Human Revolution endings: good vs evil?

[thest3alth]

[Big spoilers ahead, avoid reading if blah blah]


So I've just finished Human Revolution (incredible game, I love how the end cutscenes relate so closely with present day times. How it makes statement about humanity, beautiful..), but I'm still fining it hard to find the 'good' and 'evil' endings. You get to use Cassandra to put your spin on the augmentation issue; here are the options:

1) Tell the media the truth: that the transmission was released to show the world the dangers of augmentation and technology: this puts a stop to technology as we know it, apparently. Whether this means just augmentation or all technology is unclear, but augmentation will stop altogether. The Illuminati are also exposed (they were *sort of* the bad guys, they wanted to regulate augmentation, but one guy went rogue and fucked shit up, so can a whole organization be blamed for one man's actions?)

2) Forfil your only true duty: do what your boss says and blame the attack on an anti-augmentation terrorist group. This allows 'corporations to experiment with the ultimate fate of human evolution to no ends'. This will change nothing, an sounds a tad dodgy to me, but nothing bad has come from it so far, the only ad things that have happened are from the humanity 'purists'

3) Blame the incident on contaminated anti-rejection drugs, thus ensuring the UN heavily regulates the use to augmentations. The Illuminati get their way (and also infiltrate the UN terrorist force in the future, expanding their reach)

I'm fairly torn about the Illuminati and their intentions: on the one hand they offer a guiding hand to the world, on the other hand, can that much power be trusted to so few?

I've never played the original games, but at the end of Invisible War, it gives and option to allow the Illuminati to enter the world into an 'Age of Light'. Eh? Well that sound pretty good, but what is it? Anyway...

4) Destroy the place you're at in the final level: no one gets out alive, the world will never know what caused the incident. Jenson justifies this by saying that no one man can decide for all of humanity what is best: it must be down to every man woman and child to make that decision for humanity. Impractical, but probably morally superior.

So, I ask you, which is the be and worse moral ending, and which is your favourite ending?

Personally, I would be torn between #1 and #4 as a moral choice, but my favourite ending is probably #4

 

[Morthello]

I went with 2 because i like the idea of transhumanism and i just see augmentations in the game as the next step in human evolution. I guess i dislike the first option the most because i for one never understood the negativity and boogeyman attitude directed towards the idea of a group like the illuminati to begin with and id hate to see technological advancement haulted do to fear and misunderstanding.

 

[DustyDrB]

I went with Sarif, which is strange since I'm usually an "honest to a fault" kind of guy. But the people you are scapegoating are scum, and the truth would turn people against research. Not just augmentation research, but research in general. That's a big tragedy in my eyes.

 

[Sniper Team 4]

I went with one because it seemed the less...depressing of all of them. If that one was taken away, I would have sided with Taggart because I believe the stuff needed to be regulated. Not to the extreme that they wanted, but still. Sarif's ending freaking scares me, so I would never pick this one. And after all I went through, I sure as hell don't want to kill myself, so that one's out too. What I found amusing was that it sort of falls along Democrat, Republican, hate politics, and everyone should just die. Fun times.

 

[ZeroMachine]

First off, her name is Eliza Cassan. Not Cassandra, that's Megan's mother's name. Just sayin'.

Second, I don't think any of the choices are inherently good or evil. That's what's so awesome about it.

 

[Jandau]

It doesn't matter, you choice changes nothing. Events will proceed in mostly the same direction and result in the events of the original Deus Ex. Which is the one thing I dislike the most about the ending.

 

[Eisenfaust]

It seems they specifically avoided good v evil to let it settle more on the inherant values of the character without digressing into the whole "i have to choose this option for my moral choice continuity"

but yeah, as much as i hated taggert, and i REALLY hated taggert, i went with the illuminati... i in no way sympathised with darrow and his opinion, and while i had generally been supporting sarif the whole way through, i ended up rejecting it due to classic fear of a singularity... as much as supporting the illuminati will essentially set up bog page in Deus Ex, i still took that option because i'm not really that trusting of the notion of humanity resolving all it's issues by itself (which is why i completely avoided the whole "sink the station" option). a guiding hand is good... it's not dictatorship, just guidance... it might piss everyone off, but so long as nobody knows about the hand guiding them everything should be fine

 

[Gethsemani_v1legacy]

The thing is that all of the endings end up putting the world in a worse state than it was in before. Darrow's and Taggart's ending will probably see augmented people being persecuted and greatly limit the rate of technological advancement and personal freedoms. Sarif's ending on the other hand will allow science to march on unabated, to continue to develop such augmentations as the Typhoon and to create computers like the one at the center of Panachaea, but everyone will also be free to choose augmentations after their own mind and wallet. The sacrifice could go either way, and at worst it will simply end up being abused by others for thir own goals (seeing as how this is probably the canonical ending, you can bet that Majestic XII spun the story).

All the endings set up the fall of humanity that is bound to happen between HR and Deus Ex very nicely. No matter how hard Adam has fought up until that point, he ends up having to pick between the lesser of several evils. Very Deus Ex, I think.

 

[Corax_1990]

I went with option 2, seemed to me the most 'Deus Ex' of the 4, also I really liked Sarif and his Pragmatic view of the world, progress is necessary at any cost, some people will get left behind, thats life.

 

[ultrachicken]

I went with 2 because i like the idea of transhumanism and i just see augmentations in the game as the next step in human evolution. I guess i dislike the first option the most because i for one never understood the negativity and boogeyman attitude directed towards the idea of a group like the illuminati to begin with and id hate to see technological advancement haulted do to fear and misunderstanding.

The problem with the Illuminati is that they're corrupt and are morally bankrupt. Just look at what Zhao did in the name of the Illuminati. Those aren't the kinds of people you want leading the world.

OT: There is no "good" or "evil" ending. Just a bunch of middle ground. However, I went with the pro-Sarif ending because advancing augmentations means reaching nano-augmentation much more quickly, which is a good thing to strive for.

Also, I don't really understand how broadcasting the truth would somehow halt all technological progress. People weren't scared off from weapons research after Hiroshima and Nagasaki were decimated by atomic hellfire and even more potent weapons were in the works, why would this be any different?

 

[thest3alth]

Also, I don't really understand how broadcasting the truth would somehow halt all technological progress. People weren't scared off from weapons research after Hiroshima and Nagasaki were decimated by atomic hellfire and even more potent weapons were in the works, why would this be any different?

It wasn't known at that point that Nuclear weapons would become common enough that it was possible to end the world.

 

[Fieldy409_v1legacy]

i told the truth. Im a bit stubborn when it comes to morality. screw logic!

 

[Riobux]

I actually ended up missing the conversation with Sarif accidentally. Between getting people to possibly disregard technology altogether, silly amounts of regulations and the furthering of the Illuminati, and killing myself; I ended up blowing myself up sky-high. However, Jensen ended up raising a very good point in the final sequence I watched, that no singular man has no right to determine the future for billions of people, that it should be down to the people. However, I couldn't help but wonder: Isn't that what happens anyway? A singular man, or a small team, discovers augmentations. Isn't it up to humanity as a whole to either accept the augmentations or to regard them anyway? Although I could sort of see how Jensen's own opinion would affect humanity.

 

[GiantRaven]

For me, option 4 was the best ending. It tied up the story nicely, especially with Jensen, who throughout the story was never in control of the choices he made (instead following the orders of his superior). For him to say that nobody should be allowed to make such a huge decision for the whole of humanity was fantastic. It was also the only ending that felt like it would lead into the original Deus Ex as well, which really made Human Revolution feel like the prequel it was supposed to be, rather than the 'reimagining' that it felt like earlier in the game.

 

[Venats]

Darrow's ending is irrational; augmentation being shunned makes sense in light of the ending but all of technology? The writers for that ending were going right along the tracks, then suddenly fell off into the realm of absurdity. Humans would never drop all of their technological advancements just because one of them was bad, that goes against all of our technological development over the past 2000 years. However, I think that had they not done this, Darrow's ending would have seemed the most 'sensible' in that it is ultimately the only one that frees people from the Illuminati but by making it a batshit insane conclusion for abandoning all technology, it just turns into a stupid ending written by people disconnected from reality.

The rest of the endings end with everyone under the control of the illuminati at some point. Blowing everything up changes nothing and leaves the puppet masters alive and well, all they'd have to do is rebuild. Taggert's just begs for a corrupt UN. Sarif's ending is the quintessential amoral scientist's ending but without any actual scientific thought put into it at all, which gives everyone nice shiny body parts... while they exist under the thumb of the illuminati. Its almost like the USSR, just with shiny rather than hunger.

All of the endings reek of nonscience and nonhistory used in place of science and history, each striving to outdo the others for the most strawman vulcan.

And, someone explain to me, how the heck does augmentation out perform genetic engineering in terms of human improvement? Do people like having magnetically susceptible parts for some odd reason? Or toxic plastics?