I finally got around to playing Deus Ex: HR / Director’s Cut, and I’ve gotten as far as the first boss battle. I was anticipating how they’d change it, so you could recon, use stealth, maybe apply hacking skills… and it was exactly the same. Just as awful as it was the first time. So far as I can tell, it hasn’t been reworked at all.
EDIT: OK, so I won the fight, and went exploring. It turns out there are vents to crawl in, terminals to hack, and some turrets you can unleash if you have that upgrade. The problem is that they did the same stupid thing they did the first time around: you’re thrown into the fight with no chance to scope out the terrain, out in the open where you can be easily shot and killed. You can win the fight without doing it the hard way, but you have to know the lay of the land first.
Which sucks, that was the #1 thing I had hoped they had fixed. The boss battles were fairly easily winnable before if you knew the layout, but again the scenario sets you up to die before you can determine that.
I still hate the conversation system used for critical dialogs. The “persuasion” aug doesn’t help at all, beyond telling you that you made the wrong choice after you make the wrong choice, and choosing the most logical approach is often the wrong one. I just failed my first dialog attempt with Tracer Tong, even though I’ve played and won it before.
I’ve gotten to boss fight #2. It still sucks.
In the original game, boss fight #2 is in a small, circular arena against a woman who turns invisible and who does hit-and-run attacks with machine pistols. The arena has limited cover, pillars spaced evenly around the perimeter. As with all the boss fights, you start in the open rather than behind cover, and you don’t know the room layout.
This remains the same, except that the entrance door now has a level-2 keypad with a relatively simple network layout. It hacks quickly, but not instantly. The game strongly discourages hacking in combat, since you’re sitting in one place out in the open and it’s time consuming, yet that’s what this forces you to do. One of the lockers has a PDA with the code, but getting it out is sloppy and slow since it’s buried under other stuff.
If you hack the door, there’s a ramp to a room above the main one. It’s also small and circular, but it has no cover at all. Going up there is suicide. In theory you can turn off the laser barrier around the computer there, hack it, and take over twin roof turrets. In practice, you’ll be dead before you finish hacking it, since the boss will follow you up there and shoot you in the head while you twiddle with it.
It’s really no improvement at all.
This was the one boss fight that I agree was not really improved much. I think I simply used EMP grenades and explosive revolver shots to finisher her off. But yeah, not my fave.
In hindsight, I think the improvements to #1 don’t have the same problems. I think you can hack the stuff that needs to be hacked without getting shot if you know where you’re supposed to go.
godhugh
3746
I think you’re assuming your experience is applicable to everyone. I’m playing through the game for the first time and I had no major problems using stealth/hacking to beat either boss.
You’re going to have to explain how you used stealth against boss 2. It doesn’t seem possible.
Let her chase you and when she’s near the electrical conduits around the edge of the circular room, shoot them. The fight is quite easy, but I agree they’ve added very little stealth/hacking options to that fight.
Ah, so that’s how the floor gets electrified. I noticed that sometimes it was, but I hadn’t noticed the conduits as anything other than decoration, and I was too focused on trying to stay alive during her attacks to notice what turned on the electricity.
Houngan
3750
If you can manage to chase her while she’s invisible she’ll stay on the run nearly the whole time, and you can chip her down that way. Just circle in the inner ring and shoot when she exposes herself in the outer ring, but you have to keep up to keep her on the run.
I finished the Missing Link portion of the Director’s Cut. It’s really good. It’s quite large, and it encapsulates most of the best parts of Human Revolution. I think the Director’s Cut is worth it just to have this segment properly incorporated into the main game.
“Reset” segments have been a staple of FPS games since at least Half Life 1, and that’s how it works here - you lose all your gear and your augments. You get your weapons back in somewhat short order, but you don’t get your ammunition back until the end of the segment, so for a while you end up using weapons you wouldn’t otherwise. Uh, if you use weapons - I almost never do in HR, because the game so strongly encourages sneaking up and slugging targets.
The augment reset is a much bigger deal, and it felt well-handled. You get Praxis points at a reasonable rate, but I was struggling with deciding whether to put points into hacking or rely on dropped passwords and using the points elsewhere. I know that, for example, there’s some stuff you can only reach with the Jump augment, but I ended up passing it by because I wanted the points elsewhere.
You get the remainder of your Praxis back at the end of the mission. I’m not really sure how much I came out ahead, but I think it was maybe 1-2 points. That’s about right, since by that time you have a ton of augments, and if you’ve forgone the minor stuff like the Stealth Enhancement augs, you come out with all the path-enabling augs (wall breaking, gas immunity, jumping, heavy lifting, Hack-5 and Hack Stealth-3).
There’s no boss battle, or rather, the boss battle is what a boss battle should be in HR: a sneaking through a room of alerted enemies, taking them out one by one, in order to eliminate the chief bad guy.
I finished boss battle #3. This turned out to be quite easy - I broke through a wall, found my way into the vents, and used X-Ray vision to spot the boss and lasered him to death in complete safety. I did run out of ammo, but there was more available. I jumped out, snagged it, and then ran back into the vents to continue the laser treatment.
There’s also a hidden control room which you can use to activate two small robots. I didn’t spot it during combat because I was kind of rushing things and the entry vent is hidden behind some boxes. This would be an easy solution as well, since unlike fight #2, the control room is not reachable by the boss, so you have time to hack the terminal.
Finished it. The final, Eidos-created boss fight is notable because you start out under cover. It’s also way too easy if you keep the laser rifle. A weapon that cuts through cover is just terribly unbalancing in a game like this.
The game just cries out for a mod that changes the experience system to resemble the original Deus Ex. There’s a temptation to hack every computer and terminal, even ones where you have the code or password, because you gain XP and other rewards. You want to sneak up and slug every enemy for 50 XP. There are these neat options for turning turrets and robots against the enemy, and you never want to do it because the XP penalties are significant - only 10 XP per target, and you lose the 500 XP Ghost and 250 XP Smooth Operator rewards.
I do enjoy the game the way it is, and how strongly it emphasizes stealth and nonlethal approachs. Yet I’d love to see a variant which took a more Deus Ex approach, neither rewarding nor penalizing any particular approach. A version where only quest completion gave XP rewards, so it was up to you how you got it done. I did almost no save/reload cycles with the original Deus Ex because if I blew stealth, shooting my way out was a workable alternative. It sure would be nice to care about all those weapons Human Revolution gives you, rather than seeing them as a last resort over your fists.
Giaddon
3754
I agree with you about the XP system, although New Game+ is a decent solution to that–no need to stress XP since you already have the skills.
I’m not really interested in playing New Game+, since it’s like playing in God Mode. You keep all your augs and equipment. A fair part of the game is making decisions about where you’re going to advance next - hacking, the invisibility cloak, or one of the path-opening augs like wall-smashing? One thing I really liked about Missing Link was that it felt like those choices mattered.
sclpls
3756
This is disheartening to hear. I stopped playing the game at boss #2. I guess I’m glad I waited on picking it up though. Oh well, guess I’ll replay Dishonored instead if I get the itch to play a 1st person immersive sim style game.
I still want to know how godhugh used stealth against boss #2.
The Director’s Cut definitely gives you the tools to kill her without fighting her directly if you can break contact. What I don’t understand is how you break contact. Boss #1 and #3 now both give you vents to crawl into, and once you’re in a vent, you’re safe. They generally don’t know where you are once you’re in the vent, though they’ll keep looking.
On an unrelated note, I missed the Talion quest again. I missed it when I first played HR because I didn’t talk to the right NPC at the right time. I missed it this time because I was avoiding a trap that caught me the first time, which meant I wasn’t in the right area for the quest NPC.
I fired up another game on Hard (“Give Me Deus Ex”) difficulty, with the idea that I’d stop reflexively loading save games when I blew stealth. What I discovered was that I ended up loading my latest save game anyway, because I died. Every time. Deus Ex is a game with a fairly lethal combat model, and when fighting multiple enemies they will often end up rapidly flanking you if it’s possible. I played through an entire game on Normal without remembering that, because I never traded shots with anyone but bosses. Never. When I wasn’t slugging people, I was shooting them while they were unaware of me, or at least looking somewhere else.
Also, I’d become accustomed to the 2-cell recharge of Normal. It’s a good change. It really doesn’t make the game meaningfully easier, but it makes it a lot less tedious. On Hard, with 1 cell recharge, I found myself waiting on battery charge to do another takedown. On Normal, I rarely needed multiple cells, but having two reduced downtime.
Giaddon
3760
There are gazillions of energy bars lying around, use them.
