Deus Ex: Human Revolution discussion (spoilers in here!)

Dresden on 27/8/2011 at 06:45

Quote Posted by Renzatic

I gotta say, the game is wonderful...up until the second boss fight. Then it's just flat out goddamn FUCKING STUPID!

Okay, I'm gonna vent here. No spoilers. But I'll explain how it goes, so you all can prepare yourselves for the absolute clusterfuck that is the second boss.

Boss has a typhoon type attack. If you're playing on Give Me Deus Ex difficulty, it'll instally kill you if they fire it off in point blank range, and will drop you below 10 health if you're within like 30 FUCKING FEET of it when it detonates. Another problem is that the boss runs at about as fast as you sprint the whole damn time. As in when you hit shift and get that little burst of speed. The boss is running that fast ALL THE TIME! And even worse? If the boss detonates the typhoon in certain spots, it takes out a conduit that electrifies THE WHOLE FUCKING FLOOR! You have no safe spots to run to when this happens. And even if you did, you're perpetually below 25 health because of the goddamn blowing up typhoon bullshit, so you'd die before you could get to them anyway.

And of course the boss takes a huge amount of damage. So far, I've unloaded 2 clips of my combat rifle into their head, and they're STILL ALIVE!

Boss spoilers:

She only sprints when she's coming to use the typhoon. Just sprint away when she gets close. Also, don't fight in the outer ring. You'll cause the super computers to explode and electrify the coolant. If you're standing on the slightly raised metal plates in front of the door and the other side of the room, you won't get hurt when it happens. Place mines along the outer ring. That's where she walks around when she cloaks.

Mandatory bosses are definitely the weak point of the game considering what DE is all about, but I thought they were well done. They can be outsmarted and they have an element of strategy.

SubJeff on 27/8/2011 at 07:00

In the first mission I found I could avoid whole rooms of enemies. But by doing this I miss out on xp so I'm not so sure this is good thing, even though it is...

Renzatic on 27/8/2011 at 07:36

Quote Posted by Dresden

You're right on the first part. Barrett wasn't too horrible. I only had to reload twice before I figured out a good strategy for beating him. Fedorova was just a flat out pain in the ass for me, because of what I had equipped, and how I built my character.

This is a boss fight that almost seemed to require you spent more than one point in damage absorption. One that almost required you had a shotgun or a heavy rifle handle to kick her ass. One that had a few points in the rebreather so you could haul ass for more than a couple of seconds. To really handle her well, it seemed I had to have a character built more towards combat . I had a stealth guy with slow, long distance weaponry, and a machine pistol as my worst case scenario weapon. And mines? I had a handful of EMP mines, but nothing that could cause a large amount of damage in a short amount of time.

Basically what I did was try to stick to the outer ring when she was visible because I couldn't seem to keep pace ahead of her along the inside. And standing on those slightly raised tiles didn't seem to protect me from those moments when the conduits blew, and electrified the floor. My only strategy was to lure her into a mine, get a few shots in, run ahead of her by constantly sprinting every chance I got and hope I'm out of range when she typhoons, track her when she was invisible to get a few more shots in, hop and jump when she blows a conduit to keep from taking full damage, praying that I regained enough health when I was trying to outpace her to survive it, rinse, repeat. I had to winnow her health down a little bit at a time until I finally beat her. It was not fun.

Fafhrd on 27/8/2011 at 09:31

My verdict after about 7 hours of continuous play: It's awesome. And so very, very Deus Ex.

I feel slightly bad about using the cover system as much as I have, but it hasn't negatively impacted my immersion to any significant degree, and everything else about it (from the side quests, incidental environmental details, character banter) just works so fucking well. I haven't gotten to the first of the boss fights yet, so I can't judge how well they work in the game.

Cons: The pre-rendered cutscenes. Pointless, and without fail look worse than the game. They're clearly compressed at less than HD resolutions, and weren't rendered at the same level of detail as the engine itself is capable of, so going from the crisp and smooth visuals that I get with everything maxed in-game to the blurry blocky character models in the cutscenes is really annoying.

Also: If you've got the capability to run it in Stereoscopic 3D, I recommend giving it a brief whirl. It looks really really cool, it's just a damn shame that you have to drop the resolution to 1280x720 in order to play at 60hz with it on. It's semi-playable at 1920x1080@24hz, but not so much when any action kicks off.

Dresden on 27/8/2011 at 09:35

Renz:
Well the EMP mines will still stun her. I only went in with a nearly fully upgraded 10mm pistol and 2 full boxes of combat rifle ammo. Almost all stealth and hacking augs too. I know there's at least a shotgun and some mines in the lockers. I'll have to experiment more next time.

Edit: Oh yeah, I heard you can stun her with the stun gun too, though I haven't tried it firsthand.

Quote:

In the first mission I found I could avoid whole rooms of enemies. But by doing this I miss out on xp so I'm not so sure this is good thing, even though it is...

Don't worry about it. I did the same thing, avoiding people whenever possible, KOing them when I couldn't be bothered, and had almost every aug upgrade at the end of the game. Though I did hack just about everything.

Painman on 27/8/2011 at 16:58

Looks like they *may* be releasing the SDK on Monday. Now I definitely don't know this for sure, but last night a little ticker announcement showed up on the bottom of my game's main menu screen saying, "Be ready - GMT 2200 29 Aug". I posted a topic on the Eidos DXHR board asking about the message, and it got merged... into the SDK discussion thread.

So... I don't know if whoever merged it had inside knowledge, or just made an assumption, but it was rather curious that they did so.

In any case, they're unveiling something on Monday. Hope it's interesting, whatever it is.

Sulphur on 27/8/2011 at 18:02

So I noticed we don't have any thread dedicated to posting our views and impressions of DE: HR, and we're using the review thread instead. Well, I hate to tell you guys this but YOU'RE NOT PUBLISHED ANYWHERE.

So, whadja think of Doos Doos Revolution? Lives up to Doos Ecks? I'm like 4 hours in and I've barely done anything. It's great. I flushed a toiled, moved a crate, and shot a woman sleeping on a bed who was probably a meth head who gave head every night to the arms dealer in the other room who recently died from my unsuccessful attempt to unscrew his head from his neck. It's great. I think I'll need to actually like do quest-related stuff tonight, though.

Also, I hate the basketball. BASTARD BASKETBALL! WHY DON'T YOU GO IN, YOU FUCK!!

Okay. I'm gonna go stack some crates now.

SubJeff on 27/8/2011 at 19:37

I'm loving it. Let's face it, you can say the graphics are dated but the art style is great. And it is soooo reminiscent of Deus Ex I can't help this nostalgic feeling. I'm playing on the hardest difficulty and playing exactly as I did in the original - a stealthy pragmatist who avoids killing until screw it you guys have to go.

The plot is shaping up nicely (though I'm still only in the very early stages) and I especially like the talking/persuading stuff. But man is the combat unforgiving. I guess I'll have to get some armour augs because I'm getting capped a lot.

I'm not a big fan of the cover system, for stealth, and wish I could have lean instead/as well as. Oh, and as I said in that other thread - no iron sights for my stun gun? What? So I have to use the mid-screen reticule (though as I'm now using tranq ammo with a laser sighted pistol for back-up I might be able to ditch it).

Atmosphere is great, well enhanced by the incidental music which, imho, is a wonderful re-imagining of the original's soundtrack.

Thumbs up so far.

though niggas you just know this cover system be back for thief 4 mmmmhmm yes it will, and a brother going to maaaaaaadz

Dresden on 27/8/2011 at 21:15

Quote Posted by Subjective Effect

though niggas you just know this cover system be back for thief 4 mmmmhmm yes it will, and a brother going to maaaaaaadz

I really doubt that. Thief isn't a line of sight stealth game. And it doesn't make sense to fire a bow and arrow from cover.

Anyway, I loved it. Not quite as good as the first game, plotwise anyway, but comes very close. Gameplaywise, ...and I guess I'll get shit for this, but it's almost as good as DE1. I miss the ATMs, but anyone who thinks aiming a pistol for 20 seconds to fire is good has massive rose cyberpunk goggles on. I also miss scary swimming sections. I don't know why there's so much opposition to this now. It can't be a controller issue. MGS 2 and 3 had good swimming sections. AH YES, and we need locational damage back. Fallout: NV proved that this is still a good thing to have.

Now the plot:

Thought it was great. It's not quite as exciting as DE1's antagonist driven plot but I thought it was thought provoking and I wanted to unravel the mystery of Megan's disappearance. Not because I cared about her, but because there's a sense of something not being quite right that gets closer with each thread pulled. Speaking of Megan, it's interesting how she's very much an Eve. She steals the knowledge of Adam's DNA and gives it to Page (the devil). Hell she was working for him the whole time. That makes me feel sorry for Adam. He's a lonely, ostracized guy and the only person he loved used him.

Now for the disappointments. No clear villain. Some people might count this as a plus, but it made the game lack any urgency. They could've had Namir or Zao taunt Adam over his own infolink and they never did. The last series of missions in DE1 felt very epic and urgent, nothing in DE:HR really did except maybe the hostage situation. The three mercs aren't explained at all as characters. I don't care if they're in the book. I didn't read the book. Anyone appearing in the game should be explained in the game. Same goes for the African Belltower guy I kept meeting because I kept knocking him out. He had an actual name, but I have no idea who the fuck he was.

4/5 banana stickers.

SubJeff on 27/8/2011 at 21:54

I've actually reached a really irritating point where I have no ammo for my stun gun and nowhere to get any. Snap with the tranq rifle. What's the point of having options when really I'm having to revert to big guns?