Wow. Why would you troll eachother like that.
I get that it escalated over time, but jesus. Can't we all just get along and actually focus on the content of the discussion?
Ahem, anyway. I do think HR is less interesting to discuss, and I do think it relates to the random crap, but not whether or not it's there, but rather, how it's shaped and what its purpose is. Also, I'd like to add that I got incredibly into the plot threads of HR, probably more so than I ever got into Deus Ex on my own...I just appear to be the only one around here that into it.
Take Jocks apartment in Hong Kong. The game has a lot of apartments, but it introduces an important subplot through one which you have a good chance of just randomly discovering and figuring out. In HR, there are plenty of random apartments, and they all fit the "random crap" bill put on Deus Ex, but they don't really tell us anything about a character we already know and who's important to our own role in the story, while at the same time being ambiguous and containing a mystery.
Jocks apartment reveals that:
Paul was suspicious of maggie chow, even though they were supposedly lovers
Jock and Pauls relationship is close enough that he has no problem hirering him to spy on his girlfriend
Jock is a bit of a peeping tom
Maggie Chow is probably not someone you should trust.
By contrast, whenever there's a side-narrative going on in HR, it's rarely about a character we know about. The best example is Prichard, some of whose character details are revealed through the office hacking subplot. But thats just one character, and the details of the plot are all hiding within text, not waiting to be discovered by a sharp eye looking out a window, and the implications are less layered, so they require less lateral thinking. Furthermore, this is the exception rather than the rule in HR, whereas in Deus Ex, theres a lot more _relevant_ random crap.
I mean, it's great to sink my teeth into the details surrounding the lower production quality for the chinese typhoon nockoff (very much random crap), but it's just not as relevant...it's not even as relevant as encountering the parents of an MJ12 guardsman in Paris.
The fact that the random crap in HR simply poses less questions, I think, makes the game weaker, but also much less interesting to discuss. There's much less ambiguity introduced by much of the random crap...it's generally easy to digest, and less complex.
Ultimately, that's a matter of the map designers being less ambitious, and exploiting the medium to a smaller degree.
But I think it's unfair to say that HR is no Deus Ex game because of this distinction. Clearly, the designers tried to reverse engineer this part, but either didn't understand the depth of Deus Ex' random crap, or simply thought it a smaller priority compared to all the brilliant aspects and ideas they possesed themselves. The way the world of HR is revealed through the narrative threads is crystal clear by comparison to Deus Ex, and it's generally much more detailed and congruous. It doesn't have the same depth, because Deus Ex is full of implications riding on implications, and the massive continuity bible is a telltale sign of that...but within the game, the focus on biological enhancers, how these are perceived by society, how the enhancements are made, developed, designed and monetized the ethical implications, the publics and special interests relation to it, and so forth...it's just really thickly detailed, every angle is covered, and it all makes sense. By contrast, the grey death, in spite of being a massively important thing in Deus Ex, has very weak development.
In this case, yes, HR is different because it's bredth is narrower, and it wants to really develop and get at you from every angle concerning its most important subject, whereas deus ex is a hodge-pudge of issues that are less developed but tie together to form a larger, grander and more perillous picture. Both of those, however, are merely twists on the Deus Ex recipe: the two games are more similar to eachother than any other game, and both are quite distinct from everything else outthere.
Both are apple pies, one is just made exclusively from golden delicious while the other is larger and made from a larger variety of apples.
