@@kaptenlemper Er, I dunno what you're talking about, the cutscenes on DX: Mankind Divided are skippable once the pre-caching is done. You're not "held hostage" to watch cutscenes, that's a Hideo Kojima experience you're thinking of.
Hahaha true true, maybe it's because the electricity (or what ever it is) that is exerted when the system is activated, is yellow thus resembles the sun? Granted, the whole game is yellow.
He did the Opposite of landing safely 😭😭😭😂 But I guess it could also be symbolic of people learning from Icarus’ experience and not flying too close to the sun, of learning how to land safely instead of. What he did
You have to respect the thoroughness of the man. Most people say “fine” because they don’t want to go into any detail. He needed to take some extra time to explain why it’s not ‘great’ or ‘bad’.
Except Human Revolution is a near masterpiece. It's the greatest immersive sim ever made and offers a freedom of approach still unmatched in ANY game, TEN YEARS later. This is a terrible video.
@@FuzzyDlop I'm glad you liked it, and you are welcome to share your subjective opinion. But since doing so is an invitation for other opinions...eh. It built upon what came before, so saying it was unmatched is...objectively untrue. The original deus ex had more open endedness, and did so a ridiculous amount of time earlier. Especially since until they patched it, HR literally had huge complaints specifically about how restrictive the choices were for boss fights, even compared to other games. And how the world itself has similar things to fallout, where investing in hacking could feel like a waste, or you would deliberately avoid the other ways, so you could eke out every bit of xp from it instead of finding the passwords people were leaving literally everywhere...which doesn't literally reduce the open endedness but it does funnel people towards similar things.
i love that guy who either calls you attila the hun or ghandi based on whether or not you killed people in the mission because he's just mad at you no matter what you do. if you didn't go to the mission because you had the flu, you'd come in and he'd be like WELL WELL, IF IT ISN'T TYPHOID MARY. I GUESS YOUR ROBOT ARMS CAN'T ACCEPT A FLU SHOT, CAN THEY? DON'T ANSWER THAT. I DON'T WANT TO BE EXPOSED TO COVID-38
(Jensen comes in with donuts for everyone) Pritchard: "WELL IF IT ISN'T FRED THE BAKER HIMSELF-" ... . edited because I thought the Dunkin Donuts guy was named Bob
This video is so interesting to drop right after that story about people who got prosthetic, electronic eyes implanted by a company that no longer supports the technology. Basically, the robot eyes allowed people with certain types of blindness to see varying levels of shapes and shades of black and white, which for many people allowed them much greater freedom in navigating the world. But the technology wasn't sufficiently profitable so the company just... stopped supporting the technology. People's eyes began breaking down and there's essentially no way to have them repaired. If they break, they're just broken: you don't get to see anymore. So I think there's a possibly rich story here about what happens when you choose to be augmented but have very little control over what happens to that technology once it's actually implanted in your body and the sort of inherent terror that your body might just stop functioning and there's nothing you can do about that. Feels like something people might have a lot of rich and complex feeling about that could be explored very effectively by a protagonist who is heavily augmented but not by choice, since he has to live with that or die, idk tho...
Very interesting. Could be a very fleshed out short story, just on that premise alone. I wouldn't want augmentations, not in a world where Apple and John Deere fuck over their customers over the simplest shit.
"the inherent terror that your body might just stop functioning and there's nothing you can so about that" That already happens. Heart attacks, strokes, etc. You can die or suffer permanent disability randomly any time. Augmentations don't really add too much to that concept.
@@carcrashjayson but that could be factored into the story in an interesting way, the closest HR gets is when you have to go debt collecting on someone’s black market aug because they couldn’t keep up in their line of work without it. The whole game should’ve been more of that, that as the enforcer of one of these tech/pharmaceutical companies you see first hand how much this stuff can help someone who desperately needs it, create a false sense of hope and grind people into paste for cash, and everything beyond and in between. The fact that the ONLY time someone says “hey I know this stuff can help ordinary people but isn’t it kinda fucked how much the military is putting money into this to turn soldiers even less into people” is during that boring Megan walk and talk sucks, and the fact she just goes “yeah but need money to get Tiny Tim his robot legs” is even more shitty.
2:19:48 The vent that leads *DIRECTLY TO HIS OFFICE* leads you there from the *BATHROOM*. It's like the level designers are making fun of their own design. That vent can ONLY exist to make that guy's office smell like piss. There's no other explanation.
Reminds me of FF7, where a vent in the Shinra building directly connects a bathroom with a meeting room, and everyone is constantly asking why the room smells so bad. I refuse to believe this man's office does not smell like piss always and all the time.
One of my favourite Mark Rober videos is the self-playing piano, because when he tries to simplify the key mechanism, he finds that every part of it is essential, and nothing can be removed or altered without preventing the whole system from working properly.
My main issue with the game was that i was going for a full stealth playthrough.Jensen was a master infiltrator and hacker when controlled by me, who was never detected and left a trail of unconscious hostiles in his wake. Yet as soon as the FEMA cutscene started Jensen, who up untill then crouched more than walked, suddenly decided walking into a room, without even trying to hide, in the middle of hostile territory was a good idea, and just got caught by Barrett.......
not just the barrett fight, any boss fight. i remember my first time playing against the first boss, i did the same exact thing you did and i got so mad i was internally screaming at jensen
My issue is that you can't change your mind part way through to play it differently. If you chose the assault option, you can't get the tranquilizer gun later on to the stealthy.
the fact that hbmomber can jus drop a video thats longer than a full length feature film about a decade + old video game once a year and get 2.7 million people to watch it is fucking mindblowing sorcerer shit. thisnis my 3rd time through and ive never played the game
I've seen the whole thing at least 30 times now. But I have played both games, so I can't claim the "I love this long-ass video about a thing I've never heard about" badge.
Update: Square-Enix is now selling Eidos Montreal and the Deus Ex intellectual property to Embracer Group AB, which was previously known as THQ Nordic AB (not to be confused with its subsidary THQ Nordic GmbH or the original owner of the THQ trademark THQ Inc.) THQ Inc. went bankrupt in 2012 and sold their trademark to Nordic Games Licensing AB in 2014, which is when Nordic Games Licensing AB changed its name to THQ Nordic AB and changed the name of its subsidary Nordic Games GmbH to THQ Nordic GmbH. Does that make sense to everyone else?
I fell asleep to this video yesterday and dreamed I was in an office building in Montreal and Hbomb was following me around wearing a suit explaining how that building had bad level design
I was waking up during the RWBY video and had a dream that the video had very different visuals and UA-cam had an ugly UI. Waking up was quite confusing.
I had a dream Hbomb tried to kill me. He said it pretty violently and loudly and chased me through a walmart. It was less like a funny dream and more like the end of the shining.
Honestly I feel like if augmentations were real, radical groups who hated “all augmentations indiscriminately” while wearing glasses feels all too real.
@@TorrentialStardust nah, augmebtations are not real, none of those things you listed are an augmentation in any way. Yes, robot hands are cool as hell, but a normal ass hand is superior in every way. And it’ll stay that way forever
Vents are such a gaming trope that I find so unrealistic. Even the vent part you show why is that vent there? Why is it not connected to any AC system? Why are vents big enough to crawl through? Is there a single real life moment someone managed to crawl through a vent to be stealthy? You know how loud that would be even if you managed to crawl through one big enough to fit in?
Even when they are big enough to crawl through, vents are usually filled with nails and sharp edges, because when you're hammering together a long winding vent, you're not thinking about how crawlable it is, you're making sure the various pieces don't blow themselves apart when the air's pushed through them.
"Attention, test prisoners attempting to escape through the air ducts. I don't know what nonsense you learned on TV, but in real life, air ducts just go to the air conditioning unit. It's also pretty dusty, so if you've got asthma, chances are you're gonna die up there. And we'll be smelling it for weeks because, again, the air ducts aren't a secret escape hatch, they're how we ventilate the facility." Cave Johnson, Warden of Terra-Three penal science colony.
"Is it good? I don't know, but it's definitely THE MOST" is a line that always makes me laugh. I don't care what I do for a living, if this isn't how my work is described I haven't done a good job
"That's one of the most important movies ever made. I can't wait to see it!" is my favorite bit in the whole video, the earnestness of the delivery makes me smile every time
@@edgarallenhoe3518 1:56:11 in den so die I have no strong reason for that if I don't have any of them are you still really in your room and I'm going on a new trip with a little more and I have been unable from you but it will help me out with you in my room and your house and the family will take the time for the next little time and then we have the same place to go with it in a little more way than me to be able from the way I 1:58:56 will 1:58:56 1:58:56 1:58:56 1:58:57 1:58:57 in 1:58:57 1:58:57 so 1:58:57 was 1:58:57 1:58:57 1:58:57 die 1:58:57 1:58:57 1:58:57 1:58:58 1:58:58 in 1:58:59 1:58:59 1:58:59 1:58:59 1:58:59 1:59:00 1:59:00 1:59:01 1:59:01 1:59:01 in 1:59:02 so I'm 1:59:03 in 1:59:06 1:59:23 1:59:23 1:59:24 1:59:24 1:59:24 1:59:24 1:59:24 1:59:24 1:59:24 1:59:24 1:59:24 1:59:24 1:59:26 1:59:27 1:59:27 1:59:27 1:59:28 1:59:28 1:59:28 1:59:28 1:59:28 1:59:28 1:59:28 1:59:28 1:59:28 1:59:29 1:59:29 1:59:29 1:59:29 1:59:29 1:59:33 k
The theme of augmentation gets even more muddled in Mankind Divided, both for better and for worse. They really lean into the augmentation argument = racism thing and it makes less sense. It's harder to take the conflict seriously when the reason for your oppression lets you turn invisible and make your hand into a knife. But it managed to do one thing completely by accident. According to a friend of mine, it managed to capture the experience of being Arabic in a post 9/11 North America eerily well. The racism isn't based in hatred or a superiority complex, it's based in fear. They see you not as vermin but as an enemy whose existence is a threat. The "augs only" train cars were probably a hack job attempt at referencing "back of the bus" racism, but it accidentally managed to recreate the experience of seeing others breezing through airport security while you are forced to take extra tests and have all eyes on you. He even said it managed to give him the same feelings of feeling like you should be ashamed for something you haven't done. Adam wasn't the one who pressed the button that turned construction workers' hands into zombies, but he feels the need to somehow make up for the actions of the guy who did. Of course I have no reason to believe this was on purpose, so it just becomes funny that the most emotional resonance I have seen the game have was by accident.
why do so many modern games discussing the implications of synthetic sentience and human augmentation build so heavily on the racism narrative? The writers are so fucking devoid of any interesting perspective on the issue that doesn't tie into something you can spoonfeed an audience of babies, its like they don't even read literature from the genre they've been hired to work on a game for. Beyond there being a million interesting perspectives and tropes to build on, whats really offensive is how it makes issues of actual racism second-hand in those universes. Not only is it bland and uninspired, when used the way video game writers do it weakens discourse around racism by association.
@@EmmaBonn96 The main one that comes to mind is Mass Effect 3, since it took three entire games for your choices to evaporate due to a three-option ending. Fable 2 and 3 had similar set ups where there was an illusion of choice (although, in Fable 2 is a lot less guilty since the final choices can slightly alter the game's population).
@@lucky_veruca Following Mass Effect 3, you had Dragon Age: 2, which didn't give you a three-option ending...it gave you a TWO-option ending instead. Literally the two things you have control over in that game are which of the two endings you go for, and how many people die before you get there.
My favorite and most memorable experience in HR was non-lethally taking out every single cop in the police station as stealthily as possible (so that nobody outside of maybe one or two near me that were swiftly dispatched) were alerted in any way, then packing them all into a single small vent, only to discover that the physics engine doesn't like that and having the bodies explode everywhere, getting stuck in walls, and killing many of them. Later did the same thing at the hive, seeing how many could be packed into a bathroom stall before critical mass was achieved. Still got the pacifist achievement that run im pretty sure. A hell of a good time to be sure, but says something about the game's depth.
Dude that's literally how I play every Deus Ex game. In Mankind Divided, during the curfew, I cleared all the patrolling units on the street by knocking them out and piling them up in bins, rooms, air ducts, etc.
haha, I did a similar thing in Mankind Divided - I took out everyone in the nightclub in Prague and piled up all of the bodies on the bed in one bedroom. By the end of it the framrate was in the single digits when you entered the room.
This is really interesting actually, when my kid sister got addicted to Uncharted developed the exact same vocabulary for blaming "Cutscene Drake", like he was a separate entity, whenever the game showed her the main character doing something cool she didn't get to do herself, or when he went down to the kind of hit she'd learned he'd have been able to shrug off while she was controlling him.
you must be one of those who are easily impressed, because this is a pretty easy edit to achieve. I once edited the battlestar galactica first episode of season 1 called 33, trying to improve the series by removing all the angel/psychological bullshit. And removing the bullshit from that episode dropped it down to 33.00min, exactly. Coincidence? i think not!
@@ericaugust1501 you must be one of those that likes to brag about things that you already admit to being easy. I know how video editing works. I know it’s simple to get it it to be exactly how long you want it to be. Something being simple to do doesn’t mean it’s any less impressive to go through with and get past UA-cam messing with time limits on videos. I’ve seen UA-cam make minute long videos read as 59 or even 61 seconds. I just wanted to make a fun comment in response to his own self acknowledgment of the length. Now I’d be equally impressed if we could just leave it at that, even though that seems like an easy task
As a developer, I appreciate that in the first 20 minutes you really tackle the "Couldn't they just" argument head on. A lot of the time people think studios can still wave magic wands and solve problems the way they used to. Games have reached a level of fidelity and complication that that's slowly become more and more impossible.
There's a reason why people go "this indie title with like five people did this, why can't (other game) do that?!" And that reason is that those indie, pixelart-style games hide a major thing under the hood: they're focusing on one thing and don't have to deal with some major company trying to force that thing to take a new shape, that indie company is on their own dime, so they can toss years of work out without a larger company hanging and quartering them, they're using intentionally old-looking or stylized graphics so they don't have to deal with five million and one physics/rendering issues, or a combination of the above. This is before the issues that can befall ANY game development: game bloat, weird bugs that need dark magic to solve and they just use a niche patch that they hope won't clash with some technology of the future, engine limitations, interpersonal conflicts, hoping to god that nobody has the same idea and does it better than the team, The terrible realization that Important Feature 1 relies on something that has essentially been removed or is just not FUN, and how to finish the dang game.
I'm an author and the thought of having to finish a novel in the first draft without being able to go back and, you know, fix things quite literally gives me anxiety.
And quality subtitles at that! Changing the location of the subs to the top or bottom of screen depending on the visibility and readability of the game footage w/dialogue boxes and denoting who is speaking when switching between different speakers. Love to see it.
Really appreciate that as well: i have weird audio processing issues sometimes, so its nice to have subtitles and know im not criticlyy mishearing something
Okay the assumption that I don't want Gex to show up in Kingdom Hearts and kiss Goofy is utterly inaccurate! If society needs to crumble to see that happen, it was weak to begin with.
2:47:31 my favourite part about the vending machine consipracy is that it also turns out to be somewhat true. In the sequel invisible war you can listen to some homeless people in the ruins of the unatco building talking about the contents of this vending machine, and it turns out the machine was stocked with ONLY lemon-lime
I used to work in a lockshop and the majority of the door hardware and locks we sold/installed were from brands that were all owned by assa abloy (yale, schlage, mul-t-lock, etc). All of these brands almost directly competed with each other too. So technically all the door locks in the game being made by the same company isn't actually that unrealistic
@@tadferd4340 not necessarily, all the individual brands/companies still do their own thing so they're all different. medeco and mul-t-lock are still high security and difficult to pick and schlage has really wacky keyways that can make jamming a tool in a bit harder
Popular youtuber Harris Bomberguy creating a 1h45m deep-dive into the origins of antivax misinformation: The hero we needed. 🥺 Popular youtuber Harris Bomberguy creating a 3h30m lecture about his own weird video game opinion: The hero we deserved. 💀
Fun fact about the Shadowrun comparison: the Humanity stats is actually relatively new, and in the original incarnation of the game it represented the degree of control that corporations could exert over your life through their control of resources you need to live. It was changed to Prosthetics Make You Evil when the original company writing the game was bought out by a much bigger company lol
I just have to say that the point of Humanity in Shadowrun and Cyberpunk is not ableist, no, rather, it's the opposite. It's meant to represent how corporations have shifted the blame onto regular people for them actively ruining the world and pushing people to get more and more cybernetics. People don't go crazy because they have prosthetics, getting a lot of prosthetics in a cyberpunk setting is a symptom of other mental illnesses. It's closer to an addiction metaphor than anything else.
@@simoneidson21 I don’t think claiming it’s a metaphor for addiction makes it *less* ableist. Like, “Each beer you drink reduces your Humanity” would be a pretty fucked up thing for a game to have too.
Me when a movie I really want to see is 120 min long: awghhn that is too long 😭 Me when Hbomberguy releases a 200+ min long video about a game I have no interest in ever playing: MY GOD THIS IS THE IDEAL LENGHT I CAN'T WAIT TO WATCH IT A MILLION TIMES
Playing this in the background and hearing Shaun's voice out of nowhere was so jarring. I thought I'd passed out and missed an auto-play skip where Shaun was coincidently also talking about Deus Ex.
rewatching this again and im just thinking like. the themes of augmentation and disability are just so interesting- zeke sanders is shown to totally rip out his augmented eye because he hates it, and for the reason he does it is ridiculous, but it totally could be reasonable to do that in some situations. like, zeke couldve ripped it out because he didnt believe losing an eye was a detriment or made him less worthy as a person, and the eye augmentation wasnt an option he chose but something forced on him to make him more 'useful'. its a conversation ive seen especially deaf people have- coclear implants for instance can create a sensation similar to sound and be useful to some deaf people, but they also destroy any leftover hearing they have in that ear and can be a real challenge to adjust to. basically, these aids can be overhyped and come with their own drawbacks, but are *marketed* as complete 'cures' to disability. it also encourages disability to be seen as a problem to be fixed, which for a lot of disabled people it just isn't, even if its the overwhelming view that it is in modern societies. (some disabled people would obviously love cyborg legs and all that, including me tbf, but i dont think these are really *cures* to disability- theyre augmentations (wow!) or mobility aids. like, you'd have to do maintainance on a cyborg leg you just wouldnt have to on a fleshy human leg, and any metal parts would have the huge disadvantage of not healing on their own obviously.) sorry for any poor sod that comes across my rambling lol, i just have a lot of thoughts
Could also go the way that he had to rip the eye because he couldn't afford the neuroposine once he was out of the force - making him open his eyes (lol) about how the augmentations could be used as a leash.
it's very common in deaf culture to dislike cochlear implants actually, more than just because of their physical effects, but because they make you "less deaf" and deaf people enjoy the culture they are a part of. gallaudette university won't let people who have the ability to hear learn at their school, obviously because they can only teach so many people and they are a famously deaf institute, but this means that dead culture and the dead community is one people will work to stay in, and you'll see people go as far as to literally flush the external part of their cochlear implant down the toilet, because they value being a part of their community and their identity as a deaf person over the extra ability to hear. it's fascinating really and a lot of people would call that stupid because why would you get rid of your ability to hear, but to others it's absolutely reasonable. I went to school in gallaudette's old campus, know asl, and spent hundreds of hours with deaf people and it's immensely interesting to see cultures like that come together even when the people are spread out evenly across the world. fun fact, deaf people hate Alexander Graham Bell because he tried to destroy sign language in the U.S.
Finding out the patient’s response to being told to off himself at 1:51:00 wasn't fake dialogue recorded by Hbomb for the video and is in fact a real scene in the game is breaking my brain
@@fidget0227I don't believe there's ever been another use for it outside of Twinkies, but it's the character saying it not the writers. Same way all the white people saying the n word in Django aren't necessarily racist
the part about the og Deus Ex being 'suprisingly linear' reminds me of a quote from a dev I once heard "the best type of linear, is when the player doesn't realise how linear it was until later" as a devloper, that stuck with me as it's entirely true. If the storytelling can let players think that it's them making the decisions, linear storytelling has been done well
There's a great article by Shamus Young about how the airboat chase in Half-Life 2 makes it feel like you're constantly making choices and picking your own route through the canals... But it's actually just pretty much one path with a bunch of dead-ends that make it look like you could've gone there. The trick is that the level is designed in such a way that in the heat of a chase where you're under pressure and panicking you'll almost certainly pick the one correct path, because the incorrect dead-end paths are all way, way harder to reach or put in places where you'll spot them too late to go down them. The level design guides you through so well that you can't tell there isn't actually other paths. But it really does FEEL like you're making split-second decisions on your feet and weaving your own way down these sprawling canals, and that's all that's needed to make the chase really intense and tonnes of fun. Even after countless replays knowing those tricks it still gets my adrenaline pumping every time.
Gonna be completely honest here, Mr. Bomberguy: In my opinion, the worst part of this video was where I had to explain to my family that I couldn't hang out because I was too busy watching a three and a half hour video about how a game I've never played, and that came out a long time ago was FINE. Otherwise, I enjoyed every second!
I'm only a third of the way through, but I find it interesting that many of the criticisms Hbomb had for Human Revolution could also be applied to Fallout 4. The illusion of player agency and boringly streamlined character progression are both criticisms of Fallout 4. I wonder if he'll mention that.
I get the vague impression that he thinks of that game similarly to Skyrim: the reasons he wouldn't like it are so self-evident that a couple minutes of an April Fools video is all the time it really takes to explain.
at least with 4 you can add mods so you can make the game more like how you want it to be. Human revolution is like a time capsule from that era of design.
A video about Fallout 4 being bad would basically just be a copy/paste of why the 3rd one was bad. Maybe with a few moments to highlight some of the specific failures in storytelling the game has.
After recently playing Deus Ex for the first time, the main thing that stood out is complete lack of objective markers. Having to use actual maps, compass, and the directons you were given was such a difference from ANYTHING in modern games. That also adds to the exploration and freedom, since when you don't have an objective marker, it means that there doesn't have to be an "intended way" of doing something or getting somewhere. Having objective markers is likely my biggest issue with HR and MD.
Hey made the burden harder on themselves by doubling down instead of changing things. Nearly every part of this video is "oh we wanted to change this because we didn't like that it was like this in the last one. Oh now everyone just does this because we change this. Okay so we're going to do this." And then proceeds to do something that exacerbates the issue.
@@oath_of_ancients3803 Did you miss the part where Hbomb argues that triple A videogame devolopment nowdays might not allow changes to be made that easily. Like, if they were to change things they would need a lot, like really A LOT, of work hours to change things.
it's so goddamn funny to me that just a couple months after this video dropped Square Enix sold off the Deus Ex IP along with a bunch of other wildly popular franchises all so they could get into NFT bullshit mere hours before the bubble popped. Textbook shit, couldn't have been written better
Sanders ripping out his prosthetic eye also could've played into hbomber's idea for that faction really well. Rather than him ripping out the eye because of some puritanical ideologies, it could've something he gave up so that someone else could have the ability to see again. A moment of compassion that could draw more people to his side and allow him to take extreme measures for his goals while still maintaining an image that would realistically draw people to stand alongside him, whether that's a calculated move on his part of just sincere care for another.
Looking through Francois Lapikas' Linkedin, it's depressing how much of one's career can be spent on projects that get cancelled. Almost 9 years of his 23 year career so far have been spent working on things that never saw the light of day. After Human Revolution came out, the next thing he worked on that got published (Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance) was released 8 YEARS LATER. AAA studios are fucking whack man.
This video really made me think about all these game developers who pour years of their lives into one game, only for it to end up being a just "ok"-ish game... Since there is no way to majorly alter course and fix really obvious issues without throwing away millions. Such a waste of talent and passion
@@neokonline_ Passion? Maybe. Talent? He routinely puts his time into games that either get cancelled or end up being very mid. I don't think he's talented.
That's just how art is tho. You can just work on a piece for days only to realise its not just bad but also unsalvagable. And videogames are a combination of many art forms and also very hard to make. A youtuber I watch says the following : when you truly understand what's involved in making a videogame, you realise every game release is basically a miracle
There's a playstyle the developers completely overlooked ammo control-wise: a silenced pistol with the armor-piercing upgrade can take down any enemy in one headshot without breaking stealth and the game just doesn't seem to know it's an option so the pistol ammo is plentiful and it feels cool to play this way.
Add the laser sight to it too & it becomes a hip-fire sniper. I went back for a pacifist run before even finishing just because the game felt trivially easy with that thing.
Hey hbomber-nerd let me tell you something, at the beginning you said to use the chapter select to skip around the video and I absolutely will not you fool! I start this video from the beginning every time I watch it and there’s nothing you can do to stop me!!
Gee, it's almost like a game made by a massive corporation isn't going to distinguish between "robot arm tied to a subscription service that will kill you if you stop paying=bad" and "robot arm=bad"
The difference between accessing the internet through a phone in my pocket and accessing the internet through a chip in my brain ISN'T that the chip makes me less human! It's that the stakes of the second option are significantly higher-- consider the problems with the internet of things, where people are getting their refrigerators locked by trolls, only now the trolls have access to your memories. I signed up for UA-cam with the understanding that I would get 1 ad for every few videos. Now I get 5 ads per video. This is annoying, but i still have the option to leave. I have that control. (adhd topic jump) Imagine an apple brand foot. You are not allowed to fix it yourself, and in a couple of years they'll lock it down and force you to buy a new one. Imagine it's not apple, it's from a brand new start up. The start up goes out of business. You can no longer walk.
@@edgarallenhoe3518 oh I got one imagine if there was a company who does all this cool on paper/actually bad in real life stuff like reusable rockets and a shittier underground railway only for specific brands of expensive electric cars, and they were trying to invent literal actual brain chips but they were just really bad at basic animal husbandry that all their animals they experimented on just fuckin died. Would be mad wouldn't it?
@@madeline6951 Imagine if it didn't make it's central bit about how neuropyzene is expensive but necessary totally moot in any country with universal healthcare?
Right...... yet continued +11000 patrons making monthly donations. His videos are always good, but if I had 11000 people donating a minimum of 2$ each a month (most giving at least $5), I wouldn't feel comfortable putting out a video once or twice a year, especially without considerable production costs.
@@moejuggler6033 I mean... the amount of work he puts into his _three and a half hour_ video pretty much accounts for that, I think. Yeah, it's like once a year, but it's like getting a movie once a year.
2:33:00 Also throwing stuff around IS a meaningful interaction. It's used in stealth to distract people, toss a physics object away from yourself to make guards turn around. Literally the *only* interaction in Deus Ex that doesn't interact with other systems are billiards tables (I mean, it makes noise but that's barely anything).
It's a tough question to answer, as it depends when you ask. Today, it's 2 Grammys and a Dice award. In a few years it will be 7 Grammys, 3 Dice Awards, 2 Oscars and a Nobel Prize.
My favourite part of Human Revolution was committing to the non lethal run achievement and finishing the game then remembering I killed the guys in the tutorial because I didn't have non lethal weapons and didn't sneak past them.
My favorite part was that I actually did finish the game non lethally but lost the achievement because apparently npcs will sometimes just die after being knocked out
I can't believe I just watched a 4 hour long review about a game I'd never heard of, that I don't care about, that came out more than a decade ago and that I will never play...but I was fully invested, immersed and entertained. I'm not even a real gamer. I just play sims 3 and Last Day On Earth on my phone. You are one hell of a storyteller Mr Bomber.
Same here- loved playing video games as a kid and had to quit because I'd get terrible migraines. But listening to him here on this video, all the info here to a now non-player, alot of analysis and critical thinking clearly goes into playing these games and articulated here so well, these vids gave me a lot to consider, while doing anything.
“I’m not even a real gamer” why are you gatekeeping yourself, you play games youre a gamer? they’re even desktop games I hear so many people spending huge chunks of their lives playing video games saying they’re not gamers. My husband played all the games mentioned in this video (that’s why I started watching it) and he also often says “but i’m not a gamer”. Yet he plays literally 99% of his days at least half an hour.
"The end result is like playing a fairly simple cover shooter while being lightly choked from behind by a game designer. Even when it's straightforward, it's still a little tense. And that's what makes it fun." - Harris "Sonic Lore Analysis" Bomberguy
The "Consequences" and "Level Design" section both feel like products of the 2010's AAA dev mentality that says players should never ever be frustrated by anything, which means that if you offer multiple playstyles then every single problem must be equally solvable by every single playstyle. In theory every player gets to have their own experience but in practice every player has the exact same experience; it's a smorgasbord of gameplay where everything just tastes like overcooked chicken.
Isn't multiple solutions to problems essential to immersive sims? If the only way to do X is to have augmentation Y and you don't have it, you either have to get it or you're stuck. But if there's multiple options, you can use the tools you have to find a way.
@@eileen1020 Yeah, but that doesn't mean all solutions should be equally accessible. Different approaches should be distinct: easier or harder, locked behind stat or item requirements, obscure or obvious... Otherwise choices are contextless and without consequence, leading to that overcooked chicken texture.
HBomberguy is probably the only video essayist i know of who would create, and then upload a video twice the run-time of a feature length film, discussing in excruciating detail why a game released over a decade ago, that no one else really cares about anymore, was just pretty ok.
Shows the downward spiral of UA-cam video essays. It's all about watch time and engagement. Nothing else matters. I will never forgive this guy for his Fallout 3 sucks video 💀
@@vinslungurI mean, realistically you'd get more watch time if you separated it between 6 30-minute videos so people don't get burnt out watching one massive video
@@vinslungur I mean, sure, that is indeed the trend and for sure true for most youtubers, who went from short, less than 10 minutes, vids to these langer, higher production 30 minutes vids. However, when you pick one specific topic and go super deep and create multiple hour things, that's beyond that trend. I think most casual viewers will bypass vids like that. These super long deep dives are more testiment to the creators being that special kind of crazy.
The best part about an Hbomberguy video is thinking "Oh man it sounds like he's reaching a conclusion, guess it'll be another 6 months until a new video" then realizing you still have 2 hours left in this one
@@bugdracula1662 and over 27 different panel endings based on when you paused the video and how many times you've watched it friending for fresh content. I swear it's a thing 😂
To be fair, having most objectives revolve around finding and getting into an elevator is very accurate to my experience as a mobility aid user but, not very epic and shoot-em-up style for a cyberpunk game
@@Appletank8 actually I'm personally very interested in the intersections between technology, cyberpunk, and the social concept of being disabled. If everyone else doesn't need sleep and can lift up a refrigerator, is an un augmented person placed into the contextual category of disabled? In the modern real world, not owning a car vastly impairs one's ability to participate in normal society. So would it be a form of disability, even though it exists outside the body itself? Would be very interesting to write about
I will say: the redeeming feature of the melee cinematics is that I remember it being very easy to hit the button by accident. So my thumb would slip and suddenly Jensen would, apropos of nothing, cinematically manhandle or punch a random NPC on the street
My favourite part of the takedowns in DXHR is that random, unsuspecting people would suddenly turn into trained fighters just so Jensen can stylishly punch them out.
The Icarus metaphor for augmentations IS actually pretty clever if you think about it: Icarus had man-made wings attached to his body that allowed him to reach heights never before thought possible, but the way those wings were crafted also had a key weakness, as the wax holding them together could melt off, trading a great ability for a certain risk Augmentations are man-made objects attached to one's body that allow them to do things never before thought possible, but the way they're crafted means they can be hijacked, trading a great ability for a certain risk They didn't have to hammer in that point a thousand times, but it's a clever metaphor
@@bsims4126 I'm so sorry that multiple people sharing the same idea in the youtube comments section agitates you so deeply. We all must've forgotten that you're only allowed to express a thought publicly if no one else has done it beforehand.
This video is exquisite for one main reason: I have only willingly watched it once, when it first came out. The other dozen times that I have watched it to completion are from when I fall asleep watching other videos and then inevitably wake up at 2am to him having a meltdown over this mid game and without fail, I end up just committing and watching it to the end. This is my personal fever dream. I didn't even know what Deus Ex was before this video
@@internetexplorer6304 Aye, when you're as used to corporate-speak as I (sadly) am, it's quite a nice thing to hear, since he could just easily have said, "it's great to work for them because chances are pretty decent I'll get to work on the sequel to one of my favourite games growing up," and it would basically have meant the same thing but, taking it at face value, it really doesn't sound like something someone genuinely excited to create awesome new games would say. I guess the deeper question is why their creatives feel the need to talk in corporate-speak in interviews at all.
"Our bosses hoard intellectual property and that's the nicest thing I can say about them" sure is a quote. But perhaps it was meant in the sense that the higher ups have enough business sense not to let their projects tank and thus there was some feeling of safety in their oversight.
@@Pineappolis Corporate-speak is safe. It's how management defines the talking points you're allowed to discuss, because that formalized dispassionate language is how PR and marketing describe their fields, because they're professionals writing reports for god-knows-who and not buddies giving friendly advice to people they know. Deviating from corp-speak risks stepping over one of the guidelines without realizing it until you get an angry email about it.
As someone who will inevitably wind up watching this entire video again every 18 months, I find it incredibly precious how APOLOGETIC and DEFENSIVE creators get about the length; if it was 6 hours long I would probably be ELATED
As someone who's going to watch it several times in the next few weeks, and then again every six months or so when I remember it or need Background Content while I work on something tedious-- mood.
I made a 4 and a half hour video recently because I wanted to. It reminded me of the early days of the internet when uploading a 5 minute video took 30 minutes-an hour. It was a fuzzy and warm nostalgia. (I also regularly stream DND for 2+2 hours a week. Mainly so the players can rewatch a session if they need to)
3:10:49 the robot eye being branded with a company logo actually illustrates a real-life problem of disabled people being forced into becoming walking advertisements for the company of their prosthetic. Kinda funny how you can gleam more commentary from an in-game ad compared to the entire of the anti-augmentation organisation.
On the topic of scarcity, I find it fascinating how they could have solved it by removing the regenerating health mechanic. If they gave players all the ammo they needed but kept the healing items scarce they would naturally avoid fights anyways when wounded. It would be another risk reward thing without having to completely fuck the loot and shopping mechanics.
They did that because they were worried players might end up in a frustrating situation where they have almost no health left and can't progress. I feel like they could just have capped the health regen at some low level and it would have achieved the same thing while not making healing items useless.
@@banana-rs3pv The devs had so many options available to them to make health systems interesting, I had no idea what they were thinking by making it regen. Or at least make it regen on the lower difficulties and not on "Give Me Deus Ex".
You know, HR's overemphasis on augs becomes EXTRA weird when you remember how rare and obscure it allegedly becomes in 20 story years. Like, lots of guards say stuff like "Careful, that guy is some kinda mech", and the barkeep in the Underworld's augs were a talking point the player could bring up and learn from. It was extraordinarily rare to be augmented, reserved for only the most elite of agents. How would they even explain this in-lore?
MD tries to begin to explain that, but the real answer is they should probably just not worry too much and embrace whatever story they're making even if it diverges from the original
Yeah, the prequels kind of mess up the universe in that regard. Original Deus Ex is fairly low tech (in the grand scheme of things) - New York is still grimy New York, Paris still has old architecture, etc. Mechanical augments are few and far between, and the nano augs that JC, Paul, and Simons have are bleeding edge tech. But then in the prequels you have a Chinese floating cybercity and millions of augmented poor people. Prequels always kind of conflict with originals in some regards, but it's kind of crazy in HR/MD. Like hbomberguy says in the video, they probably should've just made a completely new universe for this game, or at least stated they were rebooting the franchise. But they did neither of those things.
The idea I think they were intending to go with is that Jensen's story explains *why* Augs are so rare in the future games: you can see the kinds of devastation a massively augmented populace would cause. But then they failed the landing with their crippled endings, and *then* Square Enix choked Eidos Montreal to make a sequel to Human Revolution and the only way they could do that was to bring back Adam Jensen, even though the most coherent ending to his story is him dying at the bottom of the Arctic Ocean. Hbomb's tangent on how Publishers and marketing affect Game development is honestly the most insightful and important part of this essay.
@@UmbreonMessiah It seems to be implied by a number of things in MD that Jensen *did* die in the Arctic, and you're playing as some kind of Manchurian Candidate clone - the original's frozen torso, sans augs, can be found in the Versalife vault at Palisade Bank. The title screen shots two Adams facing each other, Eliza says he is inconsistent with her memories of him, parts of his own memory are missing or suppressed somehow, the Sarif sidequest suggests that even his original augs have different serial numbers, etc. It seemed like they were building something in this direction before they got the plug pulled on them. Hard to say for sure, but there's a good case to be made, and the Criminal Past DLC seems to underline it further.
@@Baronhaynes Goddammit, I will never be ok with how they cut off the series after ending Mankind Divided on a cliffhanger with no real resolution. ;_; Where's my actual conclusion, dammit!
I feel very lucky, i started watching my way through some of his classics this week for the first time in over a year and then he drops this in our lap
@@incapacitaterd I had literally just started another rewatch of his Bloodborne video when this video got uploaded. Feels like finding an oasis in a desert.
He's the George R. R. Martin of UA-cam video essays. Except, you know, he actually eventually drops something. I was actually thinking of searching his name and then thought "No, what are the odds something new is out?" and then got this dropped in my recommended videos a few hours later.
55:40 an easy cool change could have been: saving Sandervals brother and talking him down causes his brother to turn non-hostile when he shows up again, or even allows you to pass through a room that would normally have a tough combat encounter.
I think what drives me mad about the vent situation beyond the gameplay pigeonholing is just their absurdity. Vents are part of an HVAC system, heating and cooling. They're not just... linear tunnels that connect two points. Some central station is pumping temperature controlled air through them, and they're usually meant to be mostly out of sight high or low in a building as they perform the singular function of pushing air around. They're not just man-sized connecting tunnels just conveniently put through buildings like shortcuts, especially not to, of all things, directly link someone's office to THE SHITTER.
to be fair, that is just vents in most stories, not only videogames but movies and tv shows and books they make for good tunnels that lead everywhere and not a lot of people care about realism in those cases
@@carso1500 My favorite use of the fictitious version of vents is from the Middleman show (for anyone who remembers that), with the “Nakatomi Protocol”. Basically a fail safe in case Middleman HQ is compromised, expanding otherwise more realistic vents into strategic tunnels.
It seems they forgot that the Icarus myth wasn't about the danger of making wings, it was about the dual danger of complacency and hubris and considering for a moment that your dad, Daedalus, one of the most intelligent people alive, and the inventor of those wings, might know what he's talking about when he tells you not to be stupid with them. After all, Daedalus made it out fine on identical wings. Applying the actual Icarus myth to the solitary malnourished theme of Human Revolution ironically gets us a completely different message: "When presented with the invention of augmentation, don't be so complacent about the concept that you reject it entirely, like the puritans, dooming countless lives to suffer fates that could easily be averted. Equally do not be so ambitious and thoughtless in your implementation that you end up with people augmented on a whim, like the cheating couple that irreparably scarred their bodies due to a passing fancy. Instead, use the technology responsibly to help people and allow humanity to soar to new heights. After all, the wings of Daedalus lift you into freedom, they are not shackles binding you to the earth.
That would've been an amazing message! But the easiest conflict is always an us v them argument, and thus could only really use the sanitized and popular version of Icarus being too ambitious and falling.
@@cgkase6210 Indeed, which is one of the main reasons I absolutely hate the trend of super-simple broad appeal plots in videogames. The last big budget game I can remember that had an actually memorable point to make is what? Spec Ops: The Line? Since then it's only been indie gems like Undertale, Disco Elysium and Obra Dinn. And it gets even worse when games like Deus Ex are subjected to it, because a simplistic "us vs them" plotline has no buissiness being anywhere near something as philosophical as the fist game, and the sequel makes it even worse since the clumsy as hell racism analogy doesn't even hold up to basic scrutiny.
@Daniel-Adamczyk I disagree. political statements have a placenin video games just as much as they do in any other form of storytelling. Takd for exampld, the aforementioned spec ops: the line. Thag game is overtly political, and yet it manages to be a good game and an amazing story.
Hello, positive feedback here: I actually really liked how you don't spoonfeed the viewer a predictable script. I feel like a part of the conversation with the twists and turns, lies, reveals. It's all really great. 👍
The way he just cuts his sentences like "Finally we can start the ga--watch another cutscene" is like an art form all on its own. "I'll give you three guesses--it's Joey. It's always Joey."
@@luminatron The Tommy Tallerico video really makes that style shine with just how much you can tell he's slowly losing his sanity as the rabbit hole gets deeper
Tbf once you're into the third hour you really HAVE to start bringing out the other side of the argument, and admit that the centrists might have a point BUT ONLY ON THIS
@@biggest_mac5060 I was confused about what you were talking about, at first I thought it was the "3" I said, then I saw the funny number and my eyes bulged
very weird to me that "choices in rpgs" generally come down to being nice in dialogue and how you get to kill people. of course there are exceptions, but in a genre where we expect choices to matter why dont they actually matter edit: i understand that making genuinely meaningful choices is more work and that AAA development pipelines and publisher mandates do not make that sort of game possible. i know that work goes in to making games. i guess it would have been more accurate to ask 'why is "meaningful choice" a selling point for these games that dont have any meaningful choices'
Or how the "You can do anything you want" promise of open world rpgs always seems to be that you can steal and kill without consequence. I remember way back in the stone age when my friend was trying to sell me on this new game called Oblivion, one of the first things he said was that it was cool you could kill most NPCs in the game and it would keep going. Is there a purpose to it? No, not really. But it provides the illusion of choice just like the dialogue options of "Yes", "Yes but snarky", "Maybe later" or "No (yes)"
There's a really good video by the great Errant Signal on why AAA games will never really move beyond shooters and platformers. I can't really summarize it well, but it has to do with the input possibilities and the work that different outputs require. But "interactive novels" with lots of branching paths have reached new peaks the past years!
@W Shiflet if theyre not willing to actually make a game with consequential decisions, maybe they shouldnt be selling the game based on how consequential those decisions are. all im sayin' is that im tired of games telling me my Choices Matter when they dont. although i guess no choice in any game matters because games are all fictional
I unironically love Fallout's hacking mechanic. Sure, it's not very realistic, and hbomb's critique of it is very valid, but I genuinely enjoy doing the hacking more than any other mechanic in that game I think. I think it's even what first hooked me into the series, because I thought it was such a fun little minigame that I'd never seen before. Its kinda funny how things that some people find tedious can be very enjoyable for others.
I'm also a fan of both the bioshock and fallout mini games. They're good downtime, something different for sure. I think hbomb's issue is with their implementation (specifically the over use of these mini games). For example, walk and talk sections in games are fine, I think the first couple of Gears of War games nail this (the 2nd moreso, as you can choose to skip several of them). However, in DE:HR, not only are they unskippable, they are long and flanked by elevator rides (which means down time from the down time) Idk, if you get satisfaction out of the hacking mini games, you shouldn't feel bad or weird. It's just different tastes after all
When I took game design in college the professor would constantly remind us "What does the player DO" because it was so easy to get caught up in your story and setting. This sounds like what happened here.
I actually worked on this game! I was the lead sound designer for the project and worked with David Sariff for the full development! He was really cool! We started by making sounds for the abilities, and then the animation designers would be inspired by our sounds and make cool stuff with it
sometimes explaining why something is aggressively average and OK takes twice as long as explaining why something is good or bad. Because you have to do both.
I imagine that someday I'll be explaining to someone's grandchildren, "You don't understand. HBomb was so good at the craft that I sat through and actually enjoyed a three and a half hour takedown of a game I've never heard of and would never play."
@@TheDalekCaan_ I have to be super careful with video games. If I get too deep I won't do other things, like eating or going to work. So I pretty much ignore the triple A game space. These days I mostly just check out whatever FTP games will run on my win7 laptop.
In some ways, the body upgrades reflect the games perfectly. The original Deus Ex presented transhumanism as having a modular body that changed how you interacted with the world based on your choices. Human Revolution presents transhumanism as inevitable and having a specific, final body by the end of the story. Two very different takes that match their source games
I credit this video with getting me interested in trying Deus Ex, and I knew the game really was all it was cracked up to be when I crowbarred a pimp to death, got a lead on a warehouse in the local tiny hub area, clumsily stealthed my way through the abandoned warehouse, whacked all the guards to death because I didn't dump any points into gunplay and blew up the generator from up on the rooftop, only to walk down into the mess and find a whole other route to the damned thing I had no idea existed.
They make a breadcrumb trail in the Sarif offices/emails the second time around about a thief, assuming you stole everything in the offices the first time around. If you were instead a turbo dork who was like, no i won’t steal my fictional co workers’ things (only read their private correspondence) then instead of what seems like a clever reaction to your previous actions you instead end up the detective following a crime that didn’t actually happen
Here's an idea: Purity First's leader didn't rip out his eye because having one is sinful, he had it removed after his boss used it to spy on his trade union meetings. He knows that Sarif Inc. won't stop at replacing organs or limbs, but *minds* as well. Imagine a workforce that always follows orders and never sleeps, with bodies and personalities custom tailored to suit corporate interests. The game could break the fourth wall and talk about how smartphones used to serve this purpose, but could always be switched off...
That would work but your villains don't have to be socialists to be compelling. I think it's fine to make them hardcore religious types who thought human augmentation was bad entirely on moral grounds, They should have been better written but you don't have to make it all about how capitalism is bad. I mean all those themes about worker's rights stuff is good and should have been in there but there are other perspectives too, and people who oppose transhumanism in general (not just *unequal* transhumanism).
@@warron24Ok what if, and stay with me here, _both_ groups were allowed to exist as villains at the same time? That way there would be interesting interactions between the two (or more) groups as their ideologies may clash and overlap, causing them to work together or independantly at times, perhaps even stepping on each other's toes or sabotaging/attacking the other as they attempt to establish an anti-augmentation world in their own way. It would certainly give less of a chance for the player to instantly dismiss the villain's arguments because irl they hold the personal belief of "religious people crazy" or "socialism bad" and immediately shut off their brains.
I want to take a minute to compliment you as a writer. I'm going to be honest - I'm not really much of a video game person, and when I started this video, I neither knew about nor cared about Deus X. I was just really looking for more long-format high-quality video essays from you, and I was like 'ugh fine I'll watch a video game essay to hear more hbomberguy.' I'm at the end of this video fully invested in the idea of creating meaningful challenges and opportunities for creativity in video games, and I could talk about why Deus X was revolutionary for the industry that I otherwise know next to nothing about. I laughed at your jokes, listened to your takes with rapt attention, and cared about what you cared about, because you're damn good at what you do. I really appreciate your work.
Messed up that they make u watch this whole video as a cut scene before u get to any of the gameplay in Mankind Divided imo
Mod that plays this whole video in parts instead of the original cutscenes
LOL That's how the _original_ Deus Ex starts.
Hahaha. Damn.
@@romxxii except the original DX allows you to skip to the gameplay instead of holding you hostage to watch the entirety of their lovely cutscene.
@@kaptenlemper Er, I dunno what you're talking about, the cutscenes on DX: Mankind Divided are skippable once the pre-caching is done. You're not "held hostage" to watch cutscenes, that's a Hideo Kojima experience you're thinking of.
I find it very funny that the slow fall mod is called the Icarus Landing System when Icarus, quite famously, did not land safely.
Hahaha true true, maybe it's because the electricity (or what ever it is) that is exerted when the system is activated, is yellow thus resembles the sun? Granted, the whole game is yellow.
'The landing system Icarus wishes he had' didn't roll off the tongue very well, I guess.
He did the Opposite of landing safely 😭😭😭😂
But I guess it could also be symbolic of people learning from Icarus’ experience and not flying too close to the sun, of learning how to land safely instead of. What he did
Bro icarus like, when you reach too far, so like, you fall, just like our society!!!! This is so deep
It's extra funny since they also used Icarus' iconography for Jensen in one of the trailers Cx
You have to respect the thoroughness of the man. Most people say “fine” because they don’t want to go into any detail. He needed to take some extra time to explain why it’s not ‘great’ or ‘bad’.
They dont call it "fine details" for nothing.
Except Human Revolution is a near masterpiece. It's the greatest immersive sim ever made and offers a freedom of approach still unmatched in ANY game, TEN YEARS later. This is a terrible video.
"Some extra time"
@@FuzzyDlop I'm glad you liked it, and you are welcome to share your subjective opinion.
But since doing so is an invitation for other opinions...eh. It built upon what came before, so saying it was unmatched is...objectively untrue. The original deus ex had more open endedness, and did so a ridiculous amount of time earlier. Especially since until they patched it, HR literally had huge complaints specifically about how restrictive the choices were for boss fights, even compared to other games.
And how the world itself has similar things to fallout, where investing in hacking could feel like a waste, or you would deliberately avoid the other ways, so you could eke out every bit of xp from it instead of finding the passwords people were leaving literally everywhere...which doesn't literally reduce the open endedness but it does funnel people towards similar things.
@@FuzzyDlop "A freedom of approach still unmatched in any game"? Reallly? Come on.
i love that guy who either calls you attila the hun or ghandi based on whether or not you killed people in the mission because he's just mad at you no matter what you do. if you didn't go to the mission because you had the flu, you'd come in and he'd be like WELL WELL, IF IT ISN'T TYPHOID MARY. I GUESS YOUR ROBOT ARMS CAN'T ACCEPT A FLU SHOT, CAN THEY? DON'T ANSWER THAT. I DON'T WANT TO BE EXPOSED TO COVID-38
s-tier writing, absolutely nailed what's-his-face's vibe
@@CooledJetsI think it'd Pritchard
He's such a fucking asshole
I love him
@@michaeluwuowo
Pritchard is not that big of an asshole. He's the cool asshole.
(Jensen comes in with donuts for everyone)
Pritchard: "WELL IF IT ISN'T FRED THE BAKER HIMSELF-"
...
.
edited because I thought the Dunkin Donuts guy was named Bob
Didn't even play this game, but I'm interested in this 3 hour hbomberguy video
Im glad to see that every good content creator also watches hbomberguy
I have never heard of this game, but a 3 hour hbomberguy video is a godsend.
3 hours and 33 minutes and 33 seconds lol
He could talk about paint drying for 10 hours and I would still watch it 10 times.
Same
This video is so interesting to drop right after that story about people who got prosthetic, electronic eyes implanted by a company that no longer supports the technology. Basically, the robot eyes allowed people with certain types of blindness to see varying levels of shapes and shades of black and white, which for many people allowed them much greater freedom in navigating the world. But the technology wasn't sufficiently profitable so the company just... stopped supporting the technology. People's eyes began breaking down and there's essentially no way to have them repaired. If they break, they're just broken: you don't get to see anymore. So I think there's a possibly rich story here about what happens when you choose to be augmented but have very little control over what happens to that technology once it's actually implanted in your body and the sort of inherent terror that your body might just stop functioning and there's nothing you can do about that. Feels like something people might have a lot of rich and complex feeling about that could be explored very effectively by a protagonist who is heavily augmented but not by choice, since he has to live with that or die, idk tho...
Very interesting. Could be a very fleshed out short story, just on that premise alone.
I wouldn't want augmentations, not in a world where Apple and John Deere fuck over their customers over the simplest shit.
“Sorry sir we no longer support your version of heart… you can either upgrade to a new version or go to another business… sir… sir…. Oh”
Ixians would never do that to you
"the inherent terror that your body might just stop functioning and there's nothing you can so about that"
That already happens. Heart attacks, strokes, etc. You can die or suffer permanent disability randomly any time. Augmentations don't really add too much to that concept.
@@carcrashjayson but that could be factored into the story in an interesting way, the closest HR gets is when you have to go debt collecting on someone’s black market aug because they couldn’t keep up in their line of work without it. The whole game should’ve been more of that, that as the enforcer of one of these tech/pharmaceutical companies you see first hand how much this stuff can help someone who desperately needs it, create a false sense of hope and grind people into paste for cash, and everything beyond and in between. The fact that the ONLY time someone says “hey I know this stuff can help ordinary people but isn’t it kinda fucked how much the military is putting money into this to turn soldiers even less into people” is during that boring Megan walk and talk sucks, and the fact she just goes “yeah but need money to get Tiny Tim his robot legs” is even more shitty.
2:19:48 The vent that leads *DIRECTLY TO HIS OFFICE* leads you there from the *BATHROOM*. It's like the level designers are making fun of their own design. That vent can ONLY exist to make that guy's office smell like piss. There's no other explanation.
@@gregoryford2532 in-game, there is no other outlets. Homie got that SOLID METAL TUBE
the whole game is so badly designed especially maps. "vents" they say...
Taking the piss, huh?
Office guy had it designed that way on purpose. They are trying to secretly tell the player that he has a piss kink.
Reminds me of FF7, where a vent in the Shinra building directly connects a bathroom with a meeting room, and everyone is constantly asking why the room smells so bad. I refuse to believe this man's office does not smell like piss always and all the time.
One of my favourite Mark Rober videos is the self-playing piano, because when he tries to simplify the key mechanism, he finds that every part of it is essential, and nothing can be removed or altered without preventing the whole system from working properly.
This is a really good comment
I think this says a lot more about Mark Rober than design more generally
My main issue with the game was that i was going for a full stealth playthrough.Jensen was a master infiltrator and hacker when controlled by me, who was never detected and left a trail of unconscious hostiles in his wake. Yet as soon as the FEMA cutscene started Jensen, who up untill then crouched more than walked, suddenly decided walking into a room, without even trying to hide, in the middle of hostile territory was a good idea, and just got caught by Barrett.......
Yeah Jensen is an absolute idiot in cutscenes and it's annoying
not just the barrett fight, any boss fight. i remember my first time playing against the first boss, i did the same exact thing you did and i got so mad i was internally screaming at jensen
My issue is that you can't change your mind part way through to play it differently. If you chose the assault option, you can't get the tranquilizer gun later on to the stealthy.
@@VariablePenguin i didnt even know that cuz i only played stealth lol
@@pasty9276 I played stealth too, but it was much harder because I had to sneak up and knock everyone out.
the fact that hbmomber can jus drop a video thats longer than a full length feature film about a decade + old video game once a year and get 2.7 million people to watch it is fucking mindblowing sorcerer shit. thisnis my 3rd time through and ive never played the game
The effects of quality over quantity really is amazing, isn't it?
illegal, play deus ex it was 85% off
Same I'd never heard of this series because I'm a fake gamer girl I guess
@@SCARaw i dont have a computer 😿
I've seen the whole thing at least 30 times now. But I have played both games, so I can't claim the "I love this long-ass video about a thing I've never heard about" badge.
Update: Square-Enix is now selling Eidos Montreal and the Deus Ex intellectual property to Embracer Group AB, which was previously known as THQ Nordic AB (not to be confused with its subsidary THQ Nordic GmbH or the original owner of the THQ trademark THQ Inc.) THQ Inc. went bankrupt in 2012 and sold their trademark to Nordic Games Licensing AB in 2014, which is when Nordic Games Licensing AB changed its name to THQ Nordic AB and changed the name of its subsidary Nordic Games GmbH to THQ Nordic GmbH. Does that make sense to everyone else?
But what about Gex?!
@@DoubleATam was part of the package, embracer groop owns him now
also toomb rider and legacy of kain
@@lordlizard2195 Hope Embracer does smth with the properties
Oh ya. Crystal clear! 😐
I fell asleep to this video yesterday and dreamed I was in an office building in Montreal and Hbomb was following me around wearing a suit explaining how that building had bad level design
I was waking up during the RWBY video and had a dream that the video had very different visuals and UA-cam had an ugly UI. Waking up was quite confusing.
I actually use his videos to fall asleep. I've watched them too many times already. 😅
That sounds funny and kinda scary
i feel like falling asleep during a hbomberguy video is like a rite of passage
I had a dream Hbomb tried to kill me. He said it pretty violently and loudly and chased me through a walmart. It was less like a funny dream and more like the end of the shining.
Honestly I feel like if augmentations were real, radical groups who hated “all augmentations indiscriminately” while wearing glasses feels all too real.
Augmentations are real? Wheelchairs, glasses, hearing aids, prosthetic limbs. I actually don’t know that much about disability politics though
@@TorrentialStardust nah, augmebtations are not real, none of those things you listed are an augmentation in any way. Yes, robot hands are cool as hell, but a normal ass hand is superior in every way. And it’ll stay that way forever
@@buffoonustroglodytus4688 You're who OP was talking about.
@@buffoonustroglodytus4688 forever? probably not
for a long while still? yea
@@a-rat-in-your-walls 90% sure he's joking bro
Vents are such a gaming trope that I find so unrealistic. Even the vent part you show why is that vent there? Why is it not connected to any AC system? Why are vents big enough to crawl through? Is there a single real life moment someone managed to crawl through a vent to be stealthy? You know how loud that would be even if you managed to crawl through one big enough to fit in?
Perhaps they are service tunnels and not vents. They are used for emergency burrowing in case of emergency.
@@RosesAndWhine as a claustrophobic person. Naw. I’ll die.
Even when they are big enough to crawl through, vents are usually filled with nails and sharp edges, because when you're hammering together a long winding vent, you're not thinking about how crawlable it is, you're making sure the various pieces don't blow themselves apart when the air's pushed through them.
"Attention, test prisoners attempting to escape through the air ducts. I don't know what nonsense you learned on TV, but in real life, air ducts just go to the air conditioning unit. It's also pretty dusty, so if you've got asthma, chances are you're gonna die up there. And we'll be smelling it for weeks because, again, the air ducts aren't a secret escape hatch, they're how we ventilate the facility."
Cave Johnson, Warden of Terra-Three penal science colony.
I always enjoy when series or movies break that trope with loud noises or them falling through the ceiling and shit.
People who want his videos to be shorter are wrong, this is the ideal hbommerguy video length
I want to watch it _now_ and also go to bed at a sensible time though
@@RoamingAdhocrat that's what chapters are for
You might not like it, but this is what peak Hbomberguy looks like
it's perfect to cook, eat, do the dishes and make a dessert while you're at it lol
It's the perfect length.
"Is it good? I don't know, but it's definitely THE MOST" is a line that always makes me laugh. I don't care what I do for a living, if this isn't how my work is described I haven't done a good job
"We don't know he owns the boat. That's not in the Wiki."
Makes me chuckle every time.
"That's one of the most important movies ever made. I can't wait to see it!" is my favorite bit in the whole video, the earnestness of the delivery makes me smile every time
Truly MandaloreGaming's greatest line read.
@@edgarallenhoe3518 1:56:11 in den so die I have no strong reason for that if I don't have any of them are you still really in your room and I'm going on a new trip with a little more and I have been unable from you but it will help me out with you in my room and your house and the family will take the time for the next little time and then we have the same place to go with it in a little more way than me to be able from the way I 1:58:56 will 1:58:56 1:58:56 1:58:56 1:58:57 1:58:57 in 1:58:57 1:58:57 so 1:58:57 was 1:58:57 1:58:57 1:58:57 die 1:58:57 1:58:57 1:58:57 1:58:58 1:58:58 in 1:58:59 1:58:59 1:58:59 1:58:59 1:58:59 1:59:00 1:59:00 1:59:01 1:59:01 1:59:01 in 1:59:02 so I'm 1:59:03 in 1:59:06 1:59:23 1:59:23 1:59:24 1:59:24 1:59:24 1:59:24 1:59:24 1:59:24 1:59:24 1:59:24 1:59:24 1:59:24 1:59:26 1:59:27 1:59:27 1:59:27 1:59:28 1:59:28 1:59:28 1:59:28 1:59:28 1:59:28 1:59:28 1:59:28 1:59:28 1:59:29 1:59:29 1:59:29 1:59:29 1:59:29 1:59:33 k
@@edgarallenhoe3518that line catches me off guard every time lol what do you mean it's so important that you've never even seen it but remark upon it
I didn't even know "butthole" was the french word for boat
Why is nobody talking about the incredible voice actors he got for the recreation of the opening walk around where Adam just annoys his ex about anime
Love how the one guy hasn't even seen the movie he's shilling
Jensen's voice actor is Mandalore.
@@MegaCygnusX1 THANK you
Oh it is absolutely mandalore gaming dudes iconic
Oh my god, it was so good I thought it was real!
The theme of augmentation gets even more muddled in Mankind Divided, both for better and for worse. They really lean into the augmentation argument = racism thing and it makes less sense. It's harder to take the conflict seriously when the reason for your oppression lets you turn invisible and make your hand into a knife. But it managed to do one thing completely by accident. According to a friend of mine, it managed to capture the experience of being Arabic in a post 9/11 North America eerily well. The racism isn't based in hatred or a superiority complex, it's based in fear. They see you not as vermin but as an enemy whose existence is a threat. The "augs only" train cars were probably a hack job attempt at referencing "back of the bus" racism, but it accidentally managed to recreate the experience of seeing others breezing through airport security while you are forced to take extra tests and have all eyes on you. He even said it managed to give him the same feelings of feeling like you should be ashamed for something you haven't done. Adam wasn't the one who pressed the button that turned construction workers' hands into zombies, but he feels the need to somehow make up for the actions of the guy who did. Of course I have no reason to believe this was on purpose, so it just becomes funny that the most emotional resonance I have seen the game have was by accident.
why do so many modern games discussing the implications of synthetic sentience and human augmentation build so heavily on the racism narrative? The writers are so fucking devoid of any interesting perspective on the issue that doesn't tie into something you can spoonfeed an audience of babies, its like they don't even read literature from the genre they've been hired to work on a game for. Beyond there being a million interesting perspectives and tropes to build on, whats really offensive is how it makes issues of actual racism second-hand in those universes. Not only is it bland and uninspired, when used the way video game writers do it weakens discourse around racism by association.
@@elfpi55-bigB0O85 this is a... horrific take.
@@TwitchyCake how so?
@@TwitchyCake not really
Or so I've been told by my Mr bomber
I feel like the silent killer of that entire era of RPGs were endings that were three options you pick in the very last moments of the game
Can you tell me more examples
@@EmmaBonn96 The main one that comes to mind is Mass Effect 3, since it took three entire games for your choices to evaporate due to a three-option ending. Fable 2 and 3 had similar set ups where there was an illusion of choice (although, in Fable 2 is a lot less guilty since the final choices can slightly alter the game's population).
@@lucky_veruca Following Mass Effect 3, you had Dragon Age: 2, which didn't give you a three-option ending...it gave you a TWO-option ending instead. Literally the two things you have control over in that game are which of the two endings you go for, and how many people die before you get there.
Dragon Age 2 came out before Mass Effect 3, but the point still stands.
I always hated those endings in those games.
immersive Sims arent always rpgs
My favorite and most memorable experience in HR was non-lethally taking out every single cop in the police station as stealthily as possible (so that nobody outside of maybe one or two near me that were swiftly dispatched) were alerted in any way, then packing them all into a single small vent, only to discover that the physics engine doesn't like that and having the bodies explode everywhere, getting stuck in walls, and killing many of them. Later did the same thing at the hive, seeing how many could be packed into a bathroom stall before critical mass was achieved. Still got the pacifist achievement that run im pretty sure.
A hell of a good time to be sure, but says something about the game's depth.
did you... end up having your workplace issues fixed then?
Dude that's literally how I play every Deus Ex game. In Mankind Divided, during the curfew, I cleared all the patrolling units on the street by knocking them out and piling them up in bins, rooms, air ducts, etc.
@@humphreyspellingbee1732 LMAO
haha, I did a similar thing in Mankind Divided - I took out everyone in the nightclub in Prague and piled up all of the bodies on the bed in one bedroom. By the end of it the framrate was in the single digits when you entered the room.
So all those cops died but the game decided it wasn’t your fault and the engine did it. You’re a genius.
Petition to have Deus Ex: Human Revolution is FINE, And Here's Why: Directors Cut Edition with the 2 hour Stalker rant intact.
This comment deserves more likes
@@FnSpiralMedia And thank you random citizen
You've got my signature for this petition. Knowing Harris's upload schedule, there's plenty time for this petition to go through.
Release the madman cut!
@@baburnit Rachel can't stop all of us! *zapped*
This is really interesting actually, when my kid sister got addicted to Uncharted developed the exact same vocabulary for blaming "Cutscene Drake", like he was a separate entity, whenever the game showed her the main character doing something cool she didn't get to do herself, or when he went down to the kind of hit she'd learned he'd have been able to shrug off while she was controlling him.
I heard Tommy Talarico worked hand in hand with Deux X himself
Amazing how he worked together with John Ion Storm to create such a masterpiece
That's also what I heard
It’s so cool how they let him do all the voices and then designed the characters around that.
JC Denton was a huge fan of his - they always talked about working together
@@timob1681JC Denton's mother is very proud
I’m not going to make fun of how long this is, I am going to say how impressive it is that you got it to be perfectly 3:33:33
Well he just made the credits very slow and put music over it
you must be one of those who are easily impressed, because this is a pretty easy edit to achieve. I once edited the battlestar galactica first episode of season 1 called 33, trying to improve the series by removing all the angel/psychological bullshit. And removing the bullshit from that episode dropped it down to 33.00min, exactly. Coincidence? i think not!
@@ericaugust1501 you must be one of those that likes to brag about things that you already admit to being easy. I know how video editing works. I know it’s simple to get it it to be exactly how long you want it to be. Something being simple to do doesn’t mean it’s any less impressive to go through with and get past UA-cam messing with time limits on videos. I’ve seen UA-cam make minute long videos read as 59 or even 61 seconds. I just wanted to make a fun comment in response to his own self acknowledgment of the length. Now I’d be equally impressed if we could just leave it at that, even though that seems like an easy task
to bad it wasn't released on the 3rd
@@lukecraver7966 you must be one of the those who doesn't know when others are fucking with them with another fun comment.
As a developer, I appreciate that in the first 20 minutes you really tackle the "Couldn't they just" argument head on. A lot of the time people think studios can still wave magic wands and solve problems the way they used to. Games have reached a level of fidelity and complication that that's slowly become more and more impossible.
Just because you can explain why something sucks doesn't somehow make it suck less.
There's a reason why people go "this indie title with like five people did this, why can't (other game) do that?!" And that reason is that those indie, pixelart-style games hide a major thing under the hood: they're focusing on one thing and don't have to deal with some major company trying to force that thing to take a new shape, that indie company is on their own dime, so they can toss years of work out without a larger company hanging and quartering them, they're using intentionally old-looking or stylized graphics so they don't have to deal with five million and one physics/rendering issues, or a combination of the above.
This is before the issues that can befall ANY game development: game bloat, weird bugs that need dark magic to solve and they just use a niche patch that they hope won't clash with some technology of the future, engine limitations, interpersonal conflicts, hoping to god that nobody has the same idea and does it better than the team, The terrible realization that Important Feature 1 relies on something that has essentially been removed or is just not FUN, and how to finish the dang game.
Nobody cares about the development process at the end of the day. The game sucks, end of story.
@@gum8191 ... i care, it tells about how and why the game sucked.
I'm an author and the thought of having to finish a novel in the first draft without being able to go back and, you know, fix things quite literally gives me anxiety.
Not making fun of the video length but at the fact that there are subtitles ON A 3 HOUR VIDEO. Massive props!
Yeah, I really appreciate that
And quality subtitles at that!
Changing the location of the subs to the top or bottom of screen depending on the visibility and readability of the game footage w/dialogue boxes and denoting who is speaking when switching between different speakers. Love to see it.
oh my god thank you for saying that, i just assumed they wouldn’t be there and was fighting for my life out here
I can't even begin to describe how rare this is
Really appreciate that as well: i have weird audio processing issues sometimes, so its nice to have subtitles and know im not criticlyy mishearing something
Welcome back everyone for our 17th rewatch of this video which for some reason can be watched again and again and it feels fresh everytime.
Okay the assumption that I don't want Gex to show up in Kingdom Hearts and kiss Goofy is utterly inaccurate! If society needs to crumble to see that happen, it was weak to begin with.
Finally somebody says it
I mean, is society even worth saving at that point?
Gay furries can destroy society just by existing, didn't you know?
@orestes0883 yes, I 2ouod rather live than die in the corporate hellscape that is the apocalypse
2:47:31 my favourite part about the vending machine consipracy is that it also turns out to be somewhat true. In the sequel invisible war you can listen to some homeless people in the ruins of the unatco building talking about the contents of this vending machine, and it turns out the machine was stocked with ONLY lemon-lime
oh thats really funny. i love that joke
We wanted ORANGE
❤
that is amazing
I used to work in a lockshop and the majority of the door hardware and locks we sold/installed were from brands that were all owned by assa abloy (yale, schlage, mul-t-lock, etc). All of these brands almost directly competed with each other too. So technically all the door locks in the game being made by the same company isn't actually that unrealistic
And all of them can probably be bumped or combed, because making better locks doesn't have a profit incentive.
Lock Picking Lawyer taught me this
Assa Abloy owns Master Lock??
@@toadfrommariokart64 they dont actually i got that part wrong. they do own arrow though
@@tadferd4340 not necessarily, all the individual brands/companies still do their own thing so they're all different. medeco and mul-t-lock are still high security and difficult to pick and schlage has really wacky keyways that can make jamming a tool in a bit harder
"Conceal- carry Buster sword" - It's been a nearly two years and that line still slays me.
“Please don’t make fun of how long this is” as if long, comprehensive deep dives aren’t why we love this channel.
35:55 Loving the details in the IKEA joke.
Popular youtuber Harris Bomberguy creating a 1h45m deep-dive into the origins of antivax misinformation: The hero we needed. 🥺
Popular youtuber Harris Bomberguy creating a 3h30m lecture about his own weird video game opinion: The hero we deserved. 💀
"please don't make fun of how long this is" is exactly what i said to your mom
Yes
there is a genre of Tweeters whose only critique of long form deep dive videos is "it's too long lol what a nerd"
Fun fact about the Shadowrun comparison: the Humanity stats is actually relatively new, and in the original incarnation of the game it represented the degree of control that corporations could exert over your life through their control of resources you need to live. It was changed to Prosthetics Make You Evil when the original company writing the game was bought out by a much bigger company lol
I like this. Thank you
I just have to say that the point of Humanity in Shadowrun and Cyberpunk is not ableist, no, rather, it's the opposite. It's meant to represent how corporations have shifted the blame onto regular people for them actively ruining the world and pushing people to get more and more cybernetics. People don't go crazy because they have prosthetics, getting a lot of prosthetics in a cyberpunk setting is a symptom of other mental illnesses. It's closer to an addiction metaphor than anything else.
@@simoneidson21 I don’t think claiming it’s a metaphor for addiction makes it *less* ableist. Like, “Each beer you drink reduces your Humanity” would be a pretty fucked up thing for a game to have too.
@@The5lacker How so? Is addiction not a problem that capitalism makes worse?
Wow
Me when a movie I really want to see is 120 min long: awghhn that is too long 😭
Me when Hbomberguy releases a 200+ min long video about a game I have no interest in ever playing: MY GOD THIS IS THE IDEAL LENGHT I CAN'T WAIT TO WATCH IT A MILLION TIMES
Playing this in the background and hearing Shaun's voice out of nowhere was so jarring. I thought I'd passed out and missed an auto-play skip where Shaun was coincidently also talking about Deus Ex.
He got Dan Olson too. I was so tickled 😅
rewatching this again and im just thinking like. the themes of augmentation and disability are just so interesting- zeke sanders is shown to totally rip out his augmented eye because he hates it, and for the reason he does it is ridiculous, but it totally could be reasonable to do that in some situations. like, zeke couldve ripped it out because he didnt believe losing an eye was a detriment or made him less worthy as a person, and the eye augmentation wasnt an option he chose but something forced on him to make him more 'useful'. its a conversation ive seen especially deaf people have- coclear implants for instance can create a sensation similar to sound and be useful to some deaf people, but they also destroy any leftover hearing they have in that ear and can be a real challenge to adjust to. basically, these aids can be overhyped and come with their own drawbacks, but are *marketed* as complete 'cures' to disability. it also encourages disability to be seen as a problem to be fixed, which for a lot of disabled people it just isn't, even if its the overwhelming view that it is in modern societies.
(some disabled people would obviously love cyborg legs and all that, including me tbf, but i dont think these are really *cures* to disability- theyre augmentations (wow!) or mobility aids. like, you'd have to do maintainance on a cyborg leg you just wouldnt have to on a fleshy human leg, and any metal parts would have the huge disadvantage of not healing on their own obviously.)
sorry for any poor sod that comes across my rambling lol, i just have a lot of thoughts
I really like that take on it!
Could also go the way that he had to rip the eye because he couldn't afford the neuroposine once he was out of the force - making him open his eyes (lol) about how the augmentations could be used as a leash.
it's very common in deaf culture to dislike cochlear implants actually, more than just because of their physical effects, but because they make you "less deaf" and deaf people enjoy the culture they are a part of. gallaudette university won't let people who have the ability to hear learn at their school, obviously because they can only teach so many people and they are a famously deaf institute, but this means that dead culture and the dead community is one people will work to stay in, and you'll see people go as far as to literally flush the external part of their cochlear implant down the toilet, because they value being a part of their community and their identity as a deaf person over the extra ability to hear. it's fascinating really and a lot of people would call that stupid because why would you get rid of your ability to hear, but to others it's absolutely reasonable. I went to school in gallaudette's old campus, know asl, and spent hundreds of hours with deaf people and it's immensely interesting to see cultures like that come together even when the people are spread out evenly across the world. fun fact, deaf people hate Alexander Graham Bell because he tried to destroy sign language in the U.S.
As someone with erbs palsy having a cybernetic arm would be fucking SICK but also thats a really interesting point
thats a very interesting take, i love hearing niche opinions!
Cool vid, i look forward to finishing it over the next 4 weeks
I’m going to watch this in one sitting like a maniac.
those are rookie numbers
@@Houfaaa right?
It's 1am, I'm 25 minutes in and I'm finishing this tonight.
Big fan of your videos man
@Murks What’s rookie numbers?
Finding out the patient’s response to being told to off himself at 1:51:00 wasn't fake dialogue recorded by Hbomb for the video and is in fact a real scene in the game is breaking my brain
He really said it's for twinks???
@@EL-jq1sqProbably with less… cultural background than we might use it
Canada in 2023 be like:
@@fidget0227I don't believe there's ever been another use for it outside of Twinkies, but it's the character saying it not the writers. Same way all the white people saying the n word in Django aren't necessarily racist
@@TheMurderBird twink isn't a slur or anything, it's just surprisingly modern to see something that old use gay slang
Wait, you don't understand, as a Ukrainian, I need that 2-hour STALKER essay
You and me both, pal.
Why? So you can release the Stalker Zone creatures on Russia?
@@johnsatan117 ...maybe >:)
Get out of here S.T.A.L.K.E.R
the part about the og Deus Ex being 'suprisingly linear' reminds me of a quote from a dev I once heard "the best type of linear, is when the player doesn't realise how linear it was until later" as a devloper, that stuck with me as it's entirely true. If the storytelling can let players think that it's them making the decisions, linear storytelling has been done well
So... something like Telltale games?
@@subira8518 If you mean the first time you play any Telltale game, yes. If you mean the second time you play any Telltale game, then no.
There's a great article by Shamus Young about how the airboat chase in Half-Life 2 makes it feel like you're constantly making choices and picking your own route through the canals... But it's actually just pretty much one path with a bunch of dead-ends that make it look like you could've gone there. The trick is that the level is designed in such a way that in the heat of a chase where you're under pressure and panicking you'll almost certainly pick the one correct path, because the incorrect dead-end paths are all way, way harder to reach or put in places where you'll spot them too late to go down them. The level design guides you through so well that you can't tell there isn't actually other paths.
But it really does FEEL like you're making split-second decisions on your feet and weaving your own way down these sprawling canals, and that's all that's needed to make the chase really intense and tonnes of fun. Even after countless replays knowing those tricks it still gets my adrenaline pumping every time.
So it’s a conspiracy to create an illusion of choice? That’s terror
@@bohdanvakulenko4266 you’re thinking of capitalism
Gonna be completely honest here, Mr. Bomberguy: In my opinion, the worst part of this video was where I had to explain to my family that I couldn't hang out because I was too busy watching a three and a half hour video about how a game I've never played, and that came out a long time ago was FINE.
Otherwise, I enjoyed every second!
.,
Could have taken a break and come back to watch it
...Whoosh? Should I have added an "/s"? Lol.
It's actually a 3:33:33.33333 long video.
"that came out a long time ago", WHAT. 2011 isn't a long time ago it's onlyohmygod it's 11 years ago, what is my life.
I'm only a third of the way through, but I find it interesting that many of the criticisms Hbomb had for Human Revolution could also be applied to Fallout 4. The illusion of player agency and boringly streamlined character progression are both criticisms of Fallout 4. I wonder if he'll mention that.
I get the vague impression that he thinks of that game similarly to Skyrim: the reasons he wouldn't like it are so self-evident that a couple minutes of an April Fools video is all the time it really takes to explain.
at least with 4 you can add mods so you can make the game more like how you want it to be. Human revolution is like a time capsule from that era of design.
I don’t think he’ll need to make a video saying FO4 is shit, because tons of people are slowly realising that already.
A video about Fallout 4 being bad would basically just be a copy/paste of why the 3rd one was bad. Maybe with a few moments to highlight some of the specific failures in storytelling the game has.
@@Joe90h 3 isn’t nearly as good as new Vegas but it is still far and away superior to 4
After recently playing Deus Ex for the first time, the main thing that stood out is complete lack of objective markers.
Having to use actual maps, compass, and the directons you were given was such a difference from ANYTHING in modern games.
That also adds to the exploration and freedom, since when you don't have an objective marker, it means that there doesn't have to be an "intended way" of doing something or getting somewhere.
Having objective markers is likely my biggest issue with HR and MD.
What I learned from this video:
- Making video games is hard.
- Making great video games is incredibly hard.
Making things is just hard in general
Hey made the burden harder on themselves by doubling down instead of changing things. Nearly every part of this video is "oh we wanted to change this because we didn't like that it was like this in the last one. Oh now everyone just does this because we change this. Okay so we're going to do this." And then proceeds to do something that exacerbates the issue.
@@oath_of_ancients3803 Did you miss the part where Hbomb argues that triple A videogame devolopment nowdays might not allow changes to be made that easily. Like, if they were to change things they would need a lot, like really A LOT, of work hours to change things.
I've been taking notes for this whole video to use as guidelines, and my project complexity just quadrupled.
@@DarkHunter047
Well it IS a 3 hour long video, poor baby probably didn’t even make it to the 10 minute mark
Key takeaway: Elevators need to have a mini-game
Haha this is immediately what jumped to my mind when Hbomb said "You want to talk about passive gameplay?" like, don't give them ideas Mr Bomb XD
Why not the hacking mini game?
The minigame is looking at your phone praying for a bar of signal so you don’t have to be alone with your thoughts
Don't forget venting
Peace was never an option
it's so goddamn funny to me that just a couple months after this video dropped Square Enix sold off the Deus Ex IP along with a bunch of other wildly popular franchises all so they could get into NFT bullshit mere hours before the bubble popped. Textbook shit, couldn't have been written better
It’s like Eidos and its IPs are a curse that keeps being passed from company to company. Surprised Square Enix didn’t change their name to Eidos too
My god, it’s almost as if this nonsense about NFTs, Crypto, and Stonks is all a big scam
Did they sell Gex?
Omfg no way
Who did they sell it to?
Sanders ripping out his prosthetic eye also could've played into hbomber's idea for that faction really well. Rather than him ripping out the eye because of some puritanical ideologies, it could've something he gave up so that someone else could have the ability to see again. A moment of compassion that could draw more people to his side and allow him to take extreme measures for his goals while still maintaining an image that would realistically draw people to stand alongside him, whether that's a calculated move on his part of just sincere care for another.
Looking through Francois Lapikas' Linkedin, it's depressing how much of one's career can be spent on projects that get cancelled. Almost 9 years of his 23 year career so far have been spent working on things that never saw the light of day. After Human Revolution came out, the next thing he worked on that got published (Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance) was released 8 YEARS LATER. AAA studios are fucking whack man.
😅😅7😅u😅🎉
Ua1😢0o0😅😊the 😅😅😅it 😢😢😢😢😢😢😢a😢8😅😅😅a!
This video really made me think about all these game developers who pour years of their lives into one game, only for it to end up being a just "ok"-ish game... Since there is no way to majorly alter course and fix really obvious issues without throwing away millions. Such a waste of talent and passion
@@neokonline_ Passion? Maybe. Talent? He routinely puts his time into games that either get cancelled or end up being very mid. I don't think he's talented.
That's just how art is tho. You can just work on a piece for days only to realise its not just bad but also unsalvagable. And videogames are a combination of many art forms and also very hard to make.
A youtuber I watch says the following : when you truly understand what's involved in making a videogame, you realise every game release is basically a miracle
There's a playstyle the developers completely overlooked ammo control-wise: a silenced pistol with the armor-piercing upgrade can take down any enemy in one headshot without breaking stealth and the game just doesn't seem to know it's an option so the pistol ammo is plentiful and it feels cool to play this way.
It's just one of those game where the devs knew what was wrong but couldn't go back far enough to fix things but still tried to make it fun
I totally thought that was the intended playstyle
I want his next video to be 4:44:44 in lenght.
i actually did this it is extremely fun and i called it my death pistol of doom
Add the laser sight to it too & it becomes a hip-fire sniper. I went back for a pacifist run before even finishing just because the game felt trivially easy with that thing.
Why not merge the best of both worlds? Deus Gex would practically print money!
Should get cross overed with Tomb Thief?
Hey hbomber-nerd let me tell you something, at the beginning you said to use the chapter select to skip around the video and I absolutely will not you fool! I start this video from the beginning every time I watch it and there’s nothing you can do to stop me!!
Gee, it's almost like a game made by a massive corporation isn't going to distinguish between "robot arm tied to a subscription service that will kill you if you stop paying=bad" and "robot arm=bad"
The difference between accessing the internet through a phone in my pocket and accessing the internet through a chip in my brain ISN'T that the chip makes me less human! It's that the stakes of the second option are significantly higher-- consider the problems with the internet of things, where people are getting their refrigerators locked by trolls, only now the trolls have access to your memories. I signed up for UA-cam with the understanding that I would get 1 ad for every few videos. Now I get 5 ads per video. This is annoying, but i still have the option to leave. I have that control. (adhd topic jump) Imagine an apple brand foot. You are not allowed to fix it yourself, and in a couple of years they'll lock it down and force you to buy a new one. Imagine it's not apple, it's from a brand new start up. The start up goes out of business. You can no longer walk.
@@edgarallenhoe3518 oh I got one imagine if there was a company who does all this cool on paper/actually bad in real life stuff like reusable rockets and a shittier underground railway only for specific brands of expensive electric cars, and they were trying to invent literal actual brain chips but they were just really bad at basic animal husbandry that all their animals they experimented on just fuckin died.
Would be mad wouldn't it?
@@edgarallenhoe3518 imagine if DE:HD actually discussed that
@@edgarallenhoe3518 this is happening right now with people who goy eye implants
@@madeline6951 Imagine if it didn't make it's central bit about how neuropyzene is expensive but necessary totally moot in any country with universal healthcare?
The "are you guys talking about ghost in the shell?!" part felt like a direct attack on me. I've been that guy. I *am* that guy.
Yeah that's me I sure do love me some Ghost in the Shell. I cannot wait to see it.
Well mr bomberguy does also reference tachikomas later on so... tongue in cheek lol
Never change, King.
I had to rewatch that part 5 times before accepting to continue the video and I couldn't stop laughing
word, good ambience too
"12 more videos are gonna start this way" hey, that's at least 12 more years of hbomberguy videos! ♥️
Here have a little smooch for giving me that good news
12 plus this one make a tasty bakers dozen.
Right......
yet continued +11000 patrons making monthly donations. His videos are always good, but if I had 11000 people donating a minimum of 2$ each a month (most giving at least $5), I wouldn't feel comfortable putting out a video once or twice a year, especially without considerable production costs.
@@moejuggler6033 i would feel great about it
@@moejuggler6033 I mean... the amount of work he puts into his _three and a half hour_ video pretty much accounts for that, I think. Yeah, it's like once a year, but it's like getting a movie once a year.
2:33:00 Also throwing stuff around IS a meaningful interaction. It's used in stealth to distract people, toss a physics object away from yourself to make guards turn around. Literally the *only* interaction in Deus Ex that doesn't interact with other systems are billiards tables (I mean, it makes noise but that's barely anything).
3 hours and you didn't answer the biggest question. How many awards did Tommy Tallarico win for his work on Deus Ex: Human Revolution?
Enough to make his mother very proud of him.
@@oxoboo Enough to make his mother very proud of Joey*
Enough to make Tommy obligated to call everyone a Gaming Racist
It's a tough question to answer, as it depends when you ask. Today, it's 2 Grammys and a Dice award. In a few years it will be 7 Grammys, 3 Dice Awards, 2 Oscars and a Nobel Prize.
all of em
My favourite part of Human Revolution was committing to the non lethal run achievement and finishing the game then remembering I killed the guys in the tutorial because I didn't have non lethal weapons and didn't sneak past them.
My favorite part was that I actually did finish the game non lethally but lost the achievement because apparently npcs will sometimes just die after being knocked out
Wait, but what about the gun arm guy boss fight where you're forced to kill him? I didn't know there was a non-lethal run option.
@@whypothetical it's been a while but iirc bosses don't count
@@whypothetical Bosses don't count, but they did rework them in the Directors Cut re-release to give you more options
The intro doesn't count for the pacifist achievement and you can actually sneak past those enemies as well.
I can't believe I just watched a 4 hour long review about a game I'd never heard of, that I don't care about, that came out more than a decade ago and that I will never play...but I was fully invested, immersed and entertained. I'm not even a real gamer. I just play sims 3 and Last Day On Earth on my phone. You are one hell of a storyteller Mr Bomber.
If you game you’re a real gamer :)
Same here- loved playing video games as a kid and had to quit because I'd get terrible migraines. But listening to him here on this video, all the info here to a now non-player, alot of analysis and critical thinking clearly goes into playing these games and articulated here so well, these vids gave me a lot to consider, while doing anything.
“I’m not even a real gamer” why are you gatekeeping yourself, you play games youre a gamer? they’re even desktop games
I hear so many people spending huge chunks of their lives playing video games saying they’re not gamers.
My husband played all the games mentioned in this video (that’s why I started watching it) and he also often says “but i’m not a gamer”. Yet he plays literally 99% of his days at least half an hour.
I hope you at least came away from this knowing the original deus ex is legendary.
@@hypatiakovalevskayasklodow9195Some people don't like the gamer label because they'd be aligning with a ton of morons.
"The end result is like playing a fairly simple cover shooter while being lightly choked from behind by a game designer. Even when it's straightforward, it's still a little tense. And that's what makes it fun."
- Harris "Sonic Lore Analysis" Bomberguy
The "Consequences" and "Level Design" section both feel like products of the 2010's AAA dev mentality that says players should never ever be frustrated by anything, which means that if you offer multiple playstyles then every single problem must be equally solvable by every single playstyle. In theory every player gets to have their own experience but in practice every player has the exact same experience; it's a smorgasbord of gameplay where everything just tastes like overcooked chicken.
I disagree with it being a bad thing.
IMHO, those can be really neat. They're never perfect, for the reasons you mention but... IDK. They are their own thing.
+
Isn't multiple solutions to problems essential to immersive sims? If the only way to do X is to have augmentation Y and you don't have it, you either have to get it or you're stuck. But if there's multiple options, you can use the tools you have to find a way.
@@eileen1020 Yeah, but that doesn't mean all solutions should be equally accessible. Different approaches should be distinct: easier or harder, locked behind stat or item requirements, obscure or obvious... Otherwise choices are contextless and without consequence, leading to that overcooked chicken texture.
HBomberguy is probably the only video essayist i know of who would create, and then upload a video twice the run-time of a feature length film, discussing in excruciating detail why a game released over a decade ago, that no one else really cares about anymore, was just pretty ok.
He has just been beaten.... Fredrik Knudsen just released an almost 6 hour long essay on EVE online...
Shows the downward spiral of UA-cam video essays. It's all about watch time and engagement. Nothing else matters.
I will never forgive this guy for his Fallout 3 sucks video 💀
@@vinslungurI mean, realistically you'd get more watch time if you separated it between 6 30-minute videos so people don't get burnt out watching one massive video
@@vinslungur I mean, sure, that is indeed the trend and for sure true for most youtubers, who went from short, less than 10 minutes, vids to these langer, higher production 30 minutes vids.
However, when you pick one specific topic and go super deep and create multiple hour things, that's beyond that trend. I think most casual viewers will bypass vids like that. These super long deep dives are more testiment to the creators being that special kind of crazy.
@@Mr._Zook He would probably do that... if he had 6 video ideas. Ok I'm done roasting. He's great at what he does.
The best part about an Hbomberguy video is thinking "Oh man it sounds like he's reaching a conclusion, guess it'll be another 6 months until a new video" then realizing you still have 2 hours left in this one
Euphoria!
Hbomberguy's videos have ~5 beginnings and 6 endings
@@bugdracula1662 and over 27 different panel endings based on when you paused the video and how many times you've watched it friending for fresh content.
I swear it's a thing 😂
Game publishers never fail to underestimate immersive sims.
g...gender???????
"If we're not careful, Gex will be in the next kingdom hearts" Somewhere out there videogamedunkey just had a heart attack
we are safe now he will be in the next saints row
good
@@johndavidtibbetts7320 That's not very nice.
@@milos1967 no, no it isn't
@@johndavidtibbetts7320 Applegize.
To be fair, having most objectives revolve around finding and getting into an elevator is very accurate to my experience as a mobility aid user but, not very epic and shoot-em-up style for a cyberpunk game
does waking up and finding out your boss sawed off all your limbs for arm cannons count as being disabled?
you should spice up things with some EMP granades here and there
Getting in before the doors close can feel like a quick-time event sometimes.
Throw more fridges at people!
@@Appletank8 actually I'm personally very interested in the intersections between technology, cyberpunk, and the social concept of being disabled. If everyone else doesn't need sleep and can lift up a refrigerator, is an un augmented person placed into the contextual category of disabled? In the modern real world, not owning a car vastly impairs one's ability to participate in normal society. So would it be a form of disability, even though it exists outside the body itself? Would be very interesting to write about
I will say: the redeeming feature of the melee cinematics is that I remember it being very easy to hit the button by accident. So my thumb would slip and suddenly Jensen would, apropos of nothing, cinematically manhandle or punch a random NPC on the street
lol, this happened to me too many times.
My favourite part of the takedowns in DXHR is that random, unsuspecting people would suddenly turn into trained fighters just so Jensen can stylishly punch them out.
I did this to every spawned npc in the game it took many many many hours and a self written guide to spawn locations but I call it Fisto%
@@dukesubterra4683 nice
The Icarus metaphor for augmentations IS actually pretty clever if you think about it: Icarus had man-made wings attached to his body that allowed him to reach heights never before thought possible, but the way those wings were crafted also had a key weakness, as the wax holding them together could melt off, trading a great ability for a certain risk
Augmentations are man-made objects attached to one's body that allow them to do things never before thought possible, but the way they're crafted means they can be hijacked, trading a great ability for a certain risk
They didn't have to hammer in that point a thousand times, but it's a clever metaphor
Yeah you and the 500 other people saying the exact thing really made that obvious
@@bsims4126 I'm so sorry that multiple people sharing the same idea in the youtube comments section agitates you so deeply. We all must've forgotten that you're only allowed to express a thought publicly if no one else has done it beforehand.
There are nearly 20,000 comments on this video. How _dare you_ not read every single one before commenting!!
This video is exquisite for one main reason: I have only willingly watched it once, when it first came out. The other dozen times that I have watched it to completion are from when I fall asleep watching other videos and then inevitably wake up at 2am to him having a meltdown over this mid game and without fail, I end up just committing and watching it to the end. This is my personal fever dream. I didn't even know what Deus Ex was before this video
me with his fallout 3 video, it just comes on randomly like everytime i fall asleep with my tv on
Woah...
Yeah I recon about 10% of the view count is where I've fallen asleep watching another video and woke up the next morning to this one 😅
Lol. Literally. That last sentence made burst out laughing irl.☺
How many times have you woken up to “ARTEMY BURACHS TORMENTOUS NIGHTMARE”
It's kinda dystopian to hear someone say "it's great to work with them, because their IP portfolio is very rich"
Oh yeah he talks about that like ten seconds later lmao
I noticed that too. "It's great to work for this company because... they own some good stuff."
@@internetexplorer6304 Aye, when you're as used to corporate-speak as I (sadly) am, it's quite a nice thing to hear, since he could just easily have said, "it's great to work for them because chances are pretty decent I'll get to work on the sequel to one of my favourite games growing up," and it would basically have meant the same thing but, taking it at face value, it really doesn't sound like something someone genuinely excited to create awesome new games would say.
I guess the deeper question is why their creatives feel the need to talk in corporate-speak in interviews at all.
"Our bosses hoard intellectual property and that's the nicest thing I can say about them" sure is a quote. But perhaps it was meant in the sense that the higher ups have enough business sense not to let their projects tank and thus there was some feeling of safety in their oversight.
@@Pineappolis Corporate-speak is safe. It's how management defines the talking points you're allowed to discuss, because that formalized dispassionate language is how PR and marketing describe their fields, because they're professionals writing reports for god-knows-who and not buddies giving friendly advice to people they know. Deviating from corp-speak risks stepping over one of the guidelines without realizing it until you get an angry email about it.
I'm really liking the bit of finding in-game skulls for the sole purpose of using them as B-roll for when Shaun reads out a line. It's great.
I got embarrassingly excited when I recognized him. Like, "I'm here to talk to you about the Avengers Initiative" excited.
Most under-appreciated part of this video is the “Stealth” chapter being written out in the UA-cam timeline with really small text
guess you could say this joke was stealthy
Just wanna say the "JUST KIDDING IT'S STILL THE HACKING CHAPTER" was hysterical. The build up, timing, and execution were flawless.
I can earnestly say that I did not only cackle. I guffawed.
Where is that, I must have missed him saying that :(
I bursted out laughing with the entire boss fights gag
I fucking lost it and then came to the comments to find this
@@arthurdurham 1:23:07, but warning, you'll miss how good the timing is
I can't believe Hbomb failed to praise this game's excellent soundtrack from Tommy Tallarico.
Don’t you mean “we can’t believe” since I basically wrote that comment 🤨🤨
My mother’s very proud.
@@Akitsunesceilingfan our mother is very proud indeed 😎
Adam Jensen has seven Guinness records!
@@Unknown-jt1jo[insert proud mother joke]
@@tomipenri i like the idea that its just one hive mind and our mother is just some giant spider or some shit
As someone who will inevitably wind up watching this entire video again every 18 months, I find it incredibly precious how APOLOGETIC and DEFENSIVE creators get about the length; if it was 6 hours long I would probably be ELATED
As someone who's going to watch it several times in the next few weeks, and then again every six months or so when I remember it or need Background Content while I work on something tedious-- mood.
Same, I mean theirs creators we kind of expect very long videos from, though they do have to work their way to them.
I made a 4 and a half hour video recently because I wanted to. It reminded me of the early days of the internet when uploading a 5 minute video took 30 minutes-an hour. It was a fuzzy and warm nostalgia. (I also regularly stream DND for 2+2 hours a week. Mainly so the players can rewatch a session if they need to)
3:10:49 the robot eye being branded with a company logo actually illustrates a real-life problem of disabled people being forced into becoming walking advertisements for the company of their prosthetic. Kinda funny how you can gleam more commentary from an in-game ad compared to the entire of the anti-augmentation organisation.
On the topic of scarcity, I find it fascinating how they could have solved it by removing the regenerating health mechanic. If they gave players all the ammo they needed but kept the healing items scarce they would naturally avoid fights anyways when wounded. It would be another risk reward thing without having to completely fuck the loot and shopping mechanics.
scaarcity
They did that because they were worried players might end up in a frustrating situation where they have almost no health left and can't progress. I feel like they could just have capped the health regen at some low level and it would have achieved the same thing while not making healing items useless.
@@banana-rs3pv The devs had so many options available to them to make health systems interesting, I had no idea what they were thinking by making it regen. Or at least make it regen on the lower difficulties and not on "Give Me Deus Ex".
@@banana-rs3pv Then lock health regeneration on higher difficulties, a game with no soft locks is a bad game.
again, i don't think it comes down to conscious bad decisions, just sheer shitty development cycle inertia
You know, HR's overemphasis on augs becomes EXTRA weird when you remember how rare and obscure it allegedly becomes in 20 story years. Like, lots of guards say stuff like "Careful, that guy is some kinda mech", and the barkeep in the Underworld's augs were a talking point the player could bring up and learn from. It was extraordinarily rare to be augmented, reserved for only the most elite of agents. How would they even explain this in-lore?
MD tries to begin to explain that, but the real answer is they should probably just not worry too much and embrace whatever story they're making even if it diverges from the original
Yeah, the prequels kind of mess up the universe in that regard. Original Deus Ex is fairly low tech (in the grand scheme of things) - New York is still grimy New York, Paris still has old architecture, etc. Mechanical augments are few and far between, and the nano augs that JC, Paul, and Simons have are bleeding edge tech. But then in the prequels you have a Chinese floating cybercity and millions of augmented poor people. Prequels always kind of conflict with originals in some regards, but it's kind of crazy in HR/MD. Like hbomberguy says in the video, they probably should've just made a completely new universe for this game, or at least stated they were rebooting the franchise. But they did neither of those things.
The idea I think they were intending to go with is that Jensen's story explains *why* Augs are so rare in the future games: you can see the kinds of devastation a massively augmented populace would cause. But then they failed the landing with their crippled endings, and *then* Square Enix choked Eidos Montreal to make a sequel to Human Revolution and the only way they could do that was to bring back Adam Jensen, even though the most coherent ending to his story is him dying at the bottom of the Arctic Ocean.
Hbomb's tangent on how Publishers and marketing affect Game development is honestly the most insightful and important part of this essay.
@@UmbreonMessiah It seems to be implied by a number of things in MD that Jensen *did* die in the Arctic, and you're playing as some kind of Manchurian Candidate clone - the original's frozen torso, sans augs, can be found in the Versalife vault at Palisade Bank. The title screen shots two Adams facing each other, Eliza says he is inconsistent with her memories of him, parts of his own memory are missing or suppressed somehow, the Sarif sidequest suggests that even his original augs have different serial numbers, etc. It seemed like they were building something in this direction before they got the plug pulled on them.
Hard to say for sure, but there's a good case to be made, and the Criminal Past DLC seems to underline it further.
@@Baronhaynes Goddammit, I will never be ok with how they cut off the series after ending Mankind Divided on a cliffhanger with no real resolution. ;_; Where's my actual conclusion, dammit!
Finally, the Long Night is over. Time to start the journey of watching and rewatching another hbomberguy video game essay a million times.
Amen to this.
I feel very lucky, i started watching my way through some of his classics this week for the first time in over a year and then he drops this in our lap
@@incapacitaterd I had literally just started another rewatch of his Bloodborne video when this video got uploaded. Feels like finding an oasis in a desert.
Count me in
He's the George R. R. Martin of UA-cam video essays. Except, you know, he actually eventually drops something. I was actually thinking of searching his name and then thought "No, what are the odds something new is out?" and then got this dropped in my recommended videos a few hours later.
55:40 an easy cool change could have been: saving Sandervals brother and talking him down causes his brother to turn non-hostile when he shows up again, or even allows you to pass through a room that would normally have a tough combat encounter.
I think what drives me mad about the vent situation beyond the gameplay pigeonholing is just their absurdity. Vents are part of an HVAC system, heating and cooling. They're not just... linear tunnels that connect two points. Some central station is pumping temperature controlled air through them, and they're usually meant to be mostly out of sight high or low in a building as they perform the singular function of pushing air around. They're not just man-sized connecting tunnels just conveniently put through buildings like shortcuts, especially not to, of all things, directly link someone's office to THE SHITTER.
to be fair, that is just vents in most stories, not only videogames but movies and tv shows and books they make for good tunnels that lead everywhere and not a lot of people care about realism in those cases
I vented straight past this section of the video
@@carso1500 My favorite use of the fictitious version of vents is from the Middleman show (for anyone who remembers that), with the “Nakatomi Protocol”. Basically a fail safe in case Middleman HQ is compromised, expanding otherwise more realistic vents into strategic tunnels.
😅
This was addressed very well in Rian Johnson's "The Brothers Bloom."
It seems they forgot that the Icarus myth wasn't about the danger of making wings, it was about the dual danger of complacency and hubris and considering for a moment that your dad, Daedalus, one of the most intelligent people alive, and the inventor of those wings, might know what he's talking about when he tells you not to be stupid with them. After all, Daedalus made it out fine on identical wings.
Applying the actual Icarus myth to the solitary malnourished theme of Human Revolution ironically gets us a completely different message:
"When presented with the invention of augmentation, don't be so complacent about the concept that you reject it entirely, like the puritans, dooming countless lives to suffer fates that could easily be averted. Equally do not be so ambitious and thoughtless in your implementation that you end up with people augmented on a whim, like the cheating couple that irreparably scarred their bodies due to a passing fancy. Instead, use the technology responsibly to help people and allow humanity to soar to new heights. After all, the wings of Daedalus lift you into freedom, they are not shackles binding you to the earth.
That would've been an amazing message!
But the easiest conflict is always an us v them argument, and thus could only really use the sanitized and popular version of Icarus being too ambitious and falling.
@@cgkase6210 Indeed, which is one of the main reasons I absolutely hate the trend of super-simple broad appeal plots in videogames.
The last big budget game I can remember that had an actually memorable point to make is what? Spec Ops: The Line?
Since then it's only been indie gems like Undertale, Disco Elysium and Obra Dinn.
And it gets even worse when games like Deus Ex are subjected to it, because a simplistic "us vs them" plotline has no buissiness being anywhere near something as philosophical as the fist game, and the sequel makes it even worse since the clumsy as hell racism analogy doesn't even hold up to basic scrutiny.
@@petsan97 True. Making a point is a political statment, and those don't have place in vidoe games.
@Daniel-Adamczyk I disagree. political statements have a placenin video games just as much as they do in any other form of storytelling. Takd for exampld, the aforementioned spec ops: the line. Thag game is overtly political, and yet it manages to be a good game and an amazing story.
@@Iaminsideofyourwalls I was sarcastic about that. They have place in video games.
Hello, positive feedback here: I actually really liked how you don't spoonfeed the viewer a predictable script. I feel like a part of the conversation with the twists and turns, lies, reveals. It's all really great. 👍
This is hillarious
indeed the thing about youtube videos is that they are famously intractable and immersive
The way he just cuts his sentences like "Finally we can start the ga--watch another cutscene" is like an art form all on its own.
"I'll give you three guesses--it's Joey. It's always Joey."
@@luminatron The Tommy Tallerico video really makes that style shine with just how much you can tell he's slowly losing his sanity as the rabbit hole gets deeper
@@ilhamutama1095 me too
I like falling asleep to this. When I rewatch this, I find the last point I remember and continue until I fall asleep. Rinse and repeat.
Explaining how a game is "ok" in 3 and a half hours was the funniest thing I've seen on my home page
Tbf once you're into the third hour you really HAVE to start bringing out the other side of the argument, and admit that the centrists might have a point BUT ONLY ON THIS
it's 3:33:33
Sorry I agree with your comment but I’m not allowed to like it because of the funny number
@@biggest_mac5060 it's already 422 you can like now
@@biggest_mac5060 I was confused about what you were talking about, at first I thought it was the "3" I said, then I saw the funny number and my eyes bulged
You know, looking at current events, the main antagonists effectively wanting to ban medicine is probably the most realistic part of this game's plot.
God, that is depressingly accurate.
@johnsatan117 god this video and the Pathologic video feel like some foreboding foreshadowing lately.
I do love how Hbomberguy is really pushing the limits of contemporary cinema.
We should petition for this to be in theaters
oh in a hindsight, dan olson, a canadian, imitating a french (Quebecer?) accent is very funny
quebecois
very weird to me that "choices in rpgs" generally come down to being nice in dialogue and how you get to kill people. of course there are exceptions, but in a genre where we expect choices to matter why dont they actually matter
edit: i understand that making genuinely meaningful choices is more work and that AAA development pipelines and publisher mandates do not make that sort of game possible. i know that work goes in to making games. i guess it would have been more accurate to ask 'why is "meaningful choice" a selling point for these games that dont have any meaningful choices'
Or how the "You can do anything you want" promise of open world rpgs always seems to be that you can steal and kill without consequence. I remember way back in the stone age when my friend was trying to sell me on this new game called Oblivion, one of the first things he said was that it was cool you could kill most NPCs in the game and it would keep going. Is there a purpose to it? No, not really. But it provides the illusion of choice just like the dialogue options of "Yes", "Yes but snarky", "Maybe later" or "No (yes)"
Because that's like Making 2 different movies, writing 2 books. It's work.
Your choices are usually: "good boi" and "absolute fucking mad asshole."
There's a really good video by the great Errant Signal on why AAA games will never really move beyond shooters and platformers. I can't really summarize it well, but it has to do with the input possibilities and the work that different outputs require. But "interactive novels" with lots of branching paths have reached new peaks the past years!
@W Shiflet if theyre not willing to actually make a game with consequential decisions, maybe they shouldnt be selling the game based on how consequential those decisions are. all im sayin' is that im tired of games telling me my Choices Matter when they dont.
although i guess no choice in any game matters because games are all fictional
i unironically like the bioshock minigame. it's a calming break from getting jumpscared by women on my way to steal a shotgun.
I unironically love Fallout's hacking mechanic. Sure, it's not very realistic, and hbomb's critique of it is very valid, but I genuinely enjoy doing the hacking more than any other mechanic in that game I think. I think it's even what first hooked me into the series, because I thought it was such a fun little minigame that I'd never seen before. Its kinda funny how things that some people find tedious can be very enjoyable for others.
same!! thats exactly how i used it lol - i just needed a break from all the people running at my face with a spanner
I'm also a fan of both the bioshock and fallout mini games. They're good downtime, something different for sure. I think hbomb's issue is with their implementation (specifically the over use of these mini games).
For example, walk and talk sections in games are fine, I think the first couple of Gears of War games nail this (the 2nd moreso, as you can choose to skip several of them). However, in DE:HR, not only are they unskippable, they are long and flanked by elevator rides (which means down time from the down time)
Idk, if you get satisfaction out of the hacking mini games, you shouldn't feel bad or weird. It's just different tastes after all
When I took game design in college the professor would constantly remind us "What does the player DO" because it was so easy to get caught up in your story and setting. This sounds like what happened here.
I actually worked on this game! I was the lead sound designer for the project and worked with David Sariff for the full development! He was really cool! We started by making sounds for the abilities, and then the animation designers would be inspired by our sounds and make cool stuff with it
Well done, actual banger Tommy Tallarico joke
I don't know what's weirder: a three and a half hour video about how a game is "fine" or the fact that I'll probably watch every second of it.
twice
god same here
@@The_Milkman_Delivers at least
sometimes explaining why something is aggressively average and OK takes twice as long as explaining why something is good or bad. Because you have to do both.
@@CantonWhy nah he just likes the smell of his farts.
I imagine that someday I'll be explaining to someone's grandchildren, "You don't understand. HBomb was so good at the craft that I sat through and actually enjoyed a three and a half hour takedown of a game I've never heard of and would never play."
This is the exakt kind of comment I was looking for as I checked the comments to see if it was worth watching the video. Here we go!
You've never heard of Deus Ex: Human Revolution? Damn.
@@TheDalekCaan_ And would never play?
Deus Ex HR is a pretty cool game and I recommend you playing it. It just made the mistake of carrying the "Deus Ex" name, which was revolutionary.
@@TheDalekCaan_ I have to be super careful with video games. If I get too deep I won't do other things, like eating or going to work. So I pretty much ignore the triple A game space. These days I mostly just check out whatever FTP games will run on my win7 laptop.
In some ways, the body upgrades reflect the games perfectly.
The original Deus Ex presented transhumanism as having a modular body that changed how you interacted with the world based on your choices. Human Revolution presents transhumanism as inevitable and having a specific, final body by the end of the story. Two very different takes that match their source games
this is a good take.
I credit this video with getting me interested in trying Deus Ex, and I knew the game really was all it was cracked up to be when I crowbarred a pimp to death, got a lead on a warehouse in the local tiny hub area, clumsily stealthed my way through the abandoned warehouse, whacked all the guards to death because I didn't dump any points into gunplay and blew up the generator from up on the rooftop, only to walk down into the mess and find a whole other route to the damned thing I had no idea existed.
They make a breadcrumb trail in the Sarif offices/emails the second time around about a thief, assuming you stole everything in the offices the first time around. If you were instead a turbo dork who was like, no i won’t steal my fictional co workers’ things (only read their private correspondence) then instead of what seems like a clever reaction to your previous actions you instead end up the detective following a crime that didn’t actually happen
"Fat-fingered my way into twelve consecutive life sentences" is quite possibly the best phrase ever written in English.
3:10:23 just a time stamp for myself cause it absolutely is
Here's an idea: Purity First's leader didn't rip out his eye because having one is sinful, he had it removed after his boss used it to spy on his trade union meetings. He knows that Sarif Inc. won't stop at replacing organs or limbs, but *minds* as well. Imagine a workforce that always follows orders and never sleeps, with bodies and personalities custom tailored to suit corporate interests. The game could break the fourth wall and talk about how smartphones used to serve this purpose, but could always be switched off...
Like it's so easy to rewrite this, I wished they actually had made changes to script.
That would work but your villains don't have to be socialists to be compelling. I think it's fine to make them hardcore religious types who thought human augmentation was bad entirely on moral grounds, They should have been better written but you don't have to make it all about how capitalism is bad. I mean all those themes about worker's rights stuff is good and should have been in there but there are other perspectives too, and people who oppose transhumanism in general (not just *unequal* transhumanism).
@@warron24Ok what if, and stay with me here, _both_ groups were allowed to exist as villains at the same time? That way there would be interesting interactions between the two (or more) groups as their ideologies may clash and overlap, causing them to work together or independantly at times, perhaps even stepping on each other's toes or sabotaging/attacking the other as they attempt to establish an anti-augmentation world in their own way. It would certainly give less of a chance for the player to instantly dismiss the villain's arguments because irl they hold the personal belief of "religious people crazy" or "socialism bad" and immediately shut off their brains.
This would also explain why you actually cannot say no to Sarif. Basically a "would you kindly" plot like in Bioshock
@@conspiracypanda1200 That would work really well I think, especially if the player had the choice of which group to ultimately side with.
I want to take a minute to compliment you as a writer. I'm going to be honest - I'm not really much of a video game person, and when I started this video, I neither knew about nor cared about Deus X. I was just really looking for more long-format high-quality video essays from you, and I was like 'ugh fine I'll watch a video game essay to hear more hbomberguy.' I'm at the end of this video fully invested in the idea of creating meaningful challenges and opportunities for creativity in video games, and I could talk about why Deus X was revolutionary for the industry that I otherwise know next to nothing about. I laughed at your jokes, listened to your takes with rapt attention, and cared about what you cared about, because you're damn good at what you do. I really appreciate your work.