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Arkane Deathloop - first-person action game from Arkane set on a time loop island

thesheeep

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Why is challenge fun? Because you learn how to do something and then exercise your ability to do it. But this game isn't about learning how to land sweet headshots or duck behind waist-high cover, and it never was. It's about learning the environment, figuring out the story, and building a better mousetrap.
Right, and that lasts for 10 hours, tops.
Unless you are into MP, which I'm not.

It's not a shitty game per se, but for that price it's fucking ridiculous.

Jesus man, look at your own review list. Was Darkside Detective "challenging"? Was Subnautica? Freaking Stardew Valley? No, these games are fun for other reasons than pew pew luk how leet I am. Same here.
Nice. Some profile stalking to try and attempt some arguments.
Not gonna lie, that's pretty pathetic.
You want my Twitter, too?

Obviously, different games are played for different reasons. Something like Stardew Valley is played for relaxation. A point & click for story/humor.
Subnautica can actually be mildly challenging at times (or I just suck at it), but in the end it's more about relaxation and exploration as well. For me, anyway.

But I don't see anything in Deathloop that would be relaxing more than it would be boring.
The story is practically nonexistent - those little scraps fed to you didn't make me want to play more, that's for sure.
The characters are almost Youngblood levels of annoying cringe.
Remains only the core of the game - and that is just woefully inadequate, mostly due to the AI.

It's a game with an identity crisis if you ask me. You give me FPS mechanics, I sure as hell expect some challenge appropriate for an FPS.
Either that or a misunderstood game looking for an audience and not finding it.
 
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Immortal

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Also it's not bad AI as it simulates perfectly crack addicts with no military background who know they will not really die anyway. It's some easy but good AI. :lol:

Seriously, this is true. This isn't supposed to be a bitterly demanding military sim, either in tone or in gameplay. There's an NPC conversation where they are joking around about shooting each other, and then one actually shoots the other like it's nothing, because it is nothing to them. Heavyweight commandos these are not, nor should they be. Not what the game is about, and not why it's fun.


"The AI is supposed to be pants on head retarded. It doesn't matter if it's engaging or offers challenge .. it's ~immersive~"

Well Gee! I guess we can use that logic for every game.
Problem solved forever.

"It doesn't matter if Choomba's run in circles around you clipping on walls, people suffering from Cyberpsychosis would totally do that!"

This is literally the "It's not a bug, it's a feature" but unironically.
Pure unfiltered cope. :lol:

Shills opinions are so worthless.
 

copebot

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If they were untrained normal people, they would not charge your position repeatedly (even with melee weapons) under fire, they would not take explosions near them in stride (they'd panic, run away, or hit the ground). They would definitely not shoot accurately at you under stress. The AI in this game behaves a little like the AI in an old game like Goldeneye 64 in that they just repeatedly charge at you while you shoot them as they round the corners, filing into buildings one by one.

I have a 2080 and a 10900K and I get the stutter, but only after an hour, after which it degrades to the point to which it's unplayable. It starts off performing perfectly and starts to get bad around the 1 hour mark before resetting it. I haven't tried the mouse polling rate fix yet, but I did try the various vsync / FPS limit suggestions and that didn't work for me. With the frame limiter on it doesn't really get the GPU hot and the CPU's barely doing anything. It's just a bug issue and not related to it being actually taxing on hardware.
 

Zombra

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It's not a shitty game per se, but for that price it's fucking ridiculous.
No argument here.

Nice. Some profile stalking to try and attempt some arguments.
Not gonna lie, that's pretty pathetic.
You want my Twitter, too?
Relax, bro. Just refuting your previous assertion that challenge and fun are always the same thing. They're not. Since you agree with me on this, it's weird that you made a statement to the contrary.

It's not my fault I remembered you write many excellent reviews. I would be delighted to subscribe to your Twitter :)

Obviously, different games are played for different reasons.
But I don't see anything in Deathloop that would be relaxing more than it would be boring.
The story is practically nonexistent - those little scraps fed to you didn't make me want to play more, that's for sure.
The characters are almost Youngblood levels of annoying cringe.
Remains only the core of the game - and that is just woefully inadequate, mostly due to the AI.
It's a game with an identity crisis if you ask me. You give me FPS mechanics, I sure as hell expect some challenge appropriate for an FPS.
Either that or a misunderstood game looking for an audience and not finding it.
OK, now you're making valid arguments. Obviously if you hate the story and characters, unraveling that story isn't going to be fun for you.
 

LarryTyphoid

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Will Arkane ever make a game with good writing? After playing Dishonored 2 I willingly fell into the loving embrace of Thief Deadly Shadows. I don't care if it has tiny levels or bad controls, at least the dialogue isn't a non-stop barrage of eye-roll inducing trash. That being said I can't see Deathloop's writing being worse than Dishonored's "bro the noblewoman blinded a little boy cause he was late with the tea!!! oh my goodness the absolute injustice, im going to faint!!"
 

RoSoDude

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RoSoDude what's your take on this game?
Not played, and won't in the near future (haven't had much time for gaming lately and have other stuff on my plate first).

My impressions from early previews:
  • Permadeath roguelite-ish structure is a godsend. Prey - Mooncrash benefitted enormously in encouraging adaptive play by adopting this kind of structure. Savescummers BTFO
  • Loop concept could be interesting, I like the idea of having to figure out a Groundhog's Day scenario. Again, much like Mooncrash which I loved (at least the first half before meta progression makes you overpowered)
  • Looks like it takes a lot of mechanical inspiration from Dishonored's action design (blink, contextual takedowns, movement, dual wielding), which is okay. I have a lot of problems with Dishonored but most of them relate to systems design
  • Greater focus on gun combat is a good thing, Prey didn't have enough guns by half and Dishonored is split between stealth and combat in a way that doesn't really engage either fully
  • Hope it's not just a mindless power fantasy by way of low difficulty, cheesy player abilities, nonexistent resource management etc. Need reasons to be creative, I don't care for sandboxes
  • Invasion multiplayer could be good or bad, no strong opinions here. I appreciate the attempt to innovate by integrating PvP in a very personal manner
  • Lots of asset reuse from Dishonored and Prey? Not a big deal but kinda makes me wonder about the development, what the scope of the project really is
My impressions based on footage and discussion around release:
  • Uh oh, this AI looks legit braindead. Getting funneled in corridors, struggling to navigate around geometry, not using their brandished weapons, no peripheral vision for stealth detection. Not good. Points to mindless power fantasy. Why bother using the vending machines to trip your enemies when a shotgun blast to the chest does equally well?
  • There appears to be no inventory or resource management. Former I can abide as it's a more action-focused game (Thief gets by without it just fine), but the latter puts me off. Limiting resources is a straightforward design technique to enforce creative problem solving. If you can just hack every device for free, what's stopping you? Mooncrash was marvelous in the beginning because you had to use all of your scavenged tools as it was key to your survival (instead of the quickload key). Together with easy AI... not good
  • I've heard the game has what amounts to a 6-hour tutorial and """dynamic difficulty""" that increases the challenge as you eliminate more targets, or something. Maybe this alleviates the prior issues? Poses a decent challenge? It's a big shame the game holds your hand for that long, especially for Arkane. For everything I can criticize about their AAA releases with Bethesda, they've always granted the player agency very quickly
  • Upgrade systems seem convoluted and more based on finding stuff than choosing how you want to play. I will reserve judgment because I really don't know the details but I will say I hope it's not like Dishonored's RPG layer
  • Level design looks Arkane standard from a pure geometry standpoint (lots of potential for expressive traversal, multiple vantage points, loops and branches, the works) which is great, but how those levels are populated with challenges is equally important and I'm a bit skeptical
So yeah, I'm interested in playing it eventually but I'm not seeing what's got every journo and gamedev twitter person gushing over it. I mean, the core concept (Groundhog's Day assassination puzzle with creative combat mechanics and surprise invasions) absolutely appeals to me and I generally want to like Arkane's games, but I'm getting Dishonored vibes in a bad way. Someone let me know if I'm off base with my impressions.

EDIT: Deathloop doesn't look like it's an Immersive Sim to me, for the record. Doesn't seem all that interested in simulated systems-driven gameplay. If Deathloop is an Immersive Sim then so is Dying Light (don't get me wrong I actually quite like DL, but it's just an action game same as Dark Messiah).
 
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Yes, as I said earlier in my initial impressions, Deathloop is absolutely not an immersive sim (it makes this abundantly obvious in the first 15 minutes), and anyone calling it one can safely be ignored as someone who doesn’t know what the fuck they’re talking about.
 

Zombra

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RoSoDude Your "power fantasy" fears are well founded. I don't even have super powers yet and I feel mostly like I am dicking around just exploring the levels with little to no fear of being stopped. I felt the same way about the Dishonoreds, flying around looking for the most hilarious way to kill a dood. Fun, but not challenging.

Upgrade systems aren't convoluted. You're just plugging materia into your body and also into your guns. The upgrade crystals are scattered around like gold coins when you kill doods. It's a little Borderlands actually. Same with the color coded gun tiers. (One nice thing about the guns, though - a tier 2 gun actually looks better than a tier 1. Different model and everything.)

Generally your impressions are on the mark. You got a B+ without even studying.
 

Trithne

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3 hour tutorial, which is still offensively long. 3 hours is how much time I've had to play it since it cane out, so I've just reached the point that the game actually opens up, but have yet to experience such.

The lack of peripheral vision is fucking real though. Two people standing next to each other but they don't notice you stabbing the other. Stabbing is also completely silent for some reason, it's actually kinda eerie.
 

Zombra

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Not to apologize for weak design, but again I like that the enemies aren't super perceptive. If they see someone walking around at the edge of their vision, they assume it's one of their drunk asshole friends.

I kind of hate stealth games where you sneak into a room with 6 people stomping around and they all scream, WAIT! I heard a footstep from somewhere!
 

Generic-Giant-Spider

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Did anyone else have Dishonored frame to them initially as being a spiritual successor to Thief then they played Dishonored and never wanted to hunt down someone and murder them more in their life?
 

Trithne

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Did anyone else have Dishonored frame to them initially as being a spiritual successor to Thief then they played Dishonored and never wanted to hunt down someone and murder them more in their life?

Anyone who told you it was a spiritual successor to Thief was lying to you. It's Whalepunk Deus Ex.
 

SharkClub

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This game is okay. I've played a little past the first loop tutorial for now.

Some posters on here and on /v/ would have you believe it's a George Floyd nig worship American religion simulator but the characters being black is so innocuous that it barely makes any difference and you could probably literally replace them with white peepo and you wouldn't notice, unless the game manages to take a huge left turn at some point and it becomes some black lives matter propaganda, which I'm pretty sure at this point that it won't.

The art style and visuals are aesthetically pleasing and I like the look of the weapons. The sound effects and music are also pretty good and stylistically fits the art direction.

My main concern is the difficulty and the AI which has been mentioned a lot already, dynamic difficulty is bad in every game that I've played that has had it and because this game has dynamic difficulty, the no savegames/continuous play thing AND has to be playable on a playstation gamepad at 30fps I think to Arkane that probably translated to "this has to be incredibly easy and dumb".

As I said I've only played just past the end of the first loop tutorial so far so maybe it ramps up but I've basically been popping heads for free and if you just pick a good vantage point and have a decent weapon and can aim at all you can pick everyone off with ease, I don't really feel like this strategy will become harder to pull off even if the difficulty starts increasing. There are also health pickups literally everywhere and health recharging stations too. I never even came close to dying from combat with the enemies.

The only time I have died so far was
when I walked into some scripted event gas trap puzzle that it took me a few moments too long to figure out how to solve, so I suffocated like a pleb.

I'm definitely getting some Mooncrash vibes as far as the structure of the gameplay goes, I think if you're not concerned about the game not being challenging enough and you liked Mooncrash you will probably find this enjoyable. I did like Mooncrash decently enough myself, so yeah, it's okay.

I'll post more as I play it. I'm willing to give this game more than its fair chance as personally I've gotten significant enjoyment out of every previous Arkane release.
 

Ash

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PREY 2017 was also too easy and that didn't stop it from being great.

Ummm, yes it did. Fuck you. :) It was one huge factor of just a few that prevented it from being a classic.

Anyone who told you it [DISHONORED] was a spiritual successor to Thief was lying to you. It's Whalepunk Deus Ex.

Wrong. It's Whalepunk Deus Ex: Invisible War. Because that is the level of banal boring basic sellout shit it is. Harvey Smith has a knack for such decline. I fucking wish it were whalepunk Deus Ex.

Wait, "Whalepunk"? That's the dumbest shit I ever heard. :lol:
Oh right, I forgot the tech in Dishonored is based on whale harvesting or something like that. Very meh.
 
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SharkClub

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I've actually completed a playthrough of DXIW semi-recently and I can tell you definitively that there is no Arkane game that even comes close (except maybe Dark Messiah) to the levels of bad that game plunges to with its limited options/imsim design/scope. Even Deathloop has more imsim DNA than Invisible War and BioShock which are just linear story based shooters with sandbox-style imsim gameplay set to an absolute minimum.
 
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LarryTyphoid

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I've actually completed a playthrough of DXIW semi-recently and I can tell you definitively that there is no Arkane game that even comes close (except maybe Dark Messiah) to the levels of bad that game plunges to with its limited options/imsim design/scope. Even Deathloop has more imsim DNA than Invisible War and BioShock which are just linear story based shooters with sandbox-style imsim gameplay set to an absolute minimum.
One thing Invisible War avoids that infests a few of Arkane's games is the "body awareness" meme. In Dark Messiah you can't even fucking crouch without the camera glitching into your own body, and the finisher animations are so shoddy it looks like they came out of a mod. Dishonored 1 avoided this and Dishonored 2 mostly did the same but they added a bunch of retarded immersion breaking animations like Corvo/Emily putting their hands on a door before peeking through the hole. Yeah, can't just let me peek through the fucking hole, I gotta watch a little gay flourish first. I think Harvey Smith was also the one responsible for Thief 3's body awareness which was almost as bad as Dark Messiah's.

The best first person games give the player an invisible body, first person body awareness is either janky and shitty looking or turns your entire game into a context-sensitive cutscene ala Thi4f and the upcoming System Shock remake.
 

SharkClub

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Having replayed Thief Deadly Shadows recently as well I can say without a doubt that the body simulator movement in that is by far the worst in any game I've played, and that includes Dark Messiah and even Thi4f. You are correct that DXIW avoided that and it made the game slightly more bearable as a result, though.
 

Riskbreaker

Guest
Aye, the "realistic" movement and body awareness in T3 are considerably worse, clunkier than in Dark Messiah. Hell, just try to remember that pagan camp mission with all the narrow ledges & sheit, you almost get the feeling that it was designed with a different movement model in mind.
 

RoSoDude

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It was also notably bad in Arx Fatalis, because every 1st person action must have an associated 3rd person animation (confirmed when a dialogue bugged out and left me in the 3rd person camera view after resuming player character control). You can't lean when holding a weapon or when crouched because there's would be no animation for such in those two states. You can't cast spells while crouching either, exiting crouch has a laborious wait appended to it, you're slowed when landing from a jump as your legs adjust, and sneaking while holding a weapon appears to do nothing. All in all, movement is uniquely unpleasant in Arx even after you come to grips with it. Still the best Arkane game by far.

It's worth noting that the Dark Engine games (Thief, System Shock 2) also put a lot of effort into body awareness, but in a much smarter way that suited the strengths of the 1st person perspective. Player movement is affected by physics, so you have momentum and will experience gravity while on slopes. You can feel the limits of your body when you lean up against surfaces (useful for listening through doors in Thief), and doors will collide with your body when you open them. To help sell the illusion further, headbob is synced with your footstep sounds, so you get a good sense of how you're traversing a ground surface (particularly important in Thief). Even the first System Shock had a physics-based character controller that, while a little bit wonky at times, made crouching and leaning around corners "feel" very grounded even as you're contorting yourself at odd angles. You don't need to see your body interacting with the world because you can feel it via the way you move through it.

It is possible to do the full body awareness thing right complete with 1st person animations; see Mirror's Edge, Dying Light, or even Prey. But all of these games make concessions to make the perspective feel natural and unobtrusive, as evidenced by how ridiculous the player character looks when modders hack the camera to go into 3rd person.
 

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