Production on Deus Ex 3 officially announced

Aja on 8/10/2008 at 06:07

No... Are they not the team supposedly renewing an old franchise that starts with a T that's shaped like the one from Thief?

Scots Taffer on 8/10/2008 at 07:03

I was as yet unaware of this fact.

Does Eidos not own Tomb Raider?

Aja on 8/10/2008 at 07:16

Yeah but for a while there the facebook page of the lead designer at Eidos Montreal had a picture of the Thief T as his profile pic. He took it down, but that's a pretty blunt suggestion. Besides, Crystal Dynamics does Tomb Raider.

(http://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=120596)

Looks like all news of the project has been erased... maybe they wanna keep it secret? (hopefully :erg: )

BlackCapedManX on 8/10/2008 at 09:42

I for one am not too concerned about Auto-Heal. I think it makes sense in context with the way FPS games are progressing. If you want to say in makes you overpowered I would beg to differ that being able to stand in a firefight with 15 medkits on your toolbelt (or the ability to pause whenever to take them from inventory) means that even if you have no combat-hardened skills, you can still sit in the middle of a fire fight and take well more than your total hp in damage, without having to do the "realistic" thing, and run away to lick your wounds. Auto-heal on the other hand would mean you'd have to act less rash under those circumstances of an unavoidable (or intentful) firefight. In the context of the game, augs/skills/whatever could make it that later on you could shrug off most weak small arms, while worrying only about bigger weapons, or as you get further in the game/increase difficulty/ai gets harder, they could focus on the hurt, such that merely wandering around the corner wouldn't be sufficient to regen and get back in the mix (because, presumably, they'd follow you) and that to save your ass you'd actually have to turn tail and run.

Then again, it's all up to successful balancing on the part of the developers. I have to say I relieved to find in GoW that I didn't have to hunt down health packs after ever damn firefight, just to make sure I'd have them for the next one, which sort of takes you out of the immersion of the game world (in whatever context) when you're no longer interacting with world events and instead have to bow out to play hide-and-seek for a bit (though to be fair, I only played GoW as a Co-op game, and it's jst really annoying when one person needs help and the other one is just waiting around for the first to find it). Again, the main concern is that instead of simply dealing with hard numbers (you have X amount of life, they do Y amount of damage per shot and shoot however fast, and each medkit gives Z life) you have to derive those functions into rates, and figure out what rate of life gain will counteract what likely rate of damage you'll potentiall recieve from an average number of enemies in a fight of whatever difficulty (single fights vs. mobs.) If the dev team played it real smart they could let the whole thing be adjustable to player preferences, so if you wanted to force yourself to be sneaky, you'd give yourself a low life cap and a long regen. Or hit and run portal style would be low life cap and quick regen. Or old school FPS would be high cap and little to no regen and stupid immortal tank that we're all hoping is not what ends up being standard would be a high cap and quick regen. And on top of that is the factor of how long the game waits between when you were last shot to when you start regaining life (I think that's essentially how GoW does it, and then you go pretty much ack up to full, though it's been a while so I could be mistaken), or if (say, though augmentations) you regen health even while being shot (again, at a slower rate, so maybe you can take one guy shooting at you without a problem, but as back up shows up suddenly you have to think about if you can take them out before your life depletes fully, or if you sould suffice to take out one and then hide, or whatever.) Clearly there are (potentially) a lot of ways that devs could go about setting this up, the main fear is that it's inherently far more complicated to structure than total health+health pool of medkits, and hence there are far more ways for the devs to screw it up.

ZylonBane on 8/10/2008 at 13:30

Quote Posted by BlackCapedManX

I for one am not too concerned about Auto-Heal. I think it makes sense in context with the way FPS games are progressing.

That's just spiffy, but you're unsurprisingly missing the point that Deus Ex isn't an FPS. It's an FPS/RPG hybrid, and the "RPG" part says that the player doesn't smegging well get infinite, free, on-demand healing. It's all part of managing limited resources to survive.

The whole "pounding down medkits while being shot at" issue is trivial to fix-- just have healed HP applied gradually instead of all at once, exactly the way the first two Thief games did it. Better yet, have medkit use take a couple of seconds, during which time you can't move or shoot. There, problem solved.

Matthew on 8/10/2008 at 13:55

I wouldn't be too concerned if auto-heal was present as long as it requires a resource - I'm thinking basically the same as the healing biomod in DX1, but only activating after combat and requiring some power source to be present.

René on 8/10/2008 at 14:07

Hi all. Long time lurker, first time poster.

For clarification on Deus Ex 3's direction, check out (http://forums.eidosgames.com/showthread.php?t=80786) and (http://forums.eidosgames.com/showpost.php?p=848303&postcount=34)

It's true that some things are being changed but this is still a Deus Ex game. While changes to health regen and stealth have occured, those are not core Deus Ex values in my opinion.

To me, Deus Ex is about choices & consequences, non-linearity, customization, different ways to complete an objective, story, dialogue, character interaction, a Cyberpunk world, a massive conspiracy, etc. All aspects Deus Ex 3 has in spades.

Anyway, I lurk in these forums all the time but feel free to send me a PM on the official forum any time and I'll reply as soon as I can.

René

TF on 8/10/2008 at 14:29

Quote Posted by René

The_Raven on 8/10/2008 at 15:27

Are you going to contribute anything, TF?

I think René will find that many of the people here who grew up with games like the original System Shock, will find that many of the members here differ in terms of the recent trend in game design. While I'll admit that there have been time when I've been frustrated at times by previous minor failures snowballing into major obstacles later one, I'll also shortly admit that after a few seconds I will realize that this is what makes it a games a why they're so appealing in the first place. Tetris is a perfect example: small mistakes will add up quickly; but a skilled, careful player will always be able to recover from them, even if it does take a awhile. Unlimited Auto-Regen turns the gameplay environment from a continuous one to a episodic one. One of my main complaints about Half-Life 2 is that there was ultimately very little challenge until the last part of the game. Nothing frustrates me more than playing a game at higher difficulty levels, making mistakes left and right, but not dying a single time until 3/4 of the way through the game. I'm a Computer Science student and I ultimately ended up being attracted to the theory side of things, even though I make plenty of retarded mistakes because most of the material isn't initially intuitive to me. So while I struggle with the material, I find it very alluring. I've mentioned this to some of my professors and they've told me that almost every one is like that: if it wasn't somewhat challenging, then the subject matter would loose its allure and appeal. Ultimately, it means that the stuff I struggle with the most is the most rewarding. If there isn't any challenge, then what's the point?

I guess in summary, it has become vastly apparent that games today aren't made for people like us anymore. Yes, you guys are a business and have to target the demographic that will maximize profits; you do have to realize that the "original audience" of these games will be somewhat annoyed that they're aren't the target audience anymore. I believe that it is possible that most of the little annoyances from older titles can be smoothed over with proper HCI, design, and balance while retaining the persistent, long term challenge. I think the key here is putting some more thought into proper scalable difficulty levels, but this can greatly increase the amount of work required on the individual game systems.

**NOTE: This is just an armchair, amateur's perspective. It is in no way meant to come across as some kid telling the professionals how it should be done.

Matthew on 8/10/2008 at 15:33

Quote Posted by Papy

Edit: Matthew, what about the "easy" level?

Thank God for it, is what I say. ;)