u/Tee_See

By "revived," I mean what was created under the Eidos umbrella.

I'm currently replaying Mankind Divided, and as I play, some thoughts are arising:

1. Prague makes no sense. The entire game portrays Prague as a police state, but Prague is literally a carbon copy of California; homeless people, drug addicts, and homeless drug addicts are everywhere. Dirty people sleep on the sidewalk next to the police checkpoint. For a "police state" and "the epicenter of oppression of augmented people," these police can't even maintain order on the streets. The dissonance is catastrophic. This isn't a police state with apartheid; it's a classic picture of liberal failure.
2. Augmented people have been turned into an entire race. The "natural" versus "augmented" conflict is clearly inspired by the old "white" versus "people of color" conflict. All other identities are overwritten by it. It makes no sense. Eidos needed to create a social allegory for "racial oppression," and they sacrificed common sense for this purpose. People with expensive implants living in sewers—it's the same catastrophic dissonance. What happened to their class, ethnicity, religion, citizenship? Why did all these identities magically evaporate? Because of "The Incident"? It's so far-fetched that it's long since snapped.
3. A childish take on conspiracy theories and liberal prejudices. Eidos clearly exploits conspiracy theories through a liberal lens, where there are rich oppressors and poor oppressed, necessarily with real-world parallels, and necessarily within a liberal context. The original Deus Ex was steeped in the spirit of '90s conspiracy theories: a mishmash of conspiracy theories (Majestic 12, the Illuminati, FEMA, black helicopters) with no clear political direction. It was a postmodern cocktail, where right-wing and left-wing fears mingled into a shared paranoia. The system was simultaneously absurd and omnipotent. Eidos translated this into the mainstream liberal discourse of the 2010s: the rich oppress the poor, corporations manipulate the media, "systemic racism" against the augmented. Conspiracy theories became a predictable metaphor for the current political agenda.

My conclusion: Eidos needs to hire an educated, well-read, cynical screenwriter like Avellone, not an amorphous, gender-neutral, blue-haired biomass.