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Reviewers Pile On Deus Ex - Invisible War

Posted by simoniker on from the pluses-and-minuses dept.

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.")

25 of 61 comments (clear)

  1. Deus Ex Mistakeuh by thirty2bit · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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)?

    1. Re:Deus Ex Mistakeuh by ziggles · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:Deus Ex Mistakeuh by thirty2bit · · Score: 3, Informative

      I don't follow Gamespy's reviews/reviewers to the T, but this article is the first I read..
      http://www.gamespy.com/reviews/november03/dx2pc/in dex.shtml
      ..where the game, played to completion, was reviewed more thoroughly and rated four stars. Based on the reviewer's comments, it felt more deserving of less stars. It's even commented upon that the length of the game is only 15 hours compared to the 40+ of the original.

      I feel the length, the already-mentioned items (odd interface, unified ammo, non-localized damage), the lack of the "Classic Deux Ex" attribute system, simplified controls... all leaves me wondering if the designers didn't really have their hearts committed to the creation process.

    3. Re:Deus Ex Mistakeuh by Imperial+Tacohead · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

    4. Re:Deus Ex Mistakeuh by Imperial+Tacohead · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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.

    5. Re:Deus Ex Mistakeuh by ziggles · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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.

  2. Re:I played it ... I agree it Sucks by MachDelta · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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 :(

  3. Re:I played it ... I agree it Sucks by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

  4. Nice game, but like others said ... it's slow by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Nice game, but like others said ... it's slow by TheOnlyCoolTim · · Score: 4, Informative
      The demo was released with all sorts of XBox settings.

      Literally, you can go into the .ini file and see

      ;this FOV is for the HUD only. On the XBox, we need to keep all HUD elements within 10% of the edges. ;FOV__d=68 ;68 is good for the PC version
      FOV__d=61


      There's another one called "MouselagThreshold" that's set to 75. It should be set to 0, and that fixes your slow response.

      Tim
      --
      Omnia vestra castrorum habetur nobis.
    2. Re:Nice game, but like others said ... it's slow by blincoln · · Score: 2, Interesting

      The demo was released with all sorts of XBox settings.

      I wish they had gone one step further and included an option to auto-configure a gamepad with the XBox controls.

      I've been playing almost exclusively console games lately, and trying out the demo made me realize just how much I hate using a keyboard and mouse as a controller.

      I just picked up an adapter from Lik-Sang that lets me use my PS2 gamepad as a PC controller (with force feedback!), and I was hoping to try it out on this demo. I think I'll just get the console version instead when it comes out.

      --
      "...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
    3. Re:Nice game, but like others said ... it's slow by cgenman · · Score: 2, Interesting

      2.4 AthXP 1GB DC DDR RAM, 80 GB 133 SATA, Radeon 9600 Pro.

      Demo maxed out at 800 x 600. However, with the multiple graphic samplings, 800 x 600 easily looked as good as 1024 x 760 does on other games.

      Still, is it the graphics engine that is slow? I'm personally amazed by the collision modeling shown in the demo level. With that many boxes bouncing around at any given time, how can one expect the game to keep up? I'm amazed that it does as well as it does without choking out the main processor.

      --
      The ______ Agenda
    4. Re:Nice game, but like others said ... it's slow by Recoil_42 · · Score: 2, Interesting

      i do too, actually.

      once you get used to it, it's actually alot nicer than using a mouse and wasd, simply because movement is analog, and you don't ever have to look down to .

      its also much more realisitc -- aiming is much harder, and while most people complain about this, i think its just a matter of how games are made -- in most PC fps's, it takes 10-50 shots to kill someone, because everyone is always so precise. ergo, very little people play tom clancy games on PC.

      but on XBOX, for instance, Rainbow Six 3 is the most-played game on XBOX live, followed by Ghost Recon: Island Thunder. Because aiming is so much more realistic, one or two shots can kill, and so more people play these games. otherwise, you get into 'death ballets' where everyone dances aroudn everyone else trying to hit them 50 times.

      really, once you get used to it, console controls on first person shooters is infintely better than mouse+wasd. it just rewards the skillful player that much more.

      (don't even bother with ps2 though, because the analog sticks are too short -- xbox has longer sticks, meaning better precision, hence the popularity of FPS's on it.)

      --


      Newsie, Moderator, www.tauniverse.com
    5. Re:Nice game, but like others said ... it's slow by TheOnlyCoolTim · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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.
  5. Spector and Church by robson · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  6. Re:I played it ... I agree it Sucks by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

  7. Time for an upgrade, I guess... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

  8. A little more than a grain of salt.... by MMaestro · · Score: 3, Insightful
    Deus Ex 1 was arguably one of the most acclaimed games of that year. When a game as big as that gets a sequel, theres GOING to be SOME kind of mass bitching either before, during, or after the game release.

    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.

  9. Re:I played it ... I agree it Sucks by ArmyOfFun · · Score: 2, Informative

    So he [Ray Kassar] called me up from Monterey and said, "Howard, we need E.T." This was like July 23, and he said "We need E.T. by September 1. Can you do it?" - Howard Scott Warshaw.
    Excerpt taken from The Ultimate History of Video Games

    Great book btw. Anyway, given the time constraints, I think Warshaw gets a pass.

  10. Re:I played it ... I agree it Sucks by cgenman · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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
  11. Re:I played it ... I agree it Sucks by cgenman · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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
  12. People want it all by yellow*five · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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....

  13. Is there a need for 'journalists' to review a demo by MBraynard · · Score: 3, Insightful
    I get the need for reviews for retail games - potentially saving a gamer 50+ dollars. But this is a review of a DEMO! Don't get a filtered (other person's) perspective or waste time reading it. DL it and find out how well it suits your tastes for free.

    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.

  14. I actually enjoyed it by mudpyr8 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

  15. Massive Overreacting by inkless1 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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?