T w e n t y S i d e d

Obviously this outline is missing a ton of detail. Miami is the most developed location in the game, and even that one needs more characters, more points of interest, and more potential routes and interactions. The other missions are positively threadbare, and a couple are missing entirely. A lot of the ending missions boil down to “the player goes to an industrial location and kills someone important”, which feels more like Hitman than Deus Ex. Again, you’d fix this by adding more stuff to do and giving the player interesting reasons to spare various conspirators.

Alex needs more development. She’s a composite of three different characters from the first game: Alex your tech guy, Jock your pilot, and Paul your brother. She’s your guide, your transport, and your conscience. Which means she really ought to have a strong personality, a backstory, and even a bit of a character arc that points her towards ending #5. 

I think the idea of “The Illuminati are the reason people are mean to each other on social media” is cute and just the right kind of stupid. Having said that, the entire idea needs a lot more meat on its bones.   Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Deus-Ex Pitch Final Thoughts (Post-Mortem Post)”

Heather Young

And speaking of missions, let’s get back to the job at hand…

Mission 9: TBD

This stretch of the game is really light on details. I don’t have a setting for this mission, except that it should probably be some sort of industrial facility owned by South African industrialist Samkelo Mensah.

We need to take care of Mensah. Also here is fellow board member Camila Ferreira, a Brazilian Environmentalist / Politician. We should find these two together, plotting. Camila is evidently an environmental crusader, and here we learn she doesn’t actually care about the environment and it’s all part of the game to her.  Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Deus Ex Pitch Part 8: Resolution (Post-Mortem Post)”

Heather Young

Troy is dropped off at a rusty old Soviet-era aerospace facility. This is a mashup of several different classic Soviet locations. There’s a nuclear missile silo to explore, an intelligence building filled with spy satellite stuff, and a decommissioned aerospace hanger inspired by the one in Kazakh. The place should be a sort of “greatest hits” of cold-war era tropes. We’re here to take out Russian intelligence leader Leonid Sidorov, one of the conspirators. 

Mission 7: Space Race

Like I said earlier, this series is going to use brute-force monologues to convey most of the information going forward. Obviously in a properly designed game, all of this would need to be spread out and delivered organically in bite-sized portions. But here Morgan Everett is just going to talk our ears off. Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Deus Ex Pitch Part 7: Space Race (Post-Mortem Post)”

Heather Young