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Anybody here played this yet? I bought the game the other night, but I
am apparently too stupid to work out how to play it...
The objective of most computer games is to murder every living thing
that you come into contact with. Call of Duty mixes things up a little,
in that there are far too many living things for you to kill *all* of
them. And the Far Cry series has a system whereby if you just walk up to
a populated area, you'll probably be dead before you can fire a single
shot, so you have to sneak around the place and take people out one by
one. Batman did a fair bit of that too. If Batman gets shot more than
about twice, he's dead. So if you're standing in a room with ten armed
guards, you wanna be a little bit careful who sees you!
I'm not precisely sure which camp Deus Ex is in, but it seems to be the
latter:
* It takes 4 bullet hits to kill you.
* It takes about twelve bullet hits to kill an opponent.
* The rate at which I expend ammo *vastly* exceeds the rate at which I
can find more. Thus far, I have yet to have more than 12 bullets in my
inventory simultaneously. And that's for a pistol!
So it seems the idea is to sneak past people. Now in Crysis, you can
press a button and turn invisible. In Far Cry, you can hide in the
bushes. And you've got binoculars. And a freaking sniper rifle! In
Batman, you can see in the dark and see through walls. You also have the
ability to fly and to instantly scale walls.
In Deux Ex, on the other hand, you're just a guy. OK, a guy with
sunglasses embedded IN YOUR FACE... but you certainly don't have any
special cyborg abilities. You can't run, you can't jump, you can't
climb, your vision is inferior to normal humans (in that every flat
surface lights up yellow when you look at it), and you die about as
easily as a normal human too. So... I'm not sure how it's supposed to be
possible to sneak past people.
Last night, I tried to steal some evidence out of the local police
station. Well no, actually that's a lie. I tried to get from one floor
to another without being shot to pieces. I presume the flashing marker
on my radar is on a different floor.
OK, so you can't go in the front door. The map clearly shows a back
door, but the floor is electrified for some reason, so going that was
leads to instant death. But apparently if you follow the sewers, they go
right there. Trouble is, some punks started shooting at me. Given that I
only have 6 bullets, that means I've got to kill one guy, wait for the
rest to disperse, grab the ammo out of his pistol, kill the next guy,
etc. All without ever being hit by a single bullet. Needless to say, it
took a few attempts.
Anyway, having got to the back entrance alive, I found I could use a box
to climb up the fire escape. And look at that, there *just happens* to
be a conveniently placed air vent just there. Isn't that surprising? So
presumably that's where I'm supposed to go.
So I get into the building, and I'm in a giant straight corridor, with
no hiding places, and a guard strolling up and down the length of it.
Several times I tried to hack the computer on the office door to sneak
in there. But apparently opening a terminal window doesn't pause the
rest of the game. ;-) So... yeah, there's now 30 cops shooting at me,
and I have 4 bullets. Clearly this can't end well.
Having died in this way multiple times, I concluded that the only
possible way out of this situation is to take out the guard. I mean,
every few seconds he comes and stands *right next to* where I'm hiding,
*with his back to me*. There is no logical reason for why a human would
do that; I can only conclude that the game is purposely designed this
way to make it easy for me to take him out. (This *is* one of the
opening missions, after all...)
So I take the guy out. (It's *really* frustrating how the button to put
somebody to sleep and the button to KILL them are *the same button*! So
every time you take somebody down, there's a 50% chance you'll kill them
rather than just knock them out...) Now I can go hack the door... well
OK, on the fifth attempt I can hack the door! (I have yet to work out
what the myriad of different icons actually *mean*...)
I get into the office, and find that there's a convenient vent system
that leads me straight past where the camera is. Which is good, because
as far as I can tell, it's impossible to evade a camera, regardless of
what the tutorial says. In one of the offices, I read some guy's email,
and find he's involved with drug dealers. Presumably this is the magic
"evidence" I need to make him talk. So that's one side-quest solved. At
least I've achieved *something*...
It seems that my main objective is on another floor. But there's a guy
patrolling every inch of the space between the air vent and the stairs.
So I wait for him to stand with his back to me, take him out, drag him
into the vent - wait, WHAT?! Why is the alarm... oh, right. I'm standing
under that camera again. OK, so the vent *doesn't* take me past the
camera. So it's actually impossible to get off this floor without
triggering the alarm. WTF? Maybe there's a control panel somewhere that
I have to hack to shut it up.
Anyway, by some miracle I managed to run down the stairs and hide in the
corner without anybody seeing me. If you just sit there for half an
hour, the alarm eventually deactivates. So now I'm on the next floor,
but it seems I still need to go down. So I sneak down while everybody
has their back to me. Now I'm on the right floor, but it again appears
to be impossible to reach my goal. There's a guy standing rooted to the
spot, glaring straight at my exit. There's no way I can get without
twenty feet of him without him seeing me. There's no way I can leave the
stairwell without him seeing me. Game over.
In fact, I tried to sneak off, but we saw me, and I got killed. So I
reloaded the game... WHAT! The last save was TWO HOURS AGO?!
Rage-quit.
There's no way in *hell* I'm replaying that entire three floors just to
get back to this dead-end. All the XP I earned, the upgrades I bought,
the emails I read through, the people I carefully took out... I have to
redo ALL of that?? >_<
Either I'm playing this game completely wrong, or the difficulty curve
is absolutely insane. This is, like, the THIRD mission or so in the
entire game. It's the very beginning. And I'm having to replay sections
of it over and over and over, dozens of times, just to advance a few
feet forward. Maybe the game really is literally THAT HARD, but I
suspect I'm just doing it wrong.
What the heck am I missing? Because every single time I play this game,
I just get my arse handed to me on a plate.
PS. I enjoy the fact that I bought an upgrade that supposedly allows you
to "see through walls", only then to find out that you have to manually
turn it on somehow. Shame they couldn't make a tutorial to tell you
*how*, eh?
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On Thu, 15 May 2014 19:15:01 +0100, Orchid Win7 v1 wrote:
>>> Anybody here played this yet?
>>
>> Yep, I found it to be a lot of fun, actually. I played it on the PS3,
>> though (I'm guessing you're playing it on the PC?), so I don't know
>> that I can help with your UI issues.
>
> Yeah, PC. I think playing this game makes my graphics card a little bit
> sad.
>
> Is it usual for it to take two and a half hours to get from one end of a
> corridor to another? I can't work out if the game is seriously *that
> hard*, or if I'm just playing it wrong...
You must be playing it wrong, because it never took me that long. What
difficulty level are you playing at?
Jim
--
"I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and
besides, the pig likes it." - George Bernard Shaw
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null> wrote: