Looking for general impressions on HR's Setting/Endings
Posted: Tue Aug 30, 2011 2:05 am
I know that I tend to focus on details but it may surprise you to know that I also notice the big things in Deus Ex. The NSF for example, it is not lost on me that they exist in Deus Ex. I have also noticed the Illuminati and MJ12 and so forth.
My impression is that while the HR team might not be focusing on the small things, they'll be trying to make the big things fit. This post is based on that assumption, so if that assumption is wrong it would be a good idea to stop reading now.
-
I'm not going to play Human Revolution in the near future, but there's something I've been wondering about pretty much since we learned when the game is set and I'd like to hear from people who have played the game on the topic.
One of the things that immediately stood out when we learned Human Revolution would be set in 2027 was that that's not long before 2030 and 2030 is kind of a flashpoint in the Deus Ex timeline. One natural disaster in 2030 set off a chain of events that resulted in the decline of the US, the creation of the original NSF (as in Northwest instead of National) the MJ12-Illuminati split, the takeover of Europe by the conspiracy groups, and more or less everything that leads up to Deus Ex. There is a possibility that the world population dropping to two billion by the end of the 2030s was unrelated, and the India-Pakistan nuclear war might have happened anyway, but for the most part what you see in Deus Ex on a big scale* has roots in 2030.
On the one hand, to a certain extent that makes Human Revolution a relatively "safe" time to have prequel. 2030 is sort of like a reset button that will knock the world off whatever course was set by the player and push everything back in the general direction of disaster. It means that you've got a lot more leeway than you would if the game were set in, say, 2042. On the other hand, putting the game more or less immediately before a reset button seems like it might make the whole thing seem ... "pointless" isn't the right word. AJ might not be able to stop an earthquake from happening three years down the line, but there's all sorts of difference he could potentially make. (If one of the endings were exposing the conspiracies to the world, for example, that would change everything. It definitely wouldn't be pointless.)
I'm not sure what the word I'm looking for here is. It seems like it would be ending Deus Ex with whatever your chosen ending was followed by, “And then in three years an asteroid hit the earth and changed everything.” It certainly would have left me with a bad taste in my mouth unless it was very well done. [Added] And I, personally, am at a total loss as to how to do something like that well. [/Added]
So I'm wondering how they handled that. Not specific details, just in general. Did the ending work for you knowing, as you do, that whatever you do a world altering disaster is looming on the horizon? Did it feel like the player's actions actually made a difference?
So that's what I'm wondering in terms of ending.
-
In terms of setting, what I'd like to get people's opinions on stems from more or less the same thing. Before 2030 there's no MJ12-Illuminati rift. Before 2030 there's no NSF. The same can be said of other fundamentals of Deus Ex. It's not just that these things don't exist, it is that the reason they will eventually exist has yet to happen. No one is going to be sitting around saying, "Well in three years I think there's going to be an earthquake and that seeing the Illiuminati/US's response to that is going to make me want to take up arms in order to leave the Illuminati/US so I'd better start preparing now." So the game can't really show the roots of any of the conflicts we see in Deus Ex. Which means that the game can't employ those conflicts.
In fact, given the time they picked, there shouldn't be a lot of Deus Ex style conflict at all, MJ12 is part of the Illuminati, the Illuminati are allies of the Templars, and that should basically cover everyone on the conspiracy front. Terrorists at the time should largely be on the Illuminati's payroll. Other than the Triads, the groups you saw in Deus Ex should be either nonexistent or all on on the same side.
That's an interesting time to set a game, to say the least.
It's not that there's no inherent conflict in a world where the secret masters are all in agreement and the revolutionaries work for the secret masters. I'm sure that there's more than enough conflict justify a game**, multiple games in fact, but the conflict can't be remotely like that in Deus Ex***. In fact, if anything you should probably get more a Dinner at Deviant's Palace vibe where you find out that pretty much all sides are the same and you're basically on your own if you want to fight against them. (Spoiler alert for Dinner at Deviant's Palace, by the way.)
Obviously that's a different direction for a Deus Ex game, and I want to know how people playing Human Revolution think it was handled. Did it work well?
-
* Big scale is in terms of groups rather than, say, technology or individuals. The Illuminati, MJ12, the NSF, the US, NATO, the entire continent of Europe, the Russo-Mexican alliance, so on. Obviously there's a lot of other set up that happens elsewhere. The nano augmentation project, for example, started before the birth of Paul, so sometime before 2018, with invasive experiments on humans (clones of Paul) starting in 2028, JC being born the year after that, and the kinks not worked out until 2049. That's a pretty major part of Deus Ex that does not remotely have roots in 2030. But while it's major, and necessary and important and I would argue that it shouldn't be fucked with, it is not on the same scale as something like the existence of the NSF.
A lot of people went through Deus Ex without ever really picking up on the details of nano augmentation and such. Hell, based on what some people were saying on the Human Revolution boards a while back some people went through Deus Ex without ever noticing there were mechs in it. I'd like to think**** that no one went through Deus Ex without noticing that the NSF existed or that the Illuminati and MJ12 had had a falling out. That's what I mean by broad strokes and big scale here. You can tell the general story of history of the 21st century in Deus Ex without ever mentioning the individuals involved or the forms of augmentation, but you kind of have to mention the organizations that shaped that history. Most of the organizations that appear in Deus Ex were shaped in large part by what happened in 2030. (Though there are exceptions. For example X-51, which wouldn't be created for 21 more years, could potentially have been made for much the same reason anyway and triads already exist today.)
** The Illuminati doesn't rule the world so they're probably going to rub up against governments and corporations they don't control, as just one example. Corporate security is a pretty logical place to start a protagonist. Though, obviously, not remotely the only option. Anyway, thumbs up to the HR team for thinking that one through.
*** Unless the game has the major conflict being the result of a hitherto unheard of group who subsequently disappears into complete obscurity, which is certainly possible given a quarter century between the games. If that is the case never mind. Though in that case all of the credit I was giving them for trying something new and different would be naively misplaced.
**** Earlier today I learned that someone somehow managed to make it to their first year of university without ever learning who Hitler was. There was much debate on how this was possible, no satisfactory conclusion was reached. Still trying to wrap my mind around the fact that that is possible. Anyway, given that something like that can happen, I suppose I have to accept the possibility that someone could theoretically play Deus Ex without noticing, say, that the Illuminati and MJ12 aren't on the same side.
[Edited because using "the game" to refer to two different games might be confusing.]
My impression is that while the HR team might not be focusing on the small things, they'll be trying to make the big things fit. This post is based on that assumption, so if that assumption is wrong it would be a good idea to stop reading now.
-
I'm not going to play Human Revolution in the near future, but there's something I've been wondering about pretty much since we learned when the game is set and I'd like to hear from people who have played the game on the topic.
One of the things that immediately stood out when we learned Human Revolution would be set in 2027 was that that's not long before 2030 and 2030 is kind of a flashpoint in the Deus Ex timeline. One natural disaster in 2030 set off a chain of events that resulted in the decline of the US, the creation of the original NSF (as in Northwest instead of National) the MJ12-Illuminati split, the takeover of Europe by the conspiracy groups, and more or less everything that leads up to Deus Ex. There is a possibility that the world population dropping to two billion by the end of the 2030s was unrelated, and the India-Pakistan nuclear war might have happened anyway, but for the most part what you see in Deus Ex on a big scale* has roots in 2030.
On the one hand, to a certain extent that makes Human Revolution a relatively "safe" time to have prequel. 2030 is sort of like a reset button that will knock the world off whatever course was set by the player and push everything back in the general direction of disaster. It means that you've got a lot more leeway than you would if the game were set in, say, 2042. On the other hand, putting the game more or less immediately before a reset button seems like it might make the whole thing seem ... "pointless" isn't the right word. AJ might not be able to stop an earthquake from happening three years down the line, but there's all sorts of difference he could potentially make. (If one of the endings were exposing the conspiracies to the world, for example, that would change everything. It definitely wouldn't be pointless.)
I'm not sure what the word I'm looking for here is. It seems like it would be ending Deus Ex with whatever your chosen ending was followed by, “And then in three years an asteroid hit the earth and changed everything.” It certainly would have left me with a bad taste in my mouth unless it was very well done. [Added] And I, personally, am at a total loss as to how to do something like that well. [/Added]
So I'm wondering how they handled that. Not specific details, just in general. Did the ending work for you knowing, as you do, that whatever you do a world altering disaster is looming on the horizon? Did it feel like the player's actions actually made a difference?
So that's what I'm wondering in terms of ending.
-
In terms of setting, what I'd like to get people's opinions on stems from more or less the same thing. Before 2030 there's no MJ12-Illuminati rift. Before 2030 there's no NSF. The same can be said of other fundamentals of Deus Ex. It's not just that these things don't exist, it is that the reason they will eventually exist has yet to happen. No one is going to be sitting around saying, "Well in three years I think there's going to be an earthquake and that seeing the Illiuminati/US's response to that is going to make me want to take up arms in order to leave the Illuminati/US so I'd better start preparing now." So the game can't really show the roots of any of the conflicts we see in Deus Ex. Which means that the game can't employ those conflicts.
In fact, given the time they picked, there shouldn't be a lot of Deus Ex style conflict at all, MJ12 is part of the Illuminati, the Illuminati are allies of the Templars, and that should basically cover everyone on the conspiracy front. Terrorists at the time should largely be on the Illuminati's payroll. Other than the Triads, the groups you saw in Deus Ex should be either nonexistent or all on on the same side.
That's an interesting time to set a game, to say the least.
It's not that there's no inherent conflict in a world where the secret masters are all in agreement and the revolutionaries work for the secret masters. I'm sure that there's more than enough conflict justify a game**, multiple games in fact, but the conflict can't be remotely like that in Deus Ex***. In fact, if anything you should probably get more a Dinner at Deviant's Palace vibe where you find out that pretty much all sides are the same and you're basically on your own if you want to fight against them. (Spoiler alert for Dinner at Deviant's Palace, by the way.)
Obviously that's a different direction for a Deus Ex game, and I want to know how people playing Human Revolution think it was handled. Did it work well?
-
* Big scale is in terms of groups rather than, say, technology or individuals. The Illuminati, MJ12, the NSF, the US, NATO, the entire continent of Europe, the Russo-Mexican alliance, so on. Obviously there's a lot of other set up that happens elsewhere. The nano augmentation project, for example, started before the birth of Paul, so sometime before 2018, with invasive experiments on humans (clones of Paul) starting in 2028, JC being born the year after that, and the kinks not worked out until 2049. That's a pretty major part of Deus Ex that does not remotely have roots in 2030. But while it's major, and necessary and important and I would argue that it shouldn't be fucked with, it is not on the same scale as something like the existence of the NSF.
A lot of people went through Deus Ex without ever really picking up on the details of nano augmentation and such. Hell, based on what some people were saying on the Human Revolution boards a while back some people went through Deus Ex without ever noticing there were mechs in it. I'd like to think**** that no one went through Deus Ex without noticing that the NSF existed or that the Illuminati and MJ12 had had a falling out. That's what I mean by broad strokes and big scale here. You can tell the general story of history of the 21st century in Deus Ex without ever mentioning the individuals involved or the forms of augmentation, but you kind of have to mention the organizations that shaped that history. Most of the organizations that appear in Deus Ex were shaped in large part by what happened in 2030. (Though there are exceptions. For example X-51, which wouldn't be created for 21 more years, could potentially have been made for much the same reason anyway and triads already exist today.)
** The Illuminati doesn't rule the world so they're probably going to rub up against governments and corporations they don't control, as just one example. Corporate security is a pretty logical place to start a protagonist. Though, obviously, not remotely the only option. Anyway, thumbs up to the HR team for thinking that one through.
*** Unless the game has the major conflict being the result of a hitherto unheard of group who subsequently disappears into complete obscurity, which is certainly possible given a quarter century between the games. If that is the case never mind. Though in that case all of the credit I was giving them for trying something new and different would be naively misplaced.
**** Earlier today I learned that someone somehow managed to make it to their first year of university without ever learning who Hitler was. There was much debate on how this was possible, no satisfactory conclusion was reached. Still trying to wrap my mind around the fact that that is possible. Anyway, given that something like that can happen, I suppose I have to accept the possibility that someone could theoretically play Deus Ex without noticing, say, that the Illuminati and MJ12 aren't on the same side.
[Edited because using "the game" to refer to two different games might be confusing.]