What was so bad about Invisible War?

[sosmoflux]

As time marches on I'm finding it harder and harder to remember why I and so many others thought poorly of good old DX:IW. By today's standards it's probably a masterpiece, a total hidden gem. If you played it now, with gaming standards having been brought so low, you'd probably like it.

So why does it remain so hated? Story? Simply how it wasn't as captivating as the original? Small level areas because of consoles?

 

[JarlFrank]

The levels are tiny like a shoebox.

I played IW in the early 2010s, long after the controversy was over. Never played it back in the day as I came late to Deus Ex (only played DX in 2009).

IW was a downgrade of Deus Ex in every way. But I'm not even going to talk about the dumbed down feature list, lack of atmosphere, and stupid "all endings were true" story.
The worst part is that its level design has touches of genius, but the engine/hardware limitations (thank you very much XBox, you fucking piece of shit, I fucking hate you you consolefag piece of trash) forced the level size to be incredibly tiny.

So you get plenty of moments where you think "Wow, this level is pretty well-designed" but then it's over within 5 seconds. There's plenty of ways to approach objectives, alternate routes, etc, but everything feels so cramped that it can never develop its full potential.

Even if you disregard all of the game's other faults, this alone ruins the game.

 

[Outlander]

That it was a sequel to Deus Ex.

 

[whydoibother]

Small level areas because of consoles?

Small is underselling it. They are tiny. Game breakingly, absurdly tiny.

 

[-M-]

Nothing says 'immersive sim' like universal ammo.

 

[Cat Headed Eagle]

At the very least, they thought of putting obstacles and enemies in vents.

 

[Fargus]

From what i remember in release version you couldn't even target enemy heads only body. Headshot wasn't a thing. They had to add that with patches.... that's like wow.

I played IW after the first game as a teenager in early 2000s and i remember it vaguely. But my personal experience was that this game is too dumbed down for my taste: 1 universal ammo type for everything, i'm not even sure there was an inventory like in Deus Ex 1 i think they butchered that too. Also too futuristic for my taste, Deus Ex 1 is the shit future we or at least the westerners are going to live in with fucks like Ellon Musk taking over the world. But fucking crab people starting nuclear war in IW or something is just garbage.

Main character looks like a douchebag, sounds like one too. JC with his autistic emotionless voice which was part of the character had 10 times more charisma than that fag.

Maps were castrated and corridor like.

Yeah, it was a pile of shit.

 

[flyingjohn]

You enter a room and see electricity blocking the way toward a goodie .You walk around it, go under a pipe and pick up a goodie instead of taking damage like a idiot.
That is the level design.

Same problem with HR. You see a glowing wall that you can break to kill somebody. Or you just go around and kill him in away that doesn't alert everybody.

 

[NecroLord]

The simple answer is that it attempted to make a Deus Ex game for consoles.
The more complicated answer would be that it tried too hard to be a sequel to one of the most celebrated video games ever made. It crumbled under the pressure. The environments can feel dull and empty. Universal ammo. Questionable level design (still has the quintessential Deus Ex vents ).
Still a decent game. Just not a worthy sequel to Deus Ex.

 

[Melcar]

Because is was invisible. We could not see how awesome it supposedly was.

 

[Trithne]

Fucking tiny-ass levels. Liberty Island had to cut into two maps. And it honestly looked terrible too, those hideous soup textures that everything had at that time.

Universal ammo was annoying, but multitools were merged as well and there was no real skill system to speak of.

Augmentations were basically magic and were always either useless, or game-breaking. There was an aug to heal by standing on a corpse.

Writing was serviceable but meh as a sequel to DX.

It's just a mediocre game, and really emblematic of the issues PC gaming suffered due to the XBox dragging the quality of everything down to its level.

 

[J1M]

As time marches on I'm finding it harder and harder to remember why I and so many others thought poorly of good old DX:IW. By today's standards it's probably a masterpiece, a total hidden gem. If you played it now, with gaming standards having been brought so low, you'd probably like it.

So why does it remain so hated? Story? Simply how it wasn't as captivating as the original? Small level areas because of consoles?

In short, yes. The anticipated sequel to the best PC game of all time was built with consoles as the lead SKU. With the best programmers at the company splitting their attention so some features could be used for Thief 3. The result wasn't terrible, but it was a huge letdown.

For all that has been written about Deus Ex 2, remarkably little blame is laid at the feet of the studio head for the disastrous decision to insist on 100% real-time lighting, console focus, and splitting talent.

TLDR: Deus Ex 2 is bad because Warren Spectre is good at interviews and bad at running a game studio.

In addition to the problems you outlined, the game ran very poorly compared to the first game. The real-time lighting decision ensured poor framerate. The workaround for Xbox memory problems was to close the game engine and reboot it on every map transition. Also, the slow loading screen problem was compounded by levels being literally 20% of the size of the first game. (Liberty Island, for example.)

As an example of how little care was put into the PC version, the game shipped with Xbox settings in the .ini file that could easily be tweaked for better performance and visuals.

 

[Morgoth]

The crime of DXIW was that they released it on PC.

 

[Cat Headed Eagle]

I remembeer finishing DE1 in like 25 hours or so. IW took me 9.

 

[NecroLord]

"Welcome to Club Cocks!"
Can't find that Invisible War parody on youtube...

 

[Spukrian]

By today's standards it's probably a masterpiece, a total hidden gem.

I agree, Invisible War is a masterpiece compared to turds like Human Revolution.

 

[kangaxx]

The level design was a massive step down from my POV. The game felt designed around consoles (which it was), and it just lost a lot of made the first game so good. There were other issues with the factions feeling pointless to me, but I can't remember specifics that well.

 

[kangaxx]

At the very least, they thought of putting obstacles and enemies in vents.

They did that in the first game too, when greasels started appearing.

 

[Behelit]

I was a teenager, but I distinctly remember the bloom (defaulted on before the first patch) annihilating my retinas. The optometrist recommended sunglasses in a well lit room.

 

[LarryTyphoid]

It just feels bad to play. I like Thief Deadly Shadows, but Invisible War just sucks. Never got out of the first city.

 

[Tweed]

Everything.

 

[deuxhero]

The game was super unstable even with fan patch.

 

[Lagole Gon]

Some of the hate must be because of the disastrous release. Buggy mess in times before the convinient autopatches and fast internet.
US release was so bad the devs called it early access version or something like that. Europe got a patched game 3 months later.

I think it's somewhat overbashed. It's blasphemous as a sequel, but an alright game compared to all that console trash of that time.

World reactivity is unironically better than in Human Revolution. Somebody might comment if you shoot random people! Imagine that!

 

[Cat Headed Eagle]

I found the ironic twist of the Illuminati and the other "secret society" being literally in bed together to be fun and preferable to the babby's 1st humanistic diatribe tone of HR.

 

[Infinitron]

Besides the shoebox-sized maps, so many things about Invisible War screamed "Yeah, we're intentionally making this more casual, Deus Ex can also be for kids!"

Human Revolution was developed in a much more mass market era of gaming, but it at least felt like it was trying. Invisible War wanted to be dumb.