I Never Asked for This 2: This Time I Asked for it

[Timbrewolf]

Comes out tonight at midnight EST.

Probably going to be GOTY2016.

Yep.

[PKPenguin321]

nice thread title

[ThanatosRa]

Aaaaarrrrgh. Neeeeeeeeeed. Well I guess I'm not getting any fingerprinting tomorrow.

[Timbrewolf]

After serious consideration I will not be feigning some kind of rare 24 hour black death plague tomorrow so I can stay home and play it all day.

Harsh.

[ThanatosRa]

Oh no I'm going to work. I just work rather late as of late and was going to do an errand. Now I'm just doing my normal schedule.

[IrishWristWatch0]

I'll probably stream this after work tomorrow or whenever it comes out. Everyone follow DJ_Canadia on twitch. Yes I'm shilling my autistic twitch. Fight me.

[oranges]

YOU CAN'T KEEP ASKING FOR IT

[DemonFiren]

I'll do the usual and wait until fixes and DLC are out.

[Timbrewolf]

I'll do the usual and wait until fixes and DLC are out.

I wish your parents did the same thing

[DemonFiren]

I suppose that is intended to be amusing, however it ended up hardly making sense.
Par for the course for you, I suspect.

[ThanatosRa]

MY IMPATIENCE IS GROWING.
I'm going to be disappointed aren't I.

[Timbrewolf]

I suppose that is intended to be amusing, however it ended up hardly making sense.
Par for the course for you, I suspect.

I thought being called a premature release was something you'd immediately recognize. Sorry it went over your head. I'll aim lower next time.

[onleavedontatme]

It's okay so far. Not mindblowing, but pretty much what I expected (more of the same). Don't regret buying it.

Game is kinda ugly/poorly optimized though, at least compared to the last AAA game I played, DOOM.

[Super Aggro Crag]

I suppose that is intended to be amusing, however it ended up hardly making sense.
Par for the course for you, I suspect.

I thought being called a premature release was something you'd immediately recognize. Sorry it went over your head. I'll aim lower next time.

too bad his dad didn't aim lower when he was with his mother, we might have been spared.


also it should be called "I never asked for PISS cuz everything is yellow"

[onleavedontatme]

I am pretty sick of this hacking game already though.

[ThanatosRa]

It's a foregone conclusion that I'd like it Played a little this morning. Maybe it's just for me, but I feel like the UI has seen improvement. Things seem smoother.
Hacking I hated from HR too, and this is more of the same.

Of course, being a DX game, My immediate thought is "NONLETHAL". Not exactly easy with that stupid Tranq Rifle. At least they give you ammo for it this time around.

[Timbrewolf]

I maxed every single hacking thing in the game and it almost feels like fucking nothing changed

It's annoying to play the hacking game on PC because of GIANT FUCKING POP UPS that happen whenever you hover over anything, making it hard to see what's happening and what to click on.
At some point in every hack you just give up and start hammering C/F on everything you can because why the fuck not.

The game has microtransactions which is fucking shameful. You can spend real money to buy more praxis kits and other stupid shit.
The breach mode seems kinda cool at first but also completely fucking pointless since it doesn't seem to have any reciprocal unlocks with the story mode or anything.
I think it's probably just another hook to get you to throw more money at the game.

Things I like so far:

Atmosphere is great. Very immersive walking around the city and seeing people everywhere doing different things.
Conversations and dialog are great. The social implant works on tons of people this time around which is great.
Game looks decent. Not Witcher 3 good but still easy on the eyes. More than just piss yellow everything, it actually has color.
New augs are fun. New stuff going on in that system is cool too.

Thigns I don't like so far:

Movement system sucks shit, at least on PC. Sometimes catch myself sliding along edges at super-sonic speeds for no reason. Try walking up and down an angled roof and you'll feel what I mean. It doesn't feel good.
Adam has super brittle bones or something. Falling one story can kill you outright.
Praxis is too hard to come by for all the shit you have to spend it on. Combat is harder to avoid than ever before so everyone needs to dip into it whether they want to or not.
Game still puts a stupid leash on you for how frequently you can use your powers. Just get rid of the fucking energy system completely and let me use all these sweet augs as much as I want. That's why I'm here, isn't it?

[Super Aggro Crag]

Adam specifically had a limited maglev system in deus ex 3: One for falling from heights, why would he remove it for deus ex 3: deus ex 3 2: four

[onleavedontatme]

You actually do start the game with the fall damage immunity. There's a "oh no you dropped all your powerups from last game!" shortly after the intro mission though. That said, only costs a single point to buy back the Icarus.

Also I'm drowning in Praxis personally, just gotta do the side quests.

I've not really found myself getting stuck in combat situations, but I've been savescumming a ton to do it all stealthily. There's always a way through if you're stubborn enough to figure it out.

[DrPillzRedux]

The final boss is a disgrace. It's like they spent 5 minutes on making it. The endings are also just bad.

The game runs lke shit on PC.

This is close to regret levels of No Man's Sky.

[XSI]

The game has microtransactions which is fucking shameful. You can spend real money to buy more praxis kits and other stupid shit.

Praxis is too hard to come by for all the shit you have to spend it on. Combat is harder to avoid than ever before so everyone needs to dip into it whether they want to or not.

Just going to put these two quotes here and then you can figure out if its intentional

[IrishWristWatch0]

Game does not run like shit. I get 60+ fps every except for one area of a city. Games fun as fuck too.

>THIS AREA IS OFF LIMITS
>punch him in the fucking face
>WEIRD THIS AREA IS SUDDENLY NO LONGER OFF LIMITS. *whistles

[Xhagi]

It does not run that well for me but my computer is kinda old now so it's not unexpected. Still fun though.

[Jacough]

The game has microtransactions which is fucking shameful. You can spend real money to buy more praxis kits and other stupid shit.

In that case fucking dropped. Seems kind of stupid too. What's stopping people from using a trainer to give themselves more praxis kits?

[IrishWristWatch0]

I didn't even notice there were micro transactions. Now that i do, I'm going to just not buy them like an adult.

[Xhagi]

I didn't even notice there were micro transactions. Now that i do, I'm going to just not buy them like an adult.

[DemonFiren]

I didn't even notice there were micro transactions. Now that i do, I'm going to just not buy the game like a dirty pirate.

[Timbrewolf]

You actually do start the game with the fall damage immunity. There's a "oh no you dropped all your powerups from last game!" shortly after the intro mission though. That said, only costs a single point to buy back the Icarus

Adam Jensen needs to rely on cybernetic augmentations to avoid instant death after landing on his feet from a 15 foot drop, or 1.4 stories. According to a a website that teaches people how to commit suicide effectively even jumping from 10 times that height in real life does not guarantee 100% fatality rate.

If I'm being honest I really like DE:MD for its atmosphere and storytelling but so far if we're speaking strictly about gameplay and nothing else I think Dishonored did this stealth/action hybrid better.
Maybe I anticipated the flow of gameplay incorrectly and the augs I have just aren't jiving with how they intended the game to be played (I'm specc'ed fully into hacking with some general movement/accessory stuff eg. strong arms for lifting shit and legs for higher jumps). I often find myself staring at a bunch of stuff I can hack the shit out of like turrets, cameras, a laser grid, etc. but then also there's a fucking guard standing there that I can't do shit about and he never moves...so I have to hack all this shit one by one super fast, still have enough energy to run up and punch the guard out, and then try to drag the guard along with me and hope there's a good hiding spot for him immediately inside wherever we're going.

Most of my master plan crimes involving turning off a camera, then sprinting in the door to someplace and punching some dude(s) out as fast as I can.

It feels kinda stupid.

[Timbrewolf]

The "three paths" philosophy has kinda broken down here, where it's really only two paths and the hacking strategy just kinda straddles both of them.
Traditionally if you were designing a short area using the three paths ideal:

Combat walks through the front door, fights all the dudes, blows open the vault and runs off with the macguffin.
Stealth climbs up the side of the building to find a vent, sneaks around some dudes and pickpockets a keycard which they use to then open the vault and steal the macguffin.
Hacking solves a bunch of puzzles to unlock the side door, disable all the traps, unlock the vault, and take the macguffin.

But that doesn't really work here. Instead the hacker opens the door, but then joins the stealth guy in sneaking through the building and maybe popping a few more doors open so that his job of sneaking is a little more direct, but at the same time he's at a much greater risk of combat not being able to just turn himself invisible or not make any noise ever. It's too inbetween and ultimately ends up just feeling like I've accidentally set myself up for more challenge where in previous games this was it's own unique balanced thing.

On the plus side I get to steal FUCKING EVERYTHING but not having the extra praxis for storage space I'm often forced to leave all kinds of bullshit behind thanks to the game throwing multiple types of ammo for everything at you, multiple types of grenades, junk parts, more aug ammo, and deciding that each of like 6-7 hacking programs needs to take up its own slot in your inventory despite just BEING A FUCKING DISK JUST FUCKING DOWNLOAD IT SOMEWHERE HOLY SHIT WHY ARGH

It may not seem like a big fucking deal but it is to me. Lots of games let you choose between being fighty or being sneaky. What always set Deus Ex apart for me (and to a lesser Extent System Shock 2) was that they offered an alternative hacking path which was basically the smart person's puzzle solvin' thinking brain meat route. To see that Deus Ex's latest entry in the franchise dropped the ball on that makes me sad.

[ThanatosRa]

I can see where the gameplay has fallen apart in some spots. I will say thought that the atmosphere feels right. And that's the experience i was looking for.

[onleavedontatme]

If I'm being honest I really like DE:MD for its atmosphere and storytelling

Yeah basically. I liked being able to get really absorbed in the game world and I'm a sucker for being able to choose conversation options/make dumb moral choices in quests.

The actual stealth gameplay was crouchwalk between hacking doorpads and hit Q when I got near people. So I guess just like most stealth games, except with lots of awful hacking. Maybe one day I'll just admit to myself I'm not a fan of the genre.

Funny you mention Dishonoured though, since in another conversation I had earlier it was brought up as another example of "game that gives you a ton of cool lethal toys but then tells you that you can't use them." I guess in Dishonoured the limit is mostly just the ending cutscene (you used one of the 20 lethal abilities instead of the ~3 non lethal ones? Bad End!) vs this game and your tiny battery limit though.

Still don't regret buying it though, was a decent game. Probably safe to wait for a sale to buy it though.

[onleavedontatme]

The ending was disappointing though.

Spoiler:

I guess it makes sense that literally nothing gets done in regards to actually finding the Illuminati and you just ended up going in a circle, since they need Adam to fail for the first game to take place.

[ThanatosRa]

The ending was disappointing though.

Spoiler:

I guess it makes sense that literally nothing gets done in regards to actually finding the Illuminati and you just ended up going in a circle, since they need Adam to fail for the first game to take place.

It sets the stage. And if any game deserves a modern remake. Done well of course.

[ThanatosRa]

Spoiler:

the implication I'm now getting from the first game is that JC only found the illuminati because they wanted him to find them. And because they had been deposed. MJ-12 gave no fucks by that point, operating openly in their coup in France. Shit was just bad. Bad juju all around us.

[onleavedontatme]

It was setting the stage for another sequel though, not a remake.

[ThanatosRa]

Yes. That doesn't invalidate my statement however.

Spoiler:

Bare in mind this is based on barely getting started on the game and wholey on old original lore. I would find it amusing and love it if Adam's failures continue and he never does find the Illuminati... because Page makes his play for power and starts Majestic 12. Provided he hasn't already. Adam just finds them instead and fails to stop them anyway.

[Timbrewolf]

Get to the fork in the road where

Spoiler:

you have to decide to save the girl or go after the versalife vaults

Choose the first option. Get to the house full of cultists. Decide since they're all crazy cultist assholes with guns that it's okay to PURGE THE HERESY and kill most of them. Complete the area, find out:

Spoiler:

they actually didn't kidnap shit, the girl is their leader, I just massacred a bunch of religious nuts for no reason

Whoooooops!

[TheColdTurtle]

So from what I have seen in this thread, it seems like the game is not worth it at all.

[Timbrewolf]

I'm really enjoying my "Fuck it just kill anyone who gets in my way" playthrough.

There's a lot of fun guns and ways to kill shit that I think if you go the hyper savescum perfect clear 100% stealth whatever playthrough you're missing out on a lot of FUN.
I poured a lot of spare parts into my revolver and my combat rifle. The revolver has a laser sight and I use armor piercing rounds in it almost exclusively to fuck up heavy dudes. The combat rifle I also pimped out adding a holosight, 4x scope silencer, laser sight, and the semi auto mods to it. I also have a grenade launcher with some different rounds for it and I carry EMP grenades with me for some situations.

You can set the combat rifle to semi-auto, screw the silencer onto it, and use armor piercing rounds to have a silenced DMR that lets you plink your way through a lot of shit. Just headshot everyone. With the experimental aug that gives you bullet time abilities you can just click that shit on and headshot everyone everywhere. Using the cloak and the Icarus Dash ability lets you pull a lot of Dishonored-esque TELEPROTS BEHIND U KID fatalities.

I take back what I said earlier about the energy system. Now that I've gotten the hang of it (and more importantly upgraded my internal battery) they actually do let you play with the augs quite a bit. It's a complex system. Basically:

Say my total battery augment can hold 100 total units of power. Right now I have 80 in there.
When I turn on my augmented vision it costs 5 off the top. Now my battery is holding 75 units and it will start to drain out as I leave the eyes on and look around. I can look around for however long 75 units will sustain my vision, then the aug will shut itself off automatically and I will have to wait for my battery to recharge. It will charge all the way back up to 75, though. If I activate the eyes again, my total charge will drop to 70, and it will drain downwards from 70 points until empty again. There's a minimum amount of charge, like maybe 25-30 units, that it will always charge back up to. If I'm at 30 and I activate the eyes my maximum wont decrease, but I only have 25 units worth of juice before the eyes have to shut off again.

Using a biocell fills your battery all the way back up to whatever the max is, in my example I would top off at 100 again.

So this lets you use your augs A LOT more than you could in Human Revolution, where each cell was basically one use of something and each cell took a candybar to replenish. This time around the battery augment is actually really really good, probably an essential upgrade, compared to Human Revolution where upgrading your cell was completely useless and the best strategy involved gaming your one free cell all the time.

[Timbrewolf]

The more I play the more I like it. There are a lot of smart little things they did:

Example: using a password you found gives you a decent amount of experience. Not as much as succesfully hacking something, but it's enough that you can save yourself the time and just use the password without feeling like you're wasting potential EXP. In Human Revolution you would never ever use passwords if you were playing on the hardest difficulties because wrenching the most EXP you can get out of each area was clutch for getting more Praxis early on. In Mankind Divided you have more of a reason to just use the damn keys you found and keep moving.

Maybe I'm just a bastard but

Spoiler:

The part where Prague is on martial law lockdown and the cops are just gunning down everyone in the streets pushed me over the tipping point and I (ab)used my augments to just murder every single "cop" in the city. I've had it with these fucking fascists telling me which train car to use and pushing augs around. Oh there's a lockdown in effect blueboy? You can read my credentials off the front of these .357's when I put them through your eye-socket.

[onleavedontatme]

>doing sidequests during that section while doing stealth/non lethal

Agony

[Timbrewolf]

For your own enjoyment you should play the game over again no rules fucking kill 'em all mode at least once.

It's very satisfying and you get to play with the new combat system and upgraded "gun feel". It's pretty good.
Also just to experience all the crazy augs have to offer. Being able to fire exploding nanoblades at shit is fucking hilarious.

[ThanatosRa]

I've been enjoying my "improvise, kill only when absolutely necessary or the fucker deserves it" playthrough so far.

The PEPS aug and non-lethal Typhoon alone let you be super aggressive yet nonlethal.

I've already ruined a pacifist run a few times. I Couldn't fight this one power armored cop, had to cap'em. I felt bad, but remembered i was in the aug city. Fuck'em.


Being Jensen is pain though. Other augs hate you cuz you're a shiny well maintained Uncle Tom working for the man. Naturals hate you because you're a robot.

[onleavedontatme]

> I Couldn't fight this one power armored cop, had to cap'em

If you EMP the power armour guys, they'll be stunned for a long time and you can CQC them.

For your own enjoyment you should play the game over again no rules fucking kill 'em all mode at least once.

It's very satisfying and you get to play with the new combat system and upgraded "gun feel". It's pretty good.
Also just to experience all the crazy augs have to offer. Being able to fire exploding nanoblades at shit is fucking hilarious.

Might try NG+ so I can try all the powers without having to grind keypads again.

[ThanatosRa]

If you EMP the power armour guys, they'll be stunned for a long time and you can CQC them.

Oh. I am retarded.

[Timbrewolf]

Final boss is indeed pretty shitty, but oh well. I think on his own he somehow manages to be better than previous bosses but when you add in

Spoiler:

that he has six drones + two turrets and a room full of all kinds of booby traps around him, plus if you're trying to do everything you need to run in there, hack a terminal, then run back out without getting mutilated

...then it's pretty fucking awful. The hallway leading up to the other half of the crescendo of the game was a pain in the fucking balls as well going loud, with an absolute fucking ton of soldiers and two turrets. Christ.

Based on the ending...

Spoiler:

I think we're lead to believe that the Adam Jensen we play in the game as isn't really Adam Jensen. Maybe some kind of clone or something? He has the same scars on Adam's face that Adam does but if you look closely his eye coverings are slightly different as are his eyes. His chin and jaw structure are also just slightly different. It's possible that these are just artistic liberties taken to make him look better, it's not at all uncommon for small features like that to change between games.

Reasons why:

1) During the stinger the psychiatrist comments that your memories are holding up okay, which means at least something in your head isn't the way it's supposed to be. A major plotpoint of the game is that you blacked out for a period of time and then came to with new augs crammed in your body, so it could be that she is just referring to your altered memories of that point in time. Alternatively, she could be referring to all of your memories, collectively, like a graft.

2) Supporting the first point, we meet a character at one point who has a chip implanted in their head to give them the memories and personality traits of someone else. It's revealed to be part of a failed program by Tai Young Medical, which IIRC acquired Sarif Industries after the events of the first game.

3) You have a bunch of augs in your system that just don't belong there. The plot seems to hint that they were implanted into you on the DL while you were unconscious all that time. That doesn't make a lot of sense to do to someone who is a rogue asset at that point unless you're confident you can use him as a sleeper agent with complete control.

4) David Sarif talks about Adam Jensen in the third person during a conversation with you regarding your augments. He remarks that "the augs I installed in Adam Jensen had serial numbers" while talking directly to you, which is a really weird way of phrasing.

5) We already know from the first game that Adam Jensen is an artificial human anyway. He's not a clone of anybody but rather genetically engineered to be able to cope with augments. We know from the first two Deus Ex games that around this point in the timeline they should be perfectly capable of creating clones of people. JC Denton was a clone as well and if I have the timeline right he should have been born by the time Mankind Divided takes place.

6) Adam Jensen dies in all of the endings of Human Revolution. The elephant in the room everyone just assumed they retconned when they made a sequel with Adam Jensen starring in it.

7) When talking about what Orchid does to people Alex says that it "looks for a specific protein chain, and deletes it" if present but otherwise just causes the infected to go through some crazy aug rejection type syndrome. Adam gets infected by it and it doesn't do jack shit to him either way. My first assumption was that it would remove his genetic perfection when it comes to augments and that he would eventually start having to take Neuroprezene like everyone else...but apparently it did fuck all nothing to him. I wonder if Orchid was supposed to be like a FoxDie for Adam Jensen, but because we're a clone it somehow didn't do anything at all?

8) Adam Jensen in MD has developed a skin condition of some sort pretty rapidly. If you wander through his apartment you can find a bottle of skin care cream in his bathroom that is for some weird degenerative skin condition. In certain cutscenes and under some lighting you can see his skin is actually kinda nasty. In the original HR Adam Jensen's skin was just fine, despite having been augmented for a few months.

I'm sure I can think of some more stuff later

[onleavedontatme]

I just sat in a vent shooting him in the head with a sniper rifle, ducking around a corner until his AI got bored of shoot at the vent and "lost me" (turned around) then shot him in the back of the head and repeated for a few minutes.

Deus Ex where enemies could search the vents would be pretty fucking spooky, they're a bit too much of a safe zone as is.

>turrets

Maxing out hacking finally paid off when I was able to pick up a turret and walk around with it shooting everyone for me.

[Ikarrus]

What a meh game

It wasn't boring, but nothing really interesting or surprising happened either. Tension was just flat the entire way through.

Last boss was easy as piss. I just cloaked and meandered my way upstairs to the security console. I had 25+ biocells to spend so it was no problem at all. Hacked the console right in front of the boss who couldn't see me, and then he died after being fired upon by his swarm of drones.

[Timbrewolf]

I would disagree but it's possible parts of the story just hooked me more?

Spoiler:

I got really invested talking to various NPC's. Like the shrink and the woman who runs the shooting range, for example. If you check back in with them over the course of the game they both update you on how they're doing and their reactions to everything going on, or how their own personal objectives are resolving. The shrink tells you a personal anecdote about how she had a child patient throw herself out a window during the augmented incident, while the shooting range NPC talks about how she finally gets cleared for active field duty despite all her difficulties. There's the two NPC's you encounter during the sidequest where you're creating and distribtuing fake ID"s and you meet up with both of them again in different circumstances depending on how you made your choices during that whole thing. I really liked how the game maintained the timeline and stuff.

Again it's completely possible it just ticked my particulars off but going into the game immediately after GM'ing my own pen and paper RPG I really appreciated the narrative of the whole thing and how it handled all the player choices and carried them along. In it's final moments I had never even thought that I would be able to achieve both objectives if I just got shit done fast enough and was really impressed that they left that window open, that you could just get in to one major thing you need to do, accomplish just what you needed to do, then duck out and double-back for the other really important thing without buying into the whole boss fight. I really liked that you could do these things.

[IcePacks]

swinging by to just throw my hat in the ring

dull surprise simulator 2016