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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.")
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 hope that what we're seeing of DX2 (demo) doesn't indicate that he's lost his edge or has become out of touch with the scene.
I can't help but wonder how DX2 would look today if more gamers had input on the alpha and beta stages of the game. Would the "wonder wheel" / "dirty contact lens" interface have made it so far? Would localized damage have been coded in? Or is all of this due to the game being coded for the lowest common denominator (i.e. the portability to consoles)?
The dissapointing part is that Ion Storm IS tried and true! Not Ion Storm itself, but Warren Spector and his crew. Warren is known for making some of the BEST PC games ever: Dues Ex (original) Thief series System Shock 1 & 2 Wing Commander series and even several Ultima games. The man is a fucking genious when it comes to game design, but this DX2 crap has me wondering if he took a sharp blow to the head recently. That, or what kind of million dollar paycheck he sold out to in exchange for making a console game (and then porting it to the PC just for a few hundred extra sales). Thats why its so frustrating to watch :(
but this DX2 crap has me wondering if he took a sharp blow to the head recently
It could also mean that his earlier work were the titles that he really wanted to make. Now that he's made them - his genius is exhausted.
It could *also* mean that his earlier titles were all flukes and it's only sheer luck that they were that good.
I personally didn't like Thief that much because I came to it late, the graphics were terrible and I didn't like the ghosts and robots (I wanted it to be more realistic). I did think the game *design* was the inspired work of genius though.
Just played the demo.
...
Good graphics. I liked the ambient sound. I also liked the "variety" -- character interaction, weapons, bioweapons, etc.
But
It's too slow. I have to admit, I didn't believe the reviewers. I thought: these guys must be running some pretty lousy machines if they're complaining about the speed!
Uhhh. No. My computer is not normally *that* slow. (P4 2.8GHz HT, 1GB dual-channel cas-2 RAM, 80GB RAID0 array, Gigabyte 8knxp mobo, GeForce 5600.)
Admittedly, my graphics card is not the "best", but even with the detail turned down in the game, and running in 640x480 (!!), the response was poor. It felt like the mouse was moving through a thick viscous fluid -- it just never responded quickly. Given the speed at which a number of other modern games play on my computer, I have a hard time believing that it's my hardware.
his earlier titles were not flukes, they all follow the same exact rule: stealh, open endedness(probably not a word), and user choice are all important.
Ultima Underground, System Shocks, the Thief series, and Deus Ex all followed these. For some reason, he must have been stoned and wanted the new deus ex choices to always end up in a fire fight I guess.
Oh well, every great genius deserves a failure, they've earned it. I mean, Howard Scott Warshaw made E.T. for the Atari and made the best freaking game in the world: Yars Revenge. ET is by far the worst, Yars revenge of course outdoes Doom 3.
Hopefully, this will only be his one failure.
This is the first time I have run into being unable to play a game on my Geforce2 GTS 32mb video card. It saddens me, because the demo won't start without "1.1 or higher pixel shader support", which I'm given to understand is generally an eyecandy feature anyway.
But the people with MX cards are the ones who are really pissed, because even with a "Geforce4" MX card they don't have the requisite pixel shading ability. Mostly something to blame Nvidia's marketing on, but nobody has really justified (to me, at least) why the game must REQUIRE support for what I sense to be a mostly luxury effects option.
Remember, Deus Ex was considered the bastard stepchild of Ion Storm. Consisting primarily of people fed up with Mr. Romero, Deus Ex was greenlighted as a throwaway project until the excellent Daiktana was ready to ship. Nobody, least of all the population at large, was expecting it to be huge.
Now that it is, people are going to pull the sequel apart for any differences it might have. "I don't like the interface." "The mouse is jerky." "It runs slow." Well guess what... The is no worse than Xenogears, the mouse is already fixed, and all new games run slow. what you can't really get is a grasp of the gameplay from a demo. Sure, you can get a taste of it... there is no area that is unreachable by piling on boxes, for example. But how far can you really go? People are already condemning it before having ever played it, simply because it is A: different than it's predecessor, and B: the Demo runs like a Demo.
I don't think we'll know if the emergent gameplay design was successful until the game ships in December. Only then can we call it a failure. Or a success.
The ______ Agenda
I agree with most of what you say, but not all of it. The lack of non-localized damage is odd, and unintuitive. Unified ammo is also odd, but not something we should hold against it until we see how the finished game plays. I tend to feel Unified ammo will free the player to play in a way reflective of their style. The interface isn't great, but it isn't terrible. The AI? I can't say for sure because the two areas of the demo were pretty severly separated, but the AI seemed to handle itself OK.
Demos always run like s#(t. They're usually finished a month before the game is, and are based off of really old code. I would be surprised if the final game was running 100% better, but many problems will have been ironed out between demo and gold.
BTW, apparently you haven't seen the depths of crappyness of modern acclaim games. Let me remind you what they're capable of.
The ______ Agenda
Immersive, great sound. I'm running a modest system (Athlon 2500, 512 MB, Radeon 9600 Pro) and I ran it in 1024x768 with 2x Oversampling. Framerate is unknown, but it never stuttered and was smooth, so I assume it was greater than 30fps. I do find it humerous that it is an "nvidia" co-branded game, but runs fine on my ATI when everyone else is having issues.
I do agree with some posters that it would be nice to have a 1-shot, 1-kill if it hits in the right spot. Since most of the baddies had body armor, hitting the right spot would be tough. There are many ways to handle avoiding the insta-kill of key bad guys, but mook gaurds should be easy pray, if you are set up right. Just because you put your crosshairs right on the guard's face and click the mouse during a fight without aiming doesn't mean that's where you'll hit.
Many tabletop RPGs have solved this problem 10x over, I don't know why the video gaming industry doesn't get it.
However, the game was still intriguing. It was a STORY based game, not UT2K3 for jimmeny's xmas! Such a game is slower moving, and requires more thought. I actually felt bad when I used the guard's flamethrower to toast a glob in a cage and caught a nearby kitty.
If you turn the opacity of the interface down to 0, it isn't obtrusive at all.
I also like the fact you can't carry a frickin' arsenal. Sure you can carry 6 guns if you want, but then you won't have room for useful items. The spider bombs were really sweet, using EMP to take out a camera and then shocking the guards. Allowed me to engage in gunplay without setting off the alarm.
The biomods were wicked. I didn't use the leech on the kitties, but the rat in the alley was worth a few points of health.
I agree the console version would be tough, but the lack of a defined hit location system makes it a little easier to imagine. Actually having a bunch of different buttons would be useful for inventory management/item activation.
I think this game has a lot of potential, and could be really great. If you prefer quake instead of system shock, this game might not be for you. It is a good blend of an RPG, and many of the slower elements that go with that genre, than say SOF2. It is probably a lot closer to Splinter Cell than anything, with more interactivity and a wider variety of sci-fi powers/effects.