Dissecting Deus Ex: Going Out with a Whimper
Alright, so after a thousand words or two about Deux Ex's final act, I've barely even mentioned Hugh Darrow or The Decision you have to make in the final moments. That's where we're picking up with this installment, because the ending in this game didn't have to be a letdown of epic proportions. It is, though. Very much so.
I'll again point out for the record that even though I'm about to do my level best to eviscerate the ending, this is still nothing short of a B+ level game. I like it. It's ever so close to greatness and I absolutely want Eidos Montreal to do another one. If I didn't enjoy it, I wouldn't spend the time on it. Yadda, yadda. Also, as with the first installment, this post is absolutely spoilerific, so if you haven't finished and don't want to know how it all ends, go no further. For the rest of you, let's go wreck this game...
It turns out, that the Big Bad of this game isn't one of your allies, it's not any of the three Augmented Brute Squad people you encounter in the game's initial moments and spend the rest of the game defeating, it's not the illusive AI Anchorwoman, and it's not even Dragon Lady who runs Tai Yong Medical. It's Darrow, the old crippled guy you run into in Sarif's office that once gave you a sidequest to do, is the father of human augmentation, and, because it doesn't work on him, hates all augmented people so much that he hatches an elaborate and convoluted plan to turn them into AugZombies as a result of which the world will forever ban future work into human augmentation. It's a plot that kind of, sort of might have something to do with the ILLUMINATI!!!! Maybe. All this because he has to walk around with a limp in his old age. I believe the word you're looking for is... Issues.
As snarky as that scintillating analysis may sound, I actually like Darrow as the Evil Foozle. He's stark raving mad, sure, but that comes with genius. He's got the big three in his corner -motive, means, and opportunity- so the fact that he's the guy in the shadows pulling all the strings, while not particularly surprising, works really well in my estimation. Too bad your encounter with him leads into one of the more bizarre and nonsensical boss(ish) battles in recent memory, not to mention an even more nonsensical Decision you must make to close out the game.
I can sum up the final hour or two of Human Revolution in two words: Utterly incomprehensible.
Okay, that's a bit strong. I suspect much of the detail for understanding the Who's Who of the story is in the game, but it relies way too much on hacking computers and reading tablets to fill in the blanks. In the first half to two-thirds of the game I was hacking and reading everything in sight. I felt I understood what I was doing, I had an idea what different factions wanted, and I understood my motivation. By the time I was done with my second trip through Hengsha (and probably earlier, really), I was pretty much done reading tablets and hacking every last computer terminal. I just couldn't muster the will anymore when such terminals are everywhere and 19 out of 20 emails are completely inconsequential. So guess what happened when I stopped doing that: Yep, by the time I reached Panchaea, the game's final location, I had only the slightest grasp of what was going on. I doubt that's a coincidence.
Sure, I knew Megan Reed was alive. I knew her kidnapped team had unwittingly developed tech to let a single person or group control implanted augmentations. I knew Tai Yong Medical was hellbent on putting its competition -including Sarif Industries- out of business. I knew the world's only trustworthy anchorwoman, who evidently distributed all global news, was an AI controlled by... somebody related to Dragon Lady and, maybe, Darrow? Regardless, clearly Darrow and Dragon Lady were involved in... Something Bad. Oh, and there's that Tong guy who was doing something to set up his kid for the next game that made sense at the time, but now I don't really remember. And down, down, down into the rabbit hole we go.
Evidently Darrow, Dragon Lady, and some others had ties to the Illuminati. Or maybe they were card-carrying members? I'm honestly not sure because all I saw were a couple of mentions that they had something to do with the Illuminati, but what they wanted to accomplish was never really clear to me. (Darrow's motivation becomes clear, yes, but is he directing the Illuminati? Is he rogue? Not a f-ing clue.) I'd be somewhere talking to somebody and they'd be like, "You're foolish to pursue me even here! I will call down the thunder and -ILLUMINATI!!!!- you'll never find Megan Reed Now fight my -ILLUMINATI!!!!- henchman!" It was like there's a special version of Tourette's Syndrome in which people just shout "ILLUMINATI!!!!" at inopportune moments. To me, the whole Illuminati thing was just sort of there for the sake of being there. The game would have not had to change one bit had you stricken that word from the script. Even if it's meant as a tie into the original game, that's a sure sign you've introduced an unnecessary plot element.
Still, I was holding on until Panchaea, a place that for all time will call to mind this:
No. I'll never be over Macho Grande Panchaea.
Right. So, here's what I know about Panchaea. It was built in the arctic to, ostensibly, do something about global warming. There was going to be a big to-do and even political adversaries like Sarif and Taggart were in attendance to see it. I guess despite their differences they both Go Green or something. That's when Darrow flips the AugZombie switch and every aug on the planet turns into a blithering, violent lunatic. Frankly, the whole AugZombie thing smacks of, "we were down to the wire and didn't have a better idea." The first half of the game so expertly builds an expectation about a big political battle over what it is to be human and whether augmentation interferes with that and the big closing set piece to highlight this mammoth struggle is... a remote installation that's been wrecked by AugZombies? Not a great call there. And just what was Panchaea really? Was the whole global warming fixer thing 100% ruse or was it a legitimate lure? Damned if I know because it never comes up once you arrive. Regardless of whether there's a future for augmentation I think building a magic fix global warming machine is KOBD (kind of a big deal).
So I arrive at and explore devastated Panchaea and locate Darrow, who, in his control room, treats me to a monologue about why The Father of Augmentation has turned augged up humans into AugZombies. I figured he was just at home and bored on a Friday night, but no it's because he can't join the club even though he basically invented the tech. Anyway. At this point, if you play your cards right, you can convince Darrow that he's stark raving mad and should help you stop his dastardly plan. It's a pretty cool sequence that can put your dialog enhancement mod to good use in picking two key dialog choices and then a correct pheromone to swing him around. Watching Darrow go on and on about why he's doing what must be done and then pause mid-step when he realizes he's run head first towards a brick wall of bad logic worked plenty well for me. It's way better than the sequence of shutting down El Presidente Computer AI in Fallout 3 and I wish the game did more of this kind of thing. If you pull this off, he gives you the code to shut down the signal in some Server Room of Doom located somewhere in the complex.
Remember this when we get to the end Decision because it's at the heart of much my dissatisfaction with the ending.
After putting down or evading a horde of AugZombies you eventually get to the final boss battle. I still haven't the foggiest what was happening during this battle. Truly. Not a clue. I arrived in a big open sub-level area, intent on shutting off the AugZombie signal and there's this mystery chick hooked up to a machine who looks like one of the freaky triplets from Minority Report. She's doing something nutty. I don't know what. Maybe it has to do with the AugZombie signal or maybe she's having trouble with the spackle that's supposed to plug the hole in the ozone layer. Could be anything with these catatonic cyborg girls.
Then Tai Yong Medical Dragon Lady walks in and is all like, "I got this." And so I stand there as she hooks herself into the big computer like she's Psycho Borg Lady from First Contact, thinking to myself, "Wait. When did she get here? Is she trying to hurt or help?" And then she starts screaming and AugZombies start showing up and I'm getting shot at and I think Minority Report girl is saying something. It's all happening at once and that's bad for me because my brain simply won't process that much simultaneous input. I'm sure if I could have sorted it out I might have had some idea of what was going on, but it was not to be. I'm running around the computer where the quest markers are, pushing buttons that are doing something, but evidently not in the correct sequence, when I notice an access panel where I'm able to punch in the ultra-complex four-digit shutdown code I got from Darrow. (I would have killed for that code to be 1-2-3-4 and a dialog response about it being a combination an idiot would have on his luggage.) I figure using the code is probably easier than trying to decode whatever it is I'm supposed to be doing with the other buttons. Sure enough, the code does... well, it does something. Still not sure what, but I don't see Minority Report girl anymore and that part of the machine seems to have shut down.
So Yay? Zombie Signal all gone now? Game over? Let's hit Brandon's place for some pie!
Wait. I'm still being attacked by guns and AugZombies, so I guess not.
I grease the AugZombies and follow the new quest marker, hoping it'll give me some semblance of a clue as to what I'm supposed to be doing next. It points to Dragon Lady who's now behind protective glass, still hooked into the machine, and it appears there's nothing I can do to interact with her. Okay, I guess I'll throw some EMP grenades at the killer robots, since I can't find anything else to do. Once they're disabled the glass in front of Dragon Lady disappears -I dunno why- so I shoot her a couple of times, and when that doesn't seem to do anything I walk up to her, and that activates a cut scene. I truly have no idea what all this is about. Maybe I should have hacked a few more computers or paid more attention to Darrow explaining his nefarious plot to me, or maybe focused more on what was happening when this giant clusterf*** kicked off, but at this point I'm just flat out lost. Regardless, the big bad computer/people hybrid thingie stops and I go into a magic control room with three covered buttons and AI Anchorwoman is telling me I have to choose the fate of mankind.
Umm... okay?
AI Anchorlady tells me I can broadcast the truth about Darrow and, as she does so, one of the buttons becomes accessible. She may have said something about this choice killing future augmentation work, but there was an odd buzzing in my ear at this point and I'm barely processing the intake of information anymore. Might have been because I've been banging my head on the desk for the last hour. All I knew is that this option was supposedly about telling the truth about what happened there. Then she tells me I can just destroy the station and people will have to figure it all out for themselves. (Best of luck to 'em because I've been here the entire time and I've got noth'n.) There's two more stations with buttons, but they stay covered and AI Anchorlady is just staring at me. This goes back to the first Dissecting post. You see, since I never found the room with Taggart and Sarif, the two other game resolutions they would advocate for (no limits on augmentation or heavy government restriction on it) aren't available. I'm all for optional quest lines and hidden areas -I think my record there is pretty clear- but when you make it possible for missing a small (kind of) hidden area to halve your options in the end game that's... not good.
What do you think of all this, Adam?
Exactly.
So now I have two options: Blow up the facility or broadcast The Truth about Darrow to the world. And now we come to our problem. Well, the final problem. If you play it out with Darrow the way I did then the "truth about Darrow" is that he's a loon and a dastardly Bond villain that should not be listened to. He flat out tells you to stop his misguided plan, which I have dutifully just done. Sounds like a good plan to me. Given that all this new shit that has come to light surely broadcasting the truth means securing a future for augmentation, right? Yeah, not so much. Picking this option means an end to augmentation and an extremely uncomfortable video montage with Jensen droning on and on about... stuff.
Forget questions about what happens to Jensen, Sarif, Reed, Darrow, or the ILLUMINATI!!!! Forget about whether or not Panchaea can fix global warming. (I know I shouldn't be hung up on what is supposed to be a minuscule plot point, but I am.) Forget about the fate of the AugZombies now that I've supposedly shut down the signal. Forget about what becomes of AI Anchorlady, whether or not all this exposes her, whether or not she continues to control dissemination of news to the entire world, and whether or not the Illuminati can still direct her actions (assuming they were to begin with). Instead, let's listen to Jensen augment himself into a human pretzel while trying to explain why technology is evil and people are better off left to their own devices, nevermind how I've been handling myself throughout the game or that I just spent ten minutes convincing Darrow he's wrong to want to end augmentation. This is an ending that only tangentially relates to anything you've actually been doing the entire game.
I've been chewing on this for five days now and I think I've finally come up with a plausible explanation for all of this...
Wait for it...
ILLUMINATI!!!!
[end transmission]
- Todd Brakke's blog
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Comments
Todd, These two posts of
Todd,
These two posts of yours on DXHR... it's like you read my brain and stuck it on the internet. I AM NOT ALONE. Yay.
Two Cents
I agree with other people that we have to applaud the ambition of the work. I've been trying to read and watch designer discussions of the state of the industry, and it must have been a pain the butt to even try some of the stuff they tried here.
Hearing elsewhere that the boss fights were *outsourced* makes perfect sense, given how incongruous they were to the rest of the game. That said, I didn't have a lot of problem with the *fact* that a player couldn't resolve the boss fights without fighting. Forcing the player to kill these individuals does serve a roleplaying purpose ("I let you roll how you want most of the time, player, but no, in this case, Adam Jensen really DOES want to kill this person"). Unfortunately, by that same token, the "Pacifist" achievement requires the player to break that illusion by NOT KILLING total strangers who are sudden and actively committed to murdering him. Still not quite as bad as the "No Russian" sequence in MW2, which is compelling by itself, but completely retarded in the larger context of the game, where shooting "enemy class" humans is always rewarded everywhere else.
My biggest problems with the endings (all four were available to me):
1. The player can save at the decision point. Given the intended gravity of the decision, the player should have to at least fight the boss each time before choosing. As it was, I put them in order of preference, then watched all the endings in a row. This reduces the sense of commitment to a single choice, I believe.
2. Giving an achievement for seeing them all cheapens this decision, as well: I would have loved to see a named achievement for each ending, but have only the first one you pick show up on your profile. Make all the endings worth the same score, but have only one of them count for each player. Doing this would let you also keep a "catch 'em all" achievement without killing the initial choice.
3. All of the "gravity" of the choice, I feel, was generated by me - the endgame was meaningful to me because I chose for it to be. As Todd points out, understanding the meaning of the choices requires reading texts. But reading "plot" texts does not give you a "Scholar" bonus. Further, the game penalizes you in the very first mission for spending too much time reading (if you go off on the office goose-chase before getting in the airship the first time, and take too long, the bad guys kill the hostages).
Todd's report that you can actually "lock out" two of the four endings is just plain stupid, and makes the problems I'll mention in a second even worse.
4. The "Extra Credits" podcast discusses a moral dilemma Shepard has in ME2: do you brainwash the geth, or kill them? This moment in ME2 works because there's no tangible benefit to either choice. ME3 may change that, but the decision must be made in a vaccuum, and both options are clearly somewhat evil, and you must choose one. The only problem is that each choice grants you different karma points (in EC's and my opinion, both choices should have given Renegade.)
This is clearly what Deus Ex was trying to do at the end, but they made two huge mistakes: the first three choices involve sacrificing your integrity, and preserving your integrity requires suicide.
Like Todd, I got Darrow to see he was being a douche. Does that video of me telling him off get included in the Darrpw ending? No! I know that including it would have made this ending the "best ending", but destroying the value of the player's choices is not the best way to fix bad writing.
I also suspect the designers believed that the "let mankind figure itself out" was the good ending, and were trying to sell the suicide as a sacrifice. Screw that. Sure, I'm letting the world figure itself out - but what if the world decides it wants augments? Well, then I've effed them, because my Holy Grail DNA is now fish food. Worse, if they want to solve global warming (maybe with a slightly less rape-y version of the Panchaea machine), f 'em again, because not only did I destroy the machine, I also smashed the pieces with high-pressure ocean water, and killed the one man who might be convinced (from prison) to rebuild it.
Finally, I'm a very John Locke sort of person. In ME2, I killed the geth, because they had made a decision to hate me, and the only way to honor that choice, without being able to let them change their own minds, was to murder them. There is no such choice in this game - your choices were "manipulate people" or "kill yourself".
All this turned the final choice into a calculation, not a dilemma. So I calculated that, if I sided with Sarif, I'd have the ability to fly with my cyber hands, and hot and cold running cyber-bimbos for life. I'd also be sticking to the guys who were hurting me and mine for the entire game.
In sum, this game could have been SO MUCH MORE. But when life gave me lemons at the end, I gave those lemons BACK. I demanded to see life's manager! "'Be dishonest or kill yourself?' Nobody tells Cave Johnson to kill himself!"
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Professing ignorance doesn't give your argument more weight
Saying that you didn't really pay attention to the game doesn't really help your argument that the end of the game is incomprehensible. Also, saying that you missed those optional objectives and it's the games fault that you didn't have those ending option is ridiculous. Reload a save, spend 5 minutes to find Taggart, hear him out, spend another 5 to find Sarif. Boom, done.
I will completely agree, though, that the ending boss fight is completely retarded. And I will also agree that the "Take a Fourth option" choice is completely out of place and nonsensical. Instead of the fourth option being "Expose everyone and let the world sort it out" or "Adam Jensen walks away" its "Adam Jensen commits suicide and lets the world sort it out". Ridiculous. Absolutely unsatisfying, an unbelievably cheap way to get the player to feel bad (or good, i guess). The crappy, stock footage ending videos just rub it in.
Some counter-points to that.
Some counter-points to that.
The problem is the game teaches you from beginning up to almost the end that if there's something important and quest-related you will have a quest marker on your HUD (either primary or secondary). I followed the quest marker as I had done for 30 hours of gameplay only to find that upon going down the elevator that the room was actually back up "there" some where. Given that I thoughtlessly quick-saved after going down the elevator, I'd of lost an hour or two of progress going back to my last manual save. (Guess I could have checked the autosave, but I didn't.) So, no, it was something more than five minutes to back track and, more importantly, it's also not like I knew ahead of time that this omission was going to cut off my end game options.
Also, it's overstating to say my argument is that I couldn't be bothered to pay attention. I'm not convinced I did miss that much plot-related material as I suspect a lot of it just isn't there, but even failing that, if I did miss details in the game it was either because I gave up hacking everything (which you have to do way to often for way too infrequent payoffs) and that in some crucial moments the game left me suffering from sensory overload because too much was happening screen at once. Maybe other people process that better than I do, but regardless it interfered with my ability to understand what was happening during that final set piece (among a couple of others).
I feel games that get
I feel games that get everything right do so almost by luck and/or just the right balance. DE was really, really ambitious and delivered on so much of it and with that kind of effort you're bound to miss things. This is of course why the glaring errors, plot and story holes, etc stick out so much. If they hadn't really shot for the moon with it and tried to balance everything I think we'd be talking about a disappointing game and not a game that got most things right. In no way do I feel that I had a bad experience with the game (except when I hit the first boss with only points in hacking and a stun gun), but I totally understand any complaints folks have with the game.
Awesome post Todd. Appreciate
Awesome post Todd. Appreciate these Deus Ex pieces...even though the end DID suck.
The ending
My only problem with ending(s) is that final cutscene which doesn't explain what happens with all those people I met on my adventure. And that it just does what description says it "may" do.
I had all 4 options available (since I found Sarif and Taggart, who is indeed with Illuminati, he admits), and I too went with Darrow's ending, expecting Adam to send the world the message about truth behind recent events. But no, he just slams augmentations in the ground, which sucks. After that, I chose Sarif's ending, since he asks to broadcast a message (false one at that) how Purity First (or however Taggart's organization is called) is behind everything, which enables corporations to continue working on augmentations.
Oh, and Darrow wasn't in Illuminati as far as I know (that is - learned from the game and reading every email and ebook I found). Or was he? Now I'm not so sure, since that Singapore complex is his, and Megan's there with Namir, with Zhao...
Ok, I got a bit lost there, gonna head to Deus Ex Wiki to read about Darrow and ending.
Point being - I quite liked it, and didn't mind it's complicity and convultedness (is it the right word?).
I gotta disagree.
I disagree with you is the idea that it's wrong not to tell the player what happens next.
I *did* follow the storyline, and read the terminals all the way through - though I agree with Todd that something so important shouldn't have been left to chance. So I got all four options, too - and I was a bit floored to discover there was a fourth choice.
It was interesting, because I went into the last elevator knowing exactly which of the first three endings I was gonna pick. I knew because I didn't care about the result - the way the choices are presented, it's clear that the point lies in what the player believes is right.
Basing right and wrong on anticipated outcomes is called utilitarianism. Video games THRIVE on this sort of philosophy, because of how focused they are on get stronger/win loot/accomplish goals. Telling the player exactly what will happen after they choose simply lets them decide what ending they like, and pick it - which sucks the meaning right out of it.
With the endings lined up that way, they become calculations, not dilemmas. People can pick the ending with the same sick dispassion that some people kill hookers in GTA to get their money back - they're not even killing the hooker because they're sadistic, they're doing it because to them, she's sort of a free health pack.
There are a lot of ways they could have made the final choice more meaningful for a greater number of players, but I honestly believe that making the predicted outcomes more clear would have been a mistake.
My biggest problem is that I
My biggest problem is that I just wanted to give world the truth, and Darrow's ending seemed like it would do it, but with giving augmentations a new chance.
I didn't want black or white ending, gray's perfectly fine, unexpected is perfectly fine, I'm just dissapointed in my first chosen ending, that's all.
Darrow
Darrow was faking to be a part of the Illuminati in order to team up with them on the super-augment pulse. While the Illuminati wanted to use the pulse to control everyone with augments, Darrow wanted to use it to make the augmented people look crazy. It's why Darrow had the code to shut the system off, because they thought he was working with them.
Sarif
100% agree with your summary of the ending.
One thing I got caught up on -- Why wasn't Sarif affected by the signal? He has an augmented arm. Was it only people with chips in their brain that turned into zombies? I might have missed an email or message explaining that.
Yeah.
This isn't dealt with as explicitly as it should be - hacker sidekick mentions that Sarif Industries is doing an internal investigation, and isn't replacing his head chip. It makes sense that Sarif would follow his security guys' advice.
Maybe he didn't replace
Maybe he didn't replace biochip, as I did (which was a mistake when I met third boss, Namir) - everyone with old biochip was "spared".
Man, all this discussion is
Man, all this discussion is just making me want to play the original Deus Ex instead. And my ageing PC can actually run it, so mayhaps I should do just that...