Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.