Deus ex: Human revolution first thoughts

[Superior Mind]

Two hours in and I'm getting the hang of it. It's a game where I know I'm going to like engaging myself in the world so I'll be taking it slow.

Facial and character animation isn't great but all in all I think it'll be a pretty good game.

 

[Weaver]

It's pretty good, but I'm going to have to chime in with some of the most common complaints here. The environments look lovely, but the character models are average at best for a new game, and the character ANIMATIONS in conversations are pretty terrible. We're talking flat-out terrible. Twitchy, marionette like movements that look completely bizarre and occasionally comical. And more than once I've had a line of dialogue come out where the lips didn't move. For a game with such lush environments and such beautiful music, it creates a real hole in the presentation.

The load times are pretty excruciating as well, especially for a game where it's not hard to get smoked pretty quickly in a pitched firefight. I'm not looking forward to banging my head against the almost universally loathed boss fights and having to endure the interminable loading over and over and over.

And as a personal gripe, I hate not having my ironsights/aiming bound to the right mouse button, and having it stay up instead of automatically go down when I release. Re-binding proved impractical because of how they designed their cover system. I have hundreds of hours of muscle memory from games like Fallout and STALKER aiming with that right mouse button. Not being able to do it feels like losing a hand.

So...good game, potential to be a VERY good game is there, I can see it...but there are certainly some rough edges on it.

What I did is I switched cover to "toggle" in the gameplay options. That way you just have to press a button to enter and the same button to leave (I chose middle mouse).

 

[Simeon Ivanov]

So apart from the Loading times, I take it the game is good? I live in Europe and I'll receive my copy of the game tomorrow

 

[pspman45]

Absolutely love it
everything is great, the minigames, the conversations, the stealth

Just plain awesome

 

[Weaver]

Ok, well I just played through the introduction level and it feels pretty solid. Still no idea what the gunplay is like as I stealthed through the attack. I think I am really going to enjoy it. I do have some technical issues with it at them moment.

1/ I'm having some performance issues, I left the graphic options at the auto settings and while my GPU monitor is telling me I'm getting 59-60 FPS I'm getting some stuttering, it might be an issue with the v-sync though I'll try triple buffering which is apparently off as default. I do have some graphics tweaking to do. Might be that Nvidia isn't the preferred GPU but that is a shit excuse.

2/ The mouse feels a bit floaty. In combination with the stuttering that occurs sometimes this isn't ideal in shooter/RPG. I know from experience I'll get used to it, but again not ideal.

3/ If you are playing on PC try walking in a diagonal line. Hot dog that is fast isn't it? Remember speed strafing in Goldeneye or Perfect Dark? Well it is back. I don't know should I consider this a perk or a problem. I'm sure this will be fixed in a patch.

4/ Character animations tend to look sped up and twitchy. I've had this in games before (most notably in R6: Vegas 2 where it was most disturbing). I don't know if it is because my machine is too fast for the game or maybe all the characters are meant to be coke/meth heads. I might be able to change things by bumping up the graphics options, but that could harm my framerate and stuttering issue. Like I said, I have some tweaking to do.

Nitpicky things I'm sure I'll either get used to them or they will be patched eventually. Otherwise I'm really looking forward to delving further into this game. Shame I have a sick child (I'm just getting over a bugger of a cold myself, the poor boy, I know he feels) and a weekend away planned.

Anyone know if you can skip through conversations? I had to restart a minor level after I forgot to pause the game when I went to comfort my son, and rather than get reprimanded for faffing about I played it again and had to do the conversations again.

EDIT: I just had a thought (I know, I'll give you a moment to recover from your shock). Anyway what if the speed strafing thing is a shout out to old-school Deus Ex players? The original did do the same thing so maybe it is a sneaky Easter-Egg?

Just remembered a fifth issue.
5/ Loading times are pretty damn long.

I'd like to recommend some things to you
1) Try turning off v-sync. That made my mouse feel way better. With v-sync off also turn off tripple buffering, it does nothing with v-sync off anyways.

2) If you're getting stuttering with an nVidia card, a lot of people have reported turning SSAO to "normal" or "off" has stopped their stuttering.

3) if people get mysterious "dots" on them, try turning off tesselation. I had this problem.

4) Don't use MLAA for anti-aliasing, that's an ATI specific thing. Use FXAA or any other option.

 

[4173]

Liking it a lot. But these loading times really make experimentation a ************. Super cloak seems a little OP, but it's single player so who cares.

 

[Harkonnen64]

the storyline is quite gripping thus far.
how do you guys feel about it?

Not so much loving the story as I am loving the philosophical arguments the story brings up. My friends and I have been watching one of our friends play it from the beginning. At one point, we paused the game for an hour to argue the ethics of putting guns into agumentations. We've spent more time discussing the game than we have playing the game.

 

[gmaverick019_v1legacy]

loving it.

the only problem that i have with it, is the loading times, which is odd because mass effect 2/new vegas/civ V which i have all played the past month hardcore, have had next to no load times (new vegas loaded within 1-2 seconds consistent) while deus ex takes a solid 15-20 seconds usually to load if i died or something.

which yeah that's a very very small problem, but when you have to make a jump across the roof and accidently forget to press the sprint button and fall to your death, its annoying as hell to waste 2-3 minutes just for loading and retrying.

 

[Nomanslander]

It's Dues Ex 1, and how 2 should have been....absolutely loving it so far!

 

[Kopikatsu]

Being a completionist, this game is a nightmare!

Maybe I'm crazy OCD, but you can make so much money doing tedious things. For instance, a shotgun sells for (i think) 360 and a pistol for 180. However, if you pick up a gun you already have it just adds ammo. This is inefficient, so I have to pick up one gun, sell it, go back pick up another, sell it, go back; etc.

It's boring, it takes forever, but it makes good cash.

As I said in another thread, the bias towards stealth is frustrating. Ghost, Smooth Operator and Silent Knockouts give more experience than any other method, thus making the whole "choose how you approach it" thing not really a choice at all. Given that, why do we even need weapon upgrades if the game doesn't want us to use them?

... ... ...Boss fights? If you don't have super weapons for boss fights, it will be HORRIBLE.

First time player of any Deus Ex game, and I am loving it. And I'm just thankful it's a prequel of the first Deus Ex so I'm not missing much in terms of story. It's very fun, story is amazing, stealth is amazingly well done. And I came across a glitch once that I'm not sure how I performed. I performed a takedown on an enemy with another one looking right at me, and he allowed me to pull the body back to cover(mind you WHILE he's looking at me) as if he never saw me at all. I only really have one gripe with the graphics in this game. Facial animation.

Spoiler

Josie Thorpe still had a smile on her face while she mourned her now dead husband. Whuuuuut?

The HUD is extremely easy for me to use, but I do wish the map was a bit more detailed in terms of paths I can and cannot take. There have been several times I tried to take a path to get somewhere, only to find my way barred by a fence or anything else that could stop me.

To be fair on the graphical aspect, the game started development four years ago...

 

[Chased]

loving it.

the only problem that i have with it, is the loading times, which is odd because mass effect 2/new vegas/civ V which i have all played the past month hardcore, have had next to no load times (new vegas loaded within 1-2 seconds consistent) while deus ex takes a solid 15-20 seconds usually to load if i died or something.

which yeah that's a very very small problem, but when you have to make a jump across the roof and accidently forget to press the sprint button and fall to your death, its annoying as hell to waste 2-3 minutes just for loading and retrying.

This is my biggest gripe with it, especially considering how heavily this game revolves around experimentation. The automatic saving system can is pretty faulty too, overall still a great game.

 

[Waaghpowa]

What I love about it, is how it's basically the original game in almost every way with some modern changes i.e guns and cover.

loving it.

the only problem that i have with it, is the loading times, which is odd because mass effect 2/new vegas/civ V which i have all played the past month hardcore, have had next to no load times (new vegas loaded within 1-2 seconds consistent) while deus ex takes a solid 15-20 seconds usually to load if i died or something.

which yeah that's a very very small problem, but when you have to make a jump across the roof and accidently forget to press the sprint button and fall to your death, its annoying as hell to waste 2-3 minutes just for loading and retrying.

Some people in the community have done some tests, on the PC version anyway, to determine what is causing the long load times. Apparently it's a bug in the engine that directly links the rate at which it reads files to the frames per second. So essentially, the game reads X number of files a second where X is equal to your FPS, rather than all of them. This should get patched soon, if you're still having problems, turn off Vsync and allow your system to run the highest number of FPS for the fastest load times.

 

[gmaverick019_v1legacy]

What I love about it, is how it's basically the original game in almost every way with some modern changes i.e guns and cover.

loving it.

the only problem that i have with it, is the loading times, which is odd because mass effect 2/new vegas/civ V which i have all played the past month hardcore, have had next to no load times (new vegas loaded within 1-2 seconds consistent) while deus ex takes a solid 15-20 seconds usually to load if i died or something.

which yeah that's a very very small problem, but when you have to make a jump across the roof and accidently forget to press the sprint button and fall to your death, its annoying as hell to waste 2-3 minutes just for loading and retrying.

Some people in the community have done some tests, on the PC version anyway, to determine what is causing the long load times. Apparently it's a bug in the engine that directly links the rate at which it reads files to the frames per second. So essentially, the game reads X number of files a second where X is equal to your FPS, rather than all of them. This should get patched soon, if you're still having problems, turn off Vsync and allow your system to run the highest number of FPS for the fastest load times.

not to call you wrong but i found the first one very boring (idk, i'll give it another un through this year i'm sure) while this one i can't get my hands off of it i'm addicted.

i'll try that with the v-sync though, i had everything cranked to max possible running smooth so i didn't really think to turn off v-sync for that specific problem.

 

[NickCaligo42]

12 hours and it's fantastic. Best game I've played in a long, long time. I can probably call it right now as my game of the year. I'd even go as far as to say that it's actually a huge improvement on Deus Ex 1. Skills and augments consolidated into one system with more depth and fewer wasted elements (looking at you, swimming and every weapon skill that's not pistols), more friendly to the exploration element, more advanced level design and interface, no dumb AI exploits on bosses (Ah, come to kill me, have you? I use the power of LADDER!), MUCH better art style, the list keeps going.

What I love about it, is how it's basically the original game in almost every way with some modern changes i.e guns and cover.

What I like more is that they added those concepts, but they did it in their own way, without depending on them to replace shit from the original. The cover system is a lot more fluid than most, for instance, and you don't need to sacrifice crouching and jumping oldschool FPS style to use it. I'd even go as far as to actually back up the regen system they have here. It's well justified, it's tweaked to be better-suited to the kind of high-stakes combat Deus Ex is known for, and it manages to work in things like health items anyway (and they're fucking invaluable), keeping a lot of the rewards that could have been sacrificed. Favorite part? Stim packs can give you health above the regen threshold. That's saved my ass a few times.

 

[CRRPGMykael]

I've played the BETA version so far and it looks AWESOME.I guess I'm a sucker for nice stealth in games...can't wait for the full version!

 

[Waaghpowa]

not to call you wrong but i found the first one very boring (idk, i'll give it another un through this year i'm sure) while this one i can't get my hands off of it i'm addicted.

This is a bit anecdotal, but I have a friend who is a long time gamer, like me, except he was more console, while I was the kid who played DOS games on floppy. He only recently tried the first Deus Ex and found it incredibly difficult. Now that he's is playing the new one, and loving it, he feels confident that he can go through the original one now, since, as I said, HR is basically the first game in almost every way. Aside from a lot of the modern upgrades to things like combat, this is the closest feeling to playing the original one I've ever had.

 

[Waaghpowa]

What I love about it, is how it's basically the original game in almost every way with some modern changes i.e guns and cover.

What I like more is that they added those concepts, but they did it in their own way, without depending on them to replace shit from the original. The cover system is a lot more fluid than most, for instance, and you don't need to sacrifice crouching and jumping oldschool FPS style to use it. I'd even go as far as to actually back up the regen system they have here. It's well justified, it's tweaked to be better-suited to the kind of high-stakes combat Deus Ex is known for, and it manages to work in things like health items anyway (and they're fucking invaluable), keeping a lot of the rewards that could have been sacrificed. Favorite part? Stim packs can give you health above the regen threshold. That's saved my ass a few times.

That's what I mean, it takes everything that made the first game amazing while improving upon them with modern mechanics and concepts. I honestly feel like this is Deus Ex: Modernized.

 

[gmaverick019_v1legacy]

not to call you wrong but i found the first one very boring (idk, i'll give it another un through this year i'm sure) while this one i can't get my hands off of it i'm addicted.

This is a bit anecdotal, but I have a friend who is a long time gamer, like me, except he was more console, while I was the kid who played DOS games on floppy. He only recently tried the first Deus Ex and found it incredibly difficult. Now that he's is playing the new one, and loving it, he feels confident that he can go through the original one now, since, as I said, HR is basically the first game in almost every way. Aside from a lot of the modern upgrades to things like combat, this is the closest feeling to playing the original one I've ever had.

it wasn't the difficulty, it just was..idk, i pushed myself through 3 hours of it and i was so fucking bored all i could think about was anything but the game.

i'll give it another run through though just to appreciate it being the sequel to the game i am playing now.

 

[Waaghpowa]

-

There was probably more to it with my friend than "It's hard", it could most likely be the time period that the game was from. What was normal for me 10 years ago isn't going to come off the same to someone who plays it now. Anyway, it's possible too that certain things in the original aren't entirely clear, whereas the new one is less obtuse.

 

[drummond13]

Being a completionist, this game is a nightmare!

Maybe I'm crazy OCD, but you can make so much money doing tedious things. For instance, a shotgun sells for (i think) 360 and a pistol for 180. However, if you pick up a gun you already have it just adds ammo. This is inefficient, so I have to pick up one gun, sell it, go back pick up another, sell it, go back; etc.

It's boring, it takes forever, but it makes good cash.

As I said in another thread, the bias towards stealth is frustrating. Ghost, Smooth Operator and Silent Knockouts give more experience than any other method, thus making the whole "choose how you approach it" thing not really a choice at all. Given that, why do we even need weapon upgrades if the game doesn't want us to use them?

No maybe about it, that's crazy OCD

That's actually a clever moneymaking scheme, but it doesn't sound nearly worth the tedium of carrying it out.