toxicitizen

Another 10-ish hours "speedrun" later and... Finally got Foxiest of the Hounds! Turns out the game isn't too long if you beeline the main objectives and ignore most of the side-quests. I could've probably even cut that 10 hours down a bit since I got sidetracked quite a few times to get some Praxis kits. I'm still not sure where I screwed up the first time. The only thing I did differently this time around was focusing on ghosting more, I never took out anyone unless I had no choice. I probably only knocked out half a dozen people or so throughout the entire game. I have to assume that's how I got screwed over last time. I must've left a body somewhere I shouldn't have and it triggered an alarm when I was too far to hear it. Oh well, that definitely scratched the Deus Ex itch the Mankind Divided announcement gave me. The wait should be a bit more bearable now.

Yeah, The Bureau doesn't break the fourth wall at all but it was close enough that I didn't bother correcting it. It's really more of a player stand-in character, I think. Spec Ops: The Line does break the fourth wall a little bit, though. It addresses the player directly during some loading screens. I mean, most games do that with loading tips and whatnot but in Spec Ops it was quite a bit more blatant and thematically relevant, which arguably makes it part of the plot.

Here you go again with your hyperbole. I'm not sure I'd go so far as to mention The Bureau in the same sentence as the words "gaming history". It's a decent but very derivative tactical third-person shooter with a neat twist. The problem is the twist is pretty much the only memorable thing about it. I seriously doubt it's going to remembered by many ten years from now.

I thought it was confirmed for 2016 but I can't find anything right now. But yeah, I doubt it's a 2015 title.

Yeah, that's most likely the case. I simply didn't remember it being this bad. Mind elaborating on that? I've heard a lot of complaints that the DC actually looks worse in many ways and reintroduced some bugs, like they built it using an older, unpatched build of the original game. The main draw was the "fixed" boss fights but I looked it up out of curiosity and turns out it's only a little bit of optional hacking throw in there for some reason. I'll wait until I see actual gameplay to comment on how Mankind Divided looks, but on a more general note I really wish people would stop complaining about color filters. I seriously don't get how games are supposed to look "so much better" without them, like so many people insist. A color filter can give a game a really unique visual identity when used properly (like in DXHR) but, as it tends to do with everything, the internet just goes full retard and indiscriminately shits on the entire concept without any consideration to how well it was actually used. Same thing with lens flare and chromatic aberrations. Both effects can add something when used properly, but as soon as they're there some people will just complain no matter what. I don't want devs to hold back their artistic vision to cater to graphics snobs, those assholes can usually mod that shit out anyway. Besides, I'm not convinced a perfectly clean picture looks necessarily better. Imperfections like chromatic aberration can actually help add a subtle illusion of photorealism to it. I mean, I never really noticed it in Alien: Isolation unless I was actively looking for it, but I thought the game looked better for its inclusion.

Yeah, the side-missions were the best part of Thief, unfortunately. Most of them were smaller but more open maps and felt like you were actually robbing a real place. More in line with the old games. And the Bank Job DLC was straight up the best level out of the entire game. It was nowhere near the brilliance of the Bank Heist mission from Thief II but it's the closest the new one ever came to recapturing that.

If we're thinking of the same thing, it's more of a bad ending/joke game over. Nothing really happens, credits just roll.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution + The Missing Link DLC. The Mankind Divided hype got to me and I decided to finally go through with the replay I had been meaning to do for a while. I was initially going to do it with the Director's Cut but at the last minute I decided to stick with vanilla instead and do an achievements clean-up run. That meant playing on the highest difficulty, non-lethally and without any alarms. I'm still not sure where I screwed up on that last one. I was so careful... I got everything but Foxiest of the Hounds, which is the no alarm achievement. I have like a couple manual saves I made at various points throughout the game but without knowing for sure where I screwed up I'm really hesitant to start over from either of them. For all I know, I might've done something wrong in the fucking tutorial mission. Same thing happened with Missing Link, too. It wasn't planned ahead of time but when I got to the part where it takes place, I said fuck it, quit out the main game and reinstalled it. Spent 6 hours replaying it only to not get the Factory Zero achievement, which is for not using any Praxis, weapons or explosives at all. Again, not sure where I went wrong. But at least Missing Link is short enough that I was able to do quick speedrun of it in like an hour and a half to get it. I'm not sure I have the willpower to go through the entirety of HR again right away. I mean, even a speed run ignoring all the side-quests is gonna be at least a 10+ hours time investment... But anyway, Human Revolution hasn't aged very well visually. It looks much worse than I remembered. Some of the character textures are downright awful and the conversation animations can look really awkward at times. And my main criticism of the game stands, not enough conspiracy in that shit! There's more talk about the Illuminati than I remembered but it's still nowhere near the level of the original. Deus Ex was pretty much The X-Files with a Matrix coat of paint. It had aliens and MiBs and even fucking El Chupacabra. I mean, the final level was Area 51, for fuck's sake. It doesn't get any more classic conspiracy than that. I really hope Mankind Divided brings some of that back.

Well

I think that was the entire point. The game was implying that I'm with you on the execution being sub-par, though. But I liked the twist. It seemed weird at the time but I can see what they were going for and I can appreciate that they tried to do something original with the story.

Yeah, it's pretty much the same formula as the Telltale games, only better. If you enjoyed any of Telltale's series, you really can't go wrong with this one.

Yeah, definitely. The best thing they could've done would've been to strip it of the XCOM name and let it be its own thing. I can understand why they wanted to use the XCOM brand when it was first revealed as an FPS and was the only XCOM project. But after Enemy Unknown became a thing there was no need to slap the name on it anymore. A lot from that video was actually recycled into The Bureau's plot. Maybe I'm reading too much into it but I kinda feel like that says a lot about how little they actually gave a shit about the story. They rebuilt the game from the ground up into a different genre but barely tweaked the story. Or shit, maybe I have it backwards. They had their own story and were forced to change genre and make it tie into Enemy Unknown, so they half-assed it. If that's what happened, I kinda feel for the team at 2K Marin. I can imagine how much it would suck to have that happen to a project because of another studio's project. What sucks is, given how secretive the industry tends to be regarding these things, we'll likely never know what truly went down. :/ And I feel like it's a story worth telling, if only as a cautionary "Here's what not to do if you don't want another Thief/The Bureau/Destiny/etc..."

The Bureau: XCOM Declassified. It's actually not that bad. Once I managed to get it to stop crashing every 20 mins, it became pretty enjoyable. Having to completely disable PhysX was a huge bummer, though. I was pretty happy to have something more demanding to throw at my new GPU and some of the effects looked great. But yeah, it's a decent game with some genuinely cool ideas in it, including what I thought was actually a pretty clever "player integration" plot twist. Unfortunately, it has a lot working against it, especially if you're a fan of Enemy Unknown. The story is your typical sci-fi shooter fare and the 1960s setting makes for a really cool backdrop for the plot. The gameplay is basically Mass Effect. I'm not even joking, the combat is lifted straight out of ME. It feels and plays the same, right down to the stiff running and cover animations. Also, dialogue wheels. The XCOM base even kinda feels like the Normandy when you're walking around in it between missions. Holy shit, now that I think about it, there's even a stealth loading room where you're stuck in a "scanner" kinda corridor for a few seconds. Overall, it's nothing particularly impressive or interesting but it gets the job done. The main problem is that the story simply doesn't make any sense when you take into account Enemy Unknown. They try to set it up as the origin story of the XCOM program, and I think the ending was implying a more direct prequel connection, which is cool in theory. But here's the thing... The characters keep insisting that "We're keeping all of this under wraps!" and "The public will never find out about any of this!" and I'm like "Are you people fucking high?!" The aliens terraformed entire fucking towns with gigantic machines, put these big-ass towers all over the goddamn place and infected hundreds of people with a black goo virus. Even when taking into account the limited means of communication of the time, the aliens weren't exactly being sneaky here. I do not buy for a fucking second that any of this happened "outside of the public eye". Like, how fucking stupid do you think I am? And let's not even get into how retarded it is that these assholes developed laser and plasma weapons and did a bunch of research on the aliens only to conveniently "forget" about all of it when they come back 50 years later. There was a lot of potential here. If they hadn't felt the need to go all-out action with it, it could've been a really cool smaller, slower X-Files kinda story with more of a thriller/mystery tone to it. That would've been awesome. Making more of an effort to better tie in with Enemy Unknown would've been a good idea, too. Despite being a completely different genre, this could've been a proper chapter in the universe established by Enemy Unknown. Instead, it's this derivative tactical-shooter with a plot that barely makes any effort to not contradict EU. If I had to guess, I'd say they probably had this story planned out long before Firaxis started working on Enemy Unknown and simply didn't feel like putting in the effort to properly tweak it once a real XCOM game was actually happening. Overall, it's a decent game, just not a very good XCOM.

You're much kinder than me. When it's the gaming community AND is on the internet, I just assume they're fucking idiots. Especially when they're losing their shit this intensely over not only video games but also what's pretty much a non-issue.

"I never asked for this. But it's kind of alright, I guess." edit: I somehow missed that bit earlier but I have to throw in an edit here. I'd argue that the production values were one of the areas where the game failed the hardest. It looked good enough but it was a technical mess at launch and there are many indications that they had to scale some presentation aspects back significantly. For example, the loading screens show concept art of a rioting city but in the actual game the closest you see to that is two dudes watching another dude get lynched. Clearly something got left on the cutting room floor. Where the game truly shined was its mechanics, imho. It was Thief through and through. Moving and sneaking as Garrett felt as good as it needed to. The various tools at your disposal didn't provide as much depth as previous games did but it was still in the same spirit. As for linearity, that depends what we're talking about here. Some levels were more linear than others and admittedly a little too scripted. But it's not like the old games were open-world or anything. Granted, it was a far cry from the first two games where the maps felt like they were designed as real places rather than as game levels. But most areas in the new one still offered multiple paths you could take, some stealthier than others. You just had to look for them. But honestly, not to start a thing here, but I never really understood this obsession the internet has with non-linearity. It's not like linearity is inherently bad or anything. I'll take a deliberately crafted linear experience over one that's open just for the hell of it any day. So it's possible I'm simply less sensitive to it, I guess? But, I mean, something like Grand Theft Auto seems as linear to me as anything else. You're still going from point A to point E the same as any other game. Giving you agency over the order in which you go through B, C and D doesn't really make the experience particularly richer for me.

Damn it! Gonna have to wait until I get home to watch, my shitty laptop doesn't like youtube. edit: I just did and it's SO GOOD! Also, Steam page is up.

I read that as them working on improving the weaker aspect of the game rather than focusing on it. Seems reasonable to me. Everything else I've been reading suggests that the multi-approach gameplay is still core to the experience. Like I said, I'm fairly certain it was different teams within the same studio. Thief had been known to be in the works since before HR came out and I'm sure this has also been in development since before Thief came out.

Much like The Bureau, which I'm currently playing, Thief had development hell written all over it. It's no secret that it had a long and troubled development and it clearly shows in the finished product. Like I said, it has its issues. But I'm with you, I don't think it was bad at all. I love the Thief series and it was Thief-y enough for me. I'm just glad that, for once, it was only the internet that felt the need to needlessly shit all over it. Some critics actually rated it reasonably well. The PC version is sitting at a Metacritic score of 70 and that seems about right to me.

It really shouldn't since it's the same studio that made Human Revolution... It's a big studio with more than one dev team. Plus, going by that Game Informer video, I'm pretty sure the project leads are the same guys who made HR. Besides, Thief had its issues but most people who actually like the series seemed to enjoy it. I know I did.

There's more info and a "trailer" for the Game Informer coverage here. Getting hyped! Looks like it. There were mentions of Icarus going as far back as the original so it's not that surprising, I suppose.

I too picked the ending where Jensen died. It's no surprise that it's being ignored, though. The google translated Russian is borderline incomprehensible but it seems to suggest no ending will be canon. That would suck but I guess it beats just having an half-assed "a little bit of column A and a little bit of column B and a little bit of column C and a little..." kinda bullshit like IW did. Also, looks like they said fuck it and started releasing stuff. Sounds like we'll get a trailer tomorrow. Gimme that second one in proper 1920x1080 and I think I'll have found a replacement for my shitty Phantom Pain desktop wallpaper.

Invisible What? A game set after the original would indeed be cool but I can see why they'd want to capitalize on Human Revolution's success. Personally, I hope they explore the traditional conspiracy stuff a little bit more this time around. I'm talking X-Files shit, here. Not necessarily aliens (although that would certainly be nice) but I remember at one point in HR you started uncovering stuff about Jensen's past and why he's important when it comes to augmentation. It was this cool conspiracy stuff and I think there were even some MIBs that showed up. But it was all relegated to a short side-quests, iirc. That was probably my biggest disappointment out of the entire game.

I was about to start a new thread but I guess this is more of a general Deus Ex thread than specifically about Human Revolution? Anyway, seems the Russian branch of Square-Enix flipped the switch early or something. Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. Seems to be current-gen only, so PC/PS4/XO. The name is also kinda familiar, I think there might've been a leak of some kind a little while back? Also Jensen's back!

Based on what? I guess I'll know for sure when I finish the campaign but so far there's been nothing to indicate that it's its own thing. It mostly comes off as "let's put in the very minimum of effort to not overtly contradict that other, better game". And I'm talking lazy throwaway lines that just kinda make you go "lol fuck off". They simply didn't care enough to bother making sure everything remained coherent. I mean, this game was in development hell for a little while and it kinda shows. Besides, if it was meant to be its own thing then they should've just rebranded it as something other than XCOM. Especially considering they already had a proper XCOM game out by the time this came out. I mean, even when it was first revealed as an FPS the reception was pretty negative. It was always going to suffer from having the XCOM brand needlessly slapped on it. Yeah, the first couple missions had some encounters that were kinda frustrating but now that I've leveled up my squad a bit I'm really glad I'm playing on Veteran difficulty. Now it's just challenging enough to be satisfying. Curious to see what you mean about the ending, though, since I heard it wasn't very good. Hopefully I'll end up agreeing with you.