Barrow_Bug said:
Fat Dragon said:
:evil: No, it's not. The game was considerably different in terms of core design, but the story, writing and characters are all just as good as the original. Atmosphere, characterisation, sound design are all superb- however the 'teh hardcorez' are all butthurt about the universal ammo and the lack of XP.
For me, Deus Ex was all about the game-world, not power gaming. So, do yourself a favour and check it out.
The gameworld itself was a letdown for me, due to the following:
- lack of 'near-real-world' setting. Part of what made Deus Ex cool was how it was set in the aftermath of a faked terrorist attack on the US, creeping loss of liberties, the formerly conservative communist china becoming a beacon of industry and freedom...all a few years before september 11.
- the combining of inverted piss-pulling sci-fi conspiracy tropes (the comedy aspect), together with some actual hard sci-fi themes (the serious aspect) such as the nature of religion and the purpose of god, the nature of justice, politics, cultural indoctrination, etc
- the few branching aspects affecting the story in meaningful ways
- an awesome protagonist
- other NPCs that I liked - Simons, Paul, Jock, Gunther etc
- that even the villains had interesting character arcs, often with a great dash of irony. For example, Gunther - the one who is most machine-like and terrified of being an out-of-date machine (his last words 'I am not a machi...') has the most 'human' motivations for villainy of the lot.
By contrast, invisible war:
- had a lame protagonist, with none of JC's cool. This was a case of the designers caving to the stupidity of reviewers. Multiple reviewers criticised JC's lack of emotion (despite the in-game explanation). But what that did as a gaming mechanic is it meant that (a) JC isn't invested with anime-style predetermined motiations through his voice-acting, and (b) the player is never 100% certain of JC's full motives - he can do some pretty fucking cold stuff in that game, as well as some stuff which might be heroic, and the emotionlessness of him was a great means of implementing that. Alex D is fucking lame by comparison;
- the 'far-future' setting means that the game is completely devoid of any thematic depth, aside from an utterly asinine and predictable (as in 1st-year undergrad student-protest level) criticism of capitalist marketing. It has none of the trope-inversion of the 1st game, and none of the subtle 'beneath the surface' more serious thematic depth. Basically it's just a pop story, no depth too it - and not a very good pop story at that.
- it was the 1st game to run into 'Oblivion syndrome' - the game tries so hard to be open-ended that you almost can't branch. Kill one character and another character from the same faction will appear to offer you the exact same quest. The result is that you don't get any 'real' choice other than which faction to join in the last mission.
- the factional choices have no thematic depth compared to the 1st. Deus Ex had an awesome choice b/w 20th century capitalism with a 'more human' correcting touch, i.e. the thematic equivalent of social democracy; a JS Mill / Voltaire-style 'freedom above all, even if it means oblivion' choice where you send the world back to the dark ages for the sake of starting again with true individual freedom; and 3rdly 'perfect communism', where a truly benevolent computer/god takes over the running of everything, for the benefit of everyone, and will bring perfect peace and end poverty at the cost of complete freedom. Makes my philosophy lecturer bones tingle with delight. Invisible War gives you a shitty choice between some student-cliche of capitalism, some completely unsympathetic bunch of religious luddites and a 'perfect gaia' solution. It not only takes all the awesome details away from the factions in the first game, but it completely neuters the moral decision. The beauty of Deus Ex's endings was that it demonstrates the sillyness of a supposed 'good-wins' ending - no matter how one defines goodness, it's going to screw someone else over. The sequel's factions are either utterly unsympathisable, where you'd have no reason to join them apart from the sake of seeing what happens, or have no downside to trade off.
- it rapes the lore of the first game. Characters from game 1 change their views or act in contradictory ways with no plausible ingame explanation for their change, other than that the developers thought it 'would be a cool twist' (the 'twist' is fucking lame and predictalbe to the very stupidest of down-syndrome kiddies - in all seriousness you'll get to the big 'factions reveal themselves', and it will remind you of the short stories you wrote in primary school).
In Deus Ex almost every character grew or developed in an interesting way. In Invisible War there was only 1 character that developed in a manner that was at all interesting. And I'll certainly pay that he was well-written - he starts off as the most annoying character (deliberately), and he ends up becoming the only sympathetic character in the game. And you do get a great 'fuck everyone, we're both badass, let's just team up and take out EVERY OTHER MOTHERFUCKER THAT"S POPPED THEIR FUCKING HEAD UP IN THE GAME option
Very cathartic given how annoying all the other characters are (and it isn't some lame 'press a button to kill everyone' option - no, you and he actually get to go around and be a 2-man wrecking squad, entering the 3-way battle between the 'real' factions, with a goal of killing the leadership (i.e. all the named characters left in the game) of each faction
.
Nice, you might think - the kind of thing that could make up for an otherwise shitty storyline. But guess what, you take that option and you're going to hit in the face with a backfire that is SO FUCKING OBVIOUS that you will find it unfuckingbelieveable that you have NO WAY of going 'hey, shouldn't we sort out this REALLY OBVIOUS problem, that ANYONE would think of, and that we are COMPLETELY CAPABLE of sorting out, before we go about doing this?'. But no, despite the fact that any non-brain-dead player can see the potential problem, both characters would CERTAINLY see the fucking problem, the game doesn't even give you the option of bringing it up, much less addressing it, until the ending slide where you sigh and go 'oh fucking really? I'm glad that one of my 2 cats didn't see that one coming - that way one out of the 3 of us was mildly surprised'. Non-fucking-linearity indeed.
It's as though in the first game you defeated Page, refused to hook up the computer, told Tong to piss off, all so you could ask the UN to run things, and then got told WHOOAHHH, YOU FORGOT ABOUT THE ILLUMINATI, SURPRISE!!!!!, with no option to deal with the illuminati problem that you and your character are both well aware of.
I actually quite liked the gameplay, unlike most of the Codex. No exp, underpowered enemies and universal ammo were disappointing, but would have been forgiven for a good gameworld and story. Pity that the gameworld and story were one of the most blatant cases of 'designed by morons, for morons' I've ever encountered.
