Deus Ex: Mankind Divided

[Alan of Rosby]

Is anyone else interested in the new Deus Ex coming out in about a month's time? As a Deus Ex fan I'm definitely getting myself a copy but I have major misgivings about the "mechanical apartheid" storyline, and not from a self-righteous SJW perspective or anything. I just think it's a dumb plot line for the following reasons.

1. The mechanically augmented individuals or "mech augs" have superhuman abilities, their segregation is not analogous to African-American segregation or apartheid in South Africa which was one set of humans discriminating against another set of humans. Some of them can even kill you with their minds (think of Gunther Hermann's skull gun or "skul-gun" as he put it). It makes sense to catalogue and register them. This is tied to my next point...
2. IT'S NOTHING PERSONAL. The mech augs purchased their biomechanical modifications from a company to improve your physical and mental attributes the same way you'd buy glasses from an opticians to improve your eyesight, it doesn't form a core part of your identity the way being black or Jewish might. Granted, it's human nature to form groups and identities based on trivialities and these augmentations do make significant changes that can set you apart from everyone except people who have them as well, but not on the level of race or religion. After all, they've only been around for a couple of years. 
3. It betrays the spirit of the original Deus Ex. In that game, the mech augs were the jack-booted bullies for the UN and ultimately MJ12. They were the oppressors, not the oppressed.
4. It's horribly, horribly clichéd. We've seen this done to death. The biggest example that springs to mind is X-Men, it had the same faulty analogy to racism as well
5. Spoiler

   At the end of Human Revolution, the mech augs went crazy and stated killing innocent people. That's a good enough justification to segregate these people.

 

 

[Werthead]

Quote

The mech augs purchased their biomechanical modifications from a company to improve your physical and mental attributes the same way you'd buy glasses from an opticians to improve your eyesight, it doesn't form a core part of your identity the way being black or Jewish might.

The surprisingly well-done live action trailer states that huge numbers of augments actually have no choice: they lost limbs in accidents, or were crippled almost to the point of death (like Jensen) or were suffering from critical diseases that implants helped them overcome. Some people have accepted augmentation perfectly willingly when they were fine to begin with, but not all of them.

Quote

 

It betrays the spirit of the original Deus Ex. In that game, the mech augs were the jack-booted bullies for the UN and ultimately MJ12. They were the oppressors, not the oppressed.

 

At this stage, I think it's unlikely that the reboots are going to lead exactly into the original two games as we remember them. There's too many differences, like the reboot world being vastly more futuristic and advanced than the original one. I suspect they'll either say it's a separate timeline inspired by the original or we'll even get a sort-of remake of the original game at some point to integrate its events into the rebooted universe.

I might be wrong though. They did mention some of the same characters in HR and they did bring up the Illuminati, which is a dumb idea for an enemy but they seem to be committing to it in the sequel.

[Alan of Rosby]

7 minutes ago, Werthead said:

The surprisingly well-done live action trailer states that huge numbers of augments actually have no choice: they lost limbs in accidents, or were crippled almost to the point of death (like Jensen) or were suffering from critical diseases that implants helped them overcome. Some people have accepted augmentation perfectly willingly when they were fine to begin with, but not all of them.

At this stage, I think it's unlikely that the reboots are going to lead exactly into the original two games as we remember them. There's too many differences, like the reboot world being vastly more futuristic and advanced than the original one. I suspect they'll either say it's a separate timeline inspired by the original or we'll even get a sort-of remake of the original game at some point to integrate its events into the rebooted universe.

I might be wrong though. They did mention some of the same characters in HR and they did bring up the Illuminati, which is a dumb idea for an enemy but they seem to be committing to it in the sequel.

Well, some people have no choice but to get glasses, they're practically blind without them. It still doesn't define you as a person that you have purchased eyeglasses.

Morgan Everett was mentioned and Joseph Manderley is the leader of the mercenary bosses you fight in HR. Bob Page is in the intro movie. So it's pretty much established that HR was at least originally meant to be in the canonical timeline. It would be really clumsy of them to start off like this and than divert and create a new timeline when they mess up.

[dog-days]

I remember in the original the mechs had a feeling of being old-hat, rather vulnerable. Gunther and Anna are anxious from the off that you've been brought in to replace them. (And if things had turned out otherwise, you might have.) The bar-woman in the Underworld Tavern was retired because her mech-augs were out of date - she was allowed to keep them on the condition that she spied for MJ12. I think one of the emails in UNATCO HQ highlights the sacrifice the mechs made by agreeing to extensive disfiguring modification. That's another presumed reason for the hostility of Gunther and Anna to JC, who still looks pretty. And possibly a reason for their heightened aggression - their modifications and the need to keep them up to date have closed off other avenues, other meaningful relationships, and they take out their frustration on anyone that gets in their way. They're in a manipulative, exploitative situation, and possibly don't see or can't imagine a way out. 

So  I can accept that as ultimately fitting in with the DEHR/MD situation, if we assume that the world has gone through a fairly awful economic crash, or some kind of terrible disturbance, in the intervening time. People got used to the mechs; or at least, they had larger problems, and the mechs suddenly didn't seem so important in the grand scheme of things. MD may lead into some kind of compromise involving the mechs being registered/made the responsibility of a company that 'owns' them. 

Haven't seen the trailer yet or followed the previews, but I'm very excited to return to the DE-verse. HR wasn't flawless - level design didn't feel as deft as the original - but I enjoyed it greatly. 

 

 

 

 

[The Drunkard]

1/2 - I haven't played the first, but in the second it seems like most of the augs were augmented for medical reasons rather than cosmetic/power reasons, and that the medication required to stop rejection is quite expensive. And after the events of the second game, with the augs being only one crazy rich dude away from turning into robot-zombies, it makes sense that normals are going to fear them. So it seems pretty reasonable to me that there'll be a divide between them, and that disgruntled augs struggling to pay for their meds while dealing with everyone's suspicion/hatred would turn to terrorist groups.

It might end up cliché but it'll depend on what they do with it.

[Ruhail]

Still looking forward to it.

[Alan of Rosby]

2 hours ago, Ruhail said:

Still looking forward to it.

Me too, absolutely. Human Revolution was a pleasant surprise after Invisible War. I just feel that there were better veins of ore to mine in the Deus Ex backstory. If you compulsively read the literature available to you in Deus Ex like I did you got tantalizing mentions of events like "Calcutta 16" which was the nuclear weapons programme launched by Pakistan which turned into a nuclear war with India, or the Second American Civil War where the right-wing militias resistance against federal gun control turned into a secessionist movement (the Northwest Secessionist Forces) in the North West of America, a precursor to the National Secessionist Forces. And that's only the tip of the iceberg.

They had so much interesting backstory to explore and they ended up going down the most hackneyed clichéd route, it's such a bitter disappointment. Racism is wrong they say! Apartheid is wrong they say! No shit Sherlock, says I!

 

[Werthead]

The game's looking pretty timely at the moment.

[Alan of Rosby]

4 hours ago, The Drunkard said:

1/2 - I haven't played the first, but in the second it seems like most of the augs were augmented for medical reasons rather than cosmetic/power reasons, and that the medication required to stop rejection is quite expensive. And after the events of the second game, with the augs being only one crazy rich dude away from turning into robot-zombies, it makes sense that normals are going to fear them. So it seems pretty reasonable to me that there'll be a divide between them, and that disgruntled augs struggling to pay for their meds while dealing with everyone's suspicion/hatred would turn to terrorist groups.

It might end up cliché but it'll depend on what they do with it.

I suppose my problem is with how they chose to end HR, and the writers of Mankind Divided are trying to make a purse out of a pig's ear, so to speak. The ending is almost ubiquitously regarded as being the game's weakest point. With the crazy robot-zombies it becomes at 28 days Later knock-off when pop culture is saturated by the zombie genre. And than you walk into a room where if you press a button which gives you ending A and you press another button which gives you ending B.

It was a massive error in judgement but you are right, apartheid is the logical result of the HR ending. 

[Kalbear]

This sounds incredibly fun! Someone does a DX MD demo playthrough avoiding as much of the actual plot and quests as they could do so.

Quote

 

Anyway, I’m at the subway station on my way to getting a train across to the other side of the city. I realise that I have a few bottles of booze in my inventory - looted from a garage lock-up that I managed to hack open on my way over, using a very similar minigame to that used in Human Revolution. My health could do with a pick-me-up, so I down a couple of them. My health goes up, while my eyesight drops off a cliff. Adam is shambolically drunk, but I am undeterred. But I decide to get out of public view until it wears off. I’ve seen enough hollering, railway drunks in real-life to not want to be counted among their number. And look! What’s that over there? Why, it’s a ‘Staff only’ door. Bound to be something good behind it. I head through, and I find a manhole cover. 

I open it, and climb down. I open up my map, and confirm that yes, these tunnels go on for miles. This is exciting, and I am hyped to explore and see what secrets they hold (when I can actually see again). But disaster! The bottom of the ladder is cloaked with poison gas, as is the rest of the chamber. Unable to focus when I first get down there, I don't notice until things go red and Adam starts coughing up thick chunks of God knows what. I shall return, sober, and augmented with air-purifying lungs, but for now, I rapidly ascend, flopping out onto the subway’s cold floor tiles like a dying seal, gasping, debased, but now at least sober.

 

 

[Kalbear]

14 hours ago, Alan of Rosby said:

Well, some people have no choice but to get glasses, they're practically blind without them. It still doesn't define you as a person that you have purchased eyeglasses.

Tell that to the kids who get teased about it non-stop. Seriously, this is one of the silliest ideas. It is absolutely the case that personal vulnerabilities define you. 

And in DX HR (and then MD) the big question was not only do these define you, but now the normals resent the augs because the augs are better able to do things. People felt pressured to get the augs so they could work at a high level. People felt resentful at these people who had it better than them. Of course when they get the chance they're going to denigrate them, especially after the ending of HR. 

Quote

 

Me too, absolutely. Human Revolution was a pleasant surprise after Invisible War. I just feel that there were better veins of ore to mine in the Deus Ex backstory. If you compulsively read the literature available to you in Deus Ex like I did you got tantalizing mentions of events like "Calcutta 16" which was the nuclear weapons programme launched by Pakistan which turned into a nuclear war with India, or the Second American Civil War where the right-wing militias resistance against federal gun control turned into a secessionist movement (the Northwest Secessionist Forces) in the North West of America, a precursor to the National Secessionist Forces. And that's only the tip of the iceberg.

They had so much interesting backstory to explore and they ended up going down the most hackneyed clichéd route, it's such a bitter disappointment. Racism is wrong they say! Apartheid is wrong they say! No shit Sherlock, says I!

 

Who says they're not going to do things with the above? 

That being said, 'racism is bad' isn't the message here. Like HR, where what human is was a defining question that didn't have a perfect answer, the mechanical apartheid doesn't have a perfect answer either. Is it bad to require people who have already been shown to be able to be mind controlled and have superhuman strength to have some kind of registration, or sequester them? At what price is their freedom worth? When you can read minds and throw cars, at what point do you cease being human? 

The live motion video did this perfectly, IMO. Where the woman, who has augs, ends up beating the shit out of her husband. She is incredibly sorry, but he can't know she won't do it again. He loves her and she loves him - but he also reasonably wants to be safe. He doesn't want her taken away from him, but he does want something else done and that's the best answer they have right now. It's poignant and moving because you can easily see both people's sides as being reasonable and good and there not being a single good answer. 

[Alan of Rosby]

7 hours ago, Dickwad Poster #3784 said:

Tell that to the kids who get teased about it non-stop. Seriously, this is one of the silliest ideas. It is absolutely the case that personal vulnerabilities define you. 

Apples and oranges. Kids pick on each other for literally anything and everything, they're cruel, horrible creatures. I've never met an adult who would pick on another adult for wearing eyeglasses (except maybe in jest) and I've never met an adult who defines him or herself as a "glasses-wearer". However, apartheid and racial segregation are policies enacted by adults (or putative adults, at least) based on irrational prejudice and pseudoscience. I have certainly had the displeasure of encountering adults who engage in racial abuse and lots of African people see their "blackness" as a fundamental part of their self-image.

Let me put it this way. No nation on Earth would start glasses-wearer apartheid, but racial apartheid has existed and does exist. However, imagine if people with eyeglasses went completely mad and started killing innocent people because of a hardware malfunction. Of course, the logical thing to do would be to sequester and monitor them until the fault can be ascertained and fixed. In the process, they would probably face hostility and perhaps brutality from the police. That's bad but it would upset me more to see black people being harassed and bullied just for being black. It's just not an interesting moral dilemma at all comparably, and it's completely hyperbolic to call it apartheid in the first place. 

8 hours ago, Dickwad Poster #3784 said:

That being said, 'racism is bad' isn't the message here. Like HR, where what human is was a defining question that didn't have a perfect answer, the mechanical apartheid doesn't have a perfect answer either. Is it bad to require people who have already been shown to be able to be mind controlled and have superhuman strength to have some kind of registration, or sequester them? At what price is their freedom worth? When you can read minds and throw cars, at what point do you cease being human? 

Of course, it's not bad at all to register or even sequester them, especially after HR! They have superhuman abilities and it's been demonstrated that literally EVERY ONE OF THEM has the potential to become a psychotic murderer! There is no meaningful moral conundrum here and calling the situation apartheid is farcical. You could say it's akin to Japanese-American internment during World War 2. Even then it's a poor analogy because the vast majority of Japanese-Americans were law-abiding citizens and never evinced a proclivity to mass homicide!

When do you cease being human is a more interesting question to pose but this apartheid business is the wrong way to answer it, because they're not being sequestered because they're "not human" anymore, they're being sequestered because the technology they're using has been demonstrated to make them dangerous to the public at large! The government is probably becoming more corrupt, authoritarian and brutal but it's not being run by Nazi-Luddites who believe on principle that mech augs are "live unworthy of life" or "untermenschen" or whatever, this separation is a pragmatic measure.

8 hours ago, Dickwad Poster #3784 said:

The live motion video did this perfectly, IMO. Where the woman, who has augs, ends up beating the shit out of her husband. She is incredibly sorry, but he can't know she won't do it again. He loves her and she loves him - but he also reasonably wants to be safe. He doesn't want her taken away from him, but he does want something else done and that's the best answer they have right now. It's poignant and moving because you can easily see both people's sides as being reasonable and good and there not being a single good answer. 

You can write the individual scenes of the poor mech augs being taken away from their loved ones and if the writing and acting is good it's very evocative and full of pathos etc. It would only briefly distract me from how risible the apartheid analogy is. I hope this is not the main narrative thread and gets sidelined quickly.

[dog-days]

I'm not sure that using the word 'apartheid' is sufficient to make MD a fully worked out apartheid analogy, unless you especially want it to. The term has broadened its use since the end of apartheid in SA.

Myself, I'm just going to play the game and enjoy the story for the issues it presents and explores. Whether the situation in MD does or does not resemble pre-1994 South Africa doesn't seem getting worked up about. 

 

 

[Alan of Rosby]

38 minutes ago, dog-days said:

I'm not sure that using the word 'apartheid' is sufficient to make MD a fully worked out apartheid analogy, unless you especially want it to. The term has broadened its use since the end of apartheid in SA.

I haven't played the game yet but based on what I've seen in the trailers it does seem that there is some kind of mech aug civil rights movement. It looks similar to segregation in the USA or apartheid in SA. I don't know how much different it could get.

39 minutes ago, dog-days said:

Myself, I'm just going to play the game and enjoy the story for the issues it presents and explores. Whether the situation in MD does or does not resemble pre-1994 South Africa doesn't seem getting worked up about.

By all means, that's my plan as well. But at the end of the day you can argue that computer games are not worth getting worked up about either. Deus Ex is a game that I have a degree of passion and enthusiasm for and if it's worth shelling out hard-earned cash for and investing time and energy in, surely it's worth debating the merits of the plot.

[dog-days]

Debate and discussion is fine, but I prefer to avoid forming very strong opinions about one aspect of a whole work that I haven't yet seen or played. Plots don't float around in their own kind of vacuum; their value shouldn't ripped out of their context and put on a table under a bright white light and consequently given a low mark because everything that made them interesting or involving has been left behind. Instead, their worth is expressed through their presentation, in terms of dialogue, pacing, the characters portrayed, the atmosphere, their causative link and jumps and no doubt many other factors. Which, at this point, we don't know about. 

I think we've all so far agreed that the apartheid plot seems to be a logical extension of where we left the world in HR. At this point, I don't think there's much more that can be said. 

[MerenthaClone]

I seem to remember in DXHR that some people are "forced" to take mech-aug surgery to stay competitive in their fields, and then end up in semi-permanent servitude because of their debts.  The companies subsidize the treatments and then essentially keep the worker forever.  Since the same can't be said of glasses, I think your analogy kind of falls flat.  

[Alan of Rosby]

5 hours ago, MerenthaClone said:

I seem to remember in DXHR that some people are "forced" to take mech-aug surgery to stay competitive in their fields, and then end up in semi-permanent servitude because of their debts.  The companies subsidize the treatments and then essentially keep the worker forever.  Since the same can't be said of glasses, I think your analogy kind of falls flat.  

Yes, I do remember that. There were also many people who did it completely of their own volition. There was a certain ambiguity there about how many did it for whichever reason.

I don't think the analogy falls flat even if all of them were pressured by market forces and competition to do it. They're still a threat to the public and discriminating against them is rational and justified.

12 hours ago, dog-days said:

I think we've all so far agreed that the apartheid plot seems to be a logical extension of where we left the world in HR. At this point, I don't think there's much more that can be said. 

I shouldn't leap to conclusions based on the trailer and the ending to HR, maybe I'll be pleasantly surprised. I'm afraid they have a mess to clean up after HR's ending.

[Alan of Rosby]

Sorry to bump an ancient topic, but I felt I had to after playing Mankind Divided. I have to say, without spoiling the plot, that I was pleasantly surprised and impressed with how they handled the mechanical apartheid issue. It wasn't as black and white as say South African apartheid and it explored the issue intelligently. 

I still think what happened at the end of HR was really silly though and the writers of MD obviosuly had a hard time picking up the pieces afterwards. I think they did a good job though.