Briareos H on 10/7/2011 at 22:43

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@van Hellsing: Oops, I skimmed through the controls, didn't see it there and assumed there was no quicksaving. Serves me right for not being thorough.

@mothra: It's a bit meh. It's as if Bioshock's silly pipemania had been taken over by a 2D, flash version of System Shock's cyberspace. I haven't played the leak for a long time and for the time being it remains short and bearable. I hope EM understands that as the game progresses, the hacking minigame must be made tougher but not in any case longer or it will get old very, very fast.
For what it's worth, it is at least successful at creating tension.

BTW there's a negative point I forgot: the audio mixing in the leak is terrible. There are no dynamics due to the huge amount of compression, so everything has the same volume from a gunshot to a quiet conversation. This leads to an impression of being bathed in a continuously flowing syrup of murmur. Or something.

Dresden on 14/7/2011 at 01:17

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I hated Bioshock's hacking but I enjoy DE:HR's. I was hacking pretty much everything and liking it. You have to use a bit more strategy than "herp derp where do the pieces go". At least when it stops holding your hand after the first mission.

John P. on 18/7/2011 at 11:52

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OK, I finally "caved in" and downloaded the leak, just came up on the first bot you see in the game, and I've decided to quit here. Definitely buying this once it's released. I'm loving it (with a few reservations, but overall it's great).

I should add that I'm "getting old", and I don't play computer/video-games much anymore, except for the occasional reinstall of some 'classics'. So playing this brand spanking new game came as more of a "shock" to me than for most others, I presume, when it comes to the cinematic feel and the level of detail. I don't think I've played any more resent games than... hmm... Half Life 2 and Far Cry, I think? :eek: That said, I don't think the quality of the graphics here excel those games to any great degree, but they are absolutely sufficient, to make an understatement. Yes, some of the textures could be higher res even here, but if they 'fix' the 'worst offenders', I think it's well balanced; the stuff that you want to be crisp close up usually are, like text on various objects etc.

I guess I can answer my own question that I asked earlier and no one answered; from what I have seen, bodies do not 'gib' like they did in Deus Ex [edit: I have now tested with explosives, and they don't], but the ragdolling is much improved over DX:IW. Animations in general are much improved. There's blood and gore to some extent (but no blood spatter left on the ground after a lethal takedown), and a grittiness to the atmosphere (thugs have the proper 'gangbanging' way of speaking, swearing and cursing, things are gritty, rotten, broken and messy when appropriate etc.) that helps it seem less of a children's cartoon than DX:IW did, and more in the direction Deus Ex was (Hell's Kitchen for instance). Actually even more so than Deus Ex. The environment is also very detailed, with lots of stuff laying around - actually, a bit too much in some cases (everyone seems to have a messy office!). The atmosphere reminds me of 'Blade Runner', especially when you enter your own apartment, some of the city etc. The music is very smooth and atmospheric, with some nice subtle touches of throwbacks to the Deus Ex music - it's a bit of a 'cheap trick', but it works. Oh, how it works.

The mentioned 'messiness' is a reason I have to eat my words to some extent, when it comes to using the object highlighting. It actually comes in handy for the first couple of hours of gameplay at least, until you start recognizing the objects you can pick up or use. There's just so much stuff everywhere, and with no clue what is what, it would be a chore to look through it all just to find that one single item out of fifty is usable. Again though - I'm for the most part used to playing games where, if there is something in a room or corridor, chances are you can either pick it up, climb it, move it, etc. Not so here. But I'll turn the highlighting off when I get the full game though I think, 'cause now I'm pretty sure I can tell what items I can use without it. Plus, after a while, it gets annoying to have every door, every other crate, and every ladder in the vicinity light up.

Umm... what else. Well - either some of the levels are huge, or they successfully fool you into thinking they are. The level I just got to where the first robot is (that I have seen at least), looks to be gigantic, and the city hub looked pretty huge as well.

Most any NPC you run into has something to say, although I think they 'run out' quicker than in Deus Ex. It seems some NPCs share the same lines as well. Then again, this is just the leak, so.

It runs almost flawlessly on my computer, very smooth most of the time. My PC sometimes sounds like it's going to take off like a jet engine, but... Playing at 1920x1200 (manually set to 16:9 ratio) with most settings at the middle level, and it seems I'm getting rather good frame rates (capped at 59fps). The only thing a bit slow and tedious is as others have mentioned loading, which takes about 20-25 seconds on my computer. This is on Windows 7 64bit, with an Intel Core i7 920 CPU @ 2,67GHz, an Nvidia GeForce GTX 465 card, and 8GB RAM and an SSD-harddrive.

So - really looking forward to it. I hope over time that it will turn out to be as 'versatile' as the original Deus Ex was. Some of the charm of the original though, has turned out to be, among many other things, flaws or minor bugs or unintended (I think) use of items (LAM wall-climbing, anyone?) one can exploit. And the feeling that if you somehow managed to get over a fence or wall you weren't supposed to get over (for instance), you'd actually be rewarded for it anyway. I recently just had some fun with it, and the first time in Deus Ex when you return to UNATCO and the island is under lockdown, I chose to cheat this time, and have a little sightseeing of the island, flying around. Of course, it wasn't totally 'fleshed out' as it was at the very beginning of the game; the dock looked different, the statue had no openings etc. BUT - there was a crate up on the statue, with a lockpick in it! I mean - moments to die for. :D I hope DX:HR will not be too 'rigid' to allow for similar things.

gunsmoke on 19/7/2011 at 12:59

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No doubt, I still use John's textures.

june gloom on 5/10/2011 at 10:25

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no

yes