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Reviewers Pile On Deus Ex - Invisible War 61

Posted by simoniker from the pluses-and-minuses dept.
Thanks to GameSpy for their 'Pile On!' feature, in which a multitide of their staff rate Ion Storm's Deus Ex: Invisible War, the hotly-awaited PC/Xbox FPS title whose recently released PC demo has met with much controversy. Comments rage from the mixed ("It does offer lots of great gameplay, but I can understand peoples' initial reaction to the title") through the positive ("Ion has tried to make the game more accessible, and I think it's done a fine job of doing this without harming the core DX gameplay"), to the negative related to game engine speed ("You trade 20 or more frames per second so that the rivet textures on a barrel accurately reflect the nearest light source.") Elsewhere, PlanetDeusEx has a demo walkthrough also discussing INI fixes to improve your experience, and there's another GameSpy article interviewing the developers about their 'magic moments' playing the game they created ("I had an epiphany when I wanted to destroy the coffee beans in QueeQueeg's coffee shop, but I didn't want to arouse suspicion.")
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Reviewers Pile On Deus Ex - Invisible War More

Reviewers Pile On Deus Ex - Invisible War

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  • Deus Ex Mistakeuh (Score:4, Interesting)

    by thirty2bit ( 685528 ) on Saturday November 29, 2003 @08:14PM (#7590159)
    What's bugged me for a long while now is that Warren Specter made a comment on Thief 3, one to the effect that he "doesn't get it", referring to the Thief genre. I hope that what we're seeing of DX2 (demo) doesn't indicate that he's lost his edge or has become out of touch with the scene.

    I can't help but wonder how DX2 would look today if more gamers had input on the alpha and beta stages of the game. Would the "wonder wheel" / "dirty contact lens" interface have made it so far? Would localized damage have been coded in? Or is all of this due to the game being coded for the lowest common denominator (i.e. the portability to consoles)?
    • After reading the Gamespy article, it seemed like they really did like the game.

      Pretty much they all agreed that the graphics were a problem, and the demo game the game a poor showing, because it only scratched the surface, and the graphics are a large part of that surface.

      But, in the end, most of them said they really liked the game because of its depth.
      • I don't follow Gamespy's reviews/reviewers to the T, but this article is the first I read..
        http://www.gamespy.com/reviews/november03/dx2pc/in dex.shtml [gamespy.com]
        ..where the game, played to completion, was reviewed more thoroughly and rated four stars. Based on the reviewer's comments, it felt more deserving of less stars. It's even commented upon that the length of the game is only 15 hours compared to the 40+ of the original.

        I feel the length, the already-mentioned items (odd interface, unified ammo, non-loc

    • Re:Deus Ex Mistakeuh (Score:4, Insightful)

      by ziggles ( 246540 ) * on Saturday November 29, 2003 @08:53PM (#7590286) Homepage
      Gamers dont make good game designers. When you look at a lot of the so called "problems" with the game most of them make sense within the context of the whole game's design. It may seem silly out of context that shooting someone in the head doesn't kill them. But you shouldn't be able to kill something with one hit if you have no biomods to increase your skill with that weapon. Otherwise what's the point of having biomods at all? And if you got rid of biomods, you'd have even more people complaining that they dumbed the game down or oversimplified it (except this time they'd be right).
      The interface is cool and I think it helps with game immersion, better than a rectangle at the bottom at the very least. I do think the inventory management needs work though.

      I think console gamers will think the game is too PC-ish. For example, can you imagine having to aim at and pick up items with a gamepad? Sounds like a pain in the ass.

      • Re:Deus Ex Mistakeuh (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Imperial Tacohead ( 216035 ) on Saturday November 29, 2003 @11:13PM (#7590829)
        The obvious solution to that is the patented DX ShakyHands (TM). Just as control with the sniper rifle was extremely difficult in the first game prior to upgrading the skill, so should it be difficult to use any weapon prior to getting biomods. A bullet to the head ought to kill, or at least put an enemy out of the picture for the near future. Rather than upping the disbelief factor by requiring you to shoot a guard four times in the head, they could have just made it harder to hit the head comparatively speaking, thus further immersing the player and avoiding the silliness that we're faced with now.
        • So it's more realistic to "miss" a point blank shot to the head than for it to not kill after one shot? I think it'd be more annoying to miss a shot I obviously should have made.
          • You don't miss because the shot randomly goes astray, you miss because at an initial stage your character's hands shake, causing the target on the screen to shake around. You can still make a head shot at point blank range. Farther away, the head is a comparitively small target, and the shaking makes it difficult to be certain that you have a good shot.

            • Re:Deus Ex Mistakeuh (Score:3, Insightful)

              by ziggles ( 246540 ) *
              I still think that would be a very annoying solution. I want to feel like I have control over what I'm doing. If my cursor is waving around it's just going to turn me off from the game.
              • If my cursor is waving around it's just going to turn me off from the game.

                I'm guessing you never played Splinter Cell, or any of the Rainbow Six clones?
              • With a real weapon you DON'T have total control over what you are doing. With a mouse, it is easy to keep it in one spot. You simply don't touch it. But if you use a rifle, or worse, a bow in real life you'll find it rather hard to keep on your target. Your body and hands will just naturally move. It takes a lot of practice to get over that. The "ShakkyHands" system is simply an in game representation of that effect. The better you are (skill point wise), the less you shake. Just like in real life.
              • As the guy who asked if you played Splinter Cell or the Rainbow Six series said, these games aren't meant for you.

                ShakeyHand is meant to add a simulation/rpg level to the gameplay. If you prefer Quakeisms, you won't like it.

                Just as I don't like the lack of it in DX:IW.

                -lw

    • Spector and Church (Score:4, Insightful)

      by robson ( 60067 ) on Saturday November 29, 2003 @10:28PM (#7590651)
      What's bugged me for a long while now is that Warren Specter made a comment on Thief 3, one to the effect that he "doesn't get it", referring to the Thief genre.

      I suspect it's part of a long-running public debate between Warren Spector and Doug Church about semi-emergent vs. stealth-style game-play. (This debate is reasonably represented by Deus Ex and Thief, respectively.) You can read more about this here [joystick101.org].

      In short, it's not that Warren doesn't "get" Thief -- it's that he doesn't necessarily agree with that particular set of design decisions.

  • Nice game, but like others said ... it's slow (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 29, 2003 @10:18PM (#7590609)
    Just played the demo.

    Good graphics. I liked the ambient sound. I also liked the "variety" -- character interaction, weapons, bioweapons, etc.

    But ...

    It's too slow. I have to admit, I didn't believe the reviewers. I thought: these guys must be running some pretty lousy machines if they're complaining about the speed!

    Uhhh. No. My computer is not normally *that* slow. (P4 2.8GHz HT, 1GB dual-channel cas-2 RAM, 80GB RAID0 array, Gigabyte 8knxp mobo, GeForce 5600.)

    Admittedly, my graphics card is not the "best", but even with the detail turned down in the game, and running in 640x480 (!!), the response was poor. It felt like the mouse was moving through a thick viscous fluid -- it just never responded quickly. Given the speed at which a number of other modern games play on my computer, I have a hard time believing that it's my hardware.
    • The demo was released with all sorts of XBox settings.

      Literally, you can go into the .ini file and see

      ;this FOV is for the HUD only. On the XBox, we need to keep all HUD elements within 10% of the edges. ;FOV__d=68 ;68 is good for the PC version

      FOV__d=61


      There's another one called "MouselagThreshold" that's set to 75. It should be set to 0, and that fixes your slow response.

      Tim
      • The demo was released with all sorts of XBox settings.

        I wish they had gone one step further and included an option to auto-configure a gamepad with the XBox controls.

        I've been playing almost exclusively console games lately, and trying out the demo made me realize just how much I hate using a keyboard and mouse as a controller.

        I just picked up an adapter from Lik-Sang that lets me use my PS2 gamepad as a PC controller (with force feedback!) [lik-sang.com], and I was hoping to try it out on this demo. I think I'll just
        • You actually prefer first person shooters with a gamepad rather than a mouse?

          Damn.

          Tim
          • i do too, actually.

            once you get used to it, it's actually alot nicer than using a mouse and wasd, simply because movement is analog, and you don't ever have to look down to .

            its also much more realisitc -- aiming is much harder, and while most people complain about this, i think its just a matter of how games are made -- in most PC fps's, it takes 10-50 shots to kill someone, because everyone is always so precise. ergo, very little people play tom clancy games on PC.

            but on XBOX, for instance, Rainbow Six
            • There are plenty of games on the PC where one or two shots kill. Day of Defeat and Operation Flashpoint, to name two. To me, the accuracy of the mouse is about right - up close, it's pretty hard to miss a man-sized target if you're standing still.

              I still remember the awfulness of goldeneye on the N64. Controlling your arms with a joystick just seems wrong to me.
              • but in a PC game, its too easy to get those 1-2 shots in... you missed my point. what i was saying is that using WASD+ a mouse makes it so easy to aim, that developers usually compensate by making it harder to kill someone. its for that reason that ghost recon and rainbow six and operation flashpoint aren't too popular on the PC, whereas they (GR and RS3) have enjoyed record sales on XBOX, where its harder to hit someone, and therefore more realistic. and to respond to your comment: "To me, the accurac
                • Except that the mouse controls are more realistic for the characters you are supposed to be playing. Look at it this way - in most of the games you've mentioned (indeed, in most games where you do any shooting) you're supposed to be a soldier or at least someone trained in firearms use (either by army, law, society or crime). Someone with some training, decent hand-eye coordination and a sniper rifle is going to be able to introduce your grey matter to a bullet from a significant distance. And that will kil
            • Whatever you enjoy, that's fine. I prefer the mouse though. I don't have to look down, since I have pretty much the same key configuration for all my first person shooters, and the mouse is simply more accurate. A perfect example: Playing GTA3 on my computer, one mission required that I snipe a series of men from far away. They stood perfectly still and shot at somebody else. On the computer, it was a piece of cake: Point and click. Meanwhile, on my Xbox, I found myself wrestling with the controls to line i
            • For movement as in walking around, I think you have an interesting point - an analog stick could give you better control than four digital keys and a modifier key that makes you run or walk.

              It still feels unnatural to me to control my aim or look direction with a joystick, though. I think if aiming is supposed to be hard, it should be accomplished more naturally, through the game - for example, Deus Ex 1 had a crosshair that would change sizes - if you were running, unskilled with a weapon, or had just fir
          • I do too. It really showed when I played Hitman 2 on the XBox (and loved it), and then tried to play it on the PC only to quit before I'd even finished the training tutorial. I'm just too used to the gamepad to get back into the swing of mouse and keyboard.
    • 2.4 AthXP 1GB DC DDR RAM, 80 GB 133 SATA, Radeon 9600 Pro.

      Demo maxed out at 800 x 600. However, with the multiple graphic samplings, 800 x 600 easily looked as good as 1024 x 760 does on other games.

      Still, is it the graphics engine that is slow? I'm personally amazed by the collision modeling shown in the demo level. With that many boxes bouncing around at any given time, how can one expect the game to keep up? I'm amazed that it does as well as it does without choking out the main processor.
    • I'll point you to a previous thread on this - the other poster here has made a few good comments, but there's a LOT of tweaks you need to make.

      http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/11/ 2 2/ 1715233&mode=thread&tid=127&tid=186&tid=204&tid=20 6

      If you look at the .ini files, they're littered with comments about this setting being for XBOX, this is for PC. And all the PC settings are commented out. Dumb dumb dumb... I hope someone in their QA team is feeling like an idiot.

      If you mak

  • Time for an upgrade, I guess... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    This is the first time I have run into being unable to play a game on my Geforce2 GTS 32mb video card. It saddens me, because the demo won't start without "1.1 or higher pixel shader support", which I'm given to understand is generally an eyecandy feature anyway.

    But the people with MX cards are the ones who are really pissed, because even with a "Geforce4" MX card they don't have the requisite pixel shading ability. Mostly something to blame Nvidia's marketing on, but nobody has really justified (to me, at
    • DirectX 8.0 class cards with primitive pixel shaders are dirt cheap now. And even if it worked without pixel shader hardware old vidcards would not cut it, because of the high number of onscreen polys... It's not that bad, and yes, time for an upgrade. Like we all do, once in a year or 1.5 years.

  • A little more than a grain of salt.... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by MMaestro ( 585010 ) on Sunday November 30, 2003 @02:22AM (#7591394)
    Deus Ex 1 was arguably one of the most acclaimed games of that year. When a game as big as that gets a sequel, theres GOING to be SOME kind of mass bitching either before, during, or after the game release.

    Before : Any big MMORPG game; complaints about it being too big, too high system requirements, bad customer service, not being able to install it correctly, etc.

    During : Too many recent games; huge bugs in the game that "some how" managed to get past beta testing and results in a new patch being released less than week after the game hits shelves.

    After : Virtually any game that doesn't have kickass multiplayer action that keeps people coming back for more; GTA3/VC which people complained about getting boring just crashing and messing around with cars, Morrowind being too big and not interactive enough, and Halo because its system requirements made it difficult to get into a good non-laggy server.

  • I think a couple important points that most people are missing is what made the original good. Deus Ex was a jack of all trades and master of none. It wasn't a tactical shooter, nor was it a pure stealth sneaking game either. It had elements of all, which added to a greater whole. I tend to agree with IS about many things, and am reserving judgement until the final game is released.

    That aside: I see a lot of people asking for a downloadable higher-res texture pack for PCs, and to have the bump-mapping and

  • Is there a need for 'journalists' to review a demo (Score:4, Insightful)

    by MBraynard ( 653724 ) on Sunday November 30, 2003 @05:59PM (#7594621) Journal
    I get the need for reviews for retail games - potentially saving a gamer 50+ dollars. But this is a review of a DEMO! Don't get a filtered (other person's) perspective or waste time reading it. DL it and find out how well it suits your tastes for free.

    Ditto for 'music' critics. Go to a store that lets you preview the music and make up your own mind.

    Eh, that's a little off topic, isn't it.

  • I actually enjoyed it (Score:2, Interesting)

    by mudpyr8 ( 443097 )
    Immersive, great sound. I'm running a modest system (Athlon 2500, 512 MB, Radeon 9600 Pro) and I ran it in 1024x768 with 2x Oversampling. Framerate is unknown, but it never stuttered and was smooth, so I assume it was greater than 30fps. I do find it humerous that it is an "nvidia" co-branded game, but runs fine on my ATI when everyone else is having issues.

    I do agree with some posters that it would be nice to have a 1-shot, 1-kill if it hits in the right spot. Since most of the baddies had body armor, hit

  • Massive Overreacting (Score:2, Insightful)

    by inkless1 ( 1269 )
    OK, performance problems suck. They always do. There's no denying it. But people are acting like this is the first PC demo in the history of man to have bizarre performance issues with unknown configs. They (and by they I mean everyone, including such pundits as Penny-Arcade) jump to the conclusion that it just must be a problem with game itself, it can't be fixed, Ion Storm sucks, blah blah blah.

    Guess what. Runs fine on lots of boxes. Full res here, no probs. It's quite likely something to be irone

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