As I mentioned in my last post, I found the ending of Deus Ex: Human Revolution a bit lacking. Basically, after defeating the final boss you end up in this room:
Push a button, get an ending montage.
You choose which ending montage you want to play, by pressing one of the four buttons. It is a bit silly and contrived, but I wanted to discuss each of the endings and it’s implications. For those of you who haven’t played the game, but want to participate in the discussion here is a quick plot synopsis.
The game takes place in near future where mechanical augmentation of human bodies became commonplace. As you can imagine some people have moral quandaries about whether or not people should become augmented. Groups like Humanity Front lead by William Taggart are calling for rigid regulations of this technology or an outright ban. On the other hand augmentation pioneers such David Sarrif (your employer) see it as a next step in human evolution. Working behind the scenes, a shadowy, organization known as the Illuminati has managed to install a backdoor logic in most of the bio-chips currently sold on the market – it allows them to shut down, or gain control of majority of augmented people in the world. Hugh Darrow, hailed as the father of the augmentation technology was highly implicated in this organization, and used his influence and contacts to allow the backdoor to be installed on such a massive scale. But where his Illuminati allies were trying to enthrall humanity to their own ends, Darrow had his own agenda. Concerned that his creation became too dangerous to be controlled he decided to use the Illuminati to destroy it. He stages a televised event during which he uses the Illuminati back door to turn thousands of augmented people into mindless zombies hoping that this will cause nations to ban the technology. He recorded a confession in which he reveals the Illuminati conspiracy, his role in it, and the purpose of this staged event. The ending choice allows you to send his message to the world, or subtly alter it to suit another agenda.
The message you send will have a huge impact on the augmentation industry, and will likely polarize the public opinion. So let’s talk about each one of them.
Hugh Darrow’s Message
Darrow’s message has one thing going for it – it is the complete truth. It reveals the Illuminati, and stops their plans dead in their tracks. Unfortunately it also results in complete ban of augmentation technology. As you can probably imagine, I could not pick this ending in clear conscience. Thwarting progress this way is counter to everything I believe as a techie, scientist and a transhumanist.
Darrow does make some compelling points, but if you choose the right conversation options in the final dialog with him, you will realize that his crusade against augmentation has some very personal roots. Ironically, the guy who has invented the augmentation process is one of the few people in the world whose body violently rejects the artificial parts. If you press him, he reveals that he secretly fears that the humanity is leaving him, and few others with the same problem behind. He is more or less a big man child – envious of other kids toys, he tries to destroy them so that no one can have them.
Bill Taggart’s Message
Taggart is the leader of the Humanity Front, but his arguments are much less extreme than those of Darrow’s. He merely seeks to control and regulate the augmentation and not ban it altogether. This sounds like a very reasonable position, until he reveals he is secretly in love with the whole concept of Illuminati. Taggart is an authoritarian who believes that if humanity should never left to it’s own devices and that centralized global control is the best thing since sliced bread. His version of the message would conceal the truth about the Illuminati and use Darrow’s staged event to push for heavy regulations.
Not being a fan of shadowy organizations ruling the human race from behind the scenes, I immediately disliked this ending.
David Sarif’s Message
Sarif is a visionary and transhumanist and the realizes that sending out Darrow’s message would put an end to a great thing. He proposes to edit the message and blame the event on the Humanity Front. This would turn public attention away from dangers of augmentation, and against hate groups and anti-agumentation activism. By attributing the back-door to an extremist terrorist group instead of Illuminati he seeks to kill two birds with one stone. On one hand, he would publicly expose the mind control logic on the chips, and help to eradicate it. On the other, it would put a muzzle on the anti-augmentation rhetoric allowing, companies such as Sarif Industries to prosper and continue improving the technology without strict regulations.
Granted, his message does not eradicate, or even reveal the existence of the Illuminati but I must admit that I liked it the most. I share a lot of Sarif philosophy. I completely believe that augmentation is the future. If we do not augment ourselves, and transcend humanity trough technology then we are dooming ourselves to irrelevance and extinction through stagnation. Thwarting technological progress is silly and irresponsible.
I often joke that our problem as a species is not that we play god sometimes, but that we don’t play god nearly often enough. I’m an optimist and an idealist. I really thing we can fix most of our problems with science and technology if we only try, and don’t chicken out when things get weird. So this was my favorite ending.
Self Destruct Button
The alternate ending is to just self destruct Pangea (where the event took place) and bury all the secrets with it. The montage at the end says that you are allowing the world to make their own mind about the augmentation debate without polluting the debate with voices from special interest groups (Sarif who is an industry insider, Taggart who leads the Human Front, and Darrow who seeks to destroy what he created). Of course to do this, you have to kill few thousand of innocent people, taking them with you to the bottom of the sea. Kinda silly if you ask me. Silly and irresponsible since it does nothing about Illuminati, and leaves the back-door logic on all the chips, allowing them to pick up where they left off.
Which ending did you pick and why? Which one did you hate the most? I found the Darrow montage to be the most depressing one, and the Sarif one the most positive and upbeat. How about you?
None of them. If there was a fifth ending that involved me leaving the damn place to its own doom and downing a few beers in a pub, I’d pick that ;)
Hell, why not send all the messages at the same time, evacuate the people, blow the place up and then have a few beers? And I’d use that camera while talking to Darrow. Send every damn word he said and let the world see what happened and who’s responsible.
And not die in a self-destructing base in the middle of nowhere. That’s stupid.
I chose the Sarif ending, but wasn’t completely satisfied with any of the choices. What I would have preferred is an ending where you just distribute the patient zero vaccine-thing (whatever it was), notify everyone of the backdoor to the biochip, and then just sit back and let humanity sort it out.
You’d have an initial negative reaction to the backdoor scandal, but that would prompt tighter regulation. The patient zero vaccine however would make augmentation safer and easier than ever, which I think would counteract the negative effect of the scandal.
As it was, the options they gave you seemed unnecessarily deceptive and heavy-handed.
One thing that always bugged me about the game was how there was pretty much one company that controlled the vast majority of bio-chips (Tai-Yong). You have one company with that much power and you’re bound to have trouble. Proper regulation, skepticism, and safety would have basically shut down the plot before it even got under way.
I kind of thought it would have been interesting if they had explored the neuropozyne dependency issue more. Turn it into a “how much of your freedom are you willing to give up for a bit of power” kind of thing.
@ peterix:
Yeah, why wasn’t there “Fuck it all!” option where you just walk away, disgusted with the whole thing, and let the authorities who arrive to evacuate/rescue people view all the tapes and sort it all out.
@ xWittaker:
Good point. I think the best ending would be to out the Illuminati, allow for tighter regulation but at the same time force Sarif to unveil the patient 0 vaccine that would remove people’s dependency on the neuropazine (sp?). This way everyone wins.
As for the bio-chip thing – that sort of thing is not entirely uncommon. I mean, look at the current computer hardware market. Most of the machines you will buy will either have Intel or AMD chips, no?
So I could easily see how a company could corner the bio-chip market – especially in its early stages when the human-machine interfaces are still mostly experimental and patented. Fast forward a decade or two, and the entry to the market may be much easier allowing for greater competition. But at the time the game takes place it almost seems like the few big corps are holding all the crucial patents, and have nearly complete monopoly on the aug-market.
I chose Sarifs ending first, then I watched the self-destruction.
Sarifs ending was my choice because I didn’t want to slow down the development of technology. I did not want to go with Taggard, because of his connections to Illuminati.
Good technology will always be used to bad things, limiting development because of this doesn’t make sense.
Some regulations could be good, but meh its just game :D