Sulphur on 24/8/2016 at 13:03
Also, crashes, and a weird lighting bug where aiming the reticle below a certain point results in some sort of overbloom that sticks around. Not the greatest day one experience, but there's been worse. Still, I'm going to wait until there's been some stability and optimisation patches and ZB stops laughing at everyone trying to play it right nao.
Might take a wee bit of time, though, that last one.
driver on 24/8/2016 at 13:14
I'm getting an 'interesting' bug where large numbers of objects aren't being rendered. I haven't even gotten through the tutorial because many of the rooms are filled with objects floating in the air that are obviously supposed to be on tables/crates/floors that don't exist. I am somewhat peeved.
Renzatic on 24/8/2016 at 16:38
Quote Posted by Sulphur
I haven't tried the combat, but the stealth is approximately as good as it was in HR, save a more obnoxious UI. Luckily, most of that can be turned off.
95% of the extraneous, hand-holdy parts of the UI seems to be turned off by default if you're playing it on Give Me Deus Ex difficulty. It threw me for a loop at first, considering that after playing MGSV for a bit, I was expecting prompts for everything.
Sulphur on 24/8/2016 at 16:46
You wound me. I only play on GMDX difficulty. :(
Also, MGSV's prompts don't draw attention to themselves, even if they are omnipresent. I mean the things like the weird target marker when you use the cover system to move from one cover point to another. What's wrong with just a glowy marker on the ground, instead of an entire box that looks like a target from a rifle range? News tablets - you can scroll the first column to read the entire story, which means the second column is redundant, and reading it gives you a microsecond of deja vu before you realise you're done with the story. Things like that. It's odd-ish.
froghawk on 24/8/2016 at 18:33
I somehow got this to run on a 750m. The secret was actually turning the mouse sensitivity down to 0%, oddly enough! Game still looks beautifully detailed, albeit low res, and boy is it glorious.
Renzatic on 24/8/2016 at 19:31
Quote Posted by Sulphur
You wound me. I
only play on GMDX difficulty. :(
Also, MGSV's prompts don't draw attention to themselves, even if they are omnipresent.
This is true. I guess I manage to avoid the worst of it, since I've spent a surprisingly small amount of time using the cover system in Manky. Mostly I use it for peeking around corners, and the occasional gunfight.
heywood on 24/8/2016 at 19:31
My first impressions so far are mostly positive.
For starters, it looks amazingly good. As Sulphur noted, the attention paid to graphical details is high. But the thing I enjoy more is that they've gone for a less stylized, more realistic look this time. I remember the first time I played HL2, I was bowled over by the way it looked like a real place not a video game level like I was used to. The first half of Far Cry 1 was a bit like that too. Once I turned off the simulated lens effects and bloom, Mankind Divided has been giving me the same vibe.
A big improvement for me was the ability to turn off the radar. It was an unwelcome crutch in HR that I couldn't seem to stop looking at. I find it's more immersive scouting out enemies and their movement patterns by actually looking at them rather than triangles on the radar. And it adds a little more tension to playing stealthy. There are a few other minor improvements. For example, movement in cover seems a little smoother and there are more movement options. Also, the early levels (so far) don't seem so obviously designed around the cover system as they did in HR.
Otherwise, gameplay seems to be about the same as Human Revolution. I guess that's mostly that's a good thing, but I also feel like there should be more refinement given that it's 5 years on from HR's release and it's supposed to be a new game not an expansion pack. For example, I recall Eidos Montreal talking about how they were happy with the stealth in HR but felt they needed to work on the combat. So far, the combat seems the same to me. It's still heavily balanced to reward stealth, and if anything the AI is even more unfairly accurate. But I'm still very early in the game so the combat option might improve with better augs and guns. Also, it still has the same XP bonuses, and a tendency to over-use vents as the alternative route.
My biggest gripe so far is with the UI. It's a step backwards from HR and feels more console port-ish. Mouse sensitivity is ridiculous, and there's too much mouse acceleration. I turned mouse sensitivity down to zero but it's still not as intuitively fluid as the game I just played (Deus Ex Revision) due to the acceleration. The HUD elements are overlay large and imposing at their default scaling (63% or something). But when you scale them down to a more reasonable and unobtrusive size, pop-ups are too small e.g. infolink messages become barely readable. I expected to be able to use the mouse wheel to cycle through the quick access wheels, but nope. And as far as I can tell, there's no way to bind the mouse wheel to cycle through the items on the shortcut bar either. The new 3D hacking view makes it harder to see what you're doing and harder to navigate. Getting around the inventory view is a bit less intuitive too, and less mouse-friendly. Also, for some strange reason you have to use different keys to enter (Tab) and exit (Esc) the inventory view. It seems like Nixxes just didn't put as much effort into adapting the UI for PC as they did last time.
Another minor gripe is that levels are cluttered with decorative junk, tempting me to turn on highlighting in order to be able to find loot, vents, wall cracks, etc. But since so much of the clutter is interact-able, too much stuff gets highlighted which makes the game look awful when it's on. Human Revolution's levels were also cluttered with decorative junk, but most of it was static and somehow the useful items stood out more so I was never tempted to use the highlighting. For now I'm keeping the highlighting off, but I find myself spending excess time poring over the contents of every room.
The microtransactions and various tie-ins are a minor annoyance too, e.g. those triangle codes for the iPhone app. But that's nit picking.
I had a bug with speech volume when I started but it seems to have gone away, at least for now. Haven't had a crash yet.
Pyrian on 25/8/2016 at 00:18
Heh, yeah, can we turn off highlighting of "throwable object"s specifically?
froghawk on 25/8/2016 at 00:25
That would be nice, I thought the same.
Really impressed with how big the levels are this time around. There's insane amounts of detail in everything, but zero loading screens within each hub, even when going to a new area like the TF29 HQ or bookstore that would've had a loading screen in HR. The trains between hubs are a very clever way of doing the loading screens and the only long load time for me is when I start up the game. It's like the exact opposite of IW in that regard.
