Eidos Outsourced Those Deux Ex: HR Boss Fights

[Dendio]

I don't know about that. The boss fights are easy if you know the cheap strategies to defeat them.

The problem was that nothing In-game hinted at these cheap strategies. Nothing you learned in thee previous level hinted at the cheap strategies. The average gamer will go in there and get overwhelmed with no clues whatsoever. So you just die until you get lucky and find out that you can toss the barrels ( no clue that barrels are movable until this) at the first dude or go online and read a strat.

 

[Zeitgeist1983]

DLC is needed to fix this

Agreed!

 

[Atmos Duality]

Eh, they were obnoxious and didn't really contribute shit to the story, but I don't bin an entire game because of one small element (and really, these are insignificant elements in the grand scheme of the game).

Though this does explain the jarring shift in tone (and quality) for each of those encounters.

EDIT:

The problem was that nothing In-game hinted at these cheap strategies. Nothing you learned in thee previous level hinted at the cheap strategies. The average gamer will go in there and get overwhelmed with no clues whatsoever. So you just die until you get lucky and find out that you can toss the barrels ( no clue that barrels are movable until this) at the first dude or go online and read a strat.

Is it really too much to ask the average gamer to experiment even a LITTLE? Are they really that retarded now? I could go on an "old man rant" about how games used to give you table scraps for clues, but I'll spare everyone that mess.

In the first two boss fights (and the fourth), the solution is practically handed to you.
1) Gee, I wonder why he's standing next to an explosive barrel, or why they're spread across the room? NEVER SEEN DAT IN A SHOOTER BEFORE.
2) The other "entity" in the room flat out gives you the hints as you fight.

3) Ok, this one actually isn't obvious, but by this point you should have a huge pool of resources with which to attack him. Failing that, Gas Grenades and the Laser Rifle kept in one of the containers will end him easily on any difficulty (it passes through the glass).

4) Same as #3 if you have it. Otherwise, they literally just HAND YOU a loaded Plasma Rifle (and heavy rifle rounds) at the proverbial boss doors. It's not hard to figure out where to go from there.

 

[Jiefu]

I think the issue here isn't that the boss fights themselves were bad. I had a combat-ready character and found them a little dull, but they weren't the issue. The issue was that combat was the only solution. Pretty much every other part of the game let you make use of several different tactics (sneaking, cloaking, hacking, alternate paths, et cetera) for a given problem. Bosses you had to fight. You couldn't sneak around them, you couldn't hack their augmentations, the best a non-combat character could do was throw things at the first boss, electrocute the second boss, and... well, you had to fight the third one.

I don't think the design decision to force combat was made purely by this third party developer. Eidos Montreal had to have some input on this, and almost certainly had to at least approve the idea to make bosses combat-only problems. They also certainly made the decision to contract the development of the bosses to this studio that one can plainly tell is used to doing combat work.

The other issue with the bosses, that Yahtzee and others have brought up, is the lack of characterization, but that's also squarely on EM's shoulders.

 

[Prof. Monkeypox]

Dr. Paul should have been better informed/looked into the fact that the game was supposed to give you multiple options to complete it. Eidos shouldn't have outsourced the game's content in the first place if they wanted to keep a consistent feel. There, that's done.

At least now we have a concrete reason the boss fights felt so out of place, and the characters had no weight.

- There are four boss fights in Deus EX: HR, each ranging from anywhere between 1-5 minutes.

- Total amount of time spent for boss fights = 20 minutes, max.

- The game lasts for about 25 - 40 hours. Let's say 20 hours.

- The boss fights amount to 1.67% of the entire game, worst case scenario.

- Now here's the best part - people are complaining about it. Not criticizing, not pointing out a flaw, we're talking about full-on bitching here.

Interesting point. I wonder if people liked the game so much they got more angry that just one flaw was holding it back from greatness.

 

[drummond13]

The problem with the boss fights isn't the boss fights themselves; they're not stellar but they're sure not worthy of the hate they've been getting.

The problem with the boss fights is that they don't fit in the context of the game. Deus Ex makes a big deal about there being multiple ways to get past every obstacle. The boss fights are the glowing exception to this rule. I don't see how this is the fault of the outsourcing company; it sounds like they delivered exactly what was asked of them.

 

[Vonnis]

Yes, it's stupid that Eidos outsourced the boss battles. It's stupid that they apparently approved of what was delivered.
That's not saying this guy didn't fuck up enormously though. Maybe I'm being silly here, but if I was given a job to create a part of a game, which is the third in a franchise, and I didn't know much about it, I'd make it my business to play the other games in said franchise before doing anything so that I knew what the hell I was working on.

 

[RJ Dalton]

Eidos is still responsible. These guys just did what they were told. Just like all the other bazillion contracts put out with software every day.

Yeah, what he said.

 

[Tsaba]

All I did for the first boss fight was grab a fire extinguisher throw unload guns and rinse wash repeat, but, for shits and giggles.

What was I thinking this is some:

 

[Susurrus]

Outsourcing the boss fights just seems odd. Isn't that as close to outsourcing an ending as you can get, without actually outsourcing the ending? What a bizarre decision.

 

[MaxwellEdison]

Their idea of balancing it was to play through with different guns.

/sigh

Well, that explains quite a bit.

 

[Twilight_guy]

This just in, Eidos Montreal learns what "passing the buck" means!

Even if it was outsourced they should have made it clear what the fight should have and told them to design a non-violent path as well as any other necessary styles. Its an extra few liens of details, its not hard.

 

[jthm]

He doesn't even try to hide the fact that they shoehorned a paint by numbers boss fight scheme into a game that he knew nothing about until approached with the job, he just talks it up like what he's done isn't exactly the same as every other cookie cutter fps boss fight. What a tool.

Can we please get a patch to undo these boss fights and dlc to remake them into something playable?

 

[CrawlingPastaHellion]

Upgraded Typhoon takes care of all the boss fights with ease even on "Give Me Deus Ex". It's cheap: only three praxis points in total. I don't really see what's the big deal. Give the guys a break, they made an excellent game that did the original justice.

 

[Terminal Blue]

What's kind of sad is that the boss fights are actually so close to being interesting.. I found Jaron's fight in particular very atmospheric, although stupidly tough if you make one bad decision earlier in the game. It actually had me shooting at anything that moved at one point. However, the main problem is that all the bosses (except the last one, which I'd only tenuously call a boss fight at all and is actually the best of the bunch to the extent that sections of it reward stealth and hacking ability) are far too mobile and aggressive considering how brutal and quick most of the combat in Human Revolution is.

Also, although I'd hesitate to call it anything but an accident, having the right stealth augmentations does make the latter two fights a lot easier. Mark and track, anyone?

However, we really don't know the full story. It may be that originally Jensen was meant to be a lot more resilient and that even non-combat characters would be able to run around exchanging fire with these man-tanks much more freely. That could have been fun, and wouldn't necessarily have even been terribly frustrating, unless you wanted a non-lethal approach to every fight. But the way it was set up, the Tyrants did kind of need to die.

Speaking of them as a story element, they also needed to be much better integrated and explained in the game so we knew who the fuck they were. They do actually have interesting backstories (Jaron in particular), and for fuck's sake Gunther Hermann was one, merely knowing that would have given them a lot more context within the franchise as a whole. But all of these things only appear in a background novel, why the hell isn't it in the game itself? I understand a blacks ops unit is meant to be secret, but part of playing a Deus Ex game is meant to be uncovering secrets like that. This in particular is where the passing the buck to the guy who did the tech falls down, the failure to integrate them with the wider concept and story was what made the boss fights feel tacked on and unnecessary, and that was definitely Eidos' responsibility.

 

[Elf Defiler Korgan]

Characters aren't complex because of 70-80 nodes.

He says they tried it with different guns trying to make it fun, but doesn't understand, what if you didn't have a powerful gun? What if you were the master of stealth, hacking and Q?

 

[karoliso]

- There are four boss fights in Deus EX: HR, each ranging from anywhere between 1-5 minutes.

- Total amount of time spent for boss fights = 20 minutes, max.

- The game lasts for about 25 - 40 hours. Let's say 20 hours.

- The boss fights amount to 1.67% of the entire game, worst case scenario.

- Now here's the best part - people are complaining about it. Not criticizing, not pointing out a flaw, we're talking about full-on bitching here.

Hell. No. They took me a LONG time to finish. Primarily because I had a stealth build and had almost no fire power. It also didn't help that my game glitched out at the end of the final boss (Jensen got stuck to a piece of cover while the enemies showered him with bullets) and had to start it all over. In the end I had to tone down the difficulty every time I encountered a boss and I didn't get the achievement for finishing the game on the Deus Ex difficulty. It does not matter even if the boss battles are "short". After reloading a game for the 20th time you really get to the point where you're almost ready to throw the game in the bin.

 

[Jorias]

I was coming into this not knowing alot about the Deus Ex world

I gotta admit i am a shooter guy

Wait what? is dumb fuck for real? wow Eidos, Outsource fail, how bout u hire me instead? i am a well rounded gamer, and i know Deus Ex pretty much like the back of my fucking hand

 

[Scars Unseen]

The company I work for outsources to a few companies to keep costs down. When the subcontractors fuck up, it's still our fault. I don't blame Grip for not knowing the source material. I blame Eidos for not hiring someone who knows the source material.

 

[endplanets]

I don't know what this guy could do because it seems like he was really out of the loop.
But this is Eidos fault since they just gave it to a guy out of the loop.

Here is how boss fights can improve
1) combat: no comment
2) Stealth: let the player pop in and out like a Predator. Make the enemy have some kind of vision cone.
3) Hacking: disable some enemy weapons, turn on friendly turrets, get special weapons, let the player change the environment, cause boss to "short out" for a second every once in a while.
4) conversation: convince flunky to change environment/ get the boss in a better environment. Convince flunkies to give you weapons, find secret passages, etc. Be able to convince some bosses to surrender when they are low on health (also a way to not have to kill every enemy in the game.) Sprout out custom short speeches that enrage/frighten/overestimate/underestimate the player which changes their AI for a time.