my preferred helibase → airport sewer route does not have a rebreather. with trained and aqualung it like literally doubles your lung capacity which is good enough for the entire game. its not like bioelectric energy is at a premium pretty much ever in the vanilla game. when I was doing the ultimate run where you can’t train skills or use anything lung capacity is the thing I missed the most lol.
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I literally started replaying the game yesterday because once I start talking about it it’s impossible not to reinstall. just played through straight to the mole people tunnels in one sitting
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I usually end up investing in Rifle so I can use a sniper rifle as a lockpick (It does enough damage at Master skill to break open most doors)
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and destroy security cameras!!
i love that you can overcome lack of lockpicking/hacking skills/resources by just blowing shit apart i remember throwing grenades into rooms full of locked cabinets at times
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LAWs are complete dogshit compared to the gep gun but if you ever find one near a door you need to blow open (like at the airport) it will destroy everything in a like three room radius which makes me laugh every time
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i think i have literally chucked those at dudes heads to kill them more than ive properly fired them lol
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laws are speedrunner gold because they shoot through walls
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Stop making me wanna replay this.
This thread has also got me curious to try Invisible War for the first time. I feel like it’s maligned but can’t be that much worse than any other. Is it just a case of following up a ‘game of all time’
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IW was the first game I ever knowingly played with Havok phyisics.
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IW has the consolification problem, levels are smaller and more broken up by load screens, and the cool multi-route design is much more limited. Less interesting character development cuz they took away skills. Also has kind of an annoying universal ammo system (every gun uses varying amounts of the same resource)
Other than those issues though i think its pretty dece. Like the levels are still well-designed even if they’re tinier, the various arcology hubs are pretty cool, plot feels a little… redundant but there are some neat ideas. Short game too, so it doesn’t wear out its welcome. It is pretty much weaker than the original but not terrible
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IW and HR pretty much perfectly bookended the era when we had lost the ability to make big budget PC games and they are underwhelming in exactly representative ways
HR came out like two months after Witcher 2 which I think of as the beginning of the return
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IWs main fault is being on an engine that absolutely could not run well on the original xbox, thus introducing many compromises
its as if the game is a cut down console port of itself
There’s good stuff in there. It is a pretty decent game even if it is a pale shadow of what it could be. The posthuman omar faction is the highlight of the game, theyre a creepy hive mind, but not antagonistic (unless you decide to antagonize them)
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In some ways it feels like a precursor to some of the Starbreeze games.
On the one hand, IW’s weapons were not well balanced, and melee is so powerful, and you can max it out so quickly, that it’s not worth engaging with any of the other weapons in the game. This leads to every combat playing out the same way as you sprint up to someone and punch them in the head.
On the other hand, you can punch a robot so hard it becomes your friend.
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iw has a gun you can shoot people through walls with so it’s good
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i remember liking the little subplots in IW best. your former dormmate who gets catfished into joining the Omar, the coffee companies who are in a fake competition with eachother, the hologram popstar who’s secretly a surveillance AI. i didnt find the main plot great shakes, it’s a bit too much of a retread of the original (especially by the third act, when named characters from the OG take more prominence) but bits like those add some nice texture to the setting that’s not always apparent at a glance
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the best thing about IW was being able to pick up bodies and launch them like you shot them out of a cannon, i filled so many dumpsters with bodies
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IW revolves around nanoaugmentation because that is the obvious plot thread to follow up on. It’s something the Illuminati and VersaLife had to engineer into the human genome; 99% of the population is fundamentally incompatible with nanoaugmentation technology. Thus the Grey Death plague, as its name alludes to, is actually the result of widespread human experimentation to remold our immune systems into being able to accept nanites. The high lethality rate in these experiments is why they weaponize it. Multiple homeless people in NYC tell you they were kidnapped by guys and injected with something. This is the overarching goal the Illuminati is working towards the entire time; it would give them total control over the one thing they really haven’t been able to subvert, which is peoples bodies and minds. meanwhile the new neolib Illuminati guys left over after the first game simply want to sell the ability to use this technology to rich people. JC/Helios plan to invert this control system to put humanity into one big direct democracy where augmentation is equitably available to everyone because its inherently part of everyone now. it takes Tong another 20 years to perfect the nanites for doing this which is why the nanite storms (which exist because MJ12 labs lost containment during the Collapse) are so bad for people, why JC/Helios hasn’t done this yet, etc.
Simons implies in a few emails that they’ve come very close to cracking the problem with the third model, aka Alex D, the protagonist of Invisible War. This is why when Tong gives you your covid shot later in the game it allows you to help JC bring his plan to fruition, the nanite serum ApostleCorp was working on was the missing link between the engineered genome, total compatibility for humanity as a whole, and compatibility with Helios. There wasn’t really any other compelling angles to take in a sequel, this is the major plot thread they were dangling by the end of the first game, along with there still being non-MJ12 Illuminati members out there, regardless of what ending you picked. if you read the pitches for a bunch of the canceled Deus Ex prequels/sequels Ion Storm was thinking of doing they are all pretty bad sounding comparatively.
When Invisible War no longer has any defenders it will be because I have finally died
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One thing I enjoyed about IW’s plot is they did the classic goofy thing of trying to make all 3 endings simultaneously canon and I love when video games do that. One of the best books in morrowind is Where Were You When the Dragon Broke which is about how all the endings of Daggerfall are simultaneously true for metaphysical “time and reality stopped making sense” reasons
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