2701

Almost certainly Neo’s weirdly stiff persistent leg in the air after he martial-arts-kicks some guy. And yes.

2702

Weird - I crash every single time I enter the elevator in the medical corp…

2703

Only the Darrow books give the bonus and an overall bonus if you find all of them.

2704

And Shepard in Mass Effect 1 works for the most secretive and powerful spec ops org in the known universe and he has to resort to pillaging weapons/ammo/armor off the dead and selling them to a quartermaster on his own ship? Or buy from vendors on planets?

2705

Arguably, this is better explained in DEHR, when…

Some Early Emails

…folks at the company are worried about not making payroll and having to cut benefits, on account of you ain’t been doing so hot for the past six months and happen to be on the verge of bankruptcy.

2706

If you’re talking about the one after the lasers, I had the same problem: fix was to deactivate lasers before going in (there’s a console on a column right in front of the elevator).

2707

yeah, found that answer on a few forums after googling it - a rather weird bug! But thanks! :-)

2708

If you’re going sneaky or nonlethal, the game strongly encourages you to use takedowns whenever you can. A takedown only requires energy, and you can regenerate one bar of that just by waiting. If you’re going sneaky, you usually have to reach the body to drag it out of sight, so you might as well just take them down rather than shoot them. The game also encourages you to play this way since you get 50 XP for doing this, versus 20 for shooting them in the head, or 30 for sedating them with a weapon.

Now and then you get an isolated guy who no one is going to see if you shoot him, but that’s pretty rare.

I will say this about the game: as much as I find it very frustrating, it does give you better tools for sneaking than just about any other game I can recall playing. The radar is the strongest tool, since you can see where everyone is looking even without the “cone of vision” upgrade. It seems to pick up people through walls without the level 2 upgrade, too.

Speaking of which, the level 2 radar seems like a huge downgrade to me. It sounds nice, but the problem is they fit 4 times the scan range into the same window. Once you get it, it becomes much harder to make out what the guy on the other side of the wall is doing, because he’s merged with you and the guy next to him. If the radar display got bigger, it would be worthwhile, but I immediately reverted to an earlier save game once I realized how difficult it was making my life.

2709

Gus - I am extremely sorry if this is provocative, but do you enjoy these kinds of games? You often describe them as frustrating (I’m thinking of Fallout: New Vegas here as well) - I wonder if its because you are a developer yourself, and perhaps notices things I dont? Sorry if I sound offensive

As for takedowns - I was actually kinda thinking that the game encuraged you to use weapons to do it, since energy bars are becoming more and more sparse (for me) while I have plenty of stun gun ammo and darts.

2710

Ammo and guns are expensive, but not that expensive… At present, 10 mm ammo costs as little as $0.36 per round according to http://gun-deals.com/ammo.php?caliber=10mm+Auto.

So anyone who’s vaguely middle class should easily be able to afford all the ammo a video game character fires in a typical 40 hour game-long killing spree.

“1,000 rounds, please.”

“Isn’t that kind of a lot? What are you planning on doing with it all?”

“Attacking a FEMA secret base. It’s in the slums a couple of blocks from here.”

“Oh, OK; here you go.”

And yeah, ME 1 Shepard was as sad as a military/spec-ops/world-saving character could be in terms of equipment options and funding. But it was all in service of the world’s worst RPG equipment system and inventory system. I don’t think I equipped any weapon drops in the whole game, they were that bad.

2711

Now that I’ve gotten past the crashing I’m really enjoying this game. My only quibble: other than the augmentations the game doesn’t seem very sci-fi. There aren’t that many giant robots, no greasels, aliens, or energy swords. I’ve just left the first hub and so far it just seems like a near-future stealth and combat game. A really good one no doubt but something’s missing from the atmosphere.

2712

That’s intentional, isn’t it? It’s the prequel to the first Deus Ex, so no mass deployment of combat robots yet.

2713

I think the presentation of the energy mechanic to the users is poor.

You naturally want to fill your entire energy meter and there’s an impulse to use energy bars to do it. But this is the wrong thing to do in most situations, because you’re using limited consumables instead of the unlimited regenerating energy. If you think of your 2+ segments as overfill and only use energy bars when you’re either out and need energy immediately or when you’re going to need multiple segments in the next few seconds, it’s much easier to manage.

2714

Yeah, the only time I fill past 1 bar is to combine cloak and typhoon (very rare) or if I am too lazy to stealth past some silly geometry puzzle of guard patterns and need extended cloaking. Hence I am carrying around some silly amount of energy snacks :)

2715

The only thing you have to watch out for is the harsh letdown when you didn’t plan for enough energy. I hated cloaking and maneuvering for a takedown only to see “OUT OF ENERGY.” By the end I got pretty good at eating those candy bars while taking fire so I could get the super move off before I died.

2716

Is there more than one weapons vendor in Heng Sha?

2717

I know of one vendor in the sewers, but to be honest, he was the only one I ever found.

2718

I don’t like stealth games much. What I particularly don’t like about them is the abrupt instant-fail nature of stealth games. I loved the original Deus Ex, but I wasn’t terribly sneaky in that game. I was hoping for something of the same experience, but I feel the game strongly rewards stealth, and it’s difficult for me to deliberately avoid what appears to be the best path.

That said, the other things I don’t like about DXHR as well. I don’t like the random nature of the hack failures, though with Capture 5 / Hack Stealth 3 that’s largely under control. And I’ve already detailed what I don’t like about the conversation system.

As for Fallout: New Vegas, I really liked that game. Maybe you’re confusing the things I disliked about Dead Money with the game as a whole?

EDIT: By the way, thanks for making clear you were asking a honest question. The acidic nature of the internet (and of this forum on occasion) can easily make such a question sound like “learn2play” when you’re honestly wondering if it’s a matter of taste.

Chris has the right of it. The correct way to use energy is to have 1 bar most of the time. You can do any action that takes 1 bar of energy as many times as you like, since that 1 bar always replenishes. You should only use consumable energy regeneration if you must use multiple bars, or you need energy right now and haven’t recharged yet.

Most of the time, 1 bar is enough. 1 bar is a takedown, or a sprint from cover to cover while invisible. At Cloak-3, it’s 7 seconds of invisibility, which will almost always let you reach where you want to go. Candy is for special situations that require 2 or more bars, like running up to someone while invisible to do a takedown, because there’s no cover and no way to bypass them.

It’s worth noting that the last bar regenerates if partially used, so if you’ve eaten a 3-energy jar, and thus have 4 bars, you can use the Vision power to look through walls, turn it off, and then wait a bit for the last bar to recharge. Similarly, if you use Cloak, if you don’t use a full bar, you can regenerate it.

2719

I found one at the end of an alley in the lower city. I didn’t find the one in the sewers.

2720

There’s also one at the brothel.