Wounded Ronin
11/23/2004 12:15pm,
I noticed a few cultural errors in the France section of Deus Ex. It's kind of funny and sad when some of the errors seem to have a lot of thought sunk into them.
Grammar:
1.) Assuming that "La Porte De L'Enfer" is supposed to mean "the gates of hell", I believe that is wrong. Firstly, "la porte" means door, as opposed to gate. "The Door Of Hell" sounds anti-climactic, dosen't it? Secondly, I'm pretty sure that "enfer" ("hell") is a masculine noun. If this is the case, it would be "La Porte D'Enfer", since you don't use the "de la" construction for masculine nouns. Assuming that I'm right and they're wrong, couldn't they have taken a whole 20 minutes to get in touch with a native French speaker over the internet to verify?
Culture/History
1.) The Paris streets only kind of sort of look like the Paris streets. In fact, all the game locations that I am familiar with (namely, Paris and NYC) look sort of correct but not really.
2.) The Paris sewers are dead wrong. If you ever visit the Paris sewers, you will find that they are very well organized with street signs at each juncture so the sewer workers know exactly where they are. There are catwalks and lots of walking room over big canals of flowing dark water with little clods in it. The entire sewer is actually on an incline so as to facilitate the flow of sewage in one direction. You can easily visit the Paris sewers if you should visit; "les egouts" are an engineering feat of modern history. Considering how painstaking good level design is, I'm surprised they didn't take the time to make the sewers right.
3.) Lastly, and most egreigously, the DuClare family history is really messed up. This is the saddest part because obviously the game designers put a lot of thought into the character Nicolette DuClare and yet this story manages to not historically make sense.
OK, firstly, in France, whenever someone has the last name "Du" plus something, that means that one of their ancestors was at one point officially a noble. "Du" means "of", and so having a "du" in your name is like having an "of" in your name in English. (I.e., Robin *of* Locksley, Elanor *of* Aquitane, etc.).
So...if there is a Chateau DuClare which the DuClare family owns, that would be their ancestral castle which they somehow retained possession of through the French revolution.
But, conversation in-game with Nicolette she says that the property was bought after World War II and that it had all these secret passageways because the previous owner used them to hide Jews from the Nazis.
Okay, fine. But then it wouldn't be the "Chateau DuClare", because it's not their ancestral home! They could *call* it the "Chateau DuClare", but that would be really snobbish and stupid. Sort of like if your name was Smith, and you decided to call your big house "Castle Smith" or "Smith Palace".
So, if we start getting contrived, maybe the property was *originally* the ancestral home of the DuClares, who lost control of it during the French Revolution, but then who did some historical research and bought it back following World War II.
But then there's the problem that if it were a historical chateau, most likely it would have become the property of the government and changed into a museum or something. All the chateaus in France are now essentially museums.
I'm just disappointed that they could have such glaring historical/cultural errors in a game where the plot is supposed to be so important.
Grammar:
1.) Assuming that "La Porte De L'Enfer" is supposed to mean "the gates of hell", I believe that is wrong. Firstly, "la porte" means door, as opposed to gate. "The Door Of Hell" sounds anti-climactic, dosen't it? Secondly, I'm pretty sure that "enfer" ("hell") is a masculine noun. If this is the case, it would be "La Porte D'Enfer", since you don't use the "de la" construction for masculine nouns. Assuming that I'm right and they're wrong, couldn't they have taken a whole 20 minutes to get in touch with a native French speaker over the internet to verify?
Culture/History
1.) The Paris streets only kind of sort of look like the Paris streets. In fact, all the game locations that I am familiar with (namely, Paris and NYC) look sort of correct but not really.
2.) The Paris sewers are dead wrong. If you ever visit the Paris sewers, you will find that they are very well organized with street signs at each juncture so the sewer workers know exactly where they are. There are catwalks and lots of walking room over big canals of flowing dark water with little clods in it. The entire sewer is actually on an incline so as to facilitate the flow of sewage in one direction. You can easily visit the Paris sewers if you should visit; "les egouts" are an engineering feat of modern history. Considering how painstaking good level design is, I'm surprised they didn't take the time to make the sewers right.
3.) Lastly, and most egreigously, the DuClare family history is really messed up. This is the saddest part because obviously the game designers put a lot of thought into the character Nicolette DuClare and yet this story manages to not historically make sense.
OK, firstly, in France, whenever someone has the last name "Du" plus something, that means that one of their ancestors was at one point officially a noble. "Du" means "of", and so having a "du" in your name is like having an "of" in your name in English. (I.e., Robin *of* Locksley, Elanor *of* Aquitane, etc.).
So...if there is a Chateau DuClare which the DuClare family owns, that would be their ancestral castle which they somehow retained possession of through the French revolution.
But, conversation in-game with Nicolette she says that the property was bought after World War II and that it had all these secret passageways because the previous owner used them to hide Jews from the Nazis.
Okay, fine. But then it wouldn't be the "Chateau DuClare", because it's not their ancestral home! They could *call* it the "Chateau DuClare", but that would be really snobbish and stupid. Sort of like if your name was Smith, and you decided to call your big house "Castle Smith" or "Smith Palace".
So, if we start getting contrived, maybe the property was *originally* the ancestral home of the DuClares, who lost control of it during the French Revolution, but then who did some historical research and bought it back following World War II.
But then there's the problem that if it were a historical chateau, most likely it would have become the property of the government and changed into a museum or something. All the chateaus in France are now essentially museums.
I'm just disappointed that they could have such glaring historical/cultural errors in a game where the plot is supposed to be so important.