PC Deus Ex: Invisible War - horrible, horrible, HOR-rible!

The BBQ Pit
1

I loved the original Deus Ex. I loved the way you could carve your own path throught the game world to complete your goal. I’ve been looking forward to the much-anticipated sequel ever since I heard about it. “Hell,” thought I, “It doesn’t even have to be revolutionary. All they have to really do is keep the same Deus Ex interface, develop a good storyline, and update the graphics and audio, and they’ll have a sure-fire instant hit.”

I slavered with anticipation.

I bought it when it came out happily, paying full retail price because I KNEW it’d be great.

It isn’t great. At all. In fact, it sucks horribly. It’s anti-Deus Ex. It’s a 180 degree turn from everything that made Deus Ex good.

The interface blows. It’s cluttered, confusing, and difficult to manage. This is quite a trick, since for DE 2, they seem to actually have REMOVED features which enhanced the original game and made it more fun to play. So yes…the menus are actually simpler, and yet more confusing. Brilliant. Gone is the skill system. No skills to develop. Now you only have biomods, and the lower levels of them are so restrictive that you might as well just go ahead and give up on stealth or trickery. Just walk in and blast everything in sight, because that’s really the only effective way to clear goals until you’ve leveled up all your critical biomods several times. Then there’s the ammo bar. It looks like a cylinder filled with purple jello, and it makes very little sense. The rationale is that all guns in the game use a standard ammo clip, and the ammo for each type is manufactured on the spot by wee li’l nanobots. The result is that you look at the purple bar and think, “I seem to have a little over half a purple bar of ammo left, and I have no idea what that means for a flamethrower, since I just switched over from a pistol.” Yeah. Useless. [sarcasm] I can’t imagine why they’d think that ammo management for a tactical first-person shooter might be an integral part of the game. [/sarcasm] In the original game, you were able to choose different types of ammo based on the approach you wanted to take in a situation. The inventory management system is confusing. If you click into the menu, you have to then use the arrow keys to cycle through, because if you just go over and click another item, for some reason the game SWITCHES the original item with the item you just clicked. Counterintuitive and stupid, especially if you’re in a fight and you want to switch over to a grenade or something in your secondary inventory (“no, not the smoke nade, the concus…no, goddamn it, not that one…the concus…aaaahhhh! Fuck! Give me the concussion…” Too late. By that time you’re dead, having just thrown a noisemaker grenade (because you ran out of ammo from misreading your retarded ammo bar) directly at the feet of the guard who was blasting away at you with a shotgun.) To ice the shitcake, so to speak, the inventory bars are intrusive and confining, curving up the sides of your screen in a way that I’m sure was supposed to look clever and high-tech, but really just gets in your fucking way.

Pure shit from the word go.

What made me fall in love with Deus Ex when I played the demo was the fantastic level creation they did. Remember the enormous, open expanse of Liberty Island? All the possibilities? The nooks to explore (ah yes…no skill points to gather, and therefore no exploration bonus points. Basically, the only reason to deviate from the game-on-rails pathing in DE 2 is to find multitools. I amassed something like 20 or 25 of the damned things before I got tired of crawling through vents to find them, and decided to just play the game straight,) the places to climb and reconnoiter? The number of possibilities? Do I kill this guard and sneak past this one? Do I take them all out in a terrifying frenzy of stealthy bloodletting? Do I sneak around the back way…all the way around the back side of the statue, or do I go in the front, past the camera? How about taking that one guard out with a sniper rifle shot from 500 yards, then keeping to the shadows?

Gone. All gone. There’s no sense of space at all in DE 2. It’s all done in these tiny little blocky sub-cells. There are no wide open scenes. No panoramas. No awe-inspiring scenes. You walk around in cramped, premade “template” environments.

Here’s the way it goes: You’re in a central location, say Upper Seattle City Center. This location consists of half a dozen or so separate areas you can look around in…a coffee shop, a secluded thug-filled alley, a night-club entryway, a metro entryway, etc. As you walk around, you get into conversations with various people in which they break the ice with you (a perfect stranger) by telling you they want to have someone murdered, and can you help them out? These appear as goals in your submenu. In order to carry out these goals (say, like the couple that are intended to be carried out in the night club,) you wander over to the night club entryway, and choose the option of entering the club. At this point, THE GAME COMES TO A COMPLETE HALT, as the program shuts down, you’re given a screen to look at with “helpful” game tip or storyline tidbit for about 30 seconds, and the program reloads with the new environment (if the program doesn’t bug out and crash to the desktop or lock up altogether, which it has done to me a frustrating number of times.) No cutscene. No transition. Just that goddamned tip screen. It completely destroys any sense of immersion you have in the game world. If I want game tips, I’ll either read the manual or learn as I muddle my way through the game world. If you have to put storyline filler outside the game proper in order for it to make sense, there’s something wrong, you numbskulls.

Stupid, stupid, stupid. In short, I have a memory cache of 384 MB. USE it, you dopes. The original Deus Ex did, and got happier results when I only had 128 MB.

Then there’s the graphics. Underwhelming to say the least. More like blocky, unrealistic shite. Looks like a game from 2000 or earlier. In fact, they’re perilously close to being just like the original Deus Ex…the one area in which I was really expecting improvement. The gun models look stupid. The people all strongly resemble each other, and share an alarmingly wooden, Stepford-like similarity of expression and movement. The ambient environmental effects aren’t bad, though. Nice shadows and fog effects, but not great. If your environmental effects are on the same level as say, Serious Sam, it’s time to update. The lighting presets are ridiculously dim, though. The default lighting palette ranges somewhere between “dusky umbra” and “inside of an alimentary canal.” You’ll be scanning around, and suddenly your crosshairs will turn red, and somebody will start shooting at you, all before you can really make out where the hell they are. To be fair, you can adjust the brightness and gamma, but if you monkey around with the sliders, it looks false and washed-out, and when you do step into a lighted area, the lighting palette changes instantly to “nuclear detonation,” light so bright you can hear it.

Basically, I’m saying that I got fucked on the price, and that the entire game is complete ass from top to bottom. I finally gave up on it and uninstalled the damned thing. Just horrible and disappointing. What I really miss are the big spaces and the immersive environment. Why, oh why, did they decide to dick a great concept up so badly?

2

Thanks, Ogre, for the warning - I loved the original too, and had thought about getting the sequel. I’ll stay away from it.

On the other hand, I just got Prince of Persia fired up, and man o man it’s purty. It’s a linear game, true, and the combat is pretty dull and annoying, but the jumping puzzles – which make up the bulk of the game – are miraculously entertaining. I normally despise jumping puzzles, but these keep me happy, for the following reasons:

-There’s no find-the-right-pixel here. If you point yourself in vaguely the right direction, you’ll make the jump. The game is very generous in this respect.
-There’s a built-in mechanism that lets you try a jump multiple times (basically, you have a limited ability to turn back time by several seconds, very useful if you fall to your death). Very rarely do you play save-and-reload.
-You’ve got a bunch of cool maneuvers to do, including running on walls, swinging on parallel bars, wall-jumping, tumbling, pillar-climbing, and balance-beam walking, amongst others. They’re all very cool to watch and to do.
-More importantly, all these maneuvers are integral to the jumping puzzles, such that you’ll often have to look at the overall scene and plan a path through it using a specific combination of moves. Excellent level design.
-Did I mention purty? I just reached a water level, and it’s got the best water effects I’ve ever seen in a game. You can splash around in a waterfall like nobody’s business. The architecture soars, the sky is brilliant, the decor is hugely flavorful. It’s a pleasure moving through these environments.
-Finally, the voice acting, script, and music are great and appropriate, unusual in a game like this.

I highly recommend it, as long as you’re willing to look past a lackluster combat system.

Daniel

3

Note to game designers: sequels are supposed to add features, not take them away.

You fucking morons.

I’m with you all the way, Ogre. Easily the most disappointing game I’ve played in a long time.

4

What I thought sucked the most were the endings of the game. I kinda sat there, going “Huh? That’s it? All that for… that? That SUCKS!” I didn’t find the graphics too bad, but the lack of wide open spaces was a bit annoying. The closest you get is in the arcology, when you can look out over Cairo. Kinda.

This is, of course, after I spent a couple of hours trying to get the game to run. I couldn’t get it to load anything after the first ‘level’, so I figured that the patch would help.

Nope. Couldn’t even start a game now, much less load one. And it’s not like I’m trying to run it on a bare bones system either.

Ended up running the game in debug mode (which makes load times so long, I had time to go to the bathroom, start up a pot of tea, light a few candles, only to come back and see that it was still loading) with a no-CD crack.

I actually didn’t have much problem with ammo, but that was because I tended to sneak up on someone and stab them with the power sword. :smiley:

I did find the interactions with some of the characters rather flat, though. After coming off of a KOTOR high, DeusEx 2 seemed very lacking in this department.

<< If love is blind, then why is lingerie so popular? >>

5

Well you’ve saved me a couple of quid, I was looking forward to Invisble War as I thought it would be booshank, but it sounds like a load of cack.

6

Ah yes. I left out a beef or two.

First, the game refuses to keep my graphical adjustments. Every time I boot the game up, it defaults to its shitty 640x480 resolution. I reset it higher, play for a while, then save, but when I come back, 640x480. Arse.

I read a review (but stupidly forgot to grab the link…I’ll see if I can hunt it down later) that may offer a partial explanation of why the game blows like it does. Apparently, the developers wanted to release an identical X Box version and PC version at the same time. For all you kiddies at home, this means that there’s a limiting factor. The game on the more powerful system can’t have any features or run better levels than the weaker system. In this case, the X Box is by far the weaker system, with only a 64 MB cache (can that be right?) This necessitates much smaller, cramped levels and frequent reloads. I swear I saw areas in DE 2 where you’d reload a level, walk 10 feet, then encounter a door where you’d have to reload AGAIN.

Anyway, if you’re going to develop a PC game, is it really too much to ask that you take advantage of the PC’s strengths?

I want to run my game at 1600x1200 with 8x oversampling, full ambient effects, and surround sound. I have a great sound card, an awesome video card, and buckets of memory. Dammit, at least give me the option!

I can’t believe how many positive reviews of this clunker I’ve seen on the web. I honestly can’t see how anyone would think DE 2 is an improvement over the original. It has a decent storyline, I suppose, but the execution of the game itself is lifeless, and has NO vision. NO soul. NO scope. It’s just awful.

I mean, I had infinite faith in Eidos. They came out with Deus Ex. Loved it. They came out with Hitman. Loved it, but thought it could be better. Then they released Hitman 2, and everything about the game was better. The improvements were just superb. I thought there was no way they’d fuck up Deus Ex 2. They fucked it up.

On a similar note, I tried PC Halo, on the recommendation of, among others, James Lileks. He raved that it was unbelievably immersive and a fantastic game. I played the single player game and meh…standard game-on-rails shooter. The multiplayer, on the other hand, is excellent, so I don’t regret that one.

7

Released on its own as a good game, it would have been hailed. However its a Deus Ex title and us fans expected more.
I can’t agree more with the OP. So much good stuff from DX was taken out for not good reason. The inventory and interface gave me a headache. Without the patch to fix the stupid problems to game is unplayable. Stories and missions are weak. Guns are weak as well. The sniper rifle in this game made me miss the old one terribly. I can’t get over how stupid all the other weapons were. They looked like blocks they covered in buttons and put handles on.
Graphic weren’t mind blowing. There were some things that were cool, but nothing that hasn’t been done before.
The only thing that allowed me to finish the game was forgetting it had anything to do with DX. That allowed me to have some fun, and forget the disapointment at what could have been.

8

Usually when I hear about a sequel to a game/movie/book I’m filled with dread but over time as more and more details come out the more excited I get.

I had the opposite reaction with Deus Ex. When I heard about a sequel I nearly did a cartwheel. Then I heard about the ammo thing. I went “umm ok annoying but I can give that a pass” Then I heard about the cramped environments b/c it was being developed for consoles I went “umm doesn’t sound to fun” Then I heard reviews talking about how every door has a vent about 2 feet from it and that it took all the fun of being stealthy out of it “Umm sounds like really poor level design.” I was still thinking about buying it when I read an interview by Warren Spector where he basically said he thought the role playing game elements were lame and redundant (I can agree there but how about retweaking the skill system not ripping it out) and how ammo placement detracted from gameplay. He implied that if he hadn’t been pressured to make a roleplaying type game he would have made a very different game.

I realized he was out of his fucking mind and put my wallet back in my pocket. He makes a great game then suggests the things that made it unique were the things he didn’t want to include? WTF?

9

I’ve only played the demo, so I can only judge Deus Ex 2 based on that, but I was not impressed at all. I think the problem was they deliberately designed the game pre-optimized for consoles. The levels were small, the textures on the PC version were comparable to what you would find on a console port and the same character models were used over and over again to conserve memory.

I never got the feeling from the demo that I was part of a larger world, the way I did with the first game. It was just a lot of wandering around a cramped, slummy area. This could have been the demo for just about any FPS.

And I also think the HUD is God-awful. I don’t need information about my inventory cluttering up the center of my screen. It might have looked nicer at 1600x1200 with 4x antialiasing, but that just wasn’t possible, given the games already-steep system requirements.

10

But all the vents have spiderbots, man! How can you not dig the spiderbots?

Harried Programmer: Uh, sir? There’s this vent, see, that goes from right beside the main door on the ground level, right to the Super Secret NanoDestructoLab on the third floor, bypassing all the guard stations, laser fences, and alarms.

Warren Spector: It’s for stealth! Whassamatter? Don’t you like STEALTH?

HP: But…sir. The vent entrance is really obvious, and it just goes right to the heart of the mission…

WS: Hm. You may be right. Put in a spiderbot!

HP: But we already have spiderbots in every other vent in the game!

WS: (covers ears, yells loudly) Spiderbots! Spiderbots! I want spiiiiiiiderbots!

11

Deus Ex 2 blew bits, man. I never even bothered to finish it. I never even left Seattle. It just plain didn’t feel fun. I could see how it COULD be fun (and I’m sure I’ll go back and finish it, some day). But it just didn’t feel enough like the original to be enough fun right now.

Although I do think the graphics were swell. The physics were pretty damn decent, and the lighting effects ran smoothly even on my SSIA (slightly showing its age) computer. And the smoothing effect was good. And the facial animations and lyp-synching were some of the best I’ve ever seen.

Basically, after being awed by the graphics for an hour or two, I stopped caring about the game. One of its problems: There’s no way to tell what quests are important, and which are totally insignificant. F’rinstance… I was pretty sure that the “Trash the coffee shop” was not terribly important to the plot, but frankly, why was it listed up there with “Stop global conspiracy” and “Save the world”? It got to the point where I had so many active quests, it was a fucking chore just trying to keep them all straight… and this was the beginning of the game! What sort of bookkeeping am I gonna have to master by the end?

12

After playing the Demo for DX2, and reading the reactions on certain gaming forums from people who had already bought the game, I decided to not purchase it. The official reviews I read seemed a bit above luke-warm, perhaps out of respect for the original. But the vitriol I read on forums from pissed off fans… whoo-boy. . .You can’t polish that stuff.

If this was any other stand alone game, I think I would have at least gave it a shot. But its the sequel to Deus Ex!!! DX was the game that made me LOVE pc gaming! DX was the game that proved to me that it “hadn’t all been done before”. That it was still possible to make something completely new and innovative, and to add more to games then just upgraded graphics and sound. The immersion, the illusion of reality it gave was like nothing I had ever seen.

After DX, I really, honestly thought games were going to go on a bit of a revolution. That it would no longer be good enough to just make mindless run-and-gun shooter type games. The years passed by, and dozens of said droning shooters and mediocre RPGs came and went. Unimmersive shit, fun for the first few days but ultimately forgettable. And all this time I kept thinking “just wait for DX2 to come out.”

And then it comes out, and it appears even Eidos/IonStorm couldnt even get their own sequel right.

I know that I’m not owed a perfect, mind boggling follow up. That the best I can do is vote with my dollar and not pay for it if I think its a failure of a program. But it still sucks, waiting this long for the sequel to a great game, and finding out how severely botched up it comes out.

Just wondering… anyone have any idea how the game was recieved on the X-box?

13

Left Hand - I found Prince of Persia to be an immensely entertaining and beautiful game, but only worth a rental. The problem with it is it’s too freaking easy, and there’s not enough gameplay time. I finished it in 12 hours, and the last time I finished a video game was probably six or seven years ago. Every puzzle is just a variation on the same theme. Granted, fun as hell to play, but rent it for a few days and you should finish it.

Deus Ex had too many menus for me and not enough ammo.

14

I guess I’m in a unique position in that I never played the original Deus Ex. Computer games are something that I’ve always done in phases, and I just wasn’t in a phase at that time.

As such, I’ve rather enjoyed DE:IW, though I have to say the plot keeps losing me. It sets itself up as being all non-linear, but then the storylines converge and you realize the choice you made back there didn’t matter all that much anyway.

I thought they could have gone further with objects and biomods. I’m coming to the end, and I haven’t seen a new weapon in forever. I also had all my biomods maxed out before I hit the halfway point in the game. As for the ammo, my biggest complaint there is that there isn’t enough of it–if you have to engage anyone close-up, you usually have to empty at least a clip directly into their head to take them down, regardless of the gun.

Still, it’s fun, and there’s enough interesting stuff there to keep me interested thus far.

Dr. J

15

I thought it was quite good, though not as good as the original. If the two weren’t associated, I’d wager that a lot more people would hold in much higher regard. My biggest complaint is that it’s far shorter than the original. Also it took a lot of messing about to get it running succesfully on my son’s Radeon 9600.

I’m hoping that there’ll be a DX3 down the road.

16

DoctorJ, just out of curiosity, because you represent a different viewpoint, run over here and grab the demo for the original Deus Ex.

If you’re willing, I’d like to hear what you think of the overall experience as compared to DX2. The graphics will obviously be a little more rudimentary, but I’d be interested in hearing your opinion.

17

What’s really sad is that Thief 3 is being made by the same company. It’s also getting released for the Xbox and the PC at the same time. It’s also getting “features” such as a 3rd person mode, and blue shadows, since black would be too hard to see on an Xbox, and since it’s running on the same engine I’m somewhat suspicious that it’s also going to get the small room treatment. Oh, and they’ve named it “Thief: Deadly Shadows.” Woohoo.

18

The game has a very odd method of saving graphical adjustments. It saves them with your save game. If you want them to stick, save your game right after you change them.

Playability was positively dreadful before the 1.1 patch. After applying the patch, I can now progress far enough in the game to wholeheartedly agree with every gripe you’ve listed.

DX was fantastic. DX:IW falls dreadfully short.

19

Welp, I just patched my version to 1.1 and downloaded the texture patch. I must admit that the game now looks a lot nicer, but the spirit still seems to be missing. Still no sweeping scope or true multipathing to your destination.

Which brings me to a point. Multipathing. You’d think that choosing certain paths might eliminate other paths. Assassinate an Order member at the behest of the WTO, and you’d think the Order would look askance at you from then on, right? Wrong. They’re just as happy to deal with you with blood on your hands as not. No biggie. As far as I can tell, no paths in the game are mutually exclusive, and you end up at the same place anyway. <shrug> Color me underwhelmed.

Anyway, what’s all this BS about developers cramming something onto the market that’s just barely beta-tested, with the raw intention of patching the living christ out of it as they go along? Now, I can understand fixing bugs and addressing user issues in a patch - to be fair, I think that’s mostly what they did for the 1.1 patch - but a texture pack? C’mon. The programmers weren’t happy with the game environment? Then why did they release the sumbitch? So far, even with the new texture pack, only Seattle seems to be complete. Presumably more make-up work is on the way.

I can’t believe that this kind of shoddy work is not impacting sales.

Bah, I sez. Bah.

20

I could not play the game for more than an hour, because of a few things:

  • The mouse movement…it was never perfect. I don’t know why.
  • Too slow on my decent computer.
  • I dont like it when it shuts down to the desktop unexpectedly.
  • I dont like long long load times.
  • Its nice that the programmers decided to help us learn to play the game, but every time I see one of those “tip” windows pop up, it was annoying to read, and very annoying that you HAD to hit Esc to leave them.
    I might play it in a few years when I get a new computer though.

OH yeah, this sounds dumb but when I was playing, I was in a hanger playing my brothers file, I think it was like…Hanger 37 way at the end of the game.
It may be odd, but I had accidentally hit the crouch key and since you didn’t have to hold it down to be crouched, I crawled along the whole floor without realising I was crouching. Finally I came across a ‘NPC’ and realised I was still crouching. Is this just my fault, or maybe imperfect graphics?