Deus Ex is "Deus Ex translated to Canadian French and back again"
Video games are software. They're also art, but they're made out of
software. I've complained about this before, after playing Fable 3.0,
I think. For a game that I don't love, like Fable, I'd rather just
play the last of the series, the best one. The Fable series, and a lot
of others, consists of successive repetitions with improved software
at each new version. The trend of trilogies, which I'm pretty sure
started for monetary reasons, may prevent this gormless
repetition--if nothing else, they are pumped out so fast that only the
content designers get a chance to refine things--the tech guys don't
get a chance to overhaul the engine. And even if the designers view
episode 1,2,3 as successive chances to refine the game mechanics, at
least the writers will feel an obligation to make a coherent story
line, one that won't make you feel ripped off for playing the same
thing 3 times in a row. (Disclaimer: I tricked a friend into
playing Fable 1.0 for me while I watched. But I did play all the way
through Fable 2.0 and 3.0)
So Fable exemplifies the Sequel Remake, when someone decides that
they'd really just like to make a few tweaks and release the same
thing as a 'sequel'. Games have been around long enough now to have
another kind of remake: the Borges Remake, in which the creators of
Fallout 3.0 are not at all the same people that made Fallout 1.0 and
2.0. They are instead people who liked it so much that they wanted to
recreate it from scratch. Like Borges' French author Pierre Menard,
they take a break from writing nonsense like Les problemes d'un
probleme to write chapters 9 and 38 of Don Quixote. From scratch. In
the original Spanish. To be exactly as good as when Cervantes wrote
it; in fact, exactly the same as when Cervantes wrote it. You can
easily tell when a game is a Borges Remakes because usually the title
is the same as the original. No additional numbers, only maybe a tiny
subtitle in small font.
This seems like the ultimate fanboyism, and in the world of
literature, that's probably all it is. But in video games, there's
real money. After the one-two punch of the Nintendo Wii and the Great
Recession, Borges Remakes have become proven safe moneymakers. Not
only can you find plenty of people who want to make Prince of Persia
again from scratch, you can find plenty of people want to play it
again. Or Mario. Or Wolfenstein. When you only play a game or two a
year, it might as well be the 'same' game that you played when you
were 12. Anyway it sounds a lot like the remastered editions of Star
Wars, or maybe the Lion King. They probably won't even notice if you
change a bunch of stuff! (That's actually good--games have improved
over time, so even an average game today will have some usability
improvements compared to the brilliant games of the past.)
Eidos Ubisoft Montreal's Deus Ex is a whole-hearted Borges Remake,
one of the pure-hearted fanboy ones (probably) (maybe). They decided
to make Deus Ex. And they did. Really well. It's almost an exact copy.
But over a decade has passed, and the innovative things about
Deus Ex are no longer innovative -- almost all games have
incorporated the good things from Deus Ex. So Deus Ex (by Ubisoft
Montreal) turns out to be a very competent sneaking/shooter with a lot
of dialogue options, while Deus Ex (by Ion Storm) was a brilliant
genre-bending hybrid of FPS, RPG, and tactical stealth espionage action mumble
mumble whatever Kojima sticks on the end of Metal Gear
titles.
Really, the only place where Deus Ex (by Ubisoft Montreal) is worse is
the overarching conspiracy theory. The conspiracies in Deus Ex (by Ion Storm)
turned out not be that gripping, but it was mostly because they were
so tangled and the game went on for so log, adding layer upon layer.
The writers must have been really into it. The conspiracy in Deus Ex
(by Ubisoft Montreal) is actually kind of stupid, and I didn't pay
much attention because the Real Villains were introduced in the first
five minutes via dramatic camera zooms and big explosions.
On the other hand, the new Deus Ex is better in a few places, mostly
places that were 'modernised' and 'consolised'. Those two words mean
pretty much the same thing except for the connotations. Basically, we
(as a race (of programmers, and maybe of humans)) have figured out
simpler ways to convey the same feeling of progression that a complex
orchestration of numbers does. I support this change, although people who
really like numbers may not.
Finally, the single worst aspect of the game was the translation. I don't how
much of the game was written in French Canadian originally, but many
of the in-game item/power descriptions obviously were. Also, a nice
multi-cultural culture (or whatever it is that Canadians do better
than us) turns out not to automatically translate into cultural
knowledge of the US. Surprise!
Even though setting the early parts of the game in Detroit was a nice
dodge for all the Canadian voice actors they hired (linguistic
research has now discovered that as many as 80% of Detroit natives are
actually speaking Canadian without even realising it), they
apparently don't know that skin colour is not a perfect predictor of
accent in Detroit. The voices are doled out strictly along lines of
skin colour, so a white gangster sounds like a college student from
Toronto, while a black one sounds like a Harlemite practising a
Chicago accent (badly). That's not how gangs work! Everybody tries to
sound the same to show that they're members of the same group.
The same problem applies to yuppies, and there are a few even more
obvious and embarrassing errors, like the Hispanic ex-Marine who
barely knows English (how did he survive in the Marines then?), and
the African-American Detroit bum who apparently just arrived from
Alabama, but has lived there for years developing a network of bum
contacts for the police to use (? ? ?).
Overall, the voice acting and motion capture suck pretty ferociously
for a AAA game, even for the main characters. Again, this feels it may
have been conscious imitation of Deus Ex (by Ion Storm), or perhaps
just clever allocation of a limited budget. It didn't stop me from
enjoying the game, but it did make me want to pace around,
sarcastically imitating David Sarif's always-enthusiastic monotone. I
so wanted him to turn out to be completely evil, but he never did. At
least I think he didn't. My sense of the moral landscape was fuzzy by
the end, mostly because I stopped paying attention.