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?

Adam Jensen, master of save creeping

I guess what I’m trying to say is that I definitely got my money’s worth. The fact that the game allowed me to take my time and play at my own pace is definitely commendable. You see, DE:HR has something that is becoming increasingly rare in the modern console driven market: quick saves. Any game that allows me to save creep through difficult battles or stealth sections gets my seal of approval. I guess video game companies know this, and being environmentally conscious they are trying to cut down on the number of seals I have to give out each year. Which is of course silly. Whenever I run out of seals, I just give out walrus’ of approval. Those are not endangered, right?

DE:HR also has an inventory screen that allows you to drag and drop items with your mouse. I have not seen this in a major triple A release in years and it almost made me tear up from nostalgia for the good old days. Seriously, the last FPRPG I have seen this type of inventory was Morrowind. And that was like three lifetimes ago. So this game wasn’t just haphazardly ported from the consoles. Someone actually sat down, and spent more than 10 minutes figuring out how to work mouse and keyboard into the game-play. And that person deserves a medal.

I am a hoarder. I cant help it.

Oh, and FPRPG is a thing now. I am making it a thing – spread the word folks. Anything that has first person mechanics and some RPG elements is henceforth going to be known a FPRPG or FPRP for short. Cause in this day and age of information overload we abbreviate even fucking acronyms. Why not just call it an RPG?

Well, because it is not. There are no stats and no skills. In DE:HR you merely “activate” your augmentations over time. Which works great as a gameplay excuse for not giving you god-like powers right away, but it is not make it a full blown RPG. It is an RPG ellement, and a limited one at that. While the number of possible ways you can spend your “praxis points” seems quite extensive, by the time you reach the end-game I can almost guarantee your character will be maxed out in all the ways which actually count. To me, this is both good and bad.

This is from near the end of the game. At this point I pretty much maxed out everything that could possibly make a difference in the gameplay.

It is bad, because it prevents you from specializing and focusing on certain gameplay style and instead allows you to make a flawless munchkin instead. I feel that good RPG ought to allow you to create very different character builds, resulting in different playtrhough experience. The original Deus Ex was like that – playing as a stealthy dude provided you with a very different experience than playing as a tweaked out tank of a man. Modern games rarely have this complexity. Deus Ex was 80% there though. Most of its levels were built to accommodate exactly that sort of thing. There were always several ways to get from point A to point B – some would require stealth, while others would force you to punch holes in walls, move heavy objects or fight hordes of enemies. The problem was that around the middle of the game my character could do all of these things. And it wasn’t a “Jack of all trades, master of none” kind of thing – I was more or less maxed out in everything. So I could take the stealth way, eliminate all the guards with silent take downs, then backtrack, and collect all the weapons and ammo scattered around the “wall destroying Rambo” path.

On the other hand, I can’t deny that being able to both cloak and throw refrigerators at people was a lot of fun. My inner munchkin was having a great time with the super-augmented Adam Jensen. In a way, I was able to experience all the different facets of the game without having to start over, and I could switch up my strategies as the situation required. It really did create some very fun moments.

Have I mentioned how much I like the backdrops in these game? Sometimes I would just walk around and stare out the windows.

For example, that one mission in which your pilot, Malik is in danger and you have to rush to save her – I went into an instant killing machine mode there. Throughout most of the game I have always used stealth and non-lethal weapons. I figured that Jensen, who used to be a cop would have a strong, Batman like work ethics. But when I saw bunch of dudes converging on Malik, I kinda lost it and dispatched all of them in a hail of very lethal machine gun bullets and EMP grenades. In fact, that entire sequence is probably my favorite part of the game – mainly because it incited such an emotional response. I really did not want Malik to die, and I kept reloading trying to save her until I was successful.

Lovely night time cityscapes

The main character is rather strongly characterized – he isn’t a blank slate. But his personality is malleable in certain limited ways. For example you can slightly skew his attitude towards the human augmentation debate which is the core social and moral conflict in the game. You can play him as a resentful and bitter guy who never asked to be made into mechanical demigod, who things such things should be either banner or very rigidly regulated and used only to treat life threatening conditions. Alternatively you can play him as an optimistic progressive who thinks people ought to be free to better themselves through augmentation, and sees it as a next logical step in the evolution of our species. Regardless how you behave in all the conversations, when you reach the end of the game, you end up in this room:

Push a button, get an ending montage.

You get four buttons, and each of them will give you a different ending. One will result in a worldwide ban on all augmentations. One will result in tight regulations, but may help to thwart the plans of the Illuminati. One will indirectly help to hide the evidence of the Illuminati, but will allow research and development of new augmentations to go on as normal. It doesn’t really matter how you behaved before this point – you can pick any button you want. Then you can watch the end sequence, reload the game and watch another ending. Once you do this four times, you get an achievement… Which is kinda ridiculous.

Not to mention that the endings are a bit weak. They are basically just stock footage montages, with the main character narrating over them. He talks about broad implications of his choice, but we never actually see how it will affect the characters we have actually met. I would love to be given a chance to have a final debriefing talk with Davin Sarif back in the Detroit office. You know, kinda like the non-martyr ending in Dragon Age: Origins where you get to walk around the throne room and talk with all your companions of the last time. It would be awesome walk trough the Sarif offices listening to NPC’s, watching the TV coverage of Pangea aftermath, and reading in game newspaper articles about it. I would love to visit Pritchard and Malik and see what they thought about my choice. Too bad they decided to end the game in such an abrupt way.

A lot of people on the internet complain about the boss fights, but I didn’t find them all that annoying. You see, I’m a hoarder so I would always try to have at least two lethal weapons and about a metric ton of ammo in my inventory, even if I only used it once in a blue moon. When I faced the first boss and realized he was immune to my stun gun, and tranqualizer darts I quickly switched to machine gun and took him down in no time. From that point on I would strategically hoard ammo, and occasionally spend praxis points on combat related upgrades. Yes, the fights felt quite out of place, but they didn’t really ruin my immersion much. I was mostly just annoyed that my super-stealthy assassin Jensen would completely forget his cloaking field and sneaking skills in every fucking cut scene. It was really silly of Edios to outsource those parts of the game, especially considering how great the rest was.

Little details like this make a whole world of difference. They make the world feel lived in.

The level design in this game is really amazing. I couldn’t help but be impressed by the Edios design teams attention to detail. Just look at the screenshots I posted throughout this review. Their backdrops and beautiful and visually interesting, and their environments feel “lived in”. A lot of games will create these sprawling industrial levels that feel very sterile, and linear. DE:HR does not do that – every room has some interesting garbage that tells you meaningful things about its inhabitant. Every computer terminal has flavorful emails that help to flesh out the game world. Offices have rooms full of janitorial supplies in the hallways, apartments have beds and bathrooms. Hell, I have even found this very odd cubbyhole somewhere in the sewers:

Wait.. Tissues, lotion, laptop and... Is that... Eeeewww! There is probably nasty stuff on my shoes now!

This is very, very good design. No, it’s more than that. It is visual storytelling. Very few game companies do it right. Valve sort of pioneered this, and are the undisputed masters of incredible level design. Their games basically tell their story through their meticulously designed environments. Bethesda is also very good at this. God knows they can’t design faces that don’t look like undead with Down syndrome, but their environments are always populated with strategically scattered junk. In Fallout you could get a good idea what each Vault was all about without reading any of the notes on the computers. They would always have enough clues scattered throughout he levels. So now I would like to officially add Edios Montreal to my hall of fame of companies with awesome level design skills.

Despite a weak ending, and somewhat sucky boss fights the game was excellent. I got plenty of entertainment for my money, and Edios deserve mad props for actually making the game PC friendly and making their environments look as awesome as they did. If you haven’t picked it up yet, I highly recommend it.

I could probably write two thousand words about my initial impressions, but the link above pretty much says it all. I might as well just copy and paste the entire thing into a blockquote segment and write “THIS!” below. I agree with everything Shamus says about this game. It looks great, it feels great and I’m having a blast with it. So instead, lets talk about One of the things that continues to amaze me as I play is the incredible attention to detail.

Let me give you some examples. One of the terminals you can hack in the game contains a 419 Scam email:

419 Scam Email

Does this email have any relevance to the plot? No. Does it have any impact on the game? No, of course not. But they put it in anyway, because they knew it will make us smile. Little details like this make the game world feel real. It is not a sterile “level” that is to be cleared – it is actual place, inhabited by actual characters.

There are lots of little touches that make me think that the designers and developers had lots of fun with the game. And it is not just the usual video-game references. The game is loaded with familiar IT-geek/code monkey themed humor. Let me show you a few examples. It is both amusing and realistic to actually encounter a desk with a computer password written on a sticky note:

Deus Ex is Realistic

It was equally fun to to see the infamous CRT bridge – one of the oldest internet memes, which I suspect dates back to the ancient BBS times:

CRT Bridge

These subtle little nods toward internet culture will probably sail over most mainstream gamers’ heads. But Edios added subtle little things to keep them amused as well. This poster of a future Final Fantasy game is a perfect example:

Final Fantasy will never die apparently.

I also found this gem – a Look of Disapproval spray paint can:

Paint of Disapproval

I appreciate this, because some designer actually took the time to create this custom logo and slap it on select cans in the game. It is a nice touch. On the other hand, it is an internet meme.

Which brings me to my question of the day: what do you think about internet memes appearing in video games (or other media)? Do you like when games reference them? Or do you think it is a bit corny?

Personally I am of the opinion that game makers should strive to create original content that could expire memes. Great games tend to do that effortlessly (look at the memetic payload of most Valve games). To me that is the natural order of things. You create something fun and amusing, and then the internet appropriates it, runs away with it and beats it into the ground via repetition.

Going the other way around seems backwards. You are taking something that has been dragged all over the internet, chewed up, digested, regurgitated and remixed to death and then you put it into your original content. Why? It is nothing more than desperate pandering. Especially if the game makes an effort to ensure you notice it. Trying to call attention to a reference of and overplayed internet joke is just pathetic.

Deus Ex does keep it relatively subtle though. The CRT bridge is something you could potentially find in an IT office – especially during a big move and equipment reshuffling. Finding a can with a meme sticker is also not unrealistic. So I didn’t actually mind this that much. Especially since the game does seem to be generating some memetic remixes via it’s original work as well. Jensen’s glasses seem to be especially liked by the internets:

He did ask for these.

What is your take on the game so far? Did you like it? Did you hate it? How does it stack up to the original? No spoilers please, both for my sake and for sake of the other readers who may not have finished it yet.