Deus Ex 3's Downloadable Content

Deus Ex: Human Revolution is a rather great game, both in its own right and as a sequel. It’s able to successfully expand upon the lore of Deus Ex, maintain the original’s spirit and aesthetic in ways that its sequel never was able to, take new steps forward while losing nothing of DE1’s style, improve upon 1 of the original’s more glaring problems in having a protagonist with some personality and depth as a character, and bring up the same questions of conspiratorial power games and social existentialism while taking a different (admittedly smaller) direction with its plot and events. And it also overall provides a thoughtful, well-told plot that betters the audience to experience. Deus Ex 1 has never quite broken onto my Greatest RPGs list, but it’s always hovered at the fringes, and Deus Ex 3 will now join it there right at the edge--if the next expansion of that list allows for 1 of them to finally join their peers at the top, I daresay it will be difficult for me to choose which.

But as evidenced by multiple Fallouts, even great RPGs can still have crappy add-ons (although, as evidenced by Neverwinter Nights 2, the opposite can also be true). So today, let’s take a look at Deus Ex 3’s Downloadable Content, and see whether it measures up to the rest of the game.

...and let’s do so without thinking overly much about whether or not there’s any point to reviewing an add-on for a game that’s the better part of a decade old which is nowadays automatically sold at no additional cost with said DLC anyways. Hey, you know how I roll: for every significant rant I make, there has to be at least, like, 4 pointless ones.



The Missing Link: My experience with this DLC is odd. I didn’t realize it was an add-on, to start with: I played DE3 recently, so my copy just automatically came with The Missing Link, and it starts up as a part of the linear story rather than (as most DLCs do) requiring me to voluntarily elect to initiate its adventure, so I really had no idea for the majority of it that I was involved in something other than the main game’s narrative. At the same time, though, it felt from the start to be something separate from the rest of DE3, slightly out of joint. So I guess we can, first and foremost, give The Missing Link credit for having authenticity to the overall sequence of Deus Ex 3’s events, while also clearly being detached enough that the main story as a whole wasn’t incomplete without it. That has to be a tough line to walk, particularly with as smooth a gait as DE3 manages.

Now, as far as the DLC’s overall quality, it’s definitely solid stuff. Adam’s capture and prolonged escape from the clutches of Belltower’s clandestine base provides a story that expands upon the lore, particularly the conspiracy lore, of the game as a whole, introduces some decent characters in its course, and creates a microcosm tale of disrupting the grasp of the monstrous social overlords upon the innocent that reflects the style and purpose of the series as a whole, and maintains a healthy allowance for the player’s personal agency in how to overcome humanity’s secret masters--more than the main campaign does, one might argue, as there’s a little more complexity to the climactic choice in this DLC than there is to the game’s own ending.

I also think that The Missing Link shines on a couple of points in particular. First of all, it provides the player with an understanding of what the deal is with the computer mainframe of Panchea at the game’s end, which I imagine must have piqued some interest in players prior to this DLC’s release. The troubling thoughts at the end of Panchea’s internal communications and, more noticeably, the whole anime-esque white-blindfolded women connected to the machine core...it’s all a great aesthetic for an unnerving final showdown setting, but it’s a little more palatable when you know what to make of it thanks to The Missing Link’s explanation of its origins. So this DLC enhances your understanding of the details of the main game, but not in such a major way that the game would feel empty without it (I would have taken Panchea’s operating system in stride overall), which is good.

The other point on which The Missing Link really stands out, and perhaps the one I think which has the most positive effect, is the fact that this DLC actually shows us the victims of Belltower’s atrocious operation. It hadn’t occurred to me until reaching this point, but the Deus Ex series has, as far as I can recall, never before this moment really driven home the cost that the innocent, the everyday men and women of the general populace, suffer at the dark manipulations of the secretive societal masters that the DE series warns us of.

Oh, sure, we get glimpses in the series up until this point of the suffering of the human species as a whole that results from these dark conspiracies of corporations and Illuminati and so on--we interact with the impoverished and homeless in Deus Ex 1, we see the needless struggles and animosity of the working class being manipulated into hating one another rather than looking at their real problems through the coffee chain rivalry in Deus Ex 2, and DE3 presents us with the hardships of common people with a dependence on medications that bankrupt them, and so on.

But though it is vitally important to see the results of the insidious, passive methods that the governing elite use to control the people of the world, the DE series hasn’t given its audience much direct contact with the ways that humanity’s hubristic handlers more actively abuse innocent common people. The horrors inflicted on people by machinations of civilization’s rulers have always, to my recollection, been more something that the series has told of, rather than shown. The Missing Link represents the first time that the weight of what the high few will do to the lower many is shown in full, inescapable clarity to the audience in this series, as we see the rows and rows of men and women unjustly incarcerated, secretly snatched from their lives by a private police under the falsehood that they’re involved in terrorism, never to be released, used instead as test subjects for inevitably fatal experiments. Hearing the frightened, angry, and confused cries of the prisoners as you pass by their cells as they beg to be returned to their loved ones, invoke basic social rights that they don’t understand they never truly possessed, and insist that their incarceration is a mistake...coming face to face with the pain and horror inflicted on hundreds of random innocents just for the sake of a fractional number of successes...it’s a sobering moment that the Deus Ex series was lacking, a putting of faces and voices to what were before tragedies and evils only described and theoretical. The whole series benefits from personally presenting this operation in motion to the player.

While it’s unimportant overall, I suppose I will say that the gameplay premise of The Missing Link is puzzling to me. The idea with it is that you get all your augmentations and weapons taken away at the DLC’s beginning, and have to get by on what you can acquire within the DLC itself, rather than all the stuff and powers you’ve amassed in the game up until that point. This sort of thing has been done before, of course, in other add-ons. Operation: Anchorage in Fallout 3 takes place primarily in a simulation, meaning you can only work with what the simulation provides, and the Sierra Madre DLC in Fallout: New Vegas did something similar, as I recall. It’s a way for the developers to create an adventure whose technical parameters can work regardless of what stage of the game you’re in, within reason--thus players who are in the endgame by the time the DLC releases can still find a challenge within it, while newer players don’t have to wait to try it out.

The thing is, that rationale doesn’t work here, because The Missing Link has a set time at which it occurs within Deus Ex 3. You can’t experience it any earlier or later than a single set spot in the game’s overall sequence of events. So everyone going into it will have had the same opportunities to build up their character and arsenal. DE3’s developers could just design The Missing Link’s difficulty level and loot output the same as they would (and did) for the next stage of the game. Forcing us to lose our entire inventory and all our upgrades--and the loss of the latter doesn’t even seem like it makes any logical sense--wasn’t even a developmental necessity! And it certainly didn’t add any fun to the adventure; I had tailored Adam’s development and inventory around a playstyle I enjoyed, and having to start that process again from scratch was a pain in the ass. It’s just an artificial and frustrating handicap that serves no purpose!

But as stated, that sort of thing doesn’t really matter all that much, and even if it did, it wouldn’t outweigh the positives of this add-on. The Missing Link is a solid and worthy part of Deus Ex 3, and while I’ve had trouble finding solid information on what it originally sold for (I think $6?), I think it’s fair to say that it was easily worth its price.