Sorry, if that sounds insulting but: Really?Nocturnal Gentleman said:
Yes, (some of) your points are correct, but really?
You know there's something called Willing suspension of disbelief, an ability needed to enjoy every piece of fiction.
Without it, you couldn't watch and enjoy the Star Wars films because you know that ,in Space, no one can hear your Death Star explode.
You couldn't play the beginning of Uncharted 2 because Drake would most likely cut his finger of while trying to climb up that hanging train.
And even in games as realistic and hardcore as the first Operation Flashpoint, the magic abilities of a medic to regrow legs apparently torn of by a grenade, would make every immersion impossible.
So ,if the fact that Tranqulizer darts (advanced future cyberpunk tranquilizer darts at that) would be a stupid idea to use on human enemies in real life turns you away from a video game, then I'd maybe consider sticking to documentaries and other non-fiction media.
This does not that there were no moments in the game that broke my sense of immersion (while it's nice and just plausible that some employees of Montréal based Picus Communication write some of their personal e-mails in (canadian) french, it leaves open the question why all citizens of upper and lower Hengsha city communicate digitally in English but often speak Mandarin on the streets), however after a minute or so I was able to take that as given and just continue to enjoy the surprisingly well fleshed-out world and the interesting quests.
And now onto something completly different:
To all you people out there saying that the way the endings were made is justified, "because we all know what happens in the original Deus Ex".
Screw you!
Screw
You!
Because that's the fan in you talking, believing that continuity or canon or whatever you might call it, is more important than the experience and choice of the player. You could hardly be more wrong. By supporting this mindset you are stripping videogames of their biggest advantage as a narrative medium: interactivity and choice.
I'm not saying that every game needs multiple endings or the illusion of free choice and there are enough good examples out there that prove that (the Uncharted or Prince of Persia series and many others), but if a game includes all those things, then the developers should have the balls to go through with it, even if it means declaring three of the four as "non-canon" and maybe upsetting a few fanboys.(It's not as if this didn't happen before, the evil ending of Bioshock leaves no way for Bioshock 2) However, if you make a choice and there are no consequences to that choice, then this choice is unimportant and therefore obsolete.
"Wait!" some of you will cry out "But can't that be used as a narrative tool, showing that one man can hardly change the fate of humanity as a whole and that our perception of interactivity in videogames is an illusion, while we are actually just following a handfull of slightly differently painted tubes, created by the developers."
Yes, you are right, a lack of choice or first creating and then brutally destroying the illusion of interactivity can be used for misguiding the player and get him to think, as popularly demonstrated by above mentioned Bioshock and its "Would you kindly...", but in this case I think you would be giving Eidos Montréal too much credit. This does not mean, that I am not confident that they could come up with something clever like that, their excellent world building shows that they might be interested in a bit more than just taking your money, while developing their games. It means that the way the endings were made are not convincing me to believe that they were intended that way. See, I have nothing against games that don't take me by the hand and repeat Every. Single. Plot. Point.(plot point plot point) three times for the slower ones of us, but I'm not going to suspect a deeper meaning behind something that seems to me more like simple lazyness.
If I'm wrong and Eidos actually wanted to show the limits of choice, then they could have made it a lot more clear without spelling every single letter of the actual meaning.
How about this:
Make a voiceover by a bitter old Jensen explaining that even though Darrow's unadultered confession caused an uproar and worldwide riots, the powers-that-be managed to discredit the video as a fake, painted the old man as a senile lunatic and put the blame for the augmentation malfunctions on a group of australian terrorists.
Or maybe let David Sarif explain, that even the widespread "NuPo-panic" wasn't enough to stop progress and the dangers of human augmentation were soon replaced by the fears of a newly rising terrorist threat.
And I want to know what happens to all the the characters that aren't in the original. I want to know what happens to the kidnapped scientists, I want to know what happens to Tai Yong Medical and the city of Hengsha after Zhao's death.
Fallout 2's ending told me about the fate of nearly every important location I visited and about what happened to my companions after the end of the game and that was more than ten years ago, surely with all our future space-man technology we are able to do something as simple and yet as effective as that again.
Or maybe let David Sarif explain, that even the widespread "NuPo-panic" wasn't enough to stop progress and the dangers of human augmentation were soon replaced by the fears of a newly rising terrorist threat.
And I want to know what happens to all the the characters that aren't in the original. I want to know what happens to the kidnapped scientists, I want to know what happens to Tai Yong Medical and the city of Hengsha after Zhao's death.
Fallout 2's ending told me about the fate of nearly every important location I visited and about what happened to my companions after the end of the game and that was more than ten years ago, surely with all our future space-man technology we are able to do something as simple and yet as effective as that again.
