Deus Ex Human Revolution

[Flabio]

Not really an option if you're playing it on Steam...

[Flabio]

I think this piece is a little harsh on GRIP to be honest:

http://www.gameinformer.com/b/news/archive/2011/09/18/eidos-montreal-outsourced-deus-ex-39-s-boss-battles.aspx

They have some really nice tech at GRIP, and this sounds like someone is trying to 'blame' them for the bosses in Deus Ex, when theres no way it was just 'here you go, make us our bosses and then we'll put them in'. They wouldn't have worked blind in complete isolation from the rest of the game. They're not an outsourcing company, they work *with* developers quite closely.

[Adam]

Just finished 2nd run, crapped myself when I reached

->Open Spoiler<-

Detroit 2

as I knocked Wayne Haas out in the hotel lobby and took his body back to my room and locked him up behind the TV. Came back later in the game and he was dead and somehow the TV was in it's raised position (!) Someones been in my room and finished him off. Still got the Pacifist Trophy somehow~

[Supergoal]

Finally finished it and definitely enjoyed every minute of it.

At the end

->Open Spoiler<-

What ending did everyone choose? 4 options and I went for the Taggert one. I kind of guessed that it was no augs, controlled augs. or total augs. Felt going half way was the best.

[Sketcz]

Put an hour into this and I'm not impressed.

Tried shooting a dead enemy and there were no bullet holes present in the corpse.

Also, everywhere in the lab were tiny bottles, so I tried shooting them - NOTHING. The environment is entirely non-interactive. I know it sounds silly, but this totally sucked out any motivation to play it, since it feels like so many other shooters.

Remember Metal Gear Solid 2? Remember the bar, where you could shoot every single glass bottle? Or the storage room where you could shoot every melon and sack of flour? That set the high mark for interactivity, with pretty much every single object reacting.

Now though we're stuck with games where you're basically in a shiny plastic box, where you can look but not touch anything.

NOTE TO DEVS:
Seriously, if you're not going to bother putting the man hours in to allow your physics engine to take into account the shooting of scenery, don't ****ing put that stuff in there! I mean this is some really lame assed **** that there are HUNDREDS of IMMORTAL glass bottles EVERYWHERE. And not one of them breaks.

I also dragged an enemy body and dropped him onto fire, and nothing happened.

Am I expecting too much from my games when I ask that - if bottles are there - that I should be allowed to shoot them? Otherwise why put the bottles there?

Just remove the bottles. Don't have any. What purpose do they otherwise serve, if you can see but not shoot them? It reminds me of the immortal pewter jugs you found in Call of Juarez, where they were cemented to tables.


And while I'm ranting, this reminded me of another game destroying bit of laziness I found in Metal Gear Solid 4. I threw a molotov cocktail at two enemies, who died at the same time, and they both fell to the ground initiating the exact same animation routine at the exact same time, so they danced and rolled in precisely the same manner. That's bull****. If you're going to have burning animations you should have semi-procedurally generated ones, so that each time it's slightly different. I spent a day burning people alive and was thoroughly disgusted that they all died the same.

Anyway, back to Deus Ex, the reason I bring all this up is: for all the bull**** people say about this new generation and the next for hardware, these modern games aren't even able to do the things 3D games on the PS2 achieved. The lack of attention to detail really bugs me.

tl;dr
Why the **** can't I shoot glass bottles in this?!

2/10

[PeteJ]

Anyone else and that would have been a good joke post, but from previous posts I know that you are actually being serious

Maybe they had higher priorities than destroying glass bottles? Madness I know.

[Sketcz]

Anyone else and that would have been a good joke post, but from previous posts I know that you are actually being serious

You're the only one who understands me Pete...

[mekanor]

That's hilarious and quite sad all at the same time!

[Sketcz]

I don't see how it's either.

Flabio on these forums is a developer, I want to ask him: how many man hours does it take to render the thing in 3D wireframe, create it's texture map in 2D, wrap it so you have an object, then have someone spend time placing it, ad infinitum, ALL OVER A LEVEL, for it to serve no purpose and be in no way interactive - in a game touting high levels of interactivity and realism.

More to the point, if Metal Gear Solid 2 can do it, and that game is over a decade old now, why aren't modern games also doing it? My whole complaint here is that developers spend vast resources on useless things.

Leave 'em out, or let me shoot them if you put them in.

Can't anyone else see that this is a regression? Devs look at their shiny nice plastic little environments and then call it a day. The environments are sterile and empty! You see that glass beaker over there? It's NOT REAL. Because if it was, WITHIN THE CONTEXT OF THE GAME, you'd be able to shoot it.

I will give it credit though:
Throw a cardboard box at a friendly NPC guard and he will KILL YOU immediately. Which is better than Half Life 2, where I harassed the guards and they threatened to harm me, but did nothing of the sort.

You see, I like stuff like that. It teaches me a valuable less: don't harass friendly NPCs. If they hadn't implemented that I'd have probably spent my entire time throwing cardboard boxes at them.


Someday, if I win the lottery, I'm gonna blow like 10 million developing my perfect OCD game, based on all the criticisms I've made over the years. And in it, every beaker will be breakable. Except for one, hidden away. You'll get a trophy for finding it. And I hate trophies.

->Open Spoiler<-

(so I'll make a special trophy for breaking the unbreakable beaker, which no one will ever get because it's unbreakable - haha!)

[Sketcz]

Put more time in to this and I've concluded the whole game engine/world is broken. Let me explain...


Found a hobo.

Tranquillised him, and made sure he was sleeping (Zz symbol on him).

Dropped a blue satchel charge on him.

Stepped away, hid behind a bin and began singing a merry song about GOING BOOM.

Then I cut the cord, flipped the switch, and let that mother****er GO BOOM. The sound of the explosion rings out all around.

Went to investigate the corpse, and he was still ALIVE. He still had the Zz symbol, instead of the skull.

So I grab his leg, drag him out into the street and put 10 rounds of Parabellum right in his cerebellum. At last, the hobo was dead. Now why didn't the bomb kill him?

The police then started attacking me, so I threw a bomb at their feet, set it off, and hazah! They all died. Which leads me to ask, how did the hobo survive the bomb? Some kind of magic hobo pants?!

Was this **** even playtested?!

I have concluded I hate this game. I think I'll put it on my shelf and replay Pathologic with one of the other available characters. Or maybe I'll go back and replay System Shock 2, because this game is ridiculous.

[QualityChimp]

Man walks into a bar and shoots the bottles but because they don't break he shoots the bartender. Then he repeatedly shoots his corpse to look at the bullet holes.

The next day he blows up a tramp in the morning then spends the rest of the day burning people to death.

Finally he kills loads of police, wins the lottery and makes Duke Nukem Forever.

If only the bottles had smashed...

[Guts]

Well, personally I'd rather have inanimate, non-destructible objects as decoration rather than just empty rooms, but that's just me... If the only complaint about a game is that you can't shoot bottles, it must be a pretty damn great game.

[Sketcz]

This **** is so ridiculous I needed to make a video:

[NW2013]

Too ashamed to look at the tramp as you detonate those explosives?

[Sketcz]

You know what else I just realised? The first game had mirrors but this does not! At least I've not found any, and there's even a stupid sub-plot about why Jensen doesn't have one in his apartment.

Seriously though, DEHR is full of niggling problems. Glitches. Internal incoherence. A sloppy levelling system. I mean some of this **** is GameDesign101.

In the original:
You gained different amounts of XP for doing stuff, which could be spent immediately. This made every discovery worthwhile, because if you did something that netted 100xp you could immediately add that to the 150 you already had and spend it on a basic upgrade like Swimming lvl1 which were 250. Or something like that. Any XP you had was immediately usable.

In Human Revolution:
You need to earn a ton of XP before it becomes a single Praxis point. This is the Zelda syndrome. First you received entire heart containers which were worth finding. Then in later games you needed 4 heart containers and in even later games 5 containers. It depreciated the value of getting stuff.

This is worsened by the fact that everything now costs 1 or 2 Praxis points, whereas in the first game weaker skill upgrades were cheaper, allowing you to upgrade one major thing, or a whole bunch of tiny things, or one big and a bunch of little. Now I'm stuck with 3 Praxis points, which are TOUGH to build up, and there's no way I'd waste any of them on anything other than the BEST skills available. Like maxing out my backpack.

In the first you actually started with a pool of XP to lean your character in a specific direction. Now you can't do that and, because he's so weak, some things are unnecessarily difficult. Why can't I hack that door that's level 5? In the original I could just choose to use more hacking items - thank god I used the DLC to get the "unlocking device" from merchants which costs $300. I've been forced to knock out guys with weapons take their guns and sell them to buy unlocking devices to unlock doors because I don't have enough Praxis to level up to level 5 to allow me to unlock the doors. In a perverse way it's almost brilliant, in that the underlying system is so crap, it's forced me to circumvent it - I spent ages harvesting weapons to to sell to afford door unlock devices because the Praxis/hacking systems are terrible. Not since Oblivion have I had to break a game like this.

The Praxis system actually removes choice, because in a way it forces everyone to upgrade the most important stuff first, compounded by the fact that everyone so far is claiming they've maxed out everything by the end of the game anyway. It's a funnel that makes you think you've got free choice, but really you're jumping through obvious hoops. It's less salient or versatile than the first game, allows less personalisation, and in most cases is just ****ing stupid.

Why are minor and major additions to your skill tree the exact same price? The whole thing is grossly unbalanced, from acquiring Praxis to spending them.


Also, regarding interactive environments.

Hundreds of games, from Goldeneye on the N64 to Metal gear Solid 2 on PS2, have given you interactive, destructible environments, which improved the sense of immersion. How old is Goldeneye? It's a game from 1996 that came on cartridge, people. CARTRIDGE. And it outclasses a 2011 game for interactive environments. To hell with polygon counts for the next hardware generation, I want interactivity to return to my games.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution is broken, utterly tragically broken and badly designed on several levels. Seriously, I can't stand it. I'm only still playing to see how more broken it gets. I'm actually tempted to restart and glitch my way to maximum XP, just to screw with the brokeness of it all.