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the new hitman games are also immersive sims
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Jun 30, 2020 07:35
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| # ? Jun 6, 2024 06:14 |
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The Deus Ex prequels are so good dude. If they didn't have the burden of the series they'd probably be considered on the same level as Dishonored. Which are all amazing. I'm playing Prey right now and it's so amazing. Hitman is absolutely an immersive sim and it's loving amazing. I'm sure I'm forgetting some I've played and I'm definitely omitting some that I haven't played. Like this is a really good genre to be a fan of, there are not a lot of games but so many of them are absolute gems and a lot of them are really modern. Not gonna fact check myself, but I heard that Warren Spector said that he wanted to make a game that was a perfect simulation of a city block and Mankind Divided was the closest we ever got to that feelix fucked around with this message at 07:56 on Jun 30, 2020 |
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Jun 30, 2020 07:48
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Me, playing a game released three years after the great recession happened and one year after the Affordable Care Act was passed that is about people being so desperate for employment that they'll hack off their own limbs and where the medicine they need to live afterward is so expensive that they're forced to turn to crime just to survive: huh wow this game basically has nothing to say other than "bio-modification will be disruptive."
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Jun 30, 2020 09:07
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bob page is literally intentionally by the developers bill gates 
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Jun 30, 2020 09:14
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Sleeveless posted:Me, playing a game released three years after the great recession happened and one year after the Affordable Care Act was passed that is about people being so desperate for employment that they'll hack off their own limbs and where the medicine they need to live afterward is so expensive that they're forced to turn to crime just to survive: huh wow this game basically has nothing to say other than "bio-modification will be disruptive." On top of the increasing consilidation of money and power in the hands of a few tech companies, increasingly widespread surveillance, and police violence. Jensen's background was that he was fired from Detroit PD for not killing a Mexican kid, for poo poo's sake. There was a lot going on in the prequels.
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Jun 30, 2020 13:13
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And also of course classic cyberpunk poo poo like an AI that first appears as a human and mostly acts like one (Eliza), humans that are actually mostly robotic but the robotic parts try to perfectly imitate humans (Namir/rest of the goons), organ harvesting stuff, exploitation of the lower classes, the impact of global warming and the fact that tech-bro solutions only makes things worse... etc. What I'm saying is: I'm sorry Meatwad, that's a bad take.
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Jun 30, 2020 14:14
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the recent zelda was also an open world immersive sim
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Jun 30, 2020 14:18
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Samopsa posted:And also of course classic cyberpunk poo poo like an AI that first appears as a human and mostly acts like one (Eliza), humans that are actually mostly robotic but the robotic parts try to perfectly imitate humans (Namir/rest of the goons), organ harvesting stuff, exploitation of the lower classes, the impact of global warming and the fact that tech-bro solutions only makes things worse... etc. Oh, yeah, I totally forgot about how heavily global warming was hanging over the plot of HR. Man that game’s story stuff aged really well.
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Jun 30, 2020 14:30
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Anyway, the old Deus Ex was immersed in pure 90s schlock, filled with silliness like Gray dissections and Black helicopters and it ends with nuclear weapons flying around, yet at the same time, it manages to say something interesting and profound about economic inequality. This is why it has aged so well despite the silliness. DXHR and DXMD come out of the gate promising something serious and profound, and it has the art direction and Michael McCann soundtrack to prove it. But despite its promises, it ends up delving into schlock, where augs are susceptible to being brainhacked into violent zombies, and the government responds by implementing segregation and apartheid. That's just silly, that's pure schlock designed to tug at your heartstrings and your sense of justice. I say that but recently people took part in a violin-playing vigil to protest a teenager being beaten to death by the police, and the police broke it up with tear gas and batons. The schlock in the fictional media that we consume and has to be created by teams of writers and artists doesn't hold a candle to reality.
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Jun 30, 2020 14:40
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The biggest thing missing from the prequels to me is the quality of writing. The ideas are there but there's no shockingly deep conversations with bartenders and rebel leaders, no real newspaper articles giving windows into things, no surprises like Morpheus. No real philosophy. The writing is limited to the quests and story whereas the original never felt constrained or narrowly focused (in large part because it was throwing everything at the wall). Everything else basically feels there but the little things that made DE what it was after the gameplay was done aren't. I hope this is coherent.
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Jun 30, 2020 15:02
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The prequels had Big Ideas that were shittily explored, is what I should have said. The quality of the writing just can't hold up the weight of the concepts, coupled with some questionable decisions. Case in point, Jensen was fired for not shooting an innocent Mexican child, right? Well the first conversation battle that you get into to is absolving the shitheaded cop that did it, and the only way to "win" (I really hate the convo battle poo poo) is to tell him it wasn't his fault. Yeeeeah nah bruh. Like Phobophilia said, sure you get the concept of people radically changing their bodies with augmentations in order to become a better functioning cog in the meat grinder that is capitalism....so that they can be turned into zombies, or something?? The Illuminati's entire plan didn't seem to make any sense. Yeah, Bob Page was analogous to Bill Gates, but he was also a holdover from the original game, where he was explored much better. What little the prequels have of him paint him as some scheming mastermind behind the curtain but there's little incidental bits of dialogue in the original that show him for what he really is; a spoiled trust fund Silicon Valley psychopath.
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Jun 30, 2020 15:52
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There's actually multiple ways to solve the conversation battles, as the responses are semi randomised between games. One solution is to berate the poo poo out of him, make him accept responsibility for the shooting and stop blaming it for all his problems.
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Jun 30, 2020 15:57
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The Illuminati plan in HR was just centralizing control over time through increasing popularity and acceptance of augmentations-something they’d always control whether by a software backdoor or a neuropozyne monopoly. The events on Panchaea jeopardize the Illuminati’s control before you even get there. By the events of Mankind Divided it seems the Illuminati have a plan to reassert themselves in a world where augs remain controversial. They don’t seem to want augs to be fully criminalized. I don’t know what status Bob Page wants for augs in the short term, but ultimately they’d like to get to a point where they are again commonplace, easy to coerce people into getting, and ultimately able to be hijacked for his own ends.
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Jun 30, 2020 16:04
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I would probably be a lot more charitable to the prequels if they weren't prequels. They make more sense to me as alternate timeline sequels to Deus Ex if you picked the option where JC joins the Illuminati and they run poo poo for a while. The prequels lean so heavily on body modification which would have been easier to swallow in a sequel but make no sense in a prequel. Basically everyone with mods in Deus Ex is either active duty military/UNATCO, former military/UNATCO, or unspeakably rich. In the prequels biomods are already at the mass market phase so it isn't believable in the timeline as taking place 25 years before Deus Ex. Maybe they felt Invisible War poisoned the well for a sequel but it made the game kinda incoherent as a result.
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Jun 30, 2020 16:07
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I wish they’d treat the Jensen games as a different continuity than the Denton games.
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Jun 30, 2020 16:10
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Shoulda just made Ion Storm's original plans for DX3. https://www.unseen64.net/2015/04/16/deus-ex-3-insurrection-cancelled-concepts/
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Jun 30, 2020 18:34
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Al Cu Ad Solte posted:Shoulda just made Ion Storm's original plans for DX3. quote:They stated that they had analysed why the Invisible War would not meet its projected sales these were as following:- I'm okay that we never got this game.
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Jun 30, 2020 21:15
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Not gonna lie, a Deux Ex where your PC didn't give a drat about all the conspiracies and kept shutting people up so they could move onto the next set piece would be kinda funny.
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Jun 30, 2020 21:31
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El_Elegante posted:I wish they’d treat the Jensen games as a different continuity than the Denton games. Head canon; skul gun
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Jun 30, 2020 21:59
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Four-Eyes posted:Not gonna lie, a Deux Ex where your PC didn't give a drat about all the conspiracies and kept shutting people up so they could move onto the next set piece would be kinda funny. Doom but Bob Page is narrating it and acting like the villains in Diablo 3, where he videocalls you every 2 minutes to tell you about his new evil plan?
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Jun 30, 2020 22:37
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Falcorum posted:Doom but Bob Page is narrating it and acting like the villains in Diablo 3, where he videocalls you every 2 minutes to tell you about his new evil plan? What about Olympus Mons? Your very own mountain! Just let me finish pulling earth into hell!
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Jun 30, 2020 22:40
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Falcorum posted:Doom but Bob Page is narrating it and acting like the villains in Diablo 3, where he videocalls you every 2 minutes to tell you about his new evil plan? As long as we get DOOM Guy responses. "Now carefully remove Heli-..." SMASH
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Jun 30, 2020 23:45
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jojoinnit posted:The biggest thing missing from the prequels to me is the quality of writing. The ideas are there but there's no shockingly deep conversations with bartenders and rebel leaders, no real newspaper articles giving windows into things, no surprises like Morpheus. No real philosophy. The writing is limited to the quests and story whereas the original never felt constrained or narrowly focused (in large part because it was throwing everything at the wall). Everything else basically feels there but the little things that made DE what it was after the gameplay was done aren't. I feel like HR never had the ideological highs of the bartender or the basement AI but the conversation battles are straight up some of the best branching conversations in gaming and the way that it used performance capture so that you could reliably go off of body language and facial expressions without descending into the cartoonish exaggeration of the Oblivion persuasion minigame or LA Noire's uncanny attempt at photorealism was something that literally could not have been done with the earlier games. And the villains of HR aren't as interesting as Bob Page and the various Illuminati figures but Jensen himself is an actual character and his allies have a lot more personality; there's nothing in the first game that really compares to Pritchard's alternating assholishness and begrudging respect and Jensen's cool taunting and teasing of him, or David Sarif being genuinely buddy-buddy with Jensen even after coldly having his limbs amputated and manipulating him for his own benefit. In the developer commentary of HR there's a part where they talk about adding young Tracer Tong for that one bonus mission and their difficulty in making his young self act and sound recognizable because his dialogue in the original game is really flat and expository, and going back with a critical eye I can definitely recognize that. Jock might have a fun voice and a good goof with him asking for beers before he reveals he's your pilot but there's a reason that Sunglasses At Night has a running joke about Jock being your actual helicopter and not a person, while Farida Malik is more of character and her death actually has some weight while Jock getting blown up is like two lines of dialogue.
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Jun 30, 2020 23:58
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Then there was Ava in IW who was your literal helicopter and a horrid waste of Terri Brosius.
Shumagorath fucked around with this message at 00:05 on Jul 1, 2020 |
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Jul 1, 2020 00:02
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Adam in HR is pretty flat compared to MD, too. They let Toufexis actually just act as he wanted and the character is real dialed in and good in that game. I replayed the series last year in reverse order and it was jarring going from MD Adam to HR.
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Jul 1, 2020 00:05
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Four-Eyes posted:There's actually multiple ways to solve the conversation battles, as the responses are semi randomised between games. One solution is to berate the poo poo out of him, make him accept responsibility for the shooting and stop blaming it for all his problems. Melee button works too. Don’t look at me like that, we all saved/punched/reloaded.
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Jul 1, 2020 00:10
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Grand Fromage posted:Adam in HR is pretty flat compared to MD, too. They let Toufexis actually just act as he wanted and the character is real dialed in and good in that game. I replayed the series last year in reverse order and it was jarring going from MD Adam to HR. I remember thinking that Adam showed more personality in the opening sequence of that MD DLC with Prichard than he showed in all of HR or MD. It seemed like the MD expansions showed that the dev team was really getting into the characters and the world before right the series got shelved again.
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Jul 1, 2020 00:16
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Adam closing his shades so you can't see his sorrow in the MD intro is very funny in a very good Deus Ex meme way
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Jul 1, 2020 00:19
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The conversion battles were certainly a good technique, but I don't know that the content couldn't have been better. I had no complaints about it at the time, but honestly none of that really stuck with me or made me want to revisit it specifically. They kinda made the newer ones with opposite philosophies; in the originals they made the character purposefully flat and it holds up because of how good the words coming out are whereas in the new ones they have everyone acting their hearts out but I guess Letishia is the best example of the words and content being mediocre in parts.
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Jul 1, 2020 00:22
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My one problem with the big philosophy talks in the original is how they go from 0-60 and feel really unnatural. It works with Morpheus because it’s an AI but on things like the bartender it’s kind of strange. The conversation battles (and conversations in general) in HR feel more like, well, conversations and flow a lot better. They may not be dropping heavy concepts but they feel like things an actual human being may actually say.
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Jul 1, 2020 00:25
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goatsestretchgoals posted:Melee button works too. Don’t look at me like that, we all saved/punched/reloaded. Tell me more.
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Jul 1, 2020 00:31
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I absolutely loved the conversation battle in MD with the pro-Aug's leader. Not only was it very well acted, but your play style had legitimate effects on how the chat went - if you slaughtered everyone you'd already failed and he would go off on you for not even bothering to think twice about the repercussions. It stood out to me though, chiefly because how if its going well the blinds in his room slowly open up and bathe everything in that warm golden glow. It was a surprisingly effective way to get your hopes up before the inevitable. goatsestretchgoals posted:Melee button works too. Don’t look at me like that, we all saved/punched/reloaded. Pft, reloading. I punched that dude and everyone else in there.
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Jul 1, 2020 00:52
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Four-Eyes posted:Pft, reloading. I punched that dude and everyone else in there.  gently caress da police
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Jul 1, 2020 01:11
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El_Elegante posted:Tell me more. I also IRL yelled “oh yeah” every time I punched through a wall.
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Jul 1, 2020 02:19
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Conversation battles: "If you pay attention to what the character is saying, how they're saying it, and their loving bloody language (in a game where every NPCs body language is otherwise that of a Parkinson's patient in mid epileptic seizure), you'll figure out what answer has the best chance of working. Of course, whether or not it actually works is based on random chance. And you can't skip any dialog or animations in our precious interactive cutscenes." Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck that. Jensen's character: He ostensibly has more personality and acting range than JC, which makes it all the more obvious and infuriating when he doesn't react to anything and has no character arc. If he's going to be a blank slate in terms of the game's events having an impact, then why even bother? Drawing from the same garbage commentary mode, the player even gets to determine exactly how Jensen feels about being augmented, which is sheer nonsense. We know how JC feels about being augmented. We know how he feels about working at UNATCO (Savage?). We know how he feels about betraying them. Etc.
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Jul 1, 2020 06:21
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Again, DXMD pulls it off a bit better, out of the framework of DXHR. Jensen has developed a vendetta against the people who hosed with him the previous game, and is working as a double triple? agent within Interpol. This gives him the motivation to start doing poo poo inside Interpol HQ, and robbing random apartments in Prague, unlike in the previous game where Jensen's implants instantly turn him into a player avatar that starts stealing candy bars and loose change from Sarif HQ and random Detroit apartments. But yeah, the generic NPC animations in Nu-DX are atrocious. Here's a video that shows how these kinds of canned animations are usually laid out, and how they can break. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NmLPpcVQFJM
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Jul 1, 2020 07:12
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The last thing Adam Jensen remembered was getting thrown through a glass wall and shot in the face. He was then given cyber super arms. Did they draw straws for who woke him up?
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Jul 1, 2020 08:36
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assistant manager writes the schedule, so obviously Tiffany and Mateo got that day off. They do however provide straws for liquid meals for the unfortunate one to wake him.
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Jul 1, 2020 17:24
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The Joss Whedon thread in GBS got me thinking hoe amazing it is that Deus Ex is 20 years old and doesn't have almost any sexism or racism in it. Like what's the worst thing about it, it's probably the fake Chinese accents and even those are somehow not that bad because it's like a 50/50 mix between real Chinese people and Americans faking a Chinese accent I think one of the keys is that JC Denton has not hosed, does not gently caress, and will never gently caress. You sidestep a lot of problems when you make a protagonist like that
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Jul 2, 2020 00:58
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| # ? Jun 6, 2024 06:14 |
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JC keeps creeping into the UNATCO women's restroom and goosing all the cleaner bots, Manderley was right to dock his pay bonus.
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Jul 2, 2020 01:16
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