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Prey vs. Deus Ex: Mankind Divided: why one intro works and the other doesn't

R

Rexatality

Member
Very cool article and I agree with him. I was already invested with Prey's world by the minute I got to the intro.

I didn't care much for Mankind Divided's intro nor its characters, sadly :/
 
D

Deleted member 325805

Unconfirmed Member
I just finished Prey and I'm just about to start Deus Ex, is this spoilery for the latter?
 
A

Ashtar

Member
St3v3 said:
I just finished Prey and I'm just about to start Deus Ex, is this spoilery for the latter?
Click to expand...
for the intro yes,

I have to agree with the analysis, I wasn't super put off by the intro to MD mainly because I was REALLY into HR... but yeah i didn't know what the heck I was doing, fight bad guy stop bad things.... I guess, meanwhile prey was very interesting and got me invested immediately
 
C

Courage

Member
The Mankind Divided intro is the worst part of the game. This comparison does a disservice to MD which comfortably stands with Prey as a competent immersive sim.

also, Prague > Talos I

edit: to be more level-headed about this, the writer clearly states he loves MD and is specifically commenting on the intros. I'll also agree the story in MD doesn't get anymore interesting really, it mostly shines through its gameplay.
 
R

RuhRo

Member
This nails (some of) what's wrong with Mankind Divided's narrative.

Everyone talks about how it's half of a plot, and it is. But it's also a bad half of a plot. So much exposition. All tell, no show. Talk talk talk. Dense, obscure motivations. No characters I care about.

Deus Ex (the first one) and Human Revolution both had intricate, densely plotted conspiracies as a backdrop but ultimately the characters and their motivations were simple. My brother is a double agent. Is he right or not? My girlfriend is missing. Can I save her?

What motivates the main characters in Mankind Divided? I'm a...counterterrorism beat cop... and I'm talking to a group of hackers...because, who knows, reasons, I seem pretty apathetic about the whole thing. There's a bombing and a frame-up also because of reasons, it's not clear how it relates to me. There's a cutaway to some old men in a room and it's suggested that they're manipulating me, but I'm never shown any manipulation or any impact on my life at all for that matter.

It's a really terrible, broken execution of whatever story they were trying to tell.
 
A

Anno

Member
If anyone wants more of Tom's takes on Prey he and a couple of the other Crate & Crowbar guys did a lengthy spoilercast last week. It's worth a listen if you enjoyed the game and want some good critical thought about it.
 
A

AndrewDean84xX

Banned
I'd agree that Prey had the better intro, but man, that game just wasn't fun to play. Especially due to the combat and load screens.

Mankind Divided however was very fun to play, but it's atmosphere was less fun to explore.
 
G

GinoFelino

Member
A clear difference between a studio that understands game design and immersive sim gameplay and a studio that doesn't. Wonderful write-up.
 
ElfArmy177

ElfArmy177

Member
As someone who restarted MD several times and cant get past the.. who knows wtf​ I'm doing. Is prey better game? I loved hr
 
S

SketchTheArtist

Member
Mankind Divided intro was a complete mess. It was amateurish and it hurt the experience greatly.

The first 30-45 minutes of a game is supposed to throw you in the world you're about to invest dozens of hours in. It's building the momentum for the player to be invested in. In Human Revolution it worked, in Mankind Divided it didn't.

In the intro portion of the game, you had three parts:

1- The first mission
2- The credits/intro
3- The on-rail exposition leading to the terrorist attack

The First Mission threw you in a badly presented and designed mission where you didn't know the world, the motivation or the bad guys. This part ended with a sandstorm that lead to the intro-credits sequence that didn't have any emotional investment (like the first game) to actually matter. You're then thrown in an on-rail section that gives you exposition and actually leads to a really impactful and dramatic moment.

What I think they should've done was:

1- Start the game with a cinematic on the train where you retell quickly the events of the first game through flashback in a dream sequence to put the player up to speed on the story and consequences of the first game and to showcase Adam's thoughts and psyche.

2- You then go to the on-rail section exposition section that gives you info and context on the world and what's at stake right now. This leads to a very dramatic moment where Adam and the player see first-hand the gravity of the situation with the kid crying over his mom's body. Now you have emotional investment and context on what the game is going to be about. You can now cut to...

3- Intro/Credits sequence where you can see news flash on the consequences of the attack and how the world reacts to it....

4- You could then cut to the scene where Adam wakes up in bed (could even wake up in shock with the kid's scream echoing in his head to confirm that this moment actually affected him emotionally and that he has a purpose to get to the bottom of this case)

5- Then you get up to speed on the first mission that opened the game because now you have context.


I don't know why the first part of the game was butchered like that but it screams 'Production issues' where they didn't know what they were doing and panicked.

PREY was a great comparison where they actually nailed the vibe, the context and the motivation for the rest of the game.
 
C

chrominance

Member
ElfArmy177 said:
As someone who restarted MD several times and cant get past the.. who knows wtf​ I'm doing. Is prey better game? I loved hr
Click to expand...

Absolutely yes. I've actually been thinking for a while about why I bounced off Mankind Divided after a few hours but played through all of Prey, and this helps explain why for me. Prey is closer to System Shock 2 than Deus Ex (more talking with actual people and conversation trees in Deus Ex, much more sneaking a peek at dead people's emails in Prey), if that makes a difference to you. I still intend to go back to Mankind Divided one day but I have a hard time imagining that it can top Prey.
 
R

renzolama

Member
For what it's worth, I enjoyed MD's intro a lot more the second playthrough when I just ran through guns blazing action-game style. By comparison, Prey's intro would have nothing new to offer me in terms of gameplay the second time. I don't think that's very relevant to the point the article is making in terms of crafting the intro hooks, admittedly.
 
K

Kill3r7

Member
I have yet to play Prey but the intro mission/tutorial for DEMD was a totally reasonable way to either introduce or provide a refresher for folks who were new to the series or had not played DEHR in like 5 years.
 
N

Nessus

Member
On the one hand it's a bit of a tradition at this point for the intro in Deus Ex games to be a little confusing and lacking in context, the whole conspiracy theory angle. Like the very first conversation between Bob Page and Walton Simons in the original Deus Ex.

But what happens immediately after that should be more straightforward.

As someone who has really enjoyed every Deus Ex game (yes, even Invisible War) the first level in MD isn't a good tutorial. I found it frustrating, even after having beaten all the other games in the series and being very familiar with that style of gameplay. And it's just not very engaging, aside from some of the beautiful vistas of the abandoned under construction hotel being slowly overtaken by the desert.
 
S

SunBroDave

Member
Kill3r7 said:
I have yet to play Prey but the intro mission/tutorial for DEMD was a totally reasonable way to either introduce or provide a refresher for folks who were new to the series or had not played DEHR in like 5 years.
Click to expand...
Disagree. MD's intro did a terrible job at getting me acquainted with the mechanics, the world, and invested in the characters. It was so ineffective that I've yet to return to it since getting to Prague. I will at some point, as apparently the game gets much better, but that'll be because I'm literally forcing myself to keep playing to get to the (hopefully) good parts.
 
H

Human Trashcan

Banned
Twice I tried getting into MD, and twice I was rebuffed by all the terrible writing in the first hour and the ham-fisted attempts at writing very obvious allegory. Prey's storytelling is so much better.
 
T

Trouble

Banned
Prey's intro does an excellent job of making you inherently distrustful of everyone for the rest of the game.
 
B

Bergerac

Member
From the responses, I can't work out whether MD's beginning hour is supposed to be overly full of direct exposition and therefore uninteresting, or so vague as to what's supposedly happening, that it's uninteresting.
 
Ristifer

Ristifer

Member
SunBroDave said:
Disagree. MD's intro did a terrible job at getting me acquainted with the mechanics, the world, and invested in the characters. It was so ineffective that I've yet to return to it since getting to Prague. I will at some point, as apparently the game gets much better, but that'll be because I'm literally forcing myself to keep playing to get to the (hopefully) good parts.
Click to expand...
I 99% agree with this. The 1% for me falls with the fact that I think the intro to MD was meant to be a little disorienting for a character that is continuing a series. And this is without all of that
Adam is a clone
stuff.

I feel like it was meant to kind of throw you into something without you quite knowing what the situation was. But yes, after that, they still dropped the ball with it. So, I can still mostly agree with what you're saying.
 
H

Human Trashcan

Banned
Bergerac said:
From the responses, I can't work out whether MD's beginning hour is supposed to be overly full of direct exposition and therefore uninteresting, or so vague as to what's supposedly happening, that it's uninteresting.
Click to expand...

It's somehow both. There's lots and lots of exposition but little of it meaningful as the game doesn't really establish any stakes or characters before things just start happening seemingly randomly. So it's lots of characters talking uninterestingly while uninteresting things happen because we aren't really given any reasons to care.
 
A

Alpha Phoenix

Member
The problem with Mankind Divided's intro is it throws you right into the action. There's no buildup. The game assumes you've read the novel Deus Ex: Blacklight which takes place between HR and MD, and the latter picks shortly after the events of the novel. So there's some reliance on supplementary material.
 
L

LowlySmokeGuy

Banned
I think Mankind Divided's intro was sort of just forced in because they needed some kind of tutorial even if it was out of sync with the rest of game storywise.

It was my first Deus Ex game and it was helpful for getting used to the gameplay and how stuff works. If they just dropped you into Prague, it's harder to craft a tutorial around an open ended place like that rather than a level they can tunnel the player along.

It might have been weird for people who played Human Revolution, but I think they had new players like me in mind when they made that intro.
 
Ristifer

Ristifer

Member
Human Trashcan said:
It's somehow both. There's lots and lots of exposition but little of it meaningful as the game doesn't really establish any stakes or characters before things just start happening seemingly randomly. So it's lots of characters talking uninterestingly while uninteresting things happen because we aren't really given any reasons to care.
Click to expand...
Pretty much a perfect way to explain it.
 
B

Bulby

Member
Mankind Divided's intro completely lost me. Stopped playing after 2 or 3 hours, and im someone who completed Human Revolution 3 times.

I found the writing incredibly poor. I dont mean from a content or ideas point of view. Its just every conversation at the start of the game was this exposition dump that was so unatural and never flowed. The world felt so completely artificial and I never bought into it as a real place.

edit: Im glad im not alone in this position
 
K

KORNdoggy

Member
i find preys intro is far too eager to get you into the action. it all feels rushed and as a result its didn't really have any sort of impact. it almost feels like more was supposed to be made of it but they cut it all out or something.
 
Ristifer

Ristifer

Member
Bulby said:
Mankind Divided's intro completely lost me. Stopped playing after 2 or 3 hours, and im someone who completed Human Revolution 3 times.

I found the writing incredibly poor. I dont mean from a content or ideas point of view. Its just every conversation at the start of the game was this exposition dump that was so unatural and never flowed. The world felt so completely artificial and I never bought into it as a real place.

edit: Im glad im not alone in this position
Click to expand...
It didn't really cause me to stop playing the game, but it really doesn't draw you in. The announcement trailer for MD did a better job of presenting an emotional connection for Adam. But the game couldn't manage that, which was unfortunate.
 
F

FrontalMonk

Banned
RuhRo said:
This nails (some of) what's wrong with Mankind Divided's narrative.

Everyone talks about how it's half of a plot, and it is. But it's also a bad half of a plot. So much exposition. All tell, no show. Talk talk talk. Dense, obscure motivations. No characters I care about.

Deus Ex (the first one) and Human Revolution both had intricate, densely plotted conspiracies as a backdrop but ultimately the characters and their motivations were simple. My brother is a double agent. Is he right or not? My girlfriend is missing. Can I save her?

What motivates the main characters in Mankind Divided? I'm a...counterterrorism beat cop... and I'm talking to a group of hackers...because, who knows, reasons, I seem pretty apathetic about the whole thing. There's a bombing and a frame-up also because of reasons, it's not clear how it relates to me. There's a cutaway to some old men in a room and it's suggested that they're manipulating me, but I'm never shown any manipulation or any impact on my life at all for that matter.

It's a really terrible, broken execution of whatever story they were trying to tell.
Click to expand...

So, while I agree that MD had a lot of narrative problems, I feel like part of it is because you're changing around the starting state of the character's knowledge, and have to figure out a way to hamfist a lot of exposition of what the character already knows to compensate. Deus Ex would be a very different and worse game if you played as Paul instead of JC, and had to deal with the conspiracies he already knows about. By the end of DX:HR Adam has already dealt with a conspiracy that encompassed the world and set up the world state of DX:MD, and we're left in a situation where Adam is playing a Paul role, where he's already a double agent working for a secret organization that is the actual good guys because of reasons.

With all of that said, MD's plot put me off and after a trek into Golem City I stopped playing, so it's entirely possible I missed some major bits.
 
C

chrominance

Member
KORNdoggy said:
i find preys intro is far too eager to get you into the action. it all feels rushed and as a result its didn't really have any sort of impact. it almost feels like more was supposed to be made of it but they cut it all out or something.
Click to expand...

I can't decide if Prey's intro needed one more apartment loop or not. On the one hand, I don't mind getting to the action quicker; on the other hand, I think repeating the same day more than twice reinforces the odd nature of what's happening to you and highlights just fucked up things are when finally the loop breaks.

(very minor Prey story spoilers)
I know there's a specific story reason why you only loop twice in the intro, of course.

Ristifer said:
It didn't really cause me to stop playing the game, but it really doesn't draw you in. The announcement trailer for MD did a better job of presenting an emotional connection for Adam. But the game couldn't manage that, which was unfortunate.
Click to expand...

The intro definitely didn't cause me to stop playing the game; I actually didn't mind the action-heavy first level. But I do remember getting to a point where I wasn't really sure what to do next. I got to a data vault and couldn't think of an obvious way in, decided I'd think about it and tackle it later, and then never came back. In hindsight, it seems clear now that Mankind Divided did a pretty poor job of making me care about anything that was happening in the world. TF42, the Juggernaut Collective, Prague, any of it. But I do want to give it a second chance at some point.
 
Ristifer

Ristifer

Member
FrontalMonk said:
With all of that said, MD's plot put me off and after a trek into Golem City I stopped playing, so it's entirely possible I missed some major bits.
Click to expand...
I think Golem City is where the game really should've picked up steam, but it just suffered the same problem as every other part of the game: Great location, but no meaningful characters. We know what happens with
Rucker
, but the main guy until the end is
Marchenko
? And his introduction is akin to Macho Man Randy Savage. They just didn't build any momentum, even after the introduction.
 
M

Mechazawa

Member
MD's intro is terrible tonally, but it did a great job showing me mechanically how it differs from HR's base shooting/movement/stealth functions.
 
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