What happened to the setting?

This is really disappointing, but if you pretend that all of the prequels are actually Ghost in the Shell it begins to be less stupid.

They've probably never even seen the first game, let alone play it.

I'll take the deeper aesthetic and futurisitc world if it means it doesn't gel as well with previous titles

I think Ross put it best.

Deus Ex was a realistic, grounded setting with elements of Sci-Fi thrown in for good measure. Human Revolution and Invisible War are just hardcore sci-fi all the way.

In Deus Ex, you have people a fuckload of homeless people on the streets, drug dealing gangs, increasingly militarized police in response to terrorist actions, (which may or may not be govt. false flags) a civilian uprising created in response to the repeal of the 2nd Amendment, increasing UN/govt. control over the world, and a conspiracy of globalists hell-bent on centralizing everything to ensure complete world domination.

In Humane Euthanasia, you have augs. AUGS ARE FAGS, FLESH > METAL. Oh yeah, and the illuminati want to make augmentations regulated because they're scared of augs or something, despite Darrow's little stunt on Panchea proving the power that augs could potentially have over a population and how they could easily be used to enslave humanity should they become widespread. Hell, the Neouropozyne requirement alone could essentially give them a total monopoly over the lives of augmented individuals Really, HR should have ditched the whole "illuminati" thing. If you haven't played DX before HR, the Illuminati being the villains just comes off as incredibly stupid and a joke compared to the rest of the plot. Can't speak for BlackAugLivesMatter since I never played it.

HR was clearly the developers wanting to distance themselves from the original source material so their title stood out but they also clearly didn't understand the source material, what themes does HR even tackle?

IW was well strange, it got some things right, NG Resonance is clearly analogous to personal privacy issues with platforms like myspace, google and Facebook, Pequods and Queequegs is probably some kind of analogy for corporate consolidation and the illusion of choice, the religion and the world trade organization are probably folded into that too with the religion and wto leading to the same ending. The setting works in pockets, I could understand the arcologies being high tech but they didn't push out the cities enough and limit their tech, even though Cairo has adobe houses on the city level. Stuff like universal ammunition, the retarded nu multi tool, the blue faction, security drones, the one world religion, the world trade organization, nano augs being too fucking memestream, this shit is way too fucking much in the 20 years after Deus Ex. HR is worse having most of this shit 30 years before Deus Ex

Holy shit! I thought it was some excavation at first. WHY?

Probably a different team, with a much different design philosophy. Another user might know if there was anyone from the original team for HR or MD.

because developers would rather make their own games but suits (or developers insecure about their talents/ outright shit) need that sweet brand recognition.

Bodily autonomy
Control of media/information
Poor people getting uppity

That said, they didn't really explore these much, just
and the street urchins talking about how they were being forced to get augged or else they'd lose their factory job, or not be the top prostitute

The themes were there, they just dindu much to explore them

he was involved in IW.
even so, the political and philosophical aspects are still quite decent even if everything else is shit.

If they didn't explore them than it doesn't matter.

Different team, different publisher (the first two games were published by Eidos themselves), different artists with different tastes in aesthetics not mention influences.

Nigger it is a different team.

Nope

Pretty much no one from Ion Storm works at Eidos Montreal

Ah. Don't scare anons like that, he's working on System Shock 3 now.

Well, sure, but the "it was all three endings at once xDDD" and the ending of IW made me very disappointed back then. Hopefully it was just him trying to push things into the next level of grimdark and succeeding only partially.

The faces were pretty great

Actually she pre-dates all but google and google wasn't really as focussed on data collection back on 2003. Both DX1 and IW were scarily accurate at predicting the coming dystopia.

The things he showed in his HR video scared me away for good.

Is Invisible War worth playing at least? I've been thinking about it but I'm hesitant because I heard it was shit.

It would be extremely painful. To get the game in a working state you have to apply fan patches or something like that. It literally restarts itself to load a new area, which are small and numerous thanks to a console it had to run on having fuckall RAM. And that's only one of its problems, some others were mentioned above.
The storyline might be of interest, but, having played the game in its entirety, I would recommend watching a playthrough without commentary instead. IW lacks (as in having too little, not being devoid of) in the one aspect the original is always most praised for - multiple paths, multiple solutions etc.

Worth a shot if you managed to find enjoyment in HR as IW isn't much worse. It won't take you long to finish either.

Do like I did.

Also I've never had to fuck around with fan patches though if one exists to merge the tiny console levels into one big one as was done with Deadly Shadows I'd get that.

I've never played HR either, just the original

Then I'd compare it to something like Bioshock in being dumbed down but not completely terrible. If you tolerated that give IW a shot. I went in not expecting anything good and it was a good time-waster. It has some interesting ideas mixed into the insanity.

Pcgamingwiki will help with any issues you encounter but I've found it stable (admittedly I haven't played it on anything later than Win7)

I played it on XP and was told by a friend, who recommended it to me and warned me of all its flaws, that playing without applying every patch or update or whatever those ~8 files were in that folder that came with the distributive will be next to impossible. And IW crashed often enough anyway.

Fair enough, I can only speak from my own experiences. It might well have been patched since, pcgamingwiki talks of a 1.2 patch that is all but essential in making it work.

I just used them as examples because the idea behind them of data mining and people giving away private information freely is just what NG does, she extracts personal information for marketing purposes and people not only don't care about the loss of privacy but they willingly embrace it, the first time you run into her a guy is telling her about having a bad dating experience and gives her his address, and the way NG replies with lines such as "we'll have more fun if you pretend I'm the real NG" and her general attitude that makes her sound like she cares about what people are telling her and then her admitting to the player "i'm supposed to make you like me". I guess it's more an extrapolation of Boy bands and Brittany spears, linked with the fast exchange of information via the internet,but it accuraltely portrays what's happened with things like Facebook and Google.

I agree completely with the comparison you made user. I was just saying they weren't a direct analogy as much as a terrifyingly accurate prediction of where things would go (extrapolation is more impressive than mere analogy in my opinion). Why collect information by force or deceit when you can persuade people to give it to you willingly?

Human revolution is great but it doesn't fit with the original at all.

I was just clarifying.

It's ok user, I was just being autistic anyway. Have a picture of the best thing to come out of Human Revolution.

The best thing being the girl, not the image itself.

Eidos montreal aren't good devs
The designers were probably failed fashion students.

Street urchins wearing fashion designer clothes
lel

Chikane wasn't bad as a character, but definitely inferior to Malik

also Malik was an Arab woman, are you really complaining about minorities?

Malik wasn't thrown in for the sake of pandering and anyway light brown girls best girls.

i don't really see him as Pandering, i mean he's got his own backstory and angst against people like Jensen. I mean he's a south african pilot who flew for the air force and then privately. he's more qualified technically speaking then Farida. he could have been more developed, but really you don't spend enough time around him to really learn a whole lot about him. Even with the bits you can get from him when you use CASIE and shit. The bigger issue is how unfinished shit is more than "pandering" because to me Chikane is just another piece of unfinished writing more than pandering

GoG version works fine, it's just a shit game.

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That's a good point actually. An underused character is going to feel token even if that wasn't the intent.

nice dubs

the whole game felt that way, please wake me up i paid full price for it

that's what you get for buying full price in 2016

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You never learn, do you?

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We all make mistakes user. I paid full price for a pre-order of Guild Wars 2, for example. The important thing is learning from your mistakes and not repeating them.

there's no redeeming the mistakes i've made

i pre-ordered Mass Effect 3 collectors edition

Oh dear.

This is almost physically painful to watch. I think I'll clean my desktop sooner than I planned.

Anyone GMDX here?