Posted in: Comics, Look! It Moves! by Adi Tantimedh, Recent Updates | Tagged: games

Look! It Moves! by Adi Tantimedh #113: Human Intervention

Published Mon, 29 Aug 2011 12:00:16 -0500

Having a grand old time playing DEUX EX: HUMAN REVOLUTION this week on the Xbox. It fills my craving for intricate Bladerunner-style Science Fiction stories and the opportunity to arse about in that world in an interactive way.

I've always liked the idea of story-based role-playing games where you play a simulation of a space ranger, mercenary, detective or whatever. Science Fiction RPGs are quite rare these days as the majority of RPGs are fantasy-based Tolkein derivatives. This is probably because building a working SF world with its rules and history might be harder than another cod-medieval world of wizards, warriors and orcs. That's why MASS EFFECT is a big deal – it had virtually been the only Science Fiction RPG on current-generation consoles until DEUS EX: HUMAN REVOLUTION came along.

The first DEUS EX game from 2000 has a reputation for being one of the greatest games of all time because of the huge list of choices it gave players on how to play the game, what decisions they made in that affected the outcome of the story and had different endings depending on what decision you made. DEUS EX: HUMAN REVOLUTION is the third game in the series (after a sequel back in 2002 that was considered a disappointment) and admirably replicates the gameplay experiences that earned the original game its reputation. The amount of freedom the player had in the game world was massive – you could decide to be either play stealth and choose cybernetic augmentations to your cyborg hero and sneak past the baddies without having to fight or kill any of them or you could go in guns blazing and kill everyone in the room. It wasn't all shooty-shooty if you didn't want to roll that way. You could try to talk your way into a heavily-guarded building or you could find a vent or sewer entrance to sneak into. You could even be a total psycho and attack random people on the streets during the non-combat parts of the game if you wanted to. And you could loot just about everyone that was dead or knocked out. You might find extra money or ammo. You could take on or refuse side quests like help a former colleague in the police force gather evidence to expose and arrest a corrupt vice cop or help the madam of a brothel get rid of a vicious pimp. You can snoop around people's apartments and offices to read their emails to get a sense of the world the game is set in, find extra door codes to avoid having to hack them and even steal their money and goodies. This is the type of game that gives you as many amusing things to do if you feel like it or you can just ignore the extra stuff and just want to play through the main plot.

There's a lot to admire in the writing, with themes involving the ethics of cybernetics and Transhumanism, class conflict, industrial espionage and corporate warfare. The section of the game set in Shanghai is impressive in its detail and research in depicting an economically expanding and harsh China obviously based on the real-life China's current rate of expansion, with companies engaged in vicious competition and hapless civilians scrambling for decent jobs in order to afford to live above the poverty level. This will probably get the game banned in China.

Alas, I am a mediocre player at best. I do my best to be a sneaky, stealthy ninja until the guards spot me, freak out and start shooting at me, then I run out of stun gun ammo and end up whipping out the pistol or combat rifle I nicked off the ones I knocked out earlier and start shooting attackers in the face. While trying to hack into an office in the police station, I accidentally punched a cop, sending a whole bunch of them gunning for me and I had to knock out about half a dozen cops and drag them into an office to hide them before going back downstairs to walk out of the place. I also looted everyone I took down for more money to spend on weapons upgrades. I heard one player say he pushed the B button by mistake and stabbed his ex-girlfriend's mother. One other player claims he murdered everyone on the streets of Detroit. Happy times.

However, there is a certain disconnect between story logic and gameplay logic that plagues games like this one. Story logic has a tendency to slam right up against the way the game has to be played. Case in point: you're playing the Head of Security for a biotech firm headed by the richest man in the world, so it should be safe to assume you're paid an impressive salary. Yet during the game, you don't really have any money on you and you usually have to steal it from people's offices, rooms and bodies in order to be able to buy the weapons upgrades you need in order to survive a firefight. You're usually grabbing weapons off the enemies you took out rather than already having access to them to start with. This is often the same with a lot of military shooter games where you can only get better guns as you play through the fights and take them off dead enemies, whereas in real life, elite soldiers are supposed to already have the best kit on them when them set out on a mission. The design of the gameplay seems to demand that players can't have the best weapons at the start, as it would make them too powerful and the game too easy to fight through. In real life, a soldier or operative would want to have the best and most powerful weapons in order to succeed in their mission and survive it. In games, the starting weapons are underpowered so as to give players a challenge. As a story logic person and pragmatist, I tend to think this is bollocks, but the demands of video games seem to be totally at odds with the logic of reality at the end of the day. There's also the immersion-breaking instances where enemies you killed or knocked out stay where you left them when you return to the area – I knocked out about five private military cops and stashed them in the living room of an empty apartment. When I returned hours later on a side mission to meet a woman there, I found her standing over the same cops right where I left them, totally ignoring them as she and I had our conversation. It was hilariously surreal, and also pointed out the limitations of the coding for the game, proving once again that games can never be 100% convincing in story.

Oh yeah, and I've found that if you throw a refrigerator at someone, they will DIE. Whee!

Sneaking badly at lookitmoves@gmail.com

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