Picasso on 12/6/2002 at 06:10

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I want to feel like I’m carrying a loaded firearm, not a bb gun.

I want my gun to look realistic, to behave and operate like a real gun. I want the action of using it to have real consequences, more than just a little hole in the wall. I want it to make me cautious enough that I try to keep my finger off the left mouse button before I’m ready to fire.

I want the environment around me to respond realistically to the way I interact with it (i.e. shoot it). If my bullet hits a metal surface I expect to see a spark and hear a metallic clang.

I want the bullets I fire to penetrate walls (with range and damage penalties of course, as well as a deflection of the bullet from it’s previous course). I want to use my enhanced vision and shoot someone through a door, or a thin wall, or whatever they happen to be hiding behind.

I want my heavier weapons to shoot people through THICK walls, for that matter. I want to open fire in an inhabited apartment building, pierce those shabby plywood walls and accidentally hit an innocent old lady in her room. I want to fire at a terrorist, shoot through his arm and hit the hostage he was taking

I want the bullets I fire to ricochet unexpectedly off hard surfaces that they approach at a shallow angle. If I spray-n-pray wildly in a long stone hallway, I want that hallway to be filled with violently bouncing projectiles of lead death.

I want my bullet tracers to look as if a hollowpoint bullet really is flying at me at supersonic speeds. Watch (http://boards.hkpro.com/video/MP5.MOV) this video, and look carefully at the first three shots that are fired. You can SEE them, and they look scary.

I want a decent chance that if I kill an alerted and armed guard, his last action will be to instinctively clench his hands (or more specifically, his trigger finger) and fire a wild shot, or if he’s carrying an automatic weapon, several rapid wild shots, in whatever direction his gun happens to be pointing when he falls.

I want to set my Assault Rifle to full auto and let loose with a suppressive covering fire to make my enemies hide behind whatever they can.

I want to set my Assault Rifle to a three-round burst and dispatch my closer targets with carefully placed groups of fire.

I want to set my Assault Rifle to semi-automatic and rain down aimed single shots amongst distant enemies.

I want to be slowed down when carrying my Sniper Rifle. Not to the extent of the GEP Gun or the Flamethrower, but I do want a full-sized rifle to impair my movement more than, say, a pistol would.

I want living things to react badly towards bullets. One bullet, any kind or size or power of bullet, hitting any part of a civilian’s body should put them down on the ground and bleeding profusely, if not killing them outright. Smaller mammals should be affected the same way. I want living things wearing body armor to react only slightly less badly towards bullets.

I want gunfire to be LOUD. A standard pistol shot on DX1’s first level should have been audible to at least half of Liberty Island. An unsilenced gunshot will carry far, especially outside and especially at night when everything else is quiet. Players that want to be stealthy and quiet shouldn’t even be using the standard pistol.

I want a toggle crouch button. DX1 was the first game I ever played that had one, and it was an absolute godsend (except for that bug where saved games wouldn’t remember that you were crouched).

I want the HUD to be very configurable. A player unconcerned with stealth should be able to switch off the visibility gauge quickly and easily (and if they really need to know how hidden they are they can just look at how well lit their weapon model is). Similarly, someone should be able to set their augmentation icons to only show up when activated, like that option was in DX1. One of the aspects which made the Thief series so immersive was the minimalist HUD. There were the health shields, the light gem and the active item icons, and that was it, and you could easily focus on what was around you in the game. Heck, world items would just grow a bit lighter when selected, that was genius.

I want DX2 to also have this minimalist HUD. I’m looking at the (http://www.deusex2.com/DX2/Screens/PC/05242002/fullsize/pcshot01.jpg) DX2 screens and there’s weapon and ammo icons at the bottom even when there’s nothing to fill them, there’s this circle in the center that doesn’t seem to do anything (maybe it’s functionality just hasn’t been added yet, is it basically the crosshairs? I think it should disappear when no item is active), there are these little icon type things that appear whenever you look at a person or robot (are those health bars? Shouldn’t I be able to tell someone or something’s health just by looking at them? How much blood they’re dropping, how much sparks and electricity a robot is giving off?

I want the character of an Intrusion expert to be a full possibility, and a bit more fleshed out than simply maxing out Lockpick and Electronics. More tools and abilities and facets to the entire concept of subverting security systems. I’d imagine people in the future would rely a bit too much on their computers.

I want to bear Warren Spector’s child.

Oops, scratch that last one…

More later…

santaClaws on 12/6/2002 at 13:32

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You can call me a pervert, but if DX2 came as a new game with a new story and new missions, but the old character, conspiracies; even engine, hud, weapons and tools, it'd be fine by me.
Am I the only one who loved DX as is? I'm not too conservative, am I?

Dragonclaw on 12/6/2002 at 19:23

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No, claws, I'm also one of those : I liked it as it was, why do you want to change it?-types...

Phydeaux on 13/6/2002 at 09:27

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Change is good, but I prefer improvement over a good thing, and Deus Ex is already good (f*cking great IMO).

Mostly, I want more realism with the weapons, especially the "assault rifle".

The "assault rifle" in DX1 was absurd. It supposedly uses a NATO 7.62x51mm rifle round. As far as rifle rounds go, this is quite a powerful bullet. So much in fact, that no modern assault rifle uses it. Only the Heckler-Koch G3 "battle rifle" (similar in purpose to the BAR Browing Automatic Rifle of WWII, which also used NATO 7.62mm). The true "assault rifle" concept was an automatic weapon for short-mid range combat (since 99% of infantry combat is at ranges where long distance accuracy is less important then getting off a hundered rounds in a few seconds). The NATO 7.62mm round is too powerful to fire accruately in full automatic fire. Thus, the NATO 5.56x45mm round is used exclusively in "assault rifles" over the world. (In Russia, the AK47 used a 7.62x39mm round while the "updated" version, the AK74, which is basically identical in design, uses a smaller 5.45x39mm round). The NATO 7.62x51mm round is now more commenly delegated to sniper rifles, where more power is needed and kick is less of an issue.

In DX1, this 7.62mm NATO round is about as deadly as a rubber band. A burst of these from the "assault rifle" is less powerful then the 10mm pistol. Also, suppressing (silencing) a rifle is somewhat pointless. For a supressed weapon to be effective, the bullet must be slower the the speed of sound, else there's a sonic boom of the bullet. The suppresser also alters the ballistics of the bullet (lowers its speed and accuracy). Even so, a suppressed 9mm round is far from "silenced". Take a gander at that video linked above. Compare the amount of echo you hear from the shots fired from the first part to those of the suppressed shots of the second part. The shots are indeed much quieter then an unsuppressed shot, but they can still be considered "loud" (if you shoot a guy in the back of the head, his buddy nearby will definitly hear it, and probably the people in the adjoining rooms).

It seems to me that the designers of DX1 wanted more of a submachine gun then an assault rifle. Simply looking at the design suggests this. Also, the weapon would likely use the same ammo as the pistol (all modern submachine guns use standard automatic pistol ammo), in this case the 10mm round.

I'm somewhat confused as to the reasoning behind the choice of 10mm ammo for the pistol(s). The "assault rifle" uses a NATO standart round, so why don't the pistols use the standard 9x19mm round? My guess is that because, at the time the game was being developed, there was contention for the adoption of a standard Law Enforcement round, and one was a 10mm (several models of Glocks, both Heckler-Koch pistols and submachine guns--MP5/10 for example--and many other companies offered 10mm chambered weapons. Most are discontinued.) However, the .40 Smith and Wesson round won out, and is the standard Law Enforcement round (the cops here in Tucson, AZ carry HK USP 40s, and is the standard issue to Custom Agents; the standard issue weapon to FBI agents is the Glock 23 compact .40S&W). I imagine that the developers of DX1 assumed that UNATCO, being a Law Enforcment Agency, would also use the standard LE calibre, but they guessed wrong as to which calibre it would be.

I'm glad they made the Stealth Pistol less powerful then the normal one, as this conforms to the power of a suppressed handgun compared to a suppressed one in Real Life. I do wish though that adding a silencer (previous technical quibbles aside) to the "assault rifle" or sniper rifle also made them less poweful (and would have made an interesting desicion the player would be forced to make regarding stealth vs power).

I agree with points on bullet penetration. A full metal jacket bullet, almost regardless of calibre, will go through a LOT. If you fire a 9mm at a person's head, the back of his head will be blown off, and the bullet will be imbedded (or go though) the wall behind him. Project IGI was actually pretty good about this, one of the few games I've seen that features penetration of world-objects (about the only good thing about the game).

Realistic bullet physics would be great too. Max Payne and Hitman had real-time bullet trajectories, you could even see the bullets (although I felt they traveled too slowly). These things can definitly be done in the game's engine (well, assuming Unreal Warfare has the capability). Mostly, I want to have to aim. At times in many games (especially MOHAA), shooting an enemy at extreme range was an insta-gib. Almost like they died before the gun actually fired and had time to kick back. A .30-06 round travels through the air at approximately 835 meters/second. Now, if you're sniping someone 500 feet away (most "extreme" range snipe shots you can make in DX1 are under 500 feet...or so the targeting thingy says), that's about 1/5 of a second between the shot and the target getting hit, which is definitly noticable. A 9x19mm parabellum round is closer to 400m/s (depends on grain). Thus, shooting at a moving vehicle or person isn't just point and click. Then there's the issue of gravity effecting the bullet, and other issues like rain and wind, but I think that much realism will detract from the gameplay (especially considering that one can't feel wind in a computer game). As for gravity, we should just assume that Denton knows how to adjust for range.

I also agree (again, picking on the "assault rifle") that modern trigger-select should be in play. Semi-auto, burst (most modern assault rifles and submachine guns have 3 shot burst, some have 2 shot), and fully automatic.

I somewhat disagree with being slowed by using a sniper rifle. While a .50 BMG rifle is definitly a monster, most "standard" calibre rifles aren't much heavier then assault rifles. A Knight's Armament SR-25 7.62x51mm NATO sniper rifle (very similar in design/appearance to an AR15/M16) used by Navy SEALs weighs only a couple pounds more then an M16A2. A .50 BMG calibre rifle however can easily weigh 30 pounds (an M16A2 weighs around 8-9), in which case I'd agree about being slowed (but such a weapon probably doesn't have much place in a game like Deus Ex).

With regards to AI, Deus Ex definitly needs improvement. When the shit hit the proverbial fan in DX1, so did the AI. I want realistic reactions to shit-hitting-fan situations. If a soldier sees me coming at him with a BFG, I want him to run for cover, spraying bullets in my general direction to cover his retreat. I want them to shoot behind cover instead of standing in open view just asking to be shot. If an enemy hears a gunshot in a nearby area, he should approach cautiously, not blindly. So far, the best job of combat AI I've seen was in No One Lives Forever (which also had penetrable objects). Surely we can improve on 2 year old technology.

The same applies to bysanders. Make them run like hell, or hide for cover, or drop to the ground, or freeze in terror...or something. Something logical. The "chicken with its head cut off" AI in Deus Ex is my single dissapointment in the entire game (I would classify the weapon stuff as nitpicks, not really dissapointments...although the "assault rifle" comes close).

Just my $.02

Dragonclaw on 13/6/2002 at 15:22

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And change can be bad.
What I'd want, would be more missions for DX, to cut it plainly. I don't think they have to cram around with the looks (HUD and such), I liked as it was. I'll prolly never understand what many game reviewers are about when they say: Nah, it looks like the one before, 10 points less. It looks like the one before, so what? If the design was good before, then there's no need to change it.

I'm not saying it was perfect, but the chance of making it better (for me) is smaller than the chance of making it worse...