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.
