Deus Ex Human Revolution - Conversation and Upgrades

And so we come to the third and final part of my amateur analysis and critique of many of the elements of Deus Ex: Human Revolution. Let's start out with a bit about the conversation mechanics in this game.

The conversation mechanics in this game are pretty solid, although a lot of the choices and conversations could better have been written in my opinion. I like that you can even install augmentations to aid you, allowing you to use pheromones and better read the person you're speaking to. This is just one of the many elements that help reinforce the idea that conversation is an important part of this game. Many parts of the game allow you to talk your way into places rather than shooting your way in, presenting what is possibly one of the best social engineering engines in a AAA game that has so many different systems. Yes, you can still accidentally select conversation options because you were skipping dialogue, which is something that is really starting to get on my nerves about most games. The people designing conversation engines should really do something about this.

Of course, this wouldn't be a Deus Ex game without an augmentation based upgrade system.

The upgrades are fairly well balanced, each choice encouraging a certain play style. I'm pretty sure it's impossible to get enough XP to afford all the upgrades(I certainly didn't), meaning you WILL be making choices. The selection is varied and interesting as well, meaning on your next play-through you're quite likely to be interested in trying a totally different upgrade strategy.

And last but not least, we have the hacking mini-game which you'll have to face in order to access security devices like camera's, turret and robots. You can also use it to shut off alarms and other things, as well as read e-mails that reveal more of the story.

Naturally, the hacking is 100 percent unrealistic, but you're not here for a realistic game. I actually didn't enjoy the hacking that much since there was only a pinch of strategy involved, but I do think it was well designed. Based on my analysis of things I don't get but other people love, I'd say the hacking simulations in this game are pretty good. From a design perspective at least, they're will constructed.

At this point I guess I'm supposed to tell you whether or not you should try the game. Obviously I loved it, if for no other reason than that I love me some Cyberpunk here and there. The only reason I can think of that you wouldn't like it would be if you have excessive graphics demands for games. I think this game pulled off a beautiful aesthetic, so I apparently don't. I recommend you give it a go even if you aren't into Cyberpunk, just because this game rocks on so many other levels.

The inevitable question is also whether or not this game is better than the original. I must say that I loved the original, but I actually enjoyed this game more. Kill me if you must, but I think the previous game's development time was spent largely enough on overcoming technological limits as to hamper the other elements. Then it still ended up looking like the inside of a rusty metal coffee can.

    --LazerBlade

Deus Ex Human Revolution - Stealth and Combat

A little while ago, I spent an entire post rambling about the story of this game. Lets see how much there is to say about the gameplay.

The main draw of the gameplay mechanics here is a simple yet powerful one. That is, simple to understand and think about. It's very difficult to actually pull off. There are a variety of different gameplay systems you'll be interacting with throughout the game, and all of them mesh and flow together smoothly. For example, I was stealthing around and hiding in ventilation shafts one moment, hacking into computers the next, and then engaged in a gun battle another moment later. Each of these elements play differently, and yet they all fit together to deliver a single, unified game. Let's look at them independently.

The first thing I noted right off the bat was the stealth. It rocks. Like a ton. Like, really. It ROCKS. I was originally quite pessimistic when I learned there was a cover system, but that went away quick when I noticed that I was applying it mostly to stealth. Cover based shooting is still there, but I'll get to that a little later. The main thing now is the stealth. I was originally expecting a watered down, simplified, and immensely boring stealth system. I was pleasantly mistaken. The stealth system is complex, interesting, and easy to start using. It balances quite well as something that takes a only minute to learn, but much practice to master.

Your footsteps make sound, guns without a silencer make sound, sound gives your position and presence away. Letting cameras or guards find bodies will give your presence away. Crawling makes your movement silent. Sound doesn't travel nearly as far past closed doors. The stealth system here is really a good one. This is especially because it mixes so smoothly with the action/battle system.

The action really doesn't stick out here in many ways. In the standard FPS mode, it's a standard FPS. You have guns and they go boom. I actually noticed that the weapon system was watered down in this sequel. In the original Deus Ex, there were different kinds of ammo for different kinds of guns. For example, the crossbow could be loaded with poisonous or tranquilizer darts. In this game, all of that goes away. Certain weapons kill, others don't.

The weapons aren't as intersting and varied as the original Deus Ex, but they're more fun than what you'll see in a cliche' AAA "realistic" shooter. There are actually some variations on the usual combination of the same FPS guns with different names. The P.E.P.S, EMP grenade, mine, R.D.E.D, tranquilizer rifle, and stun gun are all fun and interesting, although not especially. Of course, this game does have the usual canon of weapons(pun intended). There is a shotgun, pistol, assault rifle, and rocket launcher.

The cover system in this game is typical. It works, but it really doesn't stick out. I'm honestly getting bored of cover shooters, and I would have tagged the cover system as a bad thing if it didn't mix in and make the stealth more interesting. For all practical purposes, the combat system is cliche' and unimpressive. Fortunately it's not the forced center of the game. Since this game has so many elements, a functional combat system is just the icing on the cake.

Mainly of note when it comes to this games combat is that it ISN'T your cliche' "realistic" shooter. It's true that it leans a bit in that direction, but it doesn't lean far enough to bore me. This game takes the shooter thing and makes it a smoothly integrated, non-central(unless you want it to be) feature.


Wowzers. This is turning into my longest game review ever. There really is plenty to say about this game. Come next time, I'll talk about the mini-games and conversation.

        --LazerBlade

Deus Ex: Human Revolution - Story and Choice

There is a lot to say about this game. It's so full of good content, yet flawed in enough places to rag on it a bit. This might stretch out over 2-4 posts. What can I say? There hasn't been a good Cyberpunk game in awhile.

I'm going to jump into the story of this game first. One choice I loved, was when they had about half of the intro be in gameplay. Of course, I hated the first-person invisible train track bit, but it didn't last long. Anyway, you play Adam Jenson who works as security chief at Sarif Industries. Megan Reed (your wife? Girlfriend? I dunno.) works at Sarif as well, developing new human augmentation technology and planning on presenting about it at a soon to occur UN meeting.

The security system goes off, and Sarif(your boss) sends you down to the location of the breach to see what's going on. You see a bunch of heavily augmented mercenary dudes killing all the scientist and destroying all the research. You look for Megan, who is in that very section of the building, and probably in danger. Then some big mercenary dude shows up, punches a hole in your stomach, throws you through a wall, chokes you half to death, and then shoots you in the face.

The evil mercenary dudes leave you for dead. Of course, in game intros where the player gets shot in the face, it's never fatal. Sarif pushes what's left of your body to the limit, installing as many of the most advanced cyebrnetic augmentations as possible. After a six month recovery period, you come back to work. And so begins an extremely cyberpunk story where you start by setting off looking for answers about this random massacre where Megan and all her fellow scientists were burned beyond recognition along with their research.

As far as introductions go, this games is not the most creative. However, it does an excellent job of giving the context, setting the atmosphere, and actually immersing the player. The best touch was when you went through the labs looking for Megan before you got augmented. In FPS games, you're probably used to being a super-soldier who can jump 2 meters high and take several bullets before you have to recharge your health. In the beginning of this game however, you play a normal, un-augmented person who is weak compared to the augmented mercs you're up against. This is in contrast to you once you've been augmented. You experience the transformation Adam goes through first hand.

I have to talk about the choice and the endings. First off, your choices have no effect on the plot of the game until the very end. When I got to the end, I had 4 buttons to push, each of which represented a different choice. This ruined everything for me. I knew I was essentially just selecting from 4 different ending cutscenes, so I chose each one and watched each ending. This is NOT how player choice should work. This is worsened by the fact that the only selection that didn't paint you as a liar or someone who gives a slant on the truth painted you as mentally unstable.

On the gameplay choices side however, this game is almost stainless. Almost. We've probably all heard reviewers raging on this game for the mandatory boss fights, so I won't spend your time criticizing something which has already been criticized by everybody else. It was a stupid, bad decision. All the other choices work pretty solidly though. The game does an excellent job holding up a number of different ways to handle each situation, each one having different consequences and outcomes. The game will be worth playing through multiple times for most, just because of all the different ways things can be done.

Another good aspect of the game's story is non-vilification of the player. Many games will impose a set of morals on you, judging your choices as either good or evil. In this game however, the moral dilemma is spun to match your perspective.

That's another thing. When I started this game, I was of the opinion that there was no dilemma. This game convinced me otherwise, although leaving my perspective the same. I'm personally pro human augmentation and enhancements. IRL.

The story really isn't air tight, it's just a few levels above what we've come to expect. I think the story here is a step in the right direction. I would definitely like to see more games with stories like these.

Wow. I spent this entire post just talking a little bit about the story. This serves to exemplify how much there is to say about this game. Assuming the reason I go on isn't just that I'm obsessed with Cyberpunk.

    --LazerBlade

Icicle Cyberpunk Theme for LMMS

Well gents, I've gotten more than a little fed up with the stupid aesthetic and logo shipped with LMMS. I decided to create my own.

The Icicle Cyberpunk Theme is a work in progress, but still pretty to look at. Above this text is a my new splash screen, which although not amazing, I consider to be much better than the original. I've chosen a cyberspace style and designed the theme accordingly.

I don't know when I'll be done or to what level I will change the look. Hopefully I can get something more appealing and sharp than the usual dull grey look though.

I will note that it's really a pain that LMMS doesn't read certain colors from the theme file. This forces the same boring grey in several places where it should be customizable, leaving manual patching of the hardwired code as the only option. This may delay completion of my theme, but hopefully won't be too much of a hassle to deal with.

Just to dream a little bit here, I'd love it if I could eventually replace the default theme and logo. They've  been in need of a makeover for a long time.

        --LazerBlade

Fun in craziness

Between studying full-time and being in a wedding recently, my schedule has maintained a constant state of flux and unpredictability. I unfortunately haven't had time to write up any cool articles or anything for you, so this time around I just have a quick update.

The tracks on my new album are pretty much finished, with October 22nd looking like a probable release date. That's only a week away, so I'm scrambling to get things 100% ready. Track listing art looks good, so here's a preview of the more or less finished version:

The idea started as being themed after the Synth1 Virtual Synthesizer. Then it morphed it's way from being based on LMMS plugins to a cyberpunky imaginary synthesizer that was drawn completely by me. I like the outcome, so I hope you enjoy it.

So yea, nothing much else going on. The reason I haven't been doing a lot of game related stuff is because this music is part of my official education, giving it priority over the more fun things like programming. Hopefully I will soon have more time to spend on programming and games, but we have yet to see what the future brings.

        --LazerBlade

Work in progress: a tribute to One Must fall: 2097

We all know I'm a big fan of the DOS oldie, OMF: 2097. I really liked this game, hated the sequel, wish there was a new one somewhere, etc. I've been interested in recreating parts of it for the longest time. I even recently finished a remix of the theme music, planned to show up on my next album. Heck, I even made a fake trailer for a re-make back before I knew much about animation.(Yea, you're not going to see it. I've embarrassed myself with it enough times already. ;)

Anyway, let me dash you hopes early and say I'm not planing on remaking the game. Now, exactly what am I planning then? A short(around 5 minutes) 3D movie attempting to capture the feel and awesomeness of the game. To show you I mean business, here's a render of one scene I'm working on:

                                  (click for reasonable size)

You'll note the bots are in the standard t pose. This is because I haven't started animation yet. They are however, fully rigged and ready models. I'll be honest, I've had the jaguar model sitting around since the first teaser. The Katana is the only new robot on the table. You can probably tell that I'm not going for an uber-realistic or high detail short by any stretch of the imagination. The simple torches demonstrate this. I'm just trying to make it look good and capture the feeling.

In the light of story, I haven't quite decided if I'm going to include much of one yet. I'm pondering my options, but mostly I'm just cranking out art assets at the moment.

Finish this or not, it will look really cool in my demo reel.


        --LazerBlade

More Cyberspace experiments

As you can see, it's hard for me to stop working on this setup. It's really pretty fun, and I'm always thinking of making that one little tweak. It's almost like this is becoming a project in of itself. It's not, but it sure seems like it.

Anyway, it's hard to figure out what people will notice first. I can't, so I'll just list some of them in no particular order.

I added some lens distortion to make it seem more unique from reality and give it a little bit of spice. On top of that, I also added little glowy things that fly around. I mentioned the importance of such things in my post about cyberpunk visuals.

I'm thinking the towers can use something so that they seem brighter, but without losing the strong contrast the wireframes have.

Keep in mind that I did all of this is probably less than 20 hours. This just shows how simple it is to create some fairly cool cyberspace visuals.


       --LazerBlade

Cyberspace - Almost a week later

So, I posted a few days back about cyberspace and cyberpunk visuals. I even included a nifty cyberspace visualization I threw together pretty quickly. I ended up liking it, and couldn't stop tweaking around with and improving it.

I finally pulled myself away from tweaking for a whole nine hours in order to render an animation for you:

I admit, the camera motion is pretty simple and a bit too fast, but I still like it. In fact, I'm thinking about contributing it to that web-show I mentioned I was making music for. I showed it to the rest of the crew and they're liking it, so it will probably evolve into the main cyberspace visualization of the show.

I can change the animation in a pinch, so I would only have render times to worry about. I could just wait for the very rare occurrence of the phenomenon where I get more than six or seven hours of sleep.

Yes, we still haven't released our first episode yet. Did I just say we? I'll probably be one of the main contributers, and I'm already an official part of the group. Be a little patient, links will come when the first episode it out.

I'll probably keep improving this, as there aren't any kind of little glowing things flying around. I should also add some kind of fish eye camera effects and some motion blur. That will probably make my already ridiculously over-sized composite network even bigger, but meh.

Cyberpunk Visuals

How many of you have seen cyberpunk or cyberspace visuals in one form or another? A lot of you huh? Well, as a techno-geek, I'm here to over-analyze it for you. Let's say you want to have cyberspace in your game, or maybe you want to add that extra cyberpunk touch to the visuals. Maybe you just want a new desktop background. Whatever the case, I love this subject, so it should be fun to read. ;)

There are basically three kinds of cyberpunk visuals. The first, are cyberspace visuals. You have glowing things on top of black or near black, probably lots of other glowy things flying around. You can throw in some 0's and 1's for good measure, and maybe some assembler language. You can have big glowing towers, grids, circuit-board designs, or whatever else you want.

Some examples of cyberspace visuals:

Then you have urban visuals. These are basically demonstrations of industrialization, dystopian societies, and a post apocalyptic world. Common themes include Night time cities, places that look like they've been bombed out a hundred times over, huge buildings, and dark alley style places of the underworld.

Examples:

Even after urban visuals, you have cyborg visuals. These are here to express the ideas behind the combination of man and technology more directly. Cybernetic implants, people with wires hanging out of their heads, androids, and others are prominent here.


Examples:

Cyberpunk visuals aren't extremely strict however. They also seem to range from doing nothing but communicating ideas to being there only for the visual appeal. All in all, it's not that hard of a style to recreate. Naturally, cyberspace visuals are the easiest, as they contain no real world objects. Urban visuals are usually in the middle, needing a lot to be done, but not necessarily in extremely high detail. And cyborg visuals tend to be the hardest, especially if they are CG and even more so in real time. This is because of the huge amount of detail required.

I can even crank out some cyberspace visuals right now...

.
That took less than an hour. It was pretty simple really. I used gimp to draw me up a long string of zeros and ones, then slapped them onto a bunch of transparent flat quads. After that I took the schematic's I'd drawn up earlier and stuck them on a floor plain. I threw in some solid wireframe towers and a solid wireframe monkeyhead, and then was ready for post-processing effects. That was actually the hardest part, and if you don't believe me, then take a look at my composite network in blender:

See what I'm saying?


Anyway, duplicating cyberpunk visuals isn't that hard, and can be really fun. That said, if you're having trouble doing cyberpunk visuals, you can always start by trying to duplicate another cyberpunk scene. This way you'll learn a lot about how cyberpunk visuals work while getting ideas for things to use in your own creation.

As I implied, cyberpunk visuals are fairly loose. There isn't some set of rules that I check a scene with to decide whether or not it's cyberpunky. To quote cyberpunkreview about what loosely describes cyberpunk:

"Cyberpunk is about expressing (often dark) ideas about human nature, technology and their respective combination in the near future."

This is basically the same for cyberpunk visuals. Cyberpunk visuals are simply visual expressions of cyberpunk ideas.

Hm, I like that picture I made. I think it will be my new desktop background for awhile.


        --LazerBlade