Please tell me the truth... - by King Ronald
King Ronald on 4/12/2003 at 15:58
Okay, so I haven't played the demo, loved the original game and will probably buy the sequel for Christmas.
Am I wrong to do so?
All you guys who've played the full game - taking into account what the wonders of patching can do, is this game a complete pile of dross?
I mean, I got into Thief 2, and that required a 32mb patch via PC Gamer...
To make it easier, just compare it to the first game - better or worse, and why?
Any opinions would be useful.
Thanks.
Scots Taffer on 4/12/2003 at 16:25
Quote:
Originally posted by King Ronald I mean, I got into Thief 2, and that required a 32mb patch via PC Gamer...
I found the patch for Thief 2 to be detrimental to the gameplay and did a couple of Special Edition-like changes that pissed me off (yes, the zombie). I know this is a moot point, but it detracts from the power of your statement: which I believe is questioning whether or not a patch will make DX2 playable from (what I'm hearing) a fairly unresponsive sluggish game.
Shoshin on 4/12/2003 at 16:27
Hmm, the truth. Can't do that, but I can give you my opinion.
1) The interface does kind of suck. It is unintuitive and not easy to use with a mouse and keyboard. There's no lean (which sucks) and there is no key for Quick Save or Quick Load (which sucks alot).
2) I had to do some minor tweaking in some .ini files to get the movement to work better, and to move the HUD outwards.
3) I have been endlessly tweaking the gamma, brightness, and contrast to get what I want. It's a fucking dark game. Almost too dark.
Otherwise, I have to say that so far I am enjoying the game a lot. The sound is excellent, the realtime lighting is damn cool (nothing like seeing the shadow of an approaching enemy first), and I haven't really missed reloading. I'm still early in the game, so I don't know how the unified ammo system will play out, but I have a feeling that I won't miss it at all.
In short, it's shaping up to be a very good game in terms of gameplay, but the interface needs work. Unless you're playing on an Xbox. Probably the interface is perfect there.
Shoshin on 4/12/2003 at 16:28
Oh, and personally I found the demo to be completely unrepresentative of the game so far.
heywood on 4/12/2003 at 18:25
Quote:
Originally posted by King Ronald Okay, so I haven't played the demo, loved the original game and will probably buy the sequel for Christmas.
Am I wrong to do so?
All you guys who've played the full game - taking into account what the wonders of patching can do, is this game a complete pile of dross?
I think that this will be a good game - on the next generation of hardware, that is. I've only played through the first level, but based on that level and the demo, I think it has potential. They carried over enough key elements from DX1 to make DX:IW at least a good game. Not as good as DX1, not by a long shot I expect, but still a good game worth getting - once the performance issues have been addressed.
Whether you are wrong to buy the game this December depends a lot on your hardware. As I posted in another thread, this game has serious performance issues, even more so than the demo. But if you're counting on a patch to fix the performance problems, I would have to advise you to hold off on buying until a patch appears and its performance can be evaluated. I'm personally very skeptical that a patch is going to provide any significant frame rate boost. Performance is so bad right now that they even tried adding mouse lag in a desperate effort to gain back a tiny improvement in frame rate. I don't think they would have shipped the game in this state if there was anything significant they could have done to improve performance. And WS's comments on the matter weren't very encouraging. It's starting to look like this is one of those games that the hardware will have to catch up to after release.
CPLHicks39 on 7/12/2003 at 08:43
If you can keep an open mind about the design decisions and are willing to accept piss poor performance until the patch then go for it. If you want at least 80fps at 16x12 and believe that a sequel to Deus Ex that isn't exactly like Deus Ex is trash, well then your gonna be disappointed.
Epos Nix on 7/12/2003 at 10:47
Was a decent - albeit extremely short - experience, but without multiplayer or an SDK I really can't recommend the game to anyone, especially at its current price (I sold the game 2 days after buying it). Unless you absolutely need this game, I'd just suggest reading a walkthrough to get an idea of the plot and leave it at that.
James Sterrett on 7/12/2003 at 15:05
Haven't gotten far, but, like the others - if you read on how to tweak your mouse and HUD settings (find FOV in the default.ini and set it to 68, find mouselag in the same file and set it to 0 (zero), and set HUD transparency to zero in the game), then it really is a lot of fun.
Yes, the unified ammo seems weird at first, but it's transparent in the game. Yes, the interface for dealing with the inventory sucks due to reuse of keys, but you'll get over it since there are reminders onscreen about most of it.
The "one slot for one thing" inventory really does work to force you to think through what you want to carry. Early on in Deus Ex 1, you could carry anything you wanted. That's not really possible in v2; I'm only partway through Seattle, and I've already had to choose, over and over again, on what goodies I'm actually going to carry.
Similarly, the biomods do force more real choices on the player than the skills + mods did in DE1. While we may miss the way weapon skills were modeled, selecting between "see through walls" and "regeneration" is a biggie for me: I'm a big fan of both mods....
Despite the small size of the levels, there seems to be a lot to explore in each one. While I sometimes miss the grand vistas, I don't miss having to trudge across them to get places.
system shocker on 7/12/2003 at 15:09
I can even play it at 1280 by whatever with the lighting guality all the way low (you don't even notice the difference) and it goes at 37 frames per second. It's pretty nice.
foldy on 7/12/2003 at 16:01
My biggest problem with the game, aside from it's being far too short (what is it lately with games being made to last you all of one whopping weekend) is how the two main factions you deal with in the game, the WTO and The Order are handled. Now, I've only played through once, but it seems like you can play both sides the entire time without pissing either off (they're opposing factions). I'm quite sure it's impossible to make enemies of either side. I'd sided with The Order through almost all of Seattle, and still yet, the WTO is regularly contacting me, asking me to do stuff for them. While it can be said that this is explained later in the game (not telling), I still feel like it's equally as important to provide consequence along with the choices. I feel like they cut corners again there.
I'm definitely playing through twice, but I don't feel that this game has staying power. It's no classic.
