Did you play Missing Link? You learn more about the Hyron Project in it. Drone candidates are definitely not exclusively women.
Hyron is heavily reliant on Tai Young designs. Zhao had a set of blueprints in her penthouse in Hengsha. She thought she could interface with it because she has the designs and her company built the tech powering it. She wasn't walking around: she was strapped into some sort of interface suit, and there's a prototype of the suit in her penthouse as well. I'm almost positive she was planning to fuse into the system.
Eliza doesn't show up in DX or IW, but she does sort of resemble something that shows up in IW. Jensen isn't in either game.
She's likely the only AI at that point. It's difficult to say exactly how aware her owners are of her capabilities, but I think they're likely much more aware than the game seemingly lets on. In case you didn't catch it, she's a tool of the Illuminati. The basement level of Picus TV is a hidden Illuminati base, and Picus is an Illuminati operation. One of the e-mails you can come across at Picus is sent by someone that is a major player in DX who shows up towards the end of the game. Meeting him will shed some light on the matter, though he doesn't directly mention anything from HR.
Did you play Missing Link? You learn more about the Hyron Project in it. Drone candidates are definitely not exclusively women.
Hyron is heavily reliant on Tai Young designs. Zhao had a set of blueprints in her penthouse in Hengsha. She thought she could interface with it because she has the designs and her company built the tech powering it. She wasn't walking around: she was strapped into some sort of interface suit, and there's a prototype of the suit in her penthouse as well. I'm almost positive she was planning to fuse into the system.
Eliza doesn't show up in DX or IW, but she does sort of resemble something that shows up in IW. Jensen isn't in either game.
She's likely the only AI at that point. It's difficult to say exactly how aware her owners are of her capabilities, but I think they're likely much more aware than the game seemingly lets on. In case you didn't catch it, she's a tool of the Illuminati. The basement level of Picus TV is a hidden Illuminati base, and Picus is an Illuminati operation. One of the e-mails you can come across at Picus is sent by someone that is a major player in DX who shows up towards the end of the game. Meeting him will shed some light on the matter, though he doesn't directly mention anything from HR.
I did. That's where I noticed it. Most of the pods on the ship were female; I thought they were involved in human trafficking... of the, you know, normal sort. Then way more females in the detention center than males, and every candidate for testing was female. The characters also spoke of the things they were doing to women, not men. Based off of that, I figure the men were there for "legitimate" reasons, but they were expressly targeting women for the project...
As for the suit, I thought that was the same suit all the other women were wearing. Kavanagh and... uh... Gary seemed to not have the whole, super high-risk dying really quickly problem solved. Are you suggesting that Zhao did, and was keeping it from them for some reason?
I got that whole thing re. Picus + Illuminati. Was just curious about Eliza being like the only AI, and also clearly being super-advanced and sentient, and it's completely uncommented on. She also seems to be acting at least somewhat independently of the Illuminati, relaying information to Adam and trying to be all sneaky about it. Her existence also makes me wonder about ...
What's with the absence of robots in the world? They have these incredibly advanced biomechanical machinery and advanced computer technology, but nothing in the way of robots? The whole "only augmented humans could build this" argument seems a little weird in that context.
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chiasaur11Never doubt a raccoon.Do you think it's trademarked?Registered Userregular
Okay. I finished the game. And boy, did I find the latter parts of it disappointing.
Complaints:
Wasn't I in this in the first place to find Megan? And then after some 60 hours of gameplay, I finally find her, it's like, "Hi!" "Wtf?" "Wtf YOU?!" "Oh right. Later! Bad thing happened! Go now!" What the hell??
And the Omega Ranch, in general, was suuper small. Picus was way bigger, never mind Rifleman Bank Station.
Furthermore, at Omega Ranch, that was the worst plan. You had no idea how far deep Megan was, or if she was even there, and you had no evac plan, so you were just going to have these 3 scientists set off distractions and then sit for some unknown amount of time until you found Megan, get back to regather them from all the guards they drew out, and then sit with their thumbs up their asses until they figured out how to leave?
And then Panchea was suuuuuper-disappointing. After all the hype, it was visually less impressive than Tai Yong Medical was, and then the gameplay was just horrible. Very little puzzling or exploration, just swarms of enemies standing about in groups strategically placed to block hallways. What emails there were were interesting, but man, that was a shitty-ass end-location.
Also, does Zhao not realise she can just walk into that room behind where she was connecting and just press a button, rather than get her central nervous system replaced so she can hook up to a torturous hive mind computer?
Comments:
One of the more terrifying bits of the game was the juxtaposition of terrible evil with very regular, normal work emails.
I'm a little surprised Sarif didn't turn out to be Illuminati too.
Those scientists seemed pretty happy to work for an organization that made them compete in MENSA deathmatches.
I did not get the Pacifist achievement nor the Foxiest achievement. Wish I knew when/where I slipped those up at least
Questions (I'm afraid to look these up because I don't want to spoil Deus Ex for myself. Please don't answer me if it's a DX/DX2 spoiler, or spoiler tag it as such, since I think I'll be visiting those games some time in the future):
Why does the Hyron Project only take on women?
Why can Zhao Yun Ru just walk around after getting those Hyron project augmentations, when every other woman seems horribly paralyzed and in agony?
What makes Zhao Yun Ru think she can take over the damn computer anyways? Was that like a specially designed master port? Cuz if so, it sure didn't work!
Is Eliza Cassan the only AI? Do her owners not realise that she is an AI, or don't realise how self-determining she is? It seems like Federova would know, being there for her conversation with Adam, but then she also has the ability to tunnel into Panchea's computer too, and her sympathies clearly lie with Adam. Does Eliza show up in DX or DX2? (Does Adam, for that part?)
How did the Illuminati get everybody's chips to start malfunctioning in the first place? I thought the whole point of their targeting Sarif and stuff was to get Tai Yong's chips into LIMB clinics and distributed to replace the malfunctioning chips, so now they've got a kill-switch in every augmented person. But to do that, they had to have chips they could cause malfunctions in inside everybody in the first place! Did everybody always have Tai Young chips or something? Or did it just affect most people, and we didn't see the ones it didn't affect? Or did Darrow put something in his original design that they exploited, but it wasn't capable of being quite a shutdown signal? (Though it sure fucking hell seems like it could've been, given that it turned off all my augmentations for a few seconds each time.)
1) I think that's covered in some emails in Missing Link, not sure.
2) Specially designed. She had it built so she could run the thing. It...didn't quite work. She's not the brightest.
3) Adam and Eliza don't show up in Deus Ex 1. A few people you meet do, but not the leads. Eliza's known to be an AI, but the Illuminati doesn't know she's capable of going off the leash.
4) Global energy pulse thingies. Not actually direct interface with the chip. Just sending out uncomfortable signals that only augments picked up. Like a dog whistle, but for people.
Honestly, DX and HR had such different vibes that I kind of wish HR was it's own intellectual property. They're both awesome games but I feel there's no need to link them together.
This is probably my single biggest gripe with HR's setting. The game itself, especially the Directors Cut for integrating Missing Link and alleviating the terrible boss fights, is simply a great game, and putting the "Deus Ex" name on there does nothing to improve on it. The setting pretty much only has faint, superficial ties to the DE1, and mostly just in the form of some names tossed in there. The two settings clash pretty harshly, largely because all the great stuff you see in the prequel has basically evaporated completely by the time DE1 is supposed to take place. There's virtually no connection between the two whatsoever in terms of the world or the characters or events, so they simply feel like they take place in two completely different universes.
I mean, if you took out the handful of references from HR that involve DE1, a newcomer would easily be able to play both games and come away thinking they were two different franchises. That ends up leaving the "Deus Ex" in the title as basically a name to cash in on, which the game didn't even remotely need. In fact, it's extremely limiting, because now the devs for further games have to figure out how to make more prequels to DE1 without stepping all over the toes of a game that came out almost 15 years ago, instead of being able to take the good thing they've made and just run with it.
Though they could definitely work harder on "allies" and enemies that aren't annoyingly petty or stupid and I just want to punch their faces in by the time I learn everything about them, instead of loving to hate them for being conniving evil bastards.
I actually wouldn't mind seeing Deus Ex 1 being remade to bring it more in line with Human Revolution. I fully understand that several fans would be vehemently opposed to such a thing. I think the newest console generation might be able to do justice to the original game; keeping things pretty while maintaining, and adding to, the complexity of the original. Doing so would allow for a continuation of the story without keeping things in the prequel, none of this shit actually matters, box.
You may now shout me down for expressing such heretical thoughts.
I actually wouldn't mind seeing Deus Ex 1 being remade to bring it more in line with Human Revolution. I fully understand that several fans would be vehemently opposed to such a thing. I think the newest console generation might be able to do justice to the original game; keeping things pretty while maintaining, and adding to, the complexity of the original. Doing so would allow for a continuation of the story without keeping things in the prequel, none of this shit actually matters, box.
You may now shout me down for expressing such heretical thoughts.
I'm very much open to that idea, and much more so now than I was even a few months ago, but such thoughts are incredibly premature. There are still a lot of years between HR and DX to explore.
I don't want them touching the level designs at all though. They can overhaul the visuals all they want, and an AI upgrade would be very welcome, but if they touch the level layouts I will picture myself choking them out.
I wouldn't mind if Human Revolution, and everything that follows, was treated more like a reboot, a la JJ Abrams and Star Trek. It's informed by the classic, but is allowed to overwrite and update things as it goes.
As much as I love Deus Ex, I don't want Eidos/Square to remake it. I would miss everything that they can't or won't reproduce and any updated material would go further without having to sling the original game over its shoulder and carry it the entire game.
While DXHR was good enough, I'm not sure that the consolization of the interfaces could really support the kind of emergent gameplay the first game excelled at. Or for that matter, the kind of obscure reactivity that they spent the resources building, I know people always use Paul as the example for it, but that's actually quite highlighted as a possibility compared to some of the other stuff they had in there. Especially when the pinnacle of their C&C was choosing from 3 different colors buttons
I mean, look the kind of crate stairs (much less LAM climbing) you could make to skip stuff, compared to how now how alternate paths are practically (or sometimes literally) highlighted by the availability of man sized ventilation ducts or smashable walls.
I will give you this, Spoit. Man sized air ducts are just straight up lazy. I recall several ducts that made absolutely zero sense outside providing holes in security, which kinda breaks immersion for me. Stealth should be accidental and clever. Emergent and logical. Punching holes in walls if pretty badass though.
"I see everything twice!"
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Dhalphirdon't you open that trapdooryou're a fool if you dareRegistered Userregular
While DXHR was good enough, I'm not sure that the consolization of the interfaces could really support the kind of emergent gameplay the first game excelled at. Or for that matter, the kind of obscure reactivity that they spent the resources building, I know people always use Paul as the example for it, but that's actually quite highlighted as a possibility compared to some of the other stuff they had in there. Especially when the pinnacle of their C&C was choosing from 3 different colors buttons
I mean, look the kind of crate stairs (much less LAM climbing) you could make to skip stuff, compared to how now how alternate paths are practically (or sometimes literally) highlighted by the availability of man sized ventilation ducts or smashable walls.
There were a lot of ways to complete missions in DX:HR, but every single one of them FELT crafted. It felt like the developers said "okay, we want there to be exactly 7 ways to complete this mission, so let's design a level that permits 7 ways to beat it"
DX1 didn't have that feeling. A lot of the ways I beat levels didn't feel intended, or crafted. Maybe they were, but they didn't feel it. For example, using a stack of rotating crates to get up to the top of the containers on the airfield mission and snipe all of the soldiers before heading to the exit. Or using a LAM thrown through the door of the barracks window to blow open the door and all of the lockers to get the datacard that had the code to the hangar. And let's not forget climbing walls with LAMs.
Deus Ex felt like a world, a world that had been created by the designers, and you were free to make of it what you will.
Deus Ex: Human Revolution, on the other hand, still felt like a theme park ride. You still felt like you were on the developer's rails 100% of the time.
Now, there were several sets of rails in every mission and you could switch between those rails during the mission, sure, but the original game genuinely felt like there were no rails, and it's one of the few games I've EVER played where I felt that way.
Eeeeh, I'll grant that DXHR was much more 'obvious goal' oriented, but the original wasn't really off rails at all. It still had relatively narrow objectives, just as linear progression of those objectives and areas, and roughly the same size areas with plenty of it locked off and just set pieces (or entirely pointless, and often with nothing there anyway). The original absolutely gave you more freedom to complete any given objective, so it has that; but arguing that it were no rails is really inaccurate. And I'd argue, to a point anyway, that much of its freedom was due to how absurdly bad and abusable the enemy AI was in the game.
I'm not at all arguing that HR is a better, or even equal game, but as great as the original was, we're getting into some serious mysticism about its systems vs actual reality.
I don't think it's fair to call it mysticism; we think of DX1 has being crazy-open because in its time, it was. The idea of a shooter game where the missions had multiple completion paths and held you accountable for how you performed from one to the next was pretty nuts. It's just that so many of DX1's ideas have been broadly incorporated by the genre that when HR runs them back ten years later they feel contrived.
Also a fair few of the 'alternate' routes were sort of silly in DX1; like, why is this huge underwater tunnel here? I guess so that if you invested in the underwater breathing skill for some reason, you'll have something to use it for. Why do these boxes outside the statue of liberty form a near-perfect staircase? So you can climb them! DX1 is filled with man-size vents too.
it was the smallest on the list but
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
In my mind, "Deus Ex" is more indicative of a game design philosophy than it is of a specific in-universe setting. I don't even think of DX:HR as being in the same world as the original, and I don't need it to be; I just care that in DX:HR, I could skulk about, drag knocked-out guards into vents, and so on. Yes, I will agree 100% that some of the level design is a little off (the vents to nowhere being the most noticeable for me), but when I was playing DX:HR, I felt good. Like, the way a warm cup of soup makes you feel on a cold winter day. I hadn't played this kind of game for years and years and years; playing it again felt like a hug.
I don't think it's fair to call it mysticism; we think of DX1 has being crazy-open because in its time, it was. The idea of a shooter game where the missions had multiple completion paths and held you accountable for how you performed from one to the next was pretty nuts. It's just that so many of DX1's ideas have been broadly incorporated by the genre that when HR runs them back ten years later they feel contrived.
Also a fair few of the 'alternate' routes were sort of silly in DX1; like, why is this huge underwater tunnel here? I guess so that if you invested in the underwater breathing skill for some reason, you'll have something to use it for. Why do these boxes outside the statue of liberty form a near-perfect staircase? So you can climb them! DX1 is filled with man-size vents too.
For its time, yeah, it was absolutely open. There were few games that weren't relatively directionless (like the Elder Scroll games, or Might and Magics...generally fantasy RPG's) that gave you the kind of freedom DX1 had.
I was just speaking relative to DXHR though, since that's what it was being directly compared to. DXHR certainly had its faults and absolutely could have stood to be more open, but at the same time HR is still, relative to its modern contemporaries (with the exception of bethesda games, and a few others) it is pretty open and option filled. And, I'd argue, it isn't nearly as narrow or on rails, even compared to DX1, as many folks criticize it for.
As I recall, the scientists at the ranch designed a program that could cause the mild malfunctions in any aug chip. Not enough to do real damage, but enough to get people in to LIMB clinics for the free replacement from Tai Yong Medical.
A Capellan's favorite sheath for any blade is your back.
I don't think it's fair to call it mysticism; we think of DX1 has being crazy-open because in its time, it was. The idea of a shooter game where the missions had multiple completion paths and held you accountable for how you performed from one to the next was pretty nuts. It's just that so many of DX1's ideas have been broadly incorporated by the genre that when HR runs them back ten years later they feel contrived.
Also a fair few of the 'alternate' routes were sort of silly in DX1; like, why is this huge underwater tunnel here? I guess so that if you invested in the underwater breathing skill for some reason, you'll have something to use it for. Why do these boxes outside the statue of liberty form a near-perfect staircase? So you can climb them! DX1 is filled with man-size vents too.
For its time, yeah, it was absolutely open. There were few games that weren't relatively directionless (like the Elder Scroll games, or Might and Magics...generally fantasy RPG's) that gave you the kind of freedom DX1 had.
I was just speaking relative to DXHR though, since that's what it was being directly compared to. DXHR certainly had its faults and absolutely could have stood to be more open, but at the same time HR is still, relative to its modern contemporaries (with the exception of bethesda games, and a few others) it is pretty open and option filled. And, I'd argue, it isn't nearly as narrow or on rails, even compared to DX1, as many folks criticize it for.
Look, I'm all for keeping a level and and avoiding mysticism when evaluating the "Classics", but you're engaging in some serious historical revisionism of your own if you think the levels in HR even come close to the original in terms of size, completeness of the world (that is, modeling entire buildings so you can walk around them and find multiple entrances, or get from any one part of the building to another without resorting to absurd methods), and logical flow. The levels in HR felt like arbitrary mazes to me because of how ridiculously cramped and segmented they were. Want to go to the backdoor of the police station? Sure thing, mister! Just go to this completely unrelated building, climb through six vents and walk through the sewer, you can't miss it!
There are probably very good reasons for the level design in HR to be as limited as it is, like a higher ratio of expected fidelity vs what computers of the time can handle, and so on, but to claim that it's just like the original is flat out ridiculous.
I don't think it's fair to call it mysticism; we think of DX1 has being crazy-open because in its time, it was. The idea of a shooter game where the missions had multiple completion paths and held you accountable for how you performed from one to the next was pretty nuts. It's just that so many of DX1's ideas have been broadly incorporated by the genre that when HR runs them back ten years later they feel contrived.
Also a fair few of the 'alternate' routes were sort of silly in DX1; like, why is this huge underwater tunnel here? I guess so that if you invested in the underwater breathing skill for some reason, you'll have something to use it for. Why do these boxes outside the statue of liberty form a near-perfect staircase? So you can climb them! DX1 is filled with man-size vents too.
For its time, yeah, it was absolutely open. There were few games that weren't relatively directionless (like the Elder Scroll games, or Might and Magics...generally fantasy RPG's) that gave you the kind of freedom DX1 had.
I was just speaking relative to DXHR though, since that's what it was being directly compared to. DXHR certainly had its faults and absolutely could have stood to be more open, but at the same time HR is still, relative to its modern contemporaries (with the exception of bethesda games, and a few others) it is pretty open and option filled. And, I'd argue, it isn't nearly as narrow or on rails, even compared to DX1, as many folks criticize it for.
Look, I'm all for keeping a level and and avoiding mysticism when evaluating the "Classics", but you're engaging in some serious historical revisionism of your own if you think the levels in HR even come close to the original in terms of size, completeness of the world (that is, modeling entire buildings so you can walk around them and find multiple entrances, or get from any one part of the building to another without resorting to absurd methods), and logical flow. The levels in HR felt like arbitrary mazes to me because of how ridiculously cramped and segmented they were. Want to go to the backdoor of the police station? Sure thing, mister! Just go to this completely unrelated building, climb through six vents and walk through the sewer, you can't miss it!
There are probably very good reasons for the level design in HR to be as limited as it is, like a higher ratio of expected fidelity vs what computers of the time can handle, and so on, but to claim that it's just like the original is flat out ridiculous.
No, it's really not.
There are more geographically different locations in DX1, but the actual size of those locations aren't any larger than DXHR's. By larger, I mean, playable area that actually serves a purpose. That statue of liberty in DX1 is sprawling but the vast majority of it serves no purpose other than to make you walk; huge chunks of it contain no enemies, objects, options, NPC's, quests, or even sights (like, compared to a Bethesda game that litters its sprawling maps with do-dads). The central building only has 2 or 3 entrances, which is pretty on par with most locations in DXHR. Once you start moving up the building it gets even more linear. This isn't a criticism it's an observation. Battery Park and Hells Kitchen are also much smaller than they immediately appear, because again, both areas have square footage, but most serves no purpose. There's not really any more ways to save the hostages in Battery Park as there are to, say, infiltrate the Police Station in DXHR. Most of the buildings are just there for visuals and are not enter-able or otherwise interact-able in Hells Kitchen similar to Detroit. And Detroit has more land-mass street wise of things than Hells Kitchen, and more buildings that actually do something and let you go in and dick around.
Again, DX1 has more geographical locations, but DXHR has (often substantially) more visitable maps within each major location than DX1 had. Yes, you're not hopping all over from New York to China to Paris, but had they even expanded Montreal to be more than the Picus Building, it'd be pretty on par geographically. As it stands there are fewer major hubs, but more diverse areas within each hub. But even then, it's not a lot different than the various one and done areas in DX1 like Battery Park or the NSF Airfield (among others). DXHR just has man of those one and dones within the major areas it already presents. Hengsha, all said and done, is huge, when you take into account, the hive, the three districts, sewers, the Hive, Pods, and so on. And there's something to do in virtually all of it, very little space is wasted. The same is true of Detroit and all it's tertiary areas. You can criticize DXHR for not having more sprawling areas that don't actually provide any more content, if you'd like; but the content that is there is just as competitive with the amount of content in DX1. And the hub areas in DXHR, while fewer in number than DX1, are just as chock full of things to do as combinations of DX1's areas.
There's no question that DXHR pushes you along the story harder than DX1, but that's less because of how much content is there to explore, and more to do with how objectives are presented in modern games vs games of that era.
Sure paris and the like are pretty sparse, but I'm not sure if I agree on how dense the areas are relative to each other. Sure you have random apartments that have a single code lock to get some middling loot, but they're definitely lacking in side areas like the NSF sewers or smuggler's den. I mean, if you're counting one and dones like the hive and apartment complex as part of hengsha, then versalife of the molemen are are also part of shanghai and NY respectively
DXHR certainly didn't have as much retreading old locations that DX1 did.
Well, I shouldn't use retread, its not like it was lazy design, they did it all really well and you never really felt like "shit, not this again", but you know what I mean. That's likely what made it feel more linear to many people than DX1, that you were constantly moving forward and the only areas you went back to for the most part were hub areas, and the Sarif building. DX1 reused many of the locations well, and when you went back it felt like it was for a purpose and not padding.
Not better or worse, just a design decision.
There is an interesting facet of old 3D game design that I believe plays into a lot of what some folks feel made DX1 feel much larger and less cramped.
Back when I was in the Air Force (99-03) we were using game engines to design training simulations. First we used the TRIBES engine because it did vast terrain better than any other game at the time (by far) and importing content was easy due to them using the wad system, and then moved to UE for other things for its ability to have complex scripting. An issue both engines (and afaik every other engine at the time, including UE2 which we moved to at the end of my time) shared was the inability to accurately portray scale. I recall dicking with the size of buildings, and items inside said buildings, and player models, constantly because every time we briefed a general or some other VIP on what we were doing, they would always comment on how 'off' the perspective was in the demos we were showing them.
What I mean is, at the time (and I don't have the technical expertise to know exactly why, simply that it was) it was difficult, to impossible, to accurately replicate real world spacial sizes in games. Everything was either too big, too small, or if you tried to find a middle ground, just looked wrong.
As an example:
vs
What you'll notice in DX1 and most other games of the era that were fully 3D is that everything often felt tiny in the world, and the world often felt too big. Modern games manage to accurately depict proper spacial perspective, but old games simply couldn't. If you took the time (and we did) to accurately measure out sizes, dimensions, and distances, based on the the size of character models, you felt like a giant in a tiny world. Spaces felt too small and it just felt completely unnatural. If you, instead, set sizes based on the size of what your character should be given your perspective, everything felt huge and objects in the world felt tiny. Trying to mix larger objects with smaller spaces didn't work, or vice versa. No amount of fiddling with the location of the First Person camera helped either (and heaven help you if you went into 3rd person view in TRIBES, it made it all appear weirder), so you basically had to choose, and usually you chose the same thing that Ion Storm, and many other developers did, and made interior spaces large and the objects 'normal' which made everything still feel wrong, but at the very least gave the player the illusion of size, even though technical limitations at the time meant that you couldn't possibly fill those spaces to make them feel realistic.
Thus what you see in the DX1 screen above. The bar is far and away unnaturally large, as is every space in the game, but at least objects in the space feel relatively right compared to your perspective. Though, you still had situations like said bottle next to said NPC. :P
The result of all of this is that DXHR has streets like this:
Where DX1 had streets like this:
DXHR's feel 'smaller', but they're displaying relative space far more accurately. DX1's feel larger and more spacious, but the sizes themselves; both of the areas, and the objects within, are completely unnatural, but are still the best they could do with the technology at the time.
As I said, I believe the result is the illusion of size for DX1's areas vs DXHR's (not even gonna touch IW) that is more of a trick of the mind than actual playable space. DX1 had ostensibly larger areas, but given that they're more of an artifact than intentional (and often much of said spaces were incredibly sparse, underused or unused), the ultimate result is that a lot of the notion of its size is a visual trick. Again, content wise, I'll argue heavily that DXHR is on par with DX1. That's not at all to say the quality of said content was on par, mind you. And I don't say any of this to criticize DX1; I'm simply comparing and contrasting the two.
Sorry, but when you just claimed that HR had "roughly the same size areas", you don't get to go back and say that the extra space in the original "doesn't count" because of some arbitrary reason you didn't bring up before. The levels in DX are much larger and more open than the ones in HR, that is a fact.
You've already lost the argument right there, but let's take it little further just for fun. You claim that that the open space in areas like Liberty Island serves no purpose, but I find that highly questionable. Any given area of space in a map could be serving one or many of a multitude of different purposes other than being filled with enemies or doodads, which you are dismissing out of hand (and yes, that includes giving the world a sense of scale), but here's an immediately obvious one: It allows you to physically walk around the building that is the focus of your mission to search for alternate entrances without taking a ridiculously convoluted route. This is something that you literally cannot do in most of the hub areas of HR, let alone the "mission" areas, because most of your potential avenues are conveniently blocked off.
You might not see the value in that extra space, and that's fine, but you can't argue that it's not there in good faith.
I don't really think Human Revolution's scale is much different from the original Deus Ex. If you talk to game artists today who work on modern games they also tell you that you can't make realistic sized stuff without making the player feel weirdly sized. This is just because y our field of view, speed of movement, and so on in a game is different from what it is in real life.
I haven't really compared the two games but I'm pretty sure @Lork is right about Deus Ex being much larger not because it's displaying space inaccurately but because it's larger. That was easier back then when you could make a large empty-ish space that looked more or less acceptable without hours and hours and hours and hours and hours of work, which you'd have to put in these days to get the high visual fidelity that modern games have. But as a consequence modern games are usually smaller, especially if they take place in urban areas like Deus Ex and they can't just procedurally generate some forests or something.
In this screenshot the street seems like it's the same size as in the DX:HR screenshot you posted:
TychoCelchuuu on
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Dhalphirdon't you open that trapdooryou're a fool if you dareRegistered Userregular
The ability to re-use lots of generic textures and not have it seem out of place was a privilege reserved for games of Deus Ex's generation. For example, that crashed SUV in the above picture was repeated through the entire game dozens of times. You just can't get away with that stuff anymore.
Sorry, but when you just claimed that HR had "roughly the same size areas", you don't get to go back and say that the extra space in the original "doesn't count" because of some arbitrary reason you didn't bring up before. The levels in DX are much larger and more open than the ones in HR, that is a fact.
You've already lost the argument right there, but let's take it little further just for fun. You claim that that the open space in areas like Liberty Island serves no purpose, but I find that highly questionable. Any given area of space in a map could be serving one or many of a multitude of different purposes other than being filled with enemies or doodads, which you are dismissing out of hand (and yes, that includes giving the world a sense of scale), but here's an immediately obvious one: It allows you to physically walk around the building that is the focus of your mission to search for alternate entrances without taking a ridiculously convoluted route. This is something that you literally cannot do in most of the hub areas of HR, let alone the "mission" areas, because most of your potential avenues are conveniently blocked off.
You might not see the value in that extra space, and that's fine, but you can't argue that it's not there in good faith.
So, what, that there's two buildings in Hells Kitchen that you can fully circle means that DX1s area design was inherently better? It's not like it was a super common thing in DX1 either, and the buildings you could circle sure as hell didn't have much in them. There's what, 3 rooms in the hotel you can actually enter? 4?
HR did have roughly the same size of playable areas.
You didn't see stuff like this in DXHR, and for good damn reason:
You can't possibly be arguing that needless empty space is somehow fundamentally better than more realistically depicted areas that feel smaller (because they don't have to deal with the technological limitations of the time), while providing the exact same amount of gameplay.
That's not a cherry picked screenshot. Maybe you haven't loaded up DX1 in awhile, but the screens like TC posted are the rarity, DX1 is much more frequently full of gameplay-wise, worthless space. No, each area doesn't have to be filled with do-dads to make it worth exploring, but an area has to have something to make it actually count for something.
And it certainly wasn't just outdoor areas that were overly large and featureless. They weren't going for realism in size there, they were simply coping with technology. The reasons they didn't put anything in those areas is because they knew they were simply there for design reasons, to make the actual playable areas feel 'right', not because they were meant to be confused with meaningful content and gameplay. Would you argue that if you simply increased the size of the landmass of Skyrim by 10x, and add nothing into that space, you'd have more content? Because that would be really silly.
And it certainly wasn't just DX1, but a product of the technology at the time that pretty much every 3D game had to come to grips with.
Ever wonder why in games of that era you moved so fast compared to modern games? It's not because they're trying to slow you down to drag out content in modern games, it's because it was the solution to the issue of spacial perspective forced on design at the time. I didn't mention it, but one solution we attempted in TRIBES was to dramatically slow down the player so that they moved more realistically, but the result of that was it made the already overly large areas feel even bigger because you moved slower and had the odd side effect of making you feel smaller. And because of the size you had to make things (as you see in various games of the time, above) if NPC's also moved 'naturally' they appeared to be walking through molasses. This also had the effect of throwing out the window all the work you had done on models and textures to try to 'trick' the player into feeling like the space they were in made spacial sense.
It's not that I don't see value in the extra space, it's that if the extra space serves no purpose, it by its very definition has no value. And I'm not the only one who thought so; notice how few games had exterior areas and how quickly most games of the time were happy to move you to interior corridors. It wasn't simply because of limitations of most engines ability to display large areas, it was because it was easier to control the players visual perspective in interior areas (which, as I showed before, were still unnaturally large, but you could place familiar objects in them to make the player feel more 'normal') without wasting processing and design time on trying to make an inherently unnatural area feel more natural. And you seem to be confusing what is an observation of the reality of game design at the time, with criticism. I'm simply presenting factual information, and you're getting worked up that I'm arguing something in bad faith, when that's the exact opposite of what I'm doing. I'm not even arguing anything. I'm saying "here, info" and you're treating it like an attack.
I already said that the areas in DX1 were ostensibly bigger; I'm just making a point that those 'larger' spaces were more a trick of design than actual space, and content for content, the actual playable space in DXHR isn't any less than DX1.
EDIT: Also, I want to say on this topic that there's a lot of aspects of visual design in games, particularly older games, that we simply accept because we're used to it. Some of us more than others due to playing these older games at their release and not in modern days with all the mods, fixes and upgrades. What is harder for some folks to do is step back and look at these design issues of the past from the perspective of a non-gamer. When we had Colonels, Generals, contractor executives, and so on, come visit our shop when I was in the USAF they were for the most part coming in as individuals not accustomed to 3D engines or design at all. So myself, and other members of my team, would look at what we were designing in these engines and think "yeah, this looks right" but then these folks would come in with their only experience of visual space being reality and these 3D 'games' often looked really off. When you have to confront this in visual design you start to think a lot more about spacial relations, awareness and other factors of design gamers tend to not even think about because we're conditioned to accept things that are distinctly wrong. As gaming as become more universal, and technology allows visual design without the limitations of the past, there's fewer and fewer instances where it even comes into play. Much of the issues of area design I'm sure the folks at Ion Storm had to take into account never even entered the mind of the folks at EIDOS Montreal, because the limitations Ion Storm had to deal with are no longer an issue. Engines are designed, because hardware can support it, to more accurately draw polygons to represent what you modeled, and thus can more easily depict 'realistic' environments without any effort. Which is great! But it also comes with the reality of said environments. If someone produced a game with the area design of DX1 today, even with all the bells and whistles, it'd feel really off and get lambasted. Interior rooms would be 2x the size they really are, you'd have a bedroom with 1000sqft and 15ft high ceilings, hallways 12 feet across and 20 feet high, with doors that were 4x the size of people.
And, the result wouldn't be any more content just...unnaturally bigger spaces without the justification of technological limitations. :P
Both Deus Ex and Human Revolution were great games and Human Revolution was definitely as good of a prequel as one could ask for for a game that was over a decade old.
Comparing the sizes of maps and all of that just seems odd to me. While there are things they could improve upon in a sequel to HR, compairing it to the original is comparing it to a game that had the luxury of the player using their imagination to really fill out the world. While the maps may have been larger, they were sparsly detailed. And we didn't notice that back then. But now? A game like Deus Ex really needs those details filled in. Every square inch of the map needs to be packed with unique props and characters.
Just as long as HR followed the design philosophy of Deus Ex it did good by it. And to that end it did. And while I hope the next game might be larger and possibly closer to achieving a modern day Deus Ex in that wide open feel, HR was just about as close to that as anyone could realisticly expect.
Well okay, if you want to talk about recent gen games, how about the pressidium in ME1, compared to the cramped (but oh so full of junk geometry) of the 2 hallway areas tied together with a bunch of quick travel staitons that was the citadel in ME3?
Well okay, if you want to talk about recent gen games, how about the pressidium in ME1, compared to the cramped (but oh so full of junk geometry) of the 2 hallway areas tied together with a bunch of quick travel staitons that was the citadel in ME3?
If I recall correctly, the Citadel was especially limited in ME2 and ME3 because they couldn't reproduce something as large as they had with ME1's Citadel using their new engine. With the upgraded graphics and their desire to populate the area, they were running into issues with memory in the X360 and/or Playstation. Actually, in ME1, I believe one of the reasons they had those really long corridors was to hide load times from the user.
Anyways, in my mind, isn't the question, "How many interesting things are there to see?" I haven't played DX1 yet - so maybe I should bow out from this thread before I get spoiled - but DX:HR often had a lot of stuff to see even in empty rooms... most of the time. They did a really good job of dropping in little pieces of flavour as artwork and fluff decor and interesting emails/pocket secretaries. Or the rooms were interesting to get to, and had some random loot that was uninteresting to me, but might be of interest to someone else not playing it with pure takedowns. I went through Sarif HQ hacking all their computars and reading all their emails, even though those offices really had no bearing to my advancing the story or game in any way.
It let up in the later parts of the game though, I assume because of budget/time constraints.
Eh, one of the best parts with that was Montreal, which was the part that was hit the hardest with the cuts. (though maybe they condensed a lot of the stuff that would have been otherwise spread out across the whole hub into that one smallish area instead)
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Dhalphirdon't you open that trapdooryou're a fool if you dareRegistered Userregular
in my mind the myriad of emails to read from hacking tons of computers is what made it feel the most like a Deus Ex game to me.
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Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
edited August 2014
So as somebody who actually played Invisible War before DE1, I've always thought it odd that HR got cut slack for some of the exact same things people ripped on IW for, namely smallish levels with limited routes. And thus, both games shared the same problem for me in a number of places: you bump up so hard against the barrier of "this area was obviously designed as a level, not a place" that you can just about get a bloody nose from it. Where DE1 had maps that encompassed several blocks and incorporated several building-sized structures you could all enter, IW and HR both have largely rinky-dink little maps. HR does get away from that in a few places (and has about a bazillion fewer loading points), but there is absolutely assloads of the devs building a couple of obvious alternate routes with things like 20-foot vents to nowhere except another room. Conversely, DE1 would have ventilations systems you could get lost in, because they basically built a ventilation system in a building, not short little alternate routes.
For me, HR felt like being almost constantly cramped by walls and barriers, like every structure was built on a budget (and they sort of were, in terms of either money or memory). I was directed everywhere, and the route choices were basically on the level of going left or right in terms of how much freedom they actually gave the player.
Ideally, the next Deus Ex game gets a minor visual upgrade, but the rest of the system power (because it will be limited by consoles, after all) will be devoted to handling the large, open maps that felt like real places instead of just game levels. Frankly, I'm sick of devs pushing textures with higher and higher resolutions, which ends up doing things like taking the sprawling structures of ME1 and shrinking them down to pathetic little balconies or hallways like in the later games; things can look plenty awesome without ultra-mega-super-textures, so save the budgets and system resources for things that are really an improvement like applying those great visuals to large areas.
Anyways, in my mind, isn't the question, "How many interesting things are there to see?"
As odd as it sounds, DE1 doesn't make every room have something notable in it, which is, frankly, a lot better for world design anyway. Sure, stuff that's hard to get into will be rewarding, but sometimes an office is just... an office. Not everything is some kind of loot container. The devs also put in secret places to find that people didn't find out about until years and years after the game came out, but they couldn't believe they missed them because some of them are just right out in the open. There's also buttloads of extra content to find regarding several major characters in the game; whereas HR throws some bosses at you that are genuinely a matter of "who the hell are these guys with no backstory?", DE1 accounts for some fairly convoluted (and amazing) decisions on your part depending on what you have found out about other characters beforehand. Basically, if somebody is important, you will know who they are and what they want before you maybe kill them. Or don't, if you perhaps agree with them.
I thought it was the opposite? Where for large swaths of last gen, the textures were actually WORSE than some of the transitional ones, like FEAR or Max payne 2, because they instead used the computing power for higher poly counts and fancy shaders (bloom)
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Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
Well I suppose that could explain why HR caught breaks for some of the same things IW did. :P
I thought it was the opposite? Where for large swaths of last gen, the textures were actually WORSE than some of the transitional ones, like FEAR or Max payne 2, because they instead used the computing power for higher poly counts and fancy shaders (bloom)
That's not really how the shader/textures/polycount trifecta works. Shaders allow textures to take the brunt of the detailing of a model, allowing polycounts to be lower. Bloom is more of a post processing effect than a shader (it's a camera shader, not an object). Last gen was definitely the generation of the better textures, marginally better polycounts, and much much better shaders. UE3/4 basically completely rely on shaders and textures for detail.
With the RAM improvements of the current gen consoles, it should be possible for Eidos to create more interesting areas, especially now that they have the experience of developing HR under their belt.
My favorite areas of HR were the various apartment buildings. They felt the most real, as most of them just had emails or pocket secretaries or some cash to steal from hacking. It actually felt like breaking into someone's abode. I really wished that some had NPCs in them to make it even more realistic.
Volume vs. density in map design is a valid discussion, and DX1 and DX:HR definitely sit on different sides of the spectrum (though not necessarily equidistant from some hypothetical center). I think the real issues, however, are how the levels are designed and how they connect - and this ties back to a very basic problem with DX:HR's narrative flow.
Case in point, DX1's airfield mission. You start in Battery Park, progressing through abandoned subway tunnels in pursuit of the NSF. Initially you're just dealing with homeless people, vagrants, and others who have nowhere else to go; they're not necessarily on your side, but they're certainly not hostile. As you enter the actual secret passageway the NSF uses, you encounter troopers mixed in with more civilians, and you learn that they just moved something big through the tunnels recently. You proceed along the tunnels, bypassing progressively tougher security, until you finally reach the heavily-guarded terminal itself: cameras, robots, patrols, and gun turrets on the perimeter.
Even the music accents this change, shifting from the now-familiar New York BGM to something slower and more ominous, almost somber. Dialogue music is subdued as the mission reaches its climax, followed by a downbeat, rather intense denouement as you fly out. Play the music and you can feel it; that's not a 'mission accomplished' track, that's a 'what happens now?' track.
The closest parallel I can think of in HR is the first trip to Hengsha, specifically the TYM mission. Visually it does capture the sense of moving up through a major figurative and literal barrier between cities, but the overall design doesn't quite reinforce this. Apart from a few civilian workers, you're immediately sneaking your way past guards and heavy physical security, not to mention (curiously unattended) industrial hazards. There's a brief respite in the labs, but it's not long before you're back in high security areas. The danger doesn't seem to climb so much as plateau, which is at odds with the physical climb you are making. The only difference between stealth in the factory level and stealth in the executive suites is whose email you're reading.
This would be easier to overlook if there were stronger links between missions, but HR often has you discover some world-changing information, which only serves to ferry you to your next destination. Spoilering some major plot points just to be safe:
FEMA is setting up a detention camp near Detroit? Never mind that, just follow the sketchy lead a dying mech-aug gasped out to you before trying to blow you up. Tae Yong Medical is working with the mercs that attacked us, and our scientists are alive? Well, they offhandedly mentioned 'Eliza' and 'our friends in Montreal', so fly off to Picus. Picus was a front for a conspiracy and a well-known news icon is an AI? Nah, the only important thing is she recorded a phone call.
Contrast with DX1, which had more levels overall and (in my opinion) does a better job building connections to your next destination; a comparable revelation in the last Hong Kong mission gives you a concrete objective - the superfreighter - that ties into the broader issue - the Illuminati. There's also a disparity in the subtlety of background writing. In DX1, an email on torture uses fairly cold, clinical terms like "viability of the subject is of non-importance" and "employ measures with an eye towards maximum informational yield." In HR, members of the secret conspiracy practically high-five each other over getting Habeas Corpus suspended.
I could go on, but the larger point is DX1 simply does a better job integrating the worldbuilding and level design with the plot you're following. I don't think dense levels over large levels precludes this - I agree that there's a lot of empty space in DX1, and I absolutely loved exploring in HR - but ultimately HR's plot and levels aren't as well connected.
My favorite areas of HR were the various apartment buildings. They felt the most real, as most of them just had emails or pocket secretaries or some cash to steal from hacking. It actually felt like breaking into someone's abode. I really wished that some had NPCs in them to make it even more realistic.
That reads creepier than I intended it to be. :-/
I think it would be nice if there were occasionally people who could chase you out of their apartment after you break in. Since they're civilians, they shouldn't be targeted, and they should be able to throw stuff at you, prohibiting you from hacking their stuff. Because it's a bit weird to be able to break into a couple dozen apartments with no repercussions.
Volume vs. density in map design is a valid discussion, and DX1 and DX:HR definitely sit on different sides of the spectrum (though not necessarily equidistant from some hypothetical center). I think the real issues, however, are how the levels are designed and how they connect - and this ties back to a very basic problem with DX:HR's narrative flow.
Case in point, DX1's airfield mission. You start in Battery Park, progressing through abandoned subway tunnels in pursuit of the NSF. Initially you're just dealing with homeless people, vagrants, and others who have nowhere else to go; they're not necessarily on your side, but they're certainly not hostile. As you enter the actual secret passageway the NSF uses, you encounter troopers mixed in with more civilians, and you learn that they just moved something big through the tunnels recently. You proceed along the tunnels, bypassing progressively tougher security, until you finally reach the heavily-guarded terminal itself: cameras, robots, patrols, and gun turrets on the perimeter.
Even the music accents this change, shifting from the now-familiar New York BGM to something slower and more ominous, almost somber. Dialogue music is subdued as the mission reaches its climax, followed by a downbeat, rather intense denouement as you fly out. Play the music and you can feel it; that's not a 'mission accomplished' track, that's a 'what happens now?' track.
The closest parallel I can think of in HR is the first trip to Hengsha, specifically the TYM mission. Visually it does capture the sense of moving up through a major figurative and literal barrier between cities, but the overall design doesn't quite reinforce this. Apart from a few civilian workers, you're immediately sneaking your way past guards and heavy physical security, not to mention (curiously unattended) industrial hazards. There's a brief respite in the labs, but it's not long before you're back in high security areas. The danger doesn't seem to climb so much as plateau, which is at odds with the physical climb you are making. The only difference between stealth in the factory level and stealth in the executive suites is whose email you're reading.
This would be easier to overlook if there were stronger links between missions, but HR often has you discover some world-changing information, which only serves to ferry you to your next destination. Spoilering some major plot points just to be safe:
FEMA is setting up a detention camp near Detroit? Never mind that, just follow the sketchy lead a dying mech-aug gasped out to you before trying to blow you up. Tae Yong Medical is working with the mercs that attacked us, and our scientists are alive? Well, they offhandedly mentioned 'Eliza' and 'our friends in Montreal', so fly off to Picus. Picus was a front for a conspiracy and a well-known news icon is an AI? Nah, the only important thing is she recorded a phone call.
Contrast with DX1, which had more levels overall and (in my opinion) does a better job building connections to your next destination; a comparable revelation in the last Hong Kong mission gives you a concrete objective - the superfreighter - that ties into the broader issue - the Illuminati. There's also a disparity in the subtlety of background writing. In DX1, an email on torture uses fairly cold, clinical terms like "viability of the subject is of non-importance" and "employ measures with an eye towards maximum informational yield." In HR, members of the secret conspiracy practically high-five each other over getting Habeas Corpus suspended.
I could go on, but the larger point is DX1 simply does a better job integrating the worldbuilding and level design with the plot you're following. I don't think dense levels over large levels precludes this - I agree that there's a lot of empty space in DX1, and I absolutely loved exploring in HR - but ultimately HR's plot and levels aren't as well connected.
This is well said, especially the part in the spoiler, which also disappointed me greatly.
One of the things I loved about DX1 was exploration. Compare the Detroit hub in HR to the areas around the Tong in DX1:
Detroit has more obvious areas to find. The sewers, which connect to the police department and areas around the apartments, the apartments themselves, and several nooks and crannies with hackable doors. It's fairly sprawling, but it's pretty shallow. It's just there to find, but most of it doesn't have any relationship to the setting.
The area around the Tong is deceptively simple. There's the hotel, the bar, and what, a building or two? But then there's the sewers, which keep going, and going, and going... until you stumble on a MJ-12 base with soldiers and a lot of other things. It really helped bring the conspiracy to life. The villains were quite literally under your nose the entire time. It's a great touch that heightens the paranoia. If they have a base in the heart of NYC, where else are they? What else are they controlling? It's a little thing that adds to the world, and if you stumble upon it early, like I did, really adds a sense of mystery. Who are these guys? What's their connection to FEMA or the terrorists fighting above?
"this area was obviously designed as a level, not a place"
This is a big part of why I enjoy DX's design so much: the areas you visited in DX felt like places rather than levels. There was just something about the attempts to transplant real world locations and the layouts of each area that made them feel like you were visiting places rather than solving levels. A lot of the space in the areas of DX may be superfluous from a design point of view, but those expanses helped bring those areas to life for me. A lot of the street areas in Hong Kong are unecessary to the actual game, but they help give the place personality. The DuClare mansion looks and feels huge, but most of the rooms you can explore are inconsequential. You could easily double the length of time you spent in an area just by wandering around, but that wandering would generally turn up something interesting. More background lore, an alternate path to try during a replay, some hidden secret, or nothing at all. Never knowing what you'd find, or if you'd even find anything at all, made the process of exploring every nook and cranny exciting. I've replayed DX a lot, but I still do this every single time I play through the game. The plot was all about uncovering secrets, and the level design shared that philosophy. You wanted to explore all of the buildings on a military base or explore every level of a warehouse because you never knew what might turn up.
HR, for whatever reason, felt more deliberate. The hub areas were very well done, but the interiors were generally lacking with promoting exploration. They never really felt like they had deep secrets to uncover. HR set you on the path to find the important information, whereas you could completely miss a lot of the plot and lore in DX if you just made your way from point A to point B. HR always had the stealth route (usually involving a vent), the Rambo route, and the hacker route. They're easily identifiable, and some version of each route is always available. DX wasn't so obvious with its routes. There was usually one obvious route through each area, but if you looked you could usually (but not always) find another way. And if you did find an alternate route, you generally still had to put in some work to make that other route viable.
Okay. I finished the game. And boy, did I find the latter parts of it disappointing.
Complaints:
Wasn't I in this in the first place to find Megan? And then after some 60 hours of gameplay, I finally find her, it's like, "Hi!" "Wtf?" "Wtf YOU?!" "Oh right. Later! Bad thing happened! Go now!" What the hell??
And the Omega Ranch, in general, was suuper small. Picus was way bigger, never mind Rifleman Bank Station.
Furthermore, at Omega Ranch, that was the worst plan. You had no idea how far deep Megan was, or if she was even there, and you had no evac plan, so you were just going to have these 3 scientists set off distractions and then sit for some unknown amount of time until you found Megan, get back to regather them from all the guards they drew out, and then sit with their thumbs up their asses until they figured out how to leave?
And then Panchea was suuuuuper-disappointing. After all the hype, it was visually less impressive than Tai Yong Medical was, and then the gameplay was just horrible. Very little puzzling or exploration, just swarms of enemies standing about in groups strategically placed to block hallways. What emails there were were interesting, but man, that was a shitty-ass end-location.
Also, does Zhao not realise she can just walk into that room behind where she was connecting and just press a button, rather than get her central nervous system replaced so she can hook up to a torturous hive mind computer?
Comments:
One of the more terrifying bits of the game was the juxtaposition of terrible evil with very regular, normal work emails.
I'm a little surprised Sarif didn't turn out to be Illuminati too.
Those scientists seemed pretty happy to work for an organization that made them compete in MENSA deathmatches.
I did not get the Pacifist achievement nor the Foxiest achievement. Wish I knew when/where I slipped those up at least
Questions (I'm afraid to look these up because I don't want to spoil Deus Ex for myself. Please don't answer me if it's a DX/DX2 spoiler, or spoiler tag it as such, since I think I'll be visiting those games some time in the future):
Why does the Hyron Project only take on women?
Why can Zhao Yun Ru just walk around after getting those Hyron project augmentations, when every other woman seems horribly paralyzed and in agony?
What makes Zhao Yun Ru think she can take over the damn computer anyways? Was that like a specially designed master port? Cuz if so, it sure didn't work!
Is Eliza Cassan the only AI? Do her owners not realise that she is an AI, or don't realise how self-determining she is? It seems like Federova would know, being there for her conversation with Adam, but then she also has the ability to tunnel into Panchea's computer too, and her sympathies clearly lie with Adam. Does Eliza show up in DX or DX2? (Does Adam, for that part?)
How did the Illuminati get everybody's chips to start malfunctioning in the first place? I thought the whole point of their targeting Sarif and stuff was to get Tai Yong's chips into LIMB clinics and distributed to replace the malfunctioning chips, so now they've got a kill-switch in every augmented person. But to do that, they had to have chips they could cause malfunctions in inside everybody in the first place! Did everybody always have Tai Young chips or something? Or did it just affect most people, and we didn't see the ones it didn't affect? Or did Darrow put something in his original design that they exploited, but it wasn't capable of being quite a shutdown signal? (Though it sure fucking hell seems like it could've been, given that it turned off all my augmentations for a few seconds each time.)
1) I think that's covered in some emails in Missing Link, not sure.
2) Specially designed. She had it built so she could run the thing. It...didn't quite work. She's not the brightest.
3) Adam and Eliza don't show up in Deus Ex 1. A few people you meet do, but not the leads. Eliza's known to be an AI, but the Illuminati doesn't know she's capable of going off the leash.
4) Global energy pulse thingies. Not actually direct interface with the chip. Just sending out uncomfortable signals that only augments picked up. Like a dog whistle, but for people.
At least, if memory serves. It's been a while.
About Adam and the original DE(spoilers for both)
If you pay attention to Megan's emails and other tidbits it's pretty obvious that Adam is the genetic blueprint JC and Paul are built from. She's sending Adam's samples to presumably the Illuminati. Adam's super special genes thats makes him not reject bioimplants is what makes Jc and Paul the perfect candidates for the next level nanotech project.
Okay. I finished the game. And boy, did I find the latter parts of it disappointing.
Complaints:
Wasn't I in this in the first place to find Megan? And then after some 60 hours of gameplay, I finally find her, it's like, "Hi!" "Wtf?" "Wtf YOU?!" "Oh right. Later! Bad thing happened! Go now!" What the hell??
And the Omega Ranch, in general, was suuper small. Picus was way bigger, never mind Rifleman Bank Station.
Furthermore, at Omega Ranch, that was the worst plan. You had no idea how far deep Megan was, or if she was even there, and you had no evac plan, so you were just going to have these 3 scientists set off distractions and then sit for some unknown amount of time until you found Megan, get back to regather them from all the guards they drew out, and then sit with their thumbs up their asses until they figured out how to leave?
And then Panchea was suuuuuper-disappointing. After all the hype, it was visually less impressive than Tai Yong Medical was, and then the gameplay was just horrible. Very little puzzling or exploration, just swarms of enemies standing about in groups strategically placed to block hallways. What emails there were were interesting, but man, that was a shitty-ass end-location.
Also, does Zhao not realise she can just walk into that room behind where she was connecting and just press a button, rather than get her central nervous system replaced so she can hook up to a torturous hive mind computer?
Comments:
One of the more terrifying bits of the game was the juxtaposition of terrible evil with very regular, normal work emails.
I'm a little surprised Sarif didn't turn out to be Illuminati too.
Those scientists seemed pretty happy to work for an organization that made them compete in MENSA deathmatches.
I did not get the Pacifist achievement nor the Foxiest achievement. Wish I knew when/where I slipped those up at least
Questions (I'm afraid to look these up because I don't want to spoil Deus Ex for myself. Please don't answer me if it's a DX/DX2 spoiler, or spoiler tag it as such, since I think I'll be visiting those games some time in the future):
Why does the Hyron Project only take on women?
Why can Zhao Yun Ru just walk around after getting those Hyron project augmentations, when every other woman seems horribly paralyzed and in agony?
What makes Zhao Yun Ru think she can take over the damn computer anyways? Was that like a specially designed master port? Cuz if so, it sure didn't work!
Is Eliza Cassan the only AI? Do her owners not realise that she is an AI, or don't realise how self-determining she is? It seems like Federova would know, being there for her conversation with Adam, but then she also has the ability to tunnel into Panchea's computer too, and her sympathies clearly lie with Adam. Does Eliza show up in DX or DX2? (Does Adam, for that part?)
How did the Illuminati get everybody's chips to start malfunctioning in the first place? I thought the whole point of their targeting Sarif and stuff was to get Tai Yong's chips into LIMB clinics and distributed to replace the malfunctioning chips, so now they've got a kill-switch in every augmented person. But to do that, they had to have chips they could cause malfunctions in inside everybody in the first place! Did everybody always have Tai Young chips or something? Or did it just affect most people, and we didn't see the ones it didn't affect? Or did Darrow put something in his original design that they exploited, but it wasn't capable of being quite a shutdown signal? (Though it sure fucking hell seems like it could've been, given that it turned off all my augmentations for a few seconds each time.)
1) I think that's covered in some emails in Missing Link, not sure.
2) Specially designed. She had it built so she could run the thing. It...didn't quite work. She's not the brightest.
3) Adam and Eliza don't show up in Deus Ex 1. A few people you meet do, but not the leads. Eliza's known to be an AI, but the Illuminati doesn't know she's capable of going off the leash.
4) Global energy pulse thingies. Not actually direct interface with the chip. Just sending out uncomfortable signals that only augments picked up. Like a dog whistle, but for people.
At least, if memory serves. It's been a while.
About Adam and the original DE(spoilers for both)
If you pay attention to Megan's emails and other tidbits it's pretty obvious that Adam is the genetic blueprint JC and Paul are built from. She's sending Adam's samples to presumably the Illuminati. Adam's super special genes thats makes him not reject bioimplants is what makes Jc and Paul the perfect candidates for the next level nanotech project.
There's also a missable side quest that actually spells all of it out.
Posts
Hyron is heavily reliant on Tai Young designs. Zhao had a set of blueprints in her penthouse in Hengsha. She thought she could interface with it because she has the designs and her company built the tech powering it. She wasn't walking around: she was strapped into some sort of interface suit, and there's a prototype of the suit in her penthouse as well. I'm almost positive she was planning to fuse into the system.
Eliza doesn't show up in DX or IW, but she does sort of resemble something that shows up in IW. Jensen isn't in either game.
She's likely the only AI at that point. It's difficult to say exactly how aware her owners are of her capabilities, but I think they're likely much more aware than the game seemingly lets on. In case you didn't catch it, she's a tool of the Illuminati. The basement level of Picus TV is a hidden Illuminati base, and Picus is an Illuminati operation. One of the e-mails you can come across at Picus is sent by someone that is a major player in DX who shows up towards the end of the game. Meeting him will shed some light on the matter, though he doesn't directly mention anything from HR.
As for the suit, I thought that was the same suit all the other women were wearing. Kavanagh and... uh... Gary seemed to not have the whole, super high-risk dying really quickly problem solved. Are you suggesting that Zhao did, and was keeping it from them for some reason?
I got that whole thing re. Picus + Illuminati. Was just curious about Eliza being like the only AI, and also clearly being super-advanced and sentient, and it's completely uncommented on. She also seems to be acting at least somewhat independently of the Illuminati, relaying information to Adam and trying to be all sneaky about it. Her existence also makes me wonder about ...
What's with the absence of robots in the world? They have these incredibly advanced biomechanical machinery and advanced computer technology, but nothing in the way of robots? The whole "only augmented humans could build this" argument seems a little weird in that context.
2) Specially designed. She had it built so she could run the thing. It...didn't quite work. She's not the brightest.
3) Adam and Eliza don't show up in Deus Ex 1. A few people you meet do, but not the leads. Eliza's known to be an AI, but the Illuminati doesn't know she's capable of going off the leash.
4) Global energy pulse thingies. Not actually direct interface with the chip. Just sending out uncomfortable signals that only augments picked up. Like a dog whistle, but for people.
At least, if memory serves. It's been a while.
Why I fear the ocean.
I mean, if you took out the handful of references from HR that involve DE1, a newcomer would easily be able to play both games and come away thinking they were two different franchises. That ends up leaving the "Deus Ex" in the title as basically a name to cash in on, which the game didn't even remotely need. In fact, it's extremely limiting, because now the devs for further games have to figure out how to make more prequels to DE1 without stepping all over the toes of a game that came out almost 15 years ago, instead of being able to take the good thing they've made and just run with it.
Though they could definitely work harder on "allies" and enemies that aren't annoyingly petty or stupid and I just want to punch their faces in by the time I learn everything about them, instead of loving to hate them for being conniving evil bastards.
You may now shout me down for expressing such heretical thoughts.
I'm very much open to that idea, and much more so now than I was even a few months ago, but such thoughts are incredibly premature. There are still a lot of years between HR and DX to explore.
I don't want them touching the level designs at all though. They can overhaul the visuals all they want, and an AI upgrade would be very welcome, but if they touch the level layouts I will picture myself choking them out.
As much as I love Deus Ex, I don't want Eidos/Square to remake it. I would miss everything that they can't or won't reproduce and any updated material would go further without having to sling the original game over its shoulder and carry it the entire game.
I mean, look the kind of crate stairs (much less LAM climbing) you could make to skip stuff, compared to how now how alternate paths are practically (or sometimes literally) highlighted by the availability of man sized ventilation ducts or smashable walls.
I'm not at all arguing that HR is a better, or even equal game, but as great as the original was, we're getting into some serious mysticism about its systems vs actual reality.
Origin: Galedrid - Nintendo: Galedrid/3222-6858-1045
Blizzard: Galedrid#1367 - FFXIV: Galedrid Kingshand
Also a fair few of the 'alternate' routes were sort of silly in DX1; like, why is this huge underwater tunnel here? I guess so that if you invested in the underwater breathing skill for some reason, you'll have something to use it for. Why do these boxes outside the statue of liberty form a near-perfect staircase? So you can climb them! DX1 is filled with man-size vents too.
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
For its time, yeah, it was absolutely open. There were few games that weren't relatively directionless (like the Elder Scroll games, or Might and Magics...generally fantasy RPG's) that gave you the kind of freedom DX1 had.
I was just speaking relative to DXHR though, since that's what it was being directly compared to. DXHR certainly had its faults and absolutely could have stood to be more open, but at the same time HR is still, relative to its modern contemporaries (with the exception of bethesda games, and a few others) it is pretty open and option filled. And, I'd argue, it isn't nearly as narrow or on rails, even compared to DX1, as many folks criticize it for.
Origin: Galedrid - Nintendo: Galedrid/3222-6858-1045
Blizzard: Galedrid#1367 - FFXIV: Galedrid Kingshand
To answer the last question in your spoiler:
There are probably very good reasons for the level design in HR to be as limited as it is, like a higher ratio of expected fidelity vs what computers of the time can handle, and so on, but to claim that it's just like the original is flat out ridiculous.
No, it's really not.
There are more geographically different locations in DX1, but the actual size of those locations aren't any larger than DXHR's. By larger, I mean, playable area that actually serves a purpose. That statue of liberty in DX1 is sprawling but the vast majority of it serves no purpose other than to make you walk; huge chunks of it contain no enemies, objects, options, NPC's, quests, or even sights (like, compared to a Bethesda game that litters its sprawling maps with do-dads). The central building only has 2 or 3 entrances, which is pretty on par with most locations in DXHR. Once you start moving up the building it gets even more linear. This isn't a criticism it's an observation. Battery Park and Hells Kitchen are also much smaller than they immediately appear, because again, both areas have square footage, but most serves no purpose. There's not really any more ways to save the hostages in Battery Park as there are to, say, infiltrate the Police Station in DXHR. Most of the buildings are just there for visuals and are not enter-able or otherwise interact-able in Hells Kitchen similar to Detroit. And Detroit has more land-mass street wise of things than Hells Kitchen, and more buildings that actually do something and let you go in and dick around.
Again, DX1 has more geographical locations, but DXHR has (often substantially) more visitable maps within each major location than DX1 had. Yes, you're not hopping all over from New York to China to Paris, but had they even expanded Montreal to be more than the Picus Building, it'd be pretty on par geographically. As it stands there are fewer major hubs, but more diverse areas within each hub. But even then, it's not a lot different than the various one and done areas in DX1 like Battery Park or the NSF Airfield (among others). DXHR just has man of those one and dones within the major areas it already presents. Hengsha, all said and done, is huge, when you take into account, the hive, the three districts, sewers, the Hive, Pods, and so on. And there's something to do in virtually all of it, very little space is wasted. The same is true of Detroit and all it's tertiary areas. You can criticize DXHR for not having more sprawling areas that don't actually provide any more content, if you'd like; but the content that is there is just as competitive with the amount of content in DX1. And the hub areas in DXHR, while fewer in number than DX1, are just as chock full of things to do as combinations of DX1's areas.
There's no question that DXHR pushes you along the story harder than DX1, but that's less because of how much content is there to explore, and more to do with how objectives are presented in modern games vs games of that era.
Origin: Galedrid - Nintendo: Galedrid/3222-6858-1045
Blizzard: Galedrid#1367 - FFXIV: Galedrid Kingshand
Well, I shouldn't use retread, its not like it was lazy design, they did it all really well and you never really felt like "shit, not this again", but you know what I mean. That's likely what made it feel more linear to many people than DX1, that you were constantly moving forward and the only areas you went back to for the most part were hub areas, and the Sarif building. DX1 reused many of the locations well, and when you went back it felt like it was for a purpose and not padding.
Not better or worse, just a design decision.
There is an interesting facet of old 3D game design that I believe plays into a lot of what some folks feel made DX1 feel much larger and less cramped.
Back when I was in the Air Force (99-03) we were using game engines to design training simulations. First we used the TRIBES engine because it did vast terrain better than any other game at the time (by far) and importing content was easy due to them using the wad system, and then moved to UE for other things for its ability to have complex scripting. An issue both engines (and afaik every other engine at the time, including UE2 which we moved to at the end of my time) shared was the inability to accurately portray scale. I recall dicking with the size of buildings, and items inside said buildings, and player models, constantly because every time we briefed a general or some other VIP on what we were doing, they would always comment on how 'off' the perspective was in the demos we were showing them.
What I mean is, at the time (and I don't have the technical expertise to know exactly why, simply that it was) it was difficult, to impossible, to accurately replicate real world spacial sizes in games. Everything was either too big, too small, or if you tried to find a middle ground, just looked wrong.
As an example:
vs
What you'll notice in DX1 and most other games of the era that were fully 3D is that everything often felt tiny in the world, and the world often felt too big. Modern games manage to accurately depict proper spacial perspective, but old games simply couldn't. If you took the time (and we did) to accurately measure out sizes, dimensions, and distances, based on the the size of character models, you felt like a giant in a tiny world. Spaces felt too small and it just felt completely unnatural. If you, instead, set sizes based on the size of what your character should be given your perspective, everything felt huge and objects in the world felt tiny. Trying to mix larger objects with smaller spaces didn't work, or vice versa. No amount of fiddling with the location of the First Person camera helped either (and heaven help you if you went into 3rd person view in TRIBES, it made it all appear weirder), so you basically had to choose, and usually you chose the same thing that Ion Storm, and many other developers did, and made interior spaces large and the objects 'normal' which made everything still feel wrong, but at the very least gave the player the illusion of size, even though technical limitations at the time meant that you couldn't possibly fill those spaces to make them feel realistic.
Thus what you see in the DX1 screen above. The bar is far and away unnaturally large, as is every space in the game, but at least objects in the space feel relatively right compared to your perspective. Though, you still had situations like said bottle next to said NPC. :P
The result of all of this is that DXHR has streets like this:
Where DX1 had streets like this:
DXHR's feel 'smaller', but they're displaying relative space far more accurately. DX1's feel larger and more spacious, but the sizes themselves; both of the areas, and the objects within, are completely unnatural, but are still the best they could do with the technology at the time.
As I said, I believe the result is the illusion of size for DX1's areas vs DXHR's (not even gonna touch IW) that is more of a trick of the mind than actual playable space. DX1 had ostensibly larger areas, but given that they're more of an artifact than intentional (and often much of said spaces were incredibly sparse, underused or unused), the ultimate result is that a lot of the notion of its size is a visual trick. Again, content wise, I'll argue heavily that DXHR is on par with DX1. That's not at all to say the quality of said content was on par, mind you. And I don't say any of this to criticize DX1; I'm simply comparing and contrasting the two.
Origin: Galedrid - Nintendo: Galedrid/3222-6858-1045
Blizzard: Galedrid#1367 - FFXIV: Galedrid Kingshand
You've already lost the argument right there, but let's take it little further just for fun. You claim that that the open space in areas like Liberty Island serves no purpose, but I find that highly questionable. Any given area of space in a map could be serving one or many of a multitude of different purposes other than being filled with enemies or doodads, which you are dismissing out of hand (and yes, that includes giving the world a sense of scale), but here's an immediately obvious one: It allows you to physically walk around the building that is the focus of your mission to search for alternate entrances without taking a ridiculously convoluted route. This is something that you literally cannot do in most of the hub areas of HR, let alone the "mission" areas, because most of your potential avenues are conveniently blocked off.
You might not see the value in that extra space, and that's fine, but you can't argue that it's not there in good faith.
I don't really think Human Revolution's scale is much different from the original Deus Ex. If you talk to game artists today who work on modern games they also tell you that you can't make realistic sized stuff without making the player feel weirdly sized. This is just because y our field of view, speed of movement, and so on in a game is different from what it is in real life.
I haven't really compared the two games but I'm pretty sure @Lork is right about Deus Ex being much larger not because it's displaying space inaccurately but because it's larger. That was easier back then when you could make a large empty-ish space that looked more or less acceptable without hours and hours and hours and hours and hours of work, which you'd have to put in these days to get the high visual fidelity that modern games have. But as a consequence modern games are usually smaller, especially if they take place in urban areas like Deus Ex and they can't just procedurally generate some forests or something.
In this screenshot the street seems like it's the same size as in the DX:HR screenshot you posted:
So, what, that there's two buildings in Hells Kitchen that you can fully circle means that DX1s area design was inherently better? It's not like it was a super common thing in DX1 either, and the buildings you could circle sure as hell didn't have much in them. There's what, 3 rooms in the hotel you can actually enter? 4?
HR did have roughly the same size of playable areas.
You didn't see stuff like this in DXHR, and for good damn reason:
You can't possibly be arguing that needless empty space is somehow fundamentally better than more realistically depicted areas that feel smaller (because they don't have to deal with the technological limitations of the time), while providing the exact same amount of gameplay.
That's not a cherry picked screenshot. Maybe you haven't loaded up DX1 in awhile, but the screens like TC posted are the rarity, DX1 is much more frequently full of gameplay-wise, worthless space. No, each area doesn't have to be filled with do-dads to make it worth exploring, but an area has to have something to make it actually count for something.
And it certainly wasn't just outdoor areas that were overly large and featureless. They weren't going for realism in size there, they were simply coping with technology. The reasons they didn't put anything in those areas is because they knew they were simply there for design reasons, to make the actual playable areas feel 'right', not because they were meant to be confused with meaningful content and gameplay. Would you argue that if you simply increased the size of the landmass of Skyrim by 10x, and add nothing into that space, you'd have more content? Because that would be really silly.
And it certainly wasn't just DX1, but a product of the technology at the time that pretty much every 3D game had to come to grips with.
Ever wonder why in games of that era you moved so fast compared to modern games? It's not because they're trying to slow you down to drag out content in modern games, it's because it was the solution to the issue of spacial perspective forced on design at the time. I didn't mention it, but one solution we attempted in TRIBES was to dramatically slow down the player so that they moved more realistically, but the result of that was it made the already overly large areas feel even bigger because you moved slower and had the odd side effect of making you feel smaller. And because of the size you had to make things (as you see in various games of the time, above) if NPC's also moved 'naturally' they appeared to be walking through molasses. This also had the effect of throwing out the window all the work you had done on models and textures to try to 'trick' the player into feeling like the space they were in made spacial sense.
It's not that I don't see value in the extra space, it's that if the extra space serves no purpose, it by its very definition has no value. And I'm not the only one who thought so; notice how few games had exterior areas and how quickly most games of the time were happy to move you to interior corridors. It wasn't simply because of limitations of most engines ability to display large areas, it was because it was easier to control the players visual perspective in interior areas (which, as I showed before, were still unnaturally large, but you could place familiar objects in them to make the player feel more 'normal') without wasting processing and design time on trying to make an inherently unnatural area feel more natural. And you seem to be confusing what is an observation of the reality of game design at the time, with criticism. I'm simply presenting factual information, and you're getting worked up that I'm arguing something in bad faith, when that's the exact opposite of what I'm doing. I'm not even arguing anything. I'm saying "here, info" and you're treating it like an attack.
I already said that the areas in DX1 were ostensibly bigger; I'm just making a point that those 'larger' spaces were more a trick of design than actual space, and content for content, the actual playable space in DXHR isn't any less than DX1.
EDIT: Also, I want to say on this topic that there's a lot of aspects of visual design in games, particularly older games, that we simply accept because we're used to it. Some of us more than others due to playing these older games at their release and not in modern days with all the mods, fixes and upgrades. What is harder for some folks to do is step back and look at these design issues of the past from the perspective of a non-gamer. When we had Colonels, Generals, contractor executives, and so on, come visit our shop when I was in the USAF they were for the most part coming in as individuals not accustomed to 3D engines or design at all. So myself, and other members of my team, would look at what we were designing in these engines and think "yeah, this looks right" but then these folks would come in with their only experience of visual space being reality and these 3D 'games' often looked really off. When you have to confront this in visual design you start to think a lot more about spacial relations, awareness and other factors of design gamers tend to not even think about because we're conditioned to accept things that are distinctly wrong. As gaming as become more universal, and technology allows visual design without the limitations of the past, there's fewer and fewer instances where it even comes into play. Much of the issues of area design I'm sure the folks at Ion Storm had to take into account never even entered the mind of the folks at EIDOS Montreal, because the limitations Ion Storm had to deal with are no longer an issue. Engines are designed, because hardware can support it, to more accurately draw polygons to represent what you modeled, and thus can more easily depict 'realistic' environments without any effort. Which is great! But it also comes with the reality of said environments. If someone produced a game with the area design of DX1 today, even with all the bells and whistles, it'd feel really off and get lambasted. Interior rooms would be 2x the size they really are, you'd have a bedroom with 1000sqft and 15ft high ceilings, hallways 12 feet across and 20 feet high, with doors that were 4x the size of people.
And, the result wouldn't be any more content just...unnaturally bigger spaces without the justification of technological limitations. :P
Origin: Galedrid - Nintendo: Galedrid/3222-6858-1045
Blizzard: Galedrid#1367 - FFXIV: Galedrid Kingshand
Comparing the sizes of maps and all of that just seems odd to me. While there are things they could improve upon in a sequel to HR, compairing it to the original is comparing it to a game that had the luxury of the player using their imagination to really fill out the world. While the maps may have been larger, they were sparsly detailed. And we didn't notice that back then. But now? A game like Deus Ex really needs those details filled in. Every square inch of the map needs to be packed with unique props and characters.
Just as long as HR followed the design philosophy of Deus Ex it did good by it. And to that end it did. And while I hope the next game might be larger and possibly closer to achieving a modern day Deus Ex in that wide open feel, HR was just about as close to that as anyone could realisticly expect.
If I recall correctly, the Citadel was especially limited in ME2 and ME3 because they couldn't reproduce something as large as they had with ME1's Citadel using their new engine. With the upgraded graphics and their desire to populate the area, they were running into issues with memory in the X360 and/or Playstation. Actually, in ME1, I believe one of the reasons they had those really long corridors was to hide load times from the user.
Anyways, in my mind, isn't the question, "How many interesting things are there to see?" I haven't played DX1 yet - so maybe I should bow out from this thread before I get spoiled
It let up in the later parts of the game though, I assume because of budget/time constraints.
For me, HR felt like being almost constantly cramped by walls and barriers, like every structure was built on a budget (and they sort of were, in terms of either money or memory). I was directed everywhere, and the route choices were basically on the level of going left or right in terms of how much freedom they actually gave the player.
Ideally, the next Deus Ex game gets a minor visual upgrade, but the rest of the system power (because it will be limited by consoles, after all) will be devoted to handling the large, open maps that felt like real places instead of just game levels. Frankly, I'm sick of devs pushing textures with higher and higher resolutions, which ends up doing things like taking the sprawling structures of ME1 and shrinking them down to pathetic little balconies or hallways like in the later games; things can look plenty awesome without ultra-mega-super-textures, so save the budgets and system resources for things that are really an improvement like applying those great visuals to large areas.
As odd as it sounds, DE1 doesn't make every room have something notable in it, which is, frankly, a lot better for world design anyway. Sure, stuff that's hard to get into will be rewarding, but sometimes an office is just... an office. Not everything is some kind of loot container. The devs also put in secret places to find that people didn't find out about until years and years after the game came out, but they couldn't believe they missed them because some of them are just right out in the open. There's also buttloads of extra content to find regarding several major characters in the game; whereas HR throws some bosses at you that are genuinely a matter of "who the hell are these guys with no backstory?", DE1 accounts for some fairly convoluted (and amazing) decisions on your part depending on what you have found out about other characters beforehand. Basically, if somebody is important, you will know who they are and what they want before you maybe kill them. Or don't, if you perhaps agree with them.
That's not really how the shader/textures/polycount trifecta works. Shaders allow textures to take the brunt of the detailing of a model, allowing polycounts to be lower. Bloom is more of a post processing effect than a shader (it's a camera shader, not an object). Last gen was definitely the generation of the better textures, marginally better polycounts, and much much better shaders. UE3/4 basically completely rely on shaders and textures for detail.
My favorite areas of HR were the various apartment buildings. They felt the most real, as most of them just had emails or pocket secretaries or some cash to steal from hacking. It actually felt like breaking into someone's abode. I really wished that some had NPCs in them to make it even more realistic.
Case in point, DX1's airfield mission. You start in Battery Park, progressing through abandoned subway tunnels in pursuit of the NSF. Initially you're just dealing with homeless people, vagrants, and others who have nowhere else to go; they're not necessarily on your side, but they're certainly not hostile. As you enter the actual secret passageway the NSF uses, you encounter troopers mixed in with more civilians, and you learn that they just moved something big through the tunnels recently. You proceed along the tunnels, bypassing progressively tougher security, until you finally reach the heavily-guarded terminal itself: cameras, robots, patrols, and gun turrets on the perimeter.
Even the music accents this change, shifting from the now-familiar New York BGM to something slower and more ominous, almost somber. Dialogue music is subdued as the mission reaches its climax, followed by a downbeat, rather intense denouement as you fly out. Play the music and you can feel it; that's not a 'mission accomplished' track, that's a 'what happens now?' track.
The closest parallel I can think of in HR is the first trip to Hengsha, specifically the TYM mission. Visually it does capture the sense of moving up through a major figurative and literal barrier between cities, but the overall design doesn't quite reinforce this. Apart from a few civilian workers, you're immediately sneaking your way past guards and heavy physical security, not to mention (curiously unattended) industrial hazards. There's a brief respite in the labs, but it's not long before you're back in high security areas. The danger doesn't seem to climb so much as plateau, which is at odds with the physical climb you are making. The only difference between stealth in the factory level and stealth in the executive suites is whose email you're reading.
This would be easier to overlook if there were stronger links between missions, but HR often has you discover some world-changing information, which only serves to ferry you to your next destination. Spoilering some major plot points just to be safe:
Contrast with DX1, which had more levels overall and (in my opinion) does a better job building connections to your next destination; a comparable revelation in the last Hong Kong mission gives you a concrete objective - the superfreighter - that ties into the broader issue - the Illuminati. There's also a disparity in the subtlety of background writing. In DX1, an email on torture uses fairly cold, clinical terms like "viability of the subject is of non-importance" and "employ measures with an eye towards maximum informational yield." In HR, members of the secret conspiracy practically high-five each other over getting Habeas Corpus suspended.
I could go on, but the larger point is DX1 simply does a better job integrating the worldbuilding and level design with the plot you're following. I don't think dense levels over large levels precludes this - I agree that there's a lot of empty space in DX1, and I absolutely loved exploring in HR - but ultimately HR's plot and levels aren't as well connected.
Now playing: Teardown and Baldur's Gate 3 (co-op)
Sunday Spotlight: Horror Tales: The Wine
That reads creepier than I intended it to be. :-/
I think it would be nice if there were occasionally people who could chase you out of their apartment after you break in. Since they're civilians, they shouldn't be targeted, and they should be able to throw stuff at you, prohibiting you from hacking their stuff. Because it's a bit weird to be able to break into a couple dozen apartments with no repercussions.
This is well said, especially the part in the spoiler, which also disappointed me greatly.
One of the things I loved about DX1 was exploration. Compare the Detroit hub in HR to the areas around the Tong in DX1:
The area around the Tong is deceptively simple. There's the hotel, the bar, and what, a building or two? But then there's the sewers, which keep going, and going, and going... until you stumble on a MJ-12 base with soldiers and a lot of other things. It really helped bring the conspiracy to life. The villains were quite literally under your nose the entire time. It's a great touch that heightens the paranoia. If they have a base in the heart of NYC, where else are they? What else are they controlling? It's a little thing that adds to the world, and if you stumble upon it early, like I did, really adds a sense of mystery. Who are these guys? What's their connection to FEMA or the terrorists fighting above?
This is a big part of why I enjoy DX's design so much: the areas you visited in DX felt like places rather than levels. There was just something about the attempts to transplant real world locations and the layouts of each area that made them feel like you were visiting places rather than solving levels. A lot of the space in the areas of DX may be superfluous from a design point of view, but those expanses helped bring those areas to life for me. A lot of the street areas in Hong Kong are unecessary to the actual game, but they help give the place personality. The DuClare mansion looks and feels huge, but most of the rooms you can explore are inconsequential. You could easily double the length of time you spent in an area just by wandering around, but that wandering would generally turn up something interesting. More background lore, an alternate path to try during a replay, some hidden secret, or nothing at all. Never knowing what you'd find, or if you'd even find anything at all, made the process of exploring every nook and cranny exciting. I've replayed DX a lot, but I still do this every single time I play through the game. The plot was all about uncovering secrets, and the level design shared that philosophy. You wanted to explore all of the buildings on a military base or explore every level of a warehouse because you never knew what might turn up.
HR, for whatever reason, felt more deliberate. The hub areas were very well done, but the interiors were generally lacking with promoting exploration. They never really felt like they had deep secrets to uncover. HR set you on the path to find the important information, whereas you could completely miss a lot of the plot and lore in DX if you just made your way from point A to point B. HR always had the stealth route (usually involving a vent), the Rambo route, and the hacker route. They're easily identifiable, and some version of each route is always available. DX wasn't so obvious with its routes. There was usually one obvious route through each area, but if you looked you could usually (but not always) find another way. And if you did find an alternate route, you generally still had to put in some work to make that other route viable.
About Adam and the original DE(spoilers for both)
If you pay attention to Megan's emails and other tidbits it's pretty obvious that Adam is the genetic blueprint JC and Paul are built from. She's sending Adam's samples to presumably the Illuminati. Adam's super special genes thats makes him not reject bioimplants is what makes Jc and Paul the perfect candidates for the next level nanotech project.
There's also a missable side quest that actually spells all of it out.
Adam has been a part of the Illuminati's plans for his entire life.