Ben X

The Big FPS Playthrough MISSION COMPLETE

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I'm in Detroit now and it's opened up into a proper sprawling level now, which is cool. There are still the usual Deus Ex problems (which may be common to RPGs, I dunno), like feeling obliged to do a ton of rather dull secondary missions in order to rank up a bit, and being given tons of clues and information that I can never wrangle into a clear strategy. Honestly, what I'd like is a map with labels on it, possibly labels I can make myself when I find a point of interest, and a list of pertinent info I've found out from conversations, emails etc, ideally with each bit of info having a hyperlink to a map location if it mentions it (or let me create a hyperlink to one of my own POIs so it feels more like I'm putting the pieces together). It may be a little hand-holdy but I'd prefer it to having to scan through dozens of emails every time I want to remind myself of something, or having a pen and paper ready to note down the vague directions NPCs give me. I found a map of secret entrances and stuff in a detective's office that I snuck into, and I really wish Jensen's UI had scanned that and applied it to my overall map because I just could not contextualise it.

 

The story and setting isn't half as interesting as Invisible War so far...

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Maps you can add your own notes to is something I wish more games had. It was really cool in thief to be able to write down notes on the map for points of interest. For supporting it on consoles where input it more awkward, Zelda Breath of the Wild handled this really well by giving you about 6 or 7 icons which were generic enough that you could impart your own meaning on them. It worked really well and helped me keep focused on what I was doing safe in the knowledge that I have a note on my map that there's something interesting here.

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You could do it in Th1ef? I don't think I was ever aware of that. As I remember it, though, you couldn't see where you were on the map, so I always had trouble reconciling the hand-drawn maps with the actual levels and notes probably wouldn't have helped. It's one of those things that would be easy enough IRL but the disconnect of video games renders difficult. Another Deus Ex example is when they say "yeah, this dude lives on X street in the Y complex on the 4th floor", and irl you would be able to follow those instructions using prior world knowledge, shorthand notes, maps, street signs, GPS, asking strangers for directions, etc, but the relative low-fidelity of a game's visuals and world detail plus the level design often being geared towards aethetics over function and clarity makes what is an ostensibly simple task quite daunting.

 

The cyborg trappings make this all the more galling, as putting all the hyperlinks, overlays and such in would absolutely fit with the UI and story. At least in Thief it's justified that you probably would only have a crappy bit of paper with some scrawlings on it (although I'm sure some creative UI design could minimise the dissonance).

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I started the Wii U version yesterday evening. I really like the tablet ui when the game really starts after the intro, but I really disliked heavily all the combat in the first intro mission.

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Hmmm, I'll try and be careful of spoilers as you're playing along, kolzig! I won't be talking much story though, so should be fine. 

 

I've got to the next city hub now, and have levelled up a bit. Because of my new augs and weaponry, the game is starting to feel more enjoyable - the firefights are more manageable and the cover-system is actually quite cool if you make sure to get yourself in a good position and use health regen and cover a lot. Some of the quests are okay, some are either dull or confusing. For one I'm on at the moment, I'm supposed to use a non-lethal takedown, but I can't actually figure out how to do one of those. Firstly, both my takedown modes are lethal, and secondly the option doesn't pop up when I sneak up behind him [EDIT: ah ha, ok, I think the issue was I didn't have enough battery power left for a takedown after cloaking into his apartment. Also apparently one of the takedowns is non-lethal, I'll have to take another look at that]. For another, it required me to hack a terminal in a place where I was guaranteed to get swarmed by enemies but acted as if I'd be sauntering out of the place. I'm going to finish off the secondary quests I've got open, then I think I'll stick to the story quests for a while. This is a problem I find with RPGs, or RPG elements - the best strategy is to push through all the boring secondary stuff at the start to get yourself powered up enough to enjoy the main game. It even leaks through to games like Psychonauts or Rage.

 

The story is still pretty dull. I'm kind of waiting for a huge revelation to blow my mind, rather than the various strata of corporate espionage I'm working through now. The setting is kind of cool and detailed, but aside from the future-renaissance fashion and black/gold colour scheme it's the usual cyberpunk stuff. I'm getting pretty sick of clubs and brothels and strip-clubs. At least have a male pole-dancer or something if you're going to stick with the Duke Nukem settings!

 

I think I'm enjoying the game overall? It has the classic Deus Ex problem of playing as a cool dude superhuman but never really feeling in control of the situation.

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2 hours ago, Ben X said:

This is a problem I find with RPGs, or RPG elements - the best strategy is to push through all the boring secondary stuff at the start to get yourself powered up enough to enjoy the main game. It even leaks through to games like Psychonauts or Rage.

 

Yeah, the reliance that RPGs tend to have on tedium and frustration being the opportunity costs for optimal play is, in my opinion, the worst feature of the genre and its associated mechanics. It's not that bad in Human Revolution, but it ultimately made me quit Mankind Divided. So much of the content was gated by my willingness to be bored out of my skull for minutes at a time.

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Yeah. The game regularly has rooms full of boxes (be they lockers, sleeping pods or whatever) for you to laboriously go through looking for money (which you have to because some quests require you to pay up thousands of creds).

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I got around 70-80% through the game and, as per usual, this is the point of the game where I'm starting to feel like a super-agent. I've got a laser-gun so I can finally take down the armoured enemies with relative ease, I can hack bots and turrets to kill enemies and I can fall long distances. I still can't sprint for more than 4 seconds, and if I run out of candy bars all my cloaking and take-down powers are useless, but I'm getting there.

 

And then they pull the classic 'take away all your stuff' move. Suddenly I'm on a very linear level on a ship full of crates with no powers and having to save-scum through the exact stealth and platforming route laid out by the devs, kill by kill. All the weapons and augs I'd spent the whole game gathering and balancing are gone. They give a few aug points back to you and all your weapons but no ammo, so you're forced back to basics. There's a hint that if I get to a LIMB clinic I'll be able to go back to exactly what I had before, so if they do that straight after this level it won't be too bad, but will that be the case and will they give me all my ammo back too?  It's an infuriating thing for the devs to do as I approach the end stretch of the game. 

 

I found out after a little research that this is in fact the poorly-received DLC that has been inserted into the middle of the Director's Cut. What a bone-headed decision. I probably wouldn't have minded if they'd given me all my stuff back - sure I'd be overpowered for this section, but it might have been a nice break in the game to just rip through a more Half-Life/Modern Warfare level without breaking a sweat. As it is I almost rage-uninstalled. If they don't get me back on track directly after this section, I still might.

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That's the whole shit show with the DC. Missing Link was a standalone game executable/entry in the steam library and they only shoe horned it into the game instead of doing good things. It's a separate DLC with whack progression fucking at the end. It could be the dealbreaker for you :P

 

mechanics spoiler

you start the DLC mission with lets say 20 skill points. you find 17 points over the mission (let's say there's more than 20 in the mission), once the mission ends you get 3 extra points.



 

if you start with 20 points, find 23, you get _nothing_ back at the end of it.

 

it's really garbage

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I'm not sure if I'm understanding your spoiler there, but I'm certainly not going out of my way to level up again. I'm getting through this level as quickly as possible and expecting to be returned to the aug level I was at. If these aug kits I'm picking up are temporary, that's fine. (I was considering levelling up all the stuff I didn't have before just in case I was allowed to keep them, but that would have made the level much harder and wasn't guaranteed to work. It sounds like I made the right choice.)

 

However they handle it, though, it's still a very bad design choice to depower the player almost completely at this stage of the game. Perhaps if they'd been more generous with early levelling up it would work better, but as it is I've spent most of the game frustrated at my lack of powers!

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Goddamn, this gets worse and worse. First I get sent to a guy for some weapons then it turns out he's going to charge me - the one thing I've been aiming to get out of this is a ton of cash I can spend in the game proper, so it grates that they took all my ammo away then made me buy more. Then I have to do a ton of backtracking across almost the entire level. This includes a large multi-level circular room which you have to go round half of, up some stairs, round half again, up some more stairs, round half of again (while avoiding bots and turrets) to get through, and TWO identical scanning points where you have to stand still for 30 seconds. So far:

 

Ammo guy to morgue - through most of the level including the round room and the scan points

Morgue back to ammo guy for a key - through most of the level including the round room and the scan points

Back to the morgue - through most of the level including the round room and the scan points

From the morgue to a lab - long-ass elevator ride

From the lab back to the ammo guy - long-ass elevator ride, through most of the level including the round room and the scan points

 

And I'm not even sure if I'm done yet! This is absolutely dreadful; if I'd purchased this as DLC I'd be annoyed enough; as I didn't purchase it and am still being forced to play through it to get the rest of my game, I'm fuming! (The only thing stopping me from giving up right now is that the level before this happened - Stowing Away - was very fun.) I don't think I've ever bought DLC, but if this is the general standard, no wonder Minerva's Den is regularly referred to as the best DLC ever.

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Oh the whole DLC is a few hours long at least, my playtime for it is 6 hours. It does have some really neat reactivity the main game is sometimes lacking.

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Well it made me swap my souped-up sniper rifle for a crappy vanilla one so I'm very annoyed. What kind of reactivity are you thinking of, though, @Jutranjo? I don't think I noticed anything particularly different, reactivity-wise...

 

Anyway, I'm past it now, and there was another good level where I got to use all my stuff, then a boss fight which was a little annoying but fine, then a ton of linear stuff. I'm pretty much onto the last level now, according to a walkthrough I glanced at. I also happened to see that I'll get a chance to buy some more augs and that the Typhoon aug will come in useful for the next boss fight, which will be the first time in the game. The Typhoon shoots out a bunch of bullets in  a 360 spread to an 8m radius. The problem is, if you've let enemies get that close to you, you're already fucked - the combat is simply not designed for you to get in those situations. They really should have made it shoot off a few homing rockets or something.

 

Have you been playing much, @Kolzig?

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I used the typhoon on every single boss encounter to finish it in 2-3 uses the first time I played the game. Never had to engage with the combat.

 

There's a bunch of little things about the DLC but the only thing I remember is a pretty big one. If you're never detected and reach the final boss, they are panicky and crying out "who the fuck are you that you are doing this?!", plus there's much fewer guards and stuff.

 

There's also using the CASIE aug on the person you talk to just before getting off the DLC sea base.

 

Didn't you get your nice sniper rifle back at the end of the DLC?

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I think I got given it at the start of the DLC with no ammo, but then there were some different types of sniper rifle right at the end that for some reason used different ammo, and I may have got confused and swapped them over :(

 

That boss thing sounds cool, but I gave up on stealthing my way through an entire level at the start of the game! Also, I haven't bothered with getting CASIE, but is using it on the person here any different to those in the main game?

 

I tried the typhoon on one boss (the woman) and it was useless, so I've been sticking to the heavy rifle. Even the laser rifle didn't seem to do anything in the most recent boss fight...

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I made a decision to continue it in December. I just don't seem to have enough time right now to really focus on playing Deus Ex. I just have tonight and maybe tomorrow morning time before I will fly to Japan.

I'll need to continue Deus Ex HR in December when I'm back home. I'm focusing all my available time for Affordable Space Adventures on these last days before vacation, might be able to finish that at least.

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Aaand I'm done. The last level was not only linear but also

an attempt at a zombie shooter - crowds of 28 Days Later-style NPCs gone crazy due to the Illuminati mucking about with their implants, running at you screaming, and chain-gun ammo scattered about liberally

. Then a final boss fight which entailed moving behind cover to push a few buttons, then a final moral choice between revealing the conspiracy to the world or, um, killing yourself and a couple of the conspirators. Really disappointing. I also missed the chance to speak to two main characters before wrapping the game up because the game didn't mark them as secondary objectives. Though frankly, if it had, I possibly would have skipped them anyway as the writing in this game is as dull and long-winded as the previous ones, but without aliens and shit to pep it up.

 

I enjoyed this game sporadically but it has a lot of flaws and really falls apart at the end.

 

Forum thread

Making of vid (also included with the game)

vid - Comparing modernisations - DXHR vs Duke Nukem Forever by that guy whose videos we've linked a few times

a light-hearted vid on the game that Jut linked to in another thread

2011 post-mortem interview

 

There's also a video playlist of the dev commentary out there, but it's almost 9 hours in total!

 

Next is E.Y.E. Divine Cybermancy. I think I'll play a little bit to get au fait with the systems then see if anyone (I know Jutranjo suggested it before) is around for co-op.

 

 

 

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The ending isn't good but there's 4 buttons, 3 up front and 1 hidden in a corridor!

 

After the Missing Link you're only left with the research facility in Thailand or somewhere? And then you're rocketed to the last level. It's really mimicking the ocean base and area 51 of the original Deus Ex hard. All the good bits are where you're walking and talking around some city area or similar, once it's all combat missions they both go downhill.

 

Some thoughts about E.Y.E.: Divine Cybermancy:

 

0. It's ludicrously obtuse.

1. I love the game but it's really tough to get into. The in game tutorials are videos in a menu. Message me when you start playing if you just want to coop from the start, I'm fine idling while you check out menus and dialogue.

2. On character creation you can pick 3 genomes out of a pool of a dozen or more. Ignore everything, pick 3x  metastreumonic and keep rolling until every stat is 35-50. 

3. This short 1 page intro will help you get through the worst bits, it's much better than the tutorial, I'd really recommend reading it first https://roguelikedeveloper.blogspot.si/2012/07/eye-divine-cybermancy-getting-started.html

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Awesome, thanks, I'll take a look at all that and hit you up soon. I think I'll probably futz around with it a tiny bit myself first, but co-op'ing pretty much from the start sounds cool!

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Deus Ex Mankind Divided is free to play for the next 30ish hours on Steam! I think I'll have a little go on that while I can, though I'm not going to try to maximise my playtime as I imagine it'll be very similar to the game I just played for 37 hours and only quite liked.

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I played a few hours of DXMD. It looks great - the leap forward in 5 years is huge. The UI has been revamped, some changes for better, some for worse. Story is just as boring as the last one! I couldn't really be bothered to scrabble round in the opening hours of another DX game just to uninstall when the freebie ran out, though, so I'm moving on. Apart from anything else, my PC was struggling a little - it was pretty impressive when I got it at the end of 2012, but I guess I'll have to get used to turning settings down if I want to play games from, say, 2015 onwards...

 

Moving onwards, I'm going to install both EYE and Serious Sam 3, so I can play the former as co-op and have the latter to play when no one's around.

 

In case I forget due to jumping around a bit, here's what I posted about Rage elsewhere:

 

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I started playing it when I got my new PC just as a tester game, then got bored and left it. As I've just finished the HL1 expansions (OF was great, I put BS on hard because I was told it's ridiculously easy and had to give up) and Minerva mod (nothing special, difficulty not very well balanced), I thought I'd give it another try so I've deleted my saves and started a new game. It looks absolutely gorgeous, but what I remember about it from last time is finding the shooting imprecise and the RPG-lite elements irritating. I've stuck it on easy this time and am hoping to blast through it enjoying the scenery.

 

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Just got back into this, and Paul is right, this immediately gets better once you've picked up a couple of weapons. They should have had a few one-shot enemies at the start so as not to put the player off straight away. I'm really enjoying it now I'm used to all the systems (like, that you can buy ammo, which they're really stingy with otherwise) and possibly also because I've got it on easy! The RPG-lite stuff is still the least entertaining aspect, but it's not too cumbersome, I guess. I am enjoying getting to know the map layout.

I just got to a bit where bandits have set up a blockade and I'm supposed to put some explosives on then leg it, but they've got a rocket launcher that's making it really annoying. I'll come back and try again later, which I'm looking forward to.

 

 

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Got this as soon as I tried again, it was just easily-snipable dudes. I've just got to Wellspring, though, and it's making me walk around talking to people and choosing clothes and shit.

 

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There are loads of hints on the loading screens that suggest I'll be getting into vehicle battles and having to upgrade my buggy and shit, which I really can't be bothered with either. It really should make those hints progress-related, there's loads of them that are completely irrelevant to me at the moment.

 

(4 months later)

 

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I finally dragged myself back to this game and spent ages talking to people and getting through annoying car battles (you don't seem to be able to do anything about the turrets or explosive toy cars or incoming rockets, and the handling is crap), then finally got to a new shooty bit and it's immediately ace again.

 

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I've gritted my teeth and got through some races to soup up my car, so I can now just leg it past any bandits and not bother with any car fights. There's still a load of boring RPG in my FPS, though. It's "walk through confusingly laid-out hub, get mission from boring character, drive shitty-handling car to mission, do FUN SHOOTING interspersed with picking up bottles, drive back to hub, go to shop, sell bottles, buy ammo and ingredients, craft things with ingredients, repeat." It's shallow and dull fluff tacked onto a good-looking, fun shooter. If they'd used all the characters and locations in a Half-Life 2 structure it also would have been much better.

The shooter sections are starting to wear a little thin too, though. I'm hoping I'm either near the end or some new stuff is going to get introduced (I just got to the subway town and am on the second mission there, fighting gearheads for the first time). It might not help that I'm only doing the main missions and I have it on Easy...

 

 

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Phew, finished. That ending was bizarrely anti-climactic, yeah. So strange to put your only massive boss (with glowing hit-points no less!) halfway through the game and have the final fight be against a handful of pretty much the most basic enemy. I don't think I'll ever bother with the DLC, I can't imagine it will have enough new stuff to make it worth my time.

I'd love for there to be a mod of this game which HL2s it.

 

 

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Fuck, I just realised I never bothered firing the BFG rounds because the final level was so easy.

 

So there you go. It's hard to find any post-mortems or anything of this game, it seems to have been forgotten about. But hey, we have two forum threads on it!

 

 

 

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I thought Serious Sam 3 was also one of those single player or coop games, and that it was even more coop-oriented than EYE. I might be wrong though - I've never played it.

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Yeah, I think it might be. I'll want to play at least some of that on my own, but maybe at some point I'll add it to the roster of co-op games and install Receiver too!

 

(Uh, Receiver's not a co-op game, is it?)

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