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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 :(
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.
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.
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.
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
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.