Games

[keelhaul]

I was trying to say how there are several ways to get from the beginning of a level to the end, but most of them amount to taking the express lane since you are merely bypassing cameras, guards, robots, mines, etc. with very little effort. Using barriers to hide behind then moving when you see an opening after you've watched the patterns of three or four enemies is where the game shines in terms of sneaking, but when you're given so many options to just take some empty hallway or vent around, it hurts the thrill.

[icycalm]

Well, be more specific next time then. We can't read your fucking mind.

[icycalm]

It's not even just a matter of not being specific enough. The word "spoiled" that you used has absolutely nothing to do with the elaboration you gave. If the designers are "spoiling" us it means they are giving us too much of a good thing, whereas what you want us to believe that you meant is that they shouldn't have provided the "fast-forward" path options -- which is something completely different.

Anyway, like I said in the other thread, if you want to keep your account it'd be a good idea to stop posting.

[El Chaos]

A short walkthrough of The Missing Link DLC: http://youtu.be/FnrxC8k9VTQ

It really reminds me of Metal Gear Solid 2's tanker episode, coupled with the whole "being captured and stripped of your stuff" shebang that happens in so many of those.

[David]

http://www.next-gen.biz/reviews/deus-ex-human-revolution-review

The story is, dare we say it, probably a better yarn than that delivered by the first game. Its themes are certainly more relevant. While Deus Ex was more consciously a pastiche, starting with the premise that every conspiracy theory is true and spiralling off into hysteria about aliens, Human Revolution focuses on more immediate and credible issues surrounding transhumanism – its effect on morality, the vast social inequalities it will create and how the powerful will seek to subvert its potential to their own ends. And the game is particularly good at illustrating how power sustains itself through illicit collaboration between corporations, governments and the media. You only need to turn on the TV to see how relevant that is.

The themes of Human Revolution's narrative are indeed more relevant than those of the first game, but this is probably the only aspect in which its narrative could be considered better (and it is questionable whether the relevance of a narrative's themes has any bearing on its quality, anyway). Human Revolution's narrative starts strongly enough, but after establishing the initial mystery, it doesn't take any interesting twists or turns. The only genuine surprise comes in the endgame, but it is not so much clever as cheap, with an unremarkable side character clumsily thrust into the role of master antagonist. The characterisation is also quite terrible. Your character's relationship with the love interest is supposed to serve as one of your main motivations, but her character is too underdeveloped for you to possibly care about her. The same goes for the generic boss characters, who for most of the game are the only antagonists. Gunther Hermann and Walton Simons these guys are not -- the only time you get to know them is while you're pumping their bodies full of lead. Deus Ex has minor characters with more depth than many of the main characters in Human Revolution.

[Worm]

I'm a couple hours in, and one positive thing I can say is that it has the best menus I've seen in a Western game.



They look cool, everything is sensibly laid out and marked, and all the animations are not only smooth but fast. Shuffling inventory items around is a breeze. My only complaint is that you have to click items and select "examine" from a pop-up list to get their stats and descriptions, unlike the first Deus Ex.

[Worm]

I really liked this game. Aside from the menus, there's cool stuff to look at everywhere. The engine isn't anything impressive, but design-wise there's a lot of great work. Almost everything has a believably futuristic aesthetic, from the stylish weapons to the realistic building layouts. It has some decent-sized, non-linear areas and gives you many of the same options from the first Deus Ex. You can use stealth, you can hack, you can stack objects and climb, you can be non-lethal, you can be a mass murderer, etc.

But, while playing, I kept thinking of Matt Warner's review for the first Deus Ex. I won't spoil anything about Human Revolution, but I'm going to refer to a couple minor spoilers for the original.

Nothing's ever come quite as close to a genuine interactive sci-fi novel that's written as you go. Other games have tried, but the guide rails have always been way too visible. In Deus Ex they blend in perfectly, while still being there to eventually steer you in the proper direction, so the game never loses focus. It's almost magic.

Human Revolution is a step back in plot elasticity. There are no "killing Anna" moments in Human Revolution. What you do get is a handful of "killing Maggie Chow" moments, where minor characters can briefly appear (or not) based on your previous actions. There are also occasional dialogue changes in response to your choices, but again, not as many as in the original.

It feels more guided in other ways, too. And I'm not talking about stuff like conspicuously placed air ducts (though there are plenty of those). I mean things like NPCs outright telling you, "You could complete the sidequest this way... or you could try this other, less violent way," and the game constantly popping up XP bonuses and messages telling you that yes, you are taking the sneaky path, or choosing to not be a killer.

I also got the impression that Human Revolution was designed with the mindset that content creation is expensive, and there's no sense making areas that a sizable percentage of players won't see. Many of the sidequests (and side areas) are optional, but to miss them you have to willfully ignore the markers and bread crumbs the game hands you. There are still plenty of chances to poke around and explore, but I never found anything truly surprising or a place that gave me that "Am I supposed to be here?" feeling.

[icycalm]

Yeah, whatev. If it's not in 2D, made in Japan and played with an arcade stick it's trash. See here for more details:

http://postback.geedorah.com/foros/view ... hp?id=1643

[David]

I was somewhat disappointed with the combat. The shooting mechanics are a vast improvement from the first two games, but melee combat is incredibly simplified. Instead of melee weapons, you have the "takedown" system. Get within a couple of metres of an enemy and press the takedown key and you trigger a third-person cutscene, showing you killing the enemy or knocking him unconscious (depending on whether you tapped the key or held it down). The game then swoops back into the first-person and returns control to you.

This mechanic makes one-on-one encounters far too easy, and since you're watching your character kill someone rather than feeling like it is actually you doing it, it breaks your immersion in the game. It's all the more irritating because you have what ought to be an awesome weapon (a nano-ceramic blade built into your arm), but takedowns are the only way that you can use it (so really you're not using it, you're watching it be used).

Overall, I did like the game. As Worm says, there is a lot to admire aesthetically, especially the environments, and you're nearly always given multiple ways of approaching situations. There are some cool side-missions, a few of which can be completed in numerous ways. I particularly liked one that involved gathering evidence on a bent cop, since it allows you to accept a bribe from him, with no ill consequences resulting from it (so there's no moralising about your choices, basically).

Concerning plot elasticity/non-linearity: with the lack of a "killing Anna" moment, or even a moment as dramatic as the decision of whether to stay behind in the apartment to save Paul, it feels like the plot wasn't actually written with non-linearity in mind, but rather that the writers came up with the plot in the same fashion that they would for any narrative-driven FPS, and then afterwards the designers worked out how they could work some elements of non-linearity into it. With the first Deus Ex, the way that you're led to become increasingly suspicious of UNATCO, and the curiosity that Paul's defection arouses, perfectly sets the scene for that encounter with Anna on the airliner. The elegance with which it all comes together suggests that the writers always had one eye firmly on role-playing scenarios.

[icycalm]

The funny thing is that, though Insomnia is regarded as a sort of bastion of love for the series (due largely to Matt's review of the original, which has garnered something like 13K views solely from StumbleUpon, among other places, and is the only review of the game being linked anymore; as well as my RPG articles, which have been read by everyone by this point, and reference Deus Ex extensively), I've yet to play anymore than the first couple of missions of the original, lol, and even those back in something like late-2003. So all my references to the game have been made solely on the strength of Matt's analysis of it. But I am saving all three games for a special Deus Ex thematic week, in which I'll finish all of them back-to-back.

In the meantime, however, how would you guys feel if we put up a review of the third game, using your comments? We already have what seems to me enough material; all it'd take is for you to rack your brains for a little while and post any other comments on the game you can think of, and then I'll stitch everything together, we'll make perhaps a few final edits, and voila: Insomnia will have reviewed the entire series (I'll even make a page for it for the Archive). And actually that's exactly how Matt's review came about: he had made a series of lengthy posts on the game on SelectButton (and was being, if you will believe it, actually HAZED for them by the rest of the goddamn forum!), until I stepped in, stitched all his comments up in Word and emailed them to him. A couple emails back and forth later and the review we all know and love had been born!

So, if you are up for it let me know and post away. No need to use the review forum; we'll do it in this thread. And if anyone else who's played the game has any objections or suggestions, make yourselves heard.

[icycalm]

As for the rating, everything screams to me "4 stars", much like Mirror's Edge and Far Cry 2, and more recent, current-generation high profile titles than I can count. It's really that fifth star that eludes modern game design so depressingly often. That last bit of attention to detail and coordination among the various elements, that hinges so much on lack of handholding, appropriate challenge, lack of blunders in basic mechanics, atmosphere and plot development, etc., and ties everything together into a kick-ass, unforgetable experience.

[icycalm]

Also, two clarifications on David's comments:

This mechanic makes one-on-one encounters far too easy, and since you're watching your character kill someone rather than feeling like it is actually you doing it, it breaks your immersion in the game.

Be careful when making such statements. It is your instinct that should deliver the final judgement on things like this, not icycalm's theory. For the camera also pulls back in Gears of War when fighting swarming enemies in close range, for example (actually, YOU are the one who pulls it back), but that by no means harms the immersion; it rather increases it, in this case, since it enables you to actually DEAL with the goddamn things, instead of simply taking the hits as in Halo with the Flood, or in any other first-person shooter.

And the same applies here:

The themes of Human Revolution's narrative are indeed more relevant than those of the first game, but this is probably the only aspect in which its narrative could be considered better (and it is questionable whether the relevance of a narrative's themes has any bearing on its quality, anyway).

Just because I've written an article titled "On Narrative Delusions" doesn't mean that the narrative, or its themes, have no bearing on the game's quality. Read the goddamn article first. And realize that the higher-immersion a game is, the more relevance the aesthetics (which the plot is a part of) acquire. I don't think I've said this anywhere else yet, but here it is anyway, for the purposes of the current discussion. It will be properly analyzed and elaborated when the time comes, so until then use your instincts. What if Human Revolution's plot/theme was about giant pandas invading Los Angeles? Would that be irrelevant to your enjoyment of the game? And so on and so forth.

[kini]

Combat and stealth were dissapointing to me. You can aim while behind cover. You can line up your reticule with the enemies head while you're invulnerable, pop out and headshot an enemy, go back behind cover and repeat. The enemies don't really change that much through the game so you can do this almost the whole way through. As for stealth, I mostly used cloak, so all I had to do was cloak, find a hiding place that is closer to my goal than where I was, wait for my energy to recharge, and repeat. You also do this for every enemy encounter in the game. Both of them eventually get monotonous. If the game were longer I might have gotten sick of doing either of these and stopped playing or started trying to stealth without using cloak, which during the one time I tried it in my playthrough seemed okay but just not really very challenging.

I really disliked the city hubs. They're very big with lots of areas and buildings that serve no purpose. Getting around them is a chore due to their size. I liked the original much better in this respect. Every part of every map had some purpose so you could have fun exploring all of it and learning the maps that way.

The boss fights are very mild challenges and so only mildly interesting. What's easy about most of them is that they only really require you to observe your surroundings a bit to figure out. But still, there is an extent to which you need to figure them out, which is more than I can say for most of the rest of the game. I'd give this 3 stars mostly because of the boss fights, the rest for the combat and stealth which aren't really that bad the first few times you do them, I guess for the novelty.

[icycalm]

The last sentence is very badly written and I can't make much sense out of it without a lot of creative thinking. Any chance you could try rephrasing it in a new post?

[Yurian]

I was quite disappointed in how you always get rewarded with a lot more experience points by doing things the stealthy and non-lethal way. So if you want to make a powerful character with as many augs as possible, you don't really have a choice when it comes to playstyle.

Something else that is mandatory when it comes to maximizing experience points is playing the tedious hacking mini-game like a hundred times. It gets boring really fast and it doesn't help that the hacked computers contain useless or uninteresting information 99% of the time.

[kini]

The last sentence is very badly written and I can't make much sense out of it without a lot of creative thinking. Any chance you could try rephrasing it in a new post?

Oh, sorry. Here it is again:

Combat and stealth by cloaking aren't really that bad the first few times you use them, I'd guess because of the novelty. I'd give the game 3 stars, mostly for the mildly interesting boss fights, but partly also for the initial fun with combat and cloaking.

[David]

I'm happy for any comments of mine to be used in a review. Here are a few more thoughts I had:

Also, two clarifications on David's comments:

This mechanic makes one-on-one encounters far too easy, and since you're watching your character kill someone rather than feeling like it is actually you doing it, it breaks your immersion in the game.

Be careful when making such statements. It is your instinct that should deliver the final judgement on things like this, not icycalm's theory. For the camera also pulls back in Gears of War when fighting swarming enemies in close range, for example (actually, YOU are the one who pulls it back), but that by no means harms the immersion; it rather increases it, in this case, since it enables you to actually DEAL with the goddamn things, instead of simply taking the hits as in Halo with the Flood, or in any other first-person shooter.

To elaborate on my statement: the takedowns don't harm the immersion because the camera pulls back, but rather because after triggering the takedown and choosing whether it will be lethal or non-lethal, you don't have any control over its execution. The game just generates a cut-scene, with the type of action (whether you choke the enemy, punch him etc.) determined on the basis of variables like the position of the enemy and your surroundings (there's an example at the start of this video, to give you a better idea). The effect for me was that I often felt like a spectator to the action rather than the one acting.

It doesn't help that during a takedown sequence everyone else around you freezes, which produces some pretty absurd moments. In that video I linked, for example, the player is choking a cop right next to three of his colleagues, but they only react after the sequence finishes and the cop's out cold on the floor. Even then, the guy right next to you reacts as if he hadn't even seen anything -- "Hello? Anyone there?", lol.

Combat and stealth were dissapointing to me. You can aim while behind cover. You can line up your reticule with the enemies head while you're invulnerable, pop out and headshot an enemy, go back behind cover and repeat. The enemies don't really change that much through the game so you can do this almost the whole way through. As for stealth, I mostly used cloak, so all I had to do was cloak, find a hiding place that is closer to my goal than where I was, wait for my energy to recharge, and repeat. You also do this for every enemy encounter in the game. Both of them eventually get monotonous.

I agree with this. The reticule not disappearing while you're in cover is the biggest flaw with the gunplay. As for the cloak, I didn't actually use it when I was playing, precisely because I imagined that it would make the game as easy as you describe. It's always likely to be a problem when you give the player an ability as powerful as a cloak without severely limiting the amount that it can be used. It's not like Eidos Montreal had to look far for a successful template for this, either -- the first Deus Ex already nailed the balance by making bio-electric energy a non-rechargeable, relatively scarce resource.

I really disliked the city hubs. They're very big with lots of areas and buildings that serve no purpose. Getting around them is a chore due to their size. I liked the original much better in this respect. Every part of every map had some purpose so you could have fun exploring all of it and learning the maps that way.

I liked the hubs, especially Lower Hengsha. Sure, it would have been cool if you'd have been able to go into every building, but considering the size of the areas, the number that you can explore is actually pretty impressive.

When I first got to Hengsha I was taken aback by the sheer scale of it -- the buildings crammed together, the skyline stretching into the distance as far as you can see, and the enormous roof-like structure above that supports Upper Hengsha, blocking out the sun. It's not only the landscape that is impressive, either. On the ground there are a variety of detailed locations: apartment complexes for rich and poor (and the contrast is pretty striking: a low-rent apartment in this city is a small cubicle just large enough to fit a mattress in), bars, various shops, back alleys infested with rubbish, a night club, a brothel, sewers, etc. All of this, along with the little touches like the advertisements and graffiti scattered around, and the bustle of pedestrians, makes Hengsha exceptionally believable and engrossing as a futuristic city. It's easily one of the best parts of the game.

[icycalm]

Well, the game certainly has some seriously good wallpapers:

http://www.gamewallpapers.com/wallpaper ... Revolution

That alone makes it a standout among Western games.

[Worm]

The reticule not disappearing while you're in cover is the biggest flaw with the gunplay.

The reticle, like the object highlighting and HUD objective markers, is at least disabled by default when you choose the hardest difficulty. It's still an easy game, and that does drag everything down a little. I could list a ton of criticisms about such-and-such being overpowered, or this or that tactic being too reliable and effective.

The thing is, I could do the same for the first Deus Ex. The original was even easy in some of the same ways, like being able to turn the standard pistol into a laser-sighted headshot murder machine. Not that old flaws excuse current ones, but Deus Ex was a great game because it had a lot of neat elements that were (and are still) rare for the genre, not because it was an impeccably polished masterpiece of old-school challenge and rock-solid design.

Human Revolution still has enough of that stuff — and does it well enough — for me to rate it highly. Stealth mechanics? The Chronicles of Riddick games are the only recent competition. Resource management? Not as important as in the first Deus Ex, but I like how ammo now takes up space, and for an FPS it's still notable for having an inventory to manage at all. Similarly, the first game was better about forcing hard choices with skill points and augmentations — this time around, you'll almost certainly be good at everything by the end of the game — but a few of the upgrades do allow for significantly different paths and options. The hacking? Yeah, it's a shallow minigame, and it's easy to think of ways they could have made it more interesting. But compared to the hacking in, say, the Bioshock games? No contest.

It's lame that Human Revolution has so many of the negative symptoms of modern game design, but as a comparative ranking, I'd give it four stars for sure. And I'd be happy to have any of my comments used in a review.

[David]

I went back and checked the reticule thing just to be sure, and you're right of course. Forget about that comment, then. I think I must have been left with that impression from playing a bit of the 360 version recently at my friend's house.

A four star rating sounds right to me. Aside from my gripe with the takedowns, the basic mechanics are very solid. The cover system is well implemented -- anything that you'd expect to be able to take cover behind, you can (tipped over vending machines proved to be quite useful for me on a couple of occasions), and the transition from first to third-person and back again is pretty seamless. Even if mechanically it were a three star game, the aesthetics would elevate it to four stars for me anyway. The distinctive black and gold colour theme really adds to the atmosphere, even with the game's more unremarkable environments. As if to prove this, there's actually a mod available that tones down the colour filter that gives the game its gold sheen -- it makes the environments look sterile in comparison. The soundtrack must be mentioned, as well. It's an awesome blend of electronic and choral/orchestral sounds, varying in intensity from the ambience of the Detroit City and Hengsha themes to the epic main theme. Melodies are sparse, but the atmosphere it creates is anything but.

[kini]

I forgot about turning the reticule off. I just tried it and it makes gunplay a lot harder. You can't aim very well so you end up using all your ammo. Or if you use the iron sights it makes you move a lot slower. I'd think it would be less fun for people taking the combat route due to them either not being able to aim well or not being able to move quickly, so maybe this option is for people who want to take the stealth route.

You could also turn the reticule off and use the laser which would only affect the reticule during cover, but this wouldn't make combat much more difficult. You would still be able to headshot the enemies pretty quickly. The enemies rarely use grenades and they never run behind your cover, so they don't have any counters to cover, which makes it an overpowered move unless you had to come out from it for more than a couple seconds.

[icycalm]

http://www.the-ghetto.org/forums/index. ... 8#msg24178

I started writing a short review, of sorts. Not finished. And the Albert Camus quote is mainly just a jab at icycalm, so I'll remove that eventually :p

----------------

I suppose I should get the most obligatory of Deus Ex-references out of the way first: What a shame.

Deus Ex was released in 2000. Eleven years later, it continues to be one of the worthier contenders for the „best videogame ever“-award, alongside luminaries such as Doom, Quake 3, Planescape: Torment, and Defence of The Ancients. Just kidding, DoTa sucks.

Deus Ex: Invisible War was released in 2003. Sadly, Invisible War turned out to be one of the most prominent casualties of consolization. The game was dumbed down to oblivion – one kind of ammo for every weapon, for christs sake! What we were left with was an empty shell of Deus Ex. Like non-alcoholic beer. Who the fuck drinks that shit?

On the 17th of May 2007, Deus Ex 3 was announced. For the next few years, people gradually got more and more excited. The developers want to stay really close to the spirit of the original! Sure, this is a line which every fan of a video game series has heard at least once. But never did we want to believe it so much. And that trailer looked pretty cool!

Alas, it wasn't meant to be. Deus Ex: Human Revolution was released in August 2011. It's not a non-alcoholic beer, but compared to the original Deus Ex, its alcohol content is miniscule.
And no, it's not just the boss fights. Sure, they suck, but if that was my only gripe with the game, i'd be pretty happy. What makes Human Revolution fall on its face so brutally is a single overarching theme which can be found throughout the entire game: The failure to make the freedom and choices in the game exciting and meaningful. I'll try to showcase this with several examples, each time making comparisons to the original. So if you haven't played Deus Ex, some of these things may not seem as important to you. And furthermore, if you haven't played Deus Ex, what the hell is wrong with you? Stop reading this and get to it.


#1. Why the Human Revolutions augmentation system is not as good as the original one

"Everything is permitted" does not mean that nothing is forbidden.
- Albert Camus

In Human Revolution, however, everything is permitted, and nothing is forbidden. Human Revolution has 69 augmentation upgrades in total. With perfect play (that is, perform a non-lethal takedown on every enemy without being seen once), you can get every single one. But even if you play the game relatively casual, you should get more than 40 at least. I finished the game with 48 and I didn't even bother finding some of the augmentation kits laying around. With numerous utterly useless perks (I'll talk about the speech augmentation later), its not hard to max out your character in just about everything. That isn't choice. You merely choose when to upgrade, not what.
In the original Deus Ex, by contrast, every augmentation canister had you CHOOSE between two different augs. Some of them were no brainers – Faster Running, for example, could literally do everything that its alternative Silent Running could (by simply crouching) and so much more. But there were some real gems in there as well. The cranial augmentation slot is a perfect example. You could either get a spydrone which would, upon detonation, release a small EMP blast powerful enough to take out every robot in the game. Or you could make use of an „Agressive Defensive System“ which, fully upgraded, would detonate enemies' rockets directly after being fired, killing rocketlauncher-equipped soldiers instantly by turning them into small chunks. Neither ability was terribly powerful, but they were both cool. The system in Deus Ex enhanced the games' replay value by making the choice between two augmentations meaningful. Deus Ex permits you to get either augmentation. But choosing one will make the other one automatically forbidden. And that's a good thing.

I mentioned the speech perk earlier. In Human Revolution, there are multiple conversations with NPC's where you have to choose correct responses in order to persuade them. The speech perk is intended to help you with that by providing you with additional information on the NPCs' psyche. Its just too bad that YOU DON'T NEED THIS EVER. A lot of reviewers noted that it's unnecessary because the characters are so easy to read that you can give the right answers anyway. But thats not even the biggest problem; If I fail my persuade attempt, I can simply quickload and try a different conversation tree. And since the game gives me experience points for passing speech challenges, you can bet the life of your grandma I'm gonna do that. But there is an extremely limited amount of different conversation trees, and usually theres even two or three conversation branches which result in a successfull persuasion. So all the game does by throwing these 'challenges' at me is waste my time. Compare this to a room, populated by six heavily armed soldiers. Sure, I can quickload after a failed attempt to shoot them. But if I just keep repeating the same thing over and over again, I could quickload twelvehundred times and fail. If you fail in a gunfight, you have to start thinking what to change up, you have to improve your aiming etc. If I fail a speech check, I just click a different answer and see if that one works. I'll find the right one eventually.

This is how it should be:
Either 'speech' is a skill which is REQUIRED for a multitude of speechchecks, so that if you don't have skilled speech, you CAN'T persuade. This would give players more incentive to get a speech perk.
Or passing a Speech challenge doesn't grant an experience bonus. Deus Ex did this; In Human Revolution, persuading an NPC gives you 1000 XP. In Deus Ex, conversations usually aren't even about persuading in the first place. The answers you give instead define your character. It's a clever trick to make you role-play. You want to antagonise the NSF leader? The game is okay with that. You want to appear reasonable? Go ahead. Neither option gives you a discernible advantage. But the answer that you give is a reflection of the kind of person you want your character to be.
Either that, or the 'bonus' for a speech check only comes up much later in the game so that you can't simply quickload and try every option. In Deus Ex, while you are escaping New York, you can tell a friend of yours to either meet up with you in Hong Kong, or in Paris. Depending on your choice, you will not meet him until several hours later, and if you meet him in Paris, he will give you something different than he would in Hong Kong. That's smart game design. To be fair, Human Revolution pulls this once too. But my point remains that the speech augmentation is simply redundant in this game.

-----

Next points on the agenda: game design in regards to playing around in the city hubs. Bossfights. Hacking.

http://www.the-ghetto.org/forums/index. ... 2#msg24322

#2) INSTANT GRATIFICATION

When it comes down to it, Human Revolution is akin to a Hollywood Blockbuster, „a remake of a classic that has the rough edges shaved off for mass, not cult, consumption.“[1] Human Revolution is streamlined. It want's to provide instant gratification. THAT is why you get experience points for persuading NPCs. A mainstream, marketed-for-the-masses Hollywood production will do its' best to not leave the viewer confused at any point in time. At no point in time will the recipient have to ask himself „I wonder what happens next!“. This makes for easy entertainment. Guessing the outcome before it happens leads to satisfaction. But when everything is spelled out to you, this satisfaction is shallow. The same applies to video games.By the end of Deus Ex, you will have a very distinctive feel of your character, based on the way you acted all game long. Trying to be peaceful towards the NSF terrorist leader at the end of the first level may simply seem like the reasonable thing to do. But the true satisfaction of this decision comes hours later, when you realize that the NSF aren't just the bad guys, and that they may in fact have acted correctly all along.
Do you even remember what argument you used to convince Sarif that you need to know about that security leak? Yeah, right. You got the 1000 XP bonus for it, you were satisfied, time to move on.
In todays industry, where a major game title comes out every month, no developer seems to give a rats' ass about the longevity of a game. Who cares if players will want to come back to Human Revolution in six months and play it again? Half a decade from now, Deus Ex will STILL be remembered as the one game that did it all right , while Human Revolution is basically an afterthought even now. Games that provide instant gratification, ironically enough, are designed on the premise that they will rake money in within the first few months – they are designed to dazzle an industry of game journalists who play the product for ten or twenty hours in the week prior to release and then write up their thoughts. Whether or not some random bloke on an obscure internet forum recommends your game to a newbie five years from now doesn't matter one bit.

[1] gameranx.com: Human Revolutions failure to be revolutionary

Unless someone objects, I am including these comments in the review and crediting their author. They were made in November anyway, and if he'd had any intention of completing his own review he'd probably have done it by now. And can someone comment on the boss fights and solve this issue for me? Apparently they were outsourced and everyone hated them or something?

[icycalm]

And, by the way, the Camus quote, if it is indeed by him, is stupid.

[icycalm]

His "lack of replayability" comments by the way are stupid. That should never be a reason to dock a game; quite the opposite in fact: replaying games is boring. But his comments still stand nevertheless, but on another justification. The justification for genuinely branching, meaningful choices is not "replayability" for fuck's sake -- meaningful choices are meaningful in themselves -- they simply do not need another justification.

The fact that you have to kind of, sort of, replay certain parts of a game perhaps in order to REALIZE whether OR NOT some choices are INDEED branching and meaningful is another matter. But quite often you can realize it even with a single playthrough with hardly any, or very little save-loading, especially if the nonlinearity has been seriously botched.

[Worm]

About the speech augmentation Surth mentions: I don't think it affects the main persuasion-oriented conversations in any way other than by making them easier, but for a few minor characters in the game, it does allow dialogue options and outcomes that aren't available otherwise. So that's something at least.