Looking for general impressions on HR's Setting/Endings

[Jaedar]

The thing after the credits kinda makes it seem like AJ is quite related(not in the biological way) to the Dentons

The whole thing kinda sounds weird. White Helix is a subsidary or something of versalife, correct(its what someone told me anyway)? Cause if so(spoilers for sidequest in HR)HR indicates that they would know Jensen is augmentation compatible and probably have a sample of his blood. Assuming this all is correct, it creates some serious divergence from DX as it is unlikely the Paul thing would go down as it did/will do.

[nerdenstein]

I've just seen the clip at the end of the credits; I'm not sure it implys anything really but that was better than the other endings that was extremely vague about what it had Accomplished.

[bobby 55]

Since Megan was meeting Page, perhaps she's "the continuity". What she discovered about AJ, maybe she found something similar or more evolved about Paul or his bilogical parents. *shrugs shoulders*

[chris the cynic]

Obviously this is getting into territory where I can't contribute much having not played the new game.

That said, I might be able to help with how it fits in timing wise with Denton related stuff.

My understanding is that HR takes place entirely within the year 2027. In this year Paul is eight or nine (depending on whether or not his birthday has come) MJ12 has cloned him, but has not yet tested on the clones since it's waiting until certain areas of their brains are developed enough which they figure happens around the age of five. The oldest of the clones are three or four years old. Testing on them will start in 2028. When that testing produces one or two promising results (and leaves the rest of the test subjects severely brain damaged) they'll decide to create JC. This turns out to be easy because the Denton parents were trying to have another child anyway, they just weren't fertile anymore. Implanting an embryonic clone of Paul into Paul's mother produced JC. JC will be born in 2029.

Some of this, particularly JC's age, is explicitly stated in the original game, other bits come from other sources (the continuity bible is great for this stuff.)

Anyway, that should help you guys seeing how things might and might not fit. I, obviously, can't help out much.

[nerdenstein]

@Bobby; That was kinda what I was thinking but I'm not sure that's way too... convenient.
Cheers for the dates Chris.

I've come up with another theory, inspired by what Chris said about gather data from small pox vaccinations: Could they used vaccinations as a method of distributing something that would cause the offspring of whomever had taken the vaccinations to be compatible with nano-augmentation? Or is that a far fetched theory?

[bobby 55]

Yeah cheers Chris, the dates don't totally debunk my theory, though they do cast it into unlikely territory.

@nerdenstein: That doesn't seem too far fetched, although aren't they naturally compatible with the nano-augs? That doesn't exclude gathering information on them, to find those compatible, from the vaccinations/blood work.

[chris the cynic]

I've come up with another theory, inspired by what Chris said about gather data from small pox vaccinations: Could they used vaccinations as a method of distributing something that would cause the offspring of whomever had taken the vaccinations to be compatible with nano-augmentation? Or is that a far fetched theory?

I'm going to have to say it's too far fetched.

In isolation it's as good any theory. The problems come when we try to integrate it with the rest of what we know. That would mean that they were trying to make things compatible with nano augmentation in the 1940s. Everything we know says that Everett did a lot of the groundwork for that, and he probably wasn't doing it one hundred and two years before Deus Ex.

Also, there's the email that mentioned the smallpox vaccinations in the first place. It is pretty much inconceivable that if the smallpox vaccinations had been used for that it wouldn't be mentioned. Here's a message about trying to create people with nano-augmentation that mentions the smallpox vaccinations but leaves out that they were intended to make people compatible? That makes no sense. I suppose if they were intended for that purpose and failed then maybe they wouldn't want to beat a dead horse, but if they had any kind of success that should have been called out quite explicitly because the email is talking about how the small pox vaccine might be used in getting people who are compatible.

Wide swaths of the email don't make sense if the smallpox vaccine was intended to make people compatible:
For example:
1 Why would they need to sift through their data on people who got the smallpox vaccine to look for the very few people likely to be compatible with nano augmentation if everyone who got it was given a thing to make their descendants compatible?
2 If the vaccine changed people in a way that changed the likelihood that their kids would be augmentation compatible, wouldn't that mean that genetic information collected when the vaccine was administered (thus before the changes had a chance to take place) would be useless for locating people whose kids might be augmentation compatible?
3 Millions (billions?) of people were vaccinated. I don't know how many, but it was enough that the virus has been (as near as we can tell) completely eliminated in the wild. It's actually the only disease we can say that for. Given so many people got the vaccine, if it made your descendants augmentation compatible shouldn't most people be augmentation compatible?

[nerdenstein]

Ignoring the whole vaccinations thing then: you say they identified Paul's parents as likely to have a child capable of taking Nano-Augmentation? As in, before he was actually conceived of? They didn't find Paul as a new born and found he could take them?

Going back to Jensen again for a moment; How did White Helix find he could take augs without rejection? And how did Megan find out?
You could put it in spoiler tags for Chris' sake but I assume he'd read it anyway. I just need a memory refresh. I'd start a new playthrough but it's so far into the game and I haven't the time to start a new playthrough for awhile.

Considering the secret ending, I'm going to assume Eidos/Square have got something planned as a sequal to HR on that side of things.

[bobby 55]

They did a thorough investigation of him before hiring him. I can tell you from personal experience that certain employers have you get a complete medical before you start with them. Megan seems to have found out accidently about Jensen, so maybe she was using Jensens blood in some experiment...maybe.

[nerdenstein]

They did a thorough investigation of him before hiring him. I can tell you from personal experience that certain employers have you get a complete medical before you start with them. Megan seems to have found out accidently about Jensen, so maybe she was using Jensens blood in some experiment...maybe.

I guess that's one way she could have found out. The other option is, of course, that she was in cahoots with White Helix (which I assume is an Illuminati-MJ12 group) from the start and new what happened to Jensen as a baby. The secret ending seemed to suggest that.
What did happen when Jensen was a baby Bobby? Are you at that bit yet? During the riots in Detroit when Pritchard asks you to see that private investigator.

[bobby 55]

They did a thorough investigation of him before hiring him. I can tell you from personal experience that certain employers have you get a complete medical before you start with them. Megan seems to have found out accidently about Jensen, so maybe she was using Jensens blood in some experiment...maybe.

I guess that's one way she could have found out. The other option is, of course, that she was in cahoots with White Helix (which I assume is an Illuminati-MJ12 group) from the start and new what happened to Jensen as a baby. The secret ending seemed to suggest that.
What did happen when Jensen was a baby Bobby? Are you at that bit yet? During the riots in Detroit when Pritchard asks you to see that private investigator.

I missed that sidequest in my first run. I'm just about to to talk to Sarif after Picas, and I did get the first part of that sidequest done this time, so I'll be able to tell you soonish.

[nerdenstein]

Oh right, sorry.

It's an interesting side quest to say the least.

[chris the cynic]

Ignoring the whole vaccinations thing then: you say they identified Paul's parents as likely to have a child capable of taking Nano-Augmentation? As in, before he was actually conceived of? They didn't find Paul as a new born and found he could take them?

The game implies that they identified his parents as being likely to give birth to someone who could be augmented before Paul was born. The continuity bible comes out and says it.

How to find such a test subject? The Illuminati -- then in power, though no one knew it -- had done a great, secret census between 1940 and 1965, tracking everyone who received a small pox vaccine. From this they were able to build a database of the genetic codes of nearly all citizens of the United States and much of the rest of the world.

The conspirators' agents, posing as nurses and doctors, in pediatricians' offices and elementary schools across the nation, used the smallpox census data, to keep track of high potential candidates. The specialists in charge of the project were updated regularly on the progress of potential candidates. All the conspirators had to do was wait. Ma and Pa Denton -- two such potential candidates -- fell in love (perhaps even with some help from the conspirators!) and produced young Paul under the watchful, albeit covert eye of Majestic 12 operatives who played the parts of friends, family doctors, neighbors, school teachers and so on...

And so on.

You'd figure that they did this with many couples. The other children produced weren't nano aug compatible, Paul was. Which is why you never hear about them in the game.

[Jonas]

What I picked up from DXHR was a little scattered and a little confusing - I'm fine with that, but it did make me question whether Adam's history, which seems extremely convoluted in proper Deus Ex fashion, actually adds up. I'm going to give Eidos Montreal the benefit of the doubt and assume they did work out all of the causality of Adam's history, and that they're just keeping a lot of it from us such as to 1) not overload us with exposition and 2) keep it just a little mysterious for the sake of maintaining our interest in the character.

Anyway, what I picked up was that... okay time for a massive fucking spoiler tag, sorry about this, Adam's parents participated in an experiment conducted on new-born infants at White Helix, a subsidiary of Versalife. Whether they worked for White Helix or not, I couldn't quite figure out, but it was found that Adam had this special genetic ability that the other infants didn't have. It's strongly implied that this was not just an innate ability, but just a unique reaction to whatever crazy shit they did to the test subjects in the womb. When the treatment worked on Adam, White Helix obviously planned to try and make the treatment work on more children, but for whatever reason his parents disagreed with this decision and managed to torch the whole facility. Michelle (the nurse) escaped with Adam but for some reason or another his parents were killed in the fire.

It gets a little hazy after that. I don't recall much of what we're told about Adam after Michelle escaped, I assume foster parents were involved but I think he pretty much dropped off the Illuminati's radar after that whole thing. He grew up to take an interest in law enforcement, got a university education in whatever weird course your police officers have to take over there in the States, and then joined the Force. He was there for 8 years during which he became a SWAT officer and met Megan Reed (he picked her up in a police car so he must've still been a cop when they met). This appears to be a huge fucking coincidence, but to the game's credit, it's probably the only real coincidence in the game's background fiction. The guy has an extremely rare genetic condition and just happens to meet a successful biologist? Well, I suppose it's possible she only became successful because of her discovery, and I'm led to believe biologists will commonly use their partners and other friends and family as test subjects in their lab experiments, so once they've met, it's not strange that she'd take a blood sample and notice his genetic mutation. This could be the reason she was hired by Sarif, or she could already be working there and just get insta-promoted because of her discovery.

Eventually Adam leaves the Force because one or more of his superiors fucks with his service record to make him out to be a dangerous, unstable asshole who had a problem with authority - probably as a result of a shooting incident where a mechanically augmented kid is killed by Adam's SWAT lieutenant which sparks a riot, and Adam loudly objects, earning him the ire of his superiors. It's worth noting that this seems to have happened before David Sarif started doing background checks on Adam, so it's very unlikely that Sarif had any involvement in getting Adam fired. Adam is out of a job for about 6 months before Sarif hires him as his security chief, almost certainly because Megan has told him that Adam is in fact Subject X. At some point before or after this, Adam and Megan break up, but Adam obviously remains Sarif's security chief. That's roughly when the plot of the game begins.

Do let me know if I missed anything or got anything wrong. At this point, the theory I'm personally partial to is that Megan's research is the link between the two games - she has knowledge of Adam's genetic qualities and has probably come quite a ways with her research based on them, so she could be exactly what MJ12 needs to kick their nanoaugmentation project into gear. Assuming EM didn't just throw out the DX bible stuff and retconned Adam in as some sort of genetic template for Paul, Megan might just be able to use her research on Adam (who is the successful and long lost result of a 34-year-old MJ12 experiment) to make whatever they're doing to JC work. Maybe at some point EM will release any of this information and we'll see for ourselves

[Jonas]

What the fuck is this guy talking about?

http://www.reddit.com/r/gamernews/comme ... lc/c2gofq8