on the current political climate. Still I'm not super in the mood to hear about mechanical apartheid for 30 hours at the moment so I think I'll pick this up on sale.

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I'm less then surprised that it sounds like the game is pretty solid except the uninteresting story given the lead writer (I believe) going on about how 'Aug Lives Matter" is not meant to be commentary on the current political climate. Still I'm not super in the mood to hear about mechanical apartheid for 30 hours at the moment so I think I'll pick this up on sale.

 

When talking about the "apolitical" politics of the game, Nick Capozzoli tweeted about an interview with the artistic director where the latter briefly tried to argue that the fictional phrase predated the actual one (which was popularized by Trayvon Martin's death in 2013). We're either seeing an unwillingness to accept that they were making hay out of real-world events or a (frankly unbelievable) lack of research and awareness on the human cost of racism.

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I tried to watch that launch trailer the other day and I had to turn it off half way through. Just made me feel disenfranchised with the whole video game business, like it's really not for me anymore. I'm guilty of being too quick to judge things, but the few lines delivered in that trailer were enough to put me off and dismiss the writing in this game. Now the reviews are out and people don't seem happy with that aspect of it.

Look, I know Deus Ex is in many ways a mess of a game, with some atrocious voice acting and writing that sometimes is almost comically bad. However, it was still a much smarter game than DX:HR and, being the cynic I am, I'm convinced that it'll prove to be smarter than DX:MD as well. It also had a lot of personality, and quirky stuff that actually made some of the bad parts endearing. It's been 16 years since it came out, I want to play games at least interesting as the ones I played when I was 13. I'd like to think today's 13 year olds are interested in playing something thought provoking as well. Maybe they're not.

I watch that trailer and I honestly don't know who this game is for, which probably means I'm out of touch. I complained about it somewhere else and the post above me had a gif from the trailer and said something about Jensen being a badass. Someone wants that I guess. Me though, I've had enough power fantasies for a lifetime I think. I grew up, but the games didn't. Not these ones anyway (

). Am I just the old man yelling at clouds?

Despite all my whining I know that this will probably be one of the more mechanically ambitious AAA games released for a while, but that only makes it worse.

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I tried to watch that launch trailer the other day and I had to turn it off half way through. Just made me feel disenfranchised with the whole video game business, like it's really not for me anymore. I'm guilty of being too quick to judge things, but the few lines delivered in that trailer were enough to put me off and dismiss the writing in this game. Now the reviews are out and people don't seem happy with that aspect of it.

 

I...really thought you were exaggerating.  That's some video game ass video game writing, for sure. 

 

 

One thing I do greatly appreciate about games like Deus Ex, Dishonored and MGS is that they allow for non-lethal runs, which is such a rarity in games and gives a player agency over the narrative of their character in a way that most of AAA action games don't.  No matter what kind of a cynical badass they might write him as, you can choose to play him as a man put into an impossible situation who still insists on protecting the sanctity of all human life even if it isn't in his best interest to do so.  So, no matter how awful the in game treatment of certain topics is, they at least have this interesting component to them that so few games in the genre do. 

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My copy arrived this morning (PS4) My early impressions copied from Neogaf:

 

-Art direction is top. Atmosphere is great as always. I've seen the developer gameplay videos in the past but playing Prague yourself is really cool. Seems like such a massive area to explore. Very atmospheric and nice to play somewhere set during daytime.
-Music seems great so far, again very atmospheric. 
-Frame rate is pretty smooth, noticeable drops during some conversations though.
-Graphics seem decent, some character models are pretty low compared.
- Hacking is better, it doesn't look as good as HR but its easier to do. No weird holding the left stick forward and releasing the button.

- I've noticed the voice syncing is off some  alot of the time
- I had some serious pop in during a scene in the second mission / area. It was kinda funny actually.
- The HUD is so cluttered with icons I wish I could make them smaller or something. Maybe I should look into the settings (I did and you can turn off alot of options and scale the HUD which is great)
- Shooting doesn't feel that good. I played HR as stealth, but when I used weapons they seemed better than this game

 

I made a goofy clip from the start of the second mission, so spoilers.
 
The video has bad tearing, which is weird because it wasn't like that during gameplay.
 

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So I picked this up because the original is one of my favorite games. I know it isn't perfect and that its story is super goofy (though 13 year old me thought it was so, so good). HR felt similar, if a bit more grimdark. I enjoyed it for a lot of the reasons I like the original, even if it feels like a cover version of a song I love.

 

This new one though, I'm not feeling it so far. The trailer issues and its apolitical politics are rubbing me the wrong way really badly in the first post-credits area, and the "mechanical apartheid" stuff is just cringe-worthy. 

 

On top of that, it drops you into the game after the credits in a City 17-esque train station and has you meet up with a woman named Alex.

I'm also not sure how I feel about the set-piece battle before the credits start where the gold masks show up and you have to protect the undercover agent. It seems nearly impossible to keep him alive and do a non-lethal playthrough. I'm still not sure if that's an interesting trade off (sure you can do a pacifist run, but people will die as a result) or a bit of a slap in the face to players who want to minimize their own use of violence.

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I watched a Let's Play of the beginning of the first level out of curiosity (I skipped past the intro cut-scenes). Jensen skydives into Dubai or something and lands like a naked Terminator. Then the player looked around and saw that some objects have highlighted borders. Approaching the objects, they then had the option to move or throw them. I quickly noticed that these objects were duplicated frequently enough to make this high-fidelity production immediately feel repetitious (I think they were hinged-saws).

Then the player found a ventilation-grate they could remove and they did so the reveal a cubby with a dead worker who had a credit-chip to loot. Behind that desicated body (which I believe could be moved or thrown) there was another chip of some sort. The player picked it up and was prompted to download a phone-app in order to scan its geometric pattern. Then he moved some boxes in order to go through a door.

I have a vague interest in craft and the systemic reasons for video gameness. I've been playing Magic Wand which seems to be an 8-bit JRPG hyperbole that seems to attempt to maintain enough ambiguity to keep the player in a state where they can't quite define what is going on in the narrative. Watching a few moments of this DEus Ex Let's Play made me immediately want to see what a similar treatment would look like if given to these self-proclaimed AAA games from the 2010's that ask players to create multiple log-ins and maintain the odd theatrical qualities of trying to form a character within a power-fantasy where you can do such limited actions in a world of prefabs. This form is so odd and I'd love to see a game that hyperbolizes these qualities while still being interesting to play.

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i don't really care about this game despite cyberpunk ostensibly being an auto-win for me but i just gotta say

 

"grumpy chiselarms" is a good fuckin name

 

it's got good mouthfeel and mouthflow

 

props, my dude

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So, I'm really wary about the story, but I've got the itch for some Deus Ex, so I went in on this.  It's weird, and I'm liking the gameplay for what it is, but, man, this story.

 

The thing that kinda typifies for me what seems up with this game in story terms comes pretty early in, at the train station:

So, after the train station gets blown up, you have that moment of Jensen hearing the kid calling for his mom, and you start to dig her out of the rubble and she grabs your hand and then goes limp.  And Jensen just stares for a second with sad face before he activates his sunglasses.

 

That is so silly and video game-y that I just couldn't stop laughing at something that clearly was meant to play as like sour-note badass.

 

I'm also not sure how I feel about the set-piece battle before the credits start where the gold masks show up and you have to protect the undercover agent. It seems nearly impossible to keep him alive and do a non-lethal playthrough. I'm still not sure if that's an interesting trade off (sure you can do a pacifist run, but people will die as a result) or a bit of a slap in the face to players who want to minimize their own use of violence.

 

So, on that front, you can absolutely do that.

 

Your actual mission there is to get to the helicopter and stop it from taking off.  I jumped down the elevator shaft, rolled out to the right, jumped down and used Icarus Strike to knock out the guy at the bottom, go up along the left, use the glass aug to stealth past the guys running towards you, stay hidden along the left side behind obstacles, and then you get to a point from there that there's only one guy between you and the helicopter.  Sneak up on and do a non-lethal takedown and you can walk up to the chopper and rip the battery out of it.

 

I had to play it a bunch to get that route down, but it's totally there.  I thought this was supposed to be a moment like with your helicopter pilot in DX:HR where you either had to stealth to sneak away and ler her die or go in heavy to kill all the bad guys and save her, so I tried disabling as many guys using non-lethal tactics as possible, but he just kept dying.  Turns out, all you need to do is be quick about disabling the chopper.

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Regarding that the last bit in the tutorial mission

I had spent most of my energy which made navigating the area during the standstorm a pain in the ass. I decided to (blindly) shoot my way to the chopper in order to save the contact. I realized that I could probably just sneak my way through the area, but I think this is a better option in terms of my enjoyment of the rest of the game, because now I don't have to worry whether or not I get the non-leathal achievement (which I don't care about really, but might irrationally start caring about towards the end).

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So, I'm really wary about the story, but I've got the itch for some Deus Ex, so I went in on this.  It's weird, and I'm liking the gameplay for what it is, but, man, this story.

 

The thing that kinda typifies for me what seems up with this game in story terms comes pretty early in, at the train station:

So, after the train station gets blown up, you have that moment of Jensen hearing the kid calling for his mom, and you start to dig her out of the rubble and she grabs your hand and then goes limp.  And Jensen just stares for a second with sad face before he activates his sunglasses.

 

That is so silly and video game-y that I just couldn't stop laughing at something that clearly was meant to play as like sour-note badass.

 

 

So, on that front, you can absolutely do that.

 

Your actual mission there is to get to the helicopter and stop it from taking off.  I jumped down the elevator shaft, rolled out to the right, jumped down and used Icarus Strike to knock out the guy at the bottom, go up along the left, use the glass aug to stealth past the guys running towards you, stay hidden along the left side behind obstacles, and then you get to a point from there that there's only one guy between you and the helicopter.  Sneak up on and do a non-lethal takedown and you can walk up to the chopper and rip the battery out of it.

 

I had to play it a bunch to get that route down, but it's totally there.  I thought this was supposed to be a moment like with your helicopter pilot in DX:HR where you either had to stealth to sneak away and ler her die or go in heavy to kill all the bad guys and save her, so I tried disabling as many guys using non-lethal tactics as possible, but he just kept dying.  Turns out, all you need to do is be quick about disabling the chopper.

 

On the tutorial mission

Good to know. I suppose that makes sense. I was trying to methodically work my way around the room, knocking out each guy with tranquilizers or takedowns, and by the time I made the smallest bit of progress, the guy I was supposed to save would die. I guess quick stealth makes sense, but I was, like Nappi, out of energy at that point from playing with all of my augs earlier in the tutorial. Oh well.

 

Overall, though, I am starting to come around on the game. The story stuff is still not great, but once you get into the city and can wander around, it feels more like what I want out of a Deus Ex game. Lots of hacking, sneaking, breaking into places and finding secrets off the beaten path. And it's not like the originals had great stories, writing, or voice acting. "I spill my drink!" and all that.

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(didn't read any of the previous comment)

I'm a huge asshole, breaking into people's houses stealing their credits and booze.

So far I've done the tutorial, which has a shitty end I did not enjoy. and the first two side missions.

 

Is it just me or is the game way less stylized? They're trying to be more realistic in all forms, except for the enormous augmented overlays.

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Does anyone really understand the energy mechanic and it's upgrades?  One of the first things I did was increase the maximum energy to maximum, but it seems like at random intervals my maximum energy is being downgraded to the point where all my upgrades are effectively nill.  I've noticed that if I use biocells I can pump the maximu size of the bar back up, but eventually it goes back to the starting amount.  I just can't for the life of me understand the design or aesthetic justification for this mechanic, and I'm not entirely sure if it's just a bug that I'm seeing or not.  Other than that however, I'm really enjoying this game, but oddly it's making me look forward to another dishonored more than anything.

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You seem to basically have it.  The battery mechanic is that the wide part of the bar is the only part of the bar you're really guaranteed.  When you use a Biocell, it gives you meter and moves that vertical white line out to the right (possibly to your max?).  Your energy will recharge up to the white line, but the white line slowly begins to recede back to that wide section of the bar.

 

It's why I haven't been upgrading battery, because most of the time I just settle for working with the short meter, and when I'm in a bad spot I can burn a biocell and have more battery to expend.

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I like the Sunday writing roundups that some sites like Rock, Paper, Shotgun do, so here's some Deus Ex related reading:

 

Alec Meer at RPS reckons Adam Jensen is out of place in Prague

 

I agree with some of the points made in this piece. The major thrusts of Human Revolution were centred around Jensen's personal relationships and being the first man not to need the future drug that makes augmentations work. Having ol' Chiselarms come back for this one just adds a lot of sequel baggage without doing anything interesting with it. I don't remember if Jensen even has any direct interaction with the behind-the-scenes bad guys in HR and his story was mostly resolved in that game, so why is he in Prague? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

 

- Gareth Damian Martin at Kill Screen goes on some digital tourism of Mankind Divided's vision of Prague

 

I have been to Prague in real life, and I was curious to see if there was anything I recognised. I haven't seen any landmarks I might know, but Kill Screen delves into how "has always felt like a city uniquely in communion with the past and future versions of itself." Plus, there are some nice pictures. I think the environmental art direction is top notch, even though a lot of the clothes that people are wearing around the city seem wildly impractical. Cyberpunk fashion! Bonus: a Dead End Thrills gallery of Human Revolution.

 

- Tom Francis, he of Gunpoint fame, tries to figure out what made Deus Ex maps good (using the original and HR)

 

It's mostly about investing in one method of problem solving. One thing to note is that the preorder bonuses of both HR and MD give additional upgrade currency, which complete upsets the balance and destroys the sense of specialisation. Strangely, those bonuses are a one-time use boost in the new game, meaning that on subsequent playthroughs, you will have to play the game as intended rather than breaking the balance because you were enthusiastic. It's almost as if the marketing for this game was rubbish from all angles.

 

- Joe Martin at Eurogamer from 2014 about previous failed attempts at a Deus Ex sequel

 

I always find this kind of thing interesting, alternate visions of alternate futures that don't come to pass. It also highlights that different people have different interpretations of what makes Deus Ex what it is, and that the original was this 

 (video by Mark Brown of Game Maker's Toolkit), whereas HR and MD are really more of a stealth RPG, maybe?

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I thought this was supposed to be a moment like with your helicopter pilot in DX:HR where you either had to stealth to sneak away and ler her die or go in heavy to kill all the bad guys and save her, so I tried disabling as many guys using non-lethal tactics as possible, but he just kept dying.  Turns out, all you need to do is be quick about disabling the chopper.

 

In DXHR you can totally take out all those guys and save your chopper pilot sneakily and non-lethally, it just takes some very quick and exacting play.

 

 

Does anyone really understand the energy mechanic and it's upgrades?  One of the first things I did was increase the maximum energy to maximum, but it seems like at random intervals my maximum energy is being downgraded to the point where all my upgrades are effectively nill.  I've noticed that if I use biocells I can pump the maximu size of the bar back up, but eventually it goes back to the starting amount.  I just can't for the life of me understand the design or aesthetic justification for this mechanic, and I'm not entirely sure if it's just a bug that I'm seeing or not.  Other than that however, I'm really enjoying this game, but oddly it's making me look forward to another dishonored more than anything.

 

Okay, so your actual maximum is just your bar. The line that you get is the recharge maximum. When you use an aug, it drains energy (obviously), and when you stop, it starts to recharge itself. As it recharges, the recharge maximum slowly depletes as well, until the two meet. You always get enough to do one takedown. That's where the aug's upgrades come into play. You can boost recharge rate and recharge time delay, making it so that the recharge max doesn't have as much time to deplete.

 

I finished the game yesterday, got the no-kill achievement, but didn't get no alarms even though I don't have any memories of setting one off. Just started the "I didn't ask for this" difficulty - it sets it to "Give me Deus Ex," but with permadeath. Going lethal on this one, trying to keep it stealth still because open firefights on that difficulty are a problem.

 

I tried Breach mode, and it's just kinda meh. Deus Ex's gameplay is focused around careful, improvisatory play, and the Breach stuff tries turning it into an optimization puzzle. I don't think it works all that well.

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I haven't even done the first real mission. I've been robbing people in Prague a doing a few side missions. I created pretty much the same characters as before, a lot of hacking skills early in the game so I can break into everything.

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I haven't even done the first real mission. I've been robbing people in Prague a doing a few side missions. I created pretty much the same characters as before, a lot of hacking skills early in the game so I can break into everything.

 

Man, robbing people is practically the soul of the series for me. The biggest thrills and rewards in any deus ex game are always the points when I've crawled through all the vents linking together different spaces and found everyone's hidden compartments to find some awesome treasure trove full of grenades or neuropyzene. 

 

I want Eliza Cassan to die. I'm so sick of hearing her stupid voice on every single TV in this world. The first thing I do whenever i walk into a new space is turn off all the fucking tv's that are playing Picus News. It's insane how many times they let the same loop play. "I still have memories of that horrible day two years ago", "I don't need to remind you folks that this is the third such attack to happen in prague this year". Shut the fuck up. Her voice is so staid and fake sounding (and I know that's supposed to be her role, that she's this manifestation of the 24 hour news cycle emptiness that we have now), but man they could tone it down a little.

 

Also...

The AI - I was impressed when a guard turned suspicious when I flicked the privacy shades on in a guard station and went to check out the situation - but thats really about the only time i've been impressed. I know that its hard to make stealth games, and that the dev has to finely calibrate things like NPC view depth, length of time a player is visible before triggering an alarm, etc, but it feels super neutered in deus ex. I can be highly visible an NPC will give me a solid 3-4 seconds before reacting to me at all unless I am within 10 feet of them. But then once you've triggered an alarm, they suddenly become able to spot you from across impossible distances, as if their relaxed / offensive states have radically different settings for view depth, etc.  It's also a bummer the way I can pick off guards one by one, quietly, and no one seems to eventually realize that people have gone missing. I want to see a stealth game where guards are frequently checking in with one another and getting suspicious when anyone is missing. And once any unusual event happens, like a guard going missing, the guards in that area should be permanently on alert, or at least for a much longer time than they are now (alarms only last like, what, 60 seconds?)

I'm just struggling to feel immersed in the stealth gameplay as it is, so I'm trying to enjoy it more by roleplaying, for instance telling myself that I can only ghost an area and cannot knock anyone out, in order to maintain some sort of narrative facade that my character really did complete a mission stealthily. 

There's just something very phony about stun gunning 10 guards in a room and then having the narrative give some pretense that I actually did a good job on a mission like that.

 

It's also ridiculous how easy it is to access areas in someone's property that should be off limits. A shop owner can be directly talking to you while you open the door to his basement, and continue to talk to you while you walk downstairs and rob the shit out of him. Come on, give me at least the illusion that the people in this world care. It makes thievery a little less rewarding.

Those criticism aside though, the game is mechanically very good, as in the controls, the UI, the inventory are all super well built. All of the shortcuts on console work really nicely. The inventory wheel is also super good, cant believe no one has made one as good as this before (the way it spreads each inventory slot into an equally-sized slice depending on the number of items in your inventory - so if you have 8 items, it creates 8 equally sized segments, but if you have 20, it creates 20 equally sized segments.) It just means I can play the game without worrying about fussy inventory management and things are always accessible.

 

And the politics and tone of the game are smarter than people are giving credit. You're frequently able to give an answer that articulately expresses the complicated nature of some of the struggles in the world, like the aug apartheid, or police violence. Jensen said something smart about how the ruling class needs to take some ownership for the fact that their actions are the cause of a lot of terrorism in the first place; another time a counter-terrorist guy (Macready?) made a smart observation that he stopped seeing the point in fighting terrorists after doing it for 12 years, since it always seemed like more terrorists kept getting created.  I think the devs shot themselves in the foot with their answer about "aug lives matter" being a coincidence (which is bullshit), since the game is actually quite intelligent.

Also I love hacking. Only on mission 2 or 3 and I've maxed out hacking. So rewarding.

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I like the Sunday writing roundups that some sites like Rock, Paper, Shotgun do, so here's some Deus Ex related reading:

(removed content for brevity)

 

Great post. Going to trawl through these links this afternoon.  RPS in general is such a great source for smart games discussion.

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Aw shit. I've got into that cycle where the sequel reminds me I still haven't got round to the previous game. Got the Wii U game just sitting on my shelf. Suppose I should get Pikmin 3 done before too long, too. Damn you, games and time!

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