Deus Ex 3!? - Page 59

So some thoughts about the gaming, going through it on DX difficulty. The first time I tried stealth, but then I switched to combat and had more fun. Let me first say this is currently the GOTY, but I don't expect that to last when the heavy hitters come out later this year.

This is still very much a console game and you can feel it in a number of different areas. They're mostly little things, but they add up to annoy me. Climbing, talking, inventory/sales menus, the cover system and a few other things. Sure they did some work to bring it to a mouse and keyboard (item bar, keypad password entrylol) but overall as a port, they really only did a decent job. A lot of people are still reporting input issues and the sensitivities really don't feel right until you tweak things. More than that, they just did a shitty job optimizing the game. Most highend setups seem to have no problems while some do, but for a game of this graphics level, performance should be better across the board.

As for the graphics, they're really poor for a 2011 game. Don't mistake what I'm saying, the art direction is really cool and gives the game a good style but the graphics themselves, the nuts and bolts behind everything and the driving engine, are not good. We know it's UE3, but a lot of the game looks like it's from the gen1 Source engine. They talked a lot about tessellation and faces, but the faces look terrible. Adam is really the only one who looks alright, and the rest look worse in live action than they do in screenshots.

Now that's a superficial complaint and some will argue that graphics shouldn't matter (although I disagree, for the purposes of immersion they absolutely do) but the bigger issue in my complaint of the graphics is what they weren't able to do. For a game that devoted a lot of attention to stealth play, there's a remarkable lack of decent lighting in the game and in fact, the lighting never really plays a role. It didn't necessarily need Splinter Cell perma-stealth in shadows, but a modern 2011 stealth game could be a whole lot better if it took advantage of dynamic lighting, and we know the UE3 is capable of it. Let's hope Thief 4 doesn't drop the ball.

On to the stealth play itself and why I switched to combat- I just don't like it in this game. Let's ignore cloak for a minute, which while overpoweringly useful is just a weak design choice. Eidos essentially took the Arkham Asylum style of adventure game, which gives you an overwhelmingly useful HUD but detaches you from the game a bit. Because lighting doesn't matter, stealth basically boils down to following your radar and using cover to avoid LoS. The cover and LoS function in a kind of silly way, where you're just not going to get noticed if you press the cover button, and you just dodge around while looking at your radar instead of looking at the enemies, but it's basically a requirement because the stealth system is so simplistic. Once you get cloak, you largely sidestep the process and even sound stops mattering. In my opinion, switching back and forth between first and third person is actually less immersive than just being in third person the entire time.

Another major deficiency in the stealth system are the lack of grabs. Take downs look cool in an Assassin's Creed kind of way (although I'm not a fan of going into movie-view) but they're also quite dumb. Not just dumb for the game, but dumb for Adam too. Grabbing and incapacitating a guy from the shadows or behind a box and pulling him away without anyone noticing is much more interesting than just stepping out and knocking him out/killing him in the middle of the room. Adam needs to learn some subtlety.

That's the gist of why I stopped caring about stealth play. It's a lot of waiting while looking at my radar, which makes it seem a lot less like I'm in the game, and once you get decent cloak you can start being careless.

Combat has been a lot more fun, but it has a few glaring weaknesses as well. First, the AI. We all know the AI is just wretched in this game. It's incredibly dumb, it's easy to trick and they're never going to do much to flush you out. The only difficulty in the game at Deus Ex level is the few amount of hits you can take, but if your aim is good you can easily take out two people before a shot is fired on you and if you've got enough silenced sniper rifle ammo, that number is infinite. I JUST HEADSHOTTED THE PERSON YOU'RE TALKING TO. YOU SHOULD NOT BE ALARMED AND PACING AROUND SLOWLY. Then once you're spotted, everyone immediately knows where you are, including people just running into the room, and fires at your direction. Even then, once you learn how to pick them off one at a time through good angles, you won't really be in trouble.

The second problem with combat is that the weapons suck. Granted, the weapons in DX1 weren't that great either (besides Dragon's Tooth) but it seems like it's just too easy to level up a weapon (especially 10mm) and stick with it the entire game. I guess that's the same in DX1 as well, but the gun specializations made it so that you still kept upgrading your weapons through augments, on top of the weapon enhancements. And that speaks to a weakness in the augmentation system as a whole.

Most of them suck, or are so good and so cheap that you just take them. There just isn't that much choice because acquiring points isn't that hard, and the things worth taking are pretty obvious. At least in DX1, there were some important sacrifices to make so you felt a bit more unique. Also, besides Icarus and Typhoon, they're just too generic. Spending skill points to upgrade your inventory is just >.> Not even WoW would make you do that.

As for the story, I mean... it's Deux Ex. The script and voice work is good in some areas, so-so in others. The bad guys in this game definitely aren't as interesting as DX1 though. I'm sure if you were to play DX1 after DXHR, you'd feel the same way about DX1's story that I do about DXHR's. Still a great story, just slightly less great the second time around. And it's also missing a Gunther.

I know this is an extremely critical review, but I did still have fun playing it. It takes a lot longer than most other modern games so it definitely deserves credit for that, and the situations/gameplay definitely are interesting. It's not nearly as much of a "choice" game as people are making it out to be, as most things just come down to A or B and the minigames (conversation and hacking) are incredibly simple and easy once you get the right augments. I felt like it was a much bigger deal to make decisions in DX1, but to be honest, that might just be a rosy memory. So it's a fun, long FPS game. Borderline RPG-y, but usually not really. Certainly a great game by today's standards, I'm just let down that there's so many areas where it could be better and the fundamental limitation behind all of them (graphics, simplicity, immersion) are that it's a console game. Something like an action-Splinter Cell hybrid would've been more interesting to me.

So some thoughts about the gaming, going through it on DX difficulty. The first time I tried stealth, but then I switched to combat and had more fun. Let me first say this is currently the GOTY, but I don't expect that to last when the heavy hitters come out later this year.

This is still very much a console game and you can feel it in a number of different areas. They're mostly little things, but they add up to annoy me. Climbing, talking, inventory/sales menus, the cover system and a few other things. Sure they did some work to bring it to a mouse and keyboard (item bar, keypad password entrylol) but overall as a port, they really only did a decent job. A lot of people are still reporting input issues and the sensitivities really don't feel right until you tweak things. More than that, they just did a shitty job optimizing the game. Most highend setups seem to have no problems while some do, but for a game of this graphics level, performance should be better across the board.

As for the graphics, they're really poor for a 2011 game. Don't mistake what I'm saying, the art direction is really cool and gives the game a good style but the graphics themselves, the nuts and bolts behind everything and the driving engine, are not good. We know it's UE3, but a lot of the game looks like it's from the gen1 Source engine. They talked a lot about tessellation and faces, but the faces look terrible. Adam is really the only one who looks alright, and the rest look worse in live action than they do in screenshots.

Now that's a superficial complaint and some will argue that graphics shouldn't matter (although I disagree, for the purposes of immersion they absolutely do) but the bigger issue in my complaint of the graphics is what they weren't able to do. For a game that devoted a lot of attention to stealth play, there's a remarkable lack of decent lighting in the game and in fact, the lighting never really plays a role. It didn't necessarily need Splinter Cell perma-stealth in shadows, but a modern 2011 stealth game could be a whole lot better if it took advantage of dynamic lighting, and we know the UE3 is capable of it. Let's hope Thief 4 doesn't drop the ball.

On to the stealth play itself and why I switched to combat- I just don't like it in this game. Let's ignore cloak for a minute, which while overpoweringly useful is just a weak design choice. Eidos essentially took the Arkham Asylum style of adventure game, which gives you an overwhelmingly useful HUD but detaches you from the game a bit. Because lighting doesn't matter, stealth basically boils down to following your radar and using cover to avoid LoS. The cover and LoS function in a kind of silly way, where you're just not going to get noticed if you press the cover button, and you just dodge around while looking at your radar instead of looking at the enemies, but it's basically a requirement because the stealth system is so simplistic. Once you get cloak, you largely sidestep the process and even sound stops mattering. In my opinion, switching back and forth between first and third person is actually less immersive than just being in third person the entire time.

Another major deficiency in the stealth system are the lack of grabs. Take downs look cool in an Assassin's Creed kind of way (although I'm not a fan of going into movie-view) but they're also quite dumb. Not just dumb for the game, but dumb for Adam too. Grabbing and incapacitating a guy from the shadows or behind a box and pulling him away without anyone noticing is much more interesting than just stepping out and knocking him out/killing him in the middle of the room. Adam needs to learn some subtlety.

That's the gist of why I stopped caring about stealth play. It's a lot of waiting while looking at my radar, which makes it seem a lot less like I'm in the game, and once you get decent cloak you can start being careless.

Combat has been a lot more fun, but it has a few glaring weaknesses as well. First, the AI. We all know the AI is just wretched in this game. It's incredibly dumb, it's easy to trick and they're never going to do much to flush you out. The only difficulty in the game at Deus Ex level is the few amount of hits you can take, but if your aim is good you can easily take out two people before a shot is fired on you and if you've got enough silenced sniper rifle ammo, that number is infinite. I JUST HEADSHOTTED THE PERSON YOU'RE TALKING TO. YOU SHOULD NOT BE ALARMED AND PACING AROUND SLOWLY. Then once you're spotted, everyone immediately knows where you are, including people just running into the room, and fires at your direction. Even then, once you learn how to pick them off one at a time through good angles, you won't really be in trouble.

The second problem with combat is that the weapons suck. Granted, the weapons in DX1 weren't that great either (besides Dragon's Tooth) but it seems like it's just too easy to level up a weapon (especially 10mm) and stick with it the entire game. I guess that's the same in DX1 as well, but the gun specializations made it so that you still kept upgrading your weapons through augments, on top of the weapon enhancements. And that speaks to a weakness in the augmentation system as a whole.

Most of them suck, or are so good and so cheap that you just take them. There just isn't that much choice because acquiring points isn't that hard, and the things worth taking are pretty obvious. At least in DX1, there were some important sacrifices to make so you felt a bit more unique. Also, besides Icarus and Typhoon, they're just too generic. Spending skill points to upgrade your inventory is just >.> Not even WoW would make you do that.

As for the story, I mean... it's Deux Ex. The script and voice work is good in some areas, so-so in others. The bad guys in this game definitely aren't as interesting as DX1 though. I'm sure if you were to play DX1 after DXHR, you'd feel the same way about DX1's story that I do about DXHR's. Still a great story, just slightly less great the second time around. And it's also missing a Gunther.

I know this is an extremely critical review, but I did still have fun playing it. It takes a lot longer than most other modern games so it definitely deserves credit for that, and the situations/gameplay definitely are interesting. It's not nearly as much of a "choice" game as people are making it out to be, as most things just come down to A or B and the minigames (conversation and hacking) are incredibly simple and easy once you get the right augments. I felt like it was a much bigger deal to make decisions in DX1, but to be honest, that might just be a rosy memory. So it's a fun, long FPS game. Borderline RPG-y, but usually not really. Certainly a great game by today's standards, I'm just let down that there's so many areas where it could be better and the fundamental limitation behind all of them (graphics, simplicity, immersion) are that it's a console game. Something like an action-Splinter Cell hybrid would've been more interesting to me.