3261

Even without using them for combat, the air ducts feel like the “gamiest” part of the Deus Ex environments. When you see a camera, and an air duct, you know the air duct has been specifically put there to allow you to go around the camera. I’m willing to suspend disbelief, but those air ducts push the limits.

Given how well they’ve designed the sneaking, I think they would have been better off leaving the air ducts out of the game altogether. They’re not necessary and they rarely feel like the “cool” way to get past an obstacle.

Tony

3262

Although they would be the “coolest” part of any building, right? <snare>

My biggest suspension of disbelief issue with the duct work is I never noticed an aug for NFL Tight End-sized Adam Jensen to fold himself up and fit in a standard sized duct. Maybe tiny versions of his normal arms and legs deploy/chest cavity shrinks for duct travel? It would only occasionally bother me though and most of the time I loved crawling around in the HVAC.

Re: hostiles shooting into the ducts, if you are in their cone of sight they will engage. Shutting the grate stops this completely in every case, though.

3263

Interesting factoid: “alarmed” does not count towards being spotted for the “Ghost” bonus. I’m trying to avoid reloading just because I’ve lost that bonus, and a guard spotted me enough to get “alarmed” (yellow). I ran away, and still got the 500 XP bonus. Similarly, the camera “suspicious” warning doesn’t count either. This makes trying to get that bonus a lot more forgiving.

By the same token, it appears that if you hack a turret and it shoots at people, you lose the Ghost and Smooth Operator bonuses. Which is annoying, because it feels like they’re specifically penalizing you for having fun. Yeah, yeah, having a turret go berserk isn’t very stealthy, but I can’t help but think “there went 750 XP of bonuses and about 250 XP of takedown XP.”

EDIT: Also, I tried playing without the object highlighting for a while. I remember a lot of negative reactions to early screenshots because of it, and the DEHR in DE parody mod makes fun of it. I didn’t stick it out long, because the reality is it’s a huge boon. The DEHR background is incredibly busy with objects you can’t interact with, so it saves a huge amount of hunt-the-pixel when you’re trying to figure out if an object is a soda can you can’t touch or a gas grenade.

3264

I tried the same thing. It’s easier to just use the highlighting. I got used to the visual noise after a while.

I might try without it on my second playthrough. I’d rather not obsessively vacuum everything again.

3265

While there’s the vacuum argument, if you play with the highlight off, you don’t see breakable walls. Which is half the reason for having that aug, since you can destroy them with firearms.

Also, DEHR has some, um, interesting noninteractive objects lying around.

3266

What, those aren’t mixer attachments?

3267

But… are they augmented?

3268

The second time around, I’ve found with some interest that I’m not really needing Hack / Stealth. I took Hack / Capture 5 as soon as I started running into Security 5 targets, but otherwise have put no points into hacking. I’ve found now that I understand the minigame properly that I can hack a lot of networks just by being careful about early targets, and doing a lot of both captures and Fortifies simultaneously once the trace starts. If I get down to 1 attempt, I start with enough Nukes to get to a point where I’m assured to capture all rewards and win before the trace can succeed. You get a lot of Nukes and Stops just from hacking, so even with no Hack / Stealth I’m running a distinct surplus.

I may need Hack / Stealth later, of course. I’m only about halfway through my second run.

The Security rating is doesn’t, as others have observed, indicate difficulty. It indicates your minimum skill required, and also the toughness of the security nodes, which in turn means faster traces. (You may have noticed that Spam reduces Security node ratings, which in turn slows down the trace). The real difficulty of a given hack depends a lot on both the topology of the network and the strength of the nodes. Strong nodes can work to your advantage, since the trace takes just as long to capture them as you do. Clearance nodes are often a bad idea, since you want to keep nodes strong as a defense, and you usually don’t touch datastores until the last moment.

The Trace also reinforces nodes after it captures them, which makes capturing them much slower. So if you’re pretty sure you’re going to use a Stop worm, the time to do so is early, before the Trace makes your job harder.

3269

Yep, that is what I did too. I didn’t mean to but they turned hostile when I was hacking something and I just figured why not. There are not really any negatives to killing everyone in this game. I wonder what happens if I kill everyone at Sarif…

3270

When I first start a mission I end up stunning a guy or two before I kill everyone in the facility. I find myself wondering what kind of mindfuck that is to them. Of all their co-workers they’re the only one left alive. That has to leave a lot of survivors guilt. Then you take it to the next level and think when people are cleaning up afterwards they have to wonder ‘Why where these people left alive?’, which would bring a lot of scrutiny to them. Indeed, the worst thing I did was to stun those guys.

3271

I was pretty much just killing people the last third or so of the game. By that point my weapon upgrades had made most of them one shot kill capapble anyway.

But that strategy was also one of the reasons I didn’t like the final level enemies. Just shooting them seemed wrong, given the circumstances. So I was frustrated that the game pushed me to change my playstyle at the part of the game where my skills were at their most awesome in terms of lethal killing machine. The brilliance of Half-Life 2 is that they realized that and gave you the super gravity gun at the end - you were able to experience the idea of being largely unstoppable. If I end a game feeling like I’m still struggling against the lesser foes (as opposed to the boss fight), its nowhere near as satisfying.

3272

At the end of the game I had every aug unlocked except Hacking: Analyze (which is a total waste of points). I did have maybe four or five points to go in Stealth Enhancer (which didn’t do anything I needed), a couple to go in legs (silent movement, which, since it drains power, wasn’t something I worried about - it’s usually easy enough to avoid detection without it), two to go in Hacking: Fortify (I never, ever fortified since with full Capture and Stealth I had to be really unlucky to trigger the trace at a point where fortifying would help and I could just disconnect, plus massive surpluses of stop worms and nuke viruses meant I could spam those in a pinch). And I didn’t buy the radar enhancement based on feedback here, or the alarm timer. But I would say I got everything that was even remotely useful to my playstyle.

I got nonlethal bonuses only for the first half or so of the game, and frequently missed out on takedown, ghost and/or smooth operator bonuses. So yeah, I’d say there’s an excess of praxis available.

3273

There’s definitely an undocumented augmentation though. Adam’s trenchcoat can instantly be stored in an internal pouch, as that’s the only thing that can explain why it comes and goes in cutscenes and takedowns.

3274

Presumably the same thing is true of all those guns that never show on him in either. I imagined that they just popped out his leg when he needed them. ;-)

3275

It wont let you draw a weapon in Sarif.

And plot characters are immortal. I tested it by shooting the only one you really have a chance to and he took no damage from anything (nor did he turn hostile).

3276

But don’t the breakable walls have clearly-visible cracks spider-webbing across them?

3277

There’s a bit where one guard asks a second guard if he’s secured the air ducts, and the second guard mocks him for being concerned about asassination attempts by “midgets and contortionists”.

3278

stuff

You can kill Sarif, Darrow, and Taggart during the finale.

3279

Kind of a spoiler don’t you think???

3280

Kind of perpetuating the spoiler by quoting it, don’t you think?