I don't see the point in defending the shortcomings of a game by pointing fingers at it's over 10 year older predecessor developed before the turn of the millennium. Deux Ex didn't start out to offer you a flexible and reactive story but the choices it actually offers make it appear so much more and it's effect is only diminished by the open to all endings. In the final showdown nothing you have done hinders you to choose an ending contrary to all your previous actions and so nothing feels to be your achieved finishing of the story.
But what does Human Revolution do? It doesn't improve on that note and instead copies it par for par without offering anything new but some very shallow choices. There is no excuse for those development choices, when the issues have been known upfront and you claim to improve and expand on that.
How is it forcing it? Not enough vents for you?
And what is actually wrong with having to go into cover in shoot out? You want it to be like in original DX, where you can simply run at them screaming 'Jeronimo'? Besides the usual codexian kneejerk reaction, which seems to quickly infect even newcomers, what exactly is so bad about the cover system to begin with? I have crossed whole levels in basic crouch mode, when i didn't feel like shooting anyone, but it's kinda logical, that if you DO want to turn it into showdown, you will need to get a cover. Is that unreasonable? I mean, Jensen is strong, but he's not terminator ffs.
Maybe vents are the solution. After all it's the solution with which they claim to have fixed the complaints in the Director's Cut.
I can't stand it, because I'm playing an first-person shooter and get thrown off into some simplified third-person perspective when taking cover. I don't like being taken out of my perspective and pushed back into it after some seconds. That is why I can't stand those takedown animations mentioned in the article either, which only serve to show you how cool Adam looks when punching a wall or some guy in the face. Since I haven't seen more of those recently I assume I'm not the only one unhappy with them. Of course Eidos did it again in Thief, but at least they let you stay in first-person.
And regenerating behind cover is as fun as tuluse already described it to be.
Of course you can avoid it. But then you can't stealth the game because the level design is forcing you to use it, which the designers also admitted.
And like I already wrote, you can't get into shootouts on Deux Ex difficulty without resorting to it. Actually you can't get into any cover at all without it.
Bullshit. This guy -
http://lparchive.org/Deus-Ex-Human-Revolution/ - played DX:HR without using the wall-hug stealth gimmick. While this Let's Play is not about maximum stealth, where he did go stealthily, the old-school (crouch) approach was enough to do the trick. Similarly, he engaged in a good amount of firefights without using the wall-hug trick, and it all worked out well.
People like you, who claim that DX:HR can't be done without
, have no idea what you're talking about.
I'm not going to watch those videos, but he isn't playing on Deus Ex difficulty either...
Wrong. WRONG!!@!
The great thing about DX1 was that it was essentially pulp fiction and greasy cyberpunk. And that can be terrific, provided you don't take it too seriously. Five minutes into DX:HR you can tell the game was written by whiny, PC-obsessed Canadians who disappeared up their own asses while chasing self-importance. The writing was a complete bag of seen-it-coming shit from start to finish.
This! I don't know how many lucky stars aligned themselves to make it all work in Deus Ex, but somehow all those crazy ideas Spector put in as a joke produced sometimes chilling thoughts. It right out tells you everything about the whole conspiracy and you still get your head shaken by every revelation. Maybe it's too much to ask for another stroke of luck like that.
Player-Jensen actually gets to pick if he gets the firmware upgrade or not. Player-JC doesn't have anything like that.
Which makes the players screen flicker at one boss fight! But at least that wasn't as overtly coming as the rest.
It's interesting that you view this as good story telling. To me it looks like the easy way out in terms of design and writing, hey lets make a game about conspiracies, super corporations and shit, in which you as the main character get to do nothing at all!
To be fair, there wasn't much that could be done in that timeframe anyhow. It's taking place in 2027, which is not only something over a decade from now but also some twenty years prior to the original game. So not only does the world have to radically change in those ten years, but all those augmentations have to be gone before JC enters the stage. But then again Gunther would be using technology outdated by twenty years, when he is supposed to be equipped with high tech before before nano augmentations. They were proper fucked in that regard.
And there is nothing wrong with having a small scale plot. They set Jensen up as the grim and lonely ex cop who lost his girl and will never start looking, while working for the guys pulling the strings. That's noir as it can get, but then they turn they turn it up again and so Jensen saves the world from the augmented horde and all because he is the one and only enabling all the research from the beginning.
