Deus Ex 4's Downloadable Content

Well, I beat an RPG with DLC again recently, so y’all know what comes next: The RPGenius talks about years-old add-ons as though what he says could possibly influence your buying decisions or really anything else, ever.  Because damn it all, DLCs make for easy rants to write when I’ve got nothing better to offer, and after over 10 years of running this blog, my general lack of ideas has happily transitioned from a character flaw to an understandable result of having done this for so long.*  So let’s take a look at the 3 DLC packs for Deus Ex 4.  I found DE3’s single add-on to be quite good, if you recall...let’s see if the next title in the franchise managed to equal its predecessor.



Desperate Measures: Desperate Measures was, from what I can gather, 1 of those sneaky little free DLCs that companies will sometimes use to soften you up to the idea of acquiring the ones that come later, which will cost money.  It’s not a terribly honest business practice, but I guess I can’t fault it too strongly when so much else connected to microtransactions is so much worse.

Anyway, Desperate Measures is kinda blah.  There’s nothing especially wrong with it, or anything, but it just feels totally unimportant, and you don’t get anything from it.  The premise of this side-story seems to be based on answering the question of who the train station bomber was...which would be quite significant, of course, if not for the fact that the main game already provides you the opportunity to discover the bomber’s identity on a computer during Adam’s visit to Golem City.  And Desperate Measures really just doesn’t go much further than said computer’s emails did in rounding out the bomber’s character and answering players’ questions about him, either; what you learn about him is more peripheral (some light information about his family) than relevant.

So the stated purpose of this DLC is totally superfluous.  The biggest service it provides narratively, in that case, is that Desperate Measures explains why the police’s recording of the bombing incident (which Adam has to retrieve and have his coworkers analyze early in the game) was corrupted.  Which is, honestly, such a tiny lore detail that it didn’t even occur to me to ask or care during the main game’s course why that might be the case.  I dare to presume that most other players paid it as little mind as I did.  Beyond that, there’s really nothing story-wise...there are a few tiny ambient stories going on in emails and texts you can find, I suppose, but the DLC’s specific central character is pretty basic, Chang is no more than a plot device, and after delivering just enough decent lines to make for good trailer material, Adam is just there to get the quasi-plot done and move on with his life.

Bottom line, Desperate Measures is a fine enough extra level to sneak or run-and-gun through, I suppose, but only really worth the time if you’re very fond of Deus Ex’s gameplay.  Which I am, I guess, but still, I would’ve hoped for a lot better.  Still, it’s free, so I guess I can’t judge it too harshly.


System Rift: This add-on has some decent little perks to it.  It’s good to see Deus Ex 3’s Francis again, and the grudgingly respectful antagonism that he and Adam mutually share for one another is fun enough to see in action once more.  As someone who enjoyed the little side game Deus Ex: Breach more than he probably should have, I also thought it was neat to involve ShadowChild; I wasn’t expecting DEB to get a tie-in to the main series, and I liked the surprise.  And it’s neat that Stanton Dowd makes an appearance (well, a line of dialogue, anyway) here; concrete ties to the overall series lore is appreciated when one finds them.

With that said, this DLC is almost as pointless as the first.  It’s really not so much a side-story as it is a side-transition (which does, I suppose, make it fairly authentic to DE4 as a whole, as this game ultimately feels more like a transition between the series’s really important events than it does a story in its own right).  The premise of System Rift is that Adam’s old “friend” Francis wants to have him investigate Santeau, so Adam has to break into the infamous Palisade information bank to grab any of Santeau’s dirty little secrets off the servers.  But you get basically no payoff to that premise!  We’re given no substantive peek at the data Adam gets ahold of, and even secondary aspects of interest inevitably fizzle up similarly--Stanton Dowd really is nothing but a tiny cameo and we’re left with no understanding of what he’s up to with Palisade, and Adam and Frances are all too happy to refer to the mysterious period of Adam’s life between Deus Ex 3 and 4, without going into any actual goddamn detail about it.  It’s almost as bad as the cliched vague villain meetings you get in JRPGs where everyone talks in the most stiff, ridiculously inefficient manner possible about “that guy” performing “these actions” to accomplish “those goals” and so on.  Hell, the game even seems to know what a frustrating tease it is on this matter and revels in it, having Adam actually fucking hang up on Francis at the DLC’s end just as the latter was about to mention a single specific detail that the audience would find interesting about Adam’s recent past.

There’s really only 1 thing that System Rift tells us that’s of any consequence whatsoever, in that it is, unexpectedly, basically the story of how Deus Ex: Breach exists.  Yeah, thanks to System Rift, now we know the story of where the titular breach in Palisade’s network came from, which is, “1 time Adam Jenson did some stuff.”  I guess it’s nice to know that detail, but it’s also thoroughly unnecessary.  I guarantee you that no one, no matter how huge a fan of Deus Ex, was asking to know the Breach’s origins.  In fact, much like Desperate Measures revealing to us why the police evidence was corrupted, I don’t think it ever would have even occurred to me to wonder about something that small.

But unlike Desperate Measures, you have to actually pay for System Rift.  In fact, you have to pay a fucking lot for it; this add-on is sold at a whopping $12!  Considering that there isn’t anywhere even close to 12 hours of content to this thing, that would be a hell of a steep price even for a really good DLC, and this sure as hell ain’t that.  I would struggle mightily to call System Rift even minimally adequate, frankly.  I, thank Palutena, bought Deus Ex 4 a few years ago during some kind of Steam ultra-sale on SquareEnix products, paying only $4.50 for its DLC Season Pass (so essentially, $2.25 for System Rift and A Criminal Past each), or I’d really be kicking myself right now.  But even a measly 2 bucks is still overpaying for System Rift, a story that doesn’t want to actually tell you its story.


A Criminal Past: At this point, SquareEnix stopped even pretending that it had the slightest interest in using Deus Ex’s add-ons for anything relevant to Deus Ex.  I mean, Desperate Measures may have had very little to say about nothing, but at least it was connected to DE4’s plot and made the pretense of having some significance to it.  System Rift may have performed no greater storytelling task than to give the origin story of a goddamn mobile tie-in game, but at least it pretended to have substance to the series by leading you on with promises of extracting corporate secrets and finding new, interesting information about major players in DE4’s story.

A Criminal Past?  This is just a DLC that uses the backdrop of Deus Ex to tell a surface-level cop-goes-undercover-in-prison story that has nothing, and doesn’t even pretend to have anything, to do with the events, themes, values, or characters of the DE franchise.

Don’t get me wrong, if this had been, say, a movie belonging to some other franchise, or its own venture altogether, A Criminal Past would be okay, I guess.  Not good, mind you--not enough exploration into Mejia’s character and motivations, too much left open-ended about Fixer’s significance, and lacking a personal connection to the protagonist.  But it would be okay.  I guess.

But A Criminal Past isn’t it’s own thing, it’s a side story in the Deus Ex franchise.  A side story that has nothing to do with conspiracy theory fundamentals, examining the movements of human beings within their society, the question of where the line is between being a human being and being something more, or the grievously flawed foundations of a world in which the greedy and selfish few are overlords to the incalculably many.  A side story in Deus Ex that has none of that.

It’s not like it couldn’t have been an adequate representation of the series.  The undercover-in-a-prison schtick isn’t an especially on-brand move, but A Criminal Past could have used its setting as a way to show a hard, inside look at the prison system’s workings when used by corrupt social overlords as a tool for getting rich off of what effectively amounts to slave labor.  That ain’t even conspiracy theory; that’s just the current, factual corporate-run prison system of the USA right there.  But it can also tie very neatly into the theories of methods by which humankind is suppressed by its elite ringmasters, so with some decent talent and really not even all that much effort, A Criminal Past could have been a compelling part of its series.  But nope, rather than any of that thinky-thinky stuff, the bad guys in this DLC are the tired old cop-story mainstays of organized crime and officers going bad in favor of said organized crime.

At the absolute most, you can read significance into the final little summary scene with Adam and Delara, in which it is maybe implied that Adam is beginning to suspect that Delara is untrustworthy.**  But an entire DLC adventure is a hell of a lot of rigamarole to go through for such a tiny snippet of overall series plot advancement, and other DLC stories could have accomplished the same, such as ones perhaps crafted to in any goddamn way have an actual involvement of or connection to Delara.

A Criminal Past is highly pointless, plain and simple, and I’m honestly baffled by its existence.  How did such a completely irrelevant, tone-deaf thing come to be?  The best I can figure is that someone in SquareEnix had it in their head that it’s the basic, surface-level work that Adam does for TF-29 that fans of DE are interested in, and nothing more.  Of course, that would require SquareEnix to have misunderstood their franchise to a similar bungling extreme as Bethesda misunderstood (or intentionally ignored) the point of Fallout when they made Fallout 76, which seems impossible--surely no one is as stupid as Fallout 76-era Bethesda?  But then, SquareEnix is the company that gave a major narrative spotlight to Organization 13, refused to let Bravely Default bear the Final Fantasy name, and made Lufia: Curse of the Sinistrals.  So I guess no level of incompetence is truly beyond them.

With some work, A Criminal Past could have been great.  Because Deus Ex 3’s DLC, The Missing Link, was great, and that, too, was a side story in which Adam was stripped of all his augmentation advantages, imprisoned in a detention facility, and forced to bear witness to gross violations of ethics as human beings were viewed as hardware to be used and destroyed.  But A Criminal Past can’t duplicate the significance or quality of the DLC it’s plagiarizing, not even remotely, so it’s not worth the asking price of $12.  It’s not worth the effective price I paid for it of $2.25.  In fact, it’s not even worth the time it takes to play it, not unless you’re just a huge fan of the undercover-agent-in-prison schtick and don’t especially give a damn about whether it’s Deus Ex or not.  If that’s your thing, then by all means, go for A Criminal Past if you can somehow possibly get it for free, but for everyone else, I’d advise not even wasting your time on it.



And that’s it!  So how does Deus Ex 4’s add-ons compare to its predecessor?  Well, if you’ve read this far, you probably have gleaned this already, but for the heck of it, let’s go ahead and just say it for posterity: it’s crap.  None of these 3 stories are particularly exciting, interesting, or otherwise gripping, they don’t offer a proper ratio of content-per-dollar-spent, and all 3 of them weirdly share the unfortunate trait of being UTTERLY POINTLESS.  We already got about the same level of insight into the identity of the bomber and we never thought twice about the corruption of the footage.  We didn’t get to learn anything from the data we busted our hump to steal and we never felt the slightest need to know where the breach in Palisade’s firewall came from.  And we got exactly what significance to the series out of Adam’s little stint as a clank in the clink we were offered: none.  If Deus Ex 3’s downloadable content was a refreshing sample of high-caliber work sadly uncommon to the DLC landscape, then Deus Ex 4’s add-ons are a souring specimen of bilge, equally uncommon for how inconsequential they are.












* Hey, cut me some credit.  My content’s still fresher after 10+ years than the Simpsons and Family Guy were by Season 10, right?  For that matter, it’s better than Family Guy was by Season 1.


** This is inexplicably linked to his experiences with Mejia, somehow, as Adam wonders what else (besides the fact that the supposed terror attacks used as a story element in this DLC were bogus) Mejia might have been right about.  What the hell else did Mejia even really talk about that he could be right about?  At least, in connection to Delara, or the nature of Interpol, or whatever?