Be Excellent To Each Other

Aye, but before you get laser sights, or in the heat of the moment, it can take 5-6 bullets to the chest to kill a punk.

Stop being a shit shot.

Or stop killing people! The good thing about stun gunning people or dart rifling them is that it always only takes one shot.

You have to be stealthy though.

Dart rifle ammo is just ridiculously scarce. Even if you only shoot a quarter of the people it won't last you a full level. What kind of a dick sends you out on a mission with about five fucking darts? Gee, thanks, fella!

I've done some parts stealth-style, like getting into the merc compound without being seen, but sometimes I like to shoot people. It's fun.

I went down the 'kill pretty much everything' route, except where the game obviously wanted me to be stealthy.

If you kill and then hide the bodies, you're effectively doing it 'stealth-esque', I sometimes ended up with about ten corpses piled up in a toilet.

I guess I was more stealthy than not, but overall I just used whatever was most abundant at any particular time, dependent on the situation.

I bloody loved Deus Ex 3. Looking forward to a next-gen effort from the same developer. They're also working on Thief 4, which I have high hopes for after this.

Yeah it's definitely been a high point of the last few years for me, pure quality from start to finish.

Some games I very much enjoy but at the same time I'm kind of glad when I finish them and get them boxed off as it were, but Deux Ex HR I was properly like, 'Booo, all done!'

I have several highly customized guns and I hardly ever use them. It's just far too easy to use invisibility to get behind them and then do a non-lethal takedown.

I didn't bother with invisibility until right near the end and even then only used it to sneak past really tough parts. As for takedowns, I didn't like using my batteries!

As I understand it, it's pointless using powerboost bars to charge the extra ones up, so I tend to just use up the first one (the one that recharges itself) and then make myself scarce until it's ready to be used again. Powerboosts are only used when I need to use a lot of powers in close succession.

I never used powers, because I hated carrying around recharge stuff.

Still not started it

I completed the game on hard while doing the "don't kill anyone" runthrough achievement. I doubt I used more than 10-15 darts throughout the entire game. Knowing who and when to take someone down was more important. If you're using up your darts that quickly, you must be trying to kill or incapacitate everyone on the map. Daft.

Fun, though.

Depends how you're doing it. Using the "smother them with stinking hands" technique and piling their bodies on top of each other was my fun. Running through blasting everyone like a CoD game doesn't do it for me.

Yeah, I think that dawned on me when I kept running out of the ammo! Since that happened, I've done a lot more sneaking and punching/throttling.

I always tend to mix it up a bit in these sorts of games, usually unintentionally. I begin each level with all the best intentions of creeping my way through and occasionally I'll keep restarting until I get it but more often than not when things go wrong everyone just ends up dead.

Yeah, I'm the same. I'm never even sure whether it's an accident or deliberate, either. When an unprotected noggin wanders past my hidey-hole, it's just often to difficult not to put a large caliber slug into it.

You arl rack disaprin!

The battle to save Malik was ace, and I was well chuffed when I managed to save her without killing any of the attackers.

Sweet Christ there's a lot of loading screens...

Only in the hub areas. Once you're on a proper mission you've got a seamless toy box to play in. I agree though, the loading annoyed me.

Tsh, if you were playing it on the master platform, you would have had a problem.

(Subs: Please check)

Aye, but just going from Sarif Indstries to the shop and the LIMB shop, and then back... 4 loading screens. Shockingly unnecessary.

I didn't know you programmed games!

Business Analyst, mate. Trained to spot bad design.

This sounds like a mistake.
But it ain't.
Full game.
£6.48.

On PSN for download.

Or if you want it for the xbox, make me an offer and you can have mine. It looked and handled like King Kong Bundy in a tank, I packed it in after half an hour with no desire to ever return to it.

Nothing much to add here except that I cranked up the DLC again in order to get the Factory Zero cheevo. That's the one where you use no Praxis kits, no Augs, no weapons, and no explosives. You have to sneak a lot and do nothing but takedowns. Wasn't as tedious as I thought it'd be.

Started playing this the other day and am thoroughly enjoying it so far. By default I end up playing it pure stealth because it's just what I do if the option's there and the actual cover movement controls are a fucking joy, possibly even better than when Splinter Cell: Conviction stole them. The only problem with doing that is it's incredibly jarring when you find yourself in a situation where a shoot-out's the only option, something that isn't helped by the fact that the actual gunplay seems to be fucking awful. Also: having only done the first one, is it safe to assume the rest of the boss fights are going to be jaw-droppingly shit as well? Don't encourage a fucking stealthy play through then stick me a room with a guy I have to throw grenades at you twats.

Conviction is older than this, isn't it?

The boss fights were farmed out to a different studio, apparently the publisher insisted that there has to be boss fights, and the guys who were making it were all like 'Woah, this is a Deus Ex game, fuck off', and the publisher was all like 'Games need boss fights innit' so in the end they basically just contracted out the boss fights to a different studio and shoehorned them in.

That's why the boss fights exist entirely in self-contained arenas (it's also why there are improbably large amounts of heavy weaponry and explosives hanging around, in case you're playing the game stealthily), and yes, they are all pretty shit, although the second one is the least bad of the three. The first one is arguably the worst.

Yep, it absolutely is. I wonder why I thought otherwise? Probably because I'm a tit.

I have been playing this too.

It's fun, but shooting sucks if you're not in cover, and it's exceedingly linear, which I wasn't expecting from the uber-gushing early in the thread.

Linear? There are numerous ways to complete every section. Double that if you count lethal/non-lethal.

I MIGHT re-try this one day. It felt like I was playing a shitty PS2 game though, it looked awful and handled really awkwardly so I stopped. I shall consider liberating it from the "swapsies" pile and main-shelving it though.

I dunno. It's normally, 'make it to that elevator'. Yeah, you can stealth it or kill everyone, but I've not noticed it make a blind bit of difference to what is in the next section.

I have just seen one thing that might actually make a difference...



But I suspect it'd only be cosmetic.

Well yeah... The story progresses in a linear pattern. What were you expecting? It's the gameplay that is non-linear. The important bit. If you want a non-linear story, er, read a pick a path book.

But there are a few story bits that can be affected by how you played the game. The very first mission with the hostages, for example.

It's not as 'free' as the original Deus Ex but there are at LEAST two solutions to every problem, usually more.

It does feel a bit more 'contained' than the original due to the pretty obvious compartmentalisation of each area, there are no massive free-roaming levels like the original had, but that's just a memory constraint with the consoles and doesn't affect the overall nature of the game.

You just couldn't help yourself, could you?

But how much difference does it actually make? At one point I give a chap a gun and later he gives me a few quid; big deal. If I slaughter everyone in a civilian area nobody cares. If I kill a bunch of people and piss off a bouncer by a nightclub I can return in a bit and he's all smiles. If I kill the bouncer nobody in the club cares. From what EBG was saying at the start of the thread, the story would wildly differ depending on your choices. I suspect any differences are exceedingly minimal.

It's a fun game, but it doesn't seem too expansive in those terms. Which is fine, just not what I was expecting from the earlier comments, which made me think it might offer you more freedom, Just Cause 2 style.

But any story driven game is always going to be guided along a central narrative path to a fairly significant extent, the original Deus Ex was too.

Even 'proper' sandbox games like GTAIV/Just Cause 2 ultimately funnel you down something of a pre-determined path when it comes to the 'campaign missions'.

There's no other way to do it, the branching possibilities would quickly become completely unmanageable and the game would take a thousand people about a hundred years to develop.

I'm just pointing out, factually, why the game operates in fairly small areas and as such may not 'feel' like the original Deus Ex.

The phenomenon was first seen in Deus Ex 2 on the original XBox, the developers went out of their way ahead of the release to explain that the big open levels had gone in the bin due to the console's memory constraints, the same applies to Deux Ex HR on 360/PS3, it's why the levels are relatively small and it's also why there's so much loading.

Not really. I think you could realistically program towards a series of (say ten?) set endings and the choices you make branch you along them. I don't mind that the game doesn't seem to do that, and coming to it blind I wouldn't even have mentioned it. Just the earlier comments in this thread have me the impression that your actions had far reaching consequences.

Nah, they're just rubbish at programming. They should triangulated the RAM, VRAM and RAMJAM.

But has there been a game like that, ever?

Colony Wars, off the top of my head.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colony_Wars#Endings

Silent Hill 2 had 6, Dead Rising had 7, Resident Evil has 12, Chrono Trigger has 14, and Fallout 3 has north of 200.

Chrono Trigger? That was more events completed than branching, though.