Reviews update:
Official Xbox Magazine 10/10
PC Gamer 94%
Official Playstation Magazine 8/10
PELIT (Finnish Magazine) 91%
Game Master Magazine 94%
(Unconfirmed) Edge Magazine 10/10
4 days left!
So, how do you plan on playing your first play through? Stealth assassin? Non lethal? Sadist?
Is there any game that Xbox magazine won’t whore out a 10 for?
I’m looking forward to pure stealth gameplay my first time through.
Some goodies for PC gamers:
DX 11 renderer
Will use Tessellation
Improved Blur
Improved Depth of field
Improved SSAO
Fully customizable controls
Eyefinity (tripple monitor) support.
Lots of AA options
FOV settings
Improved AI
Looking sweet.
With the original, I went all non-lethal until I just ran out of ammo for my non-lethal weapons, at which point I started removing heads with the sniper rifle. I’m liable to try all non-lethal this time around, too.
Anyone know how the Greenman Gaming pre-order works?
I got an email from them with my code. When I put it in to steam, it tells me that I already own the game. Does Greenman automatically add the game to my account, or did I goof up and forgot that I had already pre-ordered the game on steam??
Also:
I’m pre-loading!!! 
Triple monitor, eh? Hmm. I could move my printer…
This game looks hot. I’ve never played any of the previous Deus Ex titles, though. Is it recommended I play those or any other games before DE: HR?
Deus Ex is pretty much universally regarded as one of the best games of all time. The AI and graphics are certainly dated though. There are updated graphics that you can download though. I’d definitely give it a try and play through the first level. If nothing is insanely annoying, keep going. It’s very immersive, has a great story, and is nearly endlessly re-playable.
One of the achievements for the game is beating it without killing anyone, boss fights excepted.
Without having played the latest, I can’t really say. However, from what I understand, this new one is a prequel to the original. So, on the one hand, you probably won’t need to know what happened in the original to follow the events in the third. On the other hand, the third one might reveal information that would be considered a spoiler for the original.
Under no circumstances should you play the second game in the series.
My preload just unlocked on Steam.
Looks to be receiving universal acclaim so far. No mention in any reviews I’ve read about major bugs, either. Decrypting on Steam right now as I drink my coffee. Wheeeeeeeeee!
It appears that Deus Ex had been getting a graphics update every couple of years in my imagination. It’s more primative looking than I remembered. Yet, Thief from the same era sticks in my mind as the Attack of the Polygon People.
So I started playing this morning, and so far I’ve been VERY impressed.
Graphics on my PC are superb, mostly due to the artistic style and aesthetic of the design rather than technical merit. But still, wow. The gold, the black, the glimpses of the city through the windows, the facial expressions, all very well done. The graphics options are also proper for a PC game - FOV (thank god, I can’t stand the claustrophobic FOV of consoles), AA, AF, Post Processing filters, etc, etc. There is no MSAA option, but FXAA does a good job of dealing with most jaggies and of course requires only a fraction of the processing and video RAM resources to run than an MSAA option would. This game is a beautiful representation of the future.
Voice work is so far excellent. I haven’t heard anything out of place, though reviews do mention uneven performances and repeated dialogue, I just haven’t seen it myself yet.
The story has already got me hooked. Who attacked Sarif industries, and why?
Have seen some cool easter eggs which I’ll let you discover. Did see a poster for Final Fantasy XXVIII 
It looks like at least some quests don’t just sit around waiting for you. My decision to explore the lower levels of the company instead of meeting up with someone changed the situation.
I’m playing in “Deus Ex” mode. 2 shots and I was dead. No object highlighting, no quest markers.
Welcome back Deus Ex. I’ve missed you.
Just finished the first mission. God DAMN. This is some classic old school PC gaming goodness, wrapped up in a shiny next gen package. I’m playing on the hardest difficulty, and like Kinthalis pointed out, they’re not fucking around when they call it “hard.”
There is some object highlighting, but its much more low key than the trailer that had people so upset a while back. Objects you can pick up have an occasional shimmer - it’s subtle enough that you need to slow down a bit to see it, but I think it’s kind of necessary considering the highly cluttered, high-rez environments. Without it, this stuff would just get completely lost in the background clutter.
I love the hacking mechanic! I can see myself filling out that tree pretty quickly. It does effectively punish you for finding passwords, though. You can get money and experience points if you capture certain nodes while hacking, which you can’t get if you use a password. And once you use a password, you can’t hack the terminal any more. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing, though. On the one hand, they’re rewarding you for specializing in hacking. On the other hand, they’re removing one of the incentives for exploring. On the grasping hand, however, there’s enough other incentives to explore that not needing passwords is pretty academic.
Did anyone take the non-lethal weapon option for the first mission? I grabbed the assault rifle, then spent the entire mission doing non-lethal stealth take-downs. But the tranq gun was kind of useless in the original game, at least on the higher difficulties, because it would take so long to knock the guards out. I’m curious if their more effective here.
The implementation of the dialogue trees is really interesting. Spoilers for the first mission:
I managed to talk Zeke into letting his hostage go. VERY cool scene! I was particularly impressed by the way the camera would get tighter and tighter on Zeke’s face every time you got him closer to letting the hostage go, and would pull back if you chose wrong and pissed him off. And the resolution seems to be setting him up as a potential ally - assuming you let him survive. I’m already curious to see what happens differently in the story if you kill him. And, for that matter, what happens if you don’t save the hostage, since her husband seems to be primed to be a recurring character as well.
I’m saving up for that “social interaction” aug next. I really want to pick apart the character interactions in this game, and that seems like a good tool for it.
On my first playthrough as well and enjoying it.
There is an achievement where you do not kill anyone (except boss fights) in the whole game. While I did not intend to try that on my first playthrough I was kind of looking for alternate routes.
So far I apparently suck at it. In the very first series (before you get cyborged) I could not find an alternate route to save my life. And really, it would have saved my life about a dozen times (you die fast and easy in this game which is cool but the load times, even on my fast PC, are long and it gets tiresome). Seemed I was stuck blasting my way through (I tried sneaking and either I suck at that too or you can’t).
I forget who did it but professional game reviewers were given a 10 hour demo of the game. One magazine had three guys review it and each tried a different tactic to get through the game (to the extreme…the guy who wanted to shoot everything literally shot everyone he could).
One of them mentioned the dialog aug did open some neat options and getting through a conversation became a sort of minigame in itself.
He also said there was only one aug for it so sadly there is no more improvement there. Seems either you have it or you don’t.
I’m planning on getting it though.
I have a Phenom II quadricore, Radeon 6850 1GB and 8GB of RAM. Will this run smoothly?
Can you play effectively from a purely first person perspective? I’m not at all a fan of third person.
Is there much replay value?
Once you’ve completed it, could you say how long it took you?
I found the tranquilizer darts handy in the original for any case where I didn’t have to worry about a victim making it to an alarm button. Most people I just had to hit once, and hide until I heard them drop. It’s even possible to tranq an entire group before you take enough damage to drop you, though in that case it’s easier if you drop a gas grenade and tranq them each at your leisure.
I’m pretty sure you’ll be able to max out the game at 1080p with that setup. I’ve only tested on my pretty high end machine, but the benchmarks I’ve seen report smooth frame rate on your hardware:
That guy is running the game with your card and a quad core Phenom II.
The game is all first person except when you go into cover. It’s done very well, so it might not bother you.