Deus Ex GMDX: Deus Ex Advancement Mod v9 Released!

[Ol' Willy]

To clarify, I do not advocate for any changes or something - just sharing my observations. I think the game was originally designed for only sporadic episodes of open combat in mind and thus such ammo balance

Nope. My personal playstyle preference is combat. But it is balanced around thoroughness, skill and good knowledge of the game on hardcore. With more lenience on all lower difficulties.

The original game was absurdly generous with ammo, I toned it down a bit but still kept it pretty abundant.

Ahh, I see

But the thing is, using ammo scarcity to limit the player works only if the alternatives are limited too or simply suck. This works well, for example, in Doom, especially in wads designed for pistol starts. Like in Hell Revealed, playing it on pistol starts feels really different and more engaging that on continuous, and there are various level design moves based around it.

Then, Deus Ex, and aforementioned System Shock 2, do have alternatives, but these alternatives are no less (even more) effective than guns and require no resources whatsoever. This really ruins muh precious balince

Thus, the obvious idea is to either pump up the guns, or nerf the melee

Speaking of which, why DTS doesn't use batteries? Prod does, but DTS doesn't? Hmm

 

[Ash]

The alternatives (in your provided example, melee) is limited by its range. Ranged combat or ranged takedowns is almost always safer than getting in the enemies face deep in enemy territory, especially since they're more competent now. Demolitions limited by rarity. Environmental kills limited by location and other things. Stealth is godly, but the point of combat is to disregard it. Nothing can really be done about that, it's the rule for all games that hybridize stealth and combat in one game as always-present options.

The goal was to limit ammo enough to at least force other tactics and weapon usage than stealth pistoling everyone in the head the whole game. Too much ammo.
As-is, there is more than enough ammo to never have to resort to melee or stealth takedowns even on hardcore as long as you play it smart and skillful. Though this does involve investment in at least two of the five weapon skills. Generally that's the new rule for all-out gun combat, whereas vanilla only one. You could just master pistols only and go to town. Not exactly deep, varied and tactical for what should be obvious reasons. Anyways, headshots and more headshots. This was dictated by the vanilla game - x8 damage multiplier for head, x2 everywhere else. I changed the torso to x3 to make center of mass a bit more sensible, and sometimes it is, but otherwise mole popping still rules engagements.

Certainly an interesting idea there with the DTS batteries. Might be problematic in regards to breaking open containers and such, unless you make it only drain battery on contact with an enemy which could work well enough I suppose even if unrealistic and confusing (at first). Certainly a feature at risk of raising eyebrows though even if logical, and I tried to stay away from those as much as possible.
The DTS does have two notable nerfs already (though it doesn't really feel like it, especially if you invest in low-tech and combat strength), while many of the lesser melees given a slight buff. This was a must to make Low-tech and combat strength worth a damn beyond door-busting.

 

[Ol' Willy]

The alternatives (in your provided example, melee) is limited by its range.

Given that most of the levels in Deus Ex are fairly tightly spaced; plus the classic AI exploit of door camping - makes it a non issue

Certainly an interesting idea there with the DTS batteries. Might be problematic in regards to breaking open containers and such, unless you make it only drain battery on contact with an enemy which could work well enough I suppose even if unrealistic and confusing (at first). Certainly a feature at risk of raising eyebrows though even if logical, and I tried to stay away from those as much as possible.

DTS may use bio charge of JC instead of regular batteries, after all, both JC and DTS run on nanites

This will also explain why so few people use it - they simply lack the augs to do this

 

[Lord_Trashcan]

For anyone curious, the new fork is a vRSD fork. The author is Sarge, and if it counts I'm also working on it every now and then though the vast majority of changes are his. Here's the GitHub link if you want to keep track of it, and a link to the changes:

https://github.com/tunbridgep/gmdx-vrsd-fork

https://github.com/tunbridgep/gmdx-vrsd-fork/blob/master/Docs/List of Changes.md

 

[Ash]

The alternatives (in your provided example, melee) is limited by its range.

Given that most of the levels in Deus Ex are fairly tightly spaced; plus the classic AI exploit of door camping - makes it a non issue

Have you tried it? AI are no longer absurdly cheeseable by door camping in this mod. Vanilla enemies opening any door while they were in the seeking state made them give up searching for you guaranteed (after which you just immediately follow them and stealth takedown as they return to their patrol), and they generally had many instances of "sleeping" during the door open process wherein they would not register sounds the player makes. There is also the new strafe around corner tactic they use which throws a spanner in the works. Furthermore they may even throw grenades even though you're hiding in wait, if they're in the combat state (have detected you, combat music playing). Some enemies will also just bust right through a door instantly destroying it, like robots. Enemies generally open doors a bit quicker, and are overall more competent across the board in detecting you and once combat starts. While door camping can still be abused to a small degree, in a few situations, it's far less exploitable than vanilla. I did a lot for the awful AI of this game. Made them from bumbling idiots into something somewhat resembling challenge and intelligence in stealth and combat, in addition to removing tons of immersion-breaking behavior, and retards that have never played it still scream about vanilla being the gold standard out of ignorance.

 

[Ol' Willy]

Have you tried it? AI are no longer absurdly cheeseable by door camping in this mod.

Yes, AI got noticeably sharper when dealing with player trying to be stealthy. The gas station level especially got me quite a lot of troubles, I don't remember it be so troublesome before.

But as my build wasn't generally about stealth, in combat mode AI still oftentimes rushed in on me through the open doors and got shanked real fast.

I guess you can't really fix it without getting AI on entirely new level, it would have to *know* how to move around the map, team up and sync their actions - and I haven't seen any game with AI like this

About grenades yes, I noticed that, very cool; I had grens thrown at me quite often