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Reviewers Pile On Deus Ex - Invisible War
Thanks to GameSpy for their 'Pile On!' feature, in which a multitide of their staff rate Ion Storm's Deus Ex: Invisible War, the hotly-awaited PC/Xbox FPS title whose recently released PC demo has met with much controversy. Comments rage from the mixed ("It does offer lots of great gameplay, but I can understand peoples' initial reaction to the title") through the positive ("Ion has tried to make the game more accessible, and I think it's done a fine job of doing this without harming the core DX gameplay"), to the negative related to game engine speed ("You trade 20 or more frames per second so that the rivet textures on a barrel accurately reflect the nearest light source.") Elsewhere, PlanetDeusEx has a demo walkthrough also discussing INI fixes to improve your experience, and there's another GameSpy article interviewing the developers about their 'magic moments' playing the game they created ("I had an epiphany when I wanted to destroy the coffee beans in QueeQueeg's coffee shop, but I didn't want to arouse suspicion.")
Gamers dont make good game designers. When you look at a lot of the so called "problems" with the game most of them make sense within the context of the whole game's design. It may seem silly out of context that shooting someone in the head doesn't kill them. But you shouldn't be able to kill something with one hit if you have no biomods to increase your skill with that weapon. Otherwise what's the point of having biomods at all? And if you got rid of biomods, you'd have even more people complaining that they dumbed the game down or oversimplified it (except this time they'd be right).
The interface is cool and I think it helps with game immersion, better than a rectangle at the bottom at the very least. I do think the inventory management needs work though.
I think console gamers will think the game is too PC-ish. For example, can you imagine having to aim at and pick up items with a gamepad? Sounds like a pain in the ass.
What's bugged me for a long while now is that Warren Specter made a comment on Thief 3, one to the effect that he "doesn't get it", referring to the Thief genre.
I suspect it's part of a long-running public debate between Warren Spector and Doug Church about semi-emergent vs. stealth-style game-play. (This debate is reasonably represented by Deus Ex and Thief, respectively.) You can read more about this here.
In short, it's not that Warren doesn't "get" Thief -- it's that he doesn't necessarily agree with that particular set of design decisions.
The obvious solution to that is the patented DX ShakyHands (TM). Just as control with the sniper rifle was extremely difficult in the first game prior to upgrading the skill, so should it be difficult to use any weapon prior to getting biomods. A bullet to the head ought to kill, or at least put an enemy out of the picture for the near future. Rather than upping the disbelief factor by requiring you to shoot a guard four times in the head, they could have just made it harder to hit the head comparatively speaking, thus further immersing the player and avoiding the silliness that we're faced with now.
I don't think this is flamebait. It would be flamebait if the demo was cool, or in the least not a port of the xbox version, but it is isn't. He speaks the truth in a rude fashion.
Xbox port proof:
In the configure controls menu, why can't you use the mouse? Why wouldn't you be able to use the mouse? I dunno, if the game was made specifically for a controller maybe... but that's just guessing
Before : Any big MMORPG game; complaints about it being too big, too high system requirements, bad customer service, not being able to install it correctly, etc.
During : Too many recent games; huge bugs in the game that "some how" managed to get past beta testing and results in a new patch being released less than week after the game hits shelves.
After : Virtually any game that doesn't have kickass multiplayer action that keeps people coming back for more; GTA3/VC which people complained about getting boring just crashing and messing around with cars, Morrowind being too big and not interactive enough, and Halo because its system requirements made it difficult to get into a good non-laggy server.
You don't miss because the shot randomly goes astray, you miss because at an initial stage your character's hands shake, causing the target on the screen to shake around. You can still make a head shot at point blank range. Farther away, the head is a comparitively small target, and the shaking makes it difficult to be certain that you have a good shot.
I think a couple important points that most people are missing is what made the original good. Deus Ex was a jack of all trades and master of none. It wasn't a tactical shooter, nor was it a pure stealth sneaking game either. It had elements of all, which added to a greater whole. I tend to agree with IS about many things, and am reserving judgement until the final game is released.
That aside: I see a lot of people asking for a downloadable higher-res texture pack for PCs, and to have the bump-mapping and specular highlighting apparent in early screenshots returned. In the same breath, they'll also demand that the game have a higher framerate. These things are mutually exlusive, and the expectation puts IS in an awkward position where they cannot possibly address people's desires with a patch. Basically people seem to want the original game, but with extremely advanced real-time graphics, that will run on a low-end 2 year old system.
keep dreaming....
I still think that would be a very annoying solution. I want to feel like I have control over what I'm doing. If my cursor is waving around it's just going to turn me off from the game.
Ditto for 'music' critics. Go to a store that lets you preview the music and make up your own mind.
Eh, that's a little off topic, isn't it.
For movement as in walking around, I think you have an interesting point - an analog stick could give you better control than four digital keys and a modifier key that makes you run or walk.
It still feels unnatural to me to control my aim or look direction with a joystick, though. I think if aiming is supposed to be hard, it should be accomplished more naturally, through the game - for example, Deus Ex 1 had a crosshair that would change sizes - if you were running, unskilled with a weapon, or had just fire, it would be huge and you would have a hard time hiting anything. If you were crouching, skilled, and taking careful aim, it would be tiny and you could get headshots. That feels better to me than just depening on cumbersome controls introducing difficulty.
Tim
Omnia vestra castrorum habetur nobis.
OK, performance problems suck. They always do. There's no denying it. But people are acting like this is the first PC demo in the history of man to have bizarre performance issues with unknown configs. They (and by they I mean everyone, including such pundits as Penny-Arcade) jump to the conclusion that it just must be a problem with game itself, it can't be fixed, Ion Storm sucks, blah blah blah.
Guess what. Runs fine on lots of boxes. Full res here, no probs. It's quite likely something to be ironed out in the near future.
Then everyone jumps on the interface, once again acting like it's some cardinal sin to have to figure out how to move an item from one slot to the other. Yes, I think it could be friendlier. No, I don't think the 10 minutes out of my life it took me to get the hang of it was worth any form of forum flaming.
Unified ammo. Yes, it's a dumb idea. I also think anyone who thinks it will completely ruin a game like Deus Ex 2 never really appreciated the first.
No locational damage. Sure I'd like to see something in SOF2, but having "run at every enemy and get headshots" removed from option list is also not the worst thing to happen to any game.
After that it degenerates into such whininess as "the levels are too dark."
Yes, it's regrettable that Ion Storm released a demo with tech problems and some really bad ini files. Yeah, that sucks. It's worse, though, to see much of the PC gaming community jump on the bandwagon over it rather than giving it a chance. The demo didn't even really grab me until I tried it for the second time, but by the fourth time I played it I was pretty sold on the game.
But hey, what Spector PC game actually sold well when it first came out anyway?