Xor42

I've messed with savegame editing a bit and I'll throw my 2 cents in. The game will crash if you mess with the wrong value, or add an extra byte in anywhere, so be careful and you should probably back up your save file in case you make a mistake. It's usually easier to start over than to find where you messed something up. Data values are in hex, meaning a numberset going from 0 to F as was explained above. You can use the Windows calculator to freely convert between decimal and hex. The largest single value a byte can hold is FF, or 255 in decimal, and there are 4 bytes, making the maximum possible value 2^32/2, or about +/- 2 billion because the values are signed. I'll spare you more pointless detail, if you're really curious take a digital systems class. Variables in the save file seem to be laid out like this: Variable name, null byte, 4 byte data value, 4 byte data value. The second data value is probably some kind of ID, as it generally increases from variable to variable and changing it crashes the game. The first data value is what the game actually reads for a given variable. When editing savegame variables, only change bytes 2-5 after the name of the variable. Changing anything else will probably crash the game on loading. In other words, the bolded range here: N_SOME_VARIABLE_NAME.00.00.00.00.01.00.00.00.12 Negative numbers count backwards from FF.FF.FF.FF (which is probably -1 but I'm not going to check), so -6 would be FF.FF.FF.FA or something close to that. The only value that will probably go above 255 and therefore take up more than one byte will be money; you can change to 00.FF.FF.FF which will translate to about $2,000,000, and that should be more than enough to buy everything you could ever want. Also, you can set health as high as you want and it won't go back down until you level up or change areas. Just be sure you don't accidentally set your health to a negative number or crazy stuff could happen. While it's technically possible to do so, I don't recommend trying to do hex editing in notepad. Get a hex editing program; they have a million and one day to day uses. My hex editor of choice is XVI32 because it's free.

I disagree with both of your suppositions for several reasons. Movie technology has changed just as much over the past, say, 50 years as gaming technology has changed in the past 20. CGI simply didn't exist until around the 80s, and it wasn't very realistic until today. What you see in films today is substantially different from films of old. Just look at recent CGI-fest movies like Transformers or Avatar and older movies like Jason and the Argonauts, or the difference between the original Star Wars trilogy and the new trilogy. "Basic concepts" change as well. As society and the world around us changes, movies have changed as well. The best stories reach across generations and are still relevant today, but many times older movies deal with issues like the cold war and are somewhat outdated today as a result. I'm not really sure what else you mean by "basic concepts", aside from maybe the fact that all movies are committed to film and have actors, but such generalizations can easily be applied to video games as well. As for gameplay changing with technology, I find that difficult to accept as well. Gameplay has unarguable changed as video games have "evolved", but what is the reason for that change? I assert that modern gameplay mechanics have arisen from the game industry itself. The game industry has been monkey see, monkey do for many years now, and whenever a new game comes out that achieves critical success and sells a lot of copies, other companies are soon folding the mechanics of that game into their own. It's gotten so bad that practically every game tries to blend what would have once been three or four separate genres into one product, with many elements usually done poorly as a result. These modern gameplay mechanics (many of which I personally cannot stand) are simply the result of companies taking the safest route when making games. It's much easier to do something that someone else has already done than try something new. As to the original topic, I felt that AP took quite a bit of inspiration from Deus Ex, but I wasn't particularly impressed with the way AP did it. I don't want to go into too much detail since this is supposed to be a spoiler free board, but I always felt that Deus Ex had more cyberpunk "realism" packed into it than any other game I've ever played. Perhaps the (by modern standards) low quality textures had something to do with it, but I always felt that the DX world was grimy and used, just like a society suffering all the problems that occurred in DX would be. I think AP was trying to appear brighter, as may spy movies do, but that entire genre is so overdone that it didn't really feel novel to me. I think that's my main problem. I can't think of a single other cyberpunk game aside from System Shock 1 and 2, so the world as a video game felt new to me. I've watched cyberpunk movies and played cyberpunk tabletop games, but cyberpunk video games are so rare that everything felt novel, even if the story really is cliche. For AP, however, the setting is modern day earth, and that's really been done to death. To make matters worse, the story is also fairly cliche. I felt like I knew where it was going almost from the first mission. Still, I don't want to leave the impression that I disliked AP. The game overall was pretty fun, and I will definitely replay it if Obsidian ever decides to release a patch (hint hint).

Shadow Operative always seemed a bit silly to me. The concept of magic invisibility that let me walk right past people without them noticing was kind of weird and I didn't really use the skill that much. But then I got it up to Expert and I found myself stealth killing entire rooms full of guards every 90 seconds without taking damage. It completely removes any challenge from normal enemies and should probably be toned down to maybe 8 seconds at Master. Brilliance shouldn't refresh Shadow Operative. Other than that it's fine. Chain shot needs to be toned down. I killed most bosses using Chain Shot twice and hiding behind cover for the rest of the fight. On hard. Other weapon skills are mostly fine. There are design decisions I don't really agree with (forced boss fights, for one) but those are etched in stone. Maybe if they release a sequel that can be addressed.

I can confirm this worked for me, too. Lowering the resolution one click actually disabled dynamic shadows and solved almost all my performance and gameplay problems.

The pins in the lockpicking minigame were moving far too slowly. After messing with various settings like mouse sensitivity and DPI for a good hour and reading another thread, I discovered how to actually disable shadows (this is another bug they need to fix), which fixed some framerate issues and somehow made the pins move faster, and I was able to continue. The hacking minigame is inconsistant and far too jittery on a PC mouse and the keyboard controls go too slowly, as well, but I've gotten used to that somewhat and spy's luck went a long way toward helping. I've more or less solved my issues with minigames but I still feel strongly that they add nothing to the game and exist only as an annoyance.

I never said the game shouldn't be challenging. I'm saying that having to spend an hour messing with my mouse controls so I can pick a lock isn't fun and the game shouldn't force me to. I have no problem reloading because I was spotted or shot to death - I can live with my mistakes and enjoy a challenge, but when I am physically incapable of completing a minigame because of poor controls, that only frustrates me. A message like "you do not have enough lockpick skill to pick this lock" or "your lack of skill has jammed the lock" due to a static skill check would be better, and would also fit with the whole "RPG" thing. Minigames are terrible and I cannot stress enough how much I would like to see them disappear from modern games.

I have a decent sabatoge skill and all the intel for the level, and I still can't complete the lockpicking minigame. I'm completely fed up at this point.

Remove minigames. Seriously, minigames are the absolute worst thing to happen to the RPG genre since BIS was closed. There is absolutely no reason for them to be in the game other than to waste the player's time, and if I had a dollar for every time I had to reload after losing a minigame due to poor control issues I'd probably have enough money to pay for my copy of AP and about an hour of my life back from staring at loading screens. If you won't remove them, at least fix the terrible, terrible control of both the hacking and lockpicking minigames (the circuit one isn't bad, just tedious). I could probably go on about this for a few paragraphs, but my level of frustration is wearing down and I really need to finish the Taiwan hotel level.