Deus Ex: Human Revolution

the point was that both his hands are on the gun so apparently hes dragging the body via his augmented cock

also i wont RBZ. deus ex was highly influential to my tastes in video games and its one of the few things i'll sperg the fuck out on.

OK, I'll bite. If you were the producer of the game, what would you do?

not make the game until i was sure it wouldnt be goddamn terrible, something the makers of this apparently overlooked

What would make you be sure the game wouldn't be terrible?

actually knowing what fans want and not getting literally every aspect of the story and game world wrong

You just restated your previous answer with different wording. OK.

So if I understand this right, you have no intention of actually answering my question in any specific sort of fashion? Well then, both you and this debate are wastes of time. Good day, sir.

how else am i supposed to say they got every part of the game possible wrong?

seriously there is nothing about the game i like. nothing. even the basic gameplay has been perverted to be yet another cover shooter with regenerating health. it's all terrible. every. single. part.

You're not supposed to say what they got wrong.

You're supposed to say what YOU would do right. Give us some real talking points and ways to improve the game, even if in minor ways, and we can have a real conversation. Repeatedly stating that it sucks doesn't add anything. What DO you want to see in the next Deus Ex title? How would implement it? Making a good game isn't easy!

- no cover system, or at the very least not in third person. this makes gunplay and stealth far too easy.

- have the technology more in-line with what was established in the universe.

- stop trying to recapture the JC magic. invisible war attempted it and Jensen is even more guilty. come up with something original instead of trying to catch lightning in a bottle again.

- no third person for anything except conversations. it decreases immersion, which is something pretty important for an FPRPG.

- dont be over-ambitious. be aware of limitations and work within them, instead of attempting to make everyone happy and falling far short of what was intended, only disappointing everyone

- environments that make sense, and lend themselves well to gameplay, instead of areas that are clearly gutted in ways that don't make sense in order to facilitate "choice". example: the aforementioned "push box out of the way to find giant hole in wall"

- have the player make the choices. don't hold their hand throughout it, if there is even any choice at all. so far Human Revolution seems to be some sort of "puzzle shooter" where it's mostly just a handful of alternate ways of going through corridors and fighting enemies. bringing us to:

- choices that have a large impact on the gameplay. if im going to hack this terminal or lockpick this vent, it should alter the path massively, or at the very least let me get through a level using the minimum amount of force necessary.

- no fucking dudes with gunarms named barrett jesus christ.


I SAY GOOD DAY SIR *puts on monocle and top hat, tapdances away*

OK! We're making progress!



I'm actually inclined to agree with you, but what would you use instead?
A first person lean system? No immediate cover-support, but AI reaction time that supports Counter-Strike style peaking, ALA half life 2?



I think this is an interesting point with a lot to discuss. On one hand, the developers need to make the tech believable with regards to modern tech and prosthetics, which requires a more futuristic aesthetic. On the other hand, the previous game had cybernetics that looked like what you'd see in a 90's cyberpunk setting (Which admittedly is what the first Deus-Ex was). Obviously, the devs have chosen to sit closer to the first requirement and while I think it may not necessarily be the best choice, I certainly don't think it's necessarily bad.



I'm afraid I don't totally see what you're getting at here. Stop giving us stereotypical CyberPunk heroes?



I agree.



This is interesting. What do you think would be a feasible goal to shoot for?



Could you give a few examples of designs that would make sense?



I agree that this is a problem with alot of modern games, but I can't see where you're getting the idea that this game is necessarily going to suffer from it comes. Can you elaborate a bit on how you'd avoid this problem? Preferably by listing things you would do, rather than not do?




This is a good idea in theory, but are you aware of the burden it places on artists to build levels like this for a modern game? Ever notice how most open-ended games seem to have crap art direction? Yeah.




Aaawww, cmon! It's not *that* bad!




I'm afraid I completely missed this reference, sorry.

Actually the best first-person cover system I've seen was in Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood. It's too bad that game was pretty much completely ignored, because it had some good ideas like that in it. I mean, it's understandable since the first game was pretty bad, but I think that should be the thing everyone else should use and refine from it. Sort of like the cover from kill.switch.



I think they could have used some sort of Retro-Futurist aesthetic. Basically, take stuff from the 80s and future them up a bit. I don't really know how this would work, but I'm not an artistic designer. I think this is kind of what they were going for with that renaissance bullshit, but they took it to a completely retarded extreme.




Not really that, but it seems like everyone keeps trying to make the hero exactly like JC. There was a connection in Invisible War, as stupid as it was, and I'm guessing there will probably be a connection in this (probably Jensen is what paul and JC were cloned from or something in that aspect). It makes sense in a story sense but it just makes the character dull to play as when they're just a lesser version of a character you've already been. Diminishing returns and whatnot.



Having a clear goal in mind, for one. DX wasn't really that huge in scope. You had a few areas, different ways to go about completing your goals, and a pretty basic FPS/RPG combo gameplay system. In HR, they seem to be trying to appease both fans of the original DX and, for lack of a better term, "The console gamers". They keep claiming it has the depth of DX, while also being "accessible" to "casual" gamers. This is where things like the third person cover and one-button stealth kills come in. You can't please everyone at once, it just ends up alienating the people who gave a shit to begin with.

I've only seen a few people really excited for HR, and they usually seem to be the Halo or Gears of War crowd. That's ok and all, I'm not against reaching to a new demographic, but the fact is they've managed to completely piss off fans of DX like myself with the massive alterations to the gameplay, story, and universe in order to do this.



Hell's Kitchen in DX, for one. It seemed like a real city and didn't just have pathways there because it could. Obviously compared to games now it seems small, but back then the amount of freedom was amazing, while not sacrificing either realism or gameplay. Want to get into Paul's apartment without alerting the guys inside the hotel? Go up the fire escape. Things like that. There weren't convenient giant holes in walls just because they couldn't come up with some other way to get you to experiment.



Granted this one is a bit tenuous and it won't be fully confirmed until the game is out and I play it because who am I kidding I'll have to witness this train wreck for myself. The videos shown so far are likely early in the game, and that amount of handholding may not be present the entire game.

Still, with the amount of that present in every single game now, I find it hard to believe that a game largely defined (at least in previous iterations) by choice would avoid that trap. Alpha Protocol (bad example I know, but it's the closest analogue in recent memory) had a really great branching storyline, but every time you had a choice it was basically indicated by giant glowing neon signs or popups on the screen. The fact is, gamers now are, generally, retarded. This is why every game seems to need to tell you to press A to jump. It's not much of a stretch that this philosophy extends into the game itself, long after someone should be familiar with its mechanics. I think Assassin's Creed kept reminding me of basic actions until the end of the fucking game.



Oh no the devs might have to actually put in some effort! What a shame.




yes it is. It is completely indicative of the amount of dumb japanese faggotry square enix is going to be putting into otherwise good games from now on. I can't wait until in Hitman 5 Agent 47 is going to use a giant sword with materia holes instead of garrottes.




You said "good day sir" which is a very homo faggot thing.

Mmm. I'm fond of lean-systems ALA system shock myself, and I think they'd fit in well with Deus-Ex which really relies on the first-person tunnel vision to maintain suspense.




TBH for most of the art I'm not seeing much Renaissance stuff. The closest I could come up with would be the sort of stuff you'd see in Ergo Proxy, which is still out of line for traditional I agree, but I don't *really* think it's such a terrible sin to do art redesign for a game that old that also had, let's be honest here, pretty uninspired art direction(And I'm not just talking in relation to old graphics.)




Hmm....I don't see it. I'll agree the new protagonist is pretty boring, but...I don't see the resemblance to JC, even in attitude. Granted I never played Invisible War since I heard it was bad, so I can't work off that, but yeah.




Hmm. I was more trying to get an idea of what you thought was a reasonable goal here, in a specific sense. If you were making the game, how big would you shoot?



That's reasonable. I don't have much to say here I guess. Out of curiosity, have you played the original Crysis? I'm curious what you'd say about the open-ended free-roam parts of it in relation to degree of freedom?



Eh, let's face it. The game probably isn't going to be real Deus-Ex, it's probably going to wind up like Fallout 3. Decent game, not a worthy successor to its predecessor, but still not that bad.



So, about those 70 hour work weeks which aren't uncommon in the industry...
Developers already work pretty fucking hard. Do you know how hard they work?
Let's just mention Valve. Valve has pretty hardworking folks. Valve makes good, polished games, though not usually multi-branching ones or especially innovative ones(They use the modders for their innovation). Now, how often is Valve late on a title, or even a minor update? Go look at their developer wiki article for 'Valve Time'. That list is far from complete.

Now you want Valve-quality environments and art assets, ontop of Deus-Ex style freeform gameplay? Sure, it can be done. How many manhours you want to devote to designing one area? You're probably bringing new artists onto the project, because the one's you've got are already overworked though. Oh, wait. Now we have to bring them up to speed on the project we're 6 months into. Now we've got to go confirm each minor aspect of the environment with the suits...Uh-oh. A lighting bug is affecting indoor spaces that use the flickering light that we can't fix without redoing the lighting code. Redo it.

Yeah...
I'm not sure effort is the issue here.



No offense, but this isn't very convincing. It sounds like 'Oh no! The political correction of America is going to turn us all into spineless wimps!'. They put an expy of a character from another genre in the game. Woop de doo.



Yeah? Fuck you.