Current thoughts on Deus Ex: Human Revolution (14 hours in)

[Dany_the_penguin]

I've been playing the deus ex games recently, beat the first a while back, tried playing both Invisible War and Human revolution switching between one another. My early game of DX:HR was admittedly not fun, I was having trouble getting use to certain qualities about it like the cover system, sluggish movement and firing, regenerating health, and generally the idea I initially was that Eidos had taken to funneling the ideas of the franchise as a somewhat deeper equivalent to modern stealth/action games with rpg elements. My mood eventually did change farther in when I began learning to accept the design choices the dev team decided to go for. There were good things I've found in Detroit, largely due by expansive exploration and, an amount, of experimental gameplay. I like the Praxis system, while I think it's easier on the player than OG Deus Ex's system of separated Skills and Augmentations, I think this system works best for the world design in terms of balance and satisfying progression. (Unrelated sidenote: I sure wish someone would try again at Invisible War's system of overloading the player with biomods and character respec, except maybe with harder choices in the matter beyond trading between high and low level biomods when doing respecs.) Is the conflict of "augmented vs not" ever going to evolve? I see a light amount of discussion surrounding the repercussions of nueropozyne relapse and how augmentation is something that may constantly be out of the poor's reach, but this is game seems so proud of it's "they're unnatural we aren't" rhetoric that it wants to hammer it into center stage instead of letting any of the other more competent arguments have some spotlight. This is all not even discussing the fact that this conflict is a complete rescaling/refocusing on that of which was present. I'm mixed on the aesthetics, things look cool but don't entirely make sense. Why does Adam have implanted sunglasses? In the original it was to hide JC's odd augmented eyes but Jensen's look fine, and even if they looked odd I still find that I would've been more practical to just give him normal sunglasses to wear. This complaint with the art extends to areas like lower Hengsha where this whole portion of a city lies underneath what I assume to be an enormous elevated highway with even higher skyscrapers. Which reminds me, isn't this game also suppose to be a prequel? How come the stuff in DX 1 looked more grounded in reality with it's weapons? It made sense in IW since it was the proper sequel to DX1 and was thereby set in far enough of a future to have more technologically advanced everything. Ah well, I'll get to the point


The point/Verdict/tl;dr: I'm enjoying it so far even if early on I didn't get the best impression I wanted. I think narrative and aesthetic qualities can use some work, but otherwise I'd say thing shave been good.

P.S.: so when I just recently tried booting my game up again, after getting past the Nixxes logo the game stuttered and crashed, help. I'm using the director's cut version and can provide further specifications if necessary.

 

[Hawki]

Piece of advice? Split up the first paragraph into smaller ones. It's a wall of text that's hard to read.

 

[Dany_the_penguin]

Piece of advice? Split up the first paragraph into smaller ones. It's a wall of text that's hard to read.

noted

 

[Phoenixmgs]

It's been a long while since I played the original and awhile since I played HR (probably near release). I recall HR being alright (probably like 6-7/10), it's all nice and polished but really did nothing very good outside of maybe level design. I recall more of the original's story than I do HR, which I feel was basically by-the-numbers and rather bland whereas the original was like a sci-fi pulpy adventure going from location to location conspiracy theory to conspiracy theory. The couple things I recall really not caring for in HR was the energy system and how you acquired augs. You will eventually get everything in HR whereas DX you had to pick and choose what you got and were locked out of augs. The energy system kind of made it so you rarely wanted to use anything that took more than a single battery or charge or whatever (as that refilled after use).

 

[meiam]

Nah the story never evolved instead it goes into conspiracy theory/illuminati stuff which isn't very interesting. Although it could be worse, mankind divided is seriously dumb in there attempt at analogy of augmented and racism.

The praxis system is cool, but its too easy to get a shiton of point very quickly, so you should have everything you need rigth away, by the time I left Detroit I was already putting point in stuff that I didn't need anymore. The most fun I had was trying to really maximize the exp gain, not to get more praxis but just for the challenge of it, you can do a lot of elaborate stuff to force the game to lock computer so you can hack them for a bit of exp and such. The only issue with that is one of the way to get more exp is to takedown two enemy at once, this often require you to do some additional stuff like using stealth system, which takes energy. But only the first bar of energy automatically recharge, which is needed for the takedown. So you need to use item to get more energy, but those item are actually limited, even shop only have limited number of them. So you can end up in a situation where you have tons of money but can't buy item that are supposed to be normal consumer item.

Overall it's a fun game but with some issues (I hope your playing the director cut, otherwise you have to deal with vanilla boss that are pretty bad). I do wish they kept making them but apparently SE had insane sales target for mankind divided and at the same time forced the dev to akwardly cut the game in half, so the game under performed and they can the franchise.

 

[happyninja42]

Why does Adam have implanted sunglasses?

I think his boss just did it because it would look cool. Remember Adam's augmentations were done to try and 1. Save him, and 2. Sort of catapult him into the spotlight of the "New Human" , in the hopes it would help their company dominate the augmentation industry. So it's partly PR I would say.

This complaint with the art extends to areas like lower Hengsha where this whole portion of a city lies underneath what I assume to be an enormous elevated highway with even higher skyscrapers.

Sadly this is an issue due to development constraints. The original plan was to have 2 large maps, Lower and then Upper Hengsha, and you would transition between them based on missions. It was going to illustrate the stark difference in life between the lower/upper decks. But, it had to be cut due to development time. So yes, it does seem like a huge, glaring hole in the design, because that's exactly what it is.

And yeah the plot of HR does focus entirely on the Augs Bad, Fleshies Good debate, though it does dip into some of the more esoteric Transhumanism concepts here and there. They are more fleshed out in Mankind Divided I think, where the questions of what does it mean to be alive/etc, come up in more compelling, and far more engaging missions.

 

[hanselthecaretaker]

noted

Wall still standing...

On topic I’ve only played up to the first boss in the Director’s Cut version, and enjoyed it a decent amount. Will probably go back to it at some point but I’m far more intrigued by Cyberpunk 2077’s world, gameplay and characters. The side quest-breaking glitch I encountered in HR (Motherly Ties IIRC) was pretty off-putting though too.