My approach was similar to yours, Flatfingers, and I finished the game in about 35 hours. And I did a lot of save-scumming and still missed the no-alarm achievement somehow.

Verdict? 8/10. I'm happy with the time I spared the game, and the core formula still works, and works very well. I spent about 80% of that time doing all the side quests and freely exploring the city (note the singular). The remaining 20% went to the main quest, which honestly felt unsatisfying. It seems clear to me that Square Enix intentionally cut MD's main plot so as to make room for future games. Maybe that's no bad thing -- but it strikes me as greedy, though consistent with how they are treating HITMAN, the FF7 remake, and so on. And this in addition to tainting the franchise with a mindless MTX shop and stupid consumable pre-order DLC. Eidos Montreal was clearly strongarmed to do so -- to their credit, the balance of the game does not in any way encourage MTX purchases.

---

The game did not allow for the skipping of company logos when it was first released, but subsequent patches allow you to bash the space key repeatedly to do so. Hack's probably the better idea, though.

I think the game looks fantastic -- not sure if you've seen Prague at night yet, but it's wonderful. And most of the textures used by the game seem to be of exceptionally high quality and very sharp.

But. Either the port or the engine should be getting more criticism than they currently are. I understand and know that Nixxes makes high-quality ports. But there's simply no justification for usual stuff like MSAA being huge performance hogs or even people with top-of-the-line video cards such as the GTX 1080 having to second-guess their FPS on the highest settings. I have a fairly high-end rig and I maintained an average of 60 FPS on Very High settings, 1440p resolution. I can't complain. Yet I boot up another dazzling game, the new DOOM, and get 100-144 FPS with everything maxed out. I am aware that DOOM is a masterpiece in optimization, but still the comparison simply doesn't hold up. Yes, the port quality in general is very good. The array of options is rich. But there's something off with the whole picture.

Regarding your point 11, I would like to interject that Deus Ex has always been kind of in-your-face about its political content. If you recall, the target of the very first mission is all too ready to discuss how much of a corporate state America has become, and that tone never really changed throughout the game. The Eidos Montreal approach, especially in this game, is somewhat more infantile, does not represent a particularly plausible direction for the future (a future in which all politics have been subsumed by augmentation politics), and puts its in-universe comraderie with the original DX into peril. But it didn't seem, at least to me, that the Eidos Montreal team imposed its own views on me. I think it has more to do with the fact that augmentation is treated as such a central issue in the new games, whereas in the original game it was more of a mild curiosity. The main character literally owes his life to it, which makes the freedom of choice you mention more difficult.

Not to worry -- the disappointing main story will ensure you never get to make a choice that matters.

Hmm. Good info -- and I appreciate how non-spoilery it was.

I do want to add one more very minor gripe about what I see as an odd omission in the PC controls. It's that when you press a button to take you to an information screen, such as pressing M to bring up the map or I to bring up the inventory, pressing that same button again doesn't take down that screen and return you to the world. This is a small bit of polish that I only notice in DX:MD because I've gotten so used to other games implementing it. I definitely miss it here, though.

To the "political" question: I make a distinction between a game's story addressing a political question, and game writers injecting their personal political beliefs into a game's story simply because they can.

(Note: I'm going to go into some detail here because I think this is an interesting subject, not because it's any kind of serious impediment to my enjoyment of DX:MD.)

Deus Ex is actually my go-to example for how to do this right in a game. As I said, those guys made DX in Austin, Texas. Austin is a liberal redoubt inside a conservative state, and that makes some of the people there particularly vocal about their views. I've followed several of the careers of Deus Ex developers, and I feel I'm pretty safe in saying most of them lean left personally. (Warren Spector in particular makes no secret of that, nor should he.) And yet despite their strong personal views, and the prevailing culture where they made DX, and their decision to make a highly political question -- how to balance the valuable goals of security and liberty -- the focus of their game's story, they made Deus Ex a case study in not telling players what to think. They didn't reward or penalize you for a particular choice. They didn't twist the many in-game conversations with NPCs, either in text or tone, to favor a particular choice overall. Even though they personally (I believe) did not agree with all the things they had some characters say, they presented those statements as fairly as they could, and they respected players of any political persuasion to decide for themselves which arguments seemed stronger.

The Eidos team in Montreal has not IMO maintained that same respectful neutrality. I think their two DX games have suffered somewhat as a result. A couple of examples are the Radio Guy and Radko Perry.

The Radio Guy is pretty obviously a hard-left person's impression of right-wing talk radio. Bearing in mind that this is a game, and the writers are trying to find a way to tell a story involving secret organizations controlling the world, it's still strange that their choice is a frothing, rabid, bears-no-resemblance-to-actual-reality caricature of conservative commentators with no equally over-the-top parody of left-wing conspiracy theories. This is pretty clearly the Montreal guys taking a free shot at someone they personally don't like. It's the kind of disrespect the original Deus Ex writers didn't indulge in.

Another example is the publicly anti-aug and right-wing character Radko Perry. This is another over-the-top "aren't those people on the right awful" characterization that is not matched (as far as I've seen so far) by any similar wildly hypocritical character spouting leftist talking points. And while I have no evidence for this suspicion, "Perry" is not a Czech name, but "Radko" is a close Czech analogue to "Rick"... and Rick Perry is an outspokenly conservative governor of Texas. I can, unfortunately, easily imagine the contract writers for DX:MD conflating Perry with the left's belief that the right is "anti-immigrant" and choosing to take a shot at this with a laughably hypocritical anti-aug character. Why do this? To anyone who doesn't share the writers' political beliefs, this kind of one-sided commentary will come off as self-indulgent and immersion-breaking.

As Deus Ex proves, it doesn't have to be that way. It is possible to dramatize a hard political question in a way that respects the ability of gamers to think for themselves. But this requires responsibility on the part of the narrative leads to enforce neutrality, so that players can freely choose who they think the good guys and bad guys are rather than having the writers' Correct Choice dramatized for them.

Again, this is a small aspect of DX:MD. Apparently there are bigger problems with the story (a criticism I've heard elsewhere as well). Overall, though, it's enjoyable for its gameplay, so that's what I'm focused on most of the time.

I dont get why people have to analyse games to such an extent.
Just enjoy the game ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

And even then, its their work of art, they can make any statements they want in it.

Cornflakes_91 wrote:I dont get why people have to analyse games to such an extent.
Just enjoy the game ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I suppose that that is their way of enjoying the game.

--IronDuke

Flatfingers wrote:stuff on DX politics

That seems to be a very reasoanble line of thinking, and I'm in agreement. And it's just about what I meant when I characterized Eidos Montreal as infantile -- the new games do lack the subtlety and the even-handedness found in the first game.

The Radio Guy definitely made me think of Rush Limbaugh. There is actually one side mission, not sure if you've seen it yet, where you involve yourself with what you might call a left-wing alternative to the Radio Guy (being vague here) and the game at least offers you the choice of not being particularly helpful (again, to put it vaguely).

Otherwise you'd be right to say that the new DXs are more leftist games and not particularly concerned with a balanced perspective. That the central issue has become augmentation, as I mentioned, is itself a leftist affection (with the New Left's intense focus on identity politics, christened with the easy label "Aug"), and contrasts with the more general debilitation of society seen in the original DX. Even the language permeating the world hints at a certain sterilization, and in one occasion the game actually calls anti-augmented people racists.

Cornflakes_91 wrote:I dont get why people have to analyse games to such an extent.
Just enjoy the game ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I can't do both?

Also, what would games (or any other creative work) be like if no one is permitted to consider how, and how well, they deliver on their intended purpose?

If you're not interested in thoughtful analyses of games, no one will force you to read or hear them.

Cornflakes_91 wrote:And even then, its their work of art, they can make any statements they want in it.

Excluding libel, of course they can (in places that protect freedom of expression). Who has suggested otherwise?

And then I can make any statements I want in response to that work of art.

alpan wrote:

Flatfingers wrote:stuff on DX politics

That seems to be a very reasoanble line of thinking, and I'm in agreement. And it's just about what I meant when I characterized Eidos Montreal as infantile -- the new games do lack the subtlety and the even-handedness found in the first game.

The Radio Guy definitely made me think of Rush Limbaugh. There is actually one side mission, not sure if you've seen it yet, where you involve yourself with what you might call a left-wing alternative to the Radio Guy (being vague here) and the game at least offers you the choice of not being particularly helpful (again, to put it vaguely).

Otherwise you'd be right to say that the new DXs are more leftist games and not particularly concerned with a balanced perspective. That the central issue has become augmentation, as I mentioned, is itself a leftist affection (with the New Left's intense focus on identity politics, christened with the easy label "Aug"), and contrasts with the more general debilitation of society seen in the original DX. Even the language permeating the world hints at a certain sterilization, and in one occasion the game actually calls anti-augmented people racists.

As I acknowledged, I haven't finished playing yet. These are just preliminary opinions -- if I'm wrong, and balance is achieved later, I'll be happy to acknowledge that then.

What's funny, in a sad way, is the criticism Eidos Montreal took just before the game launched for its PR campaign that included an "Aug Lives Matter" poster. For one example, there was this from Carolyn Petit of "Feminist Frequency":

Emblematic of the game’s unwillingness to take a stand is the way it positions a group called ARC, or the Augmented Rights Coalition. Posters in the game that include the words “Augmented Lives Matter” explicitly link ARC to the contemporary American civil rights movement, Black Lives Matter, which arose in response to the very real, widespread, systematic dehumanization and murder of black people by police. It is simply outrageous for Mankind Divided to appropriate the language of this vital and necessary social justice movement for its own narrative, which has no moral backbone whatsoever, and to apply that language to a fictional organization that, like everything else in the world of Deus Ex, is neither just nor unjust, but resides somewhere in between.

So if this game is getting hit from the left and the right, does that suggest they actually are dramatizing a real-world issue in a balanced way?

So a thread has appeared to dredge me back into heavy discussion. I'm going to take Flat's post here because that one has the most to talk to about.

Flatfingers wrote:1. Thirty seconds of unskippable company logos every time you start the game feels excessive. Fortunately, there's a hack for that, which cuts the wait time down to something like 6 seconds. (Save and run the Update batch file, and save the Restore batch file if you change your mind later.)

Yes, this is annoying, but considering the state of many games nowadays, I kinda wrote it off. I did do the hack as mentioned, but I guess maybe I'm used to all the stupid stuff that's before games.

2. Nixxes once again did a pretty good job on the PC port. Controls are reasonable and responsive; keys -- including Quicksave and Quickload -- are properly remappable; and there are an OK number of Display and Graphics options to tweak for the best blend of appearance and performance.

One quirk here is that there's an option for DirectX 12, but it's grayed out. This annoyed me as my GPU is DX12-capable. After some research, I learned that Nixxes originally intended to provide DX12 support, but chose not to include it when DX:MD launched because it wasn't working well enough yet. That's fine... but then I wish they'd have temporarily removed the DirectX 12 option from the Display menu, or at least put a note like "Coming soon!" in the tooltip.

Also, unless you are made of money and are running the game on a nitrogen-cooled supercomputer, don't even think about MSAA in 4x mode. 2x is fine, and you can crank everything else to Ultra, but -- as I figured out over a couple of hours -- 4x MSAA will turn the game into a slideshow.

I'm running a HD 7950 / R9 280, and I couldn't take settings up past medium if I wanted to at least hit 60fps from time to time. Although from a budget card from 3 years ago, the game still looks good at those settings and framerate was solid. But yeah, graphics are hitting pretty hard on the GPUs.

4. What I imagine the Eidos press release would have said: "Because so many of you told us you enjoyed crawling through ventilation ducts in Deus Ex: Human Revolution, we have designed DX:MD to have ductworks everywhere! Now you can easily spend half your playing time in ducts, which we've tastefully decorated in Steel Gray, Techno Blue, and Cobwebbed Black. You're welcome!"

Oh, don't forget the yellow. Once you break the game pretty badly, you'll see the skybox in all it's bright yellow and grey glory! But skybox colors aside and the vents, I found this to be a pretty funny read concerning HVAC.

5. Hacking is harder. One example: using Nuke to capture a node now automatically triggers detection and being traced. Another: there are now mostly-invisible Trojan Horses between nodes that set off the detectors. But the number of Stop! programs you can find doesn't seem to have increased.

Maybe that's just "Give Me Deus Ex" mode in action.

As someone who also went the hacking route (also on Give Me Deus Ex difficulty), I actually have to applaud them for this. I feel as though without these extra pieces, hacking would be just too easy. I always found myself with an abundance of software I didn't use.

6. City hubs are bigger and more densely packed with items and story than Detroit and Hengsha in DX:HR. This is nice.

If I had any complaints, this one would be it. It doesn't feel like city 'hubs'. It feels more like a single city 'hub', which smaller districts in other parts of the game. Golem City for example, can't even really be considered a hub in my eyes, more like a "Here's your linear path with a few bonus objectives along the way" -- still great, but an example of what I considered 'districts'.

8. There are also "triangles" hidden in various places. (Usually under some junk. If you need to Collect ALL The Things, get ready to lift every wastebasket, cardboard box, garbage bin, and tool chest you see... and there are hundreds of each.)

There's an aug for that. It lets you see what's under, behind, and into things even if you can't see it normally so you're not looking all over the place.

12. Loading times are unbelievably long. I'm running entirely on an SSD, with a modern quad-core processor, and it takes around two-three minutes to load a new city hub area. There's actually an animated subway riding scene during these transitions that makes the elevator rides in the Mass Effect games feel peppy and fun. Fortunately Quickload is much faster -- 20 seconds, maybe? -- but unfortunately, when you try to exit the game, it wants to do a full save first, which takes over a minute. Not so good if you need to shut down the game quickly to go deal with some interruptive life thing.

I find this behaviour odd. I'm running MD on a SSD and I have yet to experience a loading time of longer than 5-10 seconds; and that's when loading into a save game from a cold app start. Train transitions never were more than 3-4 seconds for me. I'd check the health of your SSD. The SSD I'm running off of is an old 4 year old one that's sharing my OS.


Now for my thoughts;

The rose-colored glasses are off now, and I have to say that this game is nowhere near my first impression. I like my DX as a cyberpunk game. Spending 20+ hours in Prague does not feel like a cyberpunk game.

The side missions end up more than doubling the length of the game. There is more content in side-missions than story missions. If you do nothing but play the story, you're losing out on the majority of the game by far.

Some areas are very well crafted (Intro, the bank, Golem City), but everything that isn't crafted well, feels like it's just thrown in because they needed to fill space.

Bugs. Areas of levels that won't load, even from an app and PC reboot, sections that if you happen to get past COMPLETELY reset the level (Golem City, I'm looking at you for both of these), and even some issues with abilities. I've already clipped through the floor a couple times. Not as bad as Doom where I clipped through the floor constantly, but still an issue here.

Adam Jensen has weak ankles. He two Achilles heels. I shouldn't need an augment to prevent me from dying when I fall more than 10 feet. Maybe higher, but it feels like the height from which you die is too short.

Now for the big one.

In the Mega Man games, after your previous adventure, you start your next game with none of the weapons you had previously. In the Metroid Prime series, you would start the game with all your abilities and then after the tutorial, something would happen that would knock those offline and you have to find your items again. Mankind Divided does the same here.

In the original DX, the game was about a story full of twists and turns and the main draw was "Accomplish your tasks through multiple means". Augments were the developer's way of introducing RPG leveling elements to a FPS game and it worked great. With MD, not so much. Yeah, they can help you achieve those different ways, but with how quickly and easily praxis is obtained any difficulty of not having augments quickly disappear. The game feels as though it was built around the idea you would have the lack of augments, but then overwhelms you with them.

The tutorial was very well done. It was a way to give you these augmentations, and gave you ways of getting through the area. There was no need to try to take away augments to enhance difficulty. I feel as though the devs could have taken the same gameplay ideas and used that throughout the rest of the game. Instead of taking away the augments after the tutorial, they could have added depth to the whole 'overclocking' aspect and forced you to juggle your augments instead and truly allowing for a 'multiple paths to the same ending' and retain difficulty.

There are four difficulties. The hardest one unlocks after you beat the game once. The hardest initial unlocked difficulty is ultimately easy as well if you end up exploring because they hand out praxis like candy and the game doesn't feel balanced for that. The hardest difficulty adds the fact that if you die, your save is erased to give the whole "One life to live" challenge which ultimately feels tacked on cheap.


All of the issues I have above are more from a design point-of-view rather than an execution one. When it comes to execution, what the coders did was pretty amazing. The takedowns feel much more fluid and much more context sensitive. It feels good to do take downs and pulling people over obstacles you're behind without alerting security. From a narrative perspective (and politics aside) it feels like you're an outcast just trying to get by and you can really feel how much these people are oppressed. It might feel a little heavy-handed at times, but the squalor is definitely felt.

TL;DR

Ultimately I think it's a great game. But not a great $60 game.

Hey, if I'd known this was what it would take to reactivate you, I'd have written it sooner.

Some quick thoughts for now:

You're right about the (upgraded) aug for detecting goodies. I haven't spent on that one because I've focused on mobility, plus I find it enjoyable to discover hidden pocket secretaries and buttons by crawling underneath desks, so I'm clearly Doing It The Hard Way.

I'm shocked by the difference in our loading times. 2-4 seconds on the subway? I guess I need to do some research.

On the game overall, I'm starting to wonder if this would have been more acceptable as an expansion to the original game. Remember that Squeenix actually delayed the release of this game by six months because it wasn't ready -- what the heck were they doing during this extra half-year?

Flatfingers wrote:On the game overall, I'm starting to wonder if this would have been more acceptable as an expansion to the original game. Remember that Squeenix actually delayed the release of this game by six months because it wasn't ready -- what the heck were they doing during this extra half-year?

I had a discussion about this topic a couple of weeks ago. My friend said (not quoting, but close enough) "A lot of games nowadays seem to be sold as new games but they aren't more than DLCs with some graphical upgrades. Oddly enough, most of them seem to lose good stuff gameplay-related at the same rate they get improved graphics". I thought about that a little bit and realized that it was true for the most part. But what intrigued me was the "nowadays" word. My answer was that in times of the first consoles, most of the games were sold using the same principle. A sideview shooter was ever the same, no matter if you played the first one or the fifth. Later games had new levels, some new graphics, some new weapons... but gameplay was exactly the same. Today, we could say that the first Super Mario and the Whatever Super Mario five years later were the same. You paid for new games back then, but I believe that from the current point of view that most of us have, those games weren't anything but DLCs for the first installment of the franchise with updated graphics, sound and new levels.

So my question is: how much must change a later reencarnation of a game to be considered not a DLC but a completely new game? If #2 comes ten years later but it feels like the first one with better graphics and new levels is that enough?

Because if I buy a Super Mario game today (for whatever crap-console Nintendo sells nowadays) I'm sure it is a new game because it is 3D and a can move Mario with my eyes and make him jump if I jump. I couldn't do that with my NES back then. Although... the toads are there, and I must save the Princess and the levels even have the same looks plus 1 dimension...

@Flat

You know I can never resist a good thought-provoking discussion around the games I like with you!

@Lum

You hit on a very very good point. "When does a DLC become a game and when does a game be considered DLC?"

If we look historically, we can see the original NES Super Mario Bros and Super Mario Bros 2 JP (not the re-branded Doki Doki Panic) we can see that it is the exact same engine with maybe one or two minor upgrades. For the most part though, it is almost nothing but new level design, nothing more.

Again, if we look to Doom 1 and Doom 2, it could be argued the same as well. Same engine, just new levels.

...And don't even get me started on all the Madden NFL games that are churned out every year.

We've seen how in some games, you can make your own levels. Many of us have fond memories of Doom level editing or Duke Nukem 3D. We've even seen people package up some of these bunches of levels and sell them too (I was more of a DN3D fan than Doom, so I know there were 'expansion packs' like Duke it out in D.C. which were not sold or made by the developer).

Where do you draw the line? Good question. When you toss in modding, you muddy the waters even more. Look at all the conversions for Descent Freespace.

Even if we were to enter into a large-scale debate here, I think it would still come down to personal opinion. Each person has a different opinion about it. I think there's just no way to tell when a game ends and the DLC realm begins.

Lum wrote:I had a discussion about this topic a couple of weeks ago. My friend said (not quoting, but close enough) "A lot of games nowadays seem to be sold as new games but they aren't more than DLCs with some graphical upgrades. Oddly enough, most of them seem to lose good stuff gameplay-related at the same rate they get improved graphics". I thought about that a little bit and realized that it was true for the most part. But what intrigued me was the "nowadays" word. My answer was that in times of the first consoles, most of the games were sold using the same principle. A sideview shooter was ever the same, no matter if you played the first one or the fifth. Later games had new levels, some new graphics, some new weapons... but gameplay was exactly the same. Today, we could say that the first Super Mario and the Whatever Super Mario five years later were the same. You paid for new games back then, but I believe that from the current point of view that most of us have, those games weren't anything but DLCs for the first installment of the franchise with updated graphics, sound and new levels.

I'll quote what I said before about this:

DigitalDuck wrote:This was even more true in the 80s; a numbered sequel essentially meant that it was exactly the same game with some new levels.

Jet Set Willy II is perhaps the best example of this.

Here's the map for the original Jet Set Willy: Here's the map for Jet Set Willy II: At first it looks like a whole new adventure, with nearly double the number of rooms!

Of course, that's if you ignore the fact that the new rooms are mostly filler rooms designed to pad out gaps in the mansion to make the map work, alongside a couple of offshoot linear adventures, essentially making this JSW with Sewers, Space, and Hole DLC.

DWMagus wrote:

Flatfingers wrote:

12. Loading times are unbelievably long. I'm running entirely on an SSD, with a modern quad-core processor, and it takes around two-three minutes to load a new city hub area. There's actually an animated subway riding scene during these transitions that makes the elevator rides in the Mass Effect games feel peppy and fun. Fortunately Quickload is much faster -- 20 seconds, maybe? -- but unfortunately, when you try to exit the game, it wants to do a full save first, which takes over a minute. Not so good if you need to shut down the game quickly to go deal with some interruptive life thing.

I find this behaviour odd. I'm running MD on a SSD and I have yet to experience a loading time of longer than 5-10 seconds; and that's when loading into a save game from a cold app start. Train transitions never were more than 3-4 seconds for me. I'd check the health of your SSD. The SSD I'm running off of is an old 4 year old one that's sharing my OS.

I'm going to hold off the DLC question for a bit because I'd like to come back to this: I'm baffled.

I'm running a 2TB Samsung EVO 850 SSD as my C: drive (including OS and boot). This thing is definitely not four years old.

But just to see, I downloaded Samsung's "Magician" utility for setting SSD options. Its benchmark said I was getting 383 MB/s on sequential reads. That seemed... slow. After a little more poking around, it said my OS (Win 10) was currently talking to my drive in HDD mode, not SSD mode. So I enabled that for performance.

It also said I could turn on Samsung's "RAPID" mode for even better performance. So I did that.

Sure enough, sequential read speed got boosted to 3768 MB/s -- an order of magnitude improvement! And while I didn't memorize the random read/write IOPS, they're now 83,852 and 66598 -- better than speeds I've seen posted.

So now my DX:MD load times should now be as short as yours, right?

DX:MD still takes over a minute to load from start, and over a minute on the subway transitioning between levels.



Maybe something to do with how my existing saves are cached on the SSD (maybe non-sequentially)? Or I still don't have the proper settings for random reads? Or Samsung's firmware is glitchy?

Flatfingers wrote:Or Samsung's firmware is glitchy?

Most likely in my opinion. My old laptop was a Samsung and it seemed allergic to using any CPU.

There is a firmware update available, but I want to back up some of my more volatile data before I exercise that option.

Flat;

I'm thinking about it more.

It may also have to do with your memory as well. I'm running 24gb of ram with pagefile disabled on all drives. If you have a pagefile, that could be your bottleneck. I've never liked the idea of caching fast-access items to slow storage, so I've always made sure I'm not hitting up against a memory limit.

I can do some profiling tonight to see how much memory gets used. I'll also benchmark my drive to see what's going on.

Another thing to test; try turning down the texture memory (to use less GPU memory) to see if any loading times change.