I think I just spent good 2 hours sneaking around the bank - haven’t done any real missions yet (besides seeing the ‘doc’) and I get the feeling I was supposed to visit place much later in the story. But because of my focus on stealth and hacking I was actually able to loot pretty much everything and it felt amazing.
Free pre-order DLC for everyone.
That’s pretty cool! Even more as I’m playing it right now.
I’m actually about to start this pretty soon.
Same here, think I’m ready to fire this one up.
Man, I should re-download this and play through again. I had so much fun the first time! I’m holding off though, I want there to be some more added to the main story before I play it again, if that’s something that could happen. Plus I mean, it’s only been like 6 weeks, so maybe I will chill a bit.
Anyone have options about the difficulty setting sweet spot?
If you plan on playing it as a stealth game then I’d go with the highest. I plan to try out the ironman mode after I beat it on Give me Deus Ex.
I usually try to be stealthy but if I need to I’ll use force. Sometimes before the end of a game I’ll start using force more liberally if I get impatient.
You can change the difficulty on the fly, start with whatever you feel is appropriate and adjust from there.
Golem city feels like a maze. So many floors, vents and secret places. Excellent level design.
Somehow I lost my Ghost status last night and I have no clue where. I checked the rules on the wiki and I think that throwing a traffic cone to distract the enemy might have caused it but I’m not sure. I wish these games had some kind of achievement tracker so I could know the precise moment when I fucked up and not 2-3 hours down the line when I turn in the mission.
Meh.
Reminds me of the clubs in Bloodlines.
I LOST MY SOUUUL IN BLOODLINES
(Way to really reach, Grandpa Al)
So far this feels clunkier than I remember Human Revolution feeling and the voice acting seems worse. Was the original similar to this and I’ve just forgotten or has this taken a turn for the worse?
IMO it’s a mixed bag. HR was, I think, more integrated in terms of story and theme, and the dialog stuff was better. MD has perhaps better action stuff and in some ways more intricate environments and environmental challenges. Some of the NPCs have good stories and voice acting, and some are, yeah, kinda clunky. Adam Jensen is the worst offender for me; he acts like my students on the autism spectrum when he’s in conversation, which is jarring because he’s supposed to be some badass operative, but I guess it could be passed off as side effects from the admittedly crappy handling he received at the end of HR.
Deus Ex Mankind Divided is a game where the greatest virtue is the new hub, Prague. It’s well designed, original, very dense and full of details, pleasing to the eye, with some cool sidequests hidden. And everything, streets, interiors, sewers, etc are all in the same ‘level’, without loading times, which increases both immersion and eases connectivity between areas.
Actually it’s a bit smallish as a central hub, given most of the game is just Prague, but that’s more another kind of problem.
Also it seems they have increased a bit the possibilities to enter places, the scenarios have even more paths than in HR.
Some of the best moments of the game are about doing side quests or playing by yourself doing a heist in a secure location, while ignoring the main quest.
That said, apart from that point, Mankind Divided is a game that feels very mixed in quality.
The narrative is pretty poor. The starting point is marked by how the previous game ended (badly and stupidly), and that makes the entire game as stupid and senseless. The ‘Mankind Divided’ theme is just a dumb idea, and the entire game happens to be based around it.
Apart from the silly moments where you are stopped by police, you show your papers and they say things like “wow, orange card? are you some kind of badass?”. So much for feeling the scifi Apartheid.
For a ‘realistic, gritty dystopian sci-fi’ world’, I found some of the characters and threads to be amusingly simple, full of black & white morality. For example, there is a moment where you dissolve a criminal group producing fake-papers, and you discover the one doing them was a woman, she tells she was didn’t intent to do it, she was fooled and bullied into it. I thought at first ‘ah, she is lying, she’s just trying to save her skin, she was the real criminal leader’. But no, the game plays it straight, the good guys are good guys, and the bad guys are bad guys.
The story also feels incredibly un-Cyberpunk, there is no sense of fun, of pulpness in there. It’s pretty dull and sour.
Additionally it’s missing a point of vast conspiracy, of globe-trotting spy adventure that the first Deus Ex had. At least you traveled more in HR.
The plot is surprisingly unambitious, in the end the entire game revolves around what I thought at first it was just the first big quest/argumental arc, of several (the bombing of the train station and the bad guys trying to blame the poor augmented). That’s it.
I think I finished the game in 25 hours, which seems a fair amount but I think it was a bit short. I did all the content, and explored thoroughly everything (which explains my surplus of money and items, see next paragraph), playing in another way would have made it shorter.
The game balance and progression system is totally hilariously broken. I played in the hardest mode (Third of four, the last one is unlocked until new game+?), and finished with 45.000 credits and 14 praxis points unused, and the 3 lockers in my flat full of stuff.
I mean, what are you supposed to buy? Weapons? You can take them easily and they are not really needed. Are you supposed to buy aspirins and health injections? For what reason, if your health regenerates over time??
Same with Praxis, you buy hacking skills, gas resistance, remote hacking, double takedown and… that’s pretty much it. You solve 90% of the game easily by pressing the stealth takedown button. At the end of the game I ‘wasted’ some points buying damage resistance to skip stealthing in the city when the curfew is implemented, just sprinting to my objective, and other 2 points in buying Icarus for a single optional jump I was curious to do (in the Dvali hideout)
I think that’s the main difference with Deus Ex 1. If you really think abou tit, that was a very inventory-based game, in a way that none of the new games are. You wanted to hack an electronic panel? Use a multitool. You wanted to open a door? Use a lockpick. Hacking only served to hack computer systems. Use up a re-breather to explore underwater, use biocell to recharge your energy, use healthkit to recover your health. The entire game exploration aspect served to collect one-use items, mostly. This tied elegantly with the inventory management, as your skill rating made you use up less resources from your inventory.
Now hacking is used for almost everything, making it ‘overpowered’ and additionally abusing of the hacking minigame, which is too over-used (and not that god).
Add to that you regenerate energy (only the first pip, but I found sometimes it would appear full? I never used a biocell) and you regenerate health, and how easy is to deal with enemies (very narrow field of view, deaf, slow to react) and the game core mechanics feels unfulfilling. There is no tingling sensation when you find a secret cache full of stuff, as you aren’t going to use shit.
I think the game falls on the trap of the much-vaunted player freedom. I think some companies are not really getting ‘immersive FPS’, they believe they were about player freedom. That genre final goal wasn’t player freedom, that was more a side effect of a set of philosophies in design. I don’t think for example Thief 1 was designed with the explicit intent of giving players the option of ‘ghosting’ missions, that was done later by the players that it was possible to do.
In Mankind Divided they marketed as how it was possible to play through combat, through stealth, through any combination of the two, and how it was possible to play the entire game without killing anybody. I think forcing full stealth to be possible always, and by everyone, was a mistake and has made the gameplay blander for everyone too.
In contrast, the first Deus Ex had gameplay systems solid enough to play stealthy, but in a more natural way, it didn’t feel as forced. It was harder, tricky, you had limited resources to do it, and in some parts you really had to use your imagination. Stealth was used more naturally as complement of your gameplay style, as just a tool to your disposition.
The modern way now is to use the concept of ‘player freedom’ as a way of ‘player expression’. Does the player want to feel as Rambo? Let them use big weapons! Does the player want to feel as a ninja? Let them play as a ghost in the ventilation shafts! Does the player want to be a sniper? Give him a silent sniper rifle with tons of ammo! Does the player want to shoot nano explosives from their hands? We have a praxis unlock for that! Never mind it doesn’t make fucking sense, why I would spend limited unlock points in that ability and then spend ammo that is scarce to use the ability just to kill a pair of guys, when I can kill them sprinting and pressing Q close them (and in a more silent way).
I don’t want to express myself, thank you, I would buy some oils and temperas when I want to. I want to have player freedom because it’s an intrinsic part of the realistic, believable, inmersive games I want, where player freedom is accompanied of a consequences for my actions and a good gameplay balance.
In some ways, Fallout 4 is a better Deus Ex game than it is a Fallout game.
I haven’t finished the game yet so I don’t know if this is fixed later in the game but I really miss the presence of an organisation like MJ12 in this game and even in DXHR. Both Belltower and these poor aug saps seem completely oblivious to the grand schemes that hold their strings and it makes dispatching them (in a non-lethal way of course, I’m not a monster) somewhat less enjoyable. And while the overall design and storytelling consistency between DXHR and DXMD is very high I do wish that both games were a little more like the original Deus Ex.