chris the cynic on 17/3/2009 at 23:06
My smiliey-fu is lacking, so I'm not totally sure but I think you utterly missed the point.
To say that there are complete idiots who like Deus Ex is not an insult to any Deus Ex fans other than those who are complete idiots.
There are human beings who are morons. There. I said it. Does that mean I insulted human beings in general? No. Of course not.
If you read the text of his post you will see that it indicates it is surprising or unexpected that an "utter retard" would be a Deus Ex fan. This means that Deus Ex fans are a group placed above the general population, because while anyone would expect to find the drek of society in the general population, he do not expect to find them amongst Deus Ex fans.
How is that an insult? He came out and said that he has placed Deus Ex fans in a class above and beyond ordinary people, and you called it an insult. Why? Would you have preferred he indicated that he expected Deus Ex fans to be "utter retards"?
[Added:] Hi. I be slow. He already responded.
[Added:] DDL, you while you have posted more than Chuck, Chuck has been here longer. Therefore, apparently, in Chuck's mind you don't count. At least that is the implication I get.
DDL on 17/3/2009 at 23:15
Ah well, That's the internets for you.
Anyways, cheers for summarising what I basically meant, only far more politely.
Chuck; what chris said (ignore my ranting..or at least, most of it).
Nameless Voice on 18/3/2009 at 01:10
Quote Posted by chris the cynic
First off, if the dialogue in question was necessary it wouldn't be optional. Frob the character to check, yes, but after that if one of your options is, "I have to go now," "I don't care about this," or "Please for the love of god shut up," it should be pretty clear it is optional because the game just came out and gave you the option to listen or not.
As I haven't played TNM, this is just a general comment based on what others have said (and I suspect that what others have said isn't quite accurate, and so this probably doesn't apply to TNM):
When I play a game like Deus Ex, I always talk to everyone about everything, because it might be interesting. If half of the dialogue is incomprehensible to me (and I'm not presuming to say that the TNM dialogue would be), then I won't care if that dialogue was optional or not, I'll still be annoyed because I won't see why it's there in the first place. I'd expect conversations that made no sense to be somehow labelled as conversations that made no sense, or come from characters who clearly talks nonsense. If every character had one branch of conversation about something I didn't understand, but there was no way to know which branches were interesting and which were the nonsense, I certainly wouldn't like that.
But, as I said at the start, I haven't played TNM and I suspect that the people claiming that half the lines are in-jokes and references are exaggerating, so take this all with a grain of salt.
Jonas Wæver on 18/3/2009 at 01:33
Not that I'm unbiased of course but I will say that my general impression is that people seem to assume a lot of things are in-jokes when they are, in fact, not.
Quite a lot in TNM is simply fiction, world-building, made up to contribute to the image of a setting that is alive and has existed for a while. Some of this is vaguely inspired by my own personal interpretation of my memories of things that happened in the Deus Ex community (not even limited to the PDX boards - places such as DX Editing and Deus-Ex.org have cameos as well) years ago. By far most of this (I would say 80% or so) has gone so thoroughly through the cogs and gears in my head that it can no longer be considered "a reference" but rather "fiction faintly based on something that may or may not once have happened". The difference is that in the former, it's a prerequisite that you must get the reference to understand what's going on, but in the case of the latter, you should be able to interpret it with no knowledge gained outside of the fiction itself, or if you can't, then it shouldn't matter much anyway.
When Phasmatis rewards you for killing people and Kashue rewards you for being non-lethal, for example, is that because of some rivalry that happened between Phas and KK back on the PDX boards? Not at all, it's because Deus Ex had a mechanic like that, and it was fucking awesome, so I wanted more of that, and the characters of KK and Phas were at hand to use.
It is more than implied that Kylie and Trestkon had a thing back in the day. Was there anything between them in real life? Not even remotely, it just made for a great little subplot.
People hear it takes place on an Internet forum and they learn that this forum actually existed once, so they assume anything they don't immediately understand is some obscure in-joke not meant for them. In most of these cases by far, it's not: It was just made up to add to the background fiction and flesh out the world and its characters. Whether or not it was inspired by something somebody did, said, or wrote on the PlanetDeusEx forums in april 2001 should never matter, the mod and its plot is sufficiently self-contained that you should be able to enjoy it just fine without knowing jack shit about the history of that particular corner of the Deus Ex community.
Man, glad to have got that off my chest.
Carry on :thumb:
chris the cynic on 18/3/2009 at 01:40
There really shouldn't be anything that is incomprehensible. There may be something that doesn't interest you.
For example if you aren't interested in an attempt to compress 2000 years of religious history, 50 years of modern history, and 1000-2000 years of history a few conspiracy theorist claim is real, into a single conversation in an attempt to explain the nature of a branch of the Illuminati mentioned in the Deus Ex continuity bible but not in the game itself, for the love of god do not listen to the Priory of Sion conversation. Of course that conversation gives you numerous ways to get out because it is so long (and yet remains a gross oversimplification), and the player is warned ahead of time that said conversation is quite long.
(If that does sound like your cup of tea, then go to the fan fiction shop on the second day, it will be one of the things you can ask about.)
If you don't want to know the mechanics of Forum City, don't ask.
That sort of thing.
Something that is boring to one person can be fascinating to another, all that is required of you is to know which is which for you. Also, there is the space bar if you made a mistake and just want to get out of a conversation.
henke on 18/3/2009 at 06:40
Quote Posted by ZylonBane
I dunno, I'm getting mixed reports on that front.
Reports? Oh fuck no! You are
not going to pull another TDS on this one and keep on bitching about it without even playing it. IT'S FREE FFS
I played about 3 hours of it last night and I'm having no problems keeping up with the plot even though I've never been to PlanetDeusEx. Furthermore, the writing is occasionally quite witty(I really like the guy at the fan-fiction shop) and the production-values are more than adequate(for a mod based on a 9 year old game).
Melan on 18/3/2009 at 07:15
Well, I downloaded the mod and ordered the DVD. Installed, started up, crashed. Checked the manual, looks like I need the visual C++ redistributable package. Okay; downoaded it, installed it, and the game crashed just like it first did. Now what? :erg:
FTR, all of the other DX mods I tried (that means Zodiac, Redsun, Carone, The Cassandra Project and Burden of 80 Proof) worked without a glitch. They still work without a glitch. TNM just crashes.
D'Juhn Keep on 18/3/2009 at 12:56
Quote Posted by Melan
Well, I downloaded the mod
and ordered the DVD. Installed, started up, crashed. Checked the manual, looks like I need the visual C++ redistributable package. Okay; downoaded it, installed it, and the game crashed just like it first did. Now what? :erg:
FTR, all of the other DX mods I tried (that means Zodiac, Redsun, Carone, The Cassandra Project and Burden of 80 Proof) worked without a glitch. They still work without a glitch. TNM just crashes.
Someone on the SomethingAwful forums just posted this
"If you have Shifter installed (by the "replace deusex.u" method) uninstall it before playing TNM. Revert your deusex.u to the original DX one or it can cause crash problems."
Melan on 18/3/2009 at 13:07
Shifter's not installed. However, it looks like from the forums that the C++ package is tricky to install; I will try to reinstall it when I'm done with work for the day.
