The Deus Ex Series's Problem with Endings

The Deus Ex series is by and large a pretty great one, for multiple reasons, but it is by no means perfect.  Its first protagonists didn’t have a particularly engaging or deep personality, for example, and sometimes a hiccup in some of the basics of writing will become an obstacle to the effectiveness of the series’s messages.  But if I had to pick 1 area where Deus Ex really drops the ball in a consistent and damaging way, it’d be the endings to its games.

Now, it’s a funny thing about this: most of the time, the endings to Deus Ex’s games are not, in their own right, bad ones.  DE1 and 3’s endings were actually quite good, in fact, and while it got a bit intangible and cerebral, I rather liked DE2’s conclusion--elements of it felt a bit like something Isaac Asimov might have written.*  Further, while the conclusion to Deus Ex: Breach’s narrative wasn’t exactly amazing, it fit the game’s very small story well enough that I can’t really say I find it objectionable.

Really, the only Deus Ex ending that’s actually bad is that of Deus Ex 4.  DE4’s ending, sadly, is highly dissatisfying, clearly meant to be little more than sequel bait in its resolution of the game’s main quest.  I mean, I’m okay with leaving a small amount of stuff open-ended, but a conclusion’s gotta actually feel like something important was, y’know, concluded, and DE4 did very little on that front.  And even the stuff that did actually have some element of finality, the sidequest-y stuff, was handled badly by DE4’s ending: it’s reported on Picus News, so, since the whole point of Picus is for Deus Ex to show you how completely disingenuous and manipulative major media journalism can be, it’s hard to really glean all that much about the results of your actions through the game’s course past what you already knew from completing the sidequests in the first place.  DE4’s already played up the Don’t Trust the News card all through the game in its inelegant hit-you-over-the-head manner (I miss DE1 and 3’s subtle approach to this), so it’s not like its message is really benefiting at all by this point from more proof of Picus’s dishonesty.  What we needed from the ending was to just get a decently straightforward rundown on how Adam’s actions affected those around him--that would have been a satisfying way to handle it.  And all the more important when the main story of DE4 doesn’t wrap itself up so much as just unravel into sequel bait.

So yeah, Deus Ex 4’s ending sucks, unsatisfactory both in how it doesn’t feel like much of anything was really accomplished in the main story, and in how poorly it reports the results of what smaller side-stories it does deign to finish.  But as I said, when taken strictly on their own, the rest of the series’s endings are good, or at least decent enough.  So what’s the problem?

Well, it’s that the Deus Ex games themselves have a bad habit of retroactively negating the significance of the previous title’s finale and invalidating player choice.

Let’s take the ending of Deus Ex 1, for example.  DE1 evolves into being a rather wild ride as a whole, starting as an exciting narrative of the shadowy, hidden truth of society’s masters being discovered and fought against and evolving into an analysis of humanity as a social animal and what society is, isn’t, could be, and should be.  The ending to the game reflects this gradual transformation into a treatise on the nature and potentials of the social concept, by having the player decide, through the actions of JC Denton, what shape the next age of humanity shall take.  Will the society of our future continue as a means for the privileged and undeserving few to control the many?  Will the notion of nations be retired in favor of a return to a world of city-states?  Will there be the continued order of a flawed but safe system, or the anarchy of a swift and violent transition to a new kind of world, a harsh and difficult change that might ultimately lead to something better for us all?  Deus Ex 1 has, by the time of its conclusion, made its arguments for what society is, what it is meant to be, and what we, as individuals and as cooperative beings, want and require from governance and one another...and having made its points through the course of its tale, DE1 offers the player a handful of very distinct choices, of the highest significance, for how humanity’s future will proceed, and sits back to allow the player to come to their own conclusion about it all.  It’s both philosophical and grounded in reality, and the player fully feels the weight of how much his or her choice matters.

...Except that it doesn’t, as it turns out.

See, Deus Ex 2 is a sequel set several years after DE1’s plot, and it treats the events of DE1 as having ended in 1 way and 1 way only.  So all that stuff about the importance of the player’s decision on the path that human society will venture forth on?  The intelligent and elegant way that Deus Ex 1 said its piece for the purpose of allowing the player to be an informed party that puts his/her understanding to use in the game’s conclusion?  The warring sense of satisfaction and regret at having made a decision that represents what the player believes is best for the affairs of humanity, yet one which carries heavy burdens with its implementation?  All gone!  What you thought was the memorable, distinct conclusion you chose in a great early moment of player agency over a game’s story is now non-canon, just a “what if” that didn’t come to pass.

And the weird thing is what DE2 decided, retroactively, was how the first game ended.  See, in a situation like this, where the demands of a sequel’s story force a single canon into place where before there were multiple, very different options, it usually happens that 1 of said options was the “true” one that actually did happen.  Like how in Fallout 3, the player has the choice to save the Capitol Wasteland with Project Purity and be the expected hero of the game, but you COULD decide to be a complete douchebag and instead poison Project Purity and even further ruin the lives of everyone in the Washington, D.C. area.  2 choices are in the game, but when Fallout 4 rolled around, it was quickly apparent that, canonically, Fallout 3’s Lone Wanderer was not an evil bag of dicks, and did, in fact, properly follow through with Project Purity.  I mean, it’s never implicitly said in Fallout 4 that that’s what happened, but the Brotherhood of Steel wouldn’t have prospered in the region between games and built a new military empire there, as Fallout 3’s post-game events set up, had Project Purity not been successful.  That’s the sort of thing you expect when a sequel canon-locks a predecessor’s ending choice: a selection of 1 of those choices as what did occur.  It makes some basic sense, and if nothing else, at least some of the players are happy, because their choice turned out to be the “right” decision.**

Deus Ex 2, however, made the surprising decision to make no one happy.  Instead of just picking 1 of DE1’s ending options and sticking with that, DE2 decided to instead say that elements of all 3 separate conclusions happened.  As a result, as per Tracer Tong’s plan, the world’s global communication is knocked on its ass and human civilization becomes largely city-state-based--but the goal of definitively destroying shadowy overlords’ secret control over mankind is not achieved.  As per the Illuminati’s plan, Bob Page and Helios are destroyed and the Illuminati have a chance to rebuild and regain control--but the goal of security and structure to society is not achieved, as said society is now fragmented and more chaotic, set back centuries in terms of what methods are available to control it.  And as per Helios’s plan, JC merges with it--but the goal of creating a living benevolent god and ruler to mankind is not achieved, as the merger is not fully successful, and JCelios goes into 1 of those convenient sleepy-time comas that important characters are so damn fond of in RPGs.

So in summary, Deus Ex 2 denies any of DE1’s players the satisfaction of having chosen the true future of humanity, and instead retroactively creates an extremely vague amalgamation ending for DE1 where all the endings happened while accomplishing none of the goals they intended.***  Everyone gets everything, except what they wanted.  If you ever need a (sort of) tangible example of Calvin’s belief that “A good compromise leaves everybody mad,” look no further than what Deus Ex 2 retcons DE1’s ending into.

Although, if you do want to look further than just that single example, you won’t have to look far, because this is not an isolated event.  Deus Ex pulled this shit TWICE!  The ending to DE3, while not quite as grandiose or philosophical, takes a page out of DE1’s playbook and once again offers the player several distinct endings to choose, each one representing a certain view of how humanity should proceed into the future, this time being rooted in the regulation and governance of oneself and to what degree technology factors into that.  They’re all perspectives whose arguments for and against have been witnessed and imparted to the player over the course of the game, much like the case with DE1, and as a bonus this time around, the character of Adam is present and defined enough, and his personal connection to the major questions at hand strong enough, that the choice also relates strongly to him, what has happened to him, what he’s done, who he is.  I like JC Denton and all, but it’s always better to have a protagonist who’s intimately connected to the story that he stars in, so I appreciate Adam Jensen far more.

But just as Deus Ex 3 does a decent job of copying the format and strengths of DE1’s ending, so, too, does Deus Ex 4 do a decent job of copying the manner in which DE2 ruined its predecessor’s conclusion.  Once again, the sequel renders the player’s final decision utterly meaningless, and ignores the weight and significance of the predecessor’s choices by undoing them and forcing the narrative that the sequel wanted.  And it’s once again done in a frustratingly vague fashion, as Deus Ex 4 refuses to provide any detailed commentary on what it’s tyrannically dictating occurred at the end of DE3’s events, since having to actually tell the story of how things occurred is a consequence of retconning, and Cayden Cailean forbid that writers have to actually deal with consequences of their decisions.

Although it’s not a total mimicry of Deus Ex 2’s shitty decisions: where DE2 retroactively cheapened DE1’s endings by saying they all happened and failed to accomplish the goals that were their entire purposes, DE4’s writers play it differently by saying that any of DE3’s endings might, indeed, have happened, but it doesn’t matter at all because no one in the outside world got the message Adam tried to send, regardless of which message it was.  So I guess, in a way, they’re letting the player keep his/her autonomy over the DE3 ending by saying, sure, whatever you chose to have Adam do is totally what he did, but he could just as well have flaked on the entire finale altogether, gone home, binged The Good Place on Netflix, and achieved exactly the same amount of nothing that day.

Actually, The Good Place is great, and pretty enriching as comedies go, so really, it could be argued that he’d have accomplished more by bunking off work that day.

It’s already baffling that otherwise generally competent and even skillful writers would be so incontestably stupid as to, in DE2, destroy a great ending (and in doing so, kind of run against the thematic purpose of Deus Ex in taking all autonomy to determine the course of humanity’s future out of the hand of the player, who in most cases is a representative of the common man that DE generally seems to be trying to empower with knowledge), but it boggles my mind that the series would pull this shit TWICE!  And managed to worsen it the second time around!  As much as saying that all the endings of DE1 happened and all failed to accomplish their goals, at least that results in setting the stage for DE2’s events, thus serving some function, regardless of how poorly.  Deus Ex 4, though, just outright makes DE3’s ending sequence entirely meaningless altogether.  At absolutely most, DE3’s ending is allowed to have factored into the mysterious events between games that have personal relevance to Adam, but since DE4’s so determined to play coy and keep all details of that period strictly confidential, we still get absolutely nothing out of it.

So in summary, let’s look at the Deus Ex series, here.  We’ve got a game with a great ending (DE1), whose sequel retconned all its substance, meaning, and positive qualities into oblivion.  We’ve got a game whose ending is fairly decent and has yet to be worsened (DE2).  We’ve got a game whose ending is really good (DE3), whose sequel pulled the same retcon bullshit, but somehow even worse.  We’ve got a game with an okay ending, but one which doesn’t matter at all and leaves no impact on the player or the series (DE Breach).  And finally, we’ve got an ending that’s just dissatisfying, spiritually empty sequel-bait (DE4).  So 1 positive situation, 1 neutral thing that frankly very few people even care about, and 3 complete disasters.  Yeah, this franchise has got a problem.















* And unlike Mass Effect 3, such an approach to the game’s ending was actually consistent to the game’s theme and storytelling style as a whole.  Yes, I know I find an excuse to mention how shitty ME3’s ending was every half a year or so, but all the same, for the record: Fuck you, Bioware, you incompetent nest of self-important molluscs.


** In fact, I think in the majority of cases, players will be happy about this, since the ending choices that are most useful when establishing foundations for a sequel are ones that most people would choose themselves.  I mean, I know there are plenty of asswipes out there, playing (and, for that matter, developing) Fallout games, but I daresay most would agree that Fallout 3 is a far better story and product overall when the protagonist is generally good.


*** Oh, and if by any chance you’re questioning exactly how, logically and realistically speaking, it would even be possible for the circumstances of Deus Ex 1’s story events and finale to have led to a potentiality where all 3 of these endings could occur, even just partially, then Deus Ex 2 has a big ol’ box of Fuck You ready and waiting for you, because DE2’s writers will be damned if they’re gonna commit to anything but the vaguest possible explanation for their DE1 chimera-ending.  I’ve heard JRPG villain-council conversations about “their plans” for “the object” currently sought by “that guy” which contain more useful, concrete information than DE2 deigns to provide about the patchwork fiasco it insists upon using as its foundation!  So not only did they remove all the value and satisfaction of the ending to DE1, they didn’t even really replace it with anything else; you don’t just lose the ability to decide DE1’s conclusion, you don’t even get to know what it was!