Putting the 'role' back in role-playing games since 2002.
Donate to Codex
Good Old Games
  • Welcome to rpgcodex.net, a site dedicated to discussing computer based role-playing games in a free and open fashion. We're less strict than other forums, but please refer to the rules.

    "This message is awaiting moderator approval": All new users must pass through our moderation queue before they will be able to post normally. Until your account has "passed" your posts will only be visible to yourself (and moderators) until they are approved. Give us a week to get around to approving / deleting / ignoring your mundane opinion on crap before hassling us about it. Once you have passed the moderation period (think of it as a test), you will be able to post normally, just like all the other retards.

Preview Deus Ex 3 is More Demanding than the Original

CreamyBlood

Arcane
Joined
Feb 10, 2005
Messages
1,392
I don't believe any of it for a second. Been burned too many times the last few years. Sure, maybe some of the 'features' hyped about will be there in some form, but it'll still play like a lame console shooter. Annoying, un-challenging and above all, not fun. I wish they still made games that challenged, absorbed and compelled you to play all the way through. You remember, games that were addictive and made you want to spend all of your time on, seeing what's going to happen next? None of this crap is even worth 'demoing' anymore.

These days I'm replaying oldies and watching reruns of The Love Boat.
 
Joined
Nov 8, 2007
Messages
6,207
Location
The island of misfit mascots
Well, I'm not expecting FO3-level retardedness here and I'll be disappointed if that occurs. I actually suspect that if I could get myself to think of this as a reboot utilising the same world, but nonetheless a different franchise - and think of the rpg elements as bonuses to a shooter, rather than expecting an rpg (the same mindset with which I first approached DE1), it could well be a decent game.

As for being of the same quality of Deus Ex? I simply don't have any reason to give it that much confidence. By the time Spector made Deus Ex he had extensive experience at creating first person detailed-world (and even shooter) crpgs (UU, SS). Prior to that, he had a very strong grounding in traditional crpgs (Ultima 7 part 2). There's no such pedigree here.

If the hype matches the game (yeah, I know...) then their approach could be a good one - and whilst hype rarely lives up to the gameplay, the one thing that has stood out about this compared to Bethesda's efforts is that the talk of continuing in DE1's shoes, complexity and so on hasn't come in the form of tidbits flicked off to the indie websites while most of the marketing is just 'hey, a guy riding around chopping off heads!' (c/f Dragon Age, DA2, FO3). They seem to want to SELL this as a game that stays true to the originals, at least in terms of variety of choices, albeit not in the actual style of those choices (silly, but almost standard for these days, takedown animations, 'cool' mech-augs rather than horrifically scarred hulks) - which means they're expecting to be punished if it turns out to be a marginally augmented shooter ala Bioshock. I also don't know why ANYONE would market their game as 'complex' these days if selling to the console market, given how most seem to associate that with market death, unless they were trying (not necessarily succeeding - and that's the rub) to make a decent game.

I'm hoping that the developers have made the same judgement that I have - that Deus Ex did much more with much less complexity than games like FO3 and ME, and that if you played those latter games you could easily play and enjoy a DE with updated graphics and some service to console tastes (takedown animations, 'cool' mech-augs, etc). I'm not nearly so hopeful that they'll pull it off, but I'm not expecting something that's fatally flawed from a conceptual level upwards.
 
Joined
Nov 8, 2007
Messages
6,207
Location
The island of misfit mascots
CreamyBlood said:
I don't believe any of it for a second. Been burned too many times the last few years. Sure, maybe some of the 'features' hyped about will be there in some form, but it'll still play like a lame console shooter. Annoying, un-challenging and above all, not fun. I wish they still made games that challenged, absorbed and compelled you to play all the way through. You remember, games that were addictive and made you want to spend all of your time on, seeing what's going to happen next? None of this crap is even worth 'demoing' anymore.

These days I'm replaying oldies and watching reruns of The Love Boat.

I don't ever recall Deus Ex being genuinely challenging, unless you were playing on realistic and tried to run-n-gun the early levels, and perhaps a few select fights later on. Even when I first played it, I was disappointed at the lack of challenge to the Walter Simons fight (unless you let him get the drop on you through inaction, or for some larping reason you don't use the rocket launcher/LAMs and try to gunfight him despite knowing he has bullet and flame resistance) given the awesome build-up (yes, I loved the cliched wanky WS: 'I have the same biomodifications that you do. But I have upgrades of the firmware' JC: 'Then this should be a good fight' - it would have been terrible writing if not for the game's self-knowing streak ('you're wearing sunglasses on a NIGHT op?') and all the trashtalking between JC and WS before that point).

Doom was incredibly easy, even at the time back when none us were familiar with FPS controls and there were still arguments over whether mouse+keyboard was better than pure keyboard.

System Shock 1 was easy once you got used to first-person melee fighting to save resources.

Quake 1 was easy once you got used to the controls. Similarly, I don't recall getting stuck on anything in the original Half-life.

The only difficult FPS or FPS/crpg game of old I remember playing a lot was SS2. I'm certain there were more - no need to send me a list - but I'm not sure that the average FPS was particularly hard.

What those games did, though, was give a MUCH better ILLUSION of difficulty. Regenerating health combined with cover destroys that illusion in a way that convenient healthpacks do not - because you don't know when you'll be getting that next healthpack, or if they are suddenly going to dry up in a section, until you've played the game through (and you can forgive repeat plays for not seeming difficult).

Resource management can impose difficulty - I always found that resource usage, rather than the actual fighting, was the limiting factor with SS2. But not all games should be a resource scavenge, whereas even games with abundant ammo and healthpacks can still create the feeling that you have to be cautious because you MIGHT not get a chance to heal before the next fight.

I'm not too upset about regen in DE3 so long as it (a) has an ingame explanation ala the first game with the healing aug, and (b) it isn't in-combat healing, and requires you to find a safe place to hide for a few seconds at least (again, like relying on the healing aug in Deus Ex 1, where the rate of regen isn't enough to outpace damage during a fight, so you have to get to safety first). I'd accept some lame explanation like 'we're giving you a medical implant due to your injuries, and it's got an experimental solar recharge capacity so you don't need to manually recharge it, but it's a lot slower than the ones you that use manually charged batteries'. I wouldn't accept that in most shooters, but it's true to the original game and it isn't so bad in a game where you (and enemies) have aug-driven superpowers.
 

Achilles

Arcane
Joined
Sep 5, 2009
Messages
3,425
Excellent posts Azrael, truly quality posting. I would say that most games (and plenty of gamers) are not challenging any more, but they can be difficult.

In my mind, difficulty and challenge are two different things. Difficulty is when the odds are overwhelming, when the boss has ten million hit points and does insane amounts of damage to you, when the enemies have super vision and they can kill you with one shot from 2 km away. Difficulty is easy to add in a game, just nerf the player's abilities or give God=like powers to his enemies and you're set.

Challenge is harder to get right, but more rewarding for the player. It forces the player to think in order to achieve his objectives, use creativity and his own imagination to solve a potentially difficult situation, but the developer has to work extra hard to provide alternative ways of fighting or solving quests. Which is the reason most of them prefer to just give the enemies double hitpoints for higher difficulty levels, thus making every fight drag and become boring.

tl;dr: Screw difficulty if it means shooting at the same enemy for 15 minutes. Challenge my skills by forcing me to find the optimal way of dealing with a situation.
 

Pegultagol

Erudite
Joined
Feb 4, 2005
Messages
1,183
Location
General Gaming
C&C is an illusion in these kinds of games, even in so called RPGs of nowdays because more often the so called choices do not respect the freedom of the actions of user but funnels them into simple branching chokepoints.
 
Joined
Nov 8, 2007
Messages
6,207
Location
The island of misfit mascots
Pegultagol said:
C&C is an illusion in these kinds of games, even in so called RPGs of nowdays because more often the so called choices do not respect the freedom of the actions of user but funnels them into simple branching chokepoints.

True, even in the older FPS-rpgs you didn't really get non-cosmetic C+C. I actually think C+C is the wrong term for the choices you get in Deus Ex - they always boil down to someone just commenting on what you've done, maybe offering or withholding a bonus, and very occasionally getting an extra dialogue or a change in who gives the dialogue (I'm talking about the plot/interaction choices, not the extremely well implemented multiple means of approaching situations with combat/stealth/hacking/environmental interaction and the encouraging of emergent gameplay).

The term gets horribly overused now that it's been a hype term, but 'immersion' (or IMMERSHUN) is probably the apt description. You aren't really choosing where the plot goes, or who your allies are going to be (in the old games you didn't even get red shirts v blue shirts, let alone the AP-style differences in weaponry/AI). But you're getting something that feels like an interactive world, where other characters take notice of where you explore and what you do.

Where a lot of companies fall down is that this kind of detailed-world requires that you take the risk of players missing things, and accept that almost all players will miss at least some content. If everything is served up in front of you, it devolves into an interactive cutscene, whereas Deus Ex encouraged experimentation in order to find new content and new ways of doing things - the fact that this would then affect character dialogue just gave a kind of legitimacy to the experimentation, confirming that you'd found something cool rather than just LARPing.
 

CreamyBlood

Arcane
Joined
Feb 10, 2005
Messages
1,392
Azreal, I always enjoy your posts.

For me, I thought Doom, Quake and even DE were challenging, perhaps you're just a more adept FPS guy than I am. But I agree, perhaps it was the illusion that kept me crouched down, sneaking around the Statue of Liberty.

For some reason I wanted to complete all of those games. I wanted to love Bioshock and I did for quite awhile, the atmosphere as everyone agrees on the story through tapes. But ultimately I couldn't complete it. I think it should have just gone straight shooter. It failed at that, it failed in its RPG elements. I got to the point that I didn't care about changing or upgrading my plasmids, I didn't care about ammo, and I didn't care about shooting another big daddy.

It got extremely boring for me. Even Quake 4, a mediocre shooter was way more entertaining in the long run. I would have bought an expansion for it.

Challenge/difficulty isn't a big deal, well it is. Getting that fine balance right is difficult. I just don't think many games do that anymore, they cater to people that don't want to live on that fine edge, whether it's health management, weapons upgrades or whatever.

Games used to make you sweat and fear a bit. Give you a nibble to entice you along, make you worried about what's around the next corner.

There needs to be an incentive to keep going to the next level and either I'm getting old and jaded, which is a possibility, or they're not designing games that way anymore. I'm not sure.

EDIT: Here's a question, what's an FPS that is as good as Quake 4 for pure fun, in your opinion that has been released since then. Or something that I just finished playing which I thought was better, Elite Force? Just as a pure shooter game? Do they make those anymore and did I miss it?
 

Andhaira

Arcane
Joined
Nov 25, 2007
Messages
1,868,966
This does sound too good to be true. I really dunno, I just hope the game ROCKS!
 

JarlFrank

I like Thief THIS much
Patron
Joined
Jan 4, 2007
Messages
33,052
Location
KA.DINGIR.RA.KI
Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
First thing I thought when I read the thread title was "well of course it will be more demanding for my hardware, it's made 10 years after the original!"
 

zeitgeist

Magister
Joined
Aug 12, 2010
Messages
1,444
CreamyBlood said:
Here's a question, what's an FPS that is as good as Quake 4 for pure fun, in your opinion that has been released since then. Or something that I just finished playing which I thought was better, Elite Force? Just as a pure shooter game? Do they make those anymore and did I miss it?
"PC-style" FPS games as a subgenre haven't really been made much ever since the console shooters gained popularity.
 

commie

The Last Marxist
Patron
Joined
May 12, 2010
Messages
1,865,249
Location
Where one can weep in peace
Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Divinity: Original Sin 2
Reconite said:
Something else that shocked me is the new hacking minigame. It’s dramatically complex- a kind of Uplink strategy battle where you first hide from and then race a server, with extra programs and viruses that can be found or bought and give you a helping hand.
Why can't I just use the ICE Breaker and be done with it? :x

Fucking minigames.

And yet if the original had minigames and this one had an ICEbreaker, you'd be howling at the dumbing down of a once great franchise! :roll:
 
Joined
Nov 8, 2007
Messages
6,207
Location
The island of misfit mascots
CreamyBlood said:
EDIT: Here's a question, what's an FPS that is as good as Quake 4 for pure fun, in your opinion that has been released since then. Or something that I just finished playing which I thought was better, Elite Force? Just as a pure shooter game? Do they make those anymore and did I miss it?

To be perfectly honest, I can't think of a single one. Having said that, I've never enjoyed a regeration/cover shooter, so that's a chunk that disappear from the more recent crop. With those out, I honestly can't think of many. Old shooters had a strong arcade element, in that the challenge and fun came from the ability to maneouvre radically while aiming and taking on interesting levels of enemies. More recently, they've dropped that either for a more 'cinematic' feel, where there's little space to move, one path through and often only one direction the developers want you looking.

For all of its flaws, at least HL2 was run-and-gun. Yes it was overrated, but at least it was still the right kind of game, aiming for fun rather than being an interactive film. After that, things seemed to die off pretty quickly. It's like the old isometric party-based crpgs: run-n-gun shooters never flopped, never became commercially unviable. You could make a new Quake game that played like Q4 or a new HL that played like HL1 and still sell enormous quantities. Developers just stopped making them and then with a lack of obvious recent hits to point to, publishers adopted the collective belief that they were somehow an obsolete genre.

Off topic, and I certainly wouldn't put them as a 'pure fun' shooter, but I thoroughly enjoyed the STALKER series. Flawed but amibitious and sufficiently moddable that the flaws weren't fatal. Very much up to individual tastes though - I'd hesitate to recommend them to anyone without a disclaimer, and I wouldn't rip on someone for having bad taste if they disliked them. They're also part of the whole dull-grey/brown setting problem, but colour-scheme aside (and things are a lot brighter and more vegetative in the last one) the setting is pretty decent.
 
Joined
Nov 1, 2008
Messages
7,953
Location
Cuntington Manor
love-boat_l.jpg
 

Forest Dweller

Smoking Dicks
Joined
Oct 29, 2008
Messages
12,196
Overweight Manatee said:
More interesting to me is the GW2 report. Sounds like they are adding in the idea of character origins from DA, which was probably the only part of DA everyone could agree was actually well done.
Link?
 

SharkClub

Prophet
Patron
Joined
May 27, 2010
Messages
1,508
Strap Yourselves In
commie said:
And yet if the original had minigames and this one had an ICEbreaker, you'd be howling at the dumbing down of a once great franchise! :roll:
What happened to hacking things in RPGs being dependant on your stats and not your ability to find a row of numbers in a big box of numbers? (I'm looking at you, Alpha Protocol)
 

Jaesun

Fabulous Ex-Moderator
Patron
Joined
May 14, 2004
Messages
37,241
Location
Seattle, WA USA
MCA
The one thing, will the areas be the shitty small boxed in areas like IW or have they figured out a way to get them to a similar size as say the original DX?

The C&C and other bits all sound good in theory, but shitty small areas completely ruin one of the most important aspects that made DX a great game.
 

Drakron

Arcane
Joined
May 19, 2005
Messages
6,326
commie said:
And yet if the original had minigames and this one had an ICEbreaker, you'd be howling at the dumbing down of a once great franchise! :roll:

Maybe but I also hate minigames.

Also hacking in Deus Ex was not that much mandatory as all computers had passwords and the minigame was guessing the password from a list.

So you had two choices, hack or go look for the password ... what are the chances that in DX3 the choices are hacking or password and not hacking and password?
 

Achilles

Arcane
Joined
Sep 5, 2009
Messages
3,425
Dicksmoker said:
Overweight Manatee said:
More interesting to me is the GW2 report. Sounds like they are adding in the idea of character origins from DA, which was probably the only part of DA everyone could agree was actually well done.
Link?

It's in the recently released series of human walkthroughs, here's the first one:

http://www.gametrailers.com/video/gc-10-guild-wars-2/703344

The rest are on that list to the right. During the creation of the character you can choose your background info, which does seem a lot like the origins used in Dragon Age.
 

As an Amazon Associate, rpgcodex.net earns from qualifying purchases.
Back
Top Bottom