Incredible moment in Hell’s Kitchen where someone in an alley cat calls Lady Denton. If you go over to them you’ll see they are called “Thug” by your ID software. And if you continue to interact with them a few more times, their responses quickly shift from more harassment to pressured intimidation as they complain saying shit like “it was just a joke lady, chillout.” When they have nothing new to say their name changes from Thug to Loser.
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I am most of the way through Deus Ex Nihilum right now so a few notes
There are different kinds of bad voice acting, and Nihilum lands squarely in the wrong end of bad compared to the vanilla game. The writing itself has this unfortunate habit of trying to force its own memes, like it hopes that frequently repeating a line about wanting ham sandwiches will embed itself in the player imagination like “Oh my god JC a bomb!”
It is very easy to recognize the order in which levels were made, as the level designer’s skill grew by leaps and bounds over development. Some levels (including the first level which takes place in Hong Kong) are shockingly amateur while others look and feel almost as good as the levels in vanilla.
I am impressed by the effort that went into this project more than I am enjoying it, I expect this feeling to continue through most of the total conversion mods I intend to try.
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I feel like Deus Ex doesn’t entertain much of a gradient between a slaughter and perfect stealth. I can kill a few people, but sneak past or knock out dozens more, and then later get commended for being a psychopath by Anna and Gunther. Feels weird.
But in the middle of writing this I remembered maybe the reason Carter is admonishing me for my work at Castle Clinton is because after freeing the hostages from the subway I carried a box of TNT into the vents and dropped it on the NSF from above gibbing the entire platform below. So he’s got me on that point at least but I feel like it hasn’t always gone exactly like that.
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Look I bombed an entire subway platform but that was ONE TIME it doesn’t define me!!
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i love sneaking thru the vents and telling the hostages “psst you know you can just get on the train and leave, right” and then we peace out to Hell’s Kitchen and leave the NSF guys standing around with their thumbs up their asses
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Yeah that’s because your psycho bosses are trying to encourage you to kill more people lol. Paul and Carter are about as little casualties as possible (go figure, the two guys with NSF sympathies..!) and everyone else at UNATCO doesn’t give a shit what you do as long as you kill some people, and they will encourage you to kill more at every juncture no matter what you do, because Paul did not and they’re all disappointed in him for not being a good little soldier. It’s part of the story.
Also you deserved to get scolded for coming back to explode the NSF guys. That is psycho behavior even if you only did it once, JC!
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Alex and jaime are also anti unnecessary casualties, one of the funniest ways to infuriate paul AND alex is to kill leo gold after he surrendered
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Deus Ex Unreal Revolution is maybe 20 minutes long and is absolutely brutal in its mockery of 2011 game design
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Struggling to remember the slight justification for why the MJ12 cronies and their walker bots don’t just come at you and Jock when you get grounded at that Hong Kong facility. I think I remember a single document that was like “It’s too great a risk to let these morons out of their dorm while the recently installed fuel system can be tampered with and cause everyone to die.” I wonder if this small level was a late addition, or some part of a vertical slice or test are that got included after a quick polish.
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i WILL be the one to unite the triads by democratizing laser sword weaponry
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I found a copy of dX for 2 bucks at the op shop- it still has the receipt inside the case from when Luke in 2007 bought it for 10 bucks new, lol
Might give the LDD mods a go this time
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entertaining video in a frustrating way lol
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I’m on the FEMA superfreighter docked in NYC working on blowing the thing up. For the most part I have been trying to act non-lethally, using the baton and tranq darts when permitted. But seeing as everyone outside the front gates of this facility are Illuminati troopers and goons, even the Navy dudes, I guess, I’m willing to just roll with the stealth pistol. But it’s a bit frustrating that using the pistol seems to alert everyone in the room – even if you kill your target super fast. Maybe with an upgraded Pistol skill I can one-shot guys and there won’t be any time for others to be alerted when I open up with my attack. Right now though it feels like I can’t really quietly pick people off except by using the baton… and even then I’ve alerted people in ways I don’t quite understand.
Not that it really matters. Though I wish it did a little bit more. The ways that the game gets you to consider the value of stealth is probably its most undercooked aspect, I would say.
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Stealth pistol is just a trap option unless you have master pistol skill (and even then, lethal darts in crossbow do twice as much damage silently), this is even more true in all the gameplay mods (gmdx lets you just put a silencer on the regular pistol!)
oh shit….. the crap you just gotta find out by playing and experimenting. i should trust my gut more often when i think something kind of sucks in an exceptional way and try something else. i have been upgrading an smg on the side in the case i need to blast something down with a lot of bullets, and have been split on the decision to upgrade rifles to trained or pistols to advanced.
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Rifles at trained plus the sniper rifle without zooming in is the easiest way to do a LOT of lethal damage
The reticle bloom is a lie, it only measures aim drift at maximum range for a weapon, so hip firing a sniper rifle is 100% accurate up to around 100 meters at only trained skill and slowly grows more inaccurate until you hit its max effective range
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i had to do a doubletake on what thread I was in
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Redsun 2020:
ruined by random homophobia, the orientalist view of japan isn’t good, and the level design starts quite strong but quickly turns into “we gotta pad this shit out” underground lightless labyrinths full of thugs
Burden of 80 Proof:
the 2 hour long shitpost mod with no combat has the best level design of any of these mods so far
writing is unfortunately dated to that late 00s spike tv maxim magazine misogyny core that dominated video games but it could’ve been a lot worse
maybe my standards have been lowered by how every deus ex mod except Unreal Revolution cannot be recommended to anyone but this really has been the second best one I’ve played so far. A lot of fun scripting (at one point to earn money you agree to beta test some guy’s fps and its a pastiche of half life’s opening level where you’re fighting scientists to save the aliens) but the problems with the writing are too much to make this an unqualified recommendation
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