Deus Ex

I try to play it as a stealth game, thereby avoiding all the painful gun mechanics. Upgrade your melee weapon skill and start tazing bros. Having said that, once you've upgraded your stats a bit and gotten used to the way the game plays, you can still enjoy yourself going in guns blazing.

I think of it in a similar way that I do Morrowind, an RPG that happens to have a first person interface, if you can get away from the mindset of it being an FPS, it really helps.

Human Revolution really did wonders fixing up a lot of that, and it really is a competent shooter as well as a competent RPG. Oh, and Invisible War... well, um, to be charitable... the story in that is well worth experiencing, but the gameplay really isn't great.

Oh, and the game length is quite long, but I don't think any of it could be considered filler. I'd argue that some of the best levels come along later in the game, and the length really helps the game feel like a globe-trotting epic thriller.

Scratched wrote:

I'd say it's more that due to the constraints of hardware at the time, making content to those constraints was quicker, so they could make more of it. Simply put, it doesn't take long to make a box room with blocky furniture and slap a texture on each surface as it does making a room filled with clutter and high detailed furniture.

That's definitely part of it, but I think the demand for better graphics is actually a good thing to some degree, as each room being more costly to make means you are less like to spend resources making crummy filler rooms. Not that some modern games don't do that anyway...

That's one thing I did definitely notice playing though Liberty Island last night: the sparseness of the set. The place just looked empty, square and flat. In a more recent game, the textures would be higher res to make the wall look more like a wall and less like a giant concrete slab, and there would be more things in the room to make the space feel alive.

I am wary of too much demand for MOAR GRAPHICS, as it is only making games more expensive to create (in time and money). I don't consider myself a graphics whore (I looked at the high res texture pack for Dragon Age for example, and thought it looked like a waste of time), but I think there is a happy medium. For the most part, just about anything from this generation of consoles is "good enough", and plenty of last gen stuff is good enough also, with the right art style.

Scratched wrote:

Take a screenshot of a typical DE room, and when you get around to it compare it to a DEHR room.

I may try that if I can figure out how to unbind F12 in the game. I did figure out how to bind the flashlight to another key, but F12 stays bound as well. So I can toggle the flashlight without taking a screenshot, but I can't take a screenshot without toggling the flashlight.

Redwing wrote:

I try to play it as a stealth game, thereby avoiding all the painful gun mechanics. Upgrade your melee weapon skill and start tazing bros. Having said that, once you've upgraded your stats a bit and gotten used to the way the game plays, you can still enjoy yourself going in guns blazing.

I think of it in a similar way that I do Morrowind, an RPG that happens to have a first person interface, if you can get away from the mindset of it being an FPS, it really helps.

Human Revolution really did wonders fixing up a lot of that, and it really is a competent shooter as well as a competent RPG. Oh, and Invisible War... well, um, to be charitable... the story in that is well worth experiencing, but the gameplay really isn't great.

It's weird: I have no problem grokking the RPG-ness of Mass Effect, despite it looking superficially like a third person shooter, and I similarly had no problem grokking the RPG-ness of Oblivion, or Fallout 3 despite them looking superficially like an FPS. For some reason though, the RPG-ness of Deus Ex is less... obvious to me I guess. It probably has to do with how I expect RPGs to start. DE is broken up into discrete missions (I think) and it just drops you into the first one, which makes it look more like an FPS, not just from a visual standpoint, but a design standpoint as well.

Garden Ninja wrote:

It's weird: I have no problem grokking the RPG-ness of Mass Effect, despite it looking superficially like a third person shooter, and I similarly had no problem grokking the RPG-ness of Oblivion, or Fallout 3 despite them looking superficially like an FPS. For some reason though, the RPG-ness of Deus Ex is less... obvious to me I guess. It probably has to do with how I expect RPGs to start. DE is broken up into discrete missions (I think) and it just drops you into the first one, which makes it look more like an FPS, not just from a visual standpoint, but a design standpoint as well.

This makes sense, it might help once the game opens out a bit in places like Hell's Kitchen. You can spend a lot of time there just wandering around speaking to people and discovering things, without firing a weapon. It's those times where Deus Ex really feels like an RPG.

You're also limited in what you can do early on, once you start picking up new augmentations and gadgets, your options start to multiply. Early on, it's pretty much shoot or hide, but later it's:

"Disable security camera with and EMP burst from your scout drone after reconing a room." or "Hack cages to release deadly animals into a lab, and slip past security during the confusion." or "Lay down gas mines, lure enemies into them with loud noises, and run around whacking the now blinded enemies with your baton while wearing a gas mask/using a breathing aug." (a personal favourite :))

Garden Ninja wrote:

I am wary of too much demand for MOAR GRAPHICS, as it is only making games more expensive to create (in time and money). I don't consider myself a graphics whore (I looked at the high res texture pack for Dragon Age for example, and thought it looked like a waste of time), but I think there is a happy medium. For the most part, just about anything from this generation of consoles is "good enough", and plenty of last gen stuff is good enough also, with the right art style.

Yeah, pretty much. Graphics have to serve and end, rather than being an end to themselves. Similarly with mass production of identical room, if making a hundred rooms doesn't add to the game, it's making the game worse by boring the player having to run through them.

beanman101283 wrote:

Deus Ex is VERY much an RPG. Headshots matter like most modern shooters, but it's more dependent on your stats, skills, and augs than where you point the cursor.

I noticed this when I was playing, and I think this was something that bothered me with Mass Effect 1 as well. You could have your cursor on a target's chest and still only get a glancing shot because that's how the dice rolled. Once I realized what the game was doing, combat stopped bothering me as much, although about halfway through the game you need to start paying more attention to what you're loading in your gun chambers. The different ammo types make a huge difference depending on the situation.

The game is fairly long, and the pacing isn't very good. Some missions can take you a few hours to do with no progression in the story in the meantime. A lot of people get burned out around the halfway point, in Hong Kong. The biggest trouble with the game is that the mechanics and abilities don't change or improve enough to sustain the game's length. Once your play style is established by the halfway point, that's ALL you'll be doing for the next couple dozen hours, and the only variation is in the levels and encounters (which, admittedly, they did a good job of having a large variety of levels so the spaces you move through don't feel stale).

The story is fairly interesting, especially in the first half of the game, but again, after a while it drags out and doesn't do enough to keep you motivated to continue on its own.

My thoughts exactly. It's still got some interesting/good mechanics, but there's a good amount of bloat and the core ideas behind it are probably better executed in more modern games like Human Revolution and Dishonored.

shoptroll wrote:

My thoughts exactly. It's still got some interesting/good mechanics, but there's a good amount of bloat and the core ideas behind it are probably better executed in more modern games like Human Revolution and Dishonored.

I think you need to be careful with this. Sure, the modern games with the DE style are awesome and a great follow up to DE and plenty of unquestionable improvements over it, but there's some things that DE still does better I think. Long term consequences and more characters to play around with come to mind.

As an overall package? I'd say that's a personal thing. Some people will not get on with the old games.

Back when I first played Deus Ex, I didn't find it bloated at all, but then I loved a big sprawling many-houred mess back then, when I had all the free time in the world. It's harder for me to judge now I'm older because it's not fresh to my eyes, and I know all the little secrets and tricks to make the game go smoother.

Plus games were just longer back then by default as well, it is a product of its time.

It may take a while to finish, but that's just the game it is, and I don't think it really suffers for it. Once again, if you embrace it as an RPG, it feels downright speedy compared to something like Baldur's Gate, or even Mass Effect.

Edit: Sorry for the rambly tone, I find the comparison between old and new, especially in the realms of video games, to be a very fascinating subject. I get rambly when I'm fascinated.

Hell's Kitchen is where the game really started to click for me.

ME1 is my favorite in that series, and I had no problem with the stat/dice-based combat. Same with Morrowind. So when I played Deus Ex a few months ago, it took a bit to get back in that mindset, but I was comfortable with it after not too long. I think the game took me around 40 hours or so to beat. I took it slow and did a LOT of sneaking around. I tried to kill as few people as possible, though I left unconscious guards all over the place.

I also used a guide to find all the augs, and I'm glad I did since some of them are pretty hard to find on your own.

I tried messing with the launcher EXE and with some of the mods suggested, but some combination of New Vision, HDTP and Shifter borked the game. It seemed okay initially, but when I alt tabbed out of the game, then back into it, the mouse stopped responding completely in game, but also not let go of the mouse when I alt tabbed back to the desktop. I had to use the keyboard to bring up task manager and kill the process.

I put a couple more hours into it last weekend and got through the subway tunnels and into the airfield. I tried playing this game once before, a couple of years ago and in the tunnels is where I dropped it. I think I was holding the earlier playthrough against the game, as playing through the stuff I'd seen before felt like a slog. Now that I am seeing new content, I'm enjoying it more and plan to give it another couple hours to see if it hooks me.

I think the biggest problem right now, is that I just don't feel invested in the world, probably partially because they just drop you into it, and there isn't much obvious opportunity to learn how the world works. As a comparison, I also played about an hour of Vampire: The Masquerade &emdash; Bloodlines and that world hooked me immediately. Part of that may be intrinsic to the setting (I dig vampires more than cyberpunk, I guess), but it is also the way they introduce it: in the first 15 minutes or so, you learn about "polite" vampire society and a bit how it operates, are introduced to "non-polite" vampires, are shown some of the powers you could learn and see hints of there being much more to learn (e.g. politics between the clans).

Deus Ex, on the other hand, seems to expect that you will be invested before you even start. That is actually a big part of why I'm not really convinced that it's an RPG, or at least not what I expect from something called an RPG. Due to the mechanics, it isn't really properly a shooter, or stealth game either, but a blend. Time will tell whether it's a blend I like.

Another part of what bugs me is that it seems to be getting in its own way. So much about the game (early shooting mechanics, the alternate paths, comments from certain NPCs, etc) indicate that they want you to play sneaky non-lethal, but make it incredibly hard to do that. Cameras spot you if you have so much as a shoulder visible, and there are very few lock picks, multitools, prod charges and tranq darts to be found, and I haven't found a place to buy them. Multitools I can understand being limited because they want to you find datapads with the codes, rather than hack. I think they want you to find nanokeys as well, instead of using lock picks. I'd be cool with that, but having so little non-lethal ammo and bad camera AI makes it not feel worthwhile to explore. On the other hand, actually finding that datapad, or that nanokey is pretty satisfying so maybe I should force myself to play that way. Though I do wish code entry was automatic like the keys, as digging through your notes to find the right code doesn't really add anything to the experience.

There was a spot, right before going down to the subway tunnels where the bum who helped you on Liberty Island, offers to tell you where to find the code for the secret passage if you give him 500 credits. I had more than 500 and wanted to buy the info from him, but the game wouldn't let me. The only dialog choice I had was "Not interested". I ended up hacking the passage entrance.

Also, a couple of questions:
Is there a way to respec? I don't know that I'd use it but it might be nice to experiment.
Is there a mod to add damage counters? It's kind of silly, but I actually really like seeing damage numbers fly off or enemies.

I'd say if you're not interested in the story by the completion of the airfield mission, then leave it. That's a turning point so you're either on board by then or not in my estimation. Don't play a game you're not having fun with.

As far as respeccing your character, I don't think so. It's a one way street.
In DE:IW you could overwrite augs, I don't think you can do so in DE. There are a few (and I mean few) duplicate augs so you can get both sides if you wanted. For weapons you can just throw them away and get new weapons, but the mods can't be removed and placed on another.

The only damage counter I can think of is targetting aug, where you'll get a window with information, which is not the same thing. Also take note that you can do locational damage, so shooting their hands/arms to make them drop a weapon, etc. so pure damage isn't the only thing to be concerned about (although it is most important).

Scratched wrote:

I'd say if you're not interested in the story by the completion of the airfield mission, then leave it. That's a turning point so you're either on board by then or not in my estimation. Don't play a game you're not having fun with.

I try to do that in general, which is why I made a rule for myself that games get at most 5 hours to grab me. I've technically made an exception at this point (7 hours, according to steam) because I see so much potential, plus I want to make sure I wasn't holding that earlier playthrough against it.

Scratched wrote:

As far as respeccing your character, I don't think so. It's a one way street.
In DE:IW you could overwrite augs, I don't think you can do so in DE. There are a few (and I mean few) duplicate augs so you can get both sides if you wanted. For weapons you can just throw them away and get new weapons, but the mods can't be removed and placed on another.

Respeccing isn't too big a deal to me honestly, and it's more about Gamer OCD and the concern that I've made the wrong decisions. Like, due to getting frustrated, I was lethal in the early mission, and now I wish I weren't (and therefore wish I put my mods on my crossbow, instead of my stealth pistol). By the time I got a couple Augs, I actually put some thought into how I wanted to use them, so I'm happy with the ones I picked (Microfibre Muscle instead of Combat Strength so I can lift boxes and find alternate paths, and Environmental Resistance instead of Aqualung so I can so gas grenades and whack dude with my baton.

I definitely don't want to restart at this point, but I think I can actually make a more interesting story for myself with a bit of roleplaying, even if it isn't directly present in the game. For instance, the old general (Sam Carter, according to wikia) who is now UNATCOs quartermaster is a hero to JC. When I went to get supplies after the second mission, I bragged about basically killing everyone on Liberty Island and in the warehouse. Carter ripped me a new one, talking about how in his day, they were citizens first and soldiers second, or something like that. Basically, they don't go around murdering people. As a result, he refused to give me 10mm ammo and only gave me tranq darts. Getting reamed by his childhood hero will have a strong effect on JC and he will start thinking and acting more carefully, using lethal force only when absolutely necessary.

I think I actually played that way in tunnels (prod, tranqs and gas grenades) and in the first bit of the airfield, and I plan to play that way from now on. I think I will actually take the pistol out of my hotbar. That will force me to play more carefully.

Scratched wrote:

The only damage counter I can think of is targetting aug, where you'll get a window with information, which is not the same thing. Also take note that you can do locational damage, so shooting their hands/arms to make them drop a weapon, etc. so pure damage isn't the only thing to be concerned about (although it is most important).

That actually sounds like a pretty cool aug and is close enough to what I'd want, but I think vision enhancement will be more useful for my playstyle.

DE gets rightly criticised (especially with modern eyes) that it's stealth isn't great, and it's shooting isn't great. If you try to play it as a pure stealth sneaker or a pure shooter I think anyone would get frustrated, you can do it, but it's going to take a lot of resources. I think it works best where you mix the two, don't try and sneak past everything, but try and get into a good initiator position, weaken what you can, set traps, etc, and then carve through what's left. Later in the game it does lean a bit towards combat over stealth, but the opportunities to use the level to your advantage and play the enemy AI are still there right to the end, and that kind of mix is a rare thing.

OK, so something weird and unexpected happened this weekend: it clicked and I sunk about 5 more hours into it. I had to force myself to go to sleep last night to go to bed.

Getting to the airfield, it felt like things opened up a bit more and started reward the exploratory playstyle. A good chunk of that is probably due to finally having enough augs and skill points to not feel so limited. By the end of that mission, when I meet my brother at the plane and find out he's working with the NSF, I was hooked, despite knowing ahead of time that that would be the big twist.

It was frustrating that it felt like Anna Navaro was basically invincible, as I thought the game was cheating (pepper gas didn't do anything), but was pleased reading a FAQ later, that it is possible to kill her there. I guess it just takes better planning, or maybe being specced for combat, instead of stealth.

I died a couple of times trying to send the retreat message to the NSF from the top of the warehouse, as that FEMA guy somehow knows immediately and tells the troops to kill you. I made the mistake of trying to run down through the warehouse, using the medbot a couple levels down for a recharge / breather. That didn't work. Repeatedly. So I did some recon before pushing the button, and found small boxes against one wall, so I restacked them to make a good step, went in to push the button and turned on the speed aug, stunning one soldier on the way out and jumping over the wall and 15 feet down. Then I jumped down another drop, landing on top of a dude and stunning him on the way down (the mechanics probably don't actually support that, but it felt like that in my head). Two dudes saw me and ran for the stair around the corned to come get me. As soon as they disappear around the corner, I drop down onto a dumpster, then the ground and run for my life until I escape the area.

It was awesome!

Last night I got as far as escaping the MJ12 facility. I tried the mixed approach to stealth / combat, playing hit and run with stun prods and firing tranq darts from air ducts. I also exploited the hell out of the AI against the first MIB. Tranq darts didn't seem to take him down, but in trying to get to me, he ran behind the open grate sticking out the floor, so I tossed a gas grenade over it, turned on the environment resistance aug and stunned him while he hacked up a lung.

Part of the issue with the early game, I think, was lack of options. It's a shame it took so long (5 hours? really?), but now I feel like I have enough tools to play how I want. The game seems to be giving me enough stun charges now that I'm no longer worried about running out, and I have a decent collection of tranq darts as well. Plus I'm doing enough exploring, finding codes and nanokeys that I usually have a supply of multi-tools and lock picks, which is good because most doors are taking two to open at this point.

Garden Ninja wrote:

... and Environmental Resistance instead of Aqualung so I can so gas grenades and whack dude with my baton.

YEAH!

Glad to see the game has finally grabbed you, it really does get better once it opens up. The funny thing is, in subsequent playthroughs, I kind of appreciate the minimalism of the early levels, it forces you to be crafty with limited resources, and there's a surprising amount of things you can still do even without all your augs and skills.

Garden Ninja wrote:

It was frustrating that it felt like Anna Navaro was basically invincible, as I thought the game was cheating (pepper gas didn't do anything), but was pleased reading a FAQ later, that it is possible to kill her there. I guess it just takes better planning, or maybe being specced for combat, instead of stealth.

The rocket launcher can kill her, it's also great for locked doors(presuming you have neutralized the guards in the area).

Yeah, the ability to kill or not kill Anna (and similar choices) and the repercussions of that are nice little touches that few games even attempt.

Despite the huge scope of making a modern remake of DE, it's something I'd like to see with attempts to fix bits that need fixing and improve it in areas like the beginning, although maybe they would need to disguise it as another game. There have been so many forum posts I've seen of people never getting off Liberty Island. More companies should take a stab at including aspects of it, it's a shame that the slick production lines we've got now have no problems throwing out games dozens of gigs large, but run scared of complexity.

Maybe I'm overstating it a bit there, but in over a decade I can't say there's "a better Deus Ex" that makes the original irrelevant. I want to play something new that beats DE, I want to bury it, but there's no overall package that does it better for me.

Good to hear you gave it enough room to give it a decent shake, and it rewarded you by digging it's claws in.

Redwing wrote:
Garden Ninja wrote:

... and Environmental Resistance instead of Aqualung so I can so gas grenades and whack dude with my baton.

YEAH!

Glad to see the game has finally grabbed you, it really does get better once it opens up. The funny thing is, in subsequent playthroughs, I kind of appreciate the minimalism of the early levels, it forces you to be crafty with limited resources, and there's a surprising amount of things you can still do even without all your augs and skills.

I can see that. In my case, it just felt limiting because it was the effectively the first playthrough, but I had to run through a bunch of content I'd seen first, like playing a demo then finding out it was basically just the beginning of the game. After finishing Liberty Island, I did run around quite a bit, without having to worry about enemies and finding several secret areas or different paths and that was pretty cool, though would have been more satisfying to find earlier.

Agent 86 wrote:
Garden Ninja wrote:

It was frustrating that it felt like Anna Navaro was basically invincible, as I thought the game was cheating (pepper gas didn't do anything), but was pleased reading a FAQ later, that it is possible to kill her there. I guess it just takes better planning, or maybe being specced for combat, instead of stealth.

The rocket launcher can kill her, it's also great for locked doors(presuming you have neutralized the guards in the area).

I can't really justify the space for the rocket launcher, considering I'm trying to avoid kills. LAMs work well on doors also, but there aren't that many of them.

Supposedly a LAM at the right spot will knock her health down quite a bit, but not kill her, and she'll cloak and chatter at you.

I'm actually at the point now, where I am out of the MJ12 facility, but still inside UNATCO and I have to face Anna, and I kind of wish I had dealt with her earlier.

Garden Ninja wrote:
Redwing wrote:
Garden Ninja wrote:

... and Environmental Resistance instead of Aqualung so I can so gas grenades and whack dude with my baton.

YEAH!

Glad to see the game has finally grabbed you, it really does get better once it opens up. The funny thing is, in subsequent playthroughs, I kind of appreciate the minimalism of the early levels, it forces you to be crafty with limited resources, and there's a surprising amount of things you can still do even without all your augs and skills.

I can see that. In my case, it just felt limiting because it was the effectively the first playthrough, but I had to run through a bunch of content I'd seen first, like playing a demo then finding out it was basically just the beginning of the game. After finishing Liberty Island, I did run around quite a bit, without having to worry about enemies and finding several secret areas or different paths and that was pretty cool, though would have been more satisfying to find earlier.

Agent 86 wrote:
Garden Ninja wrote:

It was frustrating that it felt like Anna Navaro was basically invincible, as I thought the game was cheating (pepper gas didn't do anything), but was pleased reading a FAQ later, that it is possible to kill her there. I guess it just takes better planning, or maybe being specced for combat, instead of stealth.

The rocket launcher can kill her, it's also great for locked doors(presuming you have neutralized the guards in the area).

I can't really justify the space for the rocket launcher, considering I'm trying to avoid kills. LAMs work well on doors also, but there aren't that many of them.

Supposedly a LAM at the right spot will knock her health down quite a bit, but not kill her, and she'll cloak and chatter at you.

I'm actually at the point now, where I am out of the MJ12 facility, but still inside UNATCO and I have to face Anna, and I kind of wish I had dealt with her earlier.

Yeah there are a ton of tricks and way to break the game. It really is a fun and great game, but I've tried playing it again and I just can't get past the gameplay. Deus ex just did not age well for me. Alpha protocol and Bloodlines now fill that niche for me. I already beat it three or so times so it's good.