Owyn_Merrilin said:
Well, the holidays are here, which means only one thing to PC gamers: Steam sales! I'm incredibly cheap when it comes to buying for myself, so there haven't been many games that screamed out at me so far, but there was one deal I couldn't pass up: Deus Ex for $2.49. That's U.S. dollars, not pounds sterling. Needless to say I bought it, installed it, and played through the tutorial. Upon reaching the final part of the tutorial, I pick up a box of dynamite, drop it in the wrong place, and have my legs crippled. I spend the next couple of minutes crawling around, getting shot by the robot, and generally failing to get to the other side of the ditch. While it was apparently impossible to actually die during the tutorial, I had managed to render it impossible to complete.
Thinking to myself "no big deal, it's optional and I've already learned what it was supposed to teach me, I'll just start the game." I start the game, take a few steps out into the world... and die. "No big deal, I'll reload the autosave and restart the mission." There is no autosave. I have to create my character, again. I recreate the character, take about twice as many steps into the world, and die once again. I forgot to save this time, so I once again create a new character and restart. This time I save, take a few steps out, and die. After about ten tries, I finally get to the dock with the informant I'm supposed to meet, try to shock a guard with a cattle prod, have him just stand there instead of going down, and wind up distracting me long enough for his buddy to kill me. This is the hardest freaking FPS I have ever played in my life.
For discussion value: For those of you who love Deus Ex, what exactly do you see in it? I get the feeling that I'll enjoy it if I can actually get a decent distance into the game, but so far it's at I Wanna Be the Guy levels of frustration. Did I mention that I'm playing on medium difficulty? For those of you who haven't played the game, do you have any stories of ridiculously frustrating games?
Edit: Fixed some grammatical issues in the post; nothing too major, just some misspellings and tense disagreements.
Going back to Deus Ex now IS a bit of a shock, but mostly because of old design philosophy- IE, theres no Autosave, and no handholding in the tutorial. Remember how old it is.
The problem is your playing it as a FPS. It's not. It's an RPG with FPS trappings, everything you do is handled by calculation in the backround. Late game, if you up your gun skills, it becomes like an FPS, but situations still almost universally require tactical thinking and taking advantage of your environment. If you try to run and gun, for at least half the game you WILL die.
Deus Ex is considered stellar for it's writing, it's story, and it's choice. You can choose to do almost everything. At one point a superior will order you to kill a prisoner. You can Follow orders, or refuse until that superior does it themselves. Or, and I just found this out years later on another play through, you can KILL THAT SUPERIOR AND COVER IT UP.
It doesn't actually change the direction of the plot much, but the sheer fact you can do it is...tremendous.
Deus Ex was a highly intellectual game. I'd suggest the second if you wanted more of a fpsy experiance, but the fact of the matter is Invisible War was technologically inferior in every way, due to being developed primarily for the X-Box.
The Third is coming out soon, many fans are worried. But it may be more up your alley.
