the ramble dump
Saturday, October 01, 2011
Deus Ex (Part 1)
Deus Ex, the 2000 first-person action role-playing 'cyberpunk' game, does not make a stellar first impression. The first thing that greets you is a menu screen with a very simple spinning logo, accompanied by a somewhat pompous little synthy theme-tune (let it get going) that does its best to hammer at any 'I am not totally lame for playing this video game or video games generally' thesis you might have been attempting to construct over the years.
Coming at it as a cyberpunk fan, as I did, stumbling across mention of it as a highly-rated cyberpunk experience with the likes of Neuromancer and The Matrix and Ghost in the Shell in mind, aghast would not be too far off the mark to describe how I reacted. At this, the menu screen.
It's no slick William Gibson ride, that's for sure.
This is J.C. Denton, the cyborg character you play as. You can make him blond, or black, or give him a goatee. I think the sunglasses are mandatory. It is my opinion that there is something inherently funny and weird about sunglasses that's always just about equal to how cool they look. It's the way they dehumanise the possessor, or convey, as Gibson states of his character Molly Millions, 'an insect calm'. When a character is never not wearing shades, it really does something to how we perceive them, humanity-wise.
J.C. Denton may look cooler to some than he does to others. He does suffer from some rather chunky, squared graphics, and a rigid impassivity bordering on paralysis that gives him the bearing of an augmented lamppost. He may or may not have a double chin in the picture above; it's hard to tell. This pretty much sums up how Deus Ex wears the stylish aspects of its cyberpunk heritage--like a nerd attending a convention, dressing up for the part, maybe for the fun of it, but not necessarily pulling it off. It's maybe even a little embarrassing.
On top of this is his voice: a deadpan monotone that strains badly when forced to inflect. And he's far from the only character you might struggle to take seriously at first glance. Among the many others, two significant characters you're introduced to early on are Anna Navarre and Gunther Hermann, two cyborgs working for the same government agency as you do, each with questionable degrees of ruthlessness and bloodlust (and you earn their approval or disapproval depending on how similarly to them you act, out in the field).
Gunther has an awful German accent like a Terminator parody, and the appearance to match. Anna is a similarly cartoonish Russian (I think). Neither would be out of place as campy Bond villains. And while they thankfully remain among the most outlandish characters, and you do kind of get used to them, the accents don't get any better from here on out--far from it.
More than one character in the game makes a quip about Denton's dress sense, and Gunther is treated as the butt of jokes about as much as he is a force to be reckoned with. Deus Ex is a game that by no means sets out to be a comedy, but it comes with a healthy dose of (often self-referential) humour. These characters, though, and the quality of the voice-acting in general, sometimes make it very hard to tell when it's being intentionally funny and when it's not. The world of Deus Ex is pretty goofy at times.
But J.C. Denton's impenetrable, vaguely comical persona is actually highly effective. Denton feels like he has a narrative presence, but his personality is minimal and inscrutable enough that a whole range of behaviour open to the player feels credible. His are sunglasses of possibility. When it comes to the player's dialogue options during conversations, there's almost a sense of mischief in some of the things you get to say, the outrageousness of certain options emphasised by having it said in such indifferent tones--like he might kill a homeless person or two and then go for a beer. And you can do that.
Choice is Deus Ex's Big Thing, as anyone who's ever heard anything about it will know. As an action role-playing game, you can choose to approach missions in certain ways--guns blazing, hacking, being stealthy (read: crawling through air vents), or most likely a combination of all three depending on your resources--spending experience points and selecting the right augmentations and inventory items accordingly. You have to decide when it's wise to use up your disposable lockpicks and multitools to get at the stuff that lies behind closed doors or booby traps, which weapons are worth lugging around, and which abilities--strength, swimming, advanced jumping, etc--will allow you to get to places or take alternate paths that wouldn't be available to you otherwise.
It's part of the role-playing side to things that you choose your own style of gameplay, and different people will tend to default to certain things given the choice. But things are rarely so straightforward. The first level, Liberty Island, where your mission is to capture a supposed terrorist leader hiding in the Statue of Liberty, and, if you like, to free an imprisoned Gunther Hermann along the way, serves as something of a crash course for this realisation. Taking a sniper rifle from three options Denton's brother gives you at the start, I figured I was being a pre-emptive genius by electing to take out all the terrorists from a distance. But this plan fell apart after about two seconds when I ran out of ammo. Then I had to get creative with what remained in my inventory and how I was going to use it... only, I wasn't very good at doing this at first.
Liberty Island forced me along the Deus Ex learning curve, rearranging my brain to think differently than it had had to for the ammo-strewn likes of Halo even at that game's most strategic. My first playthrough was pretty desperate, fought tooth and nail using the few items I hadn't already wasted. But a well-thumbed inventory is one of Deus Ex's greatest pleasures. While daunting at first, and I didn't really get to grips with most of it until some time after Liberty Island, the items I carried became the most considered aspect of my game. It was about knowing my tools, experimenting with them, and using them with a little imagination as I puzzled out different scenarios.
I have to admit that I often forgot about the XP I'd earned or the maps and photos I'd been given, squirrelled away as they were in the many inventory screens without many reminders for their use, but poring over communications--previously read emails and recordings of past conversations, with hints and tips from other characters and passwords and passcodes that I would have to figure out where to use--was another oft-used part of this inventory-focused gameplay, which really added some thought and depth.
Importantly, this choice all takes place within a controlled narrative, a series of levels each with its primary objectives, which change depending on your actions, and its optional secondary objectives, rewarding on both the level of experience points and immersive narrative detail, often with consequences of their own. You choose who to help and who not to help, picking allegiances that may or may not last, the stakes getting higher as you proceed.
The best of these levels are the city hubs--namely New York, Hong Kong, and Paris--central places that can be explored and revisited during sections of the game, with missions that branch off in and around them taking place in warehouses, labs, sewers, corporate office spaces, and so on. Deus Ex is not completely open-ended like a sandbox game, but as a person whose completist impulses tend to drive him crazy in such games and the endless piddly little things they give you to do, I appreciate the focus. No making Denton fat on hamburgers, getting him married, or having him wear leotards in all the 332,345,565 colours you can collect scattered around the globe. Everything is meaningful and somehow relevant to the main story.
The story of Deus Ex is a thousand cyberpunk/sci-fi ideas and tropes you've seen or heard before, integrated with an A-Z of conspiracy theories and a small library of references to literature, movies, and probably other stuff too. It makes for a complex plot and a world with a fairly rich backdrop, with a particularly civic-minded approach to the usual CP themes of technosocial fallout, mapping as it does the various political ideologies and realities of the people involved. You encounter a lot of people living in miserable conditions, and though the missions are not always about saving them, you are forced to confront them.
With choices, of course, come consequences. But in Deus Ex, nobody's out to lecture you--or if they are, there's at least one person around lecturing the opposite. Deus Ex works with shades of grey. The majority of decisions aren't clearly marked as 'good' or 'bad', and it generally doesn't encourage such a simplistic dichotomy, instead getting you caught up in the sticky details and the problems of a bunch of people who are themselves rarely clear-cut on the morality front either. There's no karma metre like there is in, say, Fable or Fallout, which designates clearly your position between good and evil on a spectrum.
In Deus Ex, in most civilian areas, disturbing the peace will usually get local security painting a target on your back, and if Anna Navarre approves of mass slaughter during missions, your brother Paul will berate you or Sam Carter of the armoury will stubbornly withhold ammunition. Options will open and close. But consequence in terms of how the general population relates to your actions is implemented on a mostly individual- or scenario-oriented basis, at least until the higher levels of the conspiracy where the effects of your actions are more far-reaching. Thus you can shoot some civilians in one place, and the denizens of another will not automatically run away screaming at the sight of the horns that have grown on your head.
In fact, you can even kill a homeless child in Battery Park and, as long as there's no-one else around to see it, there are zero repercussions--though the game does not particularly encourage or even advertise this possibility, and the scripted conversational moral choice simply pertains to whether or not to give him food. (He rewards you with a passcode for being nice and giving him a candy bar, though you can still kill him after and take the candy bar back.)
The game doesn't exactly treat such an act of murder as morally grey--there aren't really very many shades of grey to an act like that--but neither is the game afraid of making it a possibility, and it doesn't feel the need to assert moral arbitration in an unrealistic, inauthentic way just to assure you that the developers know such an act is a bad one. The near-universal vulnerability of the population simply raises the stakes of your actions.
It's also not wrong to play it the 'this is why we can't have nice things' way--the world is there to be an emptier, even more brutal and miserable place should that be how you want to play it. In games such as this, there is always a sense of engaging a narrative to see how such a narrative might play out, just as much as there is a sense of actually condoning Denton's actions. Though for me, at least, the desire to play out the happiest, most utilitarian outcome is always pretty strong, more so the more believable the characters, there are plenty of times I've done bad things just to see what happens--and while this is admittedly as much to test the possibilities of the game, to see what it would let me do, as to weigh any emotional or intellectual response, ultimately these things converge, because we're testing what we dare do to a world and whether or not we like how it turns out. A sense of responsibility is inevitable, at least to some extent, even when we simply do something out of curiosity--because we're still making it happen.
As stated, though, the impact of all of this obviously depends largely on believability. But Deus Ex is, in a lot of ways, extremely gamey. In addition to the variable voice acting, character skins can also be pretty unsightly at times, even when they're not Anna Navarre, stretched over blocky models and of a limited number noticeably repeated throughout the game. The grunting AI behaviour, too, is sometimes simplistic, very robotic and occasionally downright stupid. That retro-synthy soundtrack plays throughout--sometimes, during its more excitable moments, like someone's not even aiming for specific keys on the keyboard. How, then, does the world of Deus Ex still manage to be one of the most engrossing and immersive game worlds you're likely to experience? And how does all of the above actually, arguably, end up working in its favour?
Read on in Part 2.
Coming at it as a cyberpunk fan, as I did, stumbling across mention of it as a highly-rated cyberpunk experience with the likes of Neuromancer and The Matrix and Ghost in the Shell in mind, aghast would not be too far off the mark to describe how I reacted. At this, the menu screen.
It's no slick William Gibson ride, that's for sure.
This is J.C. Denton, the cyborg character you play as. You can make him blond, or black, or give him a goatee. I think the sunglasses are mandatory. It is my opinion that there is something inherently funny and weird about sunglasses that's always just about equal to how cool they look. It's the way they dehumanise the possessor, or convey, as Gibson states of his character Molly Millions, 'an insect calm'. When a character is never not wearing shades, it really does something to how we perceive them, humanity-wise.
J.C. Denton may look cooler to some than he does to others. He does suffer from some rather chunky, squared graphics, and a rigid impassivity bordering on paralysis that gives him the bearing of an augmented lamppost. He may or may not have a double chin in the picture above; it's hard to tell. This pretty much sums up how Deus Ex wears the stylish aspects of its cyberpunk heritage--like a nerd attending a convention, dressing up for the part, maybe for the fun of it, but not necessarily pulling it off. It's maybe even a little embarrassing.
On top of this is his voice: a deadpan monotone that strains badly when forced to inflect. And he's far from the only character you might struggle to take seriously at first glance. Among the many others, two significant characters you're introduced to early on are Anna Navarre and Gunther Hermann, two cyborgs working for the same government agency as you do, each with questionable degrees of ruthlessness and bloodlust (and you earn their approval or disapproval depending on how similarly to them you act, out in the field).
Gunther has an awful German accent like a Terminator parody, and the appearance to match. Anna is a similarly cartoonish Russian (I think). Neither would be out of place as campy Bond villains. And while they thankfully remain among the most outlandish characters, and you do kind of get used to them, the accents don't get any better from here on out--far from it.
More than one character in the game makes a quip about Denton's dress sense, and Gunther is treated as the butt of jokes about as much as he is a force to be reckoned with. Deus Ex is a game that by no means sets out to be a comedy, but it comes with a healthy dose of (often self-referential) humour. These characters, though, and the quality of the voice-acting in general, sometimes make it very hard to tell when it's being intentionally funny and when it's not. The world of Deus Ex is pretty goofy at times.
But J.C. Denton's impenetrable, vaguely comical persona is actually highly effective. Denton feels like he has a narrative presence, but his personality is minimal and inscrutable enough that a whole range of behaviour open to the player feels credible. His are sunglasses of possibility. When it comes to the player's dialogue options during conversations, there's almost a sense of mischief in some of the things you get to say, the outrageousness of certain options emphasised by having it said in such indifferent tones--like he might kill a homeless person or two and then go for a beer. And you can do that.
Choice is Deus Ex's Big Thing, as anyone who's ever heard anything about it will know. As an action role-playing game, you can choose to approach missions in certain ways--guns blazing, hacking, being stealthy (read: crawling through air vents), or most likely a combination of all three depending on your resources--spending experience points and selecting the right augmentations and inventory items accordingly. You have to decide when it's wise to use up your disposable lockpicks and multitools to get at the stuff that lies behind closed doors or booby traps, which weapons are worth lugging around, and which abilities--strength, swimming, advanced jumping, etc--will allow you to get to places or take alternate paths that wouldn't be available to you otherwise.
It's part of the role-playing side to things that you choose your own style of gameplay, and different people will tend to default to certain things given the choice. But things are rarely so straightforward. The first level, Liberty Island, where your mission is to capture a supposed terrorist leader hiding in the Statue of Liberty, and, if you like, to free an imprisoned Gunther Hermann along the way, serves as something of a crash course for this realisation. Taking a sniper rifle from three options Denton's brother gives you at the start, I figured I was being a pre-emptive genius by electing to take out all the terrorists from a distance. But this plan fell apart after about two seconds when I ran out of ammo. Then I had to get creative with what remained in my inventory and how I was going to use it... only, I wasn't very good at doing this at first.
Liberty Island forced me along the Deus Ex learning curve, rearranging my brain to think differently than it had had to for the ammo-strewn likes of Halo even at that game's most strategic. My first playthrough was pretty desperate, fought tooth and nail using the few items I hadn't already wasted. But a well-thumbed inventory is one of Deus Ex's greatest pleasures. While daunting at first, and I didn't really get to grips with most of it until some time after Liberty Island, the items I carried became the most considered aspect of my game. It was about knowing my tools, experimenting with them, and using them with a little imagination as I puzzled out different scenarios.
I have to admit that I often forgot about the XP I'd earned or the maps and photos I'd been given, squirrelled away as they were in the many inventory screens without many reminders for their use, but poring over communications--previously read emails and recordings of past conversations, with hints and tips from other characters and passwords and passcodes that I would have to figure out where to use--was another oft-used part of this inventory-focused gameplay, which really added some thought and depth.
Importantly, this choice all takes place within a controlled narrative, a series of levels each with its primary objectives, which change depending on your actions, and its optional secondary objectives, rewarding on both the level of experience points and immersive narrative detail, often with consequences of their own. You choose who to help and who not to help, picking allegiances that may or may not last, the stakes getting higher as you proceed.
The best of these levels are the city hubs--namely New York, Hong Kong, and Paris--central places that can be explored and revisited during sections of the game, with missions that branch off in and around them taking place in warehouses, labs, sewers, corporate office spaces, and so on. Deus Ex is not completely open-ended like a sandbox game, but as a person whose completist impulses tend to drive him crazy in such games and the endless piddly little things they give you to do, I appreciate the focus. No making Denton fat on hamburgers, getting him married, or having him wear leotards in all the 332,345,565 colours you can collect scattered around the globe. Everything is meaningful and somehow relevant to the main story.
The story of Deus Ex is a thousand cyberpunk/sci-fi ideas and tropes you've seen or heard before, integrated with an A-Z of conspiracy theories and a small library of references to literature, movies, and probably other stuff too. It makes for a complex plot and a world with a fairly rich backdrop, with a particularly civic-minded approach to the usual CP themes of technosocial fallout, mapping as it does the various political ideologies and realities of the people involved. You encounter a lot of people living in miserable conditions, and though the missions are not always about saving them, you are forced to confront them.
With choices, of course, come consequences. But in Deus Ex, nobody's out to lecture you--or if they are, there's at least one person around lecturing the opposite. Deus Ex works with shades of grey. The majority of decisions aren't clearly marked as 'good' or 'bad', and it generally doesn't encourage such a simplistic dichotomy, instead getting you caught up in the sticky details and the problems of a bunch of people who are themselves rarely clear-cut on the morality front either. There's no karma metre like there is in, say, Fable or Fallout, which designates clearly your position between good and evil on a spectrum.
In Deus Ex, in most civilian areas, disturbing the peace will usually get local security painting a target on your back, and if Anna Navarre approves of mass slaughter during missions, your brother Paul will berate you or Sam Carter of the armoury will stubbornly withhold ammunition. Options will open and close. But consequence in terms of how the general population relates to your actions is implemented on a mostly individual- or scenario-oriented basis, at least until the higher levels of the conspiracy where the effects of your actions are more far-reaching. Thus you can shoot some civilians in one place, and the denizens of another will not automatically run away screaming at the sight of the horns that have grown on your head.
In fact, you can even kill a homeless child in Battery Park and, as long as there's no-one else around to see it, there are zero repercussions--though the game does not particularly encourage or even advertise this possibility, and the scripted conversational moral choice simply pertains to whether or not to give him food. (He rewards you with a passcode for being nice and giving him a candy bar, though you can still kill him after and take the candy bar back.)
The game doesn't exactly treat such an act of murder as morally grey--there aren't really very many shades of grey to an act like that--but neither is the game afraid of making it a possibility, and it doesn't feel the need to assert moral arbitration in an unrealistic, inauthentic way just to assure you that the developers know such an act is a bad one. The near-universal vulnerability of the population simply raises the stakes of your actions.
It's also not wrong to play it the 'this is why we can't have nice things' way--the world is there to be an emptier, even more brutal and miserable place should that be how you want to play it. In games such as this, there is always a sense of engaging a narrative to see how such a narrative might play out, just as much as there is a sense of actually condoning Denton's actions. Though for me, at least, the desire to play out the happiest, most utilitarian outcome is always pretty strong, more so the more believable the characters, there are plenty of times I've done bad things just to see what happens--and while this is admittedly as much to test the possibilities of the game, to see what it would let me do, as to weigh any emotional or intellectual response, ultimately these things converge, because we're testing what we dare do to a world and whether or not we like how it turns out. A sense of responsibility is inevitable, at least to some extent, even when we simply do something out of curiosity--because we're still making it happen.
As stated, though, the impact of all of this obviously depends largely on believability. But Deus Ex is, in a lot of ways, extremely gamey. In addition to the variable voice acting, character skins can also be pretty unsightly at times, even when they're not Anna Navarre, stretched over blocky models and of a limited number noticeably repeated throughout the game. The grunting AI behaviour, too, is sometimes simplistic, very robotic and occasionally downright stupid. That retro-synthy soundtrack plays throughout--sometimes, during its more excitable moments, like someone's not even aiming for specific keys on the keyboard. How, then, does the world of Deus Ex still manage to be one of the most engrossing and immersive game worlds you're likely to experience? And how does all of the above actually, arguably, end up working in its favour?
Read on in Part 2.
Labels: deus ex, music, videogames
# posted by
Chris @ 11:49 PM 
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