ElephantBanjoGnome wrote:
Pundabaya wrote:
It is made abundantly clear that you effectively have a license to kill, and freedom to exercise it as you see fit.
Yeah yeah, you have a gun, therefore you can shoot people. I'm talking about how actions materially affect conversations in game. The fact that nobody muses on how the streets are littered with corpses, and the fact there isn't even a hint of reproach for being a derranged killer, is quite crap.
Also, Hengsha spoiler:
ZOMG Spoiler! Click here to view!
The first time I went to the Hive, I killed EVERYONE inside. Then later, when the plot makes me return to the club, everyone is still dead, and Tong is standing there at the upstairs bar, entirely unpeturbed to be the only person alive and surrounded by bodies. Not the slightest difference in conversation. Poor.
How far would you want them to go with this sort of idea though?
Ultimately the game has to:
a) Remain completable
and
b) Remain fun
I can't think of any game that really lets you deviate too far from the main plotline, however much incidental branching the missions do, they're effectively forced to come back to the main 'trunk' as it were. Even the original Deus Ex, with its three endings, let you get right up to the very last area before your actions actually chose what ending you got.
I remember having this discussion with a chum when the original Half Life came out, how far would AI be able to go? How far would we
want it go? It was quite impressive the way the soldiers would search for you within a given area, but what if they chased you from one zone to the next? What if they set up a cordon around the area you were in to make escape impossible?
I'm pretty sure I read an interview with a developer a few years ago who was saying that there was nothing much stopping them from doing far more 'realistic' AI, so that enemies had proper persistence, remembered who you were and what you'd done, communicated with each other from one area to the next, all that sort of thing - but that they very quickly ended up with a game that was impossible to play and/or so tedious and gruelling that no one could be bothered.
ZOMG Spoiler! Click here to view!
Take this game and your specific point, yes it seems odd that they don't remember you as being a maniac killer after you've slaughtered an entire club full of people, but then again what would actually happen is the police would lock the entire area down and the game would effectively be over. At the end of the day you're always going to have to buy into the fact that it's a game and not realistic.
Same goes for Tong, he has to be there, even if you've just killed every person in his club, because he's part of the main plotline -
there's only so much branching and deviation a developer can reasonably do, especially with development times for games already measured in years and tens of millions of dollars.
Overall I think this game does a pretty good job of offering a decent amount of choice and variety when it comes to what to do, whilst not becoming far too labyrinth and unwieldy, it's certainly no worse than the original Deus Ex IMO - the original Deus Ex just masked it a bit more because the levels were so big.