Deus Ex: Human Revolution, the Codex verdict?

[PorkyThePaladin]

1. Quest markers - Every quest, you just follow the x on the map or radar, never have to think or study the environment, really takes a lot out of the gameplay.

Turn it off then.

Turning off quest markers in games designed around them never works out well in my experience.

 

[Roguey]

Turning off quest markers in games designed around them never works out well in my experience.

This isn't a big open world. You'll get to where you're going just fine, much like in Deus Ex and Bloodlines.

 

[DalekFlay]

Turning off quest markers in games designed around them never works out well in my experience.

All these can be played without them perfectly well:

Deus Ex: HR and MD
Dishonored 1 and 2
Fallout New Vegas
Maybe Prey, haven't played it yet

They were obviously designed with this in mind, which is why you can turn them off in the options menu except for NV. Might be more I'm not thinking of as well.

The rest (Skyrim, Witcher 3, etc.) can usually be played with them modded out of the HUD, but on the map, which is better.

 

[Carrion]

Let's call it run and gun, like Doom or any number of old FP shooters without cover or health regen (Build Engine games, Quake, even RTCW). It's not like you rely completely on strafing in those games on higher difficulties, you still use cover and make choices about weapon selection and target prioritizing. However, you're not as fragile as Jensen and even if you are, the protagonist is not a Cyborg in a game which takes itself seriously and where other Cyborgs are walking death machines in comparison.

You can't run and gun in original Deus Ex at first either but focus on weapon skills and appropriate augs and eventually you can which makes for a very satisfying character progression.

I agree since I'm in the minority that loved the way Deus Ex handled weapon skills. I don't really think of Human Revolution as a Deus Ex game, though, so I don't have a huge problem with the game being like it is. Stupid boss battles aside, Jensen being fragile does make sense in the setting, and I think it makes for decent gameplay as well, even in first person. You can't be a walking tank but you can be a death-dealing cyber ninja.

You should be able to have the same option in HR but you can't make a walking tank, the game doesn't allow it. Not because devs intended it to be challenging, heck 99,99% of their audience plays it using the sticky cover system (try finding a single video or even an internet topic about a no cover HR run) which makes the game a breeze either way. No, it's because they designed the game around the cover system, that's why there's no leaning, why Jensen can't take a few pistol shots, why he has free health regeneration and why the level design is so rife with chest high walls.

On, no doubt about that. Then there are the third-person takedowns and other aug-related third-person animations, which I'd replace with the good ol' baton any day of the week. Intentional or not, they still somehow managed to make the thing pretty fun to play. The visual design manages to "hide" the chest-high walls well enough unless you're looking for them, and health regen is so slow that it isn't much use during combat. If only the game had proper melee weapons...

 

[DraQ]

Ugh, the second boss (the tranny looking russian chick) was retarded.

Seriously? The *second* boss was retarded?

I mean all the boss battles were fucking ass, but the first one takes all the cakes - from terminally boring crate warehouse "boss arena", through built in minigun that took around a minute to unfold, through the boss himself being terminally generic dumb pile of muscle larping a strogg to the cutscene immediately before where AJ inexplicably drops the reprogrammed turret he was (obviously) carrying only to stumble into an empty warehouse to stand there and wait for the aforementioned dumb metal and ceramic plated muscletank to deftly sneak up on him and clock him in the face.

 

[DalekFlay]

All the bosses being shit is the price you pay to enjoy the rest of a pretty good game, sadly. I think I read somewhere the bosses were outsourced.

 

[HansDampf]

All the bosses being shit is the price you pay to enjoy the rest of a pretty good game, sadly. I think I read somewhere the bosses were outsourced.

How does stuff like that even happen?

 

[Multidirectional]

Turning off quest markers in games designed around them never works out well in my experience.

All these can be played without them perfectly well:

Deus Ex: HR and MD

Not sure about HR but when I tried to play MD without quest markers I got stuck in one of early sidequests. Marker on map kept pointing me to a location that I've already visited and there was nothing else to be done there and I could find absolutely no hint of where to go next. I could only solve that quest by turning markers back on. Never disabled them again after it. So yeah, mark me as another person who doesn't trust disabling quest markers in a game that has them on by default. If only one quest fucks up without them that's already enough to keep them on, because the alternative is being hopelessly stuck on some shit through no fault of your own. And I sure as shit am not gonna try modern devs to not fuck that up. If somebody designs a game with markers off by default and have them only as an optional feature - it's another story.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

All the bosses being shit is the price you pay to enjoy the rest of a pretty good game, sadly.

What's considered 'good boss design' for games like deus ex?
Or to put it another way: are bosses something an RPG must have?

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

No, bosses are a stupid, obsolete relic from when games were more juvenile. Ideally, in a mature game, there can be fights against enemies who are really good at the game's combat, or fights that carry heavy narrative/emotional significance, but to just have some arbitrary retard with 3 million hitpoints, stupid, unrealistic abilities, and other ex-assima crap is kid stuff.

 

[HansDampf]

What you meant to say was, boss fights were carried over from other genres without thinking about whether they would fit or how else to handle climactic confrontations in RPGs.

 

[J1M]

Games without boss fights are lame. Anyone suggesting otherwise is just pushing propaganda to get you to accept an incomplete product at full price.

 

[DraQ]

All the bosses being shit is the price you pay to enjoy the rest of a pretty good game, sadly. I think I read somewhere the bosses were outsourced.

How does stuff like that even happen?

I don't know, but the person who came up with this bright idea and the head of the studio they were outsourced to should be punished by having their heads stuck into each other's sphincter then being left to suffocate.

 

[DraQ]

I agree since I'm in the minority that loved the way Deus Ex handled weapon skills.

I liked how DX handled weapon skills, but I actually liked the way DX:HR did it better. Sure, the progression is 100% augs in DX:HR, but the same approach could be used with skills. DX:HR handling of weapon skills isn't too dissimilar from DX1's either - mostly the presentation differs - instead of narrowing reticle you have weapon sway, etc.

Then there are the third-person takedowns and other aug-related third-person animations, which I'd replace with the good ol' baton any day of the week.

I wouldn't. Normally I prefer immersive over cinematic, but, first, tapping someone in their upper ass while crouched and risking taking the full brunt of impact-induced explosive shart augmented by your combat strength was neither cool nor terribly interesting mechanically and I'd rather at Jensen doing painful but inventive stuff to some balaclaved mooks than bury my head into yet another MJ12 trooper's ass prior to launching a surprise kidney massage.

Ultimately the problem with takedowns wasn't that they were TPP or uninteractive. It was that they effectively stopped time so equipped with a couple of wheelbarrows filled with candybars Jensen would easily be able to punch, stab and nippletwist his way through the entire PRC army at noon in that open square Chinese don't like to read about without a single shot being fired.
Similarly the problem with cover system wasn't that it was there, nor that it was TPP. It was that it gave unfair situational awareness and could be exploited in hilarious manner with laser sight. Different camera positioning and some cleverly applied DOF (where it at least would do no harm) would fix.

The things I truly miss are DX1's smarter story, level design and improvised weapons - you could spray an asshole in the eyes with an extinguisher in DX1 long before you could do it on London bridge. Melee weapons? Not so much. If I had forearm mounted bi-directional telescoping swords and cyberhands to twist people's heads off with I wouldn't use a melee weapon either (plus the super duper nanite sword was dorky in DX1, refer to Indiana Jones for detailed explanation).

 

[DalekFlay]

Not sure about HR but when I tried to play MD without quest markers I got stuck in one of early sidequests. Marker on map kept pointing me to a location that I've already visited and there was nothing else to be done there and I could find absolutely no hint of where to go next. I could only solve that quest by turning markers back on. Never disabled them again after it. So yeah, mark me as another person who doesn't trust disabling quest markers in a game that has them on by default. If only one quest fucks up without them that's already enough to keep them on, because the alternative is being hopelessly stuck on some shit through no fault of your own. And I sure as shit am not gonna try modern devs to not fuck that up. If somebody designs a game with markers off by default and have them only as an optional feature - it's another story.

Don't know what to tell ya, I never had them on and did fine. Dishonored's DLC had a safe code behind a palette you could break that it took me forever to find without markers, but that's the only trouble I ever had with any of those games.

Also, add Bioshock 1 and 2 to that list.

What's considered 'good boss design' for games like deus ex?
Or to put it another way: are bosses something an RPG must have?

Good point, I don't think it needed them at all, no. I guess the original had them with Hermann and Navarre but not in the same structured way. I would have preferred they just be NPCs roaming around the final area like normal guards, for example.

 

[AlsGaming]

It's a fun game with a compelling story and interesting characters. However, the core gameplay prevents it from becoming great. Cover shooters are boring, and while it's less bad in a stealth game compared to something more action orientated. It still changes the gameplay negatively. The guns weren't particularily fun to use either, so I spent 95% of the game sneaking around and knocking people out. The game encourages this because non-lethal takedowns give more xp than lethal, and it's quicker to punch a heavy trooper in the face than shoot at him. I understand the original Deus Ex is considered janky but I much prefer the free-moving shooter because you get more options. If I want to sit behind a box and regenerate my health I can choose to, or I can run around strafing and shooting the enemy. In Human Revolution, Jensen is as sturdy as a cardboard box and won't last long even with the armour upgrades. While the original hands out XP based on objectives, meaning engaging an enemy is completely reliant on the mission at hand. HR encourages you to sneak around and knock people out one by one. Which does make sense because it's a stealth game, but it ends up being the only real good option.

The cover system reliance also hinders the game's level design. Since every area with enemies is going to have a plethora of waist high cover, the only good options are to sneak past them entirely or knock them out. Engaging in a firefight takes longer and is harder because of how aggressive enemies are. That's not a bad thing, it's better than the original where enemies run at you in a straight line. It just leaves a weird balance in the gameplay, where there's the intended way to play and then you deciding you want to make the game more challenging by shooting everything.

Bosses are menial and trivial in a bad way in HR. They're a joke in the original, but I think it does well to highlight how everyone is still human, or how overpowered JC is. The killswitch codes was a good way to subvert your typical boss fight, and the magic nano sword is your problem solver. DX1 probably accepted they can't make boss fights fun, so they made them either extremely short, bypassable or essentially a dungeon when it comes down to Bob Page. However, HR boss fights can be long-winded and boring if you don't have a heavy weapon with you. I burned through all my ammo and had to scavenge during the Barrett fight. EMPs made the Fedorova fight easy, Namir died in 5 seconds because of a grenade launcher and I sat in a corner during the Zhao fight and shot robots from cover. So while HR bosses are still a joke, they are in a bad way. I know they added alternate means to deal with bosses but they end up being overly difficult or easy.

The hacking minigames was sometimes frustrating and other times fun, there's a lot of tense moments finishing the hack with only 0.2 seconds left from alerting the alarm.

I think that Mankind Divided did well to improve over Human Revolution's gameplay issues. Which is good, because it almost makes up for MD's poor story and lack of area diversity. You still have the cover system, but the experimental augmentations which are borderline super-powers incentivised to not rely so much on cover. You had greater mobility, could use biocells, remote hacking and Icarus dash to access areas in an alternate manner. And you now had exciting means to take out enemies in both lethal and non-lethal matters. It reminded me of playing Dishonored in a good way, and makes me think they could have done away with the cover system entirely. Guns are more fun to use, they could be modified to a greater degree and you could improve their stats directly. Reintroducing other ammo types also made each gun serve a greater purpose, the weaker guns became useless fast in HR. In MD you can up their fire rate, damage, capacity or keep the pistol to EMP cameras and robots. I used guns more than in HR, but still not as much because how much more fun things like the Tesla and PEPS augmentations were. And also appreciate that you can no longer just knockout the heavy soldiers, and instead have to EMP them first. Robots and turrets feel better utillised as well.

I replayed the entire series recently (Invisible War and The Fall included) and it definitely reinforced that Human Revolution is still a strong #2 in the series. At some times its pretty menial to play as some areas feel like way too enemies have been dumped in one big area. But it's definitely carried by its plot, characters and areas. The original will always be my favourite though, as I feel it made less mistakes, especially for its time.

 

[DraQ]

I left the quest marker on in DX:HR because it's a game where you have GPS in your head. I have switched it off (along with all other indicators) in Dishonored because it's a game where you don't have GPS in your head.

(Seriously, I switched it off, but then decided it adds to the ambience and turned it back on, same with highlighting stuff).

Regarding bosses, million HP ones are never a good idea regardless of genre.
Missing Link handled the matter much more sensibly, BTW.

The guns weren't particularily fun to use either, so I spent 95% of the game sneaking around and knocking people out.

I actually quite liked the guns, more so than in original, though I liked the ones in original as well.
Ok, I wouldn't mind having GEP gun with WP ammo and semi-lulzy flavour options like pepper spray or fire extinguisher, but most of the time guns are better, more sensible and more balanced too (other than magic AP pistol, that is).

I understand the original Deus Ex is considered janky but I much prefer the free-moving shooter because you get more options.

DX:HR is a free moving shoter - just don't use (or unbind) the cover button. It works just fine.

HR encourages you to sneak around and knock people out one by one. Which does make sense because it's a stealth game, but it ends up being the only real good option.

The original also did that (albeit less so due to less problematic XP mechanics), and no it doesn't make sense to do that in stealth game. In a well designed stealth game taking out a guard and ghosting should be mutually exclusive. After you take out anyone, detection shouldn't be a matter of if, but when.

 

[AlsGaming]

DX:HR is a free moving shoter - just don't use (or unbind) the cover button. It works just fine.

Sure this would technically work, but a lot of the game is designed around relying on cover. Jensen can't move quickly unless he's sprinting, and he can't shoot while doing so. He's way too vulnerable, and it took the next game to make up for this with more augmentations that improved mobility and defense. Try playing most cover shooters like a conventional FPS and you're going to die near instanteously. So while HR can work as a free-moving shooter, it's not going to be a good one because that really wasn't the idea.

After you take out anyone, detection shouldn't be a matter of if, but when.

This is definitely what's missing, enemies will notice a body but not the absence of one. I'm not the biggest stealth game player, but I wish there were more consequences for being silent and non-lethal.

 

[DraQ]

DX:HR is a free moving shoter - just don't use (or unbind) the cover button. It works just fine.

So while HR can work as a free-moving shooter, it's not going to be a good one because that really wasn't the idea.

It might not have been the idea, but it plays well this way, you only miss out on TPP cool factor.
Yes, you need to be extra careful and cover system allows better use of cover than just hiding behind it, but hiding behind is sufficient and the gameplay doesn't degenerate to trial and error even though it becomes quite tense and very lethal.

 

[DalekFlay]

You'd also miss out on "seeing everything in the next room from around the corner with no chance of getting caught," which would probably make stealth more interesting. I haven't played with cover unbound yet, but I'm interested in doing it.

 

[DDZ]

Ok guise, so I am playing through this. First time I stuck with it and I really enjoyed it butttt.

I just finished the first seawaterbase level after the first boattour, and fuck me what's with all the goddamn backtracking. Even worse when you have to go through a goddamn slow ass fucking biometric scanner.

They now shipped me to another base. Will it also have all the backtracking? Because if so I might cry.

 

[Wunderbar]

DDZ that was "the missing link" dlc.

 

[somewhatgiggly]

A very good game. Hope the team learns from some of the mistakes they've made (and judging by Missing Link, they have) and pump out a proper expansion or a sequel to continue the story.

Or follow another aug's perspective in the same setting.

My greatest fear: they'll try to cash in with a pure shooter Call of Duty clone based on the rise of the NSF and the subsequent civil war in the Northwest US. With a cheesy cameo by Adam Jensen, now a grizzled NSF commander.

I fucking wish they did this, it'll actually have some balls compared to DXMD. Plus, why the hell wouldn't Jensen try to go that route? He knows the truth, he's behind the veil. He may not know all of it, but he knows something is fucky-wucky and that governments are either inept or outright infiltrated by groups too detached from the common man they either sprang from, want to help, or want to control. Jensen might make the NSF a actual threat, maybe form a new nation in the region.

And sure there are problems. Nativists, Environmentalists, Chinese separatists, whomever, you could fill the PNW with loads of groups - everyone is part of a different clique with a different vision for the future, but at least they're looking to a future in their own hands. Of course a game would 'whitewash' it so it's somehow maddingly apolitical yet political at the same time but still better than what we got. They'll probably shove in a Survivalists-Psuedo Nativist group, a high Tech free Corp group, stuff like that if they actually did make a game in the region, but again, I'll still like that better than what we got.

 

[OSK]

I cheesed most of the bosses with the stun gun. Just run up and zap them in the face as soon as combat starts. Their shocked animation takes longer than your reload animation, so you just repeat that over and over until the next cut scene plays.

 

[J1M]

A very good game. Hope the team learns from some of the mistakes they've made (and judging by Missing Link, they have) and pump out a proper expansion or a sequel to continue the story.

Or follow another aug's perspective in the same setting.

My greatest fear: they'll try to cash in with a pure shooter Call of Duty clone based on the rise of the NSF and the subsequent civil war in the Northwest US. With a cheesy cameo by Adam Jensen, now a grizzled NSF commander.

I fucking wish they did this, it'll actually have some balls compared to DXMD. Plus, why the hell wouldn't Jensen try to go that route? He knows the truth, he's behind the veil. He may not know all of it, but he knows something is fucky-wucky and that governments are either inept or outright infiltrated by groups too detached from the common man they either sprang from, want to help, or want to control. Jensen might make the NSF a actual threat, maybe form a new nation in the region.

And sure there are problems. Nativists, Environmentalists, Chinese separatists, whomever, you could fill the PNW with loads of groups - everyone is part of a different clique with a different vision for the future, but at least they're looking to a future in their own hands. Of course a game would 'whitewash' it so it's somehow maddingly apolitical yet political at the same time but still better than what we got. They'll probably shove in a Survivalists-Psuedo Nativist group, a high Tech free Corp group, stuff like that if they actually did make a game in the region, but again, I'll still like that better than what we got.

Deus Ex Call of Duty literally already exists. It is called Project Snowblind.

Might keep you busy for a weekend.