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First Deus Ex 3 Details Emerge
Ostracus writes "Deus Ex 3, the third entry in the influential FPS/RPG series, was confirmed to be in development by Eidos Montreal nearly a year ago — and now the first solid details on the game have finally emerged. UK magazine PC Zone has a cover story on Deus Ex 3 for their 200th issue (which has reportedly just begun reaching subscribers), and CVG has relayed a number of interesting tidbits from the preview: '... this time around combat won't be influenced by stats, but will rely purely on your personal marksmanship skills. Instead stats will influence "a vast array of fully upgradeable and customisable weapons," and you'll be able to tailor your arsenal to your play style with mag upgrades, scopes and other add-ons. What's more, stealth will now rely on a cover system rather than shadows, and damage will be dealt with by a very Call of Duty-style auto-heal.'"
... please don't make it ANYTHING like Deus Ex 2. The original was fantastic, but the sequel was a horrifying dumbed-down heavy-handed console mess. Ugh, and the stupid intrusive HUD... I played through the original 3 or 4 times, but the demo of Deus Ex 2 was way more than enough.
I have re-played original deus ex upwards of 20-30 times ...sometimes just for the pure reading joy, sometimes for discovering new/hidden stuff i always seem to stumble upon and sometimes to just try something different (I did give up one attempt after I got out of Paris catacombs without directly killing a single enemy in combat)
deus ex 2 was piece of crap. i had none of the depth, none of atmosphere (despite obvious attempts at it), it had none of the fun game play, none of the re-playability. The only two good things I liked about dx2 was: machine supremacy soundtrack and the idoru.
If they want to make successful sequel, they could have went into more detail about how they have learned from the mistakes of the 2nd one, not just saying "oh yeah the universal ammo was bad but we still think console game ideas are good so we'll be putting more of them in"
personally, i would love to see an expansion pack for deus ex 1 - upgrade engine/graphics, maybe add some additional content, incorporate some half-finished mods/add-ons,etc.
Also, a real prequel where you play Paul Denton - that would be awesome! Especially all the adventures that are alluded in hong kong, miss chow, tracer tong, etc. Maybe starting with the formation of unatco - the statue of liberty being bombed, the start of grey plague, the climb to power by illuminati, and let us not forget a certain young french lady and her chatteau :)
Oh well, there is still time, the released information was not much to go by ...maybe all of these things will be part of the story line.
* Sinister voice of Simons will be returning to announce ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKS !
* mulitplayer death match via XBOX LIVE
* development focusing on volumetric 3d shadows.
* all NPCs that can offer quests will have a yellow exclamation mark over their head so you don't waste time talking to pointless NPCS!
* 2 ammo types. better than 1/universal ammo (see? we learn/listen to feedback)
* reading is for intellectualfags/pc fags. you play console games for fun, so there'll be none of that rubbish in dx3!
* It is a prequel where you play a character completely unrelated to the original game, in circumstances only vaguel related to the original game, in a storyline completely separate to the original game. It is a prequel.
* You will not be going anywhere near a certain chateau in France.
* maggie chow and tracer tong storylines unlockable via paid downloadable content.
* One install per device guaranteed by SecuROM
One of the main reasons Deus Ex 2 was such a let down was the removal of the skill system affecting marksmanship. It was and extremely pivotal game device that affected how you'd play the game from level 1. You could not run in gun in the end game unless you were trained to run and gun.
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What are they thinking with Call of Duty style regenerating health? Seriously... Deus Ex is not a run and gun game, it's a game that rewards resourcefulness and steathiness. The COD-style recharging health mechanic has *no place* here. The sole reason for recharging health is to keep the game pace up and allow the player to keep charging into frenetic combat in action games. Deus Ex is not one of these games.
I was looking forward to this, no longer following this now. Wake me up if this turns out to be good somehow.
"stealth will now rely on a cover system rather than shadows", eh?
It looks like they got my letter about adding the ubiquitous cardboard boxes as an inventory item!
TFA says that DX2 will have 20 different biomods, some pretty far-out. If this is a "prequel", why didn't they exist in the "future"?
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One of the points of a FPS being first person is to add immersion; you're looking out of the protagonist's eyes, so you *are* the protagonist. Even if most of the time it's really just a floating camera, at least it's a floating camera where your eyes should be.
Now, cover systems.. fair enough. They can be done well; see, for example, GRAW. All first person, with your body actually modelled so you can see yourself, and when you enter cover you get the impression of actually.. entering cover.
But noooo, that's too hard to get right, so they're going to do what everybody else does and give you an out of body experience every time you lean against a fucking wall. None of this nonsense where entering cover is an important tactical decision because it blocks your line of sight just as much as it blocks bullets; this is a console game, so we'll make it easy and let you look around corners with magic floating vision.
And why bother spending time balancing the game when they can just give you magic regenerating health? *sigh*, they could at least make them optional augmentations, you know, like in the critically acclaimed original?
DX3 has been a huge wildcard in my mind, simply because it offers so much promise, and as a result, even greater chance of dissapointment. DX2: Invisible War was a dissapointment because it felt like a 'dumbed down' distilled console version of the basic premese offered by Deus Ex, much as Bioshock offered a distilled version of the System Shock experience. This is not to say that Invisible War was a bad game, as I found it quite entertaining. It just didn't seem like a sequel, and it certainly didn't deliver on expectations. Deus Ex was not without it's faults, having very clunky combat mechanics, but that's not why I enjoyed playing it.
Deus Ex 3 will be hard to really get excited about until we find out how wide of a net the Dev team is casting for a playerbase. I get nervous hearing about 'shedding' more RPG elements from the DX formula, simply because it was the FPS/RPG hybrid elements that made Deus Ex (and System Shock 2) truly unique games to play.
I'm going to be taking Yatzee Crowshaw's tack on this and remain a cynic on this until I have further reason to hope. The risk of watching another beloved PC franchise ruined for the sake of the 'mainstream console gamer' is one that plays very near and dear to my heart. After having been twice dissapointed with Bioshock and Invisible War, I'm wary this time around. They're decent games, just not quite up to the bar set by the games that originally inspired them.
1. Unfortunately, "critically acclaimed" doesn't really mean much. It means that at least one reviewer wrote a glowing review, whether because he really bends over that easily for the publisher's ads and freebies, or because he liked the idea lots after playing for 5 minutes on God mode.
Anarchy Online was "critically acclaimed" and it was launched as an unplayable mess of bugs, with bad balance. It lost players hand over fist _fast_ and only stabilized after being turned into a freebie ad-supported game, and even then at a _pitiful_ number of subscribers. So not that many players liked it either.
Aiken's Artefact was "critically acclaimed" and IIRC it sold a pitiful 800 copies in the beginning. (Not sure how many more were bundled later in "top X games" bundles.)
Looking Glass's games were "critically acclaimed" and had such a rabid following that, arguably, it was the "OMG, Eidos killed Looking Glass to keep funding Daikatana" that broke the camel's back and triggered the devastating backlash against what would have otherwise have been merely a mediocre game with outdated graphics. But, funnily enough, Looking Glass had more rabid fanboys, than it had paying customers. Their last couple of games (e.g., the Terra Nova experiment) sold pitifully few copies, and even other publishers (e.g., Microsoft) no longer wanted to touch them with a ten foot polearm. Reviewers and fanboys ranted and raved about how great and innovative the Looking Glass games are, but people didn't actually buy those games.
So aiming for "critically acclaimed" instead of sales, is a bit like aiming to be the ugly girl with a great personality.
Now I'm not saying that DX1 was "bad", so hold yer horses. But if it didn't sell great, it didn't sell great, and that's that. I can see why a publisher or developper would try to change a few bits and see if it does better.
2. And part of its problem was that it wasn't really anything anyone could put their finger upon. It was barely even an FPS, but it required FPS skills to get out of a firefight alive. It wasn't a forced stealth game, but mostly you had to anyway... except when it wouldn't work and you'd be back to needing FPS skills again. It was barely even a CRPG, but it tried to tell CRPG fans that it was one. Then they'd need FPS skills or have to deal with forced stealth, instead of the usual concentrating on the semi-interactive storyline while letting the computer roll the targeting dice. Etc.
Now I'm not saying that _only_ FPS skills worked, but... let's put it like this: from all that bewildering array of possibilities for solving any problem, there'd be at least one point in the game where _your_ favourite approach just didn't work and you had to do something else. For each category of players, a different one.
Basically instead of catering to the union of FPS, stealth and RPG fans, it really catered to an intersection of the three sets. You had to be the kind of guy who enjoys all three, to go through the whole game and like it. Because otherwise sooner or later a section of the game would come up which forced you to do the one you dislike.
Now if you were indeed at least semi-comfortable with all 3, I'm not going to say you shouldn't like it. In fact, I'm happy for you. But, well, that's one possibility as to why it had only mediocre sales. Because it really catered to a minority.
And from that point of view, again I can see why a publisher would try to enlarge that target market segment.
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