#dx spec

ah! thank you!

I’m not sure I would want them to have had a deeper relationship (but that’s probably my Jensard bias talking), but I absolutely agree that the relationship between Megan and Adam should have been explored more to give more weight to the importance of finding her. and while sure, she shouldn’t be reduced to Romantic Interest The Hero Must Rescue (And Ultimately Fail To) ((here’s looking at you, Sutherland)), I just don’t see why Jensen has to be the one to find her. outside of Sarif’s insistence, that is.

(honestly though, that fits in with @kentaurex‘s musings on HR not being about Adam at all, but Sarif using Jensen as a proxy, which is a theory I think has a lot of merit.)

I personally look at Adam’s inquiry into Megan’s whereabouts to Sarif in MD as sort of a “well he’s going to expect me to ask” thing. I choose to think he’s definitely over their relationship (though probably not the betrayal of trust, especially with her lack of apology or remorse). All other references to her are kind of forced on him. Janus taunts him with it in the Bank, really, and honestly that interaction just made me distrust/hate Janus more, not think Adam is still hung up on her.

All in all she’s an influence on Jensen and helps to shape the man we see in both games, but that influence is definitely told to us more than it’s shown and I think that’s a damn shame. I don’t like Megan Reed, but I think we should have seen more of her and how she came to the decisions she did and (perhaps more importantly) how she and Jensen even worked together. as the game stands, if I hadn’t been told they used to be together, I’d have thought they were siblings or he was just pining, not that they used to live together.

Me, softly: let DX5 end with Jensen vanishing off somewhere with a nice boyfriend and live a good life im tired of being SAD JUST GIVE MY BOY A GOOD TIME

ohhhhh my god so much this. just let him and Pritchard retire to the wilds of Detroit (or where ever, probably not actually in the US) and occasionally consult remotely with Tracer Tong (and maybe Papa Denton, on the search for his sons). but mostly let them relax and enjoy just a little bit of life. let them have lazy sunday mornings and be at peace for once. let them raise bees!

ohhhhhhh man. this is gonna be kinda long, so strap in.

realistically? the next game is the end of Adam’s arc. I think we’ll hear about (and see, if we’re lucky) the California earthquake that will take out Megan Reed and the Roccasecca Beach facility (and possibly ShadowChild and her wife). I don’t think we’ll see Malik again, sadly. they got away with only giving her an off-screen cameo in MD, and unless they drag her in for a dlc like they did Pritchard, I think she’ll be quietly swept aside once again.

as for Pritchard, I think we’ll see him again. I don’t think the dev team quite realised (or wanted to believe) just how much people liked him until System Rift broke our hearts. that might have been their hope at a last goodbye to him, but I think they’ll have another riot if he doesn’t get at least a little screen time in the next game. if he’s not killed by the end of the game (the phrase “they both go down together” comes to mind) I hope he goes to work with Tracer Tong or the New Sons of Freedom, but I think if Adam dies, so does Pritchard.

Sarif is done, I think. they fucked up with the original voice actor and in trying to bring him back with someone new. he’ll either quietly disappear into Rabi’ah or be shown to be a(n evil) clone himself or something. personally I think we’ll get a newspaper article about the arcology and Sarif and Brown all just... quietly failing somehow.

I think most of TF29 will sadly also be swept under the rug. betrayed from within by Auzenne and/or Chikane (and from without by Manderley and the rest of Lyon). Miller is too idealistic  - and MacReady as well, in his own way - to survive the Rise of Page and the Majestic 12. either they’re killed early on (or in another comic series like Children’s Crusade) or a few of the major players defect with Adam (Miller, Mac, Chang... Smiley probably dies, unfortunately. Aria will probably be fridged because the series has a really bad track record with that) and get killed in other missions or offscreen during or after the game.

as for Vega.... it really depends on who Janus turns out to be. if the inadvertent hintdrop of Janus being Volkard Rand is true, than the Juggernaut Collective becomes an arm of the Illuminati working against themselves for their own ends. that part doesn’t surprise me at all, but how Vega reacts to the knowledge really depends on how true to character they keep her (and considering they couldn’t even settle on a fucking race for her between The Fall, Black Light, and MD....). I have hope Vega splinters off to join Adam and work against the Collective (if they’re truly Illuminati) but she’ll probably die in a revenge-fueled mission against them or get shuffled into the background of the New Sons of Freedom to fade away in the same manner as Malik. I would love for her to also go work with Tracer Tong (and just be retconned to be elsewhere/retired by the events of DX1) but I don’t hold much hope for it.

all other things aside, I hope we see Tong at least once so he can continue to be the only character to show up in every DX game.

I also really hope (and think we’ll get) to see Anna Navarre and Gunther Hermann. we got a teaser of Gunter in Black Light, and I think they know they have to set those guy up a little more, along with bringing FEMA and Page to (more) power. I also think we’ll see a little more (probably through emails and articles rather than ‘in person’) of the Smol Dentons. I’m here for more Dentons.

as for game content... probably the end of his arc is about taking down the parts of the Illuminati that Jensen can see right now: people who aren’t in DX1. so the fall of Volkard Rand (and the Juggernaut Collective); the stalling of the arcology projects because of a loss of fortune for Brown; and the further dismantling of Picus and Everett’s rise to psuedo-power (in preparation for his fall after the Majestic 12 coup). I suspect the game will either take place right in 2030 (during/after the earthquake) or in 2033-4 (just before the MJ12 coup). if Adam doesn’t die outright at the end, it’ll be another “three button” choice where the “best end” is for him to kill himself (and someone else/take down a building with him) to prevent some greater tragedy. I doubt we’ll be given a choice though, since I don’t think they’ll try to place another game between DX6 and DX1 with the timeline getting so tight. if they do it’ll be another cheap spinoff like The Fall, probably focused on the New Sons of Freedom or (holyfuckingshitplease) Paul.

if Adam Jensen dies in the earthquake with Megan Fucking Reed I will be so pissed.

I mean, it kinda helps Michelle is her VA but at the same time despite her immediate chemestry they characters just…didn’t have any. Megan felt like “that chick I dated once” instead of someone Jensen actually had a house and a dog qwith

jackedjoyce replied to your post: ...

and it’s frustrating bc Megan is such a tropey “My bf has amazing genes ima steal his blood” and it makes me sad bc i really did wanna care

yeah, it’s really hard to see the aftermath of a four year (p sure?) relationship in their interactions. Jensen’s concerned for her, but also not overly so, and he doesn’t go looking for revenge until Sarif offers it to him (and even then it’s like... “answers, with bonus revenge!” instead of the other way around).

either he’d be all in or all out, imo. still pining for her or still hurting/totally over her. have him grieve a little for her death, but there’s no need to center his post-aug arc around finding her just to “get her back” or whatever. answers? sure. a good talking to about moral boundaries and ethical standards in the sciences? abso-fucking-lutely. but just to “get her back and bring her home where she belongs”? hell to the no.

I can’t remember where I saw it (it was a very long time ago) but I did see a post about her taking his blood/hair samples for random testing and how basically any biologist/biochemist has done this to their friends and family (though not usually without warning/permission) just because they’re curious and have the means. I could get down with that explanation, but they tossed in that weird-ass email like anyone would trust an anonymous throwaway account telling them to betray the trust of their partner/lover because a stranger on the internet swears the guy’s insides are magic.

@czigonas​ I’m willing to bet this kind of stuff crossed the mind of at least some of the devs since these kinds of issues are bound to come up when you do research for this kind of story, but ultimately they are writing a cyberpunk fantasy more than hard sci fi so they take some liberties

oh yeah, absolutely. you don’t want to bog down your players with network security minutae anymore than you want to hang them up in the actual physics of Jensen’s nanoblades or the weird biology of his pheromone persuasion tricks.

Oh same. She was kind of unlikable and it made me wonder why Jensen was attracted to her in the first place

for real. I kind of got the impression that they grew apart though, and I wonder if the devs weren’t trying to make it look (retrospectively) as though she had started their affair with an eye to steal his dna in the first place when they had to cut some dialogue.

And how much is on ‘the cutting room floor’ because of story flow reasons or other such things? I think Megan’s story got messed up because of precisely this. (They do say on the the DC commentary that they cut some dialogue with her in the beginning for story flow reasons.)i would like a document with all the cut stuff like we have for DX1.

oh gods yes please just add on to the deus ex bible so maybe we can work out actual fucking timelines and have it all in one place. GIMME LORE :V

I’d like to believe Jensen just leaves a bottle of this on Pritchard’s desk every so often and the note always says something like: “Pretty sure this is yours, even if they spelled the name wrong!”

Or maybe he just goes and scribbles out the Benjamin and puts the t in there clumsily anyway and makes the same joke about finding it and it totally must be Francis’ whose else could it be?

And then of course Jensen would keep liberating these bottles from places and Frank has to get a new cabinet in the tech lab (or maybe Sarif thinks it’s funny and does it for him) to hold all this whiskey because he can’t drink that fast, not everyone has a damn robo-liver Jensen.

Finally he gets annoyed enough to demand Adam help him drink it if he’s going to keep dropping it off (which was totally the ploy all along) and they sit and have a nice night in and Malik comes by and has like three bottles on her own because you can’t tell me flygirl doesn’t know how to hold her liquor.