Hacker News Reader

Comment by wallscratch | Hacker News Reader

Human Revolution was wonderful, but Mankind Divided had such bizarre pacing… I was ~15 hours into Prague, waiting for the transition to the next locale like in all of the other Deus Ex games, and then the story ended… sigh

View on HN

That is because the publisher Square Enix forced the developer Eidos Montreal to split Mankind Divided into two games, and then they canceled the second game. Thankfully the IP and developer has been bought by a holding group that actually knows about gaming, Embracer Group.

Please don’t tell me that you don’t see the irony of the holding group being named “Embracer Group”. It’s literally an antagonist name.

I agree it's a pretty bad name. But they seem to have an okay track record of buying studios and publishers and letting them be. Then again, maybe they are the villains and they're going to one day direct all of this acquired talent to producing the ultimate cash cow live service free to play bullshit game.

The name is tongue-in-cheek. That you're here commenting about them means it worked.

Human Revolution had one of the best gaming preludes. You had no augmentations, and then you get rocked. The opening credits while you're in surgery, chefs kiss. Obligatory "I never asked for this"

Opening credits: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XIqJaT3cvf8

Though this site is under appreciated and less than up to date now they produced a fantastic interview with the director and opening sequence director. The additional images and videos make it really shine.

https://www.artofthetitle.com/title/deus-ex-human-revolution...

> one of the best gaming preludes. You had no augmentations, and then you get rocked. The opening credits while you're in surgery, chefs kiss.

I'm afraid it's been... nine years!

*midge ure plays*

(that's right, you think that's the real bowie you're listening to!?)

Interestingly a few people really dislike the intro to both DXHR and DXMD - and contrast it with the original Deus Ex where you effectively just hop in and start running around liberty island. If they added a skip to those sequences or created a "New Game (post-intro)" option on completion that might have been nice.

Both games definitely feel rushed gameplay and story-wise, I always wonder what they'd look like if they got a bit more love

I thought the mankind divided opening was pretty good as well. The terrorist attack really surprised me, and for a few seconds I felt like I was there.

Deus ex is by far my favourite universe, it's such a shame it isn't better developed.

It's even better with Vangelis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ef4YALlpDmQ

I barely made it past the first 20 minutes before giving up for MD. Somehow the experience was wildly different from the HR despite the mechanics being mostly the same.

One thing I think was a big contributing factor to my enjoyment of the first game was the soundtrack. The first time you enter the Sarif Industries building and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAljZX-9HMI starts playing - chills.

I did the same thing - I was very confused at first. Once you orient yourself though in that initial city and get a bit into it then it becomes very very good. I think I may have been playing years after with all the bugs fixed and the DLC's added and whatnot but I thought they killed it with that game. Still hoping we get another!

I also stop at the tutorial on my first try, then later I tried again, and now I like it more than Human Revolution, it's better in all aspects, except maybe the story for ending abruptly.

I see you Sarif Industries theme and raise you the UNATCO theme. ;)

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JhjkBE3d3Uw&t=17m35s

From memory, that was also the first mirror in the game, and so the first time you saw... yourself (JC).

Isn't there a character creator that lets you choose your skin (and therefore see your "JC Denton") even before the game starts?

> "JC Denton" is said to be a codename, and the player can create JC's true name and pick from a variety of preset appearances.

Hmmm, I don't remember that either—and JC is also sort of a meme with his default appearance (presumably), used as userpics on Youtube and elsewhere. So I guess many just picked the first look offered. Seeing as JC is considered very much a ‘blank character’, there probably wasn't much of a meaningful difference in the choice.

It's easy to miss that you can change the appearance (it's just a couple of little buttons) but you do see his head and shoulders: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iX_YSpI5a9s

I don't remember one, but it's been a few decades.

I don't know which game did it first, but I the first mirror I came across was in Duke Nukem 3D, 4 years before Deus Ex.

The parent commenter means to say that for most of the game in Deus Ex, the player doesn't see the protagonist. (Can't remember if the cutscenes shown him from a third-person view.)

Point! YT confirms there were cutscenes on Liberty Island before.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jnbCwPwJNFY&t=3m30s

So maybe it was the first player-controlled viewing of yourself.

The cutscene experience was funny if one happened to have both legs shot—so JC crawls around for hours, then stands up during a cutscene, and afterwards plops down again and proceeds to crawl to completion of the level.

I believe there may have been an unfortunate GEP gun incident where I found that out.

I kinda miss stuff like that.

Sadly, when things break like that now (looking at you, Bethesda) it usually leaves the game in an unplayable state, versus reverting to a known-good state.

Wow, I completely misread that comment.

Fun fact: afaik many games, starting with Duke Nukem 3D, implement mirrors by just having the entire room built out behind the glass, with duplicates of the objects moving on that side. In DN, with some noclip trickery or something, one can move into the ‘mirror room’, or observe the whole level with the double rooms.

Yes, that's why you need to make such a room when making a map with a mirror in Duke Nukem 3D.

Modern games also do a lot of tricks when it comes to mirrors. Real reflections are expensive. Though they're becoming increasingly common thanks to the ray tracing hardware on recent graphics cards.

As a player I recently noticed that in The Last of Us Part 2, when you're in front of a mirror the windows give off an unnaturally bright light to hide that the outdoors area wasn't reflected.

Michael McCann is a genius and deserves way more credit for Deus Ex than he is given, but he was responsible for at least half of the Mankind Divided soundtrack too.

For years I used a playlist of the soundtracks of Deus Ex: HR and the movie Transcendence on shuffle for working on the PC.

Some of the DLC for Mankind Divided is excellent, though. You should check it out if you haven't.

The worst thing about MD is the stability and bugginess. I recently replayed both, and HR is still (and more-or-less always has been) pretty damn solid.

MD, meanwhile, had intermittent jankiness in the UI including getting itself into states that required a restart to fix, wild swings in framerate, and crashed probably a half-dozen times in my playthrough (which wouldn't be a bad stat for a game in, like, 1999, but is now). I think HR crashed maybe once, but I may be mis-remembering and it was in fact zero times, and that was a much longer play-through.

[EDIT] Oh, one nice touch in MD was how they improved balance on hacking. No more ending the game with 500 pieces of hacking software because it was so easy. No more feeling compelled to hack everything even if you already had a code for it, for the XP. New UI's terrible and (on PC, at least) buggy, though :-(

I played MD recently again, including all the DLCs. It was not unstable or buggy at all. I played under Linux, but am not 100% certain anymore that I played the Linux version and not the Windows version via Proton. In any case, maybe something to test next time you play it.

There is only one DLC I'd call excellent though: A Criminal Past. The others sadly are not great. Desperate Measures might be included now, but is just missing content from the main story, suffering by it being not integrated properly and it saw clearly less design work. System Rift saw even less, it's made cheaply - but not not fun and at least a story of its own. And then there is A Criminal Past, better than some parts of the main game, the only one I'd absolutely recommend.

I’m currently playing it on Windows, 7 or 8 hours in. I’ve had 2 bugs so far that required a restart.

Yeah I've read they planned plenty more but then were pressed to wrap it up asap... still it was a fun game, awesome interior and costume design

In their defense the level of fidelity increases costs, and the franchise ownership doesn't seem as committed as to other brands.

Wait - it ends at Prague? I thought that was the first city? I swear there were lots of locations .....

It does not end in Prague. You leave and come back to Prague a couple of times, each time it’s more locked down and hostile. Finale is weirdly in a convention center in London.

IIRC there are two main hubs and then some throwaway locations. It definitely felt like there was supposed to be more.

I spent around 45 hours there in my first walkthrough, can imagine how did you beat it so fast, but can't understand why.

Playing Mankind Divided made me not want to visit Prague, ever. I guess in a way the game was well designed.

Not sure if this will sway you but the entirety of the MD version of Prague is fictional. Překážka doesn’t exist, the main train station doesn’t look like that, Golem City isn’t a thing, there are no oppressive riot police stalking the streets :-)

The things that put me off Prague aren’t in the game, and likely wouldn’t irritate a tourist

Did playing HR make you want to visit Detroit?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com