wallcloud on 27/8/2011 at 06:21
I finished the game and felt compelled to post my feelings. Let me just start off by saying that I really liked the game. According to Steam, I've played it nearly straight through for 33 hours. It's the most exciting, in-depth, and all around solid game I've played in a long time. I love the atmospheric game play, the beautiful art direction, and the rich level design; however, I dislike the long load times (hopefully they patch this), the punishing difficulty of the AI (even on medium), and lack of variety in AI controlled characters, as well as locales.
Overall it's excellent! It almost as good as the original. Unfortunately for me, that is a really big almost. Don't get me wrong. It is a great game in its own right, and Eidos Montreal should be saluted for their efforts, but for me personally I felt that there was something lacking. It took me a while to put my finger on it, but I believe I have.
What I feel is missing the most from DXHR is that there's nothing in the plot that really draws me in. I don't really care about the characters or the situation they're in. There's not enough development. I don't even care about my own character, who makes me feel disconnected from the events in the game. There's a lack of suspension of disbelief and a lack of verisimilitude. That's a crucial difference from the original in which I felt like I was the main character and the NPC's were talking to me and it was personal. I worried about the bums suffering from the plague and their children. Every threat that came over my radio scared the crap out of me. Every new piece of the puzzle I uncovered shocked me.
DXHR's plot is largely predictable and even annoying at times. It tries to pretend that I've had this deep personal relationship with one of the main characters, but there's no back story to develop it. No trips to the grand canyon, no pictures of the family. Apparently we had a dog that never shows up either. Who cares? Later on, the plot tries to force me into giving a shit about her again, but there's nothing there to hang onto. I think I've seen this chick for a grand total of 5 mins out of 30 hours of play! There was no Reyes in Paris, no Cassandra in whereeverthehell that gas station was. Simple five second moments like those made me feel that I had so much more of impact on the world. Not so much here.
I remember waking up in my jail cell in "unknown" and thinking, "holy shit this is awesome!" Then that bitch Anna Navarre came to threaten me and I thought, "I'm gonna kill the shit out of her!" DX gets even more awesome after that, especially during the breakout from this top secret prison with giant robots. Call me jaded, but I had none of these moments in DXHR. Anyone else feel the same way?
Aquinas on 27/8/2011 at 09:32
Yeah, I know what you are talking about, when you say, something is missing compared to DX 1. I agree with that. It's the tiny bit of "magic" which was present in the first Deus Ex, that is simply not present in this one.
I personally stopped playing after 8 hours or so. Yeah, it's an OK game, but compared to DX1 - it fails. There are various little reasons for me saying for that:
a) Level design is often just plain uninspired ( all this constructed "sneak tubes" which allow you to cross the level unseen using alone the cover-system; no thinking no tactics; most levels feature totally unrealistic placed piles of rubbish, where the player can hide... this ruins immersion, because their purpose is so freakin obvious - the only thing missing is a sign of some sort telling you "sneak here plz". Horrid example: the gang turf in Detroit.)
b) No more melee weapons (exception: the special moves)
c) AliensVsPredator-One-Button-Killing-Moves TM ( I don't use em, but their presence alone is annoying)
(d) Picking up more than one type of the same gun ain't possible ( If you pick up a gun you already have ie a 10mm pistol, you only get some ammo for that gun into your inventory. the gun disappears out of the world = big bs / *edit* already dx 1 did that.)
e) The whole HUD seems to be about twice as big as it needs to be for the pc (consoly anyone?)
f) A physics engine, which is inferior to DX1 in some ways (In DXHR almost nothing is moveable. Every cup on the table, every CD on the ground etc. is not in the slightest way subject to interaction. Most objects are not only static - no they are even indestructible - heck this applies to some cardboard boxes - that's one huge let down for me.)
g) No lock-pick, no multi-tools (hacking AND lock picking? Nah, that's too much for the 2011 gaming community I guess.)
h) No more implants to be found in the game world. (You already carry everything you need in your body. Pfff, OK: Sometimes you find XP Containers, which give you free Praxis-Points - not the same for me.)
i) No more animals (pigeons, rats - the whole world seems somewhat sterile and lifeless.)
...
Of course: Compared to other games nowadays, DXHR is really cool - but for the ppl who loved SS2, Thief 1/2, DX1 I don't think, this can be the sequel they wished for. The games back then in the good old days tried to create cool environments with technically very limited means. In DX 1 you could pick up almost every object, take it into your inventory etc. That was 10 years ago - and in 2011 they release a game with a game world so static, you can not even knock over a cup of coffee. I mean seriously? That's sub standard. Have game designers become so lazy? After DX1 I demand more environmental interaction than the occasional moveable refridgerator. In my eyes DXHR is not the worthy successor to DX1 like you read in 99% of the reviews. Its just not as far away from DX1 like DXIW was, but it is too far away for my taste. That's not a question of nostalgia, it's a matter of fact.
wallcloud on 27/8/2011 at 19:34
Quote Posted by Aquinas
I personally stopped playing after 8 hours or so. Yeah, it's an OK game, but compared to DX1 - it fails.
Yeah, you're right. The lack of interactivity was really disappointing. I don't need to interact with everything in a room, but give me something I can play with and please don't let it be another box. Even in IW, the level of interactivity was awesome. You push a desk, and every item on it shook (perhaps too much). You could even move the lights around. Why would they remove this? It seems like a no brainer.
Something else I just thought of...where are all the fauna? I understand the lack of transgenics, though I still miss them, but there are no other animals in the game either. No birds in the sky, no pigeons on the sidewalk, no cats in the alley ways, and no mice in the air vents. Their lack of inclusion makes the whole HR world feel very sterile.
Eidos Montreal did get a lot of things right, and I would encourage you to continue playing for sure. It is worth seeing it through, especially when compard to the crap out there nowadays, but yeah it's still no DX1.
froghawk on 28/8/2011 at 22:14
Glad this thread is here so I didn't have to make it. No offense, Aquinas, but I think you're being majorly nitpicky. I found the environments to be incredibly detailed - beautifully so. Taking a really close look around Jensen's apartment or Pritchard's office told you a ton about those characters that the game didn't outside of that - it's storytelling through detailed set building, and for me, it's extremely effective. I found myself liking these characters more when I paid more attention to my surroundings and studied the environments they lived in - and that's great game design to me. The environments were very detailed and cluttered, and extremely atmospheric - to make every object moveable would have made the game a trash pit. An enormous cluttered mess not just in appearance (which was awesome) but in actuality (which would have just felt clunky imo).
With regards to the lack of emotional connection, I think this highlights my biggest problem with the game - the overly theatrical approach at times. Let me say that Deus Ex is my favorite game ever, but I actually found this game more emotional and moving at times than I ever found the original. The first two games are partially characterized to me by their detachment, which this game definitely did not have consistently. It nailed it sometimes, but unfortunately characterized the villains in a very cartoonish and over-the-top manner which seemed out of place in an otherwise very serious game and often made it hard to take the game seriously. I'm not going to pretend that Bob Page and Walton Simons weren't guilty of a similarly silly characterization to some extent, but this was a flaw of the original and it was still more understated than what is presented here.
My biggest problem was with the boss characters. Every single one was a severely underdeveloped character (which, unlike the OP, I did not feel was true of all characters - I quite liked Jensen, Sarif, Taggart, and the Sanders brothers, among others, and I thought they gave Tong significantly more personality than he had in the first two games - though making Tong a grumpy triad leader was a pretty bizarre decision which didn't meld at all with his portrayal in the previous games to me). Zhao just seemed silly and over the top in every presentation, Barrett was downright embarrassing ('bombs away boy scout? c'mere squirt? do you like pineapples?' Are you kidding me?), and Nimir and Federovna were so reminiscent of Hermann and Navarre that I actually thought they WERE Hermann and Navarre at first. Cute tribute maybe, but these characters served absolutely no purpose in the game's story except to provide fodder for arena-style boss battles which had no place in the game, anyway. The game would have been severely improved and would have felt much more focused if they had cut the boss battles and all of the characters you fight in them. Yes, the original had boss battles, but they were much more understated - none of this cartoonish arena nonsense. Darrow also turned into a character that was difficult to take seriously by the end.
And that's my biggest problem with the game - at times, it's a very serious and emotional game that takes place in very atmospheric and grimy city hubs and confronts the issue of human augmentation in a very engaging and thought-provoking way which I found more intellectually stimulating than anything in the first two games, and at other times it's a silly, cartoonish, over-the-top game with arena-bound boss battles and a finale which basically included zombies (SERIOUSLY WTF). It felt a little unfocused and schizophrenic as a whole because of this. With that said, it captured the spirit of the original better than I ever could have hoped for and played with nostalgia for the original game in a much more palpable way than IW ever did. I'm one of the rare people who enjoyed IW enough to play it twice, but this exceeded it in many ways. We'll see how it holds up on a second play through, but my initial verdict is that I loved it and it massively exceeded my expectations.
With that said, there were some other complaints I had with the gameplay. It's definitely not as open-ended as the original - the levels are more linear on a large scale level despite having many ways to complete them on the small scale, and the game really does force you to be a stealthy hacker (especially early on, before you can upgrade defense/recoil/aim to make it possible to play the game with guns - but this is fine with me since it's my play style anyway). With that said, the hacking mini game gets EXTREMELY old very fast since, as a hacker, you have to do it over and over and over again... the AUDs are basically a cheat, but I got fed up and started using them all over the place towards the end because I got so sick of playing the hacking mini game repeatedly. They really should have kept lock picks and multitools in to diminish the monotony of the hacking mini game, which can be exciting in small doses but is severely overused.
By the way, how does Megan Reed know Bob Page? Are they trying to imply that she really is a 'bad guy'?
Bho on 29/8/2011 at 03:50
I believe the Tong that you interact with in HR is actually the father of our beloved Tracer. You can read an email between father and son when you enter Tong senior's base, and it shows Tracer making an escape after you plant the bomb in the following mission.
I wonder if Megan Reed is somehow related to Janice Reed from the first game?
froghawk on 29/8/2011 at 13:56
Then why does Tong Sr have the same scars and augs that the one from later games has, which Tong Jr lacks? You meet Tong Jr in the bonus mission but he doesn't seem any more like the one we know. But I guess if Tong is still alive by IW it would have to be the son. How much time is there between the games again?
thrawn_121 on 29/8/2011 at 14:13
It's 25 years to Deus Ex, then another 20 to Invisible War I believe. One timing mistake they made was in Picus headquarters - there are emails from Nicolette DuClare that are written as if she worked there, but she'd only be very young, if she'd been born at all.
Aquinas on 29/8/2011 at 14:34
Quote Posted by wallcloud
Yeah, you're right. The lack of interactivity was really disappointing. I don't need to interact with everything in a room, but give me something I can play with and please don't let it be another box. Even in IW, the level of interactivity was awesome. You push a desk, and every item on it shook (perhaps too much). You could even move the lights around. Why would they remove this? It seems like a no brainer.
Something else I just thought of...where are all the fauna? I understand the lack of transgenics, though I still miss them, but there are no other animals in the game either. No birds in the sky, no pigeons on the sidewalk, no cats in the alley ways, and no mice in the air vents. Their lack of inclusion makes the whole HR world feel very sterile.
Eidos Montreal did get a lot of things right, and I would encourage you to continue playing for sure. It is worth seeing it through, especially when compard to the crap out there nowadays, but yeah it's still no DX1.
Oh, yeah! How much I played around with the animals^^ - I always spawned masses of flies in the little hotel at Champs Elysees. BTW that's another thing I miss.
@froghawk: Yeah, I am beeing nit-picky. but imho physics never made an environment trashy - just think of Oblivion, Fallout 3 etc. --> That's how a gameworld should be made in 2011. DX1 wasn't a trash bin either. It is the sum of all the small details i mentioned, which keep DX3 from reaching the timeless quality of DX1. For sure - as I said - it is a very good game, but something IS missing.
froghawk on 29/8/2011 at 17:54
Yes, but not a single one of the games you mentioned had environments anywhere NEAR as detailed and cluttered as the environments of this game. It's one of the most detailed games I've ever seen in terms of environmental clutter, and for that reason I really just don't think it work if every object was moveable.
I really don't mind the little things - it's the big things that bug me, and they are there. Your point about level design is definitely a big one, but let's face it - while the level design isn't as brilliant as the original DX, it's better than it was in Invisible War and it could have been been MUCH worse - they could have gone all the way into turning into a corridor shooter, but thankfully they didn't and still provided multiple routes through each level. They succeeded in their small-scale level design - they just failed a bit with the large-scale.
I'm not sure I get what you're trying to say with point h about the implants, but the system definitely is different here. I liked how you were forced to make choices about augs in the first two (pick this or this - you can't have both), but in this game you can get every aug and upgrade them all most of the way by the end, at least if you're a big explorer and hacker.
I wish that instead of simplifying the health system in every game (health pool for each limb in DX1 -> single health pool in IW -> regenerating health in HR) that they went back and did DX1's health system properly. It was nice that you had to crawl around if you lost your legs, but they shouldn't have let you hold a gun - you should have been forced to use your arms to move if your legs were shot off. And if your arms were blown off, you also shouldn't have been allowed to use a weapon. True, you were already fucked enough if your legs were blown off, so that probably makes it too brutally difficult, but it was a unique concept that I haven't seen in any other game and which could have been taken much further.
Did it bug anyone else how in the endings Jensen kept using his own decisions as evidence for how he thought humanity should respond? Not only did it assume that the player attempted to be moral throughout the game, but it was also irrational since Adam was a more evolved human being and therefore should have been assuming that the rest of humanity would act like him. Other than that, the endings were awesome.
Quote Posted by thrawn_121
It's 25 years to Deus Ex, then another 20 to Invisible War I believe. One timing mistake they made was in Picus headquarters - there are emails from Nicolette DuClare that are written as if she worked there, but she'd only be very young, if she'd been born at all.
Huh, I missed that. Just another reason for a second play through.
I guess Tong's son is the tracer we know then... certainly makes more sense personality-wise. Tong's son is kind of a brat in this game, but he has 25 years to grow up and change so it's plausible. Now I just want to know how he ended up with the same burn scar his dad had. O.o
Also, didn't they originally say this game was going to go into 'the events leading up to the formation of UNATCO'? Other than the emails from Manderley in the police station, there's nothing about UNATCO in this game at all. Should we assume that is formed in response to the terrorism of Purity First, Hugh Darrow, etc.?
I wonder if the next game (considering the reviews and hype, I'm sure there will be one) will take place between HR and DX or if it will take place after the original game. I can't see them making a sequel to Invisible War, but I could see them ignoring that IW ever happened.
Dresden on 29/8/2011 at 18:21
I think they actually meant Elizabeth DuClare.
