more cyberpunk than cyberpunk

August 16, 2023 11:01 AM

After Cyberpunk 2077's rocky launch, it's time to bring back Deus Ex [PC Gamer] “Currently published by Square Enix, the Deus Ex series has been on hiatus since 2016, after the (mostly good) Mankind Divided failed to match sales expectations. But the huge attention and commercial success Cyberpunk has garnered, combined with its equally significant problems, has opened up a window for the series to return. This would really be things coming full circle. Deus Ex essentially served as the template for Cyberpunk 2077's core, boasting the same blend of fighting, sneaking and hacking. It also shares plenty of themes, like body modification and corporate conspiracies. For all intents and purposes, Deus Ex is a cyberpunk game. [...] Deus Ex's superiority is particularly evident when it comes to the RPG side of things. Putting aside the bugs and the technical issues, Cyberpunk's biggest problem is that its RPG systems are either poorly implemented or simply don't work at all.”

• Everything Deus Ex Still Does Better Than Cyberpunk 2077 [Screen Rant]

“Deus Ex is still better than Cyberpunk 2077 for one simple reason: it gives the player agency. Player agency is about giving every player enough interactivity within the game world to affect and change that world. This usually means the player is dropped into a game, given a general objective, and is free to tackle that objective in any way they wish with the tools provided. Unlike Deus Ex, Cyberpunk 2077 allows V to explore Night City, but doesn’t let them interact with it in any meaningful way. There's plenty to admire in the world, but it lacks substance - like a fascinating painting with a sign hanging underneath that reads “Do Not Touch" in bold letters.” Compare all of Cyberpunk 2077’s Night City to just one location in Deus Ex, Hell’s Kitchen. Both contain bustling streets and tall buildings with plenty of people to talk to. Night City is obviously larger and prettier, but there is so much more to do in Hell’s Kitchen. Night City gives players Gigs and NCPD Scanner Hustles as side activities that always task the player with eliminating every enemy, taking an item from A to B, or eliminating all enemies before finding something lying nearby to complete the mission. Cyberpunk 2077's repetitive mission structure turns Night City into a generic open world that lacks the unique tonal qualities of the genre it takes from.”

• Perhaps I Treated You Too Harshly, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided [Kotaku]

“I’m not here to go over my mistakes; I’m here today to say I’m sorry. I remember only the vaguest outlines of my indifference. I thought the setup, where my role had gone from shady half-robot corporate security guard (very cyberpunk!) to Interpol cop (no thank you) was dumb. The opening level in a ruined Dubai resort was dull. Prague was a poor man’s City 17. I recall getting halfway through breaking into a bank and just walking away from the game, seemingly never to return. Time heals all wounds, though, and my reacquaintance with Deus Ex came at the expense of Cyberpunk 2077, which hadn’t just put me off with its technical hiccups and dull AI; as someone who was keen to get lost in its world it had let me down most with its theme park vision of the genre. I’d been so excited for it, then so let down, that one afternoon just after Christmas I found myself scrolling through my Steam library, looking for something to fill the void. If Cyberpunk 2077 wasn’t going to scratch my cyberpunk itch, then damn it, something else was.”

posted by Fizz (25 comments total)

Deus Ex never marketed itself as Cyberpunk?

Oh, the new thing, not the real one?
posted by Artw at 11:28 AM on August 16, 2023 [3 favorites]

It's honestly astonishing that the Square Enix Deus Ex games are so good. I still hold out hope for a new one.
posted by rhymedirective at 11:29 AM on August 16, 2023

Maybe i should make room in my heart for it, after all I came to love XCOM after X-COM.

What I’d really love to see is something that took the crunch heavy ideas of the original and really ran with it now that modern systems allow them to be fully realized.
posted by Artw at 11:39 AM on August 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

I should give Mank Div a chance. I own it on console and Steam due to it being basically given away but I was really put off by the “aug lives matter” thing. The first Sqeenix DX was pretty decent until it turned into a vanilla shooter at the end.
posted by rodlymight at 11:43 AM on August 16, 2023

My peaceful Human Revolution run was unable to get through some of the boss fights, so I never finished that one, but I was able to successfully finish a no-kill run of Mankind Divided. I definitely thought it was better than Human Revolution and a better rpg than Cyberpunk 2077. I've been struggling to finish Cyberpunk. The world is pretty, and I have a bit of fun just wandering around sometimes, but the role-playing elements aren't great. I feel like Jensen as a character makes more sense than V. Jensen has various dialogue options to indicate mood and alignment, but they're within a believable spectrum. Jensen has character, and the aspects of it that come out in each conversation are decided by the player. On the other hand, V's dialogue options are either apathetic and amoral or self-righteous, with very little in between. As such, they don't feel like a well-defined character, and since those are the only options, I feel like there's little room for the player to define their character without going all in on amorality or piety (to the extent that it is possible). I feel similarly about the Fallout 4 dialogue options, and I think it's a situation that rpgs with a voiced player character can easily fall into.
posted by The Great Big Mulp at 11:48 AM on August 16, 2023 [2 favorites]

I also note that there is a new System Shock.
posted by Artw at 11:54 AM on August 16, 2023

My peaceful Human Revolution run was unable to get through some of the boss fights

For what it's worth, HR was updated to allow non-combat solutions to these fights; I'm not sure exactly when this happened but any version you could get ahold of now (e.g. the "director's cut") has these updates. They aren't peaceful though, but don't count against your kill count if you are doing a non-lethal run.
posted by advil at 12:02 PM on August 16, 2023 [3 favorites]

I feel similarly about the Fallout 4 dialogue options
FO4 has some great dialogue trees if you keep your character falling-down drunk the whole time. :D
posted by xedrik at 12:10 PM on August 16, 2023 [4 favorites]

Oh, wow, never knew that about FO4, getting my sole-survivor piss drunk later today.
posted by Fizz at 12:19 PM on August 16, 2023

advil: That's good to hear about HR. I might already have a "Director's Cut" copy kicking around in some service; I'll give it another shot.

Ooo, I didn't know that about FO4, either. I've gotta give that a try.
posted by The Great Big Mulp at 12:24 PM on August 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

I find the map design of Prague from Deus Ex: Mankind Divided to be one of the most beautifully designed maps ever created for a video game. The city is densely layered and there are so many unique ways to get around that serve not only the story but, specifically the unique stealth gameplay that Adam Jensen is capable of.

And for anyone curious, we've discussed Mankind Divided's politics previously, via this post.
posted by Fizz at 1:27 PM on August 16, 2023 [2 favorites]

Maybe i should make room in my heart for it, after all I came to love XCOM after X-COM.

I think you should, for similar reasons! Both of the newer Deus Ex games get a lot of things right and recapture a lot of the good aesthetic/vibe bits of the original with a lot more modern polish and design sensibility helping things work better than they were able to back in the day. And just like the X-Com to XCOM evolution, there are bits of design and flow and mechanics and ambition from the original that didn't get translated fully into the new game and which I miss, but the new ones are such solid constructions that it doesn't eat at me.

I would love for a new Deus Ex game to feel like it has alllll the goofy weird potential the original was reaching for (and sometime grasping, sometimes really failing to), and I can see more of that potential being realized if they come back around for a third swing at the modern franchise with the right director and team and resources and a little luck. But I've liked the new ones enough that a third one that was pretty much just a third chapter in what they've already done would make me happy. They do a lot of things very well in the same was the absolutely excellent Dishonored games do things well, if with slightly different inflections.

My peaceful Human Revolution run was unable to get through some of the boss fights

I also was frustrated by this in the Human Revolution and continue to feel like the boss fights of the game are one of the biggest needless blunders in an otherwise great game in recent games history. Just stupendously tonally inappropriate. I'm sure I've got a page long rant about it in my comment history somewhere. I was very glad they didn't repeat that mistake in Mankind Divided, and am glad they eventually revamped the boss fights to have non-lethal solutions though I have not gone back to try those since.

I did successfully do a non-lethal no-alarm run in both games, and the logic in Human Revolution accounted for that from the very beginning by not counting the mandatory boss kills as kills: you could get the cheevo even though it felt thematically awful.
posted by cortex at 3:01 PM on August 16, 2023 [2 favorites]

I’m just looking at the screenshots in the PC Gamer article and I gotta ask, are there any colors in the Squeenix Deus Exes that are not yellow or brown? Because those are very, very yellow and brown.
posted by egypturnash at 3:14 PM on August 16, 2023 [2 favorites]

There are also some greys! Actually the games do a pretty good job (especially Mankind Divided as I recall) of mixing up the palette of the environments significantly throughout to create a good sense of mood and separation of space. But it definitely bends a lot of the time toward muted tones of a gritted-up, worn-in landscape in the more urban/residential/underground areas. Prague in Mankind Divided makes very good use overall of playing the feel of a ground-down, old-but-modern city against the more distinctive colors and extremes of aesthetics of some of the interiors and set pieces.
posted by cortex at 3:19 PM on August 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

I played the original when I was a kid, what 20 years ago? What’s the easiet to play it on my MacBook Pro?
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 4:02 PM on August 16, 2023

they went back and took out the pee-filter, I kind of miss it as it was a deliberate thematic/stylistic choice (golden age of augmentation, icarus flying too close to the sun, etc). They also had empty cans of yellow paint everywhere lol

here's an interesting rundown on how hard it was to put the filter back.
posted by Sebmojo at 4:45 PM on August 16, 2023 [3 favorites]

Deus Ex never marketed itself as Cyberpunk?

Oh, the new thing, not the real one?

i don't understand this comment.

the new system shock remake is phenomenal, though (ending fight is bad, but that's also authentic)
posted by Sebmojo at 4:47 PM on August 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

Personal favorite version of exactly this the last time is hrbomberguy discussing the two major Deus Ex Games.

Mild derail: film is singular, in contrast to games and theater, when it comes to cult status. Games and theater can find their true voice long after the initial run through iteration, patching. So, a good idea with bad execution gets a second chance with players and (more recently for games) responsive tweaking by creators. With film, surprisingly like literature, cult does denote some actual, qualified, merit. The voice was already good and the audience came around.

This distinction is belied by Director's cuts. Damn them all to hell. Oh, hey!
posted by es_de_bah at 9:03 PM on August 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

I really enjoyed Mankind Divided, played it carefully, and felt very pleased with how easily I handled the first boss battle. Then the game ended - that was it. Which wouldn't have been so bad if the third game had appeared. a year or two later.

I like the idea of high quality, smaller episodic games appearing more often. I don't have a lot of Witcher 3 style 500 hours left! But I still feel disgruntled about Mankind Divided being so good but so short.
posted by BinaryApe at 10:20 PM on August 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

I wonder if it was intentional that the first Deus Ex is an enormous, ambitious game, the second was hobbled by the need to run on the original xBox, IIRC, so it generally stays in one city and just feels claustrophobic. Then the Square-Enix reboot essentially does the same thing. I really enjoyed the sprawling ones but something about the smaller focus of the followups made them less compelling for me. As an aside, I ran into Warren Spector at SXSW one time and asked him for his suggestion on how to get into video game development, not because I really wanted to get into video games, but because it felt like the kind of question one would ask Warren Spector when you ran into him in a hallway. I really should have had a better question like his favorite section of the original Deus Ex. Ah well.
posted by objectfox at 3:12 AM on August 17, 2023 [1 favorite]

I credit Deus Ex with being the bridge that renovated the Cyberpunk genre for the 21st century, after too many OG cyberpunk ideas either happened or got dated.

(I liked cyberpunk back in its heyday, then as we moved into the 21st century it seemed to me like the genre just kind of faded away, it's edge - relative to reality - too dulled. "Human Revolution" felt like the first time in a decade I had seen something so intentionally cyberpunk yet also feeling like a reinvented/modern take on what a cyberpunk dystopia might look like so that it worked again)
posted by Cusp at 2:24 PM on August 17, 2023 [2 favorites]

I got the "directors cut" (or whatever) for Mankind Divided - for some reason, it runs wierd like too many FPS or something. Even after adjusting mouse sensitivity it feels wrong/ runs too fast. Any suggestions?
posted by porpoise at 2:34 PM on August 17, 2023 [1 favorite]

For sure, I wish the C77 devs had played more Deus Ex, to get the idea of augments that matter and change gameplay. C77 felt like a shooter with cyberpunk afterthoughts.

Also I wished they'd played Arkham Knight for more than just long enough to steal its plot. Like, long enough to understand the stealth mechanics.

On the plus side, C77 seemed to put its actual heart into the side quests/romances. It was worth slogging through the awful combat to get to those.
posted by zompist at 3:01 PM on August 17, 2023 [2 favorites]

C77 felt like a shooter with cyberpunk afterthoughts.

Ironic given it’s origins in the Cyberpunk TTRPG.
posted by Artw at 4:37 PM on August 17, 2023

I bought Deus X and have never played it. I do still have the disc and I have a few old iMacs that I probably could run it on. Just gotta get rid of a few boxes of books first.
posted by neuron at 12:30 PM on August 18, 2023 [1 favorite]