Where does Deus Ex go from here? (series spoilers herein)

[marurun]

I've been thinking about Deus Ex a bit recently. Comes up a lot in the Diecast podcast, and there is that recent Square Enix poll that also mentions Human Revolution, so I've had it on the brain.

*Note, there be spoilers below, and I'm not enclosing them in spoiler tags, so you want in you gotta deal with spoilers.

Now, I loved the original Deus Ex... once I got into it. I had to start the game 3 times because I found the beginning off-putting. When you have few to no abilities, it is a VERY challenging game, and it is difficult to do even simple things. And you simply can't play it the way you do a more run and gun FPS of the time. You'll get creamed. I got creamed. It really took a while to warm up to. I did come to love the game, but there was some initial pain, and quite a bit of it.

Not only that, but the original Deus Ex really doesn't hold up well these days. The plotting and writing isn't so bad (but it isn't great, either), but the gun play kinda sucks, and the graphics and level design really suffer from the technological limitations of the time. Further, while Invisible War does arise from it and mesh pretty well, Human Revolution, the prequel and most recent title (we're ignoring The Fall, thankyouverymuch), doesn't actually transition well into Deus Ex. Human Revolution was very focused on a specific set of events and conspiracy groundwork. The original Deus Ex tries to cram in every conspiracy in the book.

As much as I liked the classic Deus Ex (and I enjoyed Invisible War as well), I think it's time to reboot the series, keeping Human Revolution as the anchor. Human Revolution should be re-cast not as a prequel, but as the first game in a new action RPG of the not-so-distant future. The original Deus Ex needs to be completely reimagined, much like the Tomb Raider reboot, using Human Revolution as the launch point, and retelling the core elements of the original Deus Ex, without so much of the random side-conspiracies. Focus on the Majestic 12, Bob Page, and the AI.

This would also leave the door open to DLC (cause you know companies love them). They could use the same engine but be cast as Deus Ex: Conspiracies. They could slowly reintroduce some of the weirder or less-important conspiracies to the series by having them be DLC missions, like the alien grays, the immortality project, etc... I'd also love the side-missions to have different protagonists, maybe ones who don't have the same genetic base of Jensen, the way the Dentons did. They could have to take drugs to keep side-effects and malfunctions at bay, and either buy those drugs or farm them from enhanced opponents. The more they use their abilities, the sooner they have to dose. Some missions could take place from the UNATCO side using enhanced UNATCO agents, and others could be individual corporate missions coordinated outside of M12 and UNATCO, or even on behalf of Tracer Tong or some other government or rebel organization.

So, that's my big brain fart of the day. Do you guys have any ideas on how the series should reboot, or perhaps not reboot but simply go forward? Feel free to share or comment on my thoughts.

[MrPopo]

Something that could be interesting is a game set between HR and the original where you play as Walton Simons, setting more of the groundwork for MJ12's actions in DX.