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!

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?

Deus Ex 1 and 3's Use of News Media

The Deus Ex series is not always subtle about its messages.

It is, in fact, at times almost amusingly blunt and inelegant. Oh, don’t get me wrong, I love Deus Ex 1, 2, and 3, and so far I’m also quite enjoying Deus Ex 4 (this rant is being published in the midst of my playthrough of DE4). I love what they want to say, and I even love how they say it. But to pretend that Deus Ex is always graceful about its wish to awaken the sheeple is to be delusional. Most of the time, Deus Ex delivers its messages about the quiet subjugation of humankind by the secret elites in such a forthright, nakedly earnest fashion with its exposition and dialogue that it can actually be kind of funny. I mean, I think DE1 and its protagonist JC Denton are actually by now most recognized for their memes!

Nonetheless, the Deus Ex series has its subtle moments, too. Blunt, this-is-how-the-conspiracy-works dialogue may be their favored method of communication, but the games also frequently employ more skillful methods in informing their audience of the ways in which society is coralled and controlled. You may remember, for example, that I really liked how Deus Ex 2 showed the way those in control can manufacture and use artificial rivalries as a way to distract and manipulate the common man through the Queequeg and Pequod coffee chains (even if the pace of DE2’s events completely sabotaged that revelation’s power). And 1 of these subtler methods that I think Deus Ex executes very well is the way in which DE1 and 3 show that modern news media can be used to cover up all manner of clandestine malicious activities in the world.

Now, Deus Ex makes the point that major journalism corporations shouldn’t be trusted implicitly in a few different ways, and some of these strategies are straightforward and blunt, as one might expect. With 1 method, there are multiple scenes and pieces of dialogue which have society’s shadowy masters outright speaking of how they’ll direct media outlets to report on an event or situation with the express intention to deceive the public and incite them to act (or decline to act) in a specific desired way. Another way: there are also times through the series in which you can interact with various NPC members of the public, and their dialogue will reflect natural reactions to and thought upon the content of the recent news programs. While perhaps not as hamfistedly forward as the traditional anime-tastic “mysterious dark villain council sit and discuss their sinister plans in as awkwardly vague a manner possible” approach, this is still also a pretty forthright, almost crude method of making Deus Ex’s point about news media as a tool of conspirators. Deus Ex 3’s approach of letting you read various communications in a major media corporation’s offices about what can and can’t be reported on, and their stated goals on what paths of thought they want the populace to be treading, is somewhere between Method 1 and 2 in terms of clumsy forthrightness. And in Deus Ex 4, they have sidequest content just start actively screaming in your face that corporate media can’t be trusted; 90s anti-drug PSAs have more subtlety than DE4 on this matter.

These are all fine storytelling approaches, honestly, but at the same time, they’re also as surface-level, hit-you-over-the-head-with-it as...well, as your typical vocal conspiracy theorist. The problem with that is, we’ve reached an age when for every 1 actual, earnest truther sincerely trying to keep the public safe and informed, there’s at least 10 charlatans all parroting each other’s fabricated and/or misleading “evidence” so they can prey on the gullible for profit or political gain. And these countless snake-oil salesmen of information all mimic the style of the few authentic conspiracy theorists, so they, too, are gracelessly forward with their never-ending “this is how they do it, people, this is how they control the narrative!” statements. So...when I hear and read these blunt attacks that the Deus Ex series makes on mainstream journalism, my reaction is mostly a disinterested, “Yeah, gotcha, heard it before, can’t trust the news, move on. What else have you got?”

But Deus Ex 1 and especially 3 do have another way of communicating to the player their message of major news media’s agenda and deception, and this last method is really effective and great. They use the game’s flow of events itself to make their point, and let the player do the math him/herself. There are several points in the course of DE1 and especially 3 between major story arcs at which JC and Adam have the opportunity to traverse the city streets, spending some time exploring, talking to the random citizenry, engaging in sidequests, and so on. And 1 of the things you can have Adam and JC do during this time is to listen in on or read breaking news bulletins.

And very frequently, at least 1 recent news story will be about an incident that JC or Adam was just involved in during his last mission. Only, the article will inevitably report the incident incorrectly, whether it be downplaying whatever disruptions and destruction Adam/JC caused, attributing the events to someone else’s doing (usually whatever illegal or terrorist group is the most useful scapegoat), claiming that something completely different occurred, or outright denying that anything of interest happened whatsoever. It’s a really great way of calling the audience’s attention to Deus Ex’s message about media cover-up, not just because this shows it in action without having to holler a dissertation about it into your ear as DE usually does otherwise, but also because this has the immediate attraction of being something the player him/herself was actually involved in. Since Deus Ex makes sure in every mission to give the player a lot of agency about how to approach JC and Adam’s goals, making the execution of that mission far more personally involving, the fact that the headlines are misrepresenting the events of DE1 and 3’s stories becomes more noteworthy to the player. The natural response will be for him or her to think something along the lines of, “Wait, I was just there, I did all that. That’s not how it happened at all!” They’re not just misrepresenting the game’s lore and events, they’re misrepresenting the player’s own work, and that calls a natural attention that the normal “this is what’s happening and it’s bad” approach doesn’t command so easily.

Additionally, while neither Deus Ex 1 nor 3 leaves the purposes and dangers of journalism cover-ups ambiguous in their narratives, these moments of the player’s hearing about how his or her own actions are being hidden tend to come at the player’s own pace of exploration. Rather than a part of the game’s flow with a set, specific time of revelation, these reports are generally something the player naturally discovers him/herself while playing, which makes the process of Deus Ex communicating this idea of news media distrust feel more like the player having put it together him/herself, which is a more enjoyable and compelling way to receive the lesson than just having Deus Ex 3’s Alex Jones equivalent* hollering the message directly at you whenever you pass by a radio. Yes, you find them quite easily and at the times that the game’s narrative would like you to, so there’s perhaps not that much difference in the long run, but it at least feels appealingly like a reward for the player’s exploration and puzzle-solving diligence to find, recognize, and realize the falsehood of these headlines, and that makes the message more compelling.

It all comes back to the power of showing over telling, really. Now, I’m a proponent of doing both effectively, and Deus Ex as a whole is thankfully smart enough to both show and tell its messages in a variety of ways. But there’s no denying that showing almost always has the upper hand as a narrative device than just telling, and the way that Deus Ex handles its theme of news media manipulation is a fine example of this: the many instances of the games’ characters and communiques telling you about it are perfectly functional, but what really drives the point home is the headlines and broadcasts that show you the process in action. Deus Ex 1 and particularly 3 do a damn fine job with this, so I say kudos to their writers for their work.















* There’s an endorsement that didn’t age well. Although DE3’s only got itself to blame for backing that horse; it wasn’t really much more difficult to suss out that Jones was a profiteering blowhard joke back in 2011 than it is today.

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.

Deus Ex 2's Pequod's and Queequeg's Reveal

Deus Ex 2 has a rather accelerated pace in its storytelling, going from one major event and thematic concept to the next with very little delay, making it a much shorter game than its predecessor. In general, though, the writers handle this pace well enough that, despite its quickness, it doesn’t really come off as rushed, and you still have enough time for your mind to chew on the game’s ideas without being left behind. There is, however, 1 time in DE2 in which the brisk narrative pace has a noticeably detrimental effect: the reveal of Pequod’s and Queequeg’s.

As you progress through the events of Deus Ex 2, one of the subplots you frequently encounter is the bitter corporate rivalry between the global coffeehouse chains, Pequod’s Coffee and Queequeg’s Coffee (both of which are, of course, parodies of Starbucks, also taking their names from Moby Dick). In each city that Alex Denton, the protagonist, visits, the manager of one or both of these competitors will attempt to get Alex to help them to get a leg up on their competition, sometimes legally (getting permission for Queequeg’s to do business in the ritzier part of town, for example), sometimes not so legally (a certain Pequod’s manager subscribes to the same idea as that famous NPC from The Legend of Zelda 2: If all else fails, use fire). It’s a mildly interesting subplot, but doesn’t seem to have any real importance.

Until, that is, you come across some evidence hidden in a police station in Trier, which the local Queequeg’s manager wants Alex to find for him. This evidence reveals that Queequeg’s and Pequod’s coffee chains are, in fact, both owned by the same company. That company set each chain up to appeal to different demographics (Queequeg’s is seen as the everyman’s coffee, while Pequod’s is thought to cater to the more refined, higher class tastes), and then set them to war with one another, with the idea that the competition would cause the customers of each to become all the more loyal supporters of their preferred brand, their devotion solidified by their enmity toward the supposed rival chain. Whether people support Side A or Side B, if you’re running the war, you’re the one winning, right? It also plays on people's tendency to become nervous about monopolies and other such 1-party systems, falsely reassuring them that if either chain begins doing wrong by its customers, there's another chain that the people can flock to.

This revelation is great in 2 ways. The first is that it makes the previously seemingly unimportant coffee sidequest into a genuine, significant part of the Deus Ex theme of exposing and analyzing the ways in which a population is manipulated and controlled, in this case showing us some of the ways that businesses do so. Well-executed twist, makes sense, gives the subplot some significance, very nicely done in general.

The other great thing about this revelation is that it’s clever foreshadowing for a later, much more important plot revelation: the fact that the World Trade Organization and The Order, the 2 major world power groups that have each been vying for Alex’s assistance and attempting to gain the upper hand over the other, are actually both being run by the same people: the Illuminati. Just as with the Pequod’s and Queequeg’s coffee chains, the people on both sides of the famously hostile competition between the WTO and The Order are being manipulated into working against one another, their fervor to seize every bit of control and advantage over the “enemy” only making the puppet masters of the conflict more powerful. Great little parallel they set up here, just connected enough that you can figure out that the WTO and Order will wind up being the same as the coffee chains if you’re clever, but not obvious or anything, so it’s still a neat twist even if you guessed it.

Or at least, that’s how it should work.

But this foreshadowing idea is where the problem is with the coffee chain reveal. In theory, it should work fine, because like I said, it’s clever and it’s written well, connected but still subtle. But the pacing of the game kind of just ruins it. See, after visiting the police station in Trier where you learn the truth of the Pequod’s and Queequeg’s rivalry, the next real mission of the game is to rescue the leader of The Order...and it’s then that you discover that the Illuminati are running both the WTO and The Order.

The plot twist that the coffee subplot was foreshadowing comes right after the coffee subplot reveal! It’s the very next part of the game’s story!

Foreshadowing just doesn’t work when it’s given so little time to work with. The revelation of Pequod’s and Queequeg’s origin isn’t given the time needed to sit in the audience’s head and germinate into a deeper understanding. Done properly, the reveal of the WTO and The Order would make a little light go off in your head, would make you think, “Of course! It’s like the coffee chains from earlier! I should have seen it coming--the truth was staring at me the whole time! The writers really had this theme all worked out!” Instead, coming so soon after the coffee subquest reveal, the impression is just, “Oh, like that other thing that I only just saw like 30 minutes ago. Neat connection.” The effect is still positive, but there’s none of the impact that there might have been if the plot twist had come earlier in the game. If you’d had more time to remember it and consider it, if it had been placed earlier and thus better connected the WTO and Order reveal to the earlier events of the story, making a stronger sense of the answer always having been there...well, it would simply have been a much more effective use of the Queequeg’s and Pequod’s subplot twist. Foreshadowing should be more than just 1 single step ahead of the plot.

Anyway, it’s not a huge deal, I suppose, and overall the twist and its connection to the game’s larger events and theme is still good. It’s just a shame to me that its timing keeps it from being better.