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DX:IW - Playing for the first time and... actually enjoying it


Mr Mike

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Ok, a lot of us are old school gamers/TTLG board members around here and I realise I'm probably going to be slated for this but I'm finally playing through DX:IW for the first time and actually enjoying it much more than I ever thought I would.

 

I'm not a gamer per-say (you could count the number of PC games I've actually completed on 2 hands) and pretty much the only franchise I ever enjoyed was Thief. I first heard of Thief in what was probably a PC gamer preview, got excited, and the series hit the nail on the head for me. I built up a similar expectation for Deus Ex when I heard about the guys working on it etc but I really never took to that game. Combat was clunky, the story way too cheesy IMHO and it just didn't seem to feel cohesive. Now, I'm fully aware with the slating Invisible War received and so I didn't even bother looking into it but a copy (genuine) landed on my desk recently so I checked it out. Installed a hi-res texture pack and am so far up to Cairo.

 

Please, no spoilers, but what was the beef with this game from most of 'our' crowd? It's not awe-inspiring but fun enough to play through so far...

 

Btw, my main issue so far is fairly occurant system crashes. Is there a known fix or updates I can do for this? (TTLG info has long since gone).

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I cant say too much as I only played the demo briefly but the performance was HORRIBLE on my ole Radeon 9500 pro... If you add that to the stability issues we probably have half of the infamy covered.

 

Patch

 

http://download.cnet.com/Deus-Ex-Invisible-War-patch/3000-7492_4-10266565.html

Please visit TDM's IndieDB site and help promote the mod:

 

http://www.indiedb.com/mods/the-dark-mod

 

(Yeah, shameless promotion... but traffic is traffic folks...)

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I cant say too much as I only played the demo briefly but the performance was HORRIBLE on my ole Radeon 9500 pro... If you add that to the stability issues we probably have half of the infamy covered.

 

Patch

 

http://download.cnet.com/Deus-Ex-Invisible-War-patch/3000-7492_4-10266565.html

 

Actually, now that you mention it, I did try the demo at the same time Thief III came out. Thief was just about playable and DX:IW was indeed horrid. Flys along on my current machine though.

 

As for the patch, UK versions are already 1.2 :-/

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Yeah, I think the performance improvement (other than your newer hardware...) might be due to the patch as I believe that the Stencil Shadows (shadow volume calculations) were moved to the GPU (but that may just be legend and folklore...)

Edited by nbohr1more

Please visit TDM's IndieDB site and help promote the mod:

 

http://www.indiedb.com/mods/the-dark-mod

 

(Yeah, shameless promotion... but traffic is traffic folks...)

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I haven't played it in some years, but I didn'tt totally hate it. Some of the great ideas they had were allowing you to control security turrets (not just cameras like the first game). I also liked the way the security bots and other robots actually talked. It made the world feel more realistic. For example, a cleaning bot tells you to watch your step around it, and you can hear the spider bots saying things in the distance.

 

It is evident that they *tried* to give the player a good amount of choices, but...

Why did the individual maps have to be comparable in size to the block of studio apartments in which I live? At one point in the game, you will visit a familiar location, but now it is comprised of 3 or 4 maps, instead of the one that it originally was. As time goes on, game worlds should be getting bigger and more believable.

 

The physics system is also badly flawed, but not in the manor you might think. Pick up an explosive crate and hurl it at a door, or vent, or whatever else you'd like to destroy. Notice that it just harmlessly bounces off of your target... unless you have the strength augmentation. It seems as though nothing (except the player) takes damage from gravity/basic physics. This was something the original game got right. We could toss TNT off of a ledge or around a corner to destroy something.

 

You should try equipping the SMG and picking up an NPC. Now toss him straight up and begin firing while he is in the air. Hilarity ensues.

--- War does not decide who is right, war decides who is left.

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I played IW for a few hours, liked it somewhat, but I really was bothered by the teensy tiny levels, just really killed the immersion for me personally. original DX had huge massive sprawling levels that I liked quite a lot. That's probably the biggest difference for me.

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A guy on the DX:IW development team opened up once at TTLG about why the engine had such bad performance. One team-member was tasked to do a few improvements to the Unreal3 engine and ended up rewriting much of it on his own initiative, adding real time shadows, etc. At first they thought it was good, but as time went on they realized how limited it was and how it killed performance, but by that time they had to work with the tools they had. That's probably the main reason for the small levels as I understood it, but the XBox restrictions of course didn't help. But even with the small levels, if you could get around that, DX:IW was still decent; it wasn't like Katana-bad or anything.

 

Also I think there's a general opinion that T:DS was able to work around many of the limitations after learning from DX:IW, so it could have better levels than if TDS had come first. BTW, fortunately reports are & the record shows that the engine for Deus Ex 3 and Thief 4 has good performance. So they won't have any excuse if their levels suck! :P

What do you see when you turn out the light? I can't tell you but I know that it's mine.

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Also I think there's a general opinion that T:DS was able to work around many of the limitations after learning from DX:IW, so it could have better levels than if TDS had come first. BTW, fortunately reports are & the record shows that the engine for Deus Ex 3 and Thief 4 has good performance. So they won't have any excuse if their levels suck! :P

 

Yeah, TDS compressed the textures a lot more than Invisible War did...and I am pretty sure they used fewer high res textures. They found ways to cheat and squeeze as much into that...what was it..64 megs of DDR SDRAM? lol Blood brutal to work with that when they had to deal with the AI and other Thief related overhead.

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I haven't played it in some years, but I didn'tt totally hate it.

 

I did. I found time recently to dust it off my shelf where it lay unopened for a few years (much like Homeworld 2, Ground Control 2, Tron etc. etc.). What can I say: I installed it thinking that it can't be as bad as the reviewers said, especially with the high res pack. Boy was I wrong. The ANIMATIONS! When ppl ran, it looked like... well, the animations in Thief 1 and 2 are WAY more graceful, and I always thought they are a disgrace.

 

Anyway, just in case someone get's his hands on the source code and implements higher res models and new animations, I'll be in. Until then, I'm out.

 

 

 

 

P.S.: Loved the first DX game, by the way. Boy was I god with the sniper rifle...^^

My Eigenvalue is bigger than your Eigenvalue.

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I'm not a gamer per-say...

 

...the beef with this game from most of 'our' crowd

 

I don't know if you've cottoned on yet, but... often "gamers" are quite fucking hyperbolic (amongst).

"A Rhapsody Of Feigned And Ill-Invented Nonsense" - Thomas Aikenhead, On Theology, ca. 1696

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