Well, I finally got to try Deus Ex: Invisible War.



Technical Problems:

Some posters on the Eidos forum characterized it as a crappy PC port of a console game and I have to say that I'm inclined to agree. I had to go through a lot of steps to get it to run on my PC and even now it's majorly unstable.

At first when I tried to run IW I got a freeze at the main game menu. I applied the 1.2 patch which didn't work. To fix this I had to go to amd.com and download some software they have which helps games that don't work well with a dual core processor do so, and I updated my processor software for good measure.

Now the game runs normally, but it freezes unpredictably. It could take two minutes, or maybe 40 minutes, but it freezes. I don't know what is causing these freezes, but I feel it's pretty crappy given the excess resources my system has to run the game:

From my System thingie:
AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual
Core Processor 6000+
2.99 ghz, 2 GB of RAM
Windows XP professional SP2
GEFORCE 8500 GT
Forceware version 169.21
Memory: 512
BIOS version: 60.86.26.00.09



Graphics and immersion:

Well, the graphics are better than the first Deus Ex in terms of the pixels but I find that the levels are totally boring compared to the original Deus Ex levels.

The original Deus Ex levels were evocative and lovingly made from real world location photos. I grew up in New York City and the Hell's Kitchen level reminded me a bit of when I was a little kid because it really looked like some parts of the city except with more trash and bums. I think there's something really magical in the look and feel of Deus Ex, as well. The textures and the lighting really capture my imagination. When I'd gotten back from Peace Corps service one of the first things I did in Las Vegas was go to a bar in a casino that had a lot of neon and gloom. The first thing I thought when I got there was, "this looks like a Deus Ex level". That shows the extent to which the look and feel of Deus Ex remains in my mind till this day.

However, Invisble War levels are bland. I feel like they just made the levels look vaguely sci-fi cliche future-ish. They don't have any of the feeling of reality that the Deus Ex levels did. It feels like the level designers just put everything together using some vague memories of Blade Runner and toothpaste commercials. Hell, the game would have been a lot more evocative if, if nothing else, they had at least tried to copy Blade Runner's look and feel and get it right. Because even if they'd been portraying a total ripoff at least the vision presented by the game would have been unified and strong. Better that than generic a total lack of force behind the vision that I sensed in Invisible War.



Dumbing down:

I cannot believe the extent to which Invisible War dumbed down elements taken from Deus Ex. It's not like the stuff in Deus Ex was that complicated in the first place. Apparently, there is/are no more:

1.) Peeking around corners. Too much of a pain to code peeking around corners in spite of how much that would add to the stealth aspects of gameplay?

2.) Skill points. It's not like the skill points in Deus Ex were at all comprehensive! If anything, I'd have expected more skills in a sequel, not less, and made more immersive and realistic through more realistic division of skills (perhaps short barreled and long barreled or pistol, large rifle, shotgun/carbine instead of Rifles and Pistols and Heavy Weapons) and perhaps skill-building through use rather than spending points. But getting rid of skills all together takes away one of the ways that you have to create a specific character. Depending on how you think of your character you can realize this character background by focusing on different skills. Making your character more generic was not the way to go for a Deus Ex sequel.

3.) No more lockpicks, only multitools? LOCKPICK HURT BRAIN. NO WANT CODE. MULTITOOL ONLY PLEEAAAASE.

4.) Universal ammo. Nothing more needs to be said about this. Personally, I think the most interesting way to go with ammo would have been System Shock 2's way, where the ammo itself takes up inventory space, as this requires more planning and logistics regarding which weapons the player would like to carry.

5.) Is it just me, but does the engine seem to be capable of less than Unreal 97 was? I haven't been able to get very far in the game due to constant freezing, but it seems like there's no wide open spaces like there was in the Liberty Island level of Deus Ex. Whereas Liberty Island and various Deus Ex mods had certain places where long-range sniping could be carried out demanding a lot of skill and precise headshots, it seems to me like in Invisible War distances tend to be much closer in general and headshots are no longer a "lethal takedown" in the words of Alex Jacobson. I actually feel like combat was deadlier and more tactical in Deus Ex.

The extent to which a lot of seemingly simple things that were fun in Deus Ex were flushed down the toilet is pretty extreme. It's not like any of those aspects of play were remembered by anyone as being a major pain in the ass; they were positive elements and I don't remember anyone complaining in a forum that lockpicks AND multitools made his whole Deus Ex experience stressful. So why were they taken out? Let's be logical here. If you take something positive out of a game you subtract from that game. The idea when you remove things from sequels it to remove the things which were a gigantic pain in the ass the first time around, like the invincible Gunther Hermann plot wagon, thus making the game better.


The stuff I liked:

Uh, there were a couple of things I liked, though, or else I wouldn't have kept playing with repeated freezes.

1.) The voice acting was decent.
2.) Pequod's coffee was a really funny idea, as was Pequod's vs. Queequeg's coffee. Moby Dick references FTW. Literary references in video games FTW all the way! However, I was disappointed that you could not buy coffee there.
3.) The female Alex was pretty cute. That's not something I usually say about video game characters.
4.) To give credit where credit is due, it was fun having multiple contradictory objectives all at the same time so you could choose which side to screw over.

I still haven't played the first two ... and can't find them anywhere.

I'm not sure how you can possibly critique the graphics. Afterall, it has bloom!

And brown!

With more bloom!

I recall only 2 good points about DX2 - the hologram of the pop star, which you can find and talk extensively to in all the levels, the dialog was awesome, like it was in DX1. The second thing was that "tribe" of cybered up dudes that have a sort of hive mind, which I thought was cool and portable to SR.

An example of an effective media cover-up campaign.

First, please install the community textures patches. There are three of them IIRC, and they truly enhance the graphics and the atmosphere of the game.

As for performance issues, I turned off bloom and it played ok. I finished it once without any freezing problem, but I reinstalled it recently on the exact same machine and now it looks like it freezes sometimes when I change the vision mode (for example back from scope view or back from radar vision mode). I don't know how to correct that.

As for the game itself, I'm one of the few who enjoyed it, maybe even more than the first one.
I'm not troubled by the "dumbing down", as all the implants and different routes are still enough to play however you like. And I don't see how having both decoders and lockpickers was far better than just having decoders.

On the other hand, I think it handles all the action phases far better than the first one. In DX1, the adventure part was good, but all the action part was quite weak : not as fun as a standard FPS and no special atmosphere either. But in DX2, I really enjoyed the action part and found it really immersive. Maybe it's my playstyle: I played on the highest difficulty level, tried to avoid killing, and relied on stealth, the tonfa (with enhanced strength and speed), the crossbow, the pistol and grenades. Also I avoided quicksaving/loading, saving only at the beginning and end of each "sequence" and loading only when I got killed.

This led to extremely good situations. For example, I'm infiltrating a corp building, I enter in a dark room and go for the door, not seeing a chair in the way. A guard in the corridor hears me pushing the chair. I hear him approaching, take the chair, see him enter the room cautiously, looking everywhere. As he sets his eyes on me, I throw the chair on him. Before he's able to recover from the attack, I run towards him and punch him with my tonfa until he falls down. I open the door, take a look in the corridor, start running toward the next cover but I get seen by something and an alarm goes off. Panicked, I look everywhere for a safe place to hide, see a ventilation shaft and rush inside it. I then spent a few minutes with my gun in my hand, hearing footsteps and drones coming closer, hoping they wouldn't see me...

Another example is when I had to go in a room to fetch something or do something, I don't remember. Problem was that the room was heavily guarded, and I couldn't do much with my small pistol and tonfa. I flashbanged the room, rushed inside, did what I had to, got out with everyone shooting at me, rushed in the first door I saw, closed the door and blocked it with stuff. I'm not sure if the last part had any influence but I felt like I had to do it.

No game before gave me such immersive action scene without it being totally scripted or at least foreseen by developpers and that's what I really liked.
The story was also really interesting without being a mash-up of all conspiracy theories as it was in DX1 and it had really nice elements (Omars, N.G Resonance, the coffee war and so on).

What I didn't like was the inability to peek around corners (but some implants can help with that) and the fact that some actions didn't have any effect (it didn't bother me during my first playthrough, but during the second I was disappointed when I discovered that killing all members of the Order in Seattle as a retaliation against their attack on the HQ wasn't correctly supported). But most of all, I was extremely disappointed when I found out that there wasn't any SDK to mod the game.

But all in all I have to admit I really enjoyed it, even if I can understand that most people - especially DX1 fans - didn't.

Well, I didn't feel that people needed that many more hits, but yet again I used mostly the pistol, the "crossbow" and the tonfa (maybe the sniper rifle at the end). But with the pistol, if you aim for the head one or two shot is enough, and the same applies to you.
And you can K.O someone with a tonfa without him shooting you twice while you beat him down.
That's something I hated when I played DX1 after playing IW : you rush on a guard, he hears you on the last second - so you can't automatically stun him (looks like when you know you'll be hit you don't get hurt as much as when you don't) - you start beating him anyway, and the guard just stands there shooting you.

As for the weapons, I like the feel they have. I don't know why (maybe the sounds, the muzzleflash or something) but they feel so... dynamic. Sure, the combat feeling is totally different: in DX1, at the beginning at least, you crouched in a dark place and waited 1 minute to get an aim on the enemy, shot, and started looking for the next enemy.
With a high skill you just pointed towards the head of the enemy and shot. In both cases, it wasn't really dynamic.

I understand that you might prefer DX1 combat, but I don't think that IW combat isn't gritty nor violent. Maybe at a lower difficulty mode, but at the highest one, you don't survive long in a firefight if you don't have some cover, and most of the time battles are short and violent (reminds me of those 1 to 2 combat turns scenes in SR).

I guess that DX1 has an emphasis RPG part over the FPS part, and IW has the opposite.

You guys are just making me sadder that I can't actually find them anywhere around here.