My first play through I was (mostly) sneaky specced and not much of a warrior. On my next-to-last boss fight I was really, really regretting that. I had to save the game every 10 seconds or so to get through it.
This is my ONE major complaint about Deus Ex. Fucking boss fights suck.
I did manage to save Malik but I was killing people and it took me five or so tries to manage it. I am trying a pacifist style now but I am dreading that part in this style. As others have shown it can be done but still…since I got the achievement anyway maybe this time I let her die.
Not sure if it was luck or something else but on the next-to-last boss I got a head shot and dropped him like a ton of bricks. Prior to that I was running and shooting ad nauseum then seems I got lucky and BAM…head shot. All done
I hoarded EMP grenades and found little use for them till the end (sure I used them here and there but mostly hung on to every one I found). My frugality paid off (including letting them take-up valuable inventory space) in the end where I found the last boss fight amazingly easy compared to the first three (although I was fine with killing on my first playthrough).
Like you I am now going for a second play on max difficulty and, like you, my biggest problem is not having objects of interest outlined in yellow. It is annoying.
Second time through things are certainly easier (so far…I just started and as mentioned in my last post not looking forward to running the Malik scene on pacifist/max difficulty).
Well, having already gotten the Achievement, I’m going to be more pragmatic now. I mean, while I’m dealing with idealists and unaugmented street thugs I don’t see any reason to wade through buckets of blood, but once I’m dealing with actual fool-blooded mercs and unabashed villains, I’m going to be more pragmatic. And I’ve read somewhere that a sniper rifle can take care of these bastards without even having to move around that much.
You can turn that option back on without jeopardizing your Legend achievement and playthrough. It just happens to default to off when you start a new game on hard.
I think I found a bug which allowed me to take down the 2nd boss easily.
I shot her with the PEPS while she was charging at me, and instead of being knocked out for a moment, she became completely frozen in place mid-charge.
Whereupon I proceeded to calmly unload three clips of shotgun shells, point-blank, into her face until she died.
So, playing through on Schtuper Schtud mode, I’m in theory not going to have any qualms about killing, so I can finally put that sniper rifle I got for pre-ordering (exactly like the other sniper rifles you find, but with one mod already loaded up, you’re welcome loyal customer). I get to the FEMA detention facility and it turns out that the mercs are immune to devastating headshots. The loading text mentioned about how helmets reduce the effectiveness of head shots, but these guys were wearing ski masks or something.
So, I guess that’s what makes this the harder level, except… non-lethal isn’t any harder. In fact, non-lethal takedowns are faster to trigger and attract less attention.
I loaded up my game this morning, and the loading screen had an ad on it for the Star Wars sextilogy, now available on Blu-Ray.
Allow me to be the first to say; WTF, Eidos/Square-Enix/Lucasfilm?
In my day, we NEVER had ads on load screens! Just on TV and on the radio…and in magazines…and movies. And at ball games, on buses, and milk cartons, and t-shirts, and bananas, and written on the sky. But not on load screens! No sirree!
Well, I suppose if it’s gonna take forever and a half to load, may as well look at SOMETHING in the meantime.
You don’t need the stun gun - there are half a dozen canisters of poison gas in the room (and explodey barrels). Thrown at him, they’ll stun him a long, long time.
Or you could just augment yourself with a Typhoon system, hide behind cover and let 'er rip just as he’s turning the corner. There’s no downtime and you’ll immortal during the Typhoon animation so you can basically do it for as long as you’ve got ammo. IME 3-4 pops does the trick. Cheap and gamey ? Sure, but that boss is a prick.
I’m wondering something about the ending(s):
No matter which ending I chose for my playthrough (saved in the choice room, natch) Adam emphasized that “during my journey I hung on to my morality and tried not to cut corners or use my resources in overkill ways”. And I did play it more or less like a “nice guy” - killed very few people, picked the ethical ways to solve quests. Does the narration change at all if you play like a cold robot and kill anyone in your way ?
Yup. Don’t kill 'em :). [spoiler]Most of the time you can just sprint through the crowd, find a hidey hole and let them calm down. Unlike real guards, they’re not organized and they won’t come after you. Also, they don’t have guns so you can punch their lights out.
Else: hoard gas grenades, they’re awesome. I’ve found the PEP gun (that 1 shot stunning shockwave gun that takes aeons to reload ?) to be pretty effective too, you can drop half a dozen of 'em in one go if you line them up right. Too bad there’s so little ammo for it…[/spoiler]
I’ll let you know when I’m done with this bloodthirsty playthrough. So far, Pritchard’s called me Attila the Hun in the spot where he previously called me Gandhi, heh.
I have no idea why people have so much trouble with the bosses. Two words folks:
Fragmentation.
Mines.
Seriously, they are hideously effective and easy to pick up along the game. When barret starts shooting at you, run and hide behind a column, chuck a mine in front of him, wait for him to get stunned by the detonation, and shoot him in the head with your gun of choice. When he starts shooting again, sprint across the room, use a health item, and repeat. Grenades can also be used in this fashion, but mines are easier to connect with. The trick is unloading an entire clip of assault rifle or revolver ammo into his head after every explosion.
EMP and gas weapons won’t deal damage, but they will stun him for longer.
I’ve beaten him on Give Me Deus Ex with no augmentations several times. It takes no time at all. I have my platinum trophy on deus ex btw.
Perhaps because the bosses are poorly designed and punish the gameplay the rest of DX:HR rewards? Becaue they’re rather dull fights all told, more interesting for the scenery than the battle? Because even the concept of bossfights doesn’t really fit the game?
This is the kind of game where you really ought to be able to win without firing a weapon once. Heck, not only were the bosses quite lackluster, but they were literally farmed out to a third party. We now know why they just sorta appear, with few clues about who they are, what they’re doing, or why in the game.
For some reason, the people who develop these kinds of STEALTH/action games never ever learn this pretty obvious lesson. Thief, Splinter Cell, Vampire:Bloodlines, Assassin’s Creed, Hitman, Tenchu… they always seem compelled to add a bit (usually the last stretch) of HAHAFUCKYOU pure action now !
Which is stupid on so many levels.
First, because the basic controls, design, camera angles and so forth of these games more often than not revolve around the sneaking part and are not optimized for pure brawl.
Secondly, because that’s not what the player has been facing so far, or in games where there are multiple possible paths to follow (Deus Ex, Alpha Protocol, VtM:B…) not the path they’ve been taking and practicing in so obviously the relative difficulty curve makes a hockey stick. BTW, fuck you so much, Brayko.
Finally, because it seems pretty equally obvious that if the player has gone so far through the game instead of putting it down and playing something else, it’s because they like sneaking around over action. You know, because up to this point not sneaking around resulted in swift death ? Which if they liked action so much would have frustrated them and made them rage quit ? Yeah, that part
And it’s not like it’s a big secret, either. That feedback is pretty damn consistent. You go to any of these games’ forums, you’ll find players saying “I loved the game, except for that forced action part”. In fact, it’s become as much of a cliché as players hating the retarded, forced stealth sections in their action games (which are equally clunky, artificially difficult and out of place for exactly the same reasons). But nooo, gotta add actionfests, gamers like actionfests as much as they love quick time events !
Aye. Despite some justice to the complaints, Thief did this well: no forced action, and you had the capability of escaping or putting up a decent fight at least against one enemy. Alpha Protocol was more of a hybrid anyway, and it was pretty much impossile to build a character who could not fight.
But Hitman? Ye Gods! And Vampire Bloodlines was *agonizing *in sections.
Compare the original game, which had three of what you could call “boss fights”, and two of them are skippable if you’ve hacked the right computers ahead of time and learned that character’s killphrase. The first one can occur at several different points in the game depending on the choices you make, and it can be a quick and silent assassination as easily as a toe-to-toe slugfest. The third one can mostly be skipped if you mine the room ahead of time or manage to sneak up on the boss. All three of the characters are well-established in the narrative from the beginning of the game, and there’s a real impact when you have to fight them and kill them.
In Human Revolution, I didn’t even know the NAMES of the first two bosses until I looked them up on the wiki trying to figure out how to beat them. They certainly weren’t major characters, and whether they lived or died didn’t mean a thing to me in the grand scheme of the plot.
I’m not a combat-averse person, but in a game that prides itself on being non-linear and offering multiple ways to solve any puzzle, it’s rather infuriating when you’re cut-scened into the middle of a room with minimal cover and an NPC which you can’t interact with in any other way than by shooting it in the head, and where non-lethal combat doesn’t work.
Even if they did have a boss where you were forced into a throwdown with (hey, it can happen), it would be nice if there was a damn good explanation. I honestly consider the REAL bosses of the games to be the “talkdowns” where you either persuade them to agree with you… or say “we’re done here” and shoot them in the face.
