[DJ]

My obsession with text bleeding off the image and the tired black-white-red color scheme notwithstanding, they should still use my cover, dammit. Better than whatever they're going to come up with. BAH.

Bonus points to anyone who can read hex.

Anyway, reading the rest of this thread.

(yes I know there is probably no UNATCO in DX3 because it's a prequel shut up)
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[DJ]

Deus Ex 1 is $2.50 on Steam right now.
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[DJ]

Sigh.

Just been skimming this, I'm still at my folks' house and have a date with an old friend in an hour so gotta get ready for that, but I'm liking a lot of the discussion showing up; I also have a sense of dread that this game is going to just not work. Not because of any one particular thing I'm seeing, just the sense that the aspects that came together in DX1 are simply Not Done Anymore, kinda like how none of the metrovanias ever quite managed to do Symphony again because the experimentation process was over and a lot of the hanging chaff that made Symphony interesting simply doesn't materialize once the formula is down.

DX may well be the kind of game that only works when it's blazing a new trail, not following an established one.

Conversely, maybe they know this and/or maybe the change of staff and publisher is enough to send it in a new direction and we'll see it pull it off. I really hope so. I want this game to be good so much. I would almost rather it wind up being ungodly, Sonic 2006 level bullshit than just being mediocre.

I'm hopeful. I'm just also kind of wary.
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[DJ]

God dammit I have work tomorrow.


...staying up anyway...
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[DJ]

20 minutes.

>:(
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[DJ]

Finally.
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[DJ]

Deus Ex: The Screenshots

(this will get much, much larger over the next few days)
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Woke up early to play some of it this morning, and either they toned down the difficulty from the E3 build, or standing on the show floor was just a shitty way to focus on the game. I got annihilated for about an hour straight at E3; at home, I'm playing on the hardest difficulty and just breezed through the opening mission without being spotted or killing anyone.

And it was fun.

Looks like my old standby of Stealth/Sniper/Hacker is going to be my first playthrough here.
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[DJ]

Yeah the mouse sensitivity is insanely high for some reason, had to cut it in half and it still feels twitchy.
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The amount of small detail in this game is making me incredibly happy. So far, best I can really say is that already-very-much-bandied-about phrase: It feels like Deus Ex. I guess I'll just have to say that more emphatically or something, because it's quite true. Not how Deus Ex actually was, but how I remember it being 10 years on, and that's usually an incredibly difficult mark to hit when you're making a new game in a franchise that hasn't exactly been timely in its sequels (see: Deus Ex 2).

This game is everything I wanted the second one to be, and the fact that the second one was shitty just so this game wouldn't come out until we actually had the technology to make it this nice almost makes the whole thing worth it for me.

I was walking around the city and heard someone cheerily whistling the original Deus Ex theme. I actually busted out laughing to myself like and idiot at such a tiny but fun little detail.

Also, this game was essentially run by the art team and sweet mother of christ does it show. It's like the opposite of the Crysis approach. The game isn't particularly technically demanding, and if you look you can see some cheats here and there, like the low-res rectangular blobs with orange spots they try to pass off as buildings in the distance -- an illusion that works fine when you can barely see them but doesn't hold up when your IGC has a point-of-view airplane buzzing right past them. But, for all that, there's detail where it matters.

Like Adam Jensen's clothing.

Look at this motherfucker:



That is a lot of painstaking texture work just on his clothes. And it's everyone in this game. Everything is dripping with style, and it's not a style that's easily placed (although I guess "The Matrix got it on with a Victorian Reenactment Society" would work). Walking into the LIMB clinic for the first time, I think I spent a good 120 seconds just staring at the light fixture they have in the waiting room.

Man. So much fun so far. I think I might've dumped way too many points into Hacking too early, though. Especially as I'm playing on the hardest difficulty and those combat skills might, uh, actually come in handy.

Also: Has anyone complained about the black hobo lady yet? Because yeeeeee.... That was, uh. That was something, hearing her talk for the first time.
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Dopefish Lives

Also, I'm making a somewhat-educated guess (if anyone knows otherwise please correct me) that the no-kill/no alarm achievements don't actually start tracking anything until after the intro sequence, if for no other reason than that they haven't given you a tutorial on it by that point yet, plus they give you a machine gun with infinite ammo and make it pretty clear that you're supposed to be run-n'-gunning your way through at least the very beginning of the game. You're not given a whole lot of other options.

Also, as getting the Ghost achievement taught me, Metal Gear rules apply. Cautious enemies who've spotted but not identified you don't count towards the "You've been seen!" rule, so just making them come check out what they think they saw still counts as not being seen. It's only when they're openly aware of/hostile towards you that it counts.
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[DJ]

I'm also going for a minimal-kill. I may have to kill some people because if I run out of tranq ammo and energy, well, oh well, my version of Jensen will try to avoid unnecessarily killing people but if his choice boils down to "kill some dudes or get shot in the face", he's going with the former and I guess it sucks to be a gangbanger when a down-on-his-luck augmented guy needs to get past you and all he's got is all the very lethal weapons your slightly-luckier buddies had on them before he knocked them out. I'm trying to minimize the save/be unsatisfied with result/load as much as possible and force myself to keep playing despite less-than-optimal outcomes.

The one big-ass glaring exception to this so far is when an optional quest popped up, I chose to do a different optional quest first, and suddenly the game was like HEY SURPRISE LETS GO TO THE NEXT PLOT AREA RIGHT NOW and when I got there, the first optional quest was suddenly marked as "Cancelled" with no explanation.

So yeah for that one I reloaded and did that one first.

Although now I'm wondering what would've happened if I hadn't. Does the game keep track? Is that guy going to show up way later? Do I maybe just get another chance to do it later? Does it actually make other quests show up if you let this one pass by?

...Fuuucckkk I should've just kept going.

ALSO: Weird thing. In DX1, my version of JC was very much a sneaky hacker type, but he could also very much hold his own in a firefight and one of the reasons I played him like a semi-pacifist is the idea that it was just flat-out too easy to kill everyone because he was generally so much more powerful than they were (and the game reinforced this).

This...Isn't really true in DXHR. Jensen got spotted by a couple of gang members because I stupidly turned a corner too fast, and BANG BANG BANG he was shot dead in less than two seconds. I barely had time to unholster my gun. Admittedly this is on the hardest difficulty so it's my own fault, but:

My version of Jensen is kind of a wimp, at least relative to basically every other RPG/Shooter character I've ever played. I'm finding myself avoiding combat -- or at least picking my battles very carefully and making sure I have full environmental advantage -- not because it's the "right" thing to do to keep things fair, but because Jensen is no superman, and getting lit up by a room full of dudes, even if they're just packing pistols, will drop him dead in a second and change. It's making me play the game very differently than any other game like this. There's games like Siren where you're intentionally made helpless, but DXHR isn't a horror game, and Jensen isn't necessarily helpless. Instead, he's just vulnerable enough that combat really should be a last resort after all other options are completely exhausted, because it's both the riskiest option and the most protracted. I wouldn't say its portrayal is "realistic" because realistically you're not ever going to send a single guy into a giant warehouse full of armed guards, but it takes the sort of spy-thriller film approach where when you're sneaking into someplace, you're really sneaking into it and not just metagaming the thing because it lets you do that instead of going the "normal" route of casually blowing everyone away.

I mean, I did that in DX1. If I saw a particularly nasty cluster of guards that I didn't want to kill, I'd just circle strafe and crossbow bolt until they were all dead. If I try that in Human Revolution I will get annihilated the instant I peek around cover.

So, in a weird twist, I'm actually barely speccing Jensen for combat at all. He's actually not all that powerful! Sure, if he gets up close he can shatter your jaw, but by and large I'm making him more utility-based than combat based, which you'd think would be counterintuitive on the hardest difficulty setting. All those points that should be going into fighting are instead going into being able to jump higher, lift heavy things, and release pheromones to affect people's moods and reactions while I talk to them.

This game has really managed to surprise me and I can't think of any other game that's made me play this way and actually enjoy the hell out of it.
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[DJ]

Well, really, the "challenge" is that you're being kinda OCD about the game. Not knocking it if that's your playstyle, but I would say that if it's ruining the game for you entirely, well shit, why not just go "fuck it, this is a Kill Everyone playthrough" and worry about getting a no-kill clear later on? S'what I'm doing.

I'm actually playing it very close to how I played DX1 (and it's working, which is making me astoundingly happy). Jensen doesn't kill for no reason; if I sneak up on an unsuspecting guard, I'm not going to blow him away, I'm just going to take him down. Dude's just doing his job, right? No need to kill him for that. But, if (minor spoiler) something happens where, say, a bunch of PMC goons walk into a place and massacre a bunch of civilians to get to me? Out comes the silenced 10mm and none of them are getting out alive.

I know this shafts me out of an achievement, but it's immensely adding to my enjoyment of the game, which is a more than fair tradeoff. I'll go do a "perfect" run later on. For my first time through, I'm just having fun and playing the game the way it was designed to be played.
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I also just want to add that this game is really, really good. It's the DX game I've been wanting to play since DX1. The art design, the level design, even the fucking voice acting is great, even if Jensen sounds like he eats cigarettes instead of food. This world feels awesomely lived in and authentic while still managing, somehow, to be a videogame that you play. I love it.
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I don't know a single person playing this game currently who let Diamond Chan live unless they were going for a no-kill clear.

I sure as hell killed him.

Found him later, too, decorating an awning:


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I'm annoyed I only get to play this game when I get home every night. I've yet to spend a full day playing it.

On the plus side, it's kept me entertained for quite a while now despite nightly play.

Hopefully it's done by labor day and/or they don't make me work labor day.
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Barrett was hair-pullingly hard for me. Jensen had exactly zero in the way of combat augs, and on the hardest difficulty he can literally kill you in one second flat. I will say this for that fight, though: It made me start playing Jensen in a far more ready-for-shit-to-go-down manner. Carry more guns and grenades, throw points into the Typhoon system, make sure his health is maxed out at all times, etc. Second boss was handily annihilated in well under half a minute and I think the worst I got was a light dusting of claymore shrapnel.

Totally gonna finish this on the hardest difficulty setting the first time, then do a pacifist clear the second time. Hell I might even achievement whore this one all the way through.

Also, @TXTSWORD: Disliking the takedowns seems like a weird reason to hate the game. Assuming everyone is going to grow to hate it down the line also strikes me as kinda unlikely. You're literally the only person I've seen who doesn't think the game is at least very good. Maybe not great (I think it's great purely due to my personal highly scientific criterion of "Am I having fun? - Yes."), there's definitely some kvetching about the boss battles, the takedowns, the weird difficulty curve, and the fact that Jensen really is kind of a prick. Still, the apparently-universal consensus even from some pretty harsh critics is that the game by and large nails it, a handful of usually pretty personal caveats aside.

Compare that to something like BioShock, which had (and still has) mainstream critics swinging from its dick but was getting ripped on more or less from the jump in places like this one.

Actually I still kind of expected that here, but with Deus Ex you've really got a game that treats you like a big boy and expects you to be able to handle your shit, something that's extremely rare in this day and age. I think that goes a long way in and of itself.

What other game trusts you with a rocket launcher and a huge supply of innocent civilians an hour into the game? It's perfectly possible to completely ruin the game forever by playing it "wrong" and not taking it seriously. This is serious anathema to modern game design, and something most people who were around for the great CRPG golden age of the late 90s and early 2000s usually peg as crucial missing factor in current-gen titles. There's this sense in modern games of "What if they player just acts like a total asshole and breaks everything? We can't let them do that, then the game will be no fun!" Shepard wouldn't even take his gun out anywhere except for designated combat zones safely walled off behind loading screens and populated with chest high cover. DXHR, by contrast, is like "What, you want to just murder every single NPC for kicks? Fuck it. If you think you can get away with that, knock yourself out. Not our fault if you ruin the game for yourself."
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[DJ]

It's 6:42 AM right now, and apparently I've woken up to play more Deus Ex.

Doing all I can to avoid rushing this game (It's been over a week and I still haven't beaten it!) but I'm getting close to the end now and it's hard to keep myself from wanting to just play it all the time until I beat it.

Also I can already tell my second playthrough is going to take maybe 1/4th the amount of time.
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Gettin' there...



The "anytime, flygirl" moment was fantastic, by the way. Finally had a very good reason to bust out the Sniper Rifle I've been lugging around for the entire game up to this point and never used outside of boss fights. Kinda glad I didn't sell that thing now!

[DJ]

Wait...How are you having problems avoiding Hostile status? I'm playing on Give Me Deus Ex on a (mostly) non-lethal run and I've had like no problems at all. And I'm not super amazingly great at videogames or anything either.

Maybe dump some Praxis points into stealth? (I mean the see the cones of vision thing, not the cloak thing since I know you have that).
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[DJ]

Yeeeeaaaah attempting to take every single person out and be nonlethal and be stealthy isn't generally a great idea, at least until later in the game. You can do it, but it will take a long time and you'll be reloading a lot depending on how perfectly you feel the need to pull it off.

[DJ]

[DJ]

Man I really should just say everything I need to say before needing to edit shit.
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[DJ]

Anyway! Going to work now.
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[DJ]

Yeah Jensen's kind of an asshole.

On a side note, DXHR manages to sell better than Zumba Fitness. In the UK, anyway. No small feat considering Zumba Fitness was #1 on the charts and had been for something like 10 weeks.

No word on the rest of the world yet that I could find, but definitely a promising start.

"...apparently Human Revolution almost outdid the entire lifetime sales of 2004's Deus Ex: Invisible War in just two days."

Bearing in mind that Invisible War was actually considered to be a financial if not critical or popular success, this is saying something.

Part of me is going to be extremely happy if this game makes shitloads of money.
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[DJ]

I wrapped it up tonight too.

Grand metagame tally:

Screenshots taken: 83
Achievements earned: 38
Hours played: 38.7

Overall thoughts: Best game I've played in quite a while. Doesn't quite pull off what Deus Ex 1 did but comes pretty close and certainly counts as a legitimate prequel.

Random stray thoughts:
- Fascinated by the amount of references to the first game. There're a lot.
- Ending was kinda meh but not enough to really bother me at all (and let's be honest, the ending(s) to DX1 was/were/still are pretty meh too. Only game I've ever seen stick this particular videogame landing is Metal Gear Solid 3 and I get the feeling that was by accident.)
- Also lots of Metal Gear references.
- How the hell did Jensen get out of the water after arriving at the finale?
- Am simultaneously relieved and annoyed that making a particular choice in Hengsha didn't have more consequences (because the ones it did have kinda sucked, but they sure don't last long).
- I like how Zeke's final act is to be an asshole (you know you got caught.)
- As with DX1, China is Best Setting for Game. Also, Tracer Tong's boat made me grin.

Conclusion: Goatay.
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A lot of the stuff the RPS guys touch on is pretty solid. I particularly agree with Sariff being a much better character than I was expecting. Also stuff like the fact that Megan is Jensen's ex-girlfriend at the beginning of the game lending a subtle ambiguity to the proceedings.
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Fuck, you guys. I really really liked this game a lot.

You have no idea what an incredible fucking relief that is. I was seriously prepped for Invisible War all over again.
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Wow. This is actually a really nice debug menu. Usually they're extremely utilitarian and don't even make anything resembling a token attempt at fitting in with the game world.

Anyone who's seen the "secret" menus on an iPod can attest.
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Yeah I had a gangbanger croak on me after a near-point-blank tranq round to the back of the head. Not sure if there's a criterion for killing with the tranq rifle or if it's just a bug.

Also I was particularly pleased to learn that yes, you can shoot Zeke in the face with the tranq rifle while he's holding a gun to a hostage but before he manages to pull the trigger, and the game accounts for this. Dialogue, NPC reaction, etc. all slot accordingly. You can even go to the police station and see him behind bars (and talk to him).

Hooraaaay.

How did this game even get made? Deus Ex original flavor was basically a happy accident back in 2000. I continue to be floored by how much they managed to capture in DXHR. And with Squeenix on board, too. It's like some kind of game I'd dream about back in 2003: "Hey man, they're making a sequel to Deus Ex! Except it's a prequel! It's got a giant budget, references the first game liberally, has the best art direction you've ever seen, and it's being published by Squaresoft!"

And yet here we are. Strange Days.
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[DJ]

[DJ]

tl;dr - Internal consistency gets me wet.
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Well I dunno if Mirror's Edge really needed that art style in order to work like it did on a technical level (again, see Braid: I'm sure the game was perfectly playable with placeholder art). What the art style in Mirror's Edge seemed to do, again this is for me, is set the mood which made the game possible. Mirror's Edge wouldn't be Mirror's Edge without its visual design. You could keep the red highlights in stuff and turn the whole thing into a Gears of War clone visually without changing a single aspect of the game otherwise, and it simply wouldn't work as well. Or, at the very least, I would have liked it less.

I mean, I can go down the list:

Okami wouldn't be the same game if they'd kept that realistic look to it, even had nothing else in the game been changed.
Silent Hill 2 could've swapped out those enemies for anything, really, but then the game would be missing something.
Killer 7 could've worked as a realistic-looking game, but it wouldn't be the same game at all.
On the flipside, Deadly Premonition could've gone with Killer 7 graphics. Would that have worked?

So yeah. And sorry if it sounds kind of glib, but DXHR's art "function" for me is to evoke the world properly, and that's really how I'm stacking it up to all those other games. Even though it serves no real functional purpose technically, it goes along so well with my suspension of disbelief that it feels vital.

It's one of those annoyingly intangible things I sound retarded trying to explain using words. This is when shit like "spirit" and "essence" and "je ne sais quoi" gets bandied about. It's not any of that, it's just "well done, internally consistent art direction that allows for natural suspension of disbelief" but that doesn't exactly roll off the tongue.
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I think this game did that, though!

The "trick" of it is that it has less of a real need for such a thing. In Ikaruga, you needed that bi-chromatic art style because it was directly tied to how you played the game. For something like DXHR, you could've just Gears it up and the game wouldn't really suffer technically for it. It would just be a lot less interesting, visually.

So, I mean while I agree with you that high-quality art design should meld perfectly with gameplay, I also think you have to take into consideration the angle of attack the game is going for. Does it really need that kind of art direction? A lot of games don't. It's kind of like a game's plot. Some games need that plot, some games really don't need a plot at all. I love Doom but I'm not really playing it for the story. I love Mass Effect 2 but I'm not really playing it for the visuals. I love El-Shaddai but I'm sure as fuck not playing it for the combat. And so on.

So the fact that it's there, and done that well, is what I'm applauding.

I mean let's be honest, the original Deus Ex - my favorite game of all time - was ugly as fuck. So praising a Deus Ex game for the art direction is more than a little weird to me. In a good way!
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I'm gonna run to the store in a sec here, but I also want to point something out that has nothing to do with the previous conversation but still makes me happy: I'm looking at my friends list on Steam, and DXHR is not only very popular, but people appear to actually be playing it all the way through.

A lot of times when a big-name game gets released, I'll browse my friends list and see who's doing what, and more often than not the breakup will usually be maybe 1/3rd of the people I see playing something will actually play it for any substantial amount of time. Fallout 3, Borderlands, Left 4 Dead 2, Portal 2, etc. You'll have a core group of people who play the shit out of it, but a lot of folks I'll see playing it for maybe 5-ish hours and then it peters off.

I'm looking at DXHR and of the 20 or so people I know who own it, only 2 of them haven't completed it. These are all adults with jobs, often with spouses, sometimes with kids.

Man that makes me fuckin' happy. I miss big, meaty, crunchy, grown up, handle-your-shit videogames, and apparently I'm not the only one.
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