The corpos made the cyberpunkerinos come true in the worst Torment Nexus ways possible, with the clumsiest and most solipsistic “I am the main character and a cool rebel against the system” manchild shit, like billionaires using JC Denton avatars on Twitter.
Meanwhile, JC Denton literally beating Bill Gates Bob Page to death with a shock club while fending off murder parrots and spiderbots to wrest the Universal Printer away from the hands of billionaires.
I dearly love Deus Ex. It was such a perfect blending of conspiracy theory nonsense with actual, serious problems, done in a way where thinking about the conspiracies lead me to a better understanding of how politics and power work.
I’m grumpy about how much less thoughtful and less politically intersectional the sequels became. As Ross Scott put it: DE1 was (list of concepts here) while DE2 was vague crayon scribblings of the same simplified for consoles just like the game maps, and DE3 onward was, quote, CYBORGS CYBORGS CYBORGS.
I think that’s part of why I bounced off the re-boots. Without the absurd layers of weird conspiracy shit and esoteric philosphy the substance of the game that so fascinated me wasn’t there.
It wasn’t just absent; it was kind of inverted, from though provocation to cognitohazard.
“What if racism of the future was against people with cybernetic implants?” is some Reddit-tier thought experiment. It could have gone somewhere with augmented people in relation to class struggle (like how Human Revolution briefly brought up sex workers being coerced into “upgrades” to remain employable, and then being dependent upon Neuropozyne to maintain those “upgrades”) but it was both clumsy and lazy (where the protagonist doesn’t even experience that same discrimination in practical gameplay).
See I never got that far but I thought the plot was that working class people were being forced to get cybernetics to gain employment, and then the capitalists were using control over the anti-rejection drug to discipline labor. And then the protagonist reprised JC’s role as savior, or I guess being Adam the first man, by having some goofy biological trait that allowed him to accept cybernetics without needing the anti-rejection drug and somehow giving this ability to the people to free them.
See I never got that far but I thought the plot was that working class people were being forced to get cybernetics to gain employment, and then the capitalists were using control over the anti-rejection drug to discipline labor.
It could have picked up that story hook and went with it, but it sort of set it aside in favor of “those poor superbeings with superpowers, they’re resented by the unaugmented that are both too strong and too weak” Bioshock Infinite tier pretentious-and-pretending-to-be-smart writing.
The corpos made the cyberpunkerinos come true in the worst Torment Nexus ways possible, with the clumsiest and most solipsistic “I am the main character and a cool rebel against the system” manchild shit, like billionaires using JC Denton avatars on Twitter.
Meanwhile, JC Denton literally beating
Bill GatesBob Page to death with a shock club while fending off murder parrots and spiderbots to wrest the Universal Printer away from the hands of billionaires.I dearly love Deus Ex. It was such a perfect blending of conspiracy theory nonsense with actual, serious problems, done in a way where thinking about the conspiracies lead me to a better understanding of how politics and power work.
I’m grumpy about how much less thoughtful and less politically intersectional the sequels became. As Ross Scott put it: DE1 was (list of concepts here) while DE2 was vague crayon scribblings of the same simplified for consoles just like the game maps, and DE3 onward was, quote, CYBORGS CYBORGS CYBORGS.
I think that’s part of why I bounced off the re-boots. Without the absurd layers of weird conspiracy shit and esoteric philosphy the substance of the game that so fascinated me wasn’t there.
It wasn’t just absent; it was kind of inverted, from though provocation to cognitohazard.
“What if racism of the future was against people with cybernetic implants?” is some Reddit-tier thought experiment. It could have gone somewhere with augmented people in relation to class struggle (like how Human Revolution briefly brought up sex workers being coerced into “upgrades” to remain employable, and then being dependent upon Neuropozyne to maintain those “upgrades”) but it was both clumsy and lazy (where the protagonist doesn’t even experience that same discrimination in practical gameplay).
See I never got that far but I thought the plot was that working class people were being forced to get cybernetics to gain employment, and then the capitalists were using control over the anti-rejection drug to discipline labor. And then the protagonist reprised JC’s role as savior, or I guess being Adam the first man, by having some goofy biological trait that allowed him to accept cybernetics without needing the anti-rejection drug and somehow giving this ability to the people to free them.
It could have picked up that story hook and went with it, but it sort of set it aside in favor of “those poor superbeings with superpowers, they’re resented by the unaugmented that are both too strong and too weak” Bioshock Infinite tier pretentious-and-pretending-to-be-smart writing.