Raithe

So.. not a good idea to lose any of the most irritating class members out in the wilderness?

Ah, but did you ever actually feel that anyone really reacted to you as if you were the most popular do-gooder in town? Apart from a few cut-scene moments that is...

Although being able to pile all the crap in Paul's apartment in front of the door did help you keep him alive...

The interesting question being.. if a game makes you feel like it has c&c, does it matter whether it in fact does or not?

Now I'm feeling paranoid about this thread...

I'm a 32 year old lean, bookish , bespectacled individual.. with a receding hairline that at least is holding steady enough that I'm the first male of my dad's side of the family to not actually be bald before 30. I need a haircut, half the time I have a few days stubble, and my usual casual wear for moving around the village is comfortable black jeans, a light shirt over darktshirt..and a harley davidson leather jacket. While I can be charming and personable.. I know I'm not a visual lurve god. Hence.. Paranoia.

I'm growing paranoid. It's been the third time in recent days that I've been out running errands around the village..and had a group of students wolf-whistle at me.. And yeah..it's been a different group of mixed male/female students in a car each time...

I find it a legitimate concern that the focus on DXHR is "about the same as DX1, but a little less of this and that". That's playing safe and not pushing boundries. What new features to the gameplay are there? What is the scope? Certainly nothing to raise your eyebrow about. That doesn't mean that it is not going to suck, far from it. But it will not be a stepping stone to the genre as the first one was either. Mediocrity or banality should never be accepted. One : The hacking system, that's advanced beyond the "one button click / use multitools". Now there's an actual system you can game against, and depending on how you play it, can potentially open up other rewards if you're willing to risk the alarm being raised. Two: The 'social' aspect, that's supposed to be much more advanced. Not sure how well it'll come across, but apparently reading "body language" and suchlike to figure out what's the best method in persuading them to your side. Two areas that should have significant impact on how you play the game, and both taking advances that could potentially go horribly wrong.

Although they have yet to show off the PC version... And it has been said the PC will have a different HUD setup to consoles.

It has been said by EM, that while the "basic tutorial level" is the section pre-jensen-augmentation, the first "proper" mission is also tutorial easy and laid out in a manner to guide people into proper DeusExy attitudes. And various comments have been made by the people who got to play the 3 hour demos that the highlight isn't as glaring if you're playing the game compared to how it jumps out at you if you're just watching someone else play.. So that's possibly a good thing for general immersion and other things in the game keeping your attention.. (and yes, I know that could just be the naive optimist in me..)

I think what threw me partly was the amount of time in each act.. It felt like I spent half the game in act 1.. and act 3 was barely felt.. And sure, I became the "Champion of Kirkwall" but I never really felt as if I was some central power role within the city. Just more the annoying wildcard that kept causing the people who were in power positions to do stuff. I enjoyed a lot of the game, but a chunk of it did disapoint me. The way Bio had made so much fuss about showing your character becoming this prominent character and effecting the city over the 10 years... Maybe that caused me to expect something that could never be, but .. yeah, wasn't expecting what we actually got.

There has been large amounts of cleaning things up and shifting things around.. in preperation for this alsation puppy in a short while.. Now the evenings in and I'm just having one of those spacey times where I can't really figure out what I'm in the mood to deal with or dabble in.

For such a brief example of gameplay and level design as that trailer shows.. there seems a lot of rage and distaste being shown. I don't know, I mean, I loved the original and still play it.. but I think some of you have really rose-tinted specs on about it. There were some levels in DE that the various combat vs sneak routes were that obvious. We have no real knowledge of how much more subtle it gets as the game progresses, and it kind of makes some sense that the first "real" mission will open up with a bit of spoon feeding to highlight what you should start looking for for all those people that never played the original. If you look at the various descriptions of how the rest of that level plays it , it looks like there are a lot of potential options and ways to deal with stuff. Until we actually get to see more of it, I'm withholding any firm opinion one way or the other.

And it isn't always easy to find people who can understand the same pop culture / nerd references that you sprinkle around naturally..and then wonder why people look at you strangely irl..

Hm, I played DA2 last weekend. I finished Homefront off in those few hours of Friday night.. but apart from that I've been missing a real gaming mood. I couldn't even get into Alpha Centauri for more then 10 minutes. And thats practically sacrilegious.

A super-specialised virus that Legion manages to come up with..

So the point of game 1 was that The Citadel was supposed to be on a timer..that would open a gate bringing every Reaper back into the middle of civilised space..allowing them to take out the central communications and then wipe out all life before reseeding it. Sovereign was left behind as a failsafe system.. and because the Citadel timer was scuppered by the Protheans..he went there to try to activate it all manually. So having the rest of the Reapers make their own way in because the "short-cut" was aborted still makes sense. And since it was humanity that basically stopped them that first time..they'd go directly to wipe out the annoying species before they worry about the others... So it's not as if it's entirely a bizarre concept.

What, you'd like 5 months of "squeeee!! this game is teh rox0r!!" type discussion ? Heh. Nah. But there does seem an awful lot more attempts at the total cynicism and "this is going to be utter crap" about pretty much all games to be released. There rarely seems to be weighted of "this i like, this i dont like" discussions. About the only way it could be worse was if Bio was releasing it. Then the arguments of "this is going to kill proper crpg" and "bio-bashing vs bio-fanworship" and appearances by Vol to make statements and inflame opinion...

Well there's been some mention that the health regen is something that's quite slow.. Also, there are several difficulty settings. The hardest of which is named "Deus Ex".

And now we've got another 5 months to go for the naysayers to let everyone now how horrible it is and utterly doomed any further attempts to bring back Deus Ex.. and the enthusiasts will vigerously defend it.. Thus creating many varied thread moments.. And thus it starts here..

hm. given some of the repetitive arguments that can spring up... the 2am answer that springs to mind is "intellectual masochism"

To be the voice of the hopeful optimist rather then the usual jaded cynic... All the game journalist previews of the opening sequence and first mission seemed to talk about the great background visuals and pretty things going on around you as you play...

That's too bad. It's not that they are particularly bad in and of themselves, but it's going to get real old real fast having to sit through them every time you do a takedown. One thing game developers don't quite seem to understand is that no matter how incredibly cool something is the first time, it becomes eye gouging a thousand repititions later. I think that's one of the reasons they've tried to make it context sensitive. It won't be the same takedown every time. Sensitive to where the opponent is, if he's sitting down, standing close to a wall, to a door, in the middle of a corridor.. if you're in front of them, behind them, to the side.. It's not a cutscene sequence. It's in-game, just switching to the 3rd person view exactly as it does when you go into cover/stealth sequences. I'm not sure exactly how well it'll stand up through the whole game..but it doesn't look that bad.

Got a vet's appointment for the cat on monday. The fact that he's suddenly started humping the daylights out of any orange plastic carrier bag seems a little strange. He doesn't care about bags from Tesco's..but those orange ones from Sainsbury's he goes nuts for.