Game Club 199X - Deus Ex Ultra-team Challenge

[Feynman]

Aug 15, 2012 12:36:40 GMT -5 Snarboo said:

Weapon accuracy is the biggest beef I have with this game and the one thing I'd change. You'd think a trained agent could hit the broad side of a barn, but not JC! Of course, if you slap a laser sight on a weapon, aim becomes completely irrelevant (as long as you have the laser pointed in the right direction). This is why the Dragon Tooth Sword is the best weapon in the game: you don't have to worry about it hitting things. If this game had iron sights, that would help alleviate a lot of the problems I have with shooting dudes.

To be fair, you're trained, but that's it... trained. You start the game having just finished basic training, and your skills are still low. If you continue to place points in your weapon skills and/or modify your weapons for better accuracy, halfway through the game Denton is a crack shot, and by the end of the game you can be a walking tank with nearly perfect accuracy.

Weapon accuracy at the very beginning of the game is a bit annoying, but that's intentional design for two reasons:

1. When Deus Ex came out FPS games that didn't involve being Rambo were still very much a novelty. Starting with low accuracy encourages players to explore all of their options in terms of how to progress through a level. By making guns less useful early on, you subtly guide players into learning proper stealth and infiltration tactics without making it feel forced.

2. Having low initial weapon accuracy creates a smoother power curve. If guns were too accurate from the start, there would be very little reason to invest skill points into your weapon skills, and you would be in the same situation Human Revolution suffers from, where the obvious ideal choice is to load up on noncombat skills and ignore weapon-related upgrades until you're out of utility options.

[Snarboo]

I still think you could create a system where investing in weapon skills was important while letting the player fire more accurately, all without disrupting noncombat skills and stealth. Perhaps investing in weapon skills would let you draw your weapon faster, move faster while sighting the weapon in, reload faster, carry more ammo, reduce recoil etc. It's not like you can't just throw a laser sight onto something and have it be pinpoint accurate from the start anyway.

[Feynman]

Aug 15, 2012 18:29:09 GMT -5 Snarboo said:

I still think you could create a system where investing in weapon skills was important while letting the player fire more accurately, all without disrupting noncombat skills and stealth. Perhaps investing in weapon skills would let you draw your weapon faster, move faster while sighting the weapon in, reload faster, carry more ammo, reduce recoil etc. It's not like you can't just throw a laser sight onto something and have it be pinpoint accurate from the start anyway.

Right, but things like moving faster while sighting, quick draw, and ammo count are all non-essentials. A decent player could play without them easily. The problem with basing an action entirely around player skill with minimum influence from statistics is that once you reach a certain threshold of skill, upgrading the action becomes worthless.

This is a problem in a lot of games, actually, and not just with weapons. For example, upgrading lockpicking in Skyrim is one of the most boneheaded things a player can do, since it is very easy to pick every single lock in the game without spending time a single skill point on the lockpicking tree. Or the Speechcraft tree which provides income bonuses, yet spending skill points in Speechcraft actually negatively impacts your character, since the game has an endless supply of gold but skill points are finite, thus spending points in the Speechcraft tree provides an extremely minor convenience at the cost of a large amount of character power.

In Deus Ex, the laser sight giving great accuracy makes perfect sense, as laser sights are a finite resource that are permanently consumed when used.

[Snarboo]

Aug 15, 2012 20:36:44 GMT -5 Feynman said:

Right, but things like moving faster while sighting, quick draw, and ammo count are all non-essentials. A decent player could play without them easily. The problem with basing an action entirely around player skill with minimum influence from statistics is that once you reach a certain threshold of skill, upgrading the action becomes worthless.

A skilled Deus Ex player can already do that even with the stats in place, however. For example, upgrading heavy weapons is pointless given the GEP gun is the best weapon in its class and has a heat seeking mode. The sniper rifle and crossbow really don't need points in their respective category to be effective, nor do you need to bother with demolitions since LAMs and other throwables are perfectly fine at their base level. Don't even get me started with melee weapons!

I'm not saying the game should have swung in entirely the opposite direction like Invisible War did. I understand they were working within the limitations they had, but I feel they could have come up with a better solution when it comes to weapons. I'm trying to remember how EYE tackled this since I thought it managed to balance stats versus skill better than DX did in a few cases. That said, I do like the stat limitations on things like lockpicking and hacking.

Anyway, the stream will start 30 minutes! Here's the link for the new page.

[TheGunheart]

Aug 15, 2012 18:21:14 GMT -5 Feynman said:

1. When Deus Ex came out FPS games that didn't involve being Rambo were still very much a novelty.

I'm not jumping on you for this, but I just want to say that, having seen First Blood, First Blood Part II and Rambo, Deus Ex is actually closer to Rambo than other FPS games at the time. Rambo was really more about stealth and using the environment, with the machine gun mowdown only at the climax. Hell, in the first movie, he's still doing stuff like blowing up a gas station to draw attention to the wrong place after picking up the M-50.

So yeah, I feel more like Rambo playing Deus Ex than I did with any of its contemporaries (and again, apologies if I sound hostile in any way).

That said, I'm not really bothered with how Deus Ex's skills work. I actually like the power curve, as it makes me feel all the more powerful when I can dash around with my speed aug while still capable of hitting a fly on the wall from a mile away with my assault rifle.

[muteKi]

I died a lot on the stream, and then I upgraded my swim and got through a channel.

After bypassing a lock via my awesome code cracking skills, I went and crawled through a passage up to the nsf generator and blew it up with a lem. Just narrowly avoided that killing me, but thankfully after that I was able to get to the medbot and heal myself up, and that's where the playthrough ended!

Of course I magically became competent as soon as I ended the stream. Mneh.

[Discoalucard]

Aug 15, 2012 18:21:14 GMT -5 Feynman said:

1. When Deus Ex came out FPS games that didn't involve being Rambo were still very much a novelty. Starting with low accuracy encourages players to explore all of their options in terms of how to progress through a level. By making guns less useful early on, you subtly guide players into learning proper stealth and infiltration tactics without making it feel forced.

I actually don't really care for the way that Deus Ex handles this. In my mind, in any action-RPG, the player character should skills and mobility around the same level as other purely action-focused game, and upgrades make them better. Deus Ex cripples the player and forces them to use skill points to make up the difference. I would agree in principle that it does force the player to try different methods, but the stealth is terribly implemented in this game. This is a big area where I think Human Revolution had an edge - mechanically it's more sound, even though the simplicity of the level architecture in the original game makes for better maps.

I had an old roommate that thought Deus Ex was terrible because killing anything at Liberty Island was extremely difficult, and sneaking past them isn't much easier. If you don't understand the way the game works - that accuracy is more of a dice roll than anything - then it does appear it's very sloppy. It gives a very bad first impression. Unfortunately he never saw past that and gave up there.

Two other games to consider: Mega Man X has plenty of upgradeable skills, but outside of missing a dash and having a relatively small life meter, X starts with abilities comparable to the original series. Scott Pilgrim The Game, though, starts off with slow and weak player characters, forcing you to grind them up a bit before the game becomes fun.

[Snarboo]

For those that missed my run last night, here it is in convenient video form!

I'd say this was a good run for Team Stupid, although I spent most of my time running around like a chicken with its head cut off. There were a quite a few stupid moments, namely how I dealt with Anna and Lebedev and also the guard having a seizure when I talked to Paul. It's amazing how playable this game is despite playing it in the worst, most ridiculous ways possible.

Feynman, you're up next for Team Stupid!

[Feynman]

I figured my run was up next, since it seemed like we were going right down the list in order from top to bottom. The save file from my 60 minutes is already uploaded! I'll post a few pics from my run in a bit, but the summary is:

- Upgraded Environmental Resistance twice, because I can.

- Ignored the Regeneration augment to get Energy Shield instead hahahahaha.

- The only sensible upgrade I gave Denton was the speed run augment (which I also upgraded to level 3). This may seem a bit at odds with being stupid, but the sheer amount of hilarity that can be achieved with that augment is so amazing that it's worth it.

- Number of enemies killed during my run: 0

- Number of enemies knocked unconscious during my run: 0

- Number of enemies who were even aware that Denton was anywhere even remotely nearby: One guy who yelled at me when I opened the front door of UNATCO and ran for the helicopter.

- Equipment the next guy in line (presumably EksFactr) will have in their inventory: A baton, lockpicks, multitools, and some energy cells.

I only played for 50 minutes instead of 60, since at the 50 minute mark I was right at the start of Hong Kong and that seemed like the perfect stopping point. I briefly considered spending my last 10 minutes using the console to spawn a shitload of LAMs in order to climb 50 feet up a wall and save there, but I decided that would be a bit too malicious.

EDIT:

Okay, I'm only happy with one of the screenshots I took, but here it is, the answer to your inevitable question of what happened to all the items you've been collecting:



I gave them to that guy.

[susanismyalias]

I only put in about a half hour today, the heat really boiled my brain today. Pants Denton met and killed a drug pusher in the subways however. Drugs are bad.

[Snarboo]

Update:
I notice Team Newbie is lagging a bit behind the other 3 teams, so I've decided to increase Team Newbie's turn time to 3 hours. This should give you guys a leg up until you become more familiar with the game!

[Snarboo]

Double post, but there's going to be a stream of my run around 10 PM EST this evening! Here's the stream link.

Edit: The stream has been postponed for a bit, but I'll resume it later this evening or tomorrow!

Edit 2: ...and the stream is back up!

[Deleted]

I need to look into setting up a stream sometime for this stuff.

My run yesterday went alright, certainly better than my previous attempt. I got the ambrosia, wasted a fellow agent rather than the target, left my brother to die apparently, and finished just before being hunted down. I installed the ballistic shield and muscle fiber augs; ballistic shield definitely helped out so far.

So now that I've gotten a handle on the aiming and stealth quirks, I'm starting to enjoy the game quite a bit. My main complaint is those fucking security cameras - I know you can disable them with a multitool or temporarily with an EMP (or just avoid them), but it sucks having to deal with them in closed quarters, or worse yet walking through a doorway to have an alarm go off (thanks to the camera right above you).

BTW, when you're sending out the distress signal, is there any practical way to use the halon fire supression system to kill guys?

[Snarboo]

So I've just completed my latest run for Team Stupid! After consuming all the alcohol and junk food in Honk Kong, I made it back to New York, at which point I threw myself off the roof of the 'Ton, raided the bar, then got Stanton Dowd killed in a shootout with MJ12. I then farted around a bit at the naval shipping yard before I made it into the conveniently placed air duct on the roof of the submarine pen.

I decided to leave Denton with only the bare essentials (ie junk food, cigarettes and booze), so hopefully this won't make things too difficult for Team Stupid.

[Deleted]

Aug 20, 2012 0:03:49 GMT -5 Snarboo said:

So I've just completed my latest run for Team Stupid! After consuming all the alcohol and junk food in Honk Kong, I made it back to New York, at which point I threw myself off the roof of the 'Ton, raided the bar, then got Stanton Dowd killed in a shootout with MJ12. I then farted around a bit at the naval shipping yard before I made it into the conveniently placed air duct on the roof of the submarine pen.

I decided to leave Denton with only the bare essentials (ie junk food, cigarettes and booze), so hopefully this won't make things too difficult for Team Stupid.

That's pretty amazing .

Also, I'm impressed with Feynman's junk tower.