Certain defenders of Human Revolution frustrate me with a specific thing they do

Deus Ex came out in the year 2000.  Some of the same team stayed on for the sequel, Invisible War, which came out in 2003.

Let's talk about Invisible War first because its supporters don't do the thing that frustrates me from Human Revolution supporters.

The first problem the team for Invisible War faced was that Deus Ex had three massively different mutually exclusive endings.  You see, in Deus Ex the main character is supported and directed by a hastily cobbled together coalition.  In the face of a common enemy that is on verge of world conquest, groups that would normally hate each other work together.  There's no illusion there, right in the middle one character points out that if not for the common enemy, her faction would be fighting just as hard against the ally she's helping recruit.

Throughout the whole game you have people with three competing ideologies supporting you, manipulating you, and pushing you forward.  Then, at the end, they do exactly what you'd expect: they fracture.

One group says that the system doesn't work so you should burn the whole thing down, throw the world into a dark age, and have faith that people will rebuild things better if you give them a fresh start.

One group says that the system doesn't work because it's being run by usurpers.  If you put the right people back in power then the system will work.

And finally you've got the option to try a brand new system, instead of resetting things for a fresh start you'd be catapulting forward into something new in hopes that that will be better.

The states of the world are completely different after each ending so a sequel (as opposed to, say, a side story) that followed one could not possibly fit in the world of either of the others.

It looked like Invisible War was going to have to canonize one ending and tell the supporters of the other two, "So sorry, you don't count."

Then one of the team came up with a way of weaving together elements of all three endings that, the team felt, supported and contradicted each more or less equally.

So the Invisible War development team announced, "We're doing an AU where things didn't follow any of the endings.  There will be connection without continuity."  And people were pretty much fine with that.

When Invisible War came out, people found things to hate, but no one had a huge problem with the fact that it was AU.  People also found things to love.

What people did not find was a powerful need to argue, "No, it's not an AU, it totally works as a straight up sequel that in no way contradicts the original."

Invisible War, though, turned out to be a disaster.  Now fifteen years old, Deus Ex still makes it on lists of the greatest games of all time, usually with a pretty decent ranking.  People naturally had high expectations for the sequel.  Invisible War was fucking crushed by the shadow of Deus Ex.

A game that had been being developed as a sequel to Invisible War had all reference to Deus Ex stripped out of it in hopes of avoiding the same fate, but the damage had been done.

The  team went their separate ways, all rumors of a third game were completely unfounded, the studio closed down, and for years on end nothing happened.  The franchise was dead.

Then Edios, the parent company, opened a new studio, Edios Montreal, and the people at that studio wanted their debut game to make a big fucking splash so they started lobbying itself Eidos to be given the keys to the Deus Ex franchise so they could simultaneously resurrect a beloved franchise and use the name recognition of Deus Ex to put their studio on the map.

A lot of things went wrong.  A lot of things went right.  This post isn't about either.

At first information was sparse.  Then it turned out to be a prequel, as we started getting more and more information there was a lot of, "That looks cool," but also some, "Wait, what?" and eventually, "That's fucking impossible."

Oh, also, we learned the name: Human Revolution.

So interviewers asked.  The art director was a condescending asshole about it, but I think he was the first to come out and say that they weren't even trying to make a game that could fit before Deus Ex so he merits a mention here.

Eventually people who weren't condescending assholes were asked (this is always a good thing; never judge an entire project on the grounds of one person being a condescending asshole.)

What came out when these nice people were asked (and it's worth remembering that the majority of the people working on Human Revolution were nice people) the response was more or less this (paraphrased and synthesized from multiple interviews):

Deus Ex is a decade old, and Invisible War not much more recent.  Things have changed and we have different aims and a different vision of the future.  We're treating this like building a new intellectual property from the ground up in hopes of bringing the Deus Ex experience to a modern audience, which has different aesthetics and expectations.  So Human Revolution will not be a prequel but instead a reboot, and while we'll make sure there are connections to Deus Ex it won't fit in the same continuity.

So, basically, when it comes to continuity it was the same thing that the Invisible War devs said just with a lot of time difference.  It would be an AU that had vaguely the same setting, some of the same characters, similar themes and whatnot, but it would not have continuity with Deus Ex.

This is ... hardly something new.  There are some long running game series where every single installment takes place in a different universe and the connections are broad strokes only.

The thing is, people accepted the Invisible War developers at their word when they said they were making an AU game that didn't fit in the same timeline.

With Human Revolution something else has happened.  I worry, more or less every time I tell people about Deus Ex and how the series fits together that I'm going to run into that kind of Human Revolution fan.

What kind?  The people who are all, "No, the ones who actually made the game don't know what the fuck they're talking about, Human Revolution totally fits as prequel in the same universe in the same timeline.  Now that you've implied otherwise I demand that you justify yourself to me and PROVE that it doesn't fit.  ... What's that?  You have evidence?  Well fuck your evidence because X, Y, and Z that don't actually address the point at hand. ... I don't care what was fucking canon in Deus Ex because the possible explanations for how that could come to pass don't satisfy me"

Pause, for a moment to note that sometimes the possible explanations (fanwanks basically) are really truly not at all satisfying.  The thing is, that doesn't change the fact that the things that don't have good satisfying explanations are canon.

It's like Star Trek.  The Heisenberg compensator is bullshit.  We all know the Heisenberg compensator is bullshit.  There are laws of physics that say the Heisenberg compensator must be bullshit.  That doesn't matter.  It's cannon that Star Trek has Heisnberg compensators which is what allows their brand of teleportation to work.

No matter how well you argue that a Heisenberg compenstor is bullshit, it doesn't change the fact that it's canon that Star Trek has them and thus can (and does) have Star Trek style transporters.

Resuming:

"therefore what is canonical did not happen and since it did not happen Human Revolution cannot possibly contradict it so you're wrong and the developers are wrong and everyone other than me and mine are wrong and Human Revolution is a perfectly valid same continuity prequel that doesn't contradict Deus Ex even a little."

And that really fucking frustrates me.

Even if there weren't a scrap of evidence that Human Revolution is alternate timeline to Deus Ex, the people who made Human Revolution fucking said it was before they released the game and thus before these assholes ever played it.

They did more than that, they offered up their various reasons for choosing to make a game that didn't fit in the Deus Ex timeline.  They did it knowingly and they had ways to justify it to themselves and others.

So why the fuck does it suddenly fall upon me to justify saying it's not in the same timeline when the people who made the damn thing announced that, along with the reasons why they thought it was a legitimate artistic decision, before anyone other than them ever even played the game?

I don't like the fact that I can't say how the games fit together (broad strokes only, details need not apply) without being shouted down by lengthy screeds from people who claim they know better than the makers.

I'm a detail person and I want to be able to tell other people, who may also be detail people, that the second and third games didn't even try to keep the details straight because they were set in alternate, but very similar, timelines/universes.

Also because for story people like myself Deus Ex was very much a detail hunting game.  To understand thing A you might have to combine a line from email γ and book x in spite of them being located in different levels on different continents.  There was seriously a nuclear war you could fail to learn about if you didn't stop to read the book on a coffee table during a hostage situation.  (Well, the book didn't evaporate so you could deal with the hostage situation first, but that's not the point)  Trying to do the same between games results in contradictions and divide by cheese errors.

It's not a point against the games.  It would be if they were marketed as all being perfectly consistent but they weren't.  The developers of both Invisible War and Human Revolution were kind enough to tell people before the games could be preordered much less played, that they weren't going to be consistent and weren't even trying for it because they had other priorities.

Deus Ex Index

At the time of writing this it's been several months since I had a Deus Ex post (That being Messy Beginnings) consider this a promise that there will be more to come.

Deus Ex is a game from the year 2000 that I very much recommend you buy.  (It's four bucks new.)  It takes as its setting a the future of a world where the conspiracy theorists were right, and somehow manages to make that into a very deep and complex story and setting.  It was also renowned for its game-play and has been called the best game of all time, by multiple sources I believe.

Anyway, I'm going through it slowly and writing about the experience.

Before Starting the Game

An Introduction of sorts - In which I talk about Deus Ex, its game-play, and go off on a tangent about an inexplicable "Teach the Controversy" style thing that seems to go on where some people say with no evidence to support them and plenty of evidence against them that there's a massive inconsistency about when the game takes place, and those who point out, "No there isn't, it takes place in 2052," are dismissed as star struck and believing that the developers could do no wrong (spoiler alert, they could.)
Backstory - I go over the games backstory in three ways.  First public knowledge world history, then secret history known to conspiracy groups and such, then the personal history that led the Main Character to be where he was.
On Newer Better Graphics and Original Text - Deus Ex is an old game, and even when it came out the graphics weren't exactly top of the line.  Yet for this project I'll be playing it without any enhancements because the idea is to look at Deus Ex itself not someone else's version of Deus Ex.  The post goes into a good deal more detail about that.

Training Mission

Part 1: No Exits - I talk about ways to justify examining the training mission, how the future looks, and a problem that plagued Deus Ex throughout.
Part 2: Infolinks, Lockpicks, and a lack of Female Characters - I talk about the way innovations in the setting serve the game-play and are designed around the two goals of keeping you actually playing the game (as opposed to rummaging through notes you've been taking on paper beside you) and making resource management a key element.  And then I get to gender representation.  Extremely short version: Yes, it passes the Bechdel Test, yes it has very unequal representation between the genders.  Yes the designers noticed the second thing and thought it a bad thing, but only after the fact was it noticed.
Part 3: Books and Coworkers - On meeting your first book I talk about one of the ways Deus Ex goes about creating the impression of a wider world, and you meet your first coworker.
Part 4: What The Hell Is Wrong With You People? - In order to teach you the gameplay mechanics of searching bodies, moving bodies, using hazmat suits, and using medical bots a volunteer is rendered unconscious and you're forced to swim through contaminated water.  I point out the absurdity of it all.  Also, a Soylent Green reference.
Part 5: What isn't - I talk about what ended up on the cutting room floor and how, based on dialog that remains in the game files, this section of training seems to have originally been much more ambitious and interesting.
Part 6: What Is - I talk about what is in the training mission, Gunther Hermann, what makes a tragic figure, and how stillness can improve one's accuracy with firearms.
Part 7: Killing People With Sheep - Meet the Light Attack Munition, also known as the LAM pronounced as in, "Marry had a little..." they can be used as thrown grenades or proximity mines, you meet a trooper who has thoughts on worker morale, I discover that (in this level at least) I Am Invincible, but my means of discovery reduces me to crawling through the level for my legs have been damaged to the point of being unable to hold me up.  (Can't be vinced doesn't mean can't be hurt.)
Part 8: Anna and Stealth - I talk about Anna Navarre and the stealth portion of training.
Part 9: Final Exam - There's a robot, there's a "river", the robot wants you dead, the river must be crossed.  I describe eight different crossings.  This is Deus Ex, there's always more than one way to solve a problem.  After Training forced you to do things this way or that, this part seems to be teaching you that, now that training is ending, you're not going to be forced into a single method again.
Part 10: Snippets of information - The hall of holograms provides you with background information.

Before the Game Proper

Main Menu and Character Creation - I didn't talk about the menu as much as originally planned, but I did talk a fair amount about character creation, the benefits of having a team of rivals, the downside to having the default real name be the same as the code name, and how skills work.  And that leads into the idea of resource management.
Intro - Bob Page and Walton Simons have a chat about manipulating governments and letting the bodies pile up in the streets, I provide commentary.

Theme Post: Messy Beginnings - I talk about the tendency in the game, and in the real world, for things not to have a single founding date but instead to evolve through stages and have multiple places in history where they can be said to originate.

Deus Ex Theme Post: Messy Beginnings

[This is part of a series of posts about the game Deus Ex, which, for the record, I recommend buying.]

[The series began with this post.]

I touched on this a bit in the previous post, and was going to leave it at that but a couple of things happened that made me decide to write a post on the topic.  One is that my computer is in for repairs and this computer can't play Deus Ex, another is that when I was thinking about the next post I was going to write, and thought it might get derailed in this direction.

Beginnings tend to be messy but we like having a date, so America started in 1776, July fourth if you want to be specific.  Except the stuff at Lexington and Concord happened on April 19, 1775 and the war didn't end until 1783, the Articles of Confederation kind of sort of failed so they were replaced with the US Constitution, adopted 1787, ratified 1788, and finally taking effect in 1789.  I've just given six dates that could be said to be when the US started, an argument can be made for any of them.  Beginnings are like that.

But even though beginnings are like that, and even though we know beginnings are like that, we tend to treat them as a single event and not ask, "Which one?" when someone talks about a beginning.  Deus Ex plays with that.

The two most obvious cases are the NSF and the Illuminati.

The NSF (Northwest Secessionist Forces) was founded sometime after the 2030 quake.  The goal was for several states in the Northwestern US to break away from the US.  This probably happened in 2031 or 2032, but the exact date is unknown.

The reason the exact date is unknown is that in 2042 the NSF (National Secessionist Forces) was founded in response to national gun control legislation and by changing what their first initial stood for and opening their arms to recruits from all parts of the country, the NSF became a much bigger threat.  Which is saying something given that the initial effort to put them down was considered a war.

One organization, two foundings, and two very different goals (initially for one geographic area to leave the US, then to completely get rid of the US and return to local rule throughout.)

With the Illuminati we actually get a member telling us about it as Dowd puts it:

It's true that our organization stretches back to the Order of the Assassins, or Hashishim, but not in the way you might imagine.  The order hasn't so much lasted as been continually revived. Adam Weishaupt started from scratch in Bavaria in 1776. But so did Thomas Jefferson a few years later. It's the IDEA that has lasted. The SYSTEM. Or the DESIRE, every thinking person's desire to give the world some decent organization.

 He gives one date and three foundings.  One can look up the date of the Order of Assassins (1090), Thomas Jefferson starting the American Illuminati not so much.

In that you have the idea of multiple foundings in its purest form perhaps, continual revival.  Constant change.  It's just that something stays the same.  Or perhaps, to be like Dowd, I should say, "It's just that SOMETHING stays the same."

New organizations pick up the pieces that the old ones left behind. Adam Weishaupt may have started from scratch, but at some point someone found out about the previous iterations and incorporated what they could of them, otherwise Dowd couldn't make the claim it stretched back to the Order of Assassins.

In a certain sense, MJ12, the main antagonists, are simply the next in line, though Dowd and the other surviving Illuminati would say they're perverting the idea.  But they have taken over the system, as Dowd puts it:

[...] the Illuminati laid the foundation... the multinationals, the global structures Majestic 12 depends upon.  Majestic 12 inherited a system that took millennia to develop.

Either Dowd is overstating the time it took to develop the system, or he's giving credit to people way older for than the Order of Assassins for the foundation they laid.  From 1090 to 2052 is a millennium if you round up, not multiple millennia.  Not by a long shot.  He may well be crediting older people, or he may be prone to hyperbole, or any number of things really, but this brings us to MJ12.

When did they begin?  Setting aside the foundations on which they built their power, MJ12 was founded at least twice.  Originally founded some time in the 1950s as a branch of the Illuminati it was refounded when it declared its independence and overthrew the Illuminati sometime between 2030 and 2035.

So when someone talks about MJ12, are they talking about an organization that's about 100 years old, or one closer to 20?  It can be difficult to say.

With the Triads something else is at work, the Triads trace their heritage to Triads past, which would muck things up anyway, but they also have traditions that can't really be all that traditional.

In the game, in Hong Kong, gunfire sensors are in use.  It makes it hard to wage a turf war with guns because the police will come running.  So they use swords and have woven it into the culture or their organizations even though, as one disgusted monk (they chose his temple to have a ceremony in) points out:

The grandfathers or the Triads all had Uzis.  Tradition... Bah!

Deus Ex seems to revel in the messiness of how we got here.  The Illuminati wasn't just revived once or twice, it was continually revived, the NSF had to go through two incarnations including a name change and an expansion of its goals to get to the game.

Consider UNATCO, the organization you start the game as a part of.  When was it formed?  Well we just talked about the intro where it says it was formed by executive order in response to the Statue bombing, but no.  That can't be the absolute start of UNATCO because UNATCO is secretly responsible for the bombing, as part of a successful ploy to get the US to join.  UNATCO was re-formed there just as the NSF was re-formed when it changed from Northwest to National and MJ12 was re-formed when it went from being a branch of the Illuminati to being at war with the Illuminati to overthrowing the Illuminati.

I'm not sure why there's this tendency toward messy beginnings, but given that it is called out in the game, as with the NSF's name change and the Illuminati's continual rather than continuous existence, I'm willing to give the benefit of the doubt that when we see signs that point to a thing having multiple beginnings, that's intentional rather than inconsistency.

One possible reason for this that the game's setting was built out of 1990s conspiracy theories, and those probably tend to lead to rather convoluted histories.  I especially imagine that was the case in the '90s with the fall of the Soviet Union and the Balkanization of the Balkans.  A phrase I steal from Fred Clark:

It must have been hard to keep oneself fearfully confident of an impending one-world government while watching the Balkanization of the Balkans unfold. How do you manage to stay frightened of the coming OWG when even a unified Yugoslavia proves impossible to sustain?

Those invested in the conspiracy theories, those that the developers would look to when researching their setting, probably were getting very much into a messy beginnings state of mind: sure, it looks like things are falling further away from One World Government, but the conspiracy will just be reborn and that time it'll happen just like I told you.

That's one possibility.  Another is realism.  Note what I said about dating the start of the US, and note that I could have thrown out a lot more dates.  Then realize that the design team was working in Texas.  When did Texas start?  That's like trying to say how old France is given the stages that place went through.

Another is that they just liked it.

-

The messy beginnings extends beyond organizations.  When was JC created.  We know when he was born.  He was born in 2029, but the year before that the embryo that would become JC was implanted into his mother.  Said embryo was a clone of Paul Denton.  Was he created when he was born, when the embryo was implanted, when the cloned embryo was created, when the project to do these things was greenlit?

Consider this: the project that created JC had to first lead to identifying Paul as a viable subject, and before that may have even led to Paul's parents getting together with MJ12/the Illuminati* playing secret matchmaker, and the information on which this project was based dated back to the 1940s.  So when does the story of JC Denton begin, really?

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The reason that I thought I might derail on to this topic on the next normal post is that JC and Paul's parents are soon to come up, and I see a similar thing going on there.  They had two sets (biological parents of Paul were murdered, then the second set adopted them.

Like the issue of foundings, no one ever stops and asks, "Which one?" when talking about the sets or parents.  On the one hand, there's probably a certain amount of realism to this.  Both sides probably assume the other knows which set is being talked about and it doesn't come up that often.

But I feel like the parent situation is handled less well and I can't help but wonder if the way multiple foundings were handled, which seems to have been, "We'll just throw them in and trust that the players can sort it out for themselves provided we give the occasional reminder that we do this sort of thing on purpose," played a role in the less than good handling of the parent situation.

I have not personally spoken to a developer about this, so this could be wrong, but as near as I can tell the idea of adoptive parents was added to the game later than a lot of other stuff.  There's no mention of them in the continuity bible, for example, instead it says JC ended up a ward of the state.

The only information outside of the game we have about the second set of parents is when someone wrote an email to one of the developers directly asking a question about parents and the developer responded that the person had confused the adoptive parents with the original set.

It doesn't seem to be something that was thought about long and hard, it seems more like someone said, "It would be great if we could say parent did X and Y," and someone else said, "Yeah, but parent was dead for 15 years by the time the opportunity to do either X or Y came up," and at this point someone, perhaps a third person, said, "What if they were adopted after their original parents died?"

And then everyone said, "Yeah, let's do that," and the result is a muddle where sometimes you don't know who they're talking about, and sometimes you know they're talking about one set but it really feels like this would make more sense if they were talking about the other.

And I wonder if the apparent decision to throw in two sets of parents with little explanation about which is being discussed at any given time was related to them already having built in several organizations with multiple foundings with little explanation about which is being discussed at any point in time.

-

Anyway, I think having messy beginnings where it's hard to pin down a single point where something started is generally a good thing in Deus Ex.  It lets you know that this is not a closed world where everything can be cleanly pigeonholed, instead you're standing in the middle of "It's more complicated than that" and you get a sense that not all loose ends can be tied up and not everything revolves around you.

I think that the similar ambiguity with the parents doesn't work as well.  It feels more like inconsistency in the game than the game faithfully creating a world where things are more complicated than you might like.

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*With both on the same side at this point it can be difficult to tell where one ends and the other begins since, in fact, MJ12 is a part of the Illuminati.

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[Previous][Index]

Deus Ex: Intro

[This is part of a series of posts about the game Deus Ex, which, for the record, I recommend buying.]

[The series began with this post.]

Once you've chosen a face, a real name, and a skillset for your character, the game can begin.  It begins with an intro set six months before the game.  For those who might wonder about such things, the intro is entirely skippable.

The camera starts at a spinning globe which is suspended in mid air beneath a giant black stone sculpture of a hand.

It pans down to Bob Page and Walton Simons having a discussion while a woman (Maggie Chow, yes I spoil everything) walks away from the camera.

Bob Page: Your appointment to FEMA should be finalized within the week.  I've already discussed the matter with the Senator. 

Deus Ex is built on a foundation of 1990s conspiracy theories.  The UN is a front organization for evil conspiracies who want to take over the world, our own government has been corrupted, and FEMA is in the business of preparing to take innocent people off to concentration camps.  Interestingly these conspiracy theories persist regardless of who is in office.  The people who believe them seem to want to believe them.

I leave it to someone else to figure out the psychology behind that, though I think Fred Clark may have a good start on it.  The important part here is that FEMA is bad.  It is one national state of emergency away from ending democracy and making us all into slaves.  Or something like that.  The conspiracy theory is still around today.

Anyway, back to the conversation Page just told Simons he'd soon be running this liberty crushing disaster relief agency, and he knows this because he's discussed the matter with the senator.

Walton Simons: I take it he was agreeable? 
Bob Page: He didn't really have a choice. 
Walton Simons: Has he been infected? 
Bob Page:  Oh, yes, most certainly. When I mentioned that we could put him on the priority list for the Ambrosia vaccine, he was so willing it was almost pathetic. 

And now you know that there's a plague, a plague to which Bob Page controls the vaccine.  You also know that Page seems to take a twisted joy in the power this gives over him.  Certainly blackmailing the senator was a means to an end, but it doesn't seem to be something he had any qualms about doing.  Bob Page isn't an ends justify the means villain because for him the means would appear to be fun.

Walton Simons: This plague -- the rioting is intensifying to the point where we may not be able to contain it.
Bob Page: Why contain it? Let it spill over into the schools and churches, let the bodies pile up in the streets. In the end, they'll beg  us to save them. 

A couple of things.  One is that they made the plague, and it might not be the only plague they made.  It's entirely possible that "this plague" is said in order to distinguish it from all those other plagues they've unleashed.

Second, Walton Simons is a hands on villain, Bob Page is an administrator.  Those are two rather different kinds of evil and as a result you'll never really get a chance to Bob's evil shine in the game itself, but in this intro you can see that while evil deeds done with his own hands might be lacking, he's definitely evil.

As Page is speaking the camera shows the dying and the dead in an overcrowded clinic.

Walton Simons: I've received reports of armed attacks on shipments. There's not enough vaccine to go around, and the underclasses are starting to get desperate. 
Bob Page: Of course they're desperate. They  can smell their death, and the  sound they'll make rattling their cage will serve as a warning to  the rest.
Walton Simons: Mmm. I hope you're not underestimating the problem. The others may not go as quietly as you think -- intelligence indicates they're behind the problems in Paris. 
Bob Page: A bunch of pretentious old men playing at running the world.  But the world left them behind long ago. We are the future. 

One of the things that we have to constantly be aware of is constraints, Simons can't say that they control the vaccine and the plague and if they wanted there would be enough vaccine to go around because the first time player isn't supposed to know that yet.

On one level all of this is just to serve as an exposition dump before you start playing.  Any inconsistencies in it can be dismissed as part of the constraints placed on such a dump.

On the other hand, I don't think it makes sense to dismiss it outright which means that when Walton Simons brings up things like the containability of the riots and the availability of the vaccine, we should probably take them as real concerns.  If it were up to him perhaps he'd have more vaccine around and use that to try to leverage the situation into one in which the rioting was containable.

But he doesn't argue the point, he moves on.  The others, he speaks of, are what remain of the Illuminati.  And while he speaks we see a french resistance group in a gunfight against MJ12 troops.  MJ12 being the group with which Page and Simons are associated.

Walton Simons: We have other problems. 
Bob Page: UNATCO? 

This is just weird in hindsight, unless Bob and Walton have been doing some serious work on their own without telling each other and this meeting is where they get together and Walton crituqe's Bob's handling of the vaccine situation while Bob goes, "What the hell was up with that UNATCO thing?"

The reason being that the UN is their puppet and UNATCO, a part of the UN, one of their tools.  Page shouldn't be thinking of UNATCO as a problem unless a lot of MJ12 work was done without notifying him.

I'll get to that in a moment.

Walton Simons: Formed by executive order after the terrorist strike on the Statue. I have someone in place, though. I'm more concerned about Savage -- he's relocated to Vandenberg. 

I'm going to skip over the question of, "In what world does Bob not know this," of course and move straight into foundations.

Almost nothing in Deus Ex was formed just once.  Note, for example, that it takes place in the US, France, and Hong Kong.  When were those places founded?  As someone from the US, I couldn't give you just one date.  Well, I could, but I'd be able to argue the case for other dates as well.

UNATCO was reformed by executive order.  The US finally joined UNATCO which it hadn't done before, a new charter was written, and a new headquarters was donated: Liberty Island.  In the shadow of the terrorist attack that brought down parts of the Statue.

It will turn out that UNATCO was responsible for the attack on the Statue, using it to become more than it once was, now rechartered and backed by US dollars.

That Page is unaware of this either implies taking a lot of narrative convince to get the exposition in, or a giant amount of autonomy on Simon's part.  (He would have had to carry out a terrorist attack and manipulate the political response all without Bob noticing.)

While UNATCO is being discussed the camera shows what is probably the ceremony at which UNATCO was rechartered.

Bob Page: Our biochem corpus is far in advance of theirs, as is our electronic sentience. And their...ethical inflexibility has allowed us to make progress in areas they refuse to consider. 

Ethical inflexibility is how you know Savage and his people, whoever they may be, are a hell of a lot more likely to be good guys than the people currently having a chat.  While this is said we see one of MJ12's secret labs.  And our first greasel.

After this the camera will return to Page and Simons.

Walton Simons: The augmentation project? 
Bob Page: Among other things -- but I must admit that I've been somewhat disappointed in the performance of the primary unit.
Walton Simons: The secondary unit should be online soon. It's currently undergoing preparation and will be operational within six months. My people will continue to report on its progress. If necessary, the primary will be terminated. 

The primary unit is JC's brother Paul.  He's the first human being to accept nano augmentation without rejection.  The secondary unit is JC himself, the clone of Paul grown in the same womb.  You start the game by listening to two of the movers and the shakers of the world discussing killing your brother because, hey, they'll still have you.

The camera cuts to a lab deep within Area 51 where a clone is being grown, unlike JC it's being grown to adulthood inside a tank.

Bob Page: We've had to endure much, you and I, but soon there will be order again, a new age. Aquinas spoke of the mythical City on the Hill. Soon that city will be a reality, and we will be crowned its kings. 

A lot of people assume that Bob Page and Walton Simons both planned to backstab each other in the end.  I don't.  I think Page is sincere here.  His plan for world domination includes being co-king, not absolute monarch.  I never get the sense that either Page or Simons doesn't trust the other.  I think they are genuine friends.

I think that friendship might even be necessary to them.  They have both done horrible unforgivable things, betrayal was just the start, if they didn't have something good in their lives to ground them I'm not convinced that they could function as well as they did.  It's hard to be all evil, all the time, I think the friendship between Bob Page and Walton Simons is their not-evil time.

Second thing.  As near as I can tell Aquinas did not speak of a City on a Hill.  All kinds of other people did, not the least of which being Jesus, but I can't locate Aquinas doing it.  The best I can do is find a commentary on the gospels by Aquinas which includes the phrase because it's in the Gospel being commented on.  I seriously have no idea what the Hell Page is talking about here.

Anyway, the camera goes black.

Bob Page: Or better than kings. Gods.

And that's the end of the intro.

-

[Previous][Index][Next]

Deus Ex: Main Menu and Character Creation

[This is part of a series of posts about the game Deus Ex, which, for the record, I recommend buying.]

[The series began with this post.]

We've finished training, and that dumps us back at the main menu, so lets take a look at that:

We've got a spinning logo in the background an a list of options.  It should come as no surprise that I like the second on the list "Save Game", Deus Ex also has a quicksave feature.  I didn't actually use quicksave for the "rewind"s two posts ago, I used ordinary saving.  But you can kind of see why I like saving.  I can go back and do that in six very different ways.  And I can keep on going back.  If I want to, right now, I can go right back to that moment and try my hand at that bot again.  The only way I get that in Mirror's Edge is if a true checkpoint (not a subcheckpoint) is exactly where I want it.

Anyway, what we want for now is new game, which will bring us to difficulty selection.  (Only difference made is how much damage you take) and then character creation.

In character creation the first thing is to create a new name.  The existing name is highlighted and ready to be replaced.  There's a good reason for this.  The existing name is a very, very silly name.

You see the character you play has the code name J.C. Denton, and the default real name for him?  JC Denton.  Which means that if you use the defaults, and I do, things get very screwy any time code name and real name are mentioned anywhere near each other.

You will seriously end up with, and I'm not making this up:

"Hey JC, / Guess I'll have to get used to calling you "J.C." around the office." 

"JC Denton will be joining us today [...] His assigned cover name for the duration of his service will be "J.C. Denton"" 

"J.C. Denton or "JC" or whatever he calls himself" 

"J.C. Denton, also known as "JC Denton."" 

"J.C. "JC" Denton"

Which leaves one with the strange impression that the entire world is downright obsessed with whether or not one uses periods to separate initials.

I think this was a mistake.  I think there should have been a default real name that was not the same as the code name.  I assume the reason that there wasn't was to avoid pushing one real name, and to avoid confusion for the people who didn't pay attention and wouldn't have known that Default Real Name referred to them.

I think that could have been dealt with.  The field could have been left blank initially and then, if not filled in, had the Default Real Name applied.  That would avoid pushing anything.  To notify people, "Hey, this is your name," there would be multiple possibilities.  One would just be to have a pop up saying, "Since you didn't choose a real name your real name is [Default Real Name]" or, since they'd know what the default real name was ahead of time, the could have actually recorded lines to let you know what it was, which would only play if you left it unchanged.

Before I get to that, I'm going to propose such a name.  I think Adam Smith would have worked.  It's generic in its elements, neither Adam nor Smith stand out as remarkable for an American to be called, but in combination it gives the sort of vibe one might like for a conspiracy game.

Don't use that myself, I stick with defaults and enter a world where everyone is obsessed with whether or not periods are used to separate initials, but I think it would have worked as a way to avoid the silliness of "J.C. 'JC' Denton."

And if it were done, then you could have a check to see if it was changed, and if not set a flag that would change a couple of conversations, "Hey Adam-  I mean J.C., I might as well start using your codename."

"Adam, actually.  JC's just an old code name that stuck around...."

Morpheus could have started by listing both code name and real name.

And, after that, anyone who still didn't know that the "Adam Smith" from the text files was the player character really brought it on themselves.

-

So that's my, if the player character is going to have two different names have them, by default, be different rant.

Here's why he has the two different names in the first place:

The Deus Ex design team was not made of people who agreed on everything.  It is possible that such a thing could create something like Deus Ex, but unlikely.  The Deus Ex design team was made up of people who had strong convictions and would argue on behalf of those convictions.

It was made of people who had strong ideas of what was important that didn't always agree with what other people on the team thought was important.  Deus Ex is a series of compromises.

Some people thought that it was vitally important that the player get to chose their own name.  They are and speak on behalf of a type of gamer I am not and do not even understand.  People like me only know that this is an important thing if people like them are telling us because to us it isn't important.  I stick with the default, as noted above.

I don't care about customizing a character.  Other people do.

So on the one side we had the people who do care about that, and on the other side we had people saying, "We can't tell the story we want to tell if no one ever says his name.  People need to be able to address this guy, and we can't record that dialog unless the name is set in stone ahead of time.

And so there was this major ideological divide.  On the one hand people said that the player had to be the one to pick the name, on the other hand people said that the player couldn't be the one to pick the name.

And so a compromise was struck.  Any name could be used in text.  Any name at all.  The player could pick that name.  But only one could be used in dialog, and that would be the code name that the player character was assigned by his workplace.

Was it the best compromise ever?  Probably not.  Does it make sense when his brother is in pain and calls out his code name rather than real name?  Only if UNATCO has really impressive conditioning.  But it's what worked.

My only objection is that by default they made them the same.  If they'd made them different, say my suggestion of Adam Smith, the excerpts above would look like this by default:

"Hey Adam, / Guess I'll have to get used to calling you "J.C." around the office." 

"Adam Smith will be joining us today [...] His assigned cover name for the duration of his service will be "J.C. Denton"" 

"J.C. Denton or "Adam" or whatever he calls himself" 

"J.C. Denton, also known as "Adam Smith."" 

"J.C. "Adam" Denton"

Which leads to an impression of a more reasonable, less punctuation obsessed, world.

-

In addition to real name you can also choose the player's appearance, and honestly I'm just going to skip that for now because I'm having trouble with pictures and I'm not good at description.  You have five options which cover a limited range of skin and hair color.

Also worth noting that the original plan was for JC Denton to be able to be a female character.  That was dropped.  The remnants of that are one bit of concept art and the fact that the character is identified in code as JCDentonMale, which only makes sense if there might have been some other form of JC Denton that wasn't male.  The name JC was chosen in part because it could be a male or female name.

(So Adam Smith might not be the ideal default real name after all, if we imagine a world in which JCDentonFemale was still an option.)

-

You also have a some skill points (5000) that you can assign right off the bat.  The pistols skill is set to trained by default but it isn't locked in yet, so you can drop it down to untrained to gain additional points to work with.  Depending on your perspective, fortunately or unfortunately a bug will kick the skill back up to trained regardless, so it becomes less legitimate trade-off and more exploit.

But before I get into that I want to talk about the descriptions, you can read them all here.*  There are four levels of every skill, untrained, trained, advanced, master.  Trained and advanced have exactly what you'd expect (agent is a bit better, agent is moderately better) but master always has this over the top description which I find delightful.

And so it makes it so that the gap between untrained and master, in terms of description, is huge and it seriously feels like if there were a sword fighting skill the description would be Untrained: An agent knows which end to hold.  Master: An agent can take on the Dread Pirate Roberts left handed.

Here are two actual untrained master pairs:

Medicine
UNTRAINED: An agent can use medkits.
MASTER: An agent can perform a heart bypass with household materials. 

Swimming
UNTRAINED: An agent can swim normally.
MASTER: An agent moves like a dolphin underwater.

Here is the complete list of master descriptions:

MASTER: An agent is an elite hacker that few systems can withstand.
MASTER: An agent encounters almost no security systems of any challenge.
MASTER: An agent wears suits and armor like a second skin.
MASTER: An agent can defeat almost any mechanical lock.
MASTER: An agent can perform a heart bypass with household materials.
MASTER: An agent moves like a dolphin underwater.
MASTER: An agent is an expert at all forms of demolition.
MASTER: An agent is a walking tank when equipped with heavy weaponry.
MASTER: An agent can render most opponents unconscious or dead with a single blow.
MASTER: An agent is lethally precise with pistols.
MASTER: An agent can take down a target a mile away with one shot.

Ok, so skills.

The first thing about skills is that skillpoints are a limited resource.  You can be some of the things above, but you can't be all of them.  And once you've upgraded a skill, actually upgraded it as opposed to just looked at where you'd stand if you did but not actually gone through with the purchase, there's no going back.

That's part of how Deus Ex works.  Save all you want to try it a thousand different ways, but in the course of a single playthrough when you make a decision you have to live with it.  What you choose to do will open some doors and close others, and will change your options going forward.

Another thing that the skillpoints can show us about Deus Ex is that there's the option to concentrate or go for coverage.  You can start the game as a master of one skill (it would have to be one of the cheapest skills) or you could start with as many as six things trained, but nothing advanced.

These things are both open to you.  (And many options in between.)  As is neither.  One person played through the game without upgrading a single skill, using a single weapon, using a single item, or using a single augmentation.

But you can't go both ways at once.  You can't have everything.

And this extends beyond skills.  You can spread things out, you can concentrate resources, but you can't have everything.

In certain cases skills, items and augmentations will all address the same things, and this again presents you with the option of coverage or concentration.  You can use skills to address one set of things and augmentations and items to address another, or you can choose to put them to work on the same thing thus allowing you to do one thing really well while leaving other areas not well covered.

You've got choices all over.

Things like skills are at the heart of an important part of Deus Ex, that being resource management.  You can't escape it in Deus Ex.  If you choose to ignore the resource management elements, you're trading the time spent on those for extra difficulty for yourself in the game.  You're managing resources.

Anyway, once you've chosen your skills, you move on to the intro movie, which we'll cover next time.

-

* You may notice, if you poke around on that site, that I've had involvement with that site.  Writing some articles for it, partnering with the guy running it.  One of the things on my list of things to do when less depressed and more able to branch beyond where I am now is to get back in contact with him.  We were friends, be nice to be that again.  Right now though, I don't have the energy to reach out.

There's a whole bunch of people I ought to reach out to.  Ought to have reached out to ages ago.

-

[Previous][Index][Next]

Deus Ex Training - Part 10: Snippets of information

[This is part of a series of posts about the game Deus Ex, which, for the record, I recommend buying.]

[The series began with this post.  The first post in this section is here.]

Part of the reason I decided to do posts on the training mission were the little bits of information you get here and there, mostly here.

There's also the fact that you see Walton Simons watching you from various viewing rooms (including the last one, watching your final test) and just general stuff.

But like I said, mostly the little bits of information here and there, and most of them here rather than there.

Walking away from your final test leads you to a room with some holograms in it, Jamie will explain why they're there:

Step up to each hologram for more info.  When you're through, go out the opposite door.

Six holograms, six bits of info.

These can be taken in any order one pleases, or skipped altogether.  The far door isn't locked, you can finish the level without stepping up to any of them, anyway, let's step up to some.

-

First on the right:

The NSF: the biggest terrorist threat in the U. S.  This national militia group thinks it is fighting the Second American Revolution.

The NSF, we will learn, has an interesting history.  It started as the Northwest Secessionist Forces and its goal was to break away from the country to do their own thing (sometime after the 2030 quake) but then it nationalized years later and reformed as the National Secessionist Forces.

At first it seems incoherent, how can an entire nation secede from itself?  Wouldn't you be left with the exact same nation?  Under new management perhaps, but not a lot of secession going on.  What we will learn is that they are only united by their desire to be disunited.  If they succeed they will not all live happily ever after together, they'll each go their own separate way, federal government will definitely be gone, probably state too.

The US will not be a nation but a collection of very small, very local, libertarian communities.

That is the NSF plan.

-

First on the left:

A deployment of UNATCO troopers is the central component of all UN peacekeeping occupations.

Did you catch that?  I don't remember if I did when I first heard it, but I definitely did when I first heard it doing these posts.  "Occupations" does not belong there.  "Occupations" doesn't sound right.

If I wrote, "UN peacekeeping o-" the assumption would be that the word was, "operations."  You expect operations and occupations just strikes a dissonant chord.  It says something that you don't expect to be said and has larger implications that reverberate through everything else.

However many months ago it was when, after starting these posts, I first heard that, I knew I had to write about it.  And then I looked in the game files and found this comment attached to the dialog:

"occupation" used on purpose.

So lets talk about the word occupation.

Operations, the expected term, has an implied objective, an implied end date.  Something is wrong, the UN peacekeepers go in, they fix it, they get out.  It often doesn't work that way, but that's what operations implies.

An occupation is different.  With an occupation you're talking about taking control.  You're talking about seizing the land by military force because let's remember, we're talking about troops here.  This is not someone occupying their home, or some people occupying Wall Street, this is the kind of occupation in which the central component is a soldier with a gun.  (Usually an assault rifle.)

This is not what the UN is supposed to be doing.  The UN is not supposed to be occupying land.  They're not supposed to be occupying places so much that it makes sense to talk about something as the central component in all UN peacekeeping occupations.

Occupation isn't how you keep the peace, it's how you take over.

If you came to the game not realizing it was built on a foundation of 90s' conspiracy theory, if you came to the game not realizing that there was something rotten going on in the UN, let this be your first indication: their idea of peacekeeping is military occupation, and they've got a military with which to do it.

This is the UN of the fevered dreams of Birchers, this is the UN Nicolae Carpathia wants to take over so he can rule the world.

-

Hey, is that an out of place brick I see?  *push*

*opposite me a section of wall opens up revealing a hidden room*

*cautiously I approach*

Step over to the communicator.  There's someone who wants to talk to you.

Ok, Jaime, I wonder who it could be.

*Steps over to the communicator*

Jamie, you're the one who wanted to talk to me?  Why didn't you just say you wanted to talk to me?   What's with the whole "someone" bit?  Ok, fine, what did you have to say?

Manderley likes to hear which agents find this area.  They're usually the ones who take terrorists by surprise in the field.  Your brother, Paul, for instance.  All right, carry on.  Don't let it go to your head.

That's nice.

Ok, I guess we can move back to the non-communications holograms now.

-

Middle right:

An inexpensive security bot, a favorite of Third World countries and corporate security divisions.  Not so mobile, but don't be fooled: we've lost plenty of agents to its well-armored assault gun.  Like other bots, it's difficult to damage with ordinary bullets.

Combat bots in Deus Ex come in three sizes: small, large, and "Oh my god the ground is shaking, I think T-Rex is on the way."  This one is a small one.

Off the top of my head, I can't think of a time you went up against corporate security (leaving aside those corporations that are front companies for the conspiracy) and I don't know that you go to any third world countries.  Which could explain why in the game files this bit of dialog was labeled, "DL_terrorbot" (DL for Data Link).  This is what the terrorists can generally afford.

-

Middle Left:

This Page Industries walking turret, marketed to governments worldwide, is the workhorse of most national military forces.  Due to the heavy armor, they take little damage from ordinary bullets.  If you come up against a bot, you should use an EMP grenade, scrambler grenade, or some kind of explosive.

This is the kind of bot you just outwitted.  Note that it's considered military grade.  Also take note of that name, Page Industries, they've got their fingers in everything.

For whatever it's worth, this bit of dialog was labeled, "DL_unatcobot," because this is what the UN can afford to deploy against its enemies in Deus Ex.

Of the previously mentioned categories, this would be the large bot.

-

Last on the Left:

This is the old augmentation technology, hopefully about to be phased out.  Notice the reliance on electronics and servomechanics.  A maintenance nightmare.  If I had two credits for every repair manual they've made me file in my office in the Med Lab...

The hologram is of Anna Navarre, the agent who walked you through stealth.

This isn't just hopefully about to be phased out, it's almost gone from the game as we see it.  I could go on in great detail about the opportunities lost there, but for the moment let me simply reiterate:

In the game we will meet four mechanically augmented people.
1 Gunther Hermann, active agent.
2 Anna, active agent whom I've already linked to.
3 Jordan Shea, retired agent.
4 Sam Carter, not an agent, needed part of his body replaced for what appear to be medicinal purposes.

The evil conspiracy has already moved passed mechanical augmentation in favor of various other things.  None of the police or military forces you meet other than UNATCO will contain a mech.  One mech laments that in the future he'll have nowhere to go but to a freak show where his life will consist of being used to scare children for cheap thrills.

This technology is definitely on its way out.

On the other hand, you only see a very small slice of the world, maybe if you'd gone other places you'd have encountered more mechs.

-

Last on the right:

The Coalition's new nano-augmented agents are nearly indistinguishable from the general population, except that you and your brother don't know how to smile, even for a picture.

The hologram is of JC's brother Paul.  That smile thing is a joke on Jamie's part, and not a very good one.  I'm tired, I have a headache, I'm not going to get into the great debate over whether or not he was somehow being serious.  He wasn't.

If JC and Paul couldn't smile because of their augmentations the phrase wouldn't be, "don't know how," it was a joke, it was a bad joke.

Want to know how bad of a joke it was?  When JC was a child and Paul was almost an adult their parents were murdered.  Then, sometime in the last couple of years, their adoptive parents were murdered.  On top of that they, along with the rest of the world, have lived through catastrophes piled on top of each other.

The first decade of JC's life was with the backdrop of the largest die off in human history.  They have seen their country fall apart, they have seen the world dive toward chaos, and they have personal tragedy piled on top of that.  They've lived through the violent deaths of twice as many parents as most people have in the first place.

Maybe, just maybe, Jamie, they have reasons not to smile all the damn time.  Jerk.

I generally like Jamie, but that's seriously in poor taste.  At least it seems that way to me.

-

Holograms done we go to leave and what's this?  Another hologram.  Like the thing with Jaime in the secret room, this is a communications hologram and it's going to be used for a real time chat.

Bob Page: Sufficiently impressive.  An early success for the whole organization.
JC Denton: Thanks.  You from the United Nations?
Bob Page: Your augmentations are a-go.  The real test comes next: active duty.
JC Denton: I'm ready, sir.
Bob Page: Yes.  Yes, you are.

Remember how I said to take note of Page Industries?  Well now you've met its owner.  Trillionaire (with a T) and leader of an evil conspiracy.  That's Bob Page for you.

Note how he completely ignores the whole question of whether or not he's with the UN. Presumably because saying, "I'm with the organization that uses the UN as a puppet," isn't the best answer at this point in time.

Also "early success" would be for the re-formed UNACTO, the organization has been around for an unclear amount of time not less than ten years at this point, it has been around in its present form for at most a year.

And with that, we move to the exit and training is over.

Only took six months.  A bit surprising that it worked out to be six months to the day.

-

[Previous][Index][Next]

Deus Ex Training - Part 9: Final Exam

[This is part of a series of posts about the game Deus Ex, which, for the record, I recommend buying]

[The series began with this post.  The first post in this section is here.]

Stealth done Jamie contacts us to let us know the course is almost over, only one more test to go:

Now for the last test. You have to find a way across the river to the exit on the other side. There's more than one way to get there, depending on your approach and the skills you want to use. It's up to you... Make use of the IFF system to identify enemies. The crosshairs will highlight red over enemies, green over allies, and white over neutrals.

The “river” is a pool running the length of the room. To me river evokes outdoor images, this is something wholly contained in a room. Across the river is an observation room. This one contains Jamie, Bob Page, and an anonymous male scientist.

There are ladders on the near side of the river so that if you fall in you can get back out. There are none on the far side meaning you can't simply swim across and climb out. On the far side is a drawbridge, which can be lowered via a keypad on the near side. There are various supplies scattered around.

Also, there is a Page Industries Walking Turret. A robot that's one step down from a giant military death machine. (It's a large military-and-certain-police-forces death machine.) It does not like you. What did you ever do to it?

(Apart from blowing up two of its friends I mean.)

I've done this a few times while making this series, one of the most notable being when I was checking to see if you could select a non-default race in training. To find out if it had worked I had to get a third person view, which only comes up in conversation. So, basically, I sprinted through training, got to this part, and decided that my solution would be to blow up bot, and calmly move on from there once I was out of danger.

In order to accomplish this I started pushing a big explosive barrel into the bot's path. (Its patrol route was very simple, walk in one direction, turn 180 degrees, walk in that direction, turn 180 degrees, repeat.) It turned around before I expected it to, opened fire. My legs were gone, possibly most of my arms too. My core was hanging on by a thread.

At this point I didn't realize that this level continued the cannot-die mechanic of earlier parts of training. At this point I didn't know that earlier parts of training had a cannot-die mechanic.

Now in a panic and hoping to preserve what little health I had left I dove into the river and hugged the near wall, counting on the inability of the robot to see or shoot me when I was directly below it (and that assumes the robot walked all the way up to the wall, if it held back I was definitely protected.)

Making use of the multiple ladders, I was able to misdirect the robot and crawl back on land. Scrambling to get behind some cover opposite the river. While back there I was able to discover a datapad:

Hey J.C., want to cross the water? Lower the bridge. The code is:

0089

It's either that or get all wet.

Jaime

Thanks Jamie, that's just the sort of information I could use.

Taking careful stock of where the robot was, I crawled to the bridge controls. I couldn't stand so I was looking up at them but I got the numbers in, the bridge lowered, and I made it across, barely alive, but successful.

That was then.

-

Lets talk about how we approached this today. And by we I mean me. Except if I were to replace the word “we” with something it would be “I” not “me” because of the declension. It all makes sense. Moving on.

The doors open, I see cardboard boxes in front to me. I charge toward them, grab one and jump into the water with it. I push it across the the water and then, at the other side, climb atop it and from it to the other side. I have crossed the river, success.

Rewind.

The doors open and I see that the cardboard boxes are next to some pipes. They're too large for me to jump on top of (since they are not currently partially submerged) but if I had a small crate I could use it as a stepping stool to get on the box and from the box to the pipes.

You know what comes in small crates? TNT. I grab a crate of TNT, I bring it over to cardboard boxes near the pipes. I set it down carefully (don't want to blow myself up) climb up the TNT-Cardboard Box-Pipe ladder. Walk the over the river on the pipes. Success.

Rewind.

Hey, was that TNT I just saw?

Careful around this TNT.  You can pick up the boxes and move them around, but crouch to set them down.  I don't want to have to reattach your arms.

Thank you, Jamie.

I pick up a crate of TNT when the robot is walking away from me, run up to speed, approach, and then throw the crate towards the robot (stopping at the same time because I don't want to run into the explosion. The robot is destroyed, I'm largely unscathed, I'm free to look around at leisure. Hidden by some barrels I find a datacube with the combination to lower the bridge. I lower the bridge. I walk across, success.

Rewind.

Given leisure time maybe I don't need a bridge. Perhaps I could build my own bridge. Of course, is that even necessary? Couldn't I just throw two boxes in the water, hop on one pick up and throw the other, hop to it, and repeat until I crossed the river without ever getting in the water? *more attempts than it should have taken by a long shot* Success!

Oh, and that leisure time I mentioned? Not necessary. I did all of this while the robot was still patrolling.

Rewind.

But I want a bridge. A bridge of my own design that I can amble across secure in my bridge making ability. And that Robot is going to be a problem for construction. The Robot has to go. So first I do some reconnaissance. I search the area. I find a handgun. This has potential. Small arms are all but useless against robots, but they're quite effective against explosives and volatile chemicals stored under pressure and whatnot.

I push an explosive barrel into an isolated place (I don't want it damaging potentially useful building materials.) Then I lure the Robot there. While the robot is approaching around a corner, I steady my aim on the barrel. I let myself fall into the zone and feel my hands waver less. Less shake, more on target, I breathe more slowly, and then, finally, I hold my breath. If I were a sniper I would shoot between heartbeats but that is not necessary here. The robot comes around the corner. I fire, no more robot.

The training area river has bizarre unnatural currents that make bridge construction difficult, but by putting things against the downstream side it seems to work. I construct a bridge out of four cardboard boxes and one supply crate. I cross the river without getting my feet wet or having to use the imperialist's bridge.

I'm creative and an individualist.

This is what I did with five boxes, imagine what I might do with a pair of pliers and a paperclip and some other thing MacGyver might have.

I'm on the other side of the river, success!

Rewind.

I enter the area of my final test, I quickly duck into the shadows, the sound of my robot adversary and my own unarmed status throwing me into stealth mode. I look around, what's this? A crowbar*. Believing that the flow of the universe is on my side and would not guide me to an object I will have no need for, I search for something a crowbar might be used in combination with.

I stay in the shadows, away from the robot's patrol. Near the end there's a moment of panic. At the end of it's patrol path it turns a complete 180 degrees and, because it chose to turn clockwise, for a split second it looks right at me. But the turn continues and it begins to walk away. I'm safe.

In a dark corner I see a supply crate, exactly the kind of thing the benevolent forces of the universe might have given me the crowbar to access. I break into the crate. But it's too dark to see what, if anything, that accomplished. I risk using my light and find a multitool.

I quickly take the tool and turn the light off.

A quick check, consisting of a risky peek around the corner, shows that the robot is still walking away. I have some time. I head over to the the bridge control and start to hack it. Turns out I didn't have enough time, the robot opens fire and all is lost. I jump into the water as an escape.

Then grab a cardboard box and return to plan A. The Robot hasn't lost interest, the rest of this plan is executed under fire. But I make it to the other side. Success!

Rewind.

I enter the area of my final test, I quickly duck into the shadows, the sound of my robot adversary and my own unarmed status throwing me into stealth mode. I look around, what's this? A crowbar. Believing that the flow if the universe is on my side and would not guide me to an object I will have no need for, I search for something a crowbar might be used in combination with.

I stay in the shadows, away from the robot's patrol. Near the end there's panic. At the end of it's patrol path it turns usually turns a complete 180 degrees and, because it chose to turn clockwise, for a split second it looks right at me. And stops. It's spotted me. I backpedal.

It's a robot, it's not a very smart robot. All around the mulberry-bush, the robot chased the agent, and then the robot got confused because it hadn't seen the agent in so long that the agent could be anywhere. It looked all around, saw the agent nowhere, and then resumed its ordinary patrol.

Making sure that I would have enough time, I rushed over to the bridge control, hacked it with the multitool, the bridge came down, I went across it and got out of sight of that damn robot before it could turn around and open fire. Success.

-

Ok, so it's not the most impressive mission in the history of missions. Get across this length of water however you feel like it. But it is a taste of how there are more ways to get across than you might expect.

Explore a bit and you can find information, tools and weapons.

There are two ways to lower the bridge. You can uncover the password, or you can get the multitool out of the supply crate with gun, crowbar, taunting of the robot, or other grievous bodily harm to the crate) and override the control.

Without the bridge you can push pretty much anything that floats into the river, swim it to the other side, and use it as a stepping stone out.

Or you can stack things up so you can reach the pipes and walk across.

There are also multiple ways to deal with the robot ranging from total avoidance to total destruction. One thing that I didn't mention above is that you can move things into the robot's path, doing this it is even theoretically possible to trap the robot.

Furthermore, in the test to see if the robot could be trapped, the robot ended up blowing itself up by trying to shoot at me when surrounded by explosives, some of them blocking the line of fire.

So it's not exactly the most open multiple ways to do it mission in all of history (you didn't even get to try talking or computer related stuff or crawling through vents) but it is a taste of things to come.

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* I almost forgot, as in I published the post with an asterisk but no footnote, I wanted to make note of this.  The description of the crowbar in game is this:

A crowbar.  Hit someone or something with it.  Repeat. 

<UNATCO OPS FILE NOTE GH010-BLUE> Many crowbars we call 'murder if crowbars.'  Always have one for kombat.  Ha. -- Gunther Hermann <END NOTE>

Gunther made a joke.  Gunther made a joke using an English language pun even though English is clearly not his best language.  Give Gunther some respect.

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Deus Ex Training - Part 8: Anna and Stealth

[This is part of a series of posts about the game Deus Ex.]

[The series began with this post.  The first post in this section is here.]

As noted elsewhere, I've been tired lately. I haven't been able to accomplish much and that's made it so I have an increasing amount of things I need to accomplish, which means that I haven't really been able to justify, to myself, setting aside time for something like playing a bit of Deus Ex.

Most of what I've written has been the sort of thing I can quickly bang out in response to something I read or thought or whatnot. Except for the "quickly" part, but it feels like it will be quick regardless. Also, I've had a sort of permaheadache that's made it somewhat hard to think.

On top of that, I'm not sure what I want to do with this next section. I think that I want to give the bit after it, your final test, its own post. But then that doesn't leave a lot here.

One would think that I could write quite a bit on the subject of Anna but I'm not sure that's true. We meet four mechs in Deus Ex. One, Sam Carter, seems to be a mech for medical reasons (parts of his body were replaced because they had been lost.) The three remaining ones represent a sort of moral spectrum. On the one end we have Jordan Shea who seems to be a decent human being, and who is retired. You don't get to see her methods or style, you're left guessing on a paucity of evidence stemming from the fact that she got out of the business. Which may say more about her than seeing her in action would, but it's essentially extrapolation based on negative information.

Gunther occupies a sort of middle spot. His methods are lethal, perhaps even draconian, and he's managed to rack up a higher body count than even Anna, but that's not coming from a position of sadism or bloodlust, it's largely coming from a position of corrupted good intentions. Gunther views the world with a black and white morality and functions as one might expect an action movie star to function. There are good guys, there are bad guys, and the solution is for the good guys to shoot the bad guys.

We never really get an opportunity to see what he does when there are also innocents involved, but I have a feeling that that category exists for him.

That gives one a lot to say about Gunther, even if there were nothing else (and there is a fair degree of other stuff) there would still be stuff to say about him just because his character (as in ethos, not as in the fact he is a fictional character) is at odds with his actions. There is dissonance there even if he never grasps that fact.

Anna is out beyond Gunther. She's simply not a nice person. While Gunther has more kills Anna is the one we see counting hers up. While Gunther's violence seems to be in the service of a cause, for Anna the violence seems to be her cause. If you get the job done without killing a lot of people she'll conclude that your styles are incompatible. She'll be the one telling you kill someone who already surrendered, and point out after he's dead that the lack of witnesses means it can be covered up however you see fit. She'll be the one tells you that teaching (bad) people a lethal lesson is more important than rescuing hostages.

She's the one who revels in violence.

And so there's not a lot there. She's evil. What more can you say?

Depending on how much non-game material you're willing to accept there might actually be something to say. There is some talk that Anna has ties to Israel but I think the original source to that has been lost (I believe it was an online thing) and while I'm told the strategy guide has some background on it I know that the strategy guide has information that is so very wrong it makes me wonder both who wrote it and what substances they were under the influence of when they did so. (Why the thing you have to pay for has information of a lower quality than the stuff that the company released for free on the internet is somewhat lost on me.)

So Anna might be involved with Israel. And if you take the continuity bible at face value, and given that it doesn't have any glaring errors and is contemporaneous with the game I see no reason not to, then Israel was destroyed 30 years before the game takes place. Put those two things together and you have the potential for an interesting story in which Anna's present state is in part due to a once complex and not-evil character becoming game-Anna via a troubled and difficult life spent in exile after her homeland was destroyed.

But that's barely above random guessing. We don't have Anna's story. All that we really get of it in the game is where it ends. And where it ends isn't a terribly interesting place. She's evil. Whatever complexity and humanity she might have had has been burned away in the untold story that came before.

So, that's Anna, and she's going to guide you though the stealth portion of this training and there's not much.

Before I get to what actually happens, I do want to point something out: I love this game. The only comment the last post got was one saying I was being too hard on it, I think that's probably because it's hard not to snark at a training mission. Don't forget to left click is hard to take seriously. At the same time, there has been stuff to talk about here and I think it's worth looking at, otherwise I wouldn't be doing it.

A big part of the reason I'm doing this, and definitely part of the reason that I'm writing this post right now when I have so many other more pressing things going on in my life, is that I wanted to reconnect with something I liked. Deus Ex and .hack//Sign are both things that I've had strong lasting emotional connections to and more than that the connections are overwhelmingly positive. That's not something I can say about a lot of things.

I very much love this game, and part of the reason that I'm not shy about picking apart this or that mistake, oversight, or imperfection is that I think the game can take it. It has flaws, it could have been better, but it stands up to whatever level of scrutiny you want to level at it.

Ok, onto the actual training mission.

The stealth section is something that I can see working as a real life test, at least in theory if not in the exact way that it's presented. The reason for this is simple: it actually makes sense. Since the goal is stealth there is no need to throw around explosives, or blow up robots, or fire weapons while your skills are magically altered.

It's a test of your ability to sneak, so all you need to do is to sneak. Similarly all that you need to do to run the test is get a couple of guards on patrol who will fail you if they see you. Get through the test without being seen and you pass. It actually makes a certain amount of sense, I think.

Now you will learn to move quietly and conceal yourself, so that you will be able to avoid a confrontation altogether.

For the record, hearing that from Anna, of all people, is strange. Don't get me wrong, she has a cloak which seems like a very stealth oriented augmentation, but she's also Anna. I can see her, maybe, using stealth as a means to kill someone who was heavily guarded, but honestly I'd expect her to just kill the guards.

The test is simple. Get to the far north door without being spotted by the guards below. If one of them sees you, he will sound an alarm and lock the door.

Like I said, that actually makes sense to me in a way that the other parts of training really don't.

That said, the fact that the guard will sound an alarm if he sees you through the pretest observation window really doesn't. I've never had that happen to me until a few minutes ago. Anyway, before one starts the test one can find an item and a datacube. The item is tech goggles. The datacube mentions tech goggles.

UNATCO STEALTH GUIDELINES

Overview

Stealth is a vital component of all UNATCO operations; when implemented correctly, stealth missions result in the lowest possible ratio of agent and civilian casualties to hostile losses.

Situational awareness is key, and agents should not only be familiar with the tactical opportunities offered by their immediate environment, but how those opportunities can be exploited to their advantage with the appropriate equipment. Tech goggles allow agents to operate in low-light environments such as offices or labs where illumination might otherwise attract attention. With binoculars, an agent can survey an opponent's disposition and determine the best way to evade or eliminate their defenses. A rifle or crossbow equipped with scope and silencing modifications can be used to interdict targets from a considerable distance, significantly compromising hostile resistance.

Other features of the environment can also be used by an agent to enhance their ability to operate covertly or to create useful distractions: disabling security cameras, subverting autoguns, and reprogramming bots are all viable tactics employed by experienced agents in the field.

So, yay. The first time I returned to the training mission and noticed the tech goggles I was hoping that that meant there was a hitherto unknown way to turn of the lights in this section and use the darkness to your advantage. No such luck.

Also, the “illumination might otherwise attract attention” may well be a reference to the fact that your built in flashlight was originally supposed to attract attention. In the final product it does not.

I was going to move on from there, but let me say that “interdict targets [...] significantly compromising hostile resistance,” is a very euphemistic way to say, “kill.” Though the crossbow does allow for one to triumph via the use of sedatives.

Going out into the wider test will get you some advice:

Remember: don't let the guards see you. Use the crates for cover and crouch when you move.

The guards can be distracted. Pick up and throw an object near them, and they will go investigate the noise. Bottles, plants, flasks -- many things will work.

Always remember the four basic tactics to avoid detection: crouch behind concealment, stay behind enemies, move slowly to avoid making noise, and use shadows to conceal yourself. Be alert to every possibility.

Those are labeled Stealth Advice 1, 3, and 4, respectively.

The things you'll have the best luck throwing are flasks as the level has no bottles and the plants are of the larger don't-throw-as-far variety.

Somehow I don't think an out of place plant in real life would fail to arouse suspicion. “What was that noise? Oh. It's nothing. Just a potted plant.” That said, if you're attempting to get behind the guard so you can knock them out, or so that you can sneak passed and be out of that zipcode by the time they realize that they've been distracted by a plant, it makes perfect sense.

I'm not enough of a gamer to have opinions on shadow based stealth vs. cover systems and whatnot, but I know that quite a few people thought that shadow based stealth was key to the Deus Ex experience.

Now then, were you wondering what Stealth Advice 2 was? Well, first you have to fuck up:

You blew it. The alarm just closed the north door. Return to the control room to the south and press the button in the overlook window to restart the test.

Now hang your head in shame and return to the control room in the south. Then push the button. As you exit the control room you'll get stealth advice 2:

This time, don't let the guards see you. Stay crouched, stay behind the crates, and stay behind the guards.

Thanks, Anna. I thought I was supposed to stand in front the guards jumping up and down and waving my arms.

Something worth noting is that there's another item in the map you can use. It's called thermoptic camo and it's fairly neat. Put it on, activate it, and until it wears out you're invisible.

Integrating woven fiber-optics and an advanced computing system, thermoptic camo can render an agent invisible to both humans and bots by dynamically refracting light and radar waves; however, the high power drain makes it impractical for more than short-term use, after which the circuitry is fused and it becomes useless.

So I recommend using that, just because you can. Or, you could just grab it as you sneak passed and save it for the final.

Anyway, once you leave Anna will say this:

Very good. I hope you remember this lesson, Agent. They have assigned us to be partners, and I will not stop to hold your hand and repeat myself when we are facing a real enemy.

When I first played, and failed the stealth course the first time and had to reset, I thought that the way she said “repeat myself” which sounded pissed off, meant that this was in response to the fact that I'd made her repeat herself. It's not. This is the only possible thing she can say.

It still works, but I liked it better when I thought it was responsive. If you get that when you haven't made a mistake, and you do, then it makes it clear that Anna is just saying that to be a jerk. Which... fits her character, but I'd rather there be some other, less hostile, thing for her to say if you did perfectly.

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