Grifman
2761
Warning
2763
I don’t like it because my sons and I have different accounts on the same computer. Most games let us maintain separate saves but this system prevents that.
I know some people thought the AI routines for stealth were weak, but I didn’t see any reason to mock it other than how quickly it goes back to unalarmed state.
Was I imagining it, or did one of the enemies say “The door opened, but no one went through.” Then he came to investigate. That was a reasonable acknowledgement of the world.
They’ll do that. The two times I let it play out without retreating worked a bit differently. One time the fellow approached the door, looked through it from the far side, then gave the “guess it was nothing” cue and went back to his patrol. A little dumb, if convenient for me at the time. The next time it happened the guy stood in the doorway and looked around on the far side, detecting me. That may be the intended behavior and the other guy started out from too far away or something.
I think the “dumb AI” stuff may be more of an experience of veteran stealth players who’ve been through Thief and Splinter Cell and so on. This was my first stealth game and even on normal difficulty, playing stealthy and (almost entirely) nonlethal was a perfectly adequate challenge even with the nearsighted and trusting AI.
The first time you test the boundries of the AI’s awareness and pattern following it’s glaringly game-y and fourth-wall breaking. You can put the bullet-time beatdown on one guard 60 or 70 feet away from another guard staring in the same direction. But since I saw all that on the very first mission I didn’t have much trouble shrugging and suspending my disbelief.
When issues of unrealistic AI/idle behavior come up in shooters/RPGs/MMOs I always like to bring up the “realistic” behaviors that no one actually wants to see: if these enemies had half a brain they’d always retreat from the über-powerful (and often legendarily deadly) player characters until they outnumbered them around 30:1 and occupied a defensible position. Challenging, sure, but fun? Playable?
We all want to play games where our one (or four) characters go around defeating hundreds or often thousands of enemies. Certainly it’s possible to make smarter-looking enemies than DXHR’s, but they’re always going to have to be pretty stupid on one level or another for us to mow them down in such vast numbers.
I’m absolutely in love with the soundtrack; the tempo, the vibe, the sudden but non-flow-breaking change when you alert someone, it’s just brilliant stuff.
That said, Mr. Jensen’s monotone Batman voice does tend to get old; come on, even Commander Shepard had a more engaging voice work.
But really, I’m grasping at straws here, I’m loving the game, even after spending 40 minutes to complete one of the Shanghai sidequests because…well, without going into spoiler territory, save your virus/hacking consumables people, you’ll need them.
maxle
2767
I’m currently dealing with the obvious superiority of non-lethal takedowns, in terms of xp, by shooting people in the head after I KO them.
Oh, Sarkus, thanks for the info. Love this pistol now.
This is at least more distance than your typical stealth game, right? They specifically tried to make it more about line of sight by improving guards’ vision. I still got away with a few takedowns a real person would see, but the enemies weren’t as blind as most stealth games.
It’s not perfect but to me it seems like it’s at or above current designs. That’s why I’m curious to hear about the “bad” stealth AI from people who play more of these. It’s been a long time since I played Thief.
Bite him? That dude went away happy from our second encounter!
I think players would find that confusing, but it would work if all 1-bar actions (takedowns, wall smashes) used slightly less than 1 bar. The net effect would be that doing an action wouldn’t use up your saved energy permanently, but doing two actions in quick succession would. Which is the intent, mostly.
Still, the energy regeneration rules are screwy enough that they feel very game-y rather than a “simulation” of aug energy usage.
As I recall, Deus Ex had no energy regeneration, and required that you use consumables to replace energy constantly. I’d have to play again to get a feel.
I last played Thief Gold a couple years ago, and DX3 feels near-identical, AI-wise. Which is just fine with me.
If Thief 4 turns out this well, I’ll be giddy.
The problem with that cartoon is that’s not how the game works. Yeah, leave vent covers open, move vending machines to the middle of the room, leave drawers open, and they don’t notice. Leave a body out where they can see it, though, and they go apeshit. Dragging bodies out of line of sight is such a big part of the game that you just can’t ignore that.
The closest real game behavior is that Karl will be on duty one moment, then he’s gone and no one is bothered by the fact that he’s missing.
Hansey
2773
Not only that, but if you’ve done a non-lethal takedown, they’ll actually bend over and wake the guy up. On occasion I’ve had to take cover after knocking a guy out without enough time to drag him out of sight. I’ve then watched from cover (in a vent, perhaps) as they wake him, and he picks up his gun that I also neglected to grab on my panic run.
Grifman
2774
There’s a silencer in Detroit and another at the brothel arms dealer in Hengsha.
This is the main reason to go lethal. Usually I’ve got time with the takedowns, but there was a bit where I was being stalked by a horde of guys, and I tried popping a few with the tranq rifle. Their buddies kept waking them up faster then I could put them to sleep.
Well, arguably, that one fight that gave us both difficulty was probably the best argument against going totally non-lethal. That and the fact that nonlethality starts to look pretty morally quixotic over the course of the game.
Boss fights were almost totally avoidable in the original Deus Ex, though, as long as you did enough hacking, talking, and exploring to uncover the applicable killphrases. Would’ve been nice to see something like that, though perhaps not precisely that.
I would like to add that the third boss is the worst of the three. Well, if you’re screwed the way you’re supposed to be screwed. I’ve heard that you can avoid that.
Last bossfight / fucked-upedness spoiler
Last boss fight
[spoiler]Honestly, I thought they signposted that one like craaaazy. Granted I was hacking almost all the computers in the game, but even just with the timely “symptoms” and the fact that TYM was rush-producing the chips (and isn’t that stated even outside of hacked emails?) before the problem arises were hugely suspicious to me. Also the radio guy starts ranting about it immediately.
I found that fight boring but safe, in that the safest method is to stay at full health at blink at him in very brief encounters around the outside of the maze. Also, it’s wonderful when Zhao gloatingly tries to use her tv-remote-of-doom on you and it doesn’t work; you turn her sarcastic line from your first meeting back on her.[/spoiler]
Yep, you can, in which case I assume a different cutscene plays (I haven’t done the “screwed” version yet), because the one I got acknowledged that I had the foresight to …
third boss fight
not go to the clinic for the “upgrade” to my neural chip or whatever the technobabble name for it was. Reading those emails at a certain government agency base paid off. So when the third boss fight happens, it was a nasty surprise to one of the antagonists.
