The inscrutable po on 29/5/2002 at 21:48
I've had this game for years. I have two copies actually. I got one free with my worthless soundblaster card as part of a bundle and I got the other one before that because there was a really good rebate deal on it. When I first tried the game, I had a bad monitor and it was too dark. It was also ugly and the tutorial was boring. I put the thing aside. Lately, I've been hearing good things about Deus Ex, so I finally got round to installing it and playing past the tutorial.
The game has a dark, dingy high tech look, which is just something I'm not that interested in. It has about a dozen screens and there's all kinds of stuff to read. That kind of thing puts me off. I don't play games because I like to read. The main character, JC Denton moves like crud. No where near the polish of Lara Croft. He's got a weird outfit - a long trench coat with lots of zippers and buckles. He never smiles. He wears sunglasses indoors at night.
The game reminds me a lot of System Shock 2 and that's bad because that game bored me. They just made it really complicated as far as I can see and I never really caught on to the weapons mods or fixing things, but somehow Deus Ex pulled me in. I think it was the dialogue, the interaction with other characters. Maybe it was the LAMs.
I started to move through the first level and I found that while there are puzzles, the answers are somewhere in the datacubes or one of the screens. I got the augmentation to hack and that got me into everybodies computer for a quick look. Odd, but it's fun. If you stay on too long when hacking, you set off an alarm and they suck out your battery power and guards attack.
There really are many ways to do the same thing and it's all planed very nicely. Fighting is hard. People move around fast and comically. Alerted guards are hard to kill. Definitely a good idea to play Thief and work on your stealth before you try Deus Ex.
I love things like LAMs. They're grenades that attach to walls or they can be thrown. If come across one that's set as a trap for you, you can disarm it and steal it if you're quick. They blow guards into juicy gibs and robots to pieces. Pepper spray is fun too, but trickier to use. Spray some guys and then beat them to death with the crowbar. I always end up getting some in my eyes too. As in Thief's flash bomb, you recover before the guards, so you can flashbomb three guys, recover and then knock them out while they're distracted. If you flashbomb while looking at the ceiling, you won't be blinded at all. Skillful use of flashbombs in Thief or pepper spray in Deus Ex is fun to toy with.
So, now I'm in Hong Kong in some seedy bar, The Lucky Buck or something like that. They actually have hookers, madames and gangsters and you can smoke or get drunk, which is a first in gaming for me. It adds a lot to the fun. The people in this bar are just hysterical. All the girls are trash that want you to buy them drinks and dance. They tell you how cool you are if you keep buying them stuff or they tell you to take a hike if you aren't as easy with your cash. The other bar patrons are fun to listen too, the junkie, the bodyguards, the lady that lets you in...
"I want you to stand in the spotlight and bark at the women like you are an angry dog."
"I like men who wear lots of zippers."
The bartender doesn't seem too bright, but don't get him started on politics and philosophy. Denton spars with him a little, but he can hardly keep up with the intellectual babble. Finally, dialogue for adults that's really funny. JC is such a cool guy as you get to know him. He's a little cold at times, but you really start to love the man and his ideals. There's definitely a human heart beating inside that thing.
santaClaws on 30/5/2002 at 09:24
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Originally posted by The inscrutable po It has about a dozen screens and there's all kinds of stuff to read. That kind of thing puts me off.I really don't see people's point here. What's the problem with a little bit of reading? And those screens help to perfectly organize your character. I loved them.
Recently I heard or read or whatever, that in DX 2 there won't be so many screens for character organization. Why? Thay could at least have the player dewcide whether he wants the screens or not. I mean, it was possible to play DX without looking at any other of them than the inventory and the Augs screen. My, I needed the others. How will it be possible to heal a certain part of the body, and not the body as a whole? I need the med screen. And so on.
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Originally posted by The inscrutable po No where near the polish of Lara Croft.Say, you're not serious, are you? The Tomb Raider series is crap, and the LAra Croft model is crap as well. I don't understand why everybody always criticises the motion models of DX. IMO they're one of the best ones around, still. What's so bad about them?
I even heard people comparing them to the Thief ones, and saying that the Thief models are far better. Why? Those in Thief are rather wooden, like dolls. Really, if someone could explain this to me, I'd be greatful.
Dragonclaw on 30/5/2002 at 09:34
I think the problem is that you are more into Games like TR (at least you sound so, comparing JC with Lara Croft). Now, those are more action based. TR, IMO, is a 3d-Jump'n'Run with some shooting around. Or an action shooter with some hopping, what you prefer.
You're right, DX can be much more compared to SS2, and that this bored you strengthens my impression of you. DX is more like SS2, in the meaning that there's a real story behind it, and you have to think about what to do and how to do it. This, of course, annoys/bores many people who are used to "find enemy, kill enemy"-styles of games.
Glad to hear you finally gave DX a chance in the end, and that you liked it :)
twisty on 30/5/2002 at 11:56
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Originally posted by santaClaws I don't understand why everybody always criticises the motion models of DX. IMO they're one of the best ones around, still. What's so bad about them?
Motion models? :confused: As far as the meshes were concerned, I thought that they did quite a good job, by and large. Although, some of the skinning work left a bit to be desired, in my opinion. For example, the tattoo work on peoples skin often looked like they were drawn on with crayons.
I thought that the motions used in Deus Ex were really terrible at times and were, for the most part, inferior to the motion capture animation system used in Thief 2 (also used in T1). I'm not sure what tools they used for this in Deus Ex, but two of the worst animations that I recall were ones involving fleeing and cowering AI.
Still, Deus Ex is such a brilliant game that those things that I mentioned didn't really bother me. You can never have everything, right?
santaClaws on 30/5/2002 at 13:37
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Originally posted by twisty I thought that the motions used in Deus Ex were really terrible at times and were, for the most part, inferior to the motion capture animation system used in Thief 2 (also used in T1). I'm not sure what tools they used for this in Deus Ex, but two of the worst animations that I recall were ones involving fleeing and cowering AI.Why? What are you referring to?
twisty on 30/5/2002 at 14:58
The motions for fleeing looked like the AI were trying to run with their shoelaces tied together. It didn't look remotely realistic at all, in my opinion. I also felt that the way enemy AI strafed and moved around in combat looked very rebotic, stiff and unnatural.
The inscrutable po on 30/5/2002 at 15:09
When I was talking about the polish of Lara Croft, I was thinking of how she moves as opposed to how JC Denton moves. Croft has a lot of moves and she does them all like a human being. Denton, if you watch him in a mirror, slides around without moving his feet, jumps sideways like a statue and leans by crouching and then sliding without moving any body parts. It's laughable.
When it comes to reading, I don't mind some reading, but there's just a whole lot and it's all in tiny print. You may think TR is crap, but there are good puzzles in TR. Sometimes in Deus Ex, it's just a matter of walking over to a datacube and reading some verbose note to find the password and code for the door that's right next to you. That's not really puzzle solving. It's tedious chore memorization. Now I have to remember a password and user name. Compare that to playing Tomb Raider and being stuck in some area where there's no place to go and then finding out that inscriptions above the door have something to do with the switches you're supposed to pull. You feel much more like you're in a real archeological site where someone long ago set up this system. Don't get me wrong, I'm bored to death with TR these days, but she definitely moved better than most any character around. Grant it Deus Ex is a first person game and TR is third person. You ordinarily wouldn't be looking at Denton himself, but his lean is awful. Watching him in a mirror just confirms that. I don't know why anybody made a different lean after Thief because Thief leans about the best. Denton leans like crap and I'm always in the wrong spot. Thief also leans forward - another nice touch. Every time I lean with Thief, the move is done so well, it adds to me feeling like I'm really there. He peeks. Denton rolls out into the hallway clumsily and then rolls back. That's what it feels like.
With all the options they give you, I wish they'd have given you the option to have larger text in the notes. Some of us are getting older and we don't want to lean forward in our real life chairs and squint to read something every few seconds. The AI in DE are comical when they're alarmed. I kind of like it, but I avoid shoot outs for the most part. The AI just move around too jerky for me to want to bother with them. I'd rather set traps for most of them and that's one of my favorite parts of the game. Deus Ex is far superior to TR in that respect. The gunfights in TR are a real bore to me. They all end up just being her jumping around and firing endlessly as her pistols lock on. I like to take things out with one or two well planned shots. I think it's much more realistic for a single person to make it through some big facility if he has a lot of tools and expertise in silent quick kills and stealth. In that Thief and Deus Ex are miles ahead of Lara.
Nethawk on 30/5/2002 at 15:14
Yeah, I really hated many aspects of Deus Ex as well; the blocky models, all the reading that didn't add anything to the game, the cliched storyline, the dark atmosphere that was a ripoff of Thief, and about a hundred other things. Really, I don't know why the Ion Storm team even bothered to make a sequel. Do they really think people are going to buy this game? If the Inscrutable Po and I were to design an award winning game, we would make the story revolve around this ancient sword see, and there would be these exploding frogs, and jumping puzzles, and backup AI characters that follow us throughout the levels and we would spend - oh I don't know - at least four years designing the game and we'd hype it up to the max before release and that way we' d know for sure that people would buy it. And this game would kick the living crap out of Deus Ex.
:sly:
Inscrutable Po, your review had SOME valid points. Overall however, I think you need to go out and buy a few more games and compare them to Deus Ex - just to get a reality check. Then you'll find in that about a hundred different areas, Deus Ex stands heads and shoulders above the rest. ;)
The inscrutable po on 30/5/2002 at 16:05
I have lots of games.
My review is balanced and I'm talking about first impressions. No matter how many other games I play, I'm still going to stick with my initial impressions of Deus Ex. It's not the prettiest game. It has a lot of reading. There are a lot of screens. Sure, later you get to like the way it works and it has a charm of it's own and it is in fact superior to most games, but that wasn't my first impression.
Lots of people indentify with the games they play. They think a comment about a game is a comment about them and they get defensive. That's not how you should take criticism of a game. My comments aren't about you.
Here's a comment about you. You might want to try to remember what it was like to be new to playing games. When you're new, something like Tomb Raider or Quake is much easier to get into. Things are complicated enough and these games don't expect you to also be doing a lot of reading. You just shoot your way through and find keys. Deus Ex is all about opening doors too, but they complicate things by putting in a lot of data cubes to read and offering you different ways of getting through those doors. It may not be what everyone wants.
oRGy on 30/5/2002 at 16:14
I also think the animations in DX for the characters(pc version) are a bit rubbish. The polygon count and skins are more or less ok, but jazuz!
Animations are few, don't have many frames, and are vaguely robotic.
Why?
Well, its something like this.
There are two ways of doing character animation.
Number 1 is called "vertex" or perhaps "frame based" animation. Basically, in a 3d modeling program, the animator pulls the vertices and polygons of the model in various ways to affect a movement. It can look good with an experience animator at hand, but takes up lots of memory so the space for animations is limited, and they usually have to be compressed and chopped down a bit.
Way number 2 is called "skeletal" animation. Basically, the model is animated via a virtual "skeleton" that as it moves, moves the model along with it. Basically means you can have more naturalistic animation, that also takes up a lot less memory space, and you can share the same animations along many different models.
Thief 1 + 2, as well as system shock 2, used skeletal animation (thats why very different models can have exactly the same animations for example a servant girl and a hammerite), and not only this, used <b>motion capture</b> to achieve very natural looking animations. This is why it looks good, and there are enough animations for a convincing appearance.
Deus Ex's version of the Unreal engine doesn't have support for skeletal animation. (Support for it was added in patches to Unreal Tournament). Therefore they had to cut down on the amount and quality of animations, and didn't use any motion capture data to help animate them. This is why they look a bit crud.
The more astute of you may have noticed that skeletal animation was added to the PS2 version of Deus Ex, which is why that version has much improved animations.
Thank you, and if I have to say the word animation again, I will.. ah fuck it.
