Deus Ex: Human Revolution

[infernovia]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZRYROjQPoI

Does that look awesome or what? Hopefully they make it as amazing as Deus Ex and do not follow Invisible War. Fat chance, I know.

[Xeio]

You know, I liked Invisible War... granted it's the only Deus Ex game I've played, not sure why it gets so much hate.

[Menacing Spike]

You know, I liked Invisible War... granted it's the only Deus Ex game I've played, not sure why it gets so much hate.

Well, it's a very dumbed down (hey, console gamers) Deus Ex. Prequel being far better => immense hate.

About the trailer: that's nice and all, but how is the gameplay?

[Goldstein]

Given that Square Enix have a hand in it, that five-minute video may well be the gameplay.

[psion]

That trailer is possibly the best I've seen of any game. My only complaint is the common Japanese practice of overwhelming a work with metaphors and symbolism to attempt to give it a deeper meaning. I'm sorry, but Icarus has shit-all to do with a dystopian future. Then the main character seems like a typical bad-ass-hero-who-lost-his-love-and-didn't-ask-for-his-power dude.

Not much Gameplay video. I've been following it. The game looks like it's going to be at least good. They're not really raising the bar from Deus Ex, but are more or less recreating Deus Ex with modern technology and production. I'm guessing the hardcore Deus Ex fans will feel like it could have been better for that reason.

[Larry]

more or less recreating Deus Ex with modern technology and production.

Except the plot "twist" is more or less given away in the trailer. Gee, I wonder who the bad guys are.

Still, my hopes are high, but not too high.

[infernovia]

You know, I liked Invisible War... granted it's the only Deus Ex game I've played, not sure why it gets so much hate.

Its not an atrocious game, but anyone who says this has to play the original. You will see how much a disappointment that follow up was. If the game was not named "Deus Ex," it would probably not have received as much hate.

That trailer is possibly the best I've seen of any game.

Yeah, the trailer looks so immediately immersive, it is incredible. It is as if they are building a high quality movie out of it. I hope the developers keep up with the storyline though, I can't deal with anymore animeish stories than I need to.

I actually really like the reference to Rembrandt, it feels really interesting and is not quite as over the top as the spirit coming out of the body or w/e. I think more western developers can do what the Japanese did with Okami...

Given that Square Enix have a hand in it, that five-minute video may well be the gameplay.

They are dealing with the cinematics. This actually makes sense considering how super over the top it is being. That said, it does look really good (some awkward movements and expressions, but not the biggest deal) though what it actually means for the game is questionable. The fun in Deus Ex can come from a lot of things that are inherently spoilerish though, so we aren't going to get a good idea of the game until it comes out. Its not something you can really advertise, its how free you feel in the world and all of its consequences. This is what the game apparently looks like: [>] [>]

Which isn't shabby quality at all! I am building a PC so hopefully I can play this on maximum everything.

Like I said, my hopes are high that they will be able to pull through, but I don't think they will manage it.

Edit: Btw, in Japan they are calling this game Deus Ex. Which is sad, they are missing one of the best games released ever.

[nowfocus]

I'm very excited for this.

I just started playing the original and...and I just don't understand video game design anymore.

This game came out 10 years ago, and they nailed the design in a way that games today just don't match.

Why are all the levels still so linear? Why don't I have to make any major choices real character choices in RPGs beyond Sword/Magic/Bow? Why does my character rarely make plot decisions, and when I do I have to do it when the game explicitly want me to? Why do games feel the need for all decisions to have a 'right' and 'wrong' answer? Why are my decisions being rated on some one dimensional morality scale? Why is there only one solution to problems the game throws at me?

Sorry for the rant not directly related to the game. Looking at the gaming industry today, I'm just shocked that Deus Ex existed 10 years ago. Why aren't games today more like this?

Its even more amazing that someone looked at Deus Ex, decided to make a sequel, and thought "This would be better if we simplified the decisions players have to make"

[SecondTalon]

I'm very excited for this.

I just started playing the original and...and I just don't understand video game design anymore.

This game came out 10 years ago, and they nailed the design in a way that games today just don't match.

Why are all the levels still so linear? Why don't I have to make any major choices real character choices in RPGs beyond Sword/Magic/Bow? Why does my character rarely make plot decisions, and when I do I have to do it when the game explicitly want me to? Why do games feel the need for all decisions to have a 'right' and 'wrong' answer? Why are my decisions being rated on some one dimensional morality scale? Why is there only one solution to problems the game throws at me?

Sorry for the rant not directly related to the game. Looking at the gaming industry today, I'm just shocked that Deus Ex existed 10 years ago. Why aren't games today more like this?

Its even more amazing that someone looked at Deus Ex, decided to make a sequel, and thought "This would be better if we simplified the decisions players have to make"

Tangent about Games Made Decades Ago That Have Not Been Topped Or Even Attempted To Clone :

Spoiler:

If you're in to RPGs, take a good hard look at Oblivion, Gothic and the like... then take a glance at goddamn Ultima 6. Has better NPC scheduling, arguably equal interaction in the world and a non-linear story with more moral ambiguity than most modern games (The point of 6? Two groups with two completely conflicting and contradicting viewpoints and ideals, neither one is wrong, and you have to make both happy. Also, don't be racist.)

Move up a bit to the Ultima 7 twins, and you'll pretty much find NPCs with far more personality, a world that's far more interactive and nothing at all like even Morrowind's method of Open Ended questing with 7 (7 part 2 was.. pretty linear)'s method of story quest being something that it wasn't until a few years ago I realized you could actually follow as a trail. (You follow some people, somewhere along the way I forgot what town they were going to next and just assumed that the trail went dead, as by that time I had other leads. Turns out I was wrong, and following them would have taken you all the way to the end. Huh.) But yeah, you can often collect the necessary MacGuffins and beat 7 without really once getting involved with the Storyline quests - not that the storyline quests are even quests, more of leads that you investigate. No one ever tells you to go to Point B, they just tell you that two people of interest have gone to Point B. And it's entirely possible that you miss the part of the game where they tell you that these two are persons of interest, so you may not even realize you're supposed to be trailing them.

Anyway, point being.. Ultima 6 - 1990. Ultima 7 1992, Ultima 7 Part 2 1993. I've yet to play a game that's quite as immersive as Ultima 7[/url]. And the games that come close seem to almost do it on accident.

As for why games like that don't exist..... Warren Spector can only do so much in a year. And they saddled him with Epic Mickey? Because making games where there are two or more solutions and neither one is really wrong are [i]hard and it's just easier to make a game with "Save The Puppies" and "RAR RAR BLOOD FOR THE SKULL GOD (Please don't sue, Games Workshop)" being your two options? Because critically acclaimed games with amazing player choice tend to sell like shit?

Personally, I blame Counterstrike for that last one.

[You, sir, name?]

You know, I liked Invisible War... granted it's the only Deus Ex game I've played, not sure why it gets so much hate.

A video game sequel needs to be as good as -, or better than the first game. Invisible War was merely a good game, while Deus Ex was absolutely revolutionary and genre-defining. The "Deus Ex:" in "Deus Ex: Invisible War" sets a bar that "Invisible War" fails to even approach.

Also, there was a perception that they sold out the core audience of the original game (which was a PC title) to grub money from the console folks by dumbing down the gameplay and interface.

[nowfocus]

Moving along the tangent (though talking about disappointing sequels doesn't seem to out of place here):

Spoiler:

Because making games where there are two or more solutions and neither one is really wrong are [i]hard and it's just easier to make a game with "Save The Puppies" and "RAR RAR BLOOD FOR THE SKULL GOD (Please don't sue, Games Workshop)" being your two options? Because critically acclaimed games with amazing player choice tend to sell like shit

I mean...is it that much harder? I don't work in the games industry, and I've never programmed a game, but with modern gaming budgets it seems like a lot of this stuff could be done rather easily.

Deus Ex manages to have other characters talk to you about your previous missions, and the decisions that you made in them. All in all this is just adding a few additional lines of dialogue, which seems like a reasonably easy thing to do. That rant you're about to have that character give me? Just record like 4 extra lines based on my previous actions, have them only say one of them.

I could see the additional solutions thing being a bit tricky - but what is stopping studios from doing it? Certainly not money - they have much more of that. Is it just talent? Well, then I'm just a bit surprised we don't have better game designers - that the medium as a whole didn't progress as much as I thought it would over the past ten years. I thought people would get better at it, like a science. While I understand games are art, they just don't seem to be learning from each other as much as I thought they would.

Deus Ex seems to have sold pretty well - 1 million copies doesn't sound bad. Ironically the sequel sold more, but that might just be because their were more gamers around.

[infernovia]

Deus Ex does what you are saying nowfocus, except implements it for hundreds of situations. How you handle such things is through flags that get set whenever the player does a certain action, and the programmer then has to account for all those flags. I don't think this is easy though I have not built games that are more complex than a 1980's one.

Edit: I am not trying to sound patronizing here, I am just saying how Deus Ex was built. You are right, we have had the technology to do this since the 1990s. Even Ultima could have done it.

So yeah, it was definitely quite an interesting way to build the world and we should have had more games that follow that route. But straightforward stories are much simpler and they sell.

[Menacing Spike]

Deus Ex does what you are saying nowfocus, except implements it for hundreds of situations. How you handle such things is through flags that get set whenever the player does a certain action, and the programmer then has to account for all those flags. I don't think this is easy though I have not built games that are more complex than a 1980's one.

That's probably just a few "if(flag)" there and there, and a certain number of flag++. I don't see the difficulty.

[nowfocus]

Deus Ex does what you are saying nowfocus, except implements it for hundreds of situations. How you handle such things is through flags that get set whenever the player does a certain action, and the programmer then has to account for all those flags. I don't think this is easy though I have not built games that are more complex than a 1980's one.

I'm not saying its 'easy' per se, but I can't think of a reason why it would have gotten more difficult over the years. If Deus Ex or Ultima can do it, why can't a modern game with many times the resources do it?
Some explanations
1. Lack of demand
2. Lack of talent
3. Lack of resources
4. Risk-aversion

I don't think its number 3 since resources have increased. I expected talent to increase over the years, and I expected our tastes to be a bit more refined by now. It could be risk aversion, games are bigger investments and trying this sort of thing puts that investment at risk but...shadows of a lot of these concepts already exist in modern gaming.

[psion]

I mean...is it that much harder? I don't work in the games industry, and I've never programmed a game, but with modern gaming budgets it seems like a lot of this stuff could be done rather easily.

Despite the budget and large teams, I think everyone's hands are tied to what the publisher and the average gamer wants. The average gamer wants Madden NFL 11 or whatever. Those elements of Ultima and Deus Ex aren't very financially rewarding yet, and they won't be until the average gamer matures past falling over random FPS #4348.

edit: Hm, ninja'd.

[_Axle_]

About Deus Ex itself, according to Wiki :
"Warren Spector and Harvey Smith, the creative directors behind the first two games, are not attached to the project."
That is a big factor of how good the game might be, in how true it is to the original.

About the secondary topic that this thread has spawned. Quick background, I am 1 semester away from graduating and hopefully getting a job in the gaming industry, and have been making student games and understand the game dev cycle.

@nowfocus, my 2 cents on the reasons are 1,3 and 4.
1) For everyone that wants a Deus Ex game that is true to the orignal, 3-4 times that are fine buying a new Madden game every season and a new Halo/Call of Duty game, which are basically 90% identical to the last one.

3) This is a 2 fold issues, 1 is that you need a good team of writers. You need to have a good enough story and dialogue script to make this worthwhile. As well, all dialogue and flags are memory footprints. These are competing with all level data, models, textures, the actual exe and whatever else is on the disc. Everything has to fit on 1 disc, or have enough to warrant delivering with 2 discs.

4) If you are doing a simple dialogue change depending if you picked quest a over quest b, is the change in dialogue going to change the experience? Once you get a few dozen quests, that can be done in tons of different combinations, the web of the dialogue/quest tree gets intense. This means, that you need a ton of testers, that have to test each branch to make sure it is correct in game. This adds more time to a game development.

About the costs of game dev, the majority ( minus marketing ) is purely off salaries to the team. a team of 50-100 people for a AAA game isn't cheap.

[psion]

About Deus Ex itself, according to Wiki :
"Warren Spector and Harvey Smith, the creative directors behind the first two games, are not attached to the project."
That is a big factor of how good the game might be, in how true it is to the original.

Not really. Like I said, Human Revolution seems to be copying the first game without adding much. If the creative directors were making Human Revolution, I think we could safely expect the next step in Deus Ex. I think Human Revolution is going to be true to the original in a sense that it basically copies it and doesn't provide that next step. Not that that's a bad thing at this point, though.

[Menacing Spike]

As well, all dialogue and flags are memory footprints.

Dude, a flag takes like a boolean. You can store billions of them in your RAM, and that's even before swapping.
Spoken dialogue, however, does take a fuckton of space. This is no good excuse however, as choices could alter the game by changing the gameplay; that can take far less memory. Your actions changing newspapers, npc presence/equipement/behavior, level structure, whatever.

[You, sir, name?]

About Deus Ex itself, according to Wiki :
"Warren Spector and Harvey Smith, the creative directors behind the first two games, are not attached to the project."
That is a big factor of how good the game might be, in how true it is to the original.

Not really. Like I said, Human Revolution seems to be copying the first game without adding much. If the creative directors were making Human Revolution, I think we could safely expect the next step in Deus Ex. I think Human Revolution is going to be true to the original in a sense that it basically copies it and doesn't provide that next step. Not that that's a bad thing at this point, though.

So they're pulling a BioShock (or Dead Space would probably be a better comparison), then.

[infernovia]

Deus Ex does what you are saying nowfocus, except implements it for hundreds of situations. How you handle such things is through flags that get set whenever the player does a certain action, and the programmer then has to account for all those flags. I don't think this is easy though I have not built games that are more complex than a 1980's one.

That's probably just a few "if(flag)" there and there, and a certain number of flag++. I don't see the difficulty.

Yes, but every game does that already (a game like Jak and Daxter and Gran Turismo could easily open areas based on these flags). Instead this is how it would go if you wanted the code to be readable or did not want to make a herculean translator.

Hong Kong: flagscenario<name>, flagscenario<name> flagscenario<name>, flagscenario<name>, flagscenario<name>, flagscenario<name>
Missions: flagmission<name>, flagmission<name>, flagmission<name>

And you would have some scenario where it goes.

if(flag and flag but not this flag if you have this flag) do this. If not, skip these giant lines of code that could be totally badass.

etc etc, basically the number of flags themselves would be really big. Whereas most games just use maybe 2/3 of these flags (good/better/best as in Bioshock or JRPGs that require a certain item or action that can be checked at the end anyway), Deus Ex would use hundreds of them that are quite unrelated to your stats making it quite a different experience. And it does take quite a little bit of skill to understand how to create a role-playing experience and allow the player to feel "free." If you can kill a main character, for example, your conversation-writing and story needs to be able to handle it. The problem is that you can allow the player to miss really epic moments if you can go this route, and you want players to have as many epic moments as possible.

Edit: I want to emphasize that the problem isn't in the storage of flags themselves. The problem is how you would account for it. Like I said, there is no excuse, game developers should have had this since 1990s. The tradition came to full bloom with Deus Ex, so now we just need the fans of the original to create something amazing.

[Menacing Spike]

Edit: I want to emphasize that the problem isn't in the storage of flags themselves. The problem is how you would account for it. Like I said, there is no excuse, game developers should have had this since 1990s. The tradition came to full bloom with Deus Ex, so now we just need the fans of the original to create something amazing.

Even in Deus Ex, killing a major npc changes... what? A few lines of dialog? Someone giving you an item? That chinese chick not talking with bob pages? Paul showing up at hong-kong, navarre not showing up at the unatco, simons not showing up at area 51? It didn't affect the main storyline in any significant way; the only choices you could make that mattered in the long run were about the ending and saving Paul or not.

[Ubik]

I don't see this linked anywhere in thread, so it's possibly something you haven't seen yet:

http://www.sarifindustries.com (warning, it's a 100% Flash site)

Sarif Industries is a company specialized in human augmentation. There is a hacking minigame that gives you a couple files. The augmentation designs on the site are beautiful as is the music (which unfortunately bugs for me after the minigame has been triggered).

[nowfocus]

Very cool site, but I'm a bit worried that there doesn't seem to be choices in augmentation. They only really have one listed per body part.

On the other hand, the trailer shows swords and guns embedded in the arms of the main character, so hopefully the RPG element is alive and well.

[archeleus]

Do want.

[Ubik]

I wouldn't worry about the main site showing only a few augmentations. The minigame reveals the arm blade shown in the trailer and some others - I don't remember what they were, it was a while ago when I unlocked the extras from the site. (And am now on computer which doesn't have the extras saved. They come as zip packets, giving a bit of hackerish feeling.)

[Uber_Apple]

Very cool site, but I'm a bit worried that there doesn't seem to be choices in augmentation. They only really have one listed per body part.

On the other hand, the trailer shows swords and guns embedded in the arms of the main character, so hopefully the RPG element is alive and well.

In this trailer at around 0:20 it shows the player selecting through a fairly large range of augmentations to install

[Swivelguy]

this trailer

This makes me pretty excited. Seems to follow the original Deus Ex pretty closely in gameplay.

[SlyReaper]

So this game is supposed to have a February release date right? At least that's what Steam says.

It's nearly February already, why don't we have a specific date yet?

[Ubik]

Seems to be delayed to April. (link, note that it's from 16 Dec 2010)

[SlyReaper]

NNNNOOOOO

[Swivelguy]

Retailers make wild guesses about release dates all the time. I wouldn't expect this to be any different. Even April sounds very quick, given how little time/money has apparently been spent hyping the game, for such a good franchise.

[Ubik]

EB Games Australia tweeted earlier that the new Deus Ex will be released in the end of August. Now Eidos Montréal has confirmed it in their tweet.

[SlyReaper]

[Menacing Spike]

Wait, will it have shitty DRM?

[You, sir, name?]

Delaying is good. Delaying means more time for QA. QA is more important than shipping on time.

Spoiler:

Yes, this is directed at you, Obsidian Entertainment.

[pseudoidiot]

QA? That's what customers are for!

[Ubik]

A Sarif Industries commercial. This company is clearly doing awesome job improving people's lives.

[WarDaft]

In response to earlier discussion about a branching storyline...

Having the story line increasingly branching only increases costs up to a point... after that point, it's a better use of your resources to model the game as a whole something like a game of chess between two AIs, where the player is a piece and their performance determines the outcome of the players' AI's moves involving the player. If the AIs always play the game with the same seed, then the player performing the same will have the same results in the overall game. So, that's overarching plot taken care of (I say taken care of while acknowledging that such a system would cost millions to develop, but I firmly insist that it'd be worth every penny) but what about dialogue? If the plot can branch even a fraction as much as the chess game tree, then there's no way we could ever record enough dialogue - the answer is to do the same thing with building character personalities. Instead of writing who knows how many days of dialogue, simply include a lexicon of spoken words in various moods, and build a personality for the character. Yes, it would take time. It could take an incredibly long time to get the base system working, and you'd still have to spend a lot of time building the personality for each character... but once you've built that personality, you can throw it into as many situations as you want. Note that this is a substantially less challenging task that creating a truly convincing chat bot - the chat bot would have to respond to player dialogue, not the players actions. The game can interpret the situation for the character personalities, and give them sure context rather than trying to derive meaning from a few ambiguous sentences of English. A properly done silent protagonist in such a game could result in a very immersive world, with the players actions taking the place of the slow wading through dialogue trees.

Do I ever expect a game like this to be made? Not in the next 20 years, unless I suddenly come into possession/control of a large game studio. And it wouldn't work with a small game studio, you couldn't build the characters sufficiently realistically to be believable.

[RandomPoem]

I agree with the delay. Delays = good. I have only ever been disappointed twice by delays... *cough Spore cough Alpha Protocol cough*

This game looks mindblowingly awesome, I imagine it and Skyrim will eat up a few years of my life. THE PERFECT STORM!!!

But seriously, although the other Deus Ex games were fun and innovative in their time, Human Revolution looks to be just that- a revolution. I can't waiiit!


JUST FOUND:
http://www.gamepro.com/article/news/218932/deus-ex-human-revolution-collectors-edition-detailed/
"IN EUROPE IN HIGHLY LIMITED QUANTITIES ONLY"
So not fair...

[EmptySet]

Having the story line increasingly branching only increases costs up to a point... after that point, it's a better use of your resources to model the game as a whole something like a game of chess between two AIs, where the player is a piece and their performance determines the outcome of the players' AI's moves involving the player. If the AIs always play the game with the same seed, then the player performing the same will have the same results in the overall game.

Speaking of this! According to IGN, Skyrim will apparently sport a system in which quests exist as a "skeleton" in which the roles will be filled dynamically using people, places and items you've encountered. So when the game calls for some idiot to hire assasins to take you out, it might be the boss of that skooma ring you shut down, or that shopkeeper you stole from, or that noble you called a pompous, over-taxing pillock, depending on exactly whom you've offended. Not exactly what you wanted, but a step in the right direction, maybe?