deus ex

[gcninja]

So, who's ready for this game? I've never played the previous ones, but theyve been popular and the graphics look great. Not to mention its futuristic body modding technology. I love it already. I preordered the special edition and it'll ship tomorrow. Any tips for starting off, assuming this is like the previous ones

[Darkobra]

1. PLAY THE DEUS EX GAME OF THE YEAR! JC Denton is a legend. And don't play Invisible War. Mega mega bad.
2. Raise lockpick and hacking to max ASAP. Guns can wait. You'll thank me.

[War Monkey782]

I remember bashing dudes repeatedly with a club, and that I am fucking terrified of combat robots

[Geoff_B]

Wearing sunglasses. At night. Just because.

Awesome.

[Cybren]

Play deus ex

[gcninja]

So, by "ship tomorrow" I meant next week. I forgot that "gamestop reserves the right to bill up to 10 days early". FECK

[dackwards d]

I still own a copy of Deus Ex GOTYE and reinstall it regularly. The graphics don't stand up to newer games of course but its like that jumper your girlfriend keeps trying to throw away - no matter how ugly other people might think it is, it is the comfiest goddamn thing you have ever worn in your life. Except that there are also a bunch of other people that also wear your sweater and love it just as much as you do, and the sequel to the sweater was shit.

...It isn't a perfect metaphor.

In short, I can't wait to play the new one and you should play the first.

[empath]

What dackwards said, right down to the GOTY copy sitting on my shelf with it's bright orange spine calling out to me...you know...I've never installed it on this hard drive yet...

I'll have to wait on Human Revolution, though - finances are just too tight right now.

[kodra]

Deus Ex is my favorite game ever. I occasionally reinstall it to remind myself what a truly expansive branching story can look like. Human Revolution is something I'll watch with interest, mostly because of how bad IW was.

My trust was shattered

[empath]

In all honesty, I don't (yeah, present tense) find Invisible War THAT BAD; it was a decent game in its own right.

...it just succumbed to Sequel Syndrome, and couldn't match either a) the originality and diversity of scipting/story/design its predecessor had (something's only cool and new ONCE), or 2) the hype we all had heaped on it while awaiting it.

Again, I'm gonna use my usual "wait for all the patches to be released" method for PC games - prolly get the GOTY version...after THAT starts to drop in price.

This is all assuming that the reviews and user experiences are actually good; if this game phails, I'll have simply saved my money for...well, okay debt payments, but still!

[Darkobra]

I played the second one recently with a blank slate and just could not enjoy it. The voice acting felt like an after school special and the story was just a very dumbed down version of the first one. I played it for 4 hours, got all my last straws broken and never looked back.

[Jamfalcon]

Well, I just preordered a copy off of Steam. I got the first one a couple of years back, but I just couldn't get into it, having not played it back when it was newer. I managed to play about seven hours I think, but I found that it just wasn't holding my attention the way I'm sure it would have if I'd played it five years prior. That and I couldn't figure out how to get into the warehouse.

[Cureless_Poison]

I thought that series hasn't been good since the first one...

Also none of them are like the first one, so good luck with that.

[War Monkey782]

I went and got the second one for like $5, and it played like a $5 game. I don't think I'll be playing it anymore.

Although the one positive thing I can say is that the combat robot no longer scare me. Mostly because they cannot turn very quickly, so I was able to beat them to death with a knife.

[ThrashJazzAssassin]

I'm definitely going to play Human Revolution, but I can't quite get as excited about it as I should. I hate the way they've added in third-person cover and finishing move mechanics; it seems to be in fashion to look at what's popular in games at the moment and add it in regardless of whether it's appropriate.

Okay, so I'm partly just bitching about cover-based shooting again, but in addition to not liking it I really think the takedown animations could disrupt your flow when you're trying to take down several guards in succession. The cover mechanic seems to be designed to be unobtrusive in case you don't want to use it, so I hope the takedowns will be as well, for those who want more of an old-school Deus Ex experience.

[Gollom]

Deus Ex is my favourite game of all time, bar none. It is the stick to which all other games are measured. I do not enjoy many games lately.

I think I said this on IRC, but BUY DEUS EX. DO IT NOW. NOW. It's like $10 on Steam and worth every penny. Play it vanilla once, then play through with Biomod and the HD texture pack. Then play through it again because it's so good and you'll wonder what happened if did X instead of Y. Just as an FYI, there are only...two, I think, people in the entire game you HAVE to kill. So keep that in mind. The impact of a choice isn't quite as great as say...Alpha Protocol, but for the time it was absolutely revolutionary. So yes. Buy it, play it, love it.

Invisible War is...bad. The engine was a horrible disaster that makes Gamebryo look perfect in comparison. It was an original X-Box game, so maps, textures and models had to be small, low-rez and low poly. Unlike Deus Ex, which was developed as a PC game and later ported to the PS2, Invisible War was developed from the ground up as an XBox game. Ion Storm had no experience with console games, and constructed a UI that can only be described as hateful. It had a dynamic shadow system before it was cool, but it was so clunky and hacked together it didn't work half the time. Like wise, it's physics system only made sense if the game took place on an alternate Earth where gravity was 1/2 what it is in reality.

The story was silly. It had branches, but they all lead to the exact same place: stupid. There are three (technically four, but one is a joke) endings to Deus Ex. Rather than pick one, they crammed all three together. It could have worked, but they way they went about it was so stupid it hurts to think about it.

Sorry for the wall o' bile. tl;dr: Play Invisible War, but understand that it really isn't worthy of being called Deus Ex. It's barely worthy of being called a game.

All that being said, I'm still excited for Human Revolution. Cautious, but excited. It's a prequel, so they'll be slightly less likely to fanservice us to death. The studio has some great talent with it, they have one of the original writers on as a consultant, and they really give the impression that they know what they're doing. Square also really wants it to succeed, so the studio probably had a tonne of support.

[Cybren]

So keep that in mind. The impact of a choice isn't quite as great as say...Alpha Protocol,

how fucking dare you. Take it back.

[Jamfalcon]

Alpha Protocol is one of my all time favourite games

[Alja-Markir]

...

Two words.

Goddamn Motherfucking Impossible Cocaine Fueled Bullshit "Turn Up The Radio" Boss Fight.

~Alja~

[Gollom]

*counts* Hmm...
But yeah, that fight is a pain in the ass the first time through. Alpha Protocol is still a pretty good game and almost a worthy successor of Deus Ex. Almost. I don't really understand why it's so hated. Maybe because Thorton is kind of a smarmy dick?

I'm not sure why my comment got such a hostile reply, though. Actions in Alpha Protocol DO have greater(or perhaps I should say more) consequences than in Deus Ex. It's also got nearly ten years on Deus Ex and the benefit of all that hindsight, so I would hope that it had refined some aspects. It definitely fails in other areas that Deus Ex damn near perfected, but not this one.

[Alja-Markir]

Well, it doesn't help that the plot was full of more holes than a termite mound and the ramifications of your quick-time event actions were highly unpredictable. I couldn't count the number of times I thought I was doing something that would make an NPC happy, only to piss them off royally because the game hadn't given me the proper notion of what my "style" of action would actually accomplish.

But, Alpha Protocol's CRIPPLING bugs were pretty terribad too. Like when bosses didn't spawn, or when tranquilized plot characters were flagged as dead anyway, or when enemies saw you through walls, or when you fell through the world and died, or when you got stuck on invisible walls, or when enemies would spawn in walls and become unkillable but still able to shoot you, or when wall mines would go off during cutscenes, et cetera. Rather odd number of wall-related bugs, to be honest.

Plus, the level design was really lackluster.

~Alja~

[Gollom]

Huh, I hadn't run into any of that. I didn't play it until well after it was out and patched, though. I didn't think the level design was too bad, until the very last mission.

The conversation thing is a complaint others have made too, and I sort agree. I liked the over-all concept, it just didn't do a very good job of informing you about what anything actually was. Also you could break it, but thats kind of a result of the ambitious do anything in any order thing. It's something Eidos is addressing in Human Revolution, apparently. It's going to use a similar system, but it isn't timed, you can hover over a given option to see what you'll actually say, and there is supposedly a system in place so that you can see how the NPC will react, including an aug to make it easier.

[Jamfalcon]

I also had very few bugs, none of them even close to game breaking, but I also played it after the patch, so I can't speak for how much that helped. The Moscow bossfight was a pain, although personally I had more trouble with the one in Rome, since I went to Rome first and Moscow last.

I'm currently on my fourth playthrough, having done one as a stealth/pistols character, one as a shotgun/toughness character that went for the maximum amount of named NPC deaths, one with stealth and melee where I went for the minimum amount of deaths (I only got one, being the tank driver at the end of Saudi Arabia). Currently I'm playing through trying to say all the wrong things in any given situation, and I'm seeing huge amounts of new dialogue, some new content, and noticing the astonishing amount of things I'm not learning that I had on my previous playthroughs.

I realize that I'm certainly in the minority, but I thought the game was excellent.

[Alja-Markir]

Regarding bugs, I played it on the PC. I'm told the console versions are (bizarrely) more stable.

~Alja~

[Alja-Markir]

That said, HOLY CRAP, DEUS EX IN MERE HOURS!

GAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHH!

~Alja~