T w e n t y S i d e d
This series is going to be a little weird, and I don’t know how well it’ll go over. I was having a terrible time getting back to work after the recent troubles, and I was looking for a nice softball project to ease myself back into it. So I’m going to pitch a Deus Ex game. I’ve been thinking about the game a lot over the past few weeks thanks to this video, and I guess this is my way of coping with the fact that there doesn’t seem to be a new entry on the horizon.
Link (YouTube) |
Imagine we’re all on the dev team and I’m proposing a new direction for the next game in the series. This isn’t anything as ambitious as a design document. This is just a starting point. This is a plot outline, a handful of ideas, some core characters, and a list of missions.
I’m only halfway serious with the overblown title “Pandora’s Gun”. It feels like the kind of absurd goofiness you’d get from a late 90s shooter. Which is good! On the other hand, this story is as connected to the Pandora myth as much as Human Revolution was connected to the Icarus myth.Which is to say: Not at all. On the gripping hand, the title is promising outrageous bombast that doesn’t quite match what I’ve written. Still, it’s catchy and not worse than Icarus Effect. I’m going with it mostly because it made me giggle when I thought of it.
I’ve said before that the Deus Ex series is in a terrible rut. The first game is a classic. The second is a hot mess. The third game – Human Revolution – is fine, but can’t really compare to the original. And Mankind Divided is where the series seems to have lost its way. At this point, what are these games about? Conspiracy theories? Transhumanism? Cyber bigotry? The way our future society will be shaped by technology, corporations, and government? Belabored and ill-fitting Icarus metaphors? It feels less like the writers have something to say, and more like they’re throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks.
Another problem is that the Deus Ex timeline is full. We know the near future. (The original game.) We know the far future. (The world-changing events of Invisible War.) We know the recent past. (Human Revolution and Mankind Divided.) And if you go much further into the past you run into the modern day.And of course, the further back you go, the more mundane the technology needs to be. There just isn’t much room left in the timeline to tell new stories where Important Things happen.
The final problem is that this series is built around the idea that there’s a secret conspiracy running the world. Since all of these games are set in the same universe, we end up unmasking the same conspiracy again and again. But that reveal gets to be a little less interesting every time, and the accumulated lore cruft means there’s less we can do with it.
I’m a big believer in the idea that the Deus Ex series should be like Final Fantasy: The games all draw from similar thematic elements and plots, featuring recurring character names and relationships. Each game should tell a unique story within its own universe, yet be full of familiar ideas and moments.
So this is what I’m going to pitch. I’m going to propose a Deus Ex reboot.
But I’m Sick of Reboots!
Yes, I know. Everything is getting rebooted these days. Tomb Raider. Doom. Wolfenstein. King’s Quest. Thief. Hitman. Fans are tired of publishers flipping the table on established lore and starting over when sales begin to fall.
But we shouldn’t let bad rebootsThief 2014 comes to mind as a particularly egregious example. put us off the idea of reboots altogether. Like sequels, prequels, and spinoffs, a reboot is a tool the storyteller can use to solve problems. The key is knowing when to do it and how to do it properly.
Yes, we all love JC Denton and Adam Jensen. I understand that fans don’t want to see their heroes poofed out of existence by a lazy writer. But this idea of characters being “erased” only applies if you’re planning to run this new reboot into the ground with endless same-universe sequels. Nobody complains that Final Fantasy X “erased” the characters in Final Fantasy VII. Final Fantasy XII didn’t destroy FFX’s Spira and all of its characters. It just told a different, unrelated story.
I think people really underestimate the power and potential of a blank canvas. If you’re new to the world, then you don’t know what’s going to happen next. You don’t know who to trust. You meet people along the way and discover the world, and that process is massively more rewarding than going through a parade of obligatory cameos. We want players to feel a sense of trepidation and mystery as the world is revealed. We don’t want the audience to sit there thinking, “Come on, I already know Bob Illuminati is behind this. When is he gonna show up?”
Blueprint
So let’s take an inventory and see what elements we want to include in our new Deus Ex game. We can then replace all these pieces one at a time, Ship of Theseus style.
- Transhumanism: We don’t have to make the game about cyber-racism, and it doesn’t have to be a huge part of the setting, but I feel like fans expect that we’re going to be playing as some sort of enhanced individual.
- Conspiracy Theories: Conspiracy was such a big part of the original, I think you need to feature this sort of thing. It doesn’t need to be central and the conspirators don’t need to be the central antagonists, but I think it would be a disappointing Deus Ex game if you were to play everything perfectly straight with no hidden agendas, secret powers, or major twists.
- Technology, Government, Individuals: The first game was really interested in the interplay between these three things.
- Globe-spanning adventure: Our story should take us to a variety of locations around the world, from the dirtiest slums to the shiniest labs. We can start off in the USA so the world feels like a standard Hollywood setting, but the story should quickly escalate to something global.Obviously the story is still going to be pretty western, simply because the author of this series is from the USA.
- This is a modern shooter: I’m sure you could use Deus Ex to make a really interesting Telltale-style game about choice and consequences. I’d prefer gameplay that felt a little more like the original and less like the recent cover-based stuff. But to keep this pitch plausible let’s assume we’re sticking to roughly the same gameplay style as the last couple of entries.
- While we’re not obligated to respond to player choice, there does seem to be a hope and expectation among fans that the game will respond to some well-telegraphed choices. This isn’t a BioWare game and we don’t need to do a ton of branching, but the audience will probably appreciate some narrative reactivity.
- We don’t have an infinite budget. In fact, the last game was apparently a bit of a disappointment in terms of sales.Then again, Square Enix was going through a weird phase where they projected that every game was going to meet ridiculously implausible sales targets. So we should be looking for ways to keep costs down. My story is 10 missions long. Yes, that’s more than either of the previous two games.Although a fraction the size of the original. Alas for the days of affordable gamespace. However, I don’t have any enormous open-world hub locations like Detroit or Prague from the previous games. Also, several of the locations pop up more than once, so we’re not going to need 10 distinct maps. I’ve never worked on a AAA project before and I’m sure I’ve got a few budgetary blind spots, but I’ve done my best to keep the scope under control.
Feel free to suggest other elements in the comments below, but for the purposes of this write-up, we’re going to pretend the above blueprint is the plan.
In terms of tone, I want to head back in the direction of the original. It’s been saidBy whom? I’m like 90% sure it was Chris Franklin, but I can’t remember when he said it. that the original Deus Ex was a smart game that pretended to be stupid, and that Human Revolution is a dumb game pretending to be smart. I can’t claim that I’ve made a smart game, but I did do my best to avoid pretension and embrace a little absurdity in the name of fun. I’m sure you’ll let me know how I did.
The Conspiracy Problem
So now I guess we need to talk about the elephant in the room. The original game dealt with conspiracy theories. It embraced some ridiculous and amusing ideas, and made them fit together in a crazy over-the-top world. But a lot has changed in the past 22 years, and conspiracy theories aren’t what they used to be.
Consider these three, which I’m making up right now:
- Halloween was invented by chocolate moguls Paul Ghirardelli and William Nestle in the early 1800s as a way to sell more candy. The new crop of cocoa beans would come in and they needed to get rid of last year’s stock to make room, which is why the holiday was placed in October.
- Microwaves are sensitive to short-wave radiation. That’s just how they work. That means every microwave oven is effectively a wi-fi listening device. Since the 1990s, General Electric has been working with the NSA, allowing the government to use their microwaves to listen in on everyone’s internet activity.
- The Levi corporation makes clothing using forced labor camps in Sudan, where children as young as 11 work in terrible conditions. Hundreds of these workers die every year, and hundreds more are maimed by the industrial equipment.
I submit that the first two conspiracy theories are kind of fun. They’re silly and absurd. I’ve met people who were into this sort of stuff: Flat-earthers and moon-fakers. Some of them are serious about it, and some of them treat it like a joke / troll, and enjoy the challenge of defending their absurdity against mundane facts. I don’t know why people are into this stuff, but I see them as generally harmless.I said GENERALLY harmless. Yes, there are exceptions. But for the most part this sort of recreational absurdity doesn’t cause any harm beyond being annoying.
But that third conspiracy theory is a bit different, isn’t it? That’s not a joke. That’s not something we can just agree to disagree on. Either that theory is true and we need to fight against it with whatever might we can summon, or it isn’t true and is therefore a cruel and dangerous lie.
Over the last couple of decades, the conspiracy theory meta-game has evolved away from the quasi-harmless paranoia of the first two and towards the outrage-feeding intensity of the third kind.
At the same time, our society is much more divided politically.Eh. This is true in North America. I get mixed reports from elsewhere. This means it’s very dangerous to toy with political topics. Stray too far into either camp, and the opposition will bury you in outrage. You can avoid this by pulling an Ubisoft and not saying anything, but art that has nothing to say is usually very boring art.
In short, we can’t just do like the first game did and make a big mixtape of popular conspiracy theories. The whole thing would blow up in our face. The goal is to make something that can be broadly enjoyed by people all over the political spectrum without coming off as tone-deaf or sanctimonious.For example, Picard Season 2.
I have a two-prong plan for how to deal with this:
- We’re going to make up our own conspiracy theories, rather than remixing extant theories the way the original did.
- We’re going to avoid hot-button stuff. This doesn’t mean saying nothing, it just means we’re not going to talk about a woman’s right to raise taxes on multi-gendered gun control for critical race theory. Instead we’re going to talk about… eh. You’ll see.
Of course, I’ve got my own biases and blind spots. Maybe something I’ve written will hit a nerve or stumble into a nest of controversy that I’ve been oblivious to. But I did what I could to make this ideologically inclusive.
It should go without saying, but I really, REALLY want nothing to do with the current crop of conspiracy theories. I don’t want to discuss them, and I don’t want those keywords to show up on my site. I’m going to nuke any discussion regarding them, because I don’t want the Google bot to get the idea that this site is interested in that sort of thing.
So that’s it. I’m going to pitch a AAA shooter that uses the Deus Ex name in a rebooted universe to tell a new story. We’ll start next week.
Footnotes:
[1] Which is to say: Not at all.
[2] And of course, the further back you go, the more mundane the technology needs to be.
[3] Thief 2014 comes to mind as a particularly egregious example.
[4] Obviously the story is still going to be pretty western, simply because the author of this series is from the USA.
[5] Then again, Square Enix was going through a weird phase where they projected that every game was going to meet ridiculously implausible sales targets.
[6] Although a fraction the size of the original. Alas for the days of affordable gamespace.
[7] By whom? I’m like 90% sure it was Chris Franklin, but I can’t remember when he said it.
[8] I said GENERALLY harmless. Yes, there are exceptions. But for the most part this sort of recreational absurdity doesn’t cause any harm beyond being annoying.
[9] Eh. This is true in North America. I get mixed reports from elsewhere.
[10] For example, Picard Season 2.
Ludonarrative Dissonance
What is this silly word, why did some people get so irritated by it, and why did it fall out of use?
What is Vulkan?
What is this Vulkan stuff? A graphics engine? A game engine? A new flavor of breakfast cereal? And how is it supposed to make PC games better?
Programming Language for Games
Game developer Jon Blow is making a programming language just for games. Why is he doing this, and what will it mean for game development?
Please Help I Can’t Stop Playing Cities: Skylines
What makes this borderline indie title so much better than the AAA juggernauts that came before?
Programming Vexations
Here is a 13 part series where I talk about programming games, programming languages, and programming problems.
Very glad you’re feeling somewhat better!
“Pandora’s Gun” would also be an acceptable title for a Borderlands game, although a crossover between the two franchises is too bizarre to contemplate :)
Is this thing going to be Galaxy Gun fanfic or what?
Isn’t the Borderlands planet already called Pandora? That seems like it would be too on-the-nose; like calling this one Denton’s Gun.
I think basically every sci-fi writer ever instinctively decides, in their first draft, to call their Mystery McGuffin “Pandora” – be it planet, secret weapon, codename, whatever – unless they’re sufficiently aware of their medium to know that literally every last one of their predecessors will have already done it.
It’s probably just because ancient literature really tends to leave a mark on the collective psyche of modern civilisation, possibly for no other reason than because it was the equivalent of the “first post.” The Classics are called “The Classics” for a reason.
“Pandora Typhoon”
“pandora’s typhoon”
That names dials up the 90s factor to a high 12 and I’m here for it.
I’m am so pumped about this series! Your script doctoring is always my favourite part of your retrospectives, now it’ll be kind of like that on a franchise!
About Deus Ex I don’t even know that conspiracies are THAT important to it. What really made the game was the cyberpunk mood, cool implant powers, clever illusion of choice and immersive sim mechanics. I think these are the stickler, because they are harder and more expensive to do now. They can be considered too tough and off putting to newbies, like Prey 2017. They can be utterly unbalanced meaning one method will solve every issue like the vents in Deus Ex Human Revolution. They can be meticulously crafted so much that you end up with only a few levels that can be resolved in dozens of way, like Dishonoured: Death of the Outsider, which is annoying to people who play every game once.
I’d say that’s the tricky part, more than making proper conspiracies.
I see where you’re going, and somewhat agree. That said, I think “conspiracy theories” (read broadly) are a major trope of a cyberpunk setting.
Taking an absurdly broad brush, cyberpunk (to me) is about the notion that technology and information are the true power, and that power is not benevolently shared. Whoever controls those thing (usually a corporation or a shadowy cabal) will either be in conflict with or trying to control civil power, and in conflict with similar organizations. They will be seeking to expand their power by any means, since they sit to some degree outside the law, and in any case are sufficiently powerful they don’t feel they need to answer to the law. That conflict is usually the backdrop that allows interesting stories to be told. There’s conflict, juicy secrets, and literal keys to power that exist and are carefully guarded.
Technology and information ascendency are important to demonstrate why the protagonist is “special” and has an elevated place in the story – they are either in possession of unique technology or information. The inherent conflict tells us why the thing that the protagonist possesses gives them power but also has others trying to reclaim/appropriate it.
While none of this strictly requires a “conspiracy” like the Illuminati to work, ideas like “large corporations secretly control the government!” or “evil corporation creates a plague to get rich selling the cure!” or “shadowy data broker has a file on every American citizen that can perfectly predict behavior and is being used to cull everyone the company can’t control!” have a large overlap with common conspiracy theories.
I think you’re right about the conspiracy theories.
Also, while I respect Shamus’ wishes to not deal with that political stuff on this website, I wish AAA games would stop being so politically cowardly. After all, we live in a time where game spaces are a cesspool for really toxic politics; it’s a literal matter of life and death for many people. I want less hand wringing from companies like Ubisoft that say that ‘The Division 2’ isn’t political, somehow.
I like stuff like ‘Tonight We *iot’ and ‘Get In The Car, Loser!’ which boldly speak out on the political matters of today. They are courageous and important, especially from the indie side of things. I can say the same thing about Bungie’s recent statements on certain prominent issues, although I do wish their games directly brought them up too. Also ‘Vengeful Heart’, which is a fantastic cyberpunk story.
(Incidentally, I wouldn’t call North American politics divided, because there is actually a lot of support for a lot of prog-ressif (trying to avoid tripping any bots or key word catchers, here) policies; it’s just that one side on the political spectrum is vastly over-represented in government.)
And then you get into good cyberpunk literature. That stuff isn’t just cool tech toys and giggling and nongs in trench coats smoking; it directly tackles political subject matter by examining how what’s going on today can very well continue later with new technology. Bad cyberpunk talks about how cybernetics destroy your “soul” or robots malfunction and take over the world; good cyberpunk tackles with the problem of new tech that works as intended, and what those intentions are.
But of course, this is your pitch and your website to do with as you wish.
The problem, of course, is that there’s a lot of people who consider the politics of the games you cited as being “courageous and important” to be “toxic,” and there’s a lot more of those people than you seem to think there are.
As such, it’s completely understandable why companies don’t want to risk alienating a good portion of their potental audience from the get-go.
It’s been ages since I played the game through all the way -I probably need to get a Steam or GOG version to even run it now -but I also recall the conspiracies were mainly flavor text, and most of them were probably fake.
The central conspiracy was like a dozen people, all told, and as Bob Paige put it, most of them were “old men, playing at running the world.” Their actual ability to control the world was far less than they pretended. Substantial portions of the world were clearly not under their control. The whole point of the project at the end was to let Paige take over the world (and even then, it didn’t really stick in the sequel).
The other conspiracies, like the Council of Foreign Relations/Bildiberg Group schtick with the Liberty Island terror attack was never confirmed nor denied in the game -but I read it as the funny thing is, these conspiracy theorists are both jumping at shadows, and also right -the conspiracies they were about are fake, but there is a real conspiracy working against them.
The Illuminati in Deus Ex don’t rule the world, but that’s mainly because Majestic 12 is in the process of taking it over from them. (Majestic 12 is also a real conspiracy theory, an organization supposedly created by Harry Truman to investigate UFOs.) And MJ12 is not exactly a small conspiracy – they’ve got a literal army deployed in Paris.
There are a lot of nods to other real world conspiracy theories, too. You fly from mission to mission in a black helicopter, you fight the Men in Black (augmented MJ12 agents), the final mission is set in Area 51, and you even encounter the classic “Grey” aliens in the final mission. It’s a pretty notable part of the game’s flavor. Even in the newer games like Human Revolution, there are nods like the level in a FEMA internment camp (another favorite of conspiracy theorists), and a level in a news company where you can discover fake news being created.
Well, they wouldn’t have called it “fake news” when the game came out.
No, they’re pretty important, it’s what sets the setting aside from other cyberpunk settings
The microwave thing feels like 1 part stupid, 1 part serious conspiracy. 1984 plays straight that TVs are two way devices. I can see people draw a parallel between microwaves and those google/amazon home assistants.
I would do something like “microwaves have been adjusted to send out specific wavelengths that destroy specific nutrients in food to keep the populace dumb and docile”. You get some quests early on where you distribute microwave dinners among stricken people (after some disaster or something), then later find out that you had to do that to pacify the population (since everyone is hungry, would microwave a microwave dinner, and then miss out on those nutrients).
For transhumanism you could do something other than body modification. Maybe they figured out cloning, but in order to give the new one consciousness you have to destroy the consciousness in the old body. Some important people have been cloned this way but were left in the dark they are clones. You find out that a large part of the upperclass have actually died but got their consciousness moved over from their old broken body to a new body. And that you yourself also are a clone because you died a few time in previous missions (fun way to imply dying and restarting are part of the ingame story, also you could have some early hints of this conspiracy. You have to follow up on missions a previous agent failed, but then you notice a lot of the things he did is the same way you would do it, or maybe you remember some fragments). The transhuman question is how much a clone is the same as the person.
You could have a moment where the mona lisa (or another work of art) is stolen and a universal constructor is used to analyse it and construct a second one, atom by atom, to create a copy that is indistinguishable from the original. At this point both of them are always kept together because people want to be sure they see the original, even though they don’t know which one of the two is the original. I think this concept of “realness” is something that could also work well with a political angle, as people want a “real” politician. Or if you want to avoid politics even more, “real” connections with other people.
>>The transhuman question is how much a clone is the same as the person
I have strong feelings on this one. After watching Oblivion, I told my husband he is NOT, under ANY circumstances, to shack up with my clone and let her raise our children. I don’t care if she has my memories. She isn’t me.
I’d also refuse to go through a transporter for the same reason. What comes out the other side isn’t me anymore. I don’t care how painstakingly the atoms were assembled. You can’t assemble a soul.
*suddenly gets idea for SF novel*
If this is your SF novel idea, it already gets touched upon in alpha centauri (the videogame). If you research the bulk matter transmitter you get the quote
And miriam’s faction, lorewise, probably commits mass suicide after they are defeated by stepping into a teleporter that isnt configured to any other teleporter.
I was thinking of a much more explicitly religious approach. There wouldn’t be much of a market for the idea, though.
Schlock Mercenary (An online webcomic) has a very fun clone plot that is also part of a grand conspiracy that has some fun moments. It’s a webcomic so it’s played for laughs a lot, but the concept is still quite frightening and I’d rather hate the consequences when it’s brought to light.
The clone probably wouldn’t take him anyway. The Saga of Cuckoo taught me that.
Yeah. Lots to explore.
Soma was a game that was pretty much built entirely around this idea. And, y’know, deep sea diving.
On a happy note, the belief that any clone of you is fundamentally not you makes you immune to Roko’s Basilisk. Which is nice.
China Mieville’s excellent novel “Kraken” (dark, weird urban fantasy) has a great take on that. A side character who’s a huge Star Trek nerd builds himself a working transporter using magic. Let’s just say it goes… poorly.
Indeed, in those transporters you basically die and get reconstructed. Meaning you don’t exist anymore. So in essence it is a cloning device that kills the template.
Public transport isn’t so bad after all.
A unique take on Transhumanism that would be interesting in a game would be the Altered Carbon setting – people’s memories are automatically uploaded into devices in their necks, and these devices can be tranferred between bodies. The gameplay implications of body stealing, using another person’s body as a disguise, ‘upgrading’ yourself by buying a better body, and so forth are really interesting.
Plus any conspiracy thories that the story builds on this are lurid enough to be distant from real-world politics, but understandable and compelling enough to be relatable and say something profound.
Though that’s clearly an Altered Carbon game, not a Deus Ex game. Still, I’d play it…
So, I’m going to very briefly mention my issue with that part of Altered Carbon: Those aren’t people, or at least, not humans. They’re AI’s who haven’t realized it yet. They don’t fundamentally work in the way that humans do, even to the basic biological level, and in fact they are killing humans off. That’s an interesting idea but AC doesn’t seem to want to seriously explore/understand it.
Altered Carbon also doesn’t seem to want to take the implications of the premise of the setting seriously either. I got the distinct impression that the author was writing something that would be easy to turn into a TV/movie series rather than seriously considered Sci-Fi.
It’s been ages since I watched AC and I don’t remember the specifics, but I remember having this same reaction.
“You’re not really trying to think this through. You’re just trying to make cool stuff happen.”
Altered Carbon came up in the comments here earlier, when the first season came out – the general gist as I recall was ‘They changed [intelligent plot point] from the books! It’s so much dumber!’ Full disclosure that I haven’t read any Altered Carbon books, but ‘Any TV or film adaptation of a book is inevitably worse than the source material’ is a pretty reliable rule of thumb*.
(And yes, I watched both seasons of Altered Carbon and kind of agree – my take was ‘you’ve taken a premise with such potential and you did THAT with it?!’)
Still, it doesn’t matter if the story is dumb; to me it’s the potential of the setting. And while Deus Ex was a good game, I think Deus Ex the film/TV show would be pretty terrible, too**.
*I’d love to be wrong about this. Seriously, I would. Tell me about an adaptation that’s as good as – or better than – the original story. Please.
**It might even….BOMB
Well, now I’m googling adaptations that are better than the book.
Probably a dumb idea to link this, considering I completely disagree about the one book I’ve read on there (Cuckoo’s Nest loses a good chunk in the narrator-less movie version). There’s also this one, which is much longer and doesn’t include Cuckoo. But it does have Jurassic Park and The Lord of the Rings, so… y’know.
Fight Club comes up a lot, and Forrest Gump, and the Princess Bride, and the Godfather. Various Stephen King stories, long and short (I have read Shawshank Redemption, and agree the movie is better; it makes the ending more satisfying by not rotating out the staff). Lots of adaptations of short stories like Blade Runner.
For adaptation reviews, in general, try Lost in Adaptation. Apparently the Twilight Films are examples that improved on the books.
The animated movie adaptation of *Superman: Red Son* is way less dumb than the original comic, mostly because it plays down the stupidest plot points.
Eg Luthor is still a chess-obsessed genius, but now he’s not setting up rooms full of chess geniuses just so he can give them electric shocks when they inevitably lose to him. (Yes, this is a thing in the comic.)
The Princess Bride. The book and movie are both good – which is better is a matter of personal taste (I prefer the movie; that being said, I have read the book 5-6 times).
Jaws. The book is a beyond dumb, very shallow summer beach read, while the movie is brilliant. Jaws isn’t really about a shark. It’s about the three-way conflict between the three very different men on that boat. The way they are constantly making and breaking alliances – two against the third – but no alliance can survive because they all three hate and despise each other is extremely well handled. Just an outstanding movie all around, far exceeding its garbage progenitor.
Die Hard vs. Nothing Lasts Forever? The book is a competently-executed action thriller; it’s good, but not any better than that. The film is a masterpiece – superb directing and acting across the board, with stand-out performances by the leads.
I would say that a number of changes the Expanse TV series made from the books were for the better (although the absolute mischaracterization of Avasarala and the changes to Bobbie’s involvement with Martian arms smugglers in S4 were egregiously bad). Changing Earth/Mars/Belt relations to more of a first, second, and third world model really rang truer to me than the book portrayal.
Stardust is better than the book too.
There’s a scene where someone buys something in someone else’s name by wearing their backup body, and that’s like getting away with identity fraud by driving the same model car as your target.
This is the same stance you see in all those terrible “racism against robots” plotlines – “sure, it walks like a human, talks like a human, thinks like a human, feels pain like a human, and so on, but it’s not really a human.” I think it makes more sense to say that humanity is defined by consciousness or sapience rather than by the presence of a lump of meat between your ears.
Obfuscation that muddles clear communication for the sake of a desired outcome does no favors to anyone.
I literally don’t know what argument you’re making here. Talk about obfuscation…
TL;DR: You are confusing a statement of fact with a statement of value.
There is a significant mistake of conflating “Human” with “Good”, or assuming that I am doing so. However, identifying what something is, at a fundamental level, is the basis of science fiction. Only by really identifying an idea and its weird permutations allows us to fully explore it conceptually. It is a not a question about whether an AI is good or bad, but rather thinking clearly about what a thing is at the root, because that lets us clearly engage with the idea.
I made no statement about whether or not life as presented in Altered Carbon is good in the abstract, or not. The statement I made is that they are not human, and the stories as presented have the issue of not acknowledging that problem. That exists regardless of whether you think the AC-beings are better, or worse, than humanity, or say that the question of superiority vs. inferiority is not morally relevant.
I don’t think you can use phrases like “not people,” “not human,” and “actually killing humans off” without introducing some moral judgment.
You may need to understand the premise of Altered Carbon. You seem to demanding some kind of emotional input into a statement of fact.
“What is a human” is not a question with an objective answer. “Information on a disc that can be switched between human bodies is not a human” is not a fact, it’s an opinion, and introducing the opinion has implications.
Altered Carbon doesn’t care if these are people or not; they could all be Daleks, and apart from being less visually appealing it wouldn’t change the plot or the stakes. It’s sapients dealing with sapient politics. (It also does bring it up, in that dismissive “only losers think this” way; the religious people think being resurrected will destroy their soul.)
I’m with Rho on this…the characters in Altered Carbon (well, the rich ones at least) are lacking something that is fundamental to humanity as we know it – they can’t die.
It’s like saying that if humans lived on a space station or starship for dozens of generations, they would stop being humans – because they would adapt to the environment around them over time and change physiology. No moral judgement in that.
Don’t forget, though: Altered Carbon the TV show DID make a moral statement about the technology – firstly the richest, most immortal characters got a different name (Methuselahs), and secondly the effect of immortality on people is a plot point.
I mean, the message appeared to be that “immortality will make you a murderous sex pervert due to the Ennui”, which isn’t a great insight, but hey…
Well… I don’t think the definition of humanity counts as politics, so yeah, this sounds like a fun discussion.
The question then revolves around “as we know it”: how many instances of a new thing does it take before it starts being incorporated into the definition? If mortality is a defining feature of humanity, such that losing it means losing humanity… what other features qualify?
Sight? Humanity as we know it can see, and a whole lot of things are based on the idea that people can see to understand them. But if someone is born blind, they’re still considered human ‘as we know it’.
Consciousness? If someone is in a coma, are they still human? If you can back up their memories on a disc and put the memories in another body, is it less human than the original body that’s no longer capable of movement or response?
In the other direction; humanity as we know it is incapable of picking up on a lot of smells, but some folks have supersensitive smelling, to the point they can smell chronic illnesses. In fact you can take a lot of Guinness World Record holders and ask the same thing; the guy who can suction stick a full bottle of water to his face, is he no longer human?
Heck, there’s the question of whether a dead body is no longer human. (Although that one probably does touch on politics, it has implications on corpse disposal which is a real thing society does all the time.)
“What is a human” is a Theseus’ Ship question*, where everyone’s going to draw fairly arbitrary lines because there’s no good natural stopping point.
The moral judgment is if you say they need to bring it up. The implication is that information will change the way you experience the thing, the counter being “why would it?”. (…although rereading Rho, he only said they didn’t discuss it, which could just be disappointment rather than ‘a problem’.)
*I generally agree with you guys on this. My take is a person is a combination of brain activity and chemical response; if you change or eliminate the body you change the chemical response and end up with a different person, or something not human at all. Shows like Black Mirror that make software clones and expect the audience to assume they’re human end up being annoying. Photographs don’t get human rights just because it’s a photo of a person.
I’m not sure Black Mirror does that – the episode that comes to mind is the one where a woman pays a company to make a software clone of herself, and that company’s employee then forces it to run her household appliances.
No, the clone isn’t human – but it’s still bad to enslave it, especially considering how the clone was forced to do the work.
Again, the issue is conflating ‘human’ with ‘good’. Which, by extension, makes ‘inhuman’ or ‘not human’ something bad (or a least less worthy of recognition). It’s a very common thing people do, hence the misunderstandings.
Black Mirror’s got a bunch of them. There’s one where a guy gets arrested because a software clone of him admits to a crime (I think that’s also the housemaid clone one). There’s one where dead people are hooked up to a simulation. There’s the Star Trek one. There’s the one where they digitally copy a death row inmate to execute him constantly. It’s one of their big go-tos storywise.
I’d remix your microwave idea slightly. Few people microwave all their food, and so it’s hard to deprive someone completely of a nutrient that way.
A slightly more mustache twirly take would be that the government has designed a drug that will pacify people, but which is inert in its raw form until exposed to a specific wavelength of radiation, which is the wavelength all standard microwaves are tuned to. The drug is an FDA-mandated required “routine” injection for all cattle, pork, poultry operations.
The elites have “special” microwaves tuned to a different frequency that doesn’t activate the drug (and/or rarely microwave food)
That’s… a real conspiracy theory. That’s basically the 5G conspiracy theory.
Every conspiracy theory is, to some degree, every other conspiracy theory. There’s an unseen power and something they don’t want you to know. They want to control you and only the brave few “in the know” can resist.
There’s a great scene in the book The Name of the Rose (one of my favorites) where the two leads talk about heretics in the medieval Catholic church. In some ways, every heretical faction is completely different – built of a completely different central article of faith (“Jesus was never human,” “Jesus was (what we’d call a communist)”, etc.). To the leaders at the core, their belief was what set them apart. But for the followers – the bulk of the heretical community who follow these leaders, all heresies are basically the same. They’re a way to rebel against the established order that doesn’t include them, and to feel righteous while doing so. I can’t do it justice here, but if you even get a chance to pick up a copy…
Film? What film?
Speaking of Eco, I think that the model of conspiracy used in Foucault’s Pendulum could be an interesting basis for a game, although you would have to manage it very will in order to avoid the discovery of the “secret” becoming an anti-climax.
Seems to fit the standard conspiracy theory pattern. I think every new technological fad that gets rapidly and thoughtlessly embraced by the masses, but disdained or ignored by the elite, tends to be viewed with a certain amount of instinctive suspicion by those who, for whatever good or bad reason, are inclined to be distrustful of the socio-economic structure in which they find themselves.
I’d venture to suggest that it’s not entirely unwise to have such reservations, either – even a purely accidental opiate of the masses can potentially be just as potent, and thus useful to the powers that be in suppressing free-thought and rebellion, as a deliberately designed one. It’s possibly even more likely to actually succeed than a deliberate conspiracy precisely because it’s accidental, so there is no smoking gun to be found, no trail of conspirators to unmask.
Thinking about it, it seems the real way to do a conspiracy, if you want it to succeed, is never to do anything so crass and obvious as to take direct action in pursuit of your own enrichment and entrenchment, but simply to watch and wait until some socioeconomic phenomenon naturally arises that will tend to achieve this effect for you, then quietly arrange circumstances such that this phenomenon thrives and grows and funnels civilisation in the direction you’d prefer.
All the less astute conspiracy theories seem to portray conspirators as striding directly down the secret tunnel to their in-house mad scientist, moustaches atwirl, and directly ordering them to invent some amazing new evil thing that will further increase their stranglehold on the world. That doesn’t usually happen. As a rule, manipulative, grasping, narcissistic sociopaths, though cunning, often highly intelligent and unsettlingly good at making up completely false narratives on the spot, are notoriously bad at imagining anything truly, genuinely new – they are banal, incurious and uncreative. What “new” things they come up with are typically just iterations of existing trends and patterns.
What seems a more plausible scenario – not to mention a more sophisticated and subtle narrative, if we’re setting out to create a compelling fictitious work – is for some unheard-of PhD student working quietly away and having a genuine breakthrough one day, envisioning and publishing some naive and well-wishing potential uses for it, and – a disquietingly short time later – some rich patron who read their paper and immediately saw other, rather darker potential uses for the technology comes knocking at the door with a truckload of better research equipment, a suitcase of money and, most importantly, a fat non-disclosure agreement.
Interest ideas. But I like Shamus’ microwave idea better, because it also affects people who don’t have a microwave. If you live in the city, as long as there are a couple of microwaves in your building, everything you do around WiFi in that building is being listened to.
But the second idea really is interesting. Reminds me of Theseus’ Ship…
“Some important people have been cloned this way but were left in the dark they are clones. ”
I see you haven’t delved deep into Q mythology. Long story short, don’t do that one.
Q theory is ao broad and rambling and all-encompassing that it’s kind of hard to come up with anything that doesn’t bear some resemblance. It’s effectively a conspiracy katamari.
Or you could go full Baudrillard and reveal at the end that both Mona Lisas are perfect copies, the original has been lost for a century. People feel better seeing both because they think one of them is the real thing, but they have no way of knowing because the original was never a part of their world to begin with. I mean, I wouldn’t be able to tell if you put the actual Mona Lisa and a really good forgery in front of me, I’ve never been the Louvre to see the real thing in the first place, how should I know?
I’m interested to see how you pull off the missions/locations. As you describe it:
I will reserve judgement until I read the doc, but two things jump out here that I suspect would get a lot of hate in the gaming press.
The big thing is revisiting locations to save cost. Having a “world spanning” game that reuses a small number of locations is usually not something that makes the world feel big. It makes it feel small. Our pursuit of the plot took us to Kuala Lumpur. Then Kansas City. Then Milan. Then Kuala Lumpur again. The repetition will be jarring once you’ve established “this conspiracy is globe spanning and everywhere.” It will be difficult not to be accused of “recycling assets because they ran out of money.” Maybe your story has a sufficiently compelling reason to pull this off.
Also, what are you saving? If you’re going through literally the same places on a different mission, it will get repetitive unless you have some major twist – the Sarif building, but now it’s full of malicious robots, on fire, and upside down! Might work once but hard to pull off multiple times. If it’s the same “city” but a different location with no direct overlap, why is this so much cheaper than a different city (if, as you said, there’s no “walk around the open world” hub aspect.). Saving the cost of a new local art style?
The smaller thing is losing the open world aspect. To be clear, I agree with you – 2 square block “open world” Detroit with one apartment building, one office building, one street basketball court, and a police station only barely qualifies as an “open world.” However, games that have introduced open world aspects rarely go backwards on this. It will be noticeable to fans that this is “missing,” and you’ll likely take a lot of heat for “charging full price for a stripped down game”. Or maybe you mean something different than what I’m reading into your statement of no large hub areas like Detroit or Vienna.
Interested to see what you have planned.
I won’t beg the premise since Shamus stated what he wanted. However, I would ask why *not* turn one or two of those missions into a hub area?
I could see this working with, like, a major transportation hub. You’re traveling around the globe, but you keep having to go through the same transportation bottlenecks, and the conspirators know it.
All roads lead to LaGuardia.
As someone who’s spent hundreds of hours in Triboro Bridge* traffic,, I can assure you that not nearly enough roads lead to LaGuardia.
*I’ll be in my cold, cold grave before I recognize Mizzurah
Honestly even accounting for the large hub area, there were still plenty of smaller self contained level.
Human revolution had: Sarif HQlab, Sarif factory, Sarif HQ floor, Detroit, Detroit gang hangout, Detroit police, Internement camp, Hengsha, Hengsha gang hidenout, Hengsha Biotech company, Montreal media building, Hengsha harbor, secret lab, pangea. (I might have forgotten some)
And also a smattering of smaller location, mostly tied to the hubs (sewer, apartment, etc.). That’s pretty big and varied, I wouldn’t say HR really suffered from having 2 hub area.
The thing is that in order to do this you need to use analogy. This is what old Star Trek used to do. Yes, sometimes it would be blatant (like that time they wanted to discuss racism by having people with half-black half-white faces but colored on different sides), but that’s still the better approach. Analogy allows you to put yourself in the place of someone with different ideologies and beliefs in a way that literal use of existent current politics doesn’t. That’s Picard’s problem.
For instance, say you’re a black man upset with gun violence, so you write a story where the hero is a black man and the villains are white men with guns, and the message is basically “guns need control and certain white men need to stop being judgemental of other races”. Even if you mean it exclusively on the context of that story you’re going to have a bunch of gun loving white men upset because they think the message is “white men and gun are evil” (and paradoxically a bunch of angry black men who think you’re being condescending to them).
But let’s say that instead you write an X-Men story. The protagonist is a mutant (not a dangerous one) and the villains are human (and this is important: hero and villains retain the same skin color so as not to make this a factor). The villains don’t have guns, they have instead a super serum that gives them powers. Now your story has basically the same message, but now it’s not pointing any fingers at existent groups of people, so some of those people will actually end up agreeing with you (and, again, paradoxically, some people who would agree with you before will now be against you).
This is more or less what Mankind Divided tried to do but fumbled spectacularly by using the wrong analogy. An analogy on racism absolutely needs both sides to be on equal footing (i.e. they’re all the same, but half of the people look different) for any prejudice to be unjustified. You really can’t pull that off when the “discriminated” party went on a public rampage on the other group, causing untold deaths and destruction. It didn’t help that they were also making references to real life current events with the whole “Aug lives matter” and all that.
Minor correction: it’s ‘Augs Live Matters’.
They didn’t just invoke a highly-sensitive political issue to make their game seem relevant – they got the grammar wrong so the message is nonsensical*. Cynically using politics to sell a product is one thing, but doing it so clumsily is derisible.
Speaking of derisible, let’s talk about Star Trek: Picard!
The thing about Picard is there’s not even any analysis to any of the political commentary. Forget about using allegory to distance the debate from a real-world issue; there is no debate. The show just says ‘this thing is bad!’ and then moves on. Not even the briefest attempt to see an oppising point of view.
Even Game of Thrones was better than that!
*For non-native English speakers: it’s all about where the the letter ‘s’ is. ‘Live’ in english is a verb, as in ‘I live’ – whereas ‘Lives’ is a noun. ‘Matter’ (and ‘matters’) can be both a verb or a noun.
So putting ‘s’ in the wrong place changes the meaning of the placard from ‘The lives of Augs are important!’ to ‘Augs experience (generic) things!’
Oh wow, I didn’t even notice it was Live not Lives.
‘Augs Live’ has a lot of the same feeling as ‘Live Nudes’. Augs On Parade!
It’s even more confusing, actually. ‘Live’ can be both a verb* or an adjective**, and ‘lives’ can be both a form of the verb ‘live’*** or a noun****.
*The present continuous form for all person and number combinations except third-person singular.
**As in a “live wire” (meaning electrically energized), or “We’ve got a live one here!’
***The missing third-person singular active continuous form of ‘live’.
****Plural form of ‘life’.
Live as an adjective or a noun is also common in music. (Did you catch Sabbath’s last live with Ian Gillan? Too bad they didn’t record a live album with him, he still had it back then, even if the mix on Born Again was a complete let down.)
> I’m a big believer in the idea that the Deus Ex series should be like Final Fantasy: The games all draw from similar thematic elements and plots, featuring recurring character names and relationships.
I feel like more games franchises should be like this.
Or you could say it’s a spiritual successor and just title the game Pandora’s Gun
Yeah, sadly I’m not sure the Deus Ex name has enough cachet to be worth placing on a reboot.
The Zelda series was doing just fine in this vein, until Nintendo eventually caved to fan pressure to arrange every instalment in a canonical timeline, more than a dozen games in. The results were.. headache inducing, to say the least.
Well, the Zelda games had established a lot of links between them before the timeline was published.
Perhaps links between different timelines, which is different to stories existing in the same timeline.
I know there are people who chart every crossover ever to great some interconnected multiverse of stories, but most people don’t see a crossover episode as proof that two worlds are completely entwined canonically.
Boooooooooo!
Quite a few links to the past, even.
I miss spiritual successors. Everything is a reboot now to capitalize on existing name brands, but there’s so much more freedom in creating a new setting that’s just inspired by something you like. Wasteland to Fallout is always my go-to example, and I really wish Bethesda had just done a spiritual sequel to Fallout instead of going to 3.
That said, going the Final Fantasy route is a nice middleground. It’s probably not appropriate for every IP, but I think Deus Ex is a good candidate for it. The series has really been more about a kind of idea rather than the actual mechanics of the specific setting or JC Denton/Adam Jensen in particular.
I fundamentally disagree that Deus Ex: Mankind Divided lost its way. It was my game of the year in 2016 and nothing else that came out that year was as good as it was.
Prague is one of my favourite gaming levels ever. But the game did feel unfinished, and it did seem to be the point where Deus Ex stopped feeling current in discussion.
I don’t see how those two statements have to be mutually exclusive. You can have a game that’s very very good in many ways, and still have some major thematic or plot issues.
Thumbs up on the premise of the series. Deus Ex is one of the vanishingly few series where I would welcome a full reboot over a continuation of the original canon, for all the reasons you state. It never felt like a story that needed a sequel to me, much less a bunch of prequels.
Also, if a modern narrative-focused series is allowed to straight-facedly name its upcoming installment ‘Dreadwolf’, I don’t see why Pandora’s Gun shouldn’t get a pass.
Agree on the need for the reboot. I think the timeframe that’s interesting is the period between “Augments are just starting to make their way into society, and society doesn’t know how to adjust to them” and “Augments have divided the world into haves and have nots.” Earlier than that, and there’s no role for augments. Much later than that, and augments are just a ubiquitous part of the setting vs. a major source of conflict. Nothing against cyborg fights – just that “holy crap I’m a cyborg!” is less interesting when everyone else is a cyborg too.
One thing I would like to see, by way of exploring the genre, is to back up to the idea that augmentations would be amazing and superior but at a cost. You could show this by actually making cybernetically-upgraded enemies powerful or giving them unique abilities, which the DE series mostly failed to do. I say mostly because they would give bosses ridiculous health pools, or that one lady who had a cloak. But there wasn’t really any difference between “neighborhood thug” and “elite illuminati murder man” in terms of opposition.
Another way might be to have NPC’s react very positively to people with high-quality cybernetics, and to make the enhanced individuals taller, more aesthetically appealing or distinctive, or otherwise make them stand out. The cybernetics are potent and people want them… although there should be questions about whether or not the enhancements are useful for anything but vanity and ego in the end.
If you want to question transhumanism, ask what people are doing with them or what they’re trading away. Show the equivalent of a Youtuber who gets augmentations and looks amazing on camera but behind the scenes is exhausted and wants the “upgrades” gone. Show people basically taking mortgages to improve themselves. Show a stockbroker who has to spend 24/7/365 running his numbers in his head and can’t sleep… ever… because that’s what the job now requires. Or some similar story.
I would like this, I’m tired of the idea that the people with very expensive technology implanted in them to give themselves super powers are the down-trodden ones.
In Human Revolution it wasn’t even rich people who had fallen on hard times because of the augments.
IIRC, Human Revolution’s justification for augmented people being poor was that the company they worked for would pay for them to get augmented. So they get augmented, since if they don’t they’ll get outcompeted by the people who do. But then they get fired and discover that not only do they need to pay back the company for their augs, they also need to pay for Neuropozyne for the rest of their life. And that puts them in the poorhouse real quick.
It’s a classic cyberpunk trope – you gain the power of augments only by literally selling your body to a corporation.
…oh my God, it’s a Student Loans metaphor.
I always found that justification weird. If a company’s paying for augmentations, they’re investing in that employee (like paying for them to get training), and would presumably be invested in keeping them on from a fiscal standpoint. Now sure, people do get fired in the real world for legitimate reasons of bad behavior (or just layoffs due to financial downturns), even employees that the company has invested in…but there are also plenty of people who don’t get laid off. Why is it that pretty much all augmented people seem to end up unemployed, if their augments make them so much more competitive? Why isn’t there a class of gainfully employed and financially successful augmented people? If the reason for getting augments is performance, as stated, then augmented people should be the last to be fired for economic reasons, and the first to be re-hired to new jobs since the new company won’t have to pay those costs again.
I guess my objection is not that augmented people end up unemployed (though I feel like we should see plenty of happily employed ones too), but that they remain unemployed when they should be the most attractive new hires from a cost/benefit scenario, assuming the initial justification about the purpose of getting augmented is true. Unless being augmented makes people across-the-board more aggressive, malicious, or liable to steal from the company or something, then companies are shooting themselves in the foot by paying for these valuable assets, letting them go, and not rehiring them. It makes no fiscal sense. Though maybe “companies doing self-destructive things” is also somewhat of a cyberpunk trope (I’m not overly familiar with the genre, but “reach exceeding grasp” does seem to come up fairly often…).
Considering how specialized work can be, those people could be saddled with “augmentations” that were really only good for a specific job and now that they’ve lost it, the augs have no competitive value whatsoever. So the augs didn’t make them more competitive in an absolute sense, it was just their willingness to get the augs which made them more appealing to their employer at that specific point in time.
Like, maybe that a special forces operative is strongly encouraged to get extensive body augs to be better at their job, only for technology to evolve and they’re stuck with a body that is considered obsolete but that they can’t change and still requires expensive maintenance.
Same if an augmented factory worker becomes more efficient than a robot, lots of them are augmented in response, only for the robot to regain its advantage a few years later.
We don’t see anyone with hyper specialised augmentations though. All the augs are ‘stronger limbs’ or ‘better eyesight’. It’s all supremely transferrable stuff.
And even if a special forces guy gets augs and then the technology is outdated, presumably they’ve been outdated by people with other better augs. In which case there will be plenty of well-off employed aug people even if others have been left behind.
Surely there can’t be that many jobs so hyper-specialized that, once augmented for them and fired, someone can’t find another job? Practically every job would have to be unique for that to happen, but then where are all these hyper-specialized augments coming from? What company is selling exactly one copy of bespoke hand-made augments that can’t possibly be used in any other job? It just makes no sense economically.
I guess my main contention is that it doesn’t work as an equilibrium situation. I could, perhaps, see a transitional period where people are getting augmented to be competitive in jobs which have always been done by humans, but then a few years later their job gets replaced by a robot (I can’t imagine any situation where an augment makes a human more efficient than a pre-existing robot that doesn’t need food, sleep, bathroom, or recreation breaks and can work 24/7). Then—like olde-timey gas street lamp lighters—there’s no place for that skillset/augment combo in the new world. It’s still a situation which I think falls apart under scrutiny* and economics, but that might at least delay the player looking too hard at it.
*Like, sure, it’s cool to augment one of your employees to do the job the forklift used to do, and it might even be slightly more efficient (maybe); but you can train any old Joe Schmoe off the street to use the forklift in a few days, without having to fork over beaucoup bucks to augment a new guy every time the current guys quits or gets fired.
Like, maybe that a special forces operative is strongly encouraged to get extensive body augs to be better at their job, only for technology to evolve and they’re stuck with a body that is considered obsolete but that they can’t change and still requires expensive maintenance.
Like a skul-gun.
It would be a downer to be loaded with augmentations that no longer get software updates and are generally as obsolete as a Pentium III.
Yes, exactly! There’s a huge downside to technology, especially when you rely on it. They tried to address this a little bit, but it could have gone so much further. Hoping Shamus will talk about this in this series, seeing how he talked about the tradeoffs of integrated technology a bit in basically all of his books.
Oh man, the downsides practically write themselves. Just extrapolate current software frustrations 20 minutes into the future (like, of course early cyberware software is going to have problems):
“We know you’re in the middle of a desperate fight, but patch 0.54.05.003f just dropped for your Bionic Eyes™ and they really need to reboot right now. Blink once to accept and initiate reboot.”
“Sorry, it looks like someone hacked your Mark II CyberArm with a security hole that’s been in the software undiscovered for 5 years and is making you slap yourself silly with it. We recommend powering it off until a patch can be distributed, and apologize for the disturbance.”
“Based on telemetry from your GPS-equipped Smart Foot®, we notice you’ve been traversing some shady parts of town recently. Would you be interested in purchasing some of our Personal Bodyguard services?”
I always thought a cyberpunk augments world would have something like a Curious Yellow/Curious Blue situation going on, which feels like it could be a really interesting premise.
https://blanu.net/curious_yellow.html
Some of the recent Shadowrun games touch on things like this and I love it.
There’s an optional sidequest in Dragonfall where you can meet some parents who are shopping around for brain enhancements for their son. Not only does this require invasive surgery but will also require repeated surgeries both to upgrade to newer models and to account for the child growing. But surely you understand the need to make the kid be successful so he doesn’t turn out to be a janitor or something (they say to you, who are currently undercover pretending to be a janitor)
This is what I always wanted from the New Deus Ex. I only played Human Revolution so not sure if Mankind Divided touched on it (going off Ubisoft I doubt it) but there’s so much good world building that could be done. The poor labourers can’t compete with augs (must be able to lift 500 pounds at once) so companies are willing to provide them so long as you sign a 20 year contract. Woo indentured servitude. I think the game mostly deals with this.
But then also introduce the rise of Guilds. Your middle class society/trades people who get much more specialized, less bulky augs in order to perform their tasks with greater efficiency and finesse. In fact as they go through schooling they slowly get implanted with their respective career choice augs in order to get a head start learning to use them. Have these guilds prosper and gain prominence as they hoard the tech of their particular trade to keep it from going mainstream or having opposing guilds steal it.
And finally you have the upper echelons of society. These people spare no expense in getting the latest and greatest augs. They’re seamless and barely noticeable. And since this group doesn’t need to worry about working or earning a living have rival factions where you essentially have “pure bloods”. Aristocrats who are obsessed with remaining pure and aug free and look down on the other side. You can even do an “old money” “new money” conflict.
So much to explore and build on but from the small amount I saw it was mostly just aug racism.
Man, as a millennial I would figuratively kill to have job security for the next twenty years. Having to find a new job every few years due to everything being short-term contracts is awful.
Not a fun job or high-paying at all, but the large grocery stores have one of the strongest Unions in the country, meaning you basically have to commit a crime to get fired.
Or the military, but, that one’s got a lot more rules and is also more likely to actually kill you. Although the Navy’s pretty safe. Although I got trapped on a boat with a bunch of sadists and it was the worst experience of my life. So, wouldn’t really recommend it.
The whole thing with the military is that in essence, it’s a job that requires you to kill people (or to be complicit in their killing) under certain circumstances. Depending on your nation’s policies those circumstances might never occur, but you can never be entirely sure.
I am not saying joining the army is immoral. Just that you really have to buy in to the justification of killing people in those specific circumstances in order to be a functioning member of the organisation.
It’s not a job for everyone.
There are positions that minimize that, like cooks. But if someone says “I would kill for job security,” remember there’s a job that is literally that.
i know you’re going for a reboot, but hear me out. An interquel between Mankind Divided and the original. In this one, you are part of the conspiracy, and are actively trying to maintain its secrecy. The first mission could be bad guys are doing bad things, and you and your partner have to go stop them, but the boss has special instructions for you, that your partner, who isn’t in on the conspiracy and would probably be against it if they knew about it, is getting too close to the truth and has to be removed.
For the transhumanism, maybe your character is like Gunther, the last generation of the old augmented with the very conspicuous augmentations being sidelined for the next gen augments like Paul Denton, who can do what you can but better, and are less obviously augmented, and you end up going to ever more risky plans to prove you can still keep up with the new hotness. Maybe draw parallels with how a certain fruit themed company is pumping out a new phone every six months, and people are expected to just discard their old ones, even if they would still remain useful for years to come.
So your interquel would be a game version of the Inside Job cartoon?
The not-too early stages of the colonization of the solar system would make a great & fresh setting. Allows for nice visuals, and all the cyberpunk tropes you might want. Evil corporations/governments experimenting with human modifications, biotech and nano tech. Colonies struggling for independence and resources. AI technology that may or may not have escaped into the wild.
But if they want to see any of my money they better stay clear from close parallels to current politics.
Pull an Ubisoft? Pull a Ubisoft. A Ubisoft? An Ubisoft. I was trying to figure out why the “an” article doesn’t make sense in my head, and then finally realized that I’ve always pronounced it YOU-bee-soft instead of OO-bee-soft.
Anyway.
Hyped for this series!
My understanding is that you use “an” when the word starts with a vowel sound. So it would be “an” in either case.
That said, I think of it as forgoing the diphthong since there is no umlaut, so OO-bee-soft seems correct.
If pronouncing it like “you-bee-soft” it’s not starting with a vowel sound, though. You wouldn’t say “an yacht” or “an yak”.
(I also defaulted to the “you” pronunciation at first)
Pretty much only ever going to come up with U’s, or words with silent consonants. “An usage limit.” “A honest opinion.” Sounds wrong.
One particularly fun example is “historic”, whose “h” may or may not be silent depending on which variant of English you’re talking about.
Fun fact: “a herb” and “an herb” are both completely correct depending on where you grew up and learned English!
I blame the Normans.
Well actually it is pronounced… Ubisoft. But for some reason in English most vowels are different. My name: Ruben is pronounced the same in most languages. Except native English speakers who call me “Roeben” to give the Dutch transliteration.
In English the vowels are different even from what they used to be more than ~500 years ago thanks to the Great Vowel Shift…which happened just about the same time as/slightly after spelling was starting to be standardized, which is why English spelling is such a mess: it was developed for a totally different set of vowel pronunciations.
That’s only one of the many, many reasons English spelling is a mess. Webster attempting to de-Anglicize American spelling, Englishmen intentionally copying continental spellings for cognates, and general thievery all help explain why the spelling bee is a phenomenon nearly unique to English.
I said it before, and I’ll say it again – the Shamus content I love most is about narrative and “What I would have done as a writer”.
Not only is it really compelling thanks to his unique style of writing, but it’s way more constructive and interesting than the usual fair of “LOL, this sucks, these devs are the fucking worst!”
I think an interesting way to approach the conspiracy theory aspect is to make it not only true, but also used for benevolent goal. What if microwave really let the government spy on people, but they use the information to suppress crime (of all kind, bank that let people avoid tax have microwave in them too). You’d start by finding out the conspiracy trough some of the people who abuse the system but would then slowly find out that most of the use are for the beneficial purpose. You’d be left with the choice to expose the system, risking a return to crime and possibly craze conspiracy theory nutz taking over government (they were right about microwave but they still have all kinds of crazy non sense idea) or letting the government/Illuminati spy on people, with occasional abuse.
Otherwise, for the rest of the game, I personally quite liked the hub area and I’d gladly sacrifice 2 level for one medium hub. Let you return to it after every level, slowly let you explore new area trough new powers and, more importantly, let you directly see the change you make in the world. Taking the “microwave stop crime” idea, if you were to dismantle and expose the system at some point in the game, you’d come back to a hub area full of massive protest/riot, whereas if you keep the system everything would be calm, but maybe your safehouse as being destroyed by the Illuminati since they spied on you and found out where it was.
Oh good, I’m not the only person who says this.
I’ve never even read The Mote in God’s Eye and I still use the expression.
It’s a minor plot point in the sequel that the expression was floating around, independent of its source. Presumably inspired by the authors discovering just that happening.
Huh, that mention of how you’re nuking discussion of current conspiracy theories because you don’t want Google to notice got me wondering when the Internet turned into a cosmic horror setting.
Cue astronauts meme
“Wait, the internet is a cosmic horror?”
“Always has been”
i) Sudan is probably a terrible place to have manufacturing
ii) Considering what we got from phasing out child labor, is child labor really a bad practice? Our alternative, mandatory schooling, where they spend time with university trained education majors, who are unionized /and/ work for a national bureaucracy is a nation of c 330 milllion. The teacher’s work place is like nothing else in American business, their training is an empty credential, and it can be shown that Education research is intellectually bankrupt. (Soft proof on this last point is to note that the experimental theory of Education implies that you can do statistical process control on that sort of process involving humans. But, when you look at why SPC works for fabricating, say, a part out of steel, it has to do with the defects in the material, that it is valid to look at them statistically, and what processing stages A, B, C, and D result in when you have initial feedstock defect assumptions, 1, 2, and 3. etc. This is because a chunk of steel is simple in the number of ‘state spaces’ it can have, and in being measureable. Humans are rather more difficult to measure, and broader in state spaces. You can fit a fourier series to whatever measurements you take of humans, but it is an open question and deeply relevant whether your methodology is so screwed up that you are basically working with randomly generated noise.)
Anyway, we may have by accident found our way into a situation where the teachers employed by public schools are almost the worst possible influences on children that we can possibly scrape up.
Primary and secondary teachers could care less about adult unemployment resulting from them giving terrible advice and role modeling. Some tertiary instructors could care less. Some of them do care, but how tertiary instructors have careers is still wildly different from how early career graduates have careers, and the instructors have no idea what the answers are for the latest HR bizzarro world dysfunction.
The schooling paradigm where you socialize only with classmates, and strictly listen to, and only to, instructors is wildly dysfunctional in the actual adult world, and also trends towards creating rote thinking ‘scholars’ who are not capable of tackling real world problems. One room multi-grade schools, and child labor in very intensive agricultural work would both have produced less dysfunctionally narrow cohorts of adult. Unemployment is super sucky for mental health. Unemployment that results from a failure of instructors to provide mental tools, and a failure to socialize enough outside of cohort to pick up or reverse engineer the missing tools from cohorts who are deficient in different ways can be a result of public school crippling students who spent their time there. And resulting suicide rate can be reported in various ways in the national statistics.
Hundreds die each year, and hundreds more are maimed might actually be an improvement. Arguing that it is, or is not an improvement, could be a statistical inference looking at US and Sudan numbers, etc. The wealth in US and Sudan is not the same, which creates a difference in practical available healthcare, which could change expected value for death rate and medical impairment rate for people between the age of 10 and 20 in the two sets of cultures/populations.
iii) If a country is bad enough, terrible conditions can be an improvement.
iv) We screw over Americans by pushing jobs over seas with regulatory costs. If the hypothetical jeans sweat shop would actually be an improvement over the time we forcibly steal from our children, some of the employment laws contributing to pushing that activity overseas are bullshit.
Any argument with this screed is pretty rapidly going to run into the no politics rule, but way to argue for child labor.
I hope it doesn’t violate the no-politics rule to say that most historical studies of child labour fail to look at it from a historical perspective and not treat it as an obvious evil.
I appreciate everyone being polite about something that was no doubt pretty provocative. There could be an interesting discussion here, but let’s just call this topic out-of-scope for the site and move on.
Yeah, Zoolander was an interesting movie.
As the son of a primary school teacher, I’d like to invite you to go f*ck yourself.
You think the people who go into teaching are terrible role models who don’t give a crap about children? Have you met a teacher? Chronically underpaid, underappreciated, could likely make more money doing almost anything else. People go into teaching because they’re passionate about it and truly care. There’s no other reason to.
Aw. I was so proud of everyone for keeping a cool head. And then you had to go and throw the first punch.
Thread closed.
A downside of your moderation style is not looking at the initial post and seeing it as the first punch.
There’s a huge difference between stating a controversial opinion, and telling someone “fuck you”.
I mean, this is why I ban politics. Some people see an opinion that offends them and conclude that they’re no longer responsible for their behavior. “Oh he said something that made me mad so I told him to go fuck himself!” If I let people talk politics, then it’ll be a non-stop torrent of people telling each other to fuck off.
The original post was a controversial opinion, handled indelicately, from a new visitor. Ideally I should have stepped in right there and headed this off. But I’m not always around, and so I hope people will stay cool until I can show up and deal with things.
I disagree with one statement here: “a controversial opinion, handled indelicately”. The following was literally stated in the original post:
“X are almost the worst possible influences on children that we can possibly scrape up.”
This is a very inflammatory statement, regardless of who X is. It is very hard to not see this as a vicious personal attack on X.
But I agree that doesn’t warrant the use of phrases as “go fuck yourself” in response.
I like how Shamus is subconsciously getting into the role of someone pitching an idea: “I’ve never worked on a AAA project before…”
You’re not working on an AAA project now either, Shamus!
Once a roleplayer, …
Perhaps a fun twist on the conspiracy theory angle: Bugsnax released on Steam recently with a new free DLC expansion, wherein you can find recordings of a member of the secret society that was hinted at in the original game. In it he’s audibly frustrated when asked if it’s part of the “Grumpnati”, and that people keep mixing up his secret organization with them, when they’re just “made-up movie nonsense.” But hey, “We’re a secret society, we can’t just go around correcting everyone who makes that mistake.” Thus the idea might be that there’s hints of a shadowy organization running the world (and I guess the player will expect it based on being a Deus Ex game), but it turns the Illuminati ultimately are just a myth, and it’s actually, I dunno, the International Plumber’s Society that’s running world events or something.
If we’re doing explicitly made-up conspiracy theories, you gotta have Birds Aren’t Real, the parody conspiracy that claims that birds are not biological organisms descended from T-rexes and velociraptors, but complex spy drones invented by the government to surveil you. I mean come on guys, have you ever seen a baby pigeon?
I’m also partial to the practice of adults treating other adults denying the existence of Santa Claus as if they are, in fact, cranks: you’re telling me there’s a global conspiracy to lie to kids, and every American president is in on it but also your parents, but they only ever lie about where a specific kind of gift comes from, not even all gifts, just one? And that’s all they do with that power? Yeah okay sure buddy
I bet you could also make a setting based on, like, ludicrous technology claims, like a world where Theranos machines can actually measure all your DNA with a single drop of blood, or where everyone gets around via Hyperloops, or where Juicero… well I don’t know what Juicero was actually claiming, but it does that now!
(Not super relevant, but I loved Slatestarcodex’s Prospiracy Theories, especially the Four-In-One Sphere Earth Theory. Maybe that could be something.)
((Governments are at the mercy of Bitcoin, lest they lose access to the world’s currency.))
While we’re linking not terribly relevant Slatestarcodex (well, the new version), the mention of fun conspiracy theories reminded me of the idea of Tartaria, the basis of this post: the idea that we don’t build good looking buildings anymore because those are actually the ruins of a previous civilization.
Basically true.
If we’re having fun with the ideas, you could have some ambiguity as to whether the Birds Aren’t Real one is true or not for this new Deus Ex universe by showing some birds act strangely. Shamus mentioned he wanted the game to be sort of absurd, so depending on how much we’re leaning into that tone and sense of humour, there’s either more or less room for throwing in lines and details that make the player and/or player-character start doubting their certainties against the theory, and start wondering if it’s actually true (in the game). To play it straight/serious seems like the wrong approach to me. A comedic journey down the mad rabbit hole fits it better, I think.
Maybe also have a humorously passionate back-and-forth between characters in and outside the camp of “dinosaurs had feathers”. (The Mitchells vs the Machines sort of included this, but didn’t tackle the idea in a conspiratorial manner, but rather just as a comedic clash of interests/beliefs between two children.)
I also love the Santa Claus one. Seen a fair few of hilarious memes which use some inspired parodic argumentation around that. Perhaps do something similar and mix it with the evil robot Santa from Futurama, since this is a future sci-fi / cyberpunk setting. Could also do conspiracies around robots and A.I. and some (unproven) ways digital technology effects us. Those seem pretty safe.
Maybe do a mockery of the constantly changing diets we should be going on. (That’s like to stir up some people, though.) But put a spin on it in relation to cyber enhancements (like if you get X implant and eat Y food you increase your capacity to tap into your dormant telepathic abilities, or something).
There’s absolutely an Off Switch for children, but The Man is keeping it from the everyday parents, and only the elites get to know about it and use it.
Isn’t that just hiring a nanny?
That’s what ((they)) want you to think.
Double parentheses are political- look, I know this sounds ridiculous, but multiple parentheses around words like “them” or names are used by antisemites to indicate that the “them” in question is Jewish. I wouldn’t use the double parens on here even for a joke, it feels like it’s getting a bit too close to the line, to me.
But birds aren’t descended from T-rexes or velociraptors. That’s like saying dogs are descended from lions.
This seems like a good start already. I’m excited for how this pitch will evolve.
You’ve probably considered what I’m about to say, but I’ll just add my two cents anyway, on the off-chance it might help in some regard:
Hacker-based conspiracies seem like a safe bet, if you want to stay nearer the neutral zone between ideologies, as they tend to go after just about everyone. You can make up a hacker or faction of hackers (based on one in real life or from another work like Laughing Man from GitS: S.A.C., or more original than that). It’s down to their activities and agenda(s) after that. Maybe spice it up by having competing hackers with opposing agenda(s); or more complexly, the same goals but misreadings of each other’s actions causes them to conflict with each other, despite that. Hacking’s also kind of a staple in a lot of cyberpunk and sci-fi settings.
Maybe use the whole GS hedge fund thing as inspiration for something similar. You could also take some cues from X-Files and Mr. Robot and Stand Alone Complex. There’s got to be something there that could be shaped into something different and safe enough, but still interesting. (Although Mr. Robot might be a bit of a hot one.) Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood also had a conspiracy that doesn’t seem to have stirred up (many) controversial responses. It revolved around a plot to
sacrifice millions of people so the Big Bad could ascend to godhood.If you’re going for fun and humorous conspiracies, try thinking in terms of heists. Particularly food heists. (There’s a plethora of such events that have actually occurred to draw from, should you be so inclined.) Or if you can go weirder about what’s stolen (and how), even better. If you can think back on individual-type ludicrous things you’ve seen that got you to laugh and that you wouldn’t have believed had you been told instead, that could be some good fuel for the narrative fire, too.
Just some suggestions. I’m sure you’ve already come up with better ones.
The idea of a Stand Alone Complex sounds like it would be really great for a game. Like, the whole concept is that there’s nobody actually controlling the conspiracy, it’s just people imitating something they think is cool. Like how people turned the Guy Fawkes mask into the Anonymous logo. It’s perfect for a game where you want the cool aesthetic of a conspiracy but you don’t necessarily want to point fingers at some particular bad guy.
And like, you could turn it into a ripped-from-the-headlines thing about social media and internet anonymity, but you could also just not do that and have it as a neat aesthetic for your conspiracy.
Didn’t a real conspiracy take advantage of that to obfuscate itself though ?
That just sounds like another cool layer to it; starts out incidental and then someone opportunistic takes the reins.
I love that idea. It could also be considered somewhat subversive for a Deus Ex game too, as they seem to operate under the “Yes, it’s all true, and it’s these guys behind it” approach (nearly) all the time.
Not really, HR straight up had the heads of the conspiracy admit that “the Illuminati” is just branding that works at getting a certain type of rich person to support you, implying that the original DX Illuminati had simply bought into their own hype
I’m sorry to clog up the comments with total obsession with the conspiratorial aspect of the game, but I can’t help it! That’s where my train of thought kept taking me. So here are some more ideas for conspiracies and fun theories from characters and/or events in-game that can be true, ambiguous, or just simply amusingly ridiculous flavour text:
1. X character was (believed to be) turned into a horse / wolf / car / pencil.
2. X character is secretly a vampire / werewolf / merman / robot / ninja / (regenerating) immortal.
3. X character is actually secretly Y character.
4. X character was believed to be killed by Y character, but it was actually Z character (and maybe also other characters had intended/attempted their own assassination plots at the same time).
5. A character who is very obviously dead/killed is believed to still be alive (one or a number of characters have speculation-based conversations around this that raises some amusing ideas as to how they survived).
6. There’s a civil war brewing between apparently peaceful factions/corporations.
7. There’s a secret plot that’s being going on for who knows how long in keeping X crime/plot/malignant enterprise/grand truth hush-hush (e.g. there’s a digital god playing puppeteer from the satellites above the planet, and a deal was made a long time ago with some humans to keep it secret for whatever reason(s) and in return they’re allowed survival and granted bonus benefits like high-ranking powerful positions and expanded lifespans with a promise of immortality); people have been assassinated over uncovering or coming close to the truth.
8. A debt scheme. (Someone is really good at moving and hiding money and investments, bartering, etc. No one’s sure or knows who, though. Could maybe make for an interesting sidequest where you play detective and piece together the subtle clues where they slipped up and catch them in the end, but then after listening to their side (and possibly charisma) you have a choice to turn them in to X (or Y or Z), kill them, blackmail them and let them go, or let them go sans underhanded threat.)
9. Speculation from characters about how X character(s) achieved their great power via time travel. Maybe you get the option to ask about it when/if you confront them and they go, “What? No. What?” or affirm sardonically, or whatever. Maybe you can use an implant ability to make them believe that they did do it, somehow.
10. A conspiracy around the timing of someone’s death/murder (e.g. a detective, a bystander who saw too much, an employee trying to go rogue). Who was the real culprit? What was the actual reason behind the killing? What did the person know that the murderer want covered up? (Basic stuff, I know. But it’s not hard to make more complex and funny.)
11. Various conspiracies regarding why certain factions are allied or in conflict with each other.
12. A conspiracy around clones/cloning. (Perhaps competing companies have a deeper competition not made known to the public where they’re in a sort of space race with each other… but with cloning technology instead of rockets.)
13. A conspiracy around teleportation technology, or some other mode of transportation. (Assuming it exists in this world. I can see why you wouldn’t want it in there, as it can easily cause problems. Though perhaps that could be smoothed over by it being only made available to the rich or whatever. Anyway, the conspiracy or plot could be to do with “malfunctions” where people are killed via transportation or sent somewhere they shouldn’t be sent aren’t malfunctions but deliberate tampering from an untraceable source, and it’s a shadow group/organization behind it for whatever reason. Maybe they’re targets form a pattern of people that were a threat to them in one way or another, like they wouldn’t sign deals they needed them to sign or something.)
14. A conspiracy concerning the nature of the relationship between two celebrities/powerful people; Friends? Lovers? Masked enemies? Alien in disguise and their pet human?
15. A conspiracy that someone/the Powers That Be plan to awaken some great beast or mythological creature for more power and/or out of well-hidden fanatic worship or something.
16. The lizard people conspiracy PLEASE (it would help explain why Human Revolution was so yellow; Jk. It doesn’t have to be true, of course. The immediate similar example to this that comes to mind is They Live.). ***
17. X character ate Y character with or without knowing beforehand (maybe they partook of them intentionally to gain immortality; maybe someone tricked them into ingesting them to improve their telepathic abilities and/or somehow drug them to make them more susceptible to suggestion and manipulation).
18. Dragons are real, but locked away; maybe they’re in the core of the planet or what really causes volcanic activity, etc. Maybe the government is keeping them under wraps because they don’t want the hassle of animal rights’ activists AND having to deal with potential apocalypse-inducers roaming around the skies. (This might be too fantastical for the sci-fi setting, though.)
19. Maybe some conspiracies to do with the Simulation Theory (e.g. A theory from someone that they “took the wrong pill”, making a sly reference to The Matrix while amusingly jabbering a somewhat doubt-inducing belief about being in a Simulation and unable to escape).
20. Theories around shapeshifters.
21. Theories around magic and wizards.
22. Theories around who mysterious NPC is (e.g. gravediggers and groundskeeper types spring to mind, but theoretically any occupational template could work).
23. X character didn’t die by [insert means] but instead through [insert other means] (e.g. They didn’t die by an incurable disease, but were actually poisoned over time in small doses by a borderline-impossible-to-detect drug in their tea.)
24. There are people who can control shadow monsters and use them to assassinate their enemies. (Or so one bum in a back alley believes, anyway.)
25. X implant is designed to mess with your brain in Y way(s) when you fall asleep (e.g. mind control, subliminal influence to buy certain products, etc.). I like this one a lot, because it plays closer to home with the cybernetics and transhumanism aspects. ***
26. A conspiracy about people’s memories being wiped. (Dark City comes to mind, though I wouldn’t go that far. Maybe it’s a bunk theory someone has that gets the player wondering. But it could also be partially true, in the sense that maybe there’s one person going around wiping only select individuals memories to avoid getting caught or something. (There’s a lot of potential for this one, I think.) ***
27. A conspiracy about their being a few telepaths enslaved by The Powers That Be to predict business/economic futures and change them by stealing the ideas for themselves (somewhat of a twist on Minority Report, you could say. Or basically what Biff Tannen did in BttF2.). I can see it creating issues, though, but could be a fun one if the kinks can be worked out.
28. Skinchanger conspiracies or theories where a character/bunch of NPCs are paranoid that their friends and family (or local strangers/acquaintances) were killed and replaced by doppelgangers/creatures wearing their skins (and maybe they fervently believe that The Corporation™ is behind it). Again, could make it a bunk theory instead of a real conspiracy in the game, or go the route of there being some truth to the idea and have an interesting twist reveal.
29. Maybe go the Soylent Green route, or try a different, less dark food industry conspiracy?
30. Conspiracies in the form of (throwaway) references/jokes, perhaps? e.g. “They harnessed time travel by nailing the exact frequency to microwave a banana!” (Steins;Gate).
31. Theories about memes, YouTube parallels, the rise of (certain) corporations, the cycle of prudence and degeneracy, the cycle of war and peace, the greater meaning and power of a particular shape/pattern that becomes increasingly more noticeable and prominent once acknowledged and has disturbing effects and implications on the world somehow (e.g. spirals from Uzumaki).
32. And lastly, one of my favourites, a conspiracy to do with the fashion industry. Why does everyone wear the same style of clothing (e.g. trenchcoats / dark apparel only)? Or why is one particular brand so popular (in so many locations and across different cultures)? Perhaps it’s a universal mandate across job sectors and public laws. Perhaps it’s a side effect of a common implant (you feel a strange compulsion to buy and wear them, whilst feeling disgust or aversion to all other types). Of course, feel free to alter it however you wish, but if you want a fun and sort of unsettling conspiracy in a sci-fi setting like a Deus Ex reboot, I think this could be a neat avenue to go down.
Okay, I think that’s more than plenty. Apologies again for the barrage of spitballs.
Tangentially, did something happen to the spoiler tags, or have they always been that hard to read? On Chrome, currently highlighting the spoiler makes it “brown” on top of “slightly darker brown”. I very nearly can’t read it at all
Looks like this could be improved with a bit of CSS:
strike::selection { color: white; }
strike::moz-selection { color: white; }
The question I have is, what made Deus Ex relevant to modern gaming in a way that classics like System Shock and Syndicate haven’t managed?
1) The idea of being able to do anything. Attack your “employers,” behave so immorally the evil supercomputer calls you out on it, go out of your way to arrest terrorists non-lethally, sneak using the power of swimming.
Deus Ex wasn’t quite as brilliant as Metal Gear, but the difference between this and Doom made people sit up and take notice.
2) Could the original Deus Ex be made today? Goodness no. Even taken straight none of the Grey Death/ Ambrosia elements would be permitted by a AAA company. I suspect there would be unprecedented pressure for Steam to drop it. Sure, you can get a nice focus tested conspiracy, but this was the problem that made all the sequels far less interesting. They simply wouldn’t take risks with what they wanted to say.
3) So if you can’t touch on modern conspiracies without making things look either contrived or controversial, why not talk about oveet problems instead? Make the game seemingly about a social media conspiracy led by evil corporations- only to reveal that the corporations were frantically trying to tamp down antisocial behavior at the behest of legitimate government, at which point broad-based (and totally unrecognizable) political cults blast apart the fabric of global society.
The fault is not in the Illuminati, but in ourselves. Although I am tickled by any game with an ending suggesting that “the only way to stop a bad guy conspiracy is a good guy conspiracy!”
I feel asleep.
You have to admit: the sheer variety of approaches in MGSV are absolutely staggering, even and especially when they’re flat out absurd.
Hang on, I thought we were talking about Metal Gear for the NES. Comparing Deus Ex to MG is like comparing Citizen Kane to Pink Flamingos.
But I enjoy it! Besides, both games reward tactical espionage action (especially non-lethal) while talking about conspiracies. I compare MGSV to the original Deus Ex because they’re arguably the peak of their series, especially in terms of wildly divergent gameplay.
Very interested to see where you’re going with this! I loved the original Deus Ex, though more for the gameplay than the conspiracy-kitchen-sink story. For me the most important aspect by far was the amount of freedom the game gives you – I was blown away when I realised that Paul Denton’s ‘storyline death’ could be completely averted, for example. Even now I can’t think of many other games that are this flexible with the basic plot.
Adding my voice to the chorus of interest. There are a couple of things you didn’t mention in your blueprint that I feel are absolutely essential to a Deus Ex game. Perhaps you didn’t mention them because they are more gameplay than story, but I feel they bear mentioning:
Tactical choice in overcoming challenges. You mentioned player choice with regard to branching paths in the storyline, but I think even more critical is that any particular obstacle has multiple paths to overcome it. Looking for a way into a base? You can shoot, talk, sneak, or hack your way in, or do some exploring and find a hidden or alternate route with your augs. The first Deus Ex in particular was great about this.
Character building. While so many games these days (too many, in my opinion) have some kind of RPG-lite character building and upgrade elements to them, Deus Ex has always had this in the form of augs and, in the original, skills. Honestly, I don’t think any of the games fully exploited this to provide variety and replay, since there was often a pretty clear best-choice for any given aug slot or skills. Who the hell took Environmental Training?
Yes, and the game would actually react properly to what you chose to do. If you snuck into an enemy base rather than slaughtering everyone, other characters would recognise this, and in some cases it would change their opinion of J.C. Obviously there were some practical limitations to what you could do in gameplay, but it really made you feel like almost anything was possible.
Having never Deus-ed an Ex in my life, I have no strong opinions about what a Deus Ex reboot should look like. But I have X-ed a COM or two, so it seems to me that you can make reboot that isn’t necessarily all that much like the game that inspired it and, if it’s good enough, it’ll still sell like proverbial hotcakes. So I guess I wouldn’t worry too much about faithfully recreating all aspects of either the original game or Human Revolution in your hypothetical reboot, Shamus. As long as people can look at the two and go “Yeah, that’s kinda the same thing,” I figure you’re good. You might upset a few hypothetical hardcore fans, but I’m pretty sure there aren’t enough of those to sustain the franchise anyway.
It’s probably advisable for him to do that for the sake of his sanity and “shipping” this hypothetical game. But part of what makes this a difficult franchise to tackle is that there is no consensus on what’s similar enough – and not to be snobbish, but maybe even good enough – to qualify for the DX title.
Invisible War is the most similar to the first one IMO, but it’s often gets the most disdain. Despite being a purer genetic successor to the first game (if coming out stunted and runty), nobody really likes giving it that crown.
HR and MD were bred from the same stock and have a consistency between them, but both feel significantly different from the first two entries in terms of mechanics and tone that they feel wholly distinct to me. Are they still Deus Ex? Well… yeah, sure. But kinda not really, to me?
Personally I’m looking forward to a return to the original’s game-length musical numbers.
(…epilepsy warning? Probably an epilepsy warning. Maybe NSFW too, why not.)
Counterpoint, that is *the* reason why I dropped Final Fantasy entirely.
I liked FF1 on the Nintendo. It had player picked classes rather than actual characters. I loved FF2 on the SNES. I was hyped to see more with those characters in that world. FF went in a different direction. That franchise will forever be the embodiment of disappointment made manifest for me. Which is kind of complaint and kind of not. Would FF have been more popular or made more money if they had done what I wanted from the franchise? Nope. Not a chance. Doesn’t change how I feel though.
I think the plan for “Pandora’s Gun” is a good one. I don’t know how sacrosanct the characters and settings are. I would guess not much. Mainly I just wanted to add in my pointless “well actually”.
At the same time, as someone who started with 13, I would never have considered playing a FF game if I had to crawl my way through at least 12 games’ worth of story.
Shamus –
I’m so glad that you’re feeling better, and I’m excited about this new serious. Deus Ex is one of my favorite games, and you are one of my favorite writers!
By the way, if you have not already heard about this, there is now a mod available that allows you to play a female protagonist in the original Deus Ex with all new voice acting! I’ve tried it, and it’s quite impressive!
The Lay D Denton Project
Just to throw my hat in the ring for title here – Pandora’s Clocks is similarly ridiculous with the advantage of sounding a lot like Pandora’s Box, and I feel like you can do a lot with running out of time/turning back time/avoiding a deadline stuff.
Ross Scott from Accursed Farms? Either him, or Hbomber.
I haven’t watched HBG’s video on it, yet the quote is familiar to me. I am almost convinced it was Ross Scott who said it. Though, I think he might have been quoting someone else.
Chris’s Errant Signal video calls it both smart and disposable. It wouldn’t surprise me if he’d said that ‘smart pretending to be stupid’ line sometime during the Spoiler Warning playthrough of Deus Ex HR. But that’s a lot of video to try to comb through.
I’m surprised nobody’s mentioned it, but I can’t help but notice how Cyberpunk 2077 does so much of what you want from a Deus Ex game.
Not just in setting, theme, tone, character and plot, but on a gameplay level, too.
In every capacity, right down to the fairly useless upgrades to combat swimming- believe me, I NOTICED.
Cyberpunk 2077 just might be my all-time favorite, and I thought Kingdom Come: Deliverance along with Metal Gear Solid V would be hard acts to follow.
I follow a YouTube account called Meme Analysis, guys does a lot of Freudian/Jungian/occult analysis of pop culture. One of my favorite works of his is his Theory of Conspiracy: humanity is obsessed with certain things, and those obsessions will be expressed, someway, somehow. It used to be pantheonic gods, then it was unseen demonic influence within Christendom, now it is conspiracy theory. It’s a really useful lens for categorizing (and then generating) different kinds of conspiracies. Could be a boon for this project!
https://memeanalysis.com/theoryofconspiracy
For example, if you combined Solar (“for some supposed greater good”) and Virgo (the particulars of a system, erroneously analyzed), you might get “the moon landing was a hoax because the US government wanted everyone to believe they’d beaten the Soviets, it was all a soundstage, why is the flag waving if there’s no wind?”
I even went down each list and found parallels for nearly every item in schoolyard rumors (I’m sure I’m the only person who wants Bully but with cyborgs). For example, the Jovian (rich elites enjoying their wealth and enjoying keeping you from it) conspiracy would be how you went to a few parties, but you always heard there was a more intense party with harder drugs just in the next room, but it was supposedly invite-only, and no one you talked to seemed to know who was invited or not. Whether that party happened or not isn’t the point: the point is that you felt like not only were you missing out on the finer things in life, but those things were being kept from you by those who had them.
I just wish we had a reworked, expanded, and more importantly, finished “The Fall” story-line. I think it was such a wast of potential there to “expand the Deus Ex universe” by telling the story of those other characters.
For the globe-spanning adventure aspect, I am curious what you and others think would be some good choices for locations to visit. A good starting point might be to step away from previously visited ones. And what to take their place? France? Portugal? Japan? Turkey?
For the transhumanism aspect, perhaps focus on the utility of the cybernetic enhancements in healing bodies and minds and improving human lives, with the prospect of immortality being heavily marked as right around the corner, contrasted against planned obsolescence and false promises to manipulate the masses into buying into a pipe dream (for whatever reasons; could be an investment scam to fund the immortality project for the select few in power) and with the (common) implants people use to get by in their day-to-day lives relying on an increasingly rare resource, or the like. I don’t know if the logistics could be made to add up, nor if such ideas would work well in a partial RPG narrative game, but if we want to steer away from identity-emphasized subject matter to do with the core concept of living in a transhumanistic world, then this might be a viable road to go down.
Who’s to say it even needs to take place on Earth? A space station or space colony would be an interesting setting, especially when in the real world private corporations are now at the forefront of space travel.
Imagine a Deus Ex set on, say, Mars, where cybernetic enhancements are necessary to deal with the problems of living on Mars like high radiation and low gravity. Maybe the enhanced people are a controlled underclass who can have their cybernetics turned off at any moment, giving whatever company in charge of the colony complete control over them. Or maybe cybernetics are something only the wealthy and powerful can use, meanwhile the rest of the population is confined to cramped subterranean structures to escape the radiation.
Other than that, you could set one literally anywhere. I like that Mankind Divided was set in Prague, because few games are set there, but they could also explore the idea of a less urban environment. Warzones, villages, jungles, maybe even at sea.
Don’t know if the previous games did landmarks, but a black ops base at the bottom of the Grand Canyon feels like it would make for a fun cliff level.
Heh, this is great. It’d make a good gameplay dichotomy – A) get cheap (or free!*) augmentations from your corporate masters with the knowledge that they can literally kill you if you step out of line, or B) ‘jailbreak’ your augmentations at great cost in order to have more freedom. Which path are you willing to take?
*Some strings attatched.
This kind of stuff, this chilling effect, is the sort of thing that modern cyberpunk needs to write about and that past cyberpunk couldn’t imagine.
What if I told you original wifi and microwaves both used the 2.4 GHz unlicensed band? You may even be able to yourself construct an antenna that picks up the wavelengths you desire. Unfortunately, you will also find that the wifi traffic is encrypted. And why would a secret government conspiracy make vulnerable encryption schemes? There are No Such Agencies and no such schemes either. Oh well, stumped again.
(Friends in the military have told me of amusing incidents when their radio monitoring picked up unencrypted mobile phone calls between politicians and their mistresses. But that was in an earlier era.)
Speaking of Q… (Gets vanished by secret government conspiracy and/or Shamus)
No but seriously, to randomly jump back to an interesting comment someone wrote, regarding teleportation/cloning/etc “not being the same person”, isn’t that the “Ship of Theseus” question, just in fast forward?
Or, to put it another way, given the currently accepted theories of quantum physics, particles and antiparticles (including the ones you’re made of) are constantly winking into and out of existence. You’re not the same person you were yesterday. You’re not even the same person you were when you were an inch to the right of where you are now.
I guess my point is, just get in the damn teleporter, we’ve all got places to be. Yeah, maybe you come out a little scrambled, but that happens without teleporters all the time anyway. Sometimes a person has a stroke out of the blue and their personality is completely different afterward. Is it really any different from being annihilated and replaced with a near perfect clone?
Of course, problems still remain when the original wasn’t actually annihilated, because of a paperwork screw up/ancient conspiracy.
TLDR the plot of this game should be that you’re unknowingly a clone of a person who isn’t as dead as was originally thought. Call him… Jason Crust. Or… Jemis Chrisst. We don’t have time for subtlety here!