3101

Not sure if this was posted, but it was amazing!

Fear the Vending Machine!

3102

Is this true? What the hell.

3103

I really had fun playing through DEHR, but it was nowhere near as engrossing as the original Deus Ex, as clunky as that one was. I was most disappointed I think by the story. It starts good, but sort of peters out, and while I’m a sucker for good conspiracy yarns, they don’t really do that part well–it feels kind of tacked on to a more or less generic clash between advocates and foes of genetic manipulation or what-not. Still a good game.

I will say I agree as well that I never felt that I had much of an impact on anything. Shoot people, stun people, be snarky, be nice–who cares, in the end? I like the conversation system ok, and the writing is often pretty decent, it is far from organic feeling and I miss the opportunity to be a real badass (or even a jackass) in a meaningful way. Whether Alpha Protocol was better or not is subjective, of course. I enjoyed AP mostly, but not as much as DEHR in terms of basic gameplay, but I think AP had more, I don’t know, intellectual substance, maybe? I didn’t like those boss fights either, though. I guess I just don’t like boss fights!

3104

No, I don’t think it’s a bad game, i was just had more fun with AP. One telling point of that, at the end of AP I really wanted to play through it again(the only thing that stopped me was a tiresome graphic problem that i had through the entire game that I really didnt want to deal with again). At the end of DEHR, I’m done. I’ve no interest to get the last few achievements. No interest to see if I could have done better. No interest to see if the outcome could be different.

3105

What saddens me most about HR are some of the design decisions…I liked the game, but I disliked exactly the things I though I would dislike based on interviews/videos

  • recharging batteries via Snickers ™

  • need to use energy to simply knock someone out from behind (WTF)

  • no melee weapons at all, no unarmed combat except for those cutscenes that magically freeze time and have no place in Deus Ex game

  • augmentation system that contains quite a few uninteresting augs, and is completely unbalanced so in the end you have pretty much everything

-SO MANY FREAKING CUTSCENES that look bad (what happened to Square doing them, at least ?!) and are unacceptable in Deus Ex game in how often they take control away form player

  • not much of a choice and consequence in story

  • not a single moment that would make me go “holy shit” like for example the time when I woke up in underground facility in a cell, and later found out HOLY FUCK I AM IN UNATCO!

  • boss fights suck. Not because they are bad (which they are), but because they are meaningless. We do not know those characters. There is no substance. Boss fight with Gunther or Simmons, whom I met first in a freaking tutorial, had so much more meaning.

I realize those are subjective and other people might like those cutscene takedowns and what not, but damn, I am pretty sure say, Harvey Smith dislikes those too. He is making Dishonored completely in first person after all.
In the end, HR is a great game mostly thanks to its atmosphere, solid core gameplay (stealth is mostly well done, weapons are fun to use too, so are some of the augs). But it falls short of Deus Ex, and some of the design decisions go straight against Deus Ex, which is a big shame.

Also, lean rules :P I am playing Deus Ex again now, and I just feel more immersed when I stay in first person and peek around the corners with lean, than I did when playing HR using fancy cover systems.

3106

From the same guy, even more hilarious:

3107

I saw this, I ended up wandering back to where T-Pain was lying unconscious on the ground, and he was back.

“Hey guys, Pizza’s here… Ohshit why is there a hole in the wall, 2 unconscious guys, and 2 dead ones lying around… I’ll just hang out in the kitchen here…”

I am having good fun with this. My build is not ideal, but I’m not playing for achievements. Mostly hacking, but grabbed the Typhoon for boss fights, and have wall punching and carrying ability so I can packrat weapons around.

3108

Am I missing something on (what I believe is) the second boss fight?

2nd boss (?)

[spoiler]I’m in a room with two giant mechanical spider things. I have a bunch of guns, but not really anything suited for taking out something this well armored at range. I don’t have EMP grenades.

So, I creep around the room avoiding the robots. I make my way up to some computer rooms up on the top level, where I find an EMP grenade in a desk drawer. I throw the EMP at one of the robots and disable it. Now I’m left with one spider to kill, but I don’t really have any weapons for this. The only thing I figure might work is the PEPS gun I’ve got. I unload all 6 or 7 shots at the spider… he’s still moving. I try my last frag grenade… it still doesn’t kill it. Now, I’ve only got some pistols, a combat rifle, and a shotgun. There is all kinds of ammo for rocket launcher and heavy rifle scattered around the room, but I don’t have these guns and I’ve circled the room several times and don’t see any sign of them. Is there an appropriate gun hiding somewhere in this room or am I stuck with what I have?[/spoiler]

3109

About that fight

[spoiler]That’s not a boss fight. The woman you killed before that was the boss. ;-)

As for what to do, why not just open up with what you have? The robots are not invulnerable, just hard to kill. And if you’ve been upgrading the weapons you do have (which you should have been) then the pistols, combat rifle, and shotgun will all do at least some damage to it.[/spoiler]

3110

Use the computer (if you can hack it) and disable the robots.

3111

I tried unloading most of my ammo at it, and it still didn’t kill the damn thing. Turns out, I had enough spare Praxis to upgrade to the robot disable aug and just disabled them at the computer. That was much easier.

Also, I don’t recall fighting a boss before that. Was that where …

apparently the real 2nd boss

The woman locks herself into her panic room and sends the guards out for me? You’re telling me that was a boss but these giant spider robots that wouldn’t die are not?

3112

The second boss fight has not occurred.

3113

Now that everyone’s moved beyond complaining about the boss fights, it sounds like opinions on the game are roughly similar to mine. I really liked it because of the overall style and a few great moments (plus I’m biased toward RPGs) but there were disappointments and missed opportunities.

3114

Oh come on. “Suave / professional / aggressive” isn’t “doing what I want” with a conversation, it’s three arbitrary choices, most of the time none of which comes anywhere near what I really would want to say.

Multiple-choice responses in a dialog are always going to be severely limited. To do what I “really want” with a conversation, you’d need to have free-form answers and natural language recognition. Since games aren’t going to do that anytime soon, at least 1) tell me what the hell I’m going to say and 2) give me time to read the and consider the alternatives. Even if we’re talking strictly about role-playing responses, rather than the typical manipulative game conversations, that’s the bare minimum to achieve that.

It’s not about patience, it’s about really hating what time I spent with it. How much time do you need chewing broken glass to decide it’s time to do something else?

Well, obviously, given how little time I spent with Alpha Protocol, as painful as it was, there’s a limit to how much I can say about the game. Pointing out that it was widely panned by reviewers is just a way of saying it’s probable that my intense dislike wasn’t purely a subjective reaction.

3115

Yeah, plus a hint of Bioshock syndrome (backlash).

3116

Well, great. Then Deus Ex, ME, and every other modern game fails, either because it isn’t offering me exactly what I want to do or because the description is insufficiently accurate, or both. Forgive me for assuming the conversation was pre-limited to options that actually exist in AAA games.

It’s not about patience, it’s about really hating what time I spent with it. How much time do you need chewing broken glass to decide it’s time to do something else?

Apparently, 40 minutes.

Well, obviously, given how little time I spent with Alpha Protocol, as painful as it was, there’s a limit to how much I can say about the game. Pointing out that it was widely panned by reviewers is just a way of saying it’s probable that my intense dislike wasn’t purely a subjective reaction.

I don’t understand. I guess asking about the “love” AP was getting was just a rhetorical jab rather than a question?

No one is trying to take away from you your reaction to AP or DEHR. I’m giving you criteria that matter to me and others, in which AP did something unusual, to explain why that distinction is being drawn. In particular, it’s a design decision that many of us expected DEHR to work towards and refine, given the resources, pedigree, and description of the game beforehand. Clearly, you like DEHR and are having an allergic reaction to comparative criticism to a game you didn’t like, even when it’s specifically constrained to easily defined parameters like the degree to which the plot flow is influenced by choices you make.

Well, do your thing, I guess, but that’s looking for a videogame circlejerk and no longer a conversation. As for the metacritic data, I think it’s useful as a binary yes/no kind of assessment and mostly useless for comparing one game to another, especially when they are assessed as games are. It’s a great place for cherry-picking, though, there’s that.

3117

You actually liked the gunplay in AP? I loved that game to death, but its combat was…problematic. Though, sure, popping chain shot and killing an entire room was always fun.

3118

Alpha Protocol does choice that impacts the narrative/missons. There’s mutually exclusive outcomes based on intel and character deposition. It’s the only game I completed three times in a row…weird. The journal system ala intel/dossier implementation compelled me to read everything. I can’t say the same for Mass Effect’s codex or Deus Ex HR’s e-books.

My biggest problem with Alpha Protocol is the mostly linear level design and enemy AI. It’s blah. F those guys that can’t cope with RPG elements all up in their grill. As far as critical reception goes, I think things might have been a tad different if it came out before Mass Effect 2 as originally planned.

3119

I’ve finally reached the endgame section (not yet the final boss) and I have to say that I’m hugely hugely disappointed by the direction they went here.

3120

After having finished the game, I no longer feel it’s a serious competitor for GOTY against Portal2 and (probably) Skyrim. DX3 has its issues, and it doesn’t show well against DX1, but it is still a great game.