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Desperate Measures was a fun diversion back to early-game scarcity, but I can't imagine a justification for killing a single NPC. I noticed that I failed to get Foxiest of the Hounds in my first run through MD. Is "alarm" any red / searching state and not just blaring sirens? Human Revolution Director's Cut screwed me out of that with one of the cameras in Barret's refurbished arena, though I just see that as another reason to play it again.
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Oct 15, 2020 17:30
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HR is the only game in the series besides the original that makes me want to reinstall it whenever someone mentions it. I know it's got its flaws, and it's not as groundbreaking as the original, but it's a great game that always makes me feel down when I hit Panchea and realize I'm at the end. MD gets points for being as dense as it is for sure--and if that whole overarching plot about Janus and Jensen as a clone comes off true it'll be a brilliant bit of writing--but I never feel the urge to replay it like I do DX or HR.
Eason the Fifth fucked around with this message at 17:40 on Oct 15, 2020 |
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Oct 15, 2020 17:37
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What bit about Janus? I don't feel like we got anything concrete on his identity...? As for Jensen, the clone thing would be kinda poisonous to the storytelling because it would sever continuity of the player as the player character. . I'm not saying it would be a bad twist but fan reaction could get ugly. There are still a lot of directions they could go with the "memory integrity / personality stability" line, such as the real Jensen having been brainwashed during the missing two years, why you never see Sarif in person during the Mystery Augs quest line, etc. Plus, Eliza seems pretty confident you're the real you, and the Jensen torso in the Versalife vault is too big of an indicator to leave on one side of a forked path. At the very least, Jensen recognizing the Hyron analogue in the bomb maker split of the main quest means that, clone or original, someone did indeed fish him out of Panchea. They could even claim he was black-bagged and the site intentionally wrecked rather than collapsing with him a few kilometres under the ocean. Not that it matters - just give me the last game in the trilogy, please!
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Oct 15, 2020 18:20
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Well you see when I bought these shares the absurdly inflated sales expectations set by the CEO were already baked into the price I paid so when it only sold really well my number went down and this is very disappointing to me as a shareholder.
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Oct 15, 2020 18:45
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I’m a fan of all four mainline DX games and they are all always installed. So yea. HR and MD especially are awesome.
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Oct 15, 2020 19:03
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Shumagorath posted:What bit about Janus? I don't feel like we got anything concrete on his identity...? I meant that Jensen is a clone from/reprogrammed by the Illuminati to have a driving desire to find Janus and kill him.
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Oct 15, 2020 19:46
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Shumagorath posted:What bit about Janus? I don't feel like we got anything concrete on his identity...? Nothing concrete, but I'm 100% sure Janus is the bald Illuminati guy in the opening cinematic who is the only one in the room we've never seen before. It's either that guy or someone who we haven't seen at all.
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Oct 15, 2020 20:25
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feelix posted:Yeah this is a huge thing in the industry, games are considered failures and get their series canned if they only make reasonable profit instead of massive profit. Capitalism sucks
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Oct 15, 2020 21:04
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Maybe Eidos Montréal can get out from under them like IO Interactive, but WB doesn't strike me as a good steward for the series either. Sega, perhaps? Edit: Ohh, and I forgot who just bought Bethesda! Sadly it's probably Square who own the IP. Shumagorath fucked around with this message at 21:19 on Oct 15, 2020 |
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Oct 15, 2020 21:13
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Shumagorath posted:Maybe Eidos Montréal can get out from under them like IO Interactive, but WB doesn't strike me as a good steward for the series either. Sega, perhaps? Bethesda and Arkane would be my choice.
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Oct 15, 2020 21:16
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Did EMP damage change in MD? It used to be that hitting a robot with EMP was fatal, but I had them come back to life quickly enough that I started treating it as stun-only and finishing with AP rifle rounds. For augmented enemies I would usually tap them with EMP pistol shots prior to hitting a takedown just to drop Titan / cloak.
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Oct 15, 2020 23:48
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ghouldaddy07 posted:Bethesda and Arkane would be my choice. So, Microsoft now? Hmm. Might work.
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Oct 15, 2020 23:53
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I'll never forgive microsoft for what they did to ensemble. gently caress em
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Oct 16, 2020 00:19
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chaosapiant posted:I’m a fan of all four mainline DX games and they are all always installed. So yea. HR and MD especially are awesome. Invisible War just felt like I could see what it could have been at all times. So close to being an insanely good game, but the execution made it a disappointment
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Oct 16, 2020 00:29
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Ugly In The Morning posted:Invisible War just felt like I could see what it could have been at all times. So close to being an insanely good game, but the execution made it a disappointment Shumagorath posted:I could hate the whole game for the fact it gives you the Dragon's Tooth and immediately afterward makes half the enemies explode or fountain poison gas as soon as they enter ragdoll mode (including non-lethal takedowns). 
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Oct 16, 2020 00:31
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Ugly In The Morning posted:Invisible War just felt like I could see what it could have been at all times. So close to being an insanely good game, but the execution made it a disappointment Time for my quarterly “Visible Upgrade” mod endorsement. It makes IWar work much better on widescreen monitors (including ultrawide), fixes the “minimize to desktop on load” issue and includes bug fixes and optional texture and model packs. It’s dope.
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Oct 16, 2020 02:02
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I will say that IW has that great moment of popping out of Silas Archer's own secret tunnel in front of him and his class, saying "No, I think I've seen everything I need" and shooting him with the Hellfire boltcaster.
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Oct 16, 2020 02:16
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Gaius Marius posted:I'll never forgive microsoft for what they did to ensemble. gently caress em I guess not enough people are old Age of Empires fans. I see a lot of people happy about MS and gaming these days, but all I can say is that their bodycount is lower than EA's. Shumagorath posted:I will say that IW has that great moment of popping out of Silas Archer's own secret tunnel in front of him and his class, saying "No, I think I've seen everything I need" and shooting him with the Hellfire boltcaster. I have to admire DXIW for having the guts to set a level in a school. Can't think of any other game that has done so, empty schools aside.
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Oct 16, 2020 03:26
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Shumagorath posted:Did EMP damage change in MD? It used to be that hitting a robot with EMP was fatal, but I had them come back to life quickly enough that I started treating it as stun-only and finishing with AP rifle rounds. For augmented enemies I would usually tap them with EMP pistol shots prior to hitting a takedown just to drop Titan / cloak. Yeah. In MD, EMP damage stuns bots but does not damage them. I remember on my first playthrough hitting a robot with a stungun like eighteen times and wondering why it didn't go down. Granted I was pretty stoned at the time, but still they probably should have mentioned that in the tutorial since it's a change from the previous games.
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Oct 16, 2020 04:50
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You'd think they'd also mention the change in how the energy bar works, seeing how it was such a fundamental and controversial feature from HR. But nope! Everyone went through MD thinking it was the same old, and griefing themselves with degenerate/wrong gameplay. Whoops!
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Oct 16, 2020 05:10
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I don’t remember the energy system being an issue in either HR or MD. 
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Oct 16, 2020 05:23
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You mean you *don't* recall being perpetually stuck on the last energy bar, and having that lovely dilemma of 'takedown, literally any other ability, or if you dare to want both you better start cramming down protein bars' that MD pioneered so bravely? The newer games really dropped the ball on augments in general, which is tragic as they did a lot of other good things.
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Oct 16, 2020 06:39
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Not really? I remember having enough energy to do whatever I needed to and that was that. Maybe it was an issue and it’s been some years since I played, but definitely not enough that I remember it.
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Oct 16, 2020 08:52
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I do remember always being Nearly Empty, but yea you always regen enough to use any ability at least once, right? I replayed MD earlier this year and while I guess that's annoying it never really felt like a hindrance. Did it not work the same in HR? And it's been an eternity since I played ye olde Deus Ex 1 so I don't remember how it works there by comparison, either
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Oct 16, 2020 12:34
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Yeah I never got people's issues with that system, but then I always play stealthily and am used to hiding and biding my time so my energy had usually regenerated whenever I needed to use it. I had an inventory full of biocells which barely got touched. There needs to be some limit on your augs or else you could just cheese through every later encounter with them all turned on all the time. With engineer bots like in the original Deus Ex I'd just end up running halfway across the map to recharge which absolutely wasted more time than occasionally needing to wait for the meter to regen by itself in the later games, especially after upgrades speed it up a lot.
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Oct 16, 2020 13:11
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HR's mechanics: Energy meter is divided up into little 'bars'. Energy regenerates, but only to to the top of the current bar, so there's discrete thresholds. If you drop to empty, only the last bar will regen. Using the new heavily-emphasized takedowns use an entire bar, which means their use automatically docks you down a knotch, in addition to needing to be not at the bottom bar in the first place if you wanted to do something actually fun, eg cloak before takedown. Other than major level transitions between chapters, the only way to top up the meter again is consumables, which come in various sizes/names, don't stack if they're not the name, and are bulky + not very efficient. You basically have to eat the big ones as you find them and only carry a few small ones due to inventory pressure. MD: The meter is now smooth, apart from a 'bar' at the bottom that works exactly like HR; ie you can go hog wild when emtpy using one takedown at a time. Energy regens up to a threshold somewhere on the smooth meter, which isn't apparent to the player how it decreases: every time you flick on an aug, your 'new max' drops a tiny bit, but once you turn everything off it will regen up all the way to the new max, even if you drained it. Eating protein snacks (now much smaller and less varied) pushes the new max back up to 100%, and again, the new max can never go below a certain point which is similar to a single 'bar' from HR. The HR system encourged players to quickly flick on+off their augs when above the bottom bar, to quickly cloak (or w/e) and do your poo poo before dropping into the next bar. The MD system encourages long drains of a few skills, as you get all that energy back sans a tiny bit after you run dry. But! People are being conscious of their energy bars now, so they're flicking things on and off rapidly, unwittingly ruining their 'new max' since the MD system isn't intuitive at all. Compare all this crap to how things where in DX; no costs for activation, just an intuitive drain and no regen. Almost like a battery, even?! No mechanics use energy other than the augs themselves (gently caress you, takedowns). Little top-up stations *everywhere*, so you can go hold wild at will. Consumables are also money-fied, ie take no inventory slots and you can carry a gargantuan amount thereof. Oh. I just remembered when writing this huge thing out that the MD regen mechanics where patched to be less onerous if you played on the lower difficulty settings: you'd get at least two bars of regenerating energy instead of one, which is a HUGE difference since it lets you do things like cloak + punch, instead of either/or (or eat a snack while sprinting at them, awkward). You may have been playing on those settings, chaosapiant.
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Oct 16, 2020 13:11
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Gynovore posted:Yeah. In MD, EMP damage stuns bots but does not damage them. I remember on my first playthrough hitting a robot with a stungun like eighteen times and wondering why it didn't go down. Granted I was pretty stoned at the time, but still they probably should have mentioned that in the tutorial since it's a change from the previous games.  Serephina posted:You mean you *don't* recall being perpetually stuck on the last energy bar, and having that lovely dilemma of 'takedown, literally any other ability, or if you dare to want both you better start cramming down protein bars' that MD pioneered so bravely? The newer games really dropped the ball on augments in general, which is tragic as they did a lot of other good things. I dunno about your other post as the MD system was pretty clear - maybe get that OCPD treated? I haven't felt inventory pressure in either of the new games apart from late game when I'm rolling in cash yet still hauling poo poo to vendors for peanuts. Shumagorath fucked around with this message at 13:41 on Oct 16, 2020 |
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Oct 16, 2020 13:35
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In HR I mostly used the stun gun to avoid battery drain and optic camo only when moving from cover to cover, which is really effective.
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Oct 16, 2020 14:02
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In both of the prequels I've never been in a situation that absolutely required optical camo, even ghosting Picus. I guess if you really want Foxiest of the Hounds in MD you need it because the gold masks seem to have telepathy that counts as a triggered alarm. Using it only cover-to-cover would be really smart.
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Oct 16, 2020 14:07
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Shumagorath posted:In both of the prequels I've never been in a situation that absolutely required optical camo, even ghosting Picus. I guess if you really want Foxiest of the Hounds in MD you need it because the gold masks seem to have telepathy that counts as a triggered alarm. Using it only cover-to-cover would be really smart. I really liked it in HR for going through lasers, never used it on enemies though.
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Oct 16, 2020 20:38
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I haven't played MD yet, but the problem with HR's energy system isn't that energy refills are objectively scarce, but that it conditions players to act as if they are. By giving you a regenerating battery but making it the last one, the system arbitrarily punishes you for topping up. If you want to punch somebody and you're down to the last battery, it's essentially free, but if you made the rookie mistake of actually keeping your batteries charged (lmao what an idiot smh), then you're going to have to permanently waste energy to do it. The incentives are the exact opposite of what they should be. If you want to see an example of how to do this right, check out Dishonored. It has the same basic concept of a small portion of your energy recharging, but it happens regardless of whether you're empty or not. You get the intended choice between using the occasional minor power 'for free' or for very cheap, or going hog wild for a bit in exchange for some permanent energy use without any of the unintended, perverse incentives. Though it sounds like MD might have taken some inspiration from this game?
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Oct 16, 2020 22:53
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Shumagorath posted:Desperate Measures was a fun diversion back to early-game scarcity, but I can't imagine a justification for killing a single NPC. I didnt get it originally on my first playthrough despite no alerts, but I managed to get it on my second playthrough. Apparently there's a bug with Facing the Enigma where escaping into the sewers instead of the elevator shaft causes an alarm. I didnt know this on either playthrough, but I ended up going into the sewers to stun all the civilians first and hide them so the drones don't spot them when you're escaping, which is what I thought was causing it
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Oct 17, 2020 01:16
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goku i won't do what u tell me
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I think game design is really starved for a fresh take on "mana" because both Dishonored and Deus Ex have the issue where the designers sprinkle recharge items liberally and the player's rodent brain still stores them like so many nuts for a winter that never comes. KRILLIN IN THE NAME posted:I didnt get it originally on my first playthrough despite no alerts, but I managed to get it on my second playthrough. Apparently there's a bug with Facing the Enigma where escaping into the sewers instead of the elevator shaft causes an alarm. I didnt know this on either playthrough, but I ended up going into the sewers to stun all the civilians first and hide them so the drones don't spot them when you're escaping, which is what I thought was causing it
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Oct 17, 2020 02:07
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Shumagorath posted:I think game design is really starved for a fresh take on "mana" because both Dishonored and Deus Ex have the issue where the designers sprinkle recharge items liberally and the player's rodent brain still stores them like so many nuts for a winter that never comes. It's understandable, though, especially on a first playthrough. If the player doesn't know how much energy/mana theyw ill need to face the challenges and/or when they will be able to get more items or reach a refill point, hoarding is the tendency. I just played through a double run of the RE2 remake and I ended up with piles of advanced ammo at the end of the game. I could have had the visceral pleasure of nuking basic zombies with flame grenades, but I was worried about what would happen if I didn't have the heavy artillery for the series of final bosses. Speedrunners, who play games a ludicrous number of times, don't hoard anything because they know with mathematical precision how much they need of everything for every challenge. I would say that ignorance breeds caution and familiarity breeds liberal spending of resources.
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Oct 17, 2020 02:49
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The problem isn't mana, it's that it recharges through something dumb like collecting a limited number of mana potions/cereal bars, instead of something cool like ripping out your enemies' cyborg spines and crushing them to absorb their electro-juice, or some other sort of mechanic that would reward the player for playing well (e.g. refill your magic when doing a silent takedown).
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Oct 17, 2020 09:55
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To discover a truly next level resource management design scheme, one need only look deep into the darkness… of the soul
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Oct 17, 2020 10:00
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Basic Chunnel posted:To discover a truly next level resource management design scheme, one need only look deep into the darkness… of the soul I'd rather we fill up that dark soul with LIGHT!...ight...ight...
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Oct 17, 2020 10:55
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I think the issue with Dishonored/NuDX energy is that we have several game design decisions working against each other. The designer wants to encourage active gameplay and aggressive ability use. But give the player too many tools and they trivialize everything, but gate their tool use behind finding collectibles in the world/purchasing uses from NPC vendors, and you simply run into a hoarding problem. The player simply does not know the length of the gameplay loop the first time they play, and first impressions matter. Because the designer also wants to design big open elaborate maps with lots of content and nooks and crannies to poke through. It really could be as simple as reducing maximum size of your mana bar, and making it rapidly recharge, or put skills on cooldown. That's what Death of the Outsider did, and that works for DotO because the sneaky pace of DotO matches the length of that gameplay loop with the recharge mechanic. Tack on some way of restoring ability use when you do go loud in the middle of combat, through aggressive play, and that could give the player sufficient options when sneaking and fighting. And it's not like doing this precludes exploration, because finding notes and letters and lore etc can be a reward on its own without having to put ability restores in there as well.
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Oct 17, 2020 14:11
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Phobophilia posted:Tack on some way of restoring ability use when you do go loud in the middle of combat, through aggressive play Unironically, Doom 2016's glory kills are a fantastic mechanic for exactly that reason.
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Oct 17, 2020 14:30
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Lemon-Lime posted:Unironically, Doom 2016's glory kills are a fantastic mechanic for exactly that reason. MEII Vanguard had this vibe too. I tried to explain to someone else this way. The other classes are playing a cover shooter, Vanguard is more like pinball.
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Oct 17, 2020 16:37
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