Jason Moyer on 22/10/2022 at 17:32
Man, this game is really special. It feels to me like they took everything they learned building spiritual successors to the classic ImSims and came up with a fairly original way to put it all together. The moment to moment gameplay feels a ton like Dishonored, in terms of movement/stealth/powers/combat/exploration, but the way the game is structured seems really creative/intelligent to me. Ostensibly, the game is just that small intro area and 4 small to medium sized levels, yet 30 hours into the game I'm still discovering locations in the maps that I haven't seen before, and finding relationships between different events (i.e. do this in the morning at one location, and something happens in another map later in the day) that I didn't know about and which aren't always obvious. The game signposts the main quests for killing the visionaries and finding the unique weapons/powers, but almost everything else gets noted in your journal and is left for you to figure out. There are even small little ImSim things that made me feel smart when I figured them out, like when I was scrounging for batteries in a map for the 20th time and didn't feel like wandering all over looking for them again, ended up being crouched behind a turret and taking a look at the model up close for the first time, and realized I could just yank them out of turrets/nullifiers. Managing to carry one of Frank's door passes that removes your powers (including the ability to respawn) into another map at another time of day to open a door felt like a real achievement after several hours of being unstoppable.
I dunno, it's a good game.
Jason Moyer on 24/10/2022 at 07:42
I didn't do all of the sidequests, but I just finished the game and all of the arsenal quests. It was great. I went on YT and watched the extended ending vs the original one, and don't really see how the new ending is better. I guess I don't really understand this thing where stories can't just end when all of the important bits are wrapped up. I didn't see any ambiguity in where Colt and Julianna's relationship is depending on what you do. And the extended bit not only moved the focus from that relationship, it massively changed the tone of that particular ending, which is weird.
Jason Moyer on 24/10/2022 at 11:35
Actually, I'm just going to flat out say that the extended ending *makes the story worse*.
[spoiler]Julianna tells you throughout the game that you've done all of this before - including breaking the time loop. Past Colt scolds you for being unable to love or change as a person. I read the ending where you break the loop as being a continuation of exactly what Colt has been doing over and over, and all that's going to happen is that he's going to start the loop back up again.
In the other ending, Colt finally grows as a person and fixes his relationship with his daughter. He learns how to love again. The ending where he stays in the time loop is the only one where anything changes. Julianna's reaction emphasizes this, since she's genuinely surprised that Colt did something he hadn't done before.[/spoiler]
And they replaced that with Colt rides into the sunset with the dudes he's been killing for the past 40 hours, whose motivations and personalities aren't fleshed out any more than they were in the original story, because the people who play our games are stupid and can't handle anything beyond that..
Edit: Christ, I just read an article on Polygon bitching about the original ending. It has the line "Why does one of the Colt duplicates have a mustache when all the other Colts have a beard? How can a beard grow in the loop? It doesn't make any damn sense!" Erm, yeah, there's a reason past Colts have different appearances. They're from previous timeloops. Maybe I'm wrong here, but it seemed super obvious to me, while playing the game, that there was a meta-loop where Colt kept leaving and re-entering the anomaly - and the writer did about as much as he couldn to convey this without explicitly explaining it. The past-Colts (both their appearance and dialog), Julianna's constant "yeah, I remember when you did in the last timeloop" nagging. That's why Julianna is surprised when Colt doesn't break the loop, it means he's done something different this time. And I think I'm reading the other original ending differently than most people; her reaction, to me, is basically "god damn it dad, we're doing this shit again?" not "I should kill you for real because you ruined my good time in the loop", and the reason she doesn't kill you is because she knows Colt is just going to start the loop again.
Jason Moyer on 7/11/2022 at 08:43
Quote Posted by Aja
I recommend enabling invasions; they're some of the most tense and exciting gameplay you'll get. Yeah, sometimes you get screwed, but you have to take it in stride. The game is pretty heavily biased toward Colts anyway.
I just did around a half-dozen invasions as Julianna. I don't mean this as an exaggeration; Deathloop has to have the worst multiplayer code of any game I've ever played. I played the hell out of Quake and Descent on a 14.4 modem and never experienced anything like the way this game handles latency.
Aja on 8/11/2022 at 21:33
On PC? I played through the main game on PS5 with invasions enabled and got invaded somewhat regularly, and it didn't seem too laggy to me. A few times I was even able to win by kicking, Dunkey-style.
henke on 9/11/2022 at 08:15
I played on PS5 and invasions were laggy as fuuuuuuuuuck. Got killed every time I got invaded. Could barely even see my invaders before I was dead. Then again that's probably because I got NAT type 3 and can't change it.
Thirith on 9/11/2022 at 08:41
I was lucky in that invasions worked just fine on my PC. I died frequently, but that's because I'm not very good at PvP.
Jason Moyer on 9/11/2022 at 11:58
They're amazing about 1/4 of the time when the netcode is happy, the other times I get the thing where I'm dying because every couple seconds it re-syncs and resets my movement. Annoying as hell.
The cat and mouse game of trying to kill Colt though? Wow. I've played the entire campaign twice plus doing the golden loop a bunch of times for fun, so I know the gear/maps pretty well, and it's super fun figuring out what Colt is probably going to do or trying to trick them into doing something. I like leaving the antenna "unguarded" while watching from a distance, assuming the visionaries on the map are still alive, then watching where the player goes and following them until they get into a firefight with the AI on the way to fight a visionary. Then it's Strelak semi-auto shotgun to the back. It's also fun to play super aggressively sometimes since I unlocked Havoc early, and now Shift, just blinking as fast as I can towards the tunnels and enabling Havoc and Strelok'ing them face to face.