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That leaves out too many details. I always found this video gave a better picture of the whole story.
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Dec 10, 2014 07:06
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Tiggum posted:A diamond in the rough, perhaps. I really like it and find it a lot more playable than Deus Ex, but it's far from perfect. I do think most of the criticism of it comes down to the fact that it's a sequel to Deus Ex though, which set up a lot of expectations that it couldn't live up to, especially with the rose-tinted glasses people seem to see the original through. No, people hate it because it's kinda crap. The load times and tiny levels alone would make it worlds worse, and the plot does a good job of killing any interest you might still have by destroying any incentive to care about anything in the narrative. The health balance is awful (in Deus Ex on realistic, getting shot with a pistol hurts like hell. In Invisible War, even on realistic it barely dings your health meter), the universal ammo system shits all over everything from exploration incentives to weapon balance, the biomod setup is incoherent and lets you max out less than half way into the game while heavily penalizing experimentation... It's a Bad Game.
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Dec 10, 2014 10:20
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Tiggum posted:I understand these complaints, but they never bothered me. It's still a massive objective flaw. The game loving reboots itself every level transition! That's Sonic '06 levels of lovely programming. Tiggum posted:This though, I just don't get. The plot of all the Deus Ex games is terrible. They're just ridiculously absurd and take themselves so seriously. If you're playing these games for the plot, I just don't understand where you're coming from. It's not that the plot is bad (although the writing in Invisible War is much worse), it's that the game continually undermines any attempt at emotional investment. Every time you can have a motive for something beyond "Getting paid", the game makes an effort to remind you that everyone is an rear end in a top hat and planning to stab you in the back. I mean, you can be a loyal Illuminati goon all game, and their idea of motivating you is still kidnapping one of your (supposed) friends and threatening her unless you do as they say. Now, if the game was going for a whole "Chaos is a ladder" thing, that would be fine. But it's not. It keeps offering quests where the only reward is the warm fuzzies and doesn't offer an ending where you stand at the top and just stomp on everyone else's fingers. Tiggum posted:Another thing I understand but disagree with. I don't like games that are hard. I died a few times in Invisible War, but not enough to make me stop playing. I know that some people like games that really make you work, but IW hit the right difficulty level for me to not be too frustrating but still not let me just play it on autopilot. The problem isn't the difficulty. The problem is that sniper rifles do a whole health bar's worth of damage and pistols barely ping it. Enemies shooting at you are either irrelevant or hot bullshit about to kill you with very little middle ground, which doesn't make for fun encounter design. And the damage you deal is bad too. You don't one hit kill children when you hit them with the dragon's tooth. Where Deus Ex 1 and Human Revolution both rewarded your planning with quick takedowns, Invisible War has everything sponge up damage. Tiggum posted:This is my biggest disagreement with people over IW. I love universal ammo. It lets you use the guns you like and ignore the guns you don't and you never end up breaking into some locked or hard to find cache to find some ammo you don't want or can't use. Universal ammo is brilliant. No, it means that you can't mix up weapon use, and that no ammo rewards will ever be interesting. Other people covered it already more thoroughly than I will, but anything that cuts off backup weapons is a pretty bad idea. Tiggum posted:I don't even know how what you're saying could be possible here. IW lets you max out your mods and then totally switch them out for others so you get the chance to play with different options. It's fantastic. It lets you play with your fully maxed augs from quite early in the game and then lets you change your mind and play with something else. It's one of my favourite things about the game. What I'm saying is that every time you dropped a mod, you lost all the resources invested in it. If you knew what you wanted at the start, then you were done with new abilities and advancements halfway through the game. If you didn't, every time you switched something out, it was at the cost of all the aug canisters you'd used on it with no refunds or exchanges. Which, considering you have no idea how many canisters you're getting the first time through (and if you were basing your estimates on the first game, you'd think you'd barely get enough to max everything if you found every single upgrade) discourages experimentation.
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Dec 11, 2014 08:59
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Rookersh posted:Yes, it was a buggy mess. No argument so far. Rookersh posted:None of that adds up to the amount of vitriol that game gets on a regular basis. The world was interesting, well defined, and the themes they pushed did actually provoke some measure of thought ( can utopia only be achieved by hiding the undesirable aspects, failure and the denial of self, etc ). The story while cheesy was decently told, and it provided enough mystery to get players to the ending, provided they were willing to put up with the technical problems. As an added benefit, they took one of the coolest things Deus Ex did and expanded on it, taking the nonlethal/lethal track and expanding it into an entire games worth of faction options. While Liberty Island/Castle Clinton were the only two levels that mattered for nonlethal/lethal in Deus Ex, your choices over the entire game matter to the factions in Invisible War. Now the argument starts. The problem with Invisible War's story is that it didn't make your choices matter. It's most obvious if you do a Yojimbo run, flipping sides at every chance to make a buck or gently caress someone over, but even in a pure loyalist run the facade cracks. You can repeatedly murder someone's finest lieutenants, even the woman someone (supposedly) loves, and they keep trying to hire you with the same arguments that they'd use on a hardcore loyalist. Worse, any time you try to invest in something emotionally, they rip the rug out from under you. Like the idea of being a corporate merc, like the game promises at the start? Well, gently caress you, the academy is destroyed as part of the tutorial mission. (Deus Ex the first, meanwhile, gives you nearly half a game to get into being the cool dudes in the black helicopters killing terrorists before it forced you to confront the fact your coworkers were looking at that new catalog of hats with skulls on them) Like one of the factions? gently caress you, all the initial faction choices are made irrelevant by the midgame twist. The only thing that matters come the ending is who you support in the last mission (and, to a lesser extent, who you back in the second to last mission). As for themes, I think Tom Francis (who actually liked IW) said it best. "Invisible War fails by being too scared to suggest a morally acceptable faction, and thus systematically destroying the philosophical appeal of each of the ideologies to which your character can subscribe, and thereby any spark to the plot that could make it enjoyable for repeat plays. It's fun to replay Deus Ex even when you know the twist is coming because there are real, compelling things involved - UNATCO resembles the US government unwaveringly and believably, and the NSF are exactly like certain terrorist groups with a good cause but not enough organisation to keep their methods moral. In Invisible War, you're not interested in the factions because they're all murderous hypocrites with nothing but vague, philosophically feeble rhetoric to justify their actions. You don't even believe that they believe it, let alone that it's worth fighting for or caring about. It was such a disastrously bad design decision to 'balance' them with flaws rather than working on convincing you of their merits." Rookersh posted:Even outside of storytelling the game was quite well done. Unlike Deus Ex, which presented you as a super soldier in name only, Invisible War finally gave you the power to play with the combat engine. While I'm sure some people legitimately enjoyed playing on Realistic and dying in a single hit, it somewhat ran counter intuitive to everyone claiming you were some sort of nanoaug badass who could tank bullets in most encounters. Invisible War fixed this, making the combat challenging for the average player, but also giving the player enough tools to deal with enemies from all sorts of angles/paths. They also fixed the energy issues inherent to the original game. While energy was at a premium in the original Deus Ex, only giving you the chance to fire off augs to get around/sections of combat when things were going poorly, Invisible War offered enough energy to encourage aug use during basic combat encounters, which added a bit more spice to them. And here's where I grudgingly concede a point. Deus Ex the first made augs a bit of a pain to use. I mean, if you had speed boosts and regen on and were carrying the DTS you were a blur of nanotech murder (running on worn out D cells), but for the most part, and especially early on, you still felt like a fragile creature of meat and bone. Invisible War's augs were a little simpler to work with. I mean, that was more than countered by the awful inventory and ammo system, but I give you this. Rookersh posted:Ultimately, while the levels were smaller thanks to the loading screens, they were also much larger in scope and scale if you were able to ignore them. Only the cities really suffered from the transition to consoles, with Seattle and Egypt being a bit smaller in scope/scale then Hell's Kitchen/China. The actual gameplay zones ended up being as large or larger then the average Deus Ex level, and offered as many if not more options to get into/through them. The addition of new augs/new grenades/new guns opened up strategies you couldn't even think about in Deus Ex. Like my favorite, throwing down a spiderbot, taking control of it with droid control, and then using it to sneak past everyone to the turret control center. Or using the rifle that shoots through walls alongside the eye aug to snipe general enemies before I even had the alarms sound. But the loading screens have a huge impact on levels even aside from the nuisance factor. They mean action in one part of the map can't influence the other parts as directly. And every strategy added comes at the price of other tactics lost. Deus Ex the first had plenty of chances for long range sniping, impossible with IW's basketball sized maps. The new ammo system and inventory cut off a lot of the older alpha striking plays and incentive to use oddball strategies (If you saved GEP gun ammo, it was one of the most versatile tools in your inventory. Meanwhile, the fire extinguisher only taking one slot encouraged using it in emergencies, whereas IW's rocket launcher candy bar equivalency makes oddball items much less useful). First Deus Ex also had enemies running out of ammo and taking damage to different parts. You could disable an enemy by breaking his arms, whereas IW didn't even have headshots before it was patched. Seriously, those levels are tiny. It's painful. Rookersh posted:I play through both games on a yearly basis, and Invisible War has just gotten better with age, thanks to the reduction in loading times. I played it less than two years ago, on a quad core with 8 gigs of ram. If those were reduced loading times, then I'm shocked anyone ever beat that piece of poo poo. Think they would have died of old age first. Rookersh posted:I honestly find a lot of the hate it gets nonsensical ( "There is no reason to explore!" leads people to not have any ammo. I've beaten the entire game only using the rocket launcher/mako rifle before and had no problems. I regularly fire off all sorts of big guns before switching to pistols again, and don't have any ammo problems. If you are having ammo problems, maybe you should be exploring? ), and the few people I've convinced to play it on my friends list have largely ended up enjoying it. Obviously none of us think it's a better game then Deus Ex, which is still one of the best games ever made, but it was a pretty good game in the same vein. It's a good RPG that now only has a few odd bugs, but is still treated as one of the worst games ever made because it was the first real console to PC port. No, it's treated as one of the worst games ever made because it's a moderately lovely game with abysmal optimization that came as a sequel to one of the best games ever made. It isn't just that it's not great, or that it's a sequel to a much better game, though. It also bares a lot of its shittiness on its sleeve. Deus Ex the first had awful voice work, but it took it in fun, and JC's monotone was fun and entertaining. Meanwhile, Alex D (meaning no insult to the VAs. I mean, we are talking the boss of the Saints here) has some of the least engaging voicework ever. The graphics make Deus Ex 1 look good (Which scientists previously deemed impossible), the big twist is self-evidently stupid in ways you can't help but notice, the constant chatter from the various faction leaders made it impossible to ignore the fact that they would ignore you eating their children in front of them to give you the same hiring spiel next level, the features cut stand out on even a casual look, and the crap programming is impossible to miss. (Tiny levels, 2 kinds of multitool with no difference except taking up different inventory slots, etc.) I hold no ill-will for anyone involved in the game. Harvey Smith made Dishonored, after all, and if there's a more suitable penance I can't imagine it. But the game itself can burn.
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Dec 13, 2014 23:43
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Tiggum posted:I've never understood this as a complaint against Invisible War specifically. No game I'm aware of has ever done this well, and Invisible War didn't fail in a worse way than anything else. I mean even the flawless Deus Ex was super bad about this. Alpha Protocol, for all its other faults, does okay. But the problem isn't that it fails. The problem is it draws back the curtain too much. When people keep calling you after you murder their families or try to threaten you into working for them when you've been a model employee, that wrecks the illusion. The game goes out of its way to let you know nothing you do matters. Tiggum posted:Well, there is at least some attempt to justify this. You're not just some guy, all the factions actually need you specifically (except for the templars, and they need the others not to get you). No, they just need a Tarsus grad. And there's four of 'em around, minimum. That's only at the end, even, with most of the jobs in the middle being anyone's game. And if we're taking your angle that they need you, then they do a piss-poor job of showing it most of the time. They nag at you to do their dirtywork, but they never show much talent in basic salesmanship. I mean, one of the groups is the Illuminati. Why aren't they offering you all the money? They could do that. Easily. But they don't, because everyone in invisible war except the Omar is a stupid rear end in a top hat. Tiggum posted:As opposed to Deus Ex, where the only thing that matters come the ending is who you support in the last mission? You were the one talking about the rich depth of Invisible War's reactivity. Not my fault that it's just as bad at the big things as its predecessor. And it shows less little details. Again, it's all a lie, but it matters how well you sell the lie. Deus Ex did it well. Invisible war didn't. Tiggum posted:It wasn't too scared, it's intentional. So, it intentionally sent the message "Nothing in the world is worth a second's attention, just murder people at random. Can't do a worse job than the assholes on the intercom." I don't think you're making the argument for the merits of Invisible War's plot that you think you are. Tiggum posted:Sorry, anything you say about the voice acting in Deus Ex other than "it was terrible" is just making excuses for it. It was bad. And yet IW was even worse. And unlike Deus Ex, where the comparatively decent-ish voice work went to the leads and the shittiest stuff mostly went to late game incidental characters, IW has the worst performances from Alex D. (JC also got much more memorable dialog. Try to find a good Alex D. line. Just try.) (And I haven't even got to the datacubes. If you ever needed proof Invisible War wasn't even as well written as the first Deus Ex, there you go. Just compare Jacob's Shadow and Jacob's War to get the differences between the two games in a nutshell. To top it off, while Deus Ex the first grabs the obscure but perfect for the task at hand "The Man Who Was Thursday" for its focal literary reference, Invisible War just puts a bit of Frankenstein in the last level, the go-to for every hack who needs to show they've read something about technology gone bad.) chiasaur11 fucked around with this message at 04:58 on Dec 14, 2014 |
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Dec 14, 2014 04:56
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