[TXTSWORD]

I see what you're saying, but I guess a lot of the stuff you're impressed by really did nothing for me - though I understand where you're impressed by it. Objectively I guess all of what you're saying is really good stuff - but subjectively I am extremely uninterested in the art direction. Like remote said, it's functionally successful - but I guess that doesn't really impress me when I don't find the aesthetic particularly interesting or daring. I will easily give it that it's a step above any triple A and I'd really like to see this set a standard. I think all big titles should be at least this good. This game is totally a diamond in the rough and I commend it for that. I mean, despite all the shit - I really did have a fun time and I kept playing and I do find myself wanting to play some more. (also I'd like to note that I never played a deus ex game before. This might explain my overall lack of enthusiasm for the title.)

[Waffen]

Looking at this title pretty hard, thinking of buying it.
Still kind of busy with Catherine tho.
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PSN Online ID: SylentButDeadly

[DJ]

[remote]

[Mr. Mechanical]

[DJ]

The second one gets a bad rap because it came after the first one and, for lack of any real better way to put it, "didn't get it". It was the Circle of the Moon to DX1's Symphony of the Night. Not a bad game, but it's like you took the good game before it and pruned it down to the point of being a lot more dull, even if everything seems to be correct on paper.

The developers themselves basically copped to this, saying they realized halfway through production that the sprawl and chaos of the first game was responsible for a lot of the happy accidents that made that game so popular, and meanwhile they'd spent all this time stripping that stuff out on the (probably true) assumption that it had been unintentional the first go around. By this point it was too late to do anything about it without starting over, so they just said "fuck it" and shipped the game as-is. You can see a few spots where they tried to reverse this, like breaking into the Arabian home in a level that's straight out of one of the better Hitman entries, but unfortunately they only really did this with the level design: It was too late to add anything else to the story, art, combat, even the pacing and the plot were pretty much locked down.

I don't really blame them, I mean what else are you gonna do at that point? The damage is already done, so might as well just polish up what you've got and ship it, knowing full well that it's going to disappoint some folks because you're so far off-model, even if the game is reasonably good on its own merits.

DXHR's approach is interesting. It's still way more streamlined than the first game, but this time around they built the sloppiness right in and purposely left a bunch of jags and spurs for the players to get some turbulence off of. What's probably more shocking than anything else is that this actually worked.

Anyway, yeah: Invisible War is played best if you treat it like a series of vignettes rather than a cohesive whole. Whip through the plot stuff ASAP, because there's relatively little to find and the kind of digging that yielded such results in 1 and 3 will do nothing for you here. Instead it's more like a Hitman game set in the future with some hub worlds. The stages themselves are actually quite varied and interesting (except for the last one which is horribly rushed feeling) and the aug powers have their moments. I like the idea of having to actually walk up to a robot to hijack it, for example. Also, it has even better asshole physics than Human Revolution. I'm normally not a fan of the playstyle where people will do anything in their power to avoid taking a game seriously, but with Invisible War, abusing the living hell out of the game world makes it far more entertaining -- plus the world is so dull that there isn't enough gravitas to make you feel like your actions are terribly out of place. Which is weird.
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[DJ]

Jesus I am just full of buzzwords today, aren't I.
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[BotageL]

No, Invisible War is actually a straight-up bad game. Sorry. No amount of revisionist history will fix that.
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http://www.mdgeist.com/

[DJ]

Dude I played it again like a year and a half ago. It's not great by any stretch of the imagination, and the beginning is one of the worst parts in it which really doesn't help (especially plot-wise, my god who are all these fuckers and how did they get my number and why did they all know to call me the microsecond I set foot outside of the lab) but a few of the later stages are actually pretty well put together. Its biggest problem is that once you put everything together as a whole it never stacks up.

Which, yeah. Is bad. But there's far, far more egregious offenders in that category, leastwise relative to the amount of hate Invisible War gets.

(i just wanna point out, i'm defending the game but i still don't really like it and if people skip it, honestly you're not missing much outside of a few neat maps)

((seriously though breaking into that house was hella fun))
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[Mr. Mechanical]

Yeah it's a "bad game" but even bad games are worth playing sometimes and I think Invisible War is definitely one of those games. It isn't that it's offensively terrible either, it's greatest crime is just not living up to what it could have been.

I wonder what a person's opinion on the game would be if they played it first before playing either of the other games or without any knowledge that the other games existed.
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[DJ]

[Dracko]

Invisible War is patently not worth enduring.
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[DJ]

It is if you're curious to see what not to do. If anyone's looking at getting into game design, for example, playing DX1 and 2 back to back is like a crash course in opposing design paradigms that don't realize they're opposing until it's too late.

It's definitely not worth completing (or really even playing for very long), but it's useful as a contrast to the other two if nothing else.
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[DJ]

I think I mentioned this, but while talking to a Squeenix lady at E3, she told me how the dev team was required to play the first game all the way through, then immediately play the second one to learn what not to do. Seems to have been a good learning tool. Apparently the revulsion towards the second game was fairly strong. You saw how hard they were trying to tie Human Revolution into the first game while patently ignoring the second one.
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[Tulpa]

I don't know they did a lot of things I first saw in Invisible War in this game.
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[DJ]

I thought you only played the beta.
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[BotageL]

Universal ammo does so much damage to the game on its own that it's hard to get past that to look at all of the other things that's wrong with it.
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http://www.mdgeist.com/

[Toups]

whoa, since when is waffen back?

I like this game so far guise
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[Dracko]

[Dark Age Iron Savior]

invisible war is worth playing if you have free time. although go with the PC version if you can.

[Tulpa]

[DJ]

The general consensus while designing Human Revolution was "Let's pretend the second game never happened." Seems about right. There's a few things all three games share, yes; the difference is how they were pulled off, not what they are.

And yes Universal Ammo was probably the single dumbest thing Invisible War pulled. It's rare you see something that unbelievably fucking lazy make it into what was supposed to be a triple-A, but it's indicative of the whole attitude behind the thing. I'm sure discrete ammo was in the game during development, but once deadlines started looming and it became clear that, Hey, if the player's using the flamethrower there's like whole chunks of the game with not enough flamethrower ammo and they're kinda screwed. Solution? Find all: Ammo drops, replace with: Generic Ammo, modify guns to not check ammo type. If the players are confused as to why a rocket launcher and a pistol use the same ammo, the answer is BECAUSE NANO TECHNOLOGY. Problem solved, woooo! Ship it!

That kind of thing is annoyingly common, it's just rarely so blatant as it was in IW.
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[Dracko]

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[remote]

haha
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letterboxd | last.fm | steam

[DJ]

Okay that was pretty good.
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[Mr. Mechanical]

I'm at the Tai Yong Medical place now and have started exploring it and I think this is getting pretty awesome. Still haven't reached the second boss yet but I guess he or she's in the final room of this place. Still haven't killed anyone had anyone hit an alarm panel on me, at least as far as I'm aware.

Still amazed at all the little details that pepper the environments. It was impressive back in Detroit and it just hasn't let up since.
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[sarsamis]

Finished this earlier and thought it was damn good overall. I guess I accidentally killed a person or two and missed a book somewhere. Oh well!

Spoily things: I went with Sarif's ending because fuck those other guys. Although I do plan on watching the others tomorrow since I have a save right at the terminals. I didn't think the ending video was necessarily terrible, but wish there was the slightest hint of an epilogue.

Going to start another play through as a Jensen with a firm belief in "no more people; no more wars" and go with that ending where the hydra's flooded. This time around I'll be a fucking asswipe to everyone but Sarif.

-edit-

Oh yeah, forgot to mention that bringing a hacked turret down the elevator for the third boss was the most satisfying means of getting out of a shitty situation in a game I've had in awhile.

[Mikey]

Ha, that's a brilliant idea

[Felix]

I liked the way the endings were set up, I just thought that the monologues that constituted them were universally horrible and I'd much rather have had the briefest suggestion of my decision being put into effect. In principle I liked Taggart's ending (even though I liked Sarif much better as a character, he failed to redeem himself the last time we spoke, and the world was obviously careening off of a cliff on the path he wanted to stay on), but watching newsreel footage of a Nazi rally while the narrator implores us to make good choices in life was pretty embarrassing. It wasn't as bad as the script for the "flood the base" ending, though, which was essentially "I fundamentally disagree with being governed by elected representatives!" Okay Robocop, you facile turd, I'm really excited for Deus Ex 4: Mom and Pop Store Oligarchy.

That said, this is a small, small blemish on a game that is otherwise so delightfully crunchy and meaty it helped me to remember how exciting games used to be.

Also, I think I said this already, but for anyone complaining about the bossfights: it's literally only the first one that's obligatory. You can typhoon the second, punch the third, and laser the fourth, each in about fifteen seconds flat. While I maintain that the one boss I actually bothered to fight normally was splendidly MGS-awkward, I think that the cheeseball means of victory are entirely DX-apropos, if not the point-for-point equivalent of the first game's killswitches, and I'm fairly sure that we'd be complaining about them for the exact opposite reason in any other game.

[sarsamis]

Not as someone who refused to get the typhoon and was dumb enough to get the replacement chip (which I was actually suspicious of, but went ahead with anyway out of curiosity). All my fault, of course, but still. I obviously used a Get Out of Jail Free for the third one anyway. It was just a matter of getting him in front of the turret, gassing him, and then hiding for 10 seconds. Lasered the hell out of the fourth and almost went for that shortcut by turning off their life support, but decided to use peps instead because those girls probably didn't ask for that.

I was kind of expecting the fourth boss to be Hugh Darrow, who's been hiding the most badass prosthetic arm in the whole game under that cloak because video games, but was genuinely impressed to find that wasn't the case.

[Talbain]

It's a good game, but it's still too straightforward for a Deus Ex game. I can't really call it great, aside from the art and music direction. This game's problem is basically pathfinding being too straightforward, at least in my estimation. It's also not very challenging and rewards a lot of stuff twice or three times over when there's really no need to.
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[BotageL]

[BotageL]

[Felix]

In hindsight, having defended the takedowns as blithely sadistic enough to be apropos of Deus Ex' humour (seriously, does anybody remember how funny JC was?), I did find myself getting frustrated at the way the typhoon and the punch-down-walls augs froze the game for a second. It's a funny criticism, because this game otherwise handles going in and out of first-person better than any I can think of except perhaps the morphball in Metroid Prime (note: game is nine fucking years old), but until I got a weapon that was capable of taking down robots, running right up to them and using the Typhoon was some pretty grating Because Videogames nonsense.

It's probably to soon to be talking about this, but I'm curious if anybody else felt as strongly as I did about taking Taggart's ending in this game and Helios' in the original, because they're relative ideological opposites that I think both games did a fine job of setting up in their respective ways. On a very basic level, they make the "we didn't have the technology then, but we do now" logic seem fairly intelligent and satisfying.

[Talbain]

[BotageL]

I'm perfectly willing to laud a well-executed example of ten-year-old game design when it works well and feels good. If I wasn't, do you think I'd like fighting games?

Combat feels good, stealth feels better. What the hell is "crunchy?"
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http://www.mdgeist.com/

[Talbain]

[Felix]

[Talbain]

I definitely believe that Deus Ex Human Revolution is superior to any AAA title in recent memory. Despite this, there are other titles that have been made recently that are better.

I suppose I just hope that the AAA title of the future is closer to Demon's Souls (I sincerely hope Dark Souls sells a billion copies). Not that there's really a comparison to be made there, since one's an RPG and the other's an FPS, and I've never been fond of the FPS genre. Biases along two trajectories, one along design, the other along genre, perhaps makes it difficult for me to see what others enjoy so much about Human Revolution.
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[TXTSWORD]

Yeah. What Talbain said.

[DJ]