Deus Ex - Invisible War Probed

Thanks to UGO.com for their hands-on preview of Ion Storm's Deus Ex:Invisible War, the forthcoming sequel to the much-acclaimed FPS/RPG hybrid. The feature starts: "Few RPGs have offered the level of open-ended gameplay, the Hollywood-quality back story, or the innovative character development that Deus Ex did", and goes on to describe the changes to the sequel, which include a "simplifying [of] its character-development system" and a new interface that's "similar to Metroid Prime's visor view" - in fact, "when a menu pops up, it'll be emblazoned directly on [the new lead character] Alex's eye." The game is currently due out this December for both PC and Xbox.

Comments

Anyone else unclear about the XP system?

[ElectroKiwiMonkey]

To quickly paraphrase the article: Players of DX1 found that the skill point system tended to shaft them a little unless they took the time to go explore every little room, so in DX2 they're reducing the complexity by limiting it to just the bio-mods and upgrades.

Now, my question is this: Did anyone else find that the bio-mods were almost as out of the way as the XP bonuses? That said, I really don't see how removing the skill system fixes anything.

I understand how the skill system tended to screw you over if you picked the wrong skills, especially since certain skills (Environment Training or Swimming come to mind) were only of any use at a couple points in the game. But couldn't this have been fixed simply by taking a look at the skills you have, removing the really useless ones and then tweaking the levels so that every skill can be useful?

For example, instead of just having a security system you can disable, doors that can be picked, and electronic locks to hack, why not put Enviro-Training to use by having electrical conduits to crawl in?

As for other skills like Melee combat which were of extremely limited use as you got further in DX1, I would've thought the best thing to do might be simply not including items like the Dragon Tooth sword that quite simply turn your skill system on its head.

Back more to the point of my comment, how does limiting it to just the bio-mod system help? Personally I found bio-mods to be the less-useful of the two systems, but that might be just me. If the system is going to be something along the lines of "You got this far, here's another powerup to make you happy" then I feel much of the original's open-endedness is being taken away in an effort to cater to those who just want to blaze through the game.

Again, this all might just be me, but as someone who played through, managed to miss about half of the experience bonuses and still have a damn fine time, I really think that the developers should be rewarding those who take the time to look around, hack anonymous office systems, and make the effort to see what's on the other side of things that would otherwise just be set-pieces.