[Obdigore]

I grab up to 2 gas and 2 emp's, although I expanded my inventory a couple times since I have nearly nothing else to use praxis kits on (avoiding cloaking this playthrough), just sneaking when I can and butchering when I can't.

[Gothos]

One thing that bothers me is that the nonlethal takedowns are less noisy and noticable than deadly ones... why? I'd say a guy with his throat slit to the spine would make very little noise... But for nonlethals, punching a guy a dozen times is as silent as hugging his neck until he passes out from lack of oxygen. No sense at all. The game also makes shooting someone with a silenced pistol less noisy than gutting his neck. But hey, it's normal that movie and game makers have no fucking idea what a silenced gun sounds like.

[Obdigore]

The only thing I use the silenced pistol for anymore is Shooting out cameras when I'm being lazy and pushing the story forward.

[Silencer]

Gothos, on 08 September 2011 - 08:37 AM, said:

One thing that bothers me is that the nonlethal takedowns are less noisy and noticable than deadly ones... why? I'd say a guy with his throat slit to the spine would make very little noise... But for nonlethals, punching a guy a dozen times is as silent as hugging his neck until he passes out from lack of oxygen. No sense at all. The game also makes shooting someone with a silenced pistol less noisy than gutting his neck. But hey, it's normal that movie and game makers have no fucking idea what a silenced gun sounds like.

Strictly speaking, that far in the future, a gun might actually be able to be 'silenced'. This is why some manufacturers have started actively pressing the point that the attachment in question is a suppressor, not a 'silencer'. But yeah, it's an annoying facet of fiction to be sure.

[Gothos]

Today's military-grade suppressors are able to get a handgun's loudness from 14-160 db to... 120-130 db, which can still permanently damage your hearing.
Unless they find a way different that gunpowder to propell the bullets, guns will be loud as hell.

[POOPOO MCBUMFACE]

Silencers are one break from reality I don't mind in my games; balance, usefulness and the creation of more options/approaches to a situation beat out realism for me. Annoys the hell out of me in books or movies, though.

Also, about to try this one out. Hope it's good.

[Silencer]

Gothos, on 08 September 2011 - 09:14 AM, said:

Today's military-grade suppressors are able to get a handgun's loudness from 14-160 db to... 120-130 db, which can still permanently damage your hearing.
Unless they find a way different that gunpowder to propell the bullets, guns will be loud as hell.

The powder load is only part of the problem, though. Primarily the concern is with deadening the noise - that comes down to the material of the suppressor, the material of the gun, and the fact that, at the end of the day, you have a hole at the end of your weapon from which a round moving at near-supersonic speeds will emerge. Hell, if you're not using subsonic rounds, there's really not a whole lot of use for a suppressor at all. But, with significant advances in frame and suppressor materials, plus variations in the basic design of rounds (to aid further in sound dissipation and dampening)...you could reduce the sound of the gunpowder explosion significantly. Considering we have a protagonist who has two biomechanical arms hanging off his torso, that's not so far-fetched as it may seem at first glance.

Case in point, the Walther P99, chambered in 9x19mm comes with a suppressor which reduces the sound of firing by 33dB - and if you add water or foam to it, which it's designed to take when firing sub-sonic ammunition, a further 10dB can be cut away. That's 43dB being taken off the top, with current-gen technology. That will still make a loud noise, sure. But I'd be pretty confident of shooting someone in their own home without their neighbors hearing anything, and certainly not enough to attract unwanted attention. Granted, in your standard shooter, the people whose attention you do not want to attract are usually in the same room as your target, but if we can already cut 44dB off the sound of firing a gun? Give it twenty years, and that figure may well double. That's putting aside innovations in bullet technology which reduce the initial output without sacrificing wounding capability and range too much. Heck, if you're willing to drop a caliber or so to .32ACP, we're already talking low-noise emissions.

That being said, while it IS annoying, especially in current-era games, that suppressors are unreasonably effective and efficient (though, reducing damage seems to be a common 'negative' to equipping one - really? Because I'm pretty sure that being shot, irregardless of subsonic ammunition, will hurt like a mofo unless you're hopped up on some ridiculously potent drugs - which can be the case, but that depends on who you're shooting, so the across-board damage reduction is just stupid, and has less to do with the suppressor than the target) - we have to consider how often in these games you're playing a One Man Army. In real life, how many people do you think one soldier would be confident of taking on at a time, nearly-soundless gun or otherwise? Two? Three? Even with ammunition conservation and good aim, one magazine will likely net you two or three dead enemies, at best, assuming you don't get pinned down by suppressing fire (which you would be). So there's got to be some leeway, right?

POOPOO MCBUMFACE, on 08 September 2011 - 09:25 AM, said:

Silencers are one break from reality I don't mind in my games; balance, usefulness and the creation of more options/approaches to a situation beat out realism for me. Annoys the hell out of me in books or movies, though.

Also, about to try this one out. Hope it's good.

Which is where the claim to balance comes in. Of course, I personally despise games that make unrealistic leaps to reach said balance. I get it - sacrifices have to be made (they don't, but producers, deadlines, hardware limitations and so forth tend to make it seem like they do). But that's really no excuse to take the cheap way out all the damn time. You can easily have all those things mentioned while maintaining some semblance of realism - devs are just generally under too much pressure to make the next Call of Duty to afford the effort.

And yeah, it's worse in media where it doesn't serve a purpose other than the plot, in which it basically comes down to laziness.

Oh, it's good, btw. Need to play more.

[Cause]

Typhoon solves all problems all the time, in no time. If you dont mind killing things its the best 3 praxis points you can spend. Looking back I dont know why I never used it more.

[Gothos]

Not that much ammo for it right? Not used it yet.

[Mentalist]

Cause, on 08 September 2011 - 12:24 PM, said:

Typhoon solves all problems all the time, in no time. If you dont mind killing things its the best 3 praxis points you can spend. Looking back I dont know why I never used it more.

maybe next time.
for my first playthrough, i'm going 100% non-lethal. and, in a true DX fashion, i've mapped the cover button on the far edge of the keyboard and forgot it exists. even on "give me Deus Ex" the radar is more than enough to make stealth easy.

[Illuyankas]

Ingame any silenced weapon can actually be heard by enemies if they're within a reasonable distance of you. No walking up to them and blasting their heads off while their buddy next to them doesn't notice any gunfire.

Also you want all the gas grenades you can find, the cloud they produce hangs around for a while so reinforcements run right into it. Near the end of the game I took out two whole mobs of stupider than usual enemies on some stairs with one gas grenade.

[Dolorous Menhir]

Been playing a strict no-kills policy (now at Highland Park). Now I learn that the tutorial counts against this. So all those people I shot before I was even augmented have already blocked this achievement. Do they expect people to have sneaked through the tutorial on their first run?

Argh. Frustrating.

[Mentalist]

Dolorous Menhir, on 08 September 2011 - 09:45 PM, said:

Been playing a strict no-kills policy (now at Highland Park). Now I learn that the tutorial counts against this. So all those people I shot before I was even augmented have already blocked this achievement. Do they expect people to have sneaked through the tutorial on their first run?

Argh. Frustrating.

really? that sucks.

i've spent an entire day and evening in Hengsha. it's a great hub, but it really lacks a distinctive music score. I wish they'd have just put the Wang Chai theme in there.

the exploration is awesome, though. I've found a Praxis kit while I was meandering around! and jumping around the rooftops is amazing. I love that there are numerous ways to get from one district to the other.
Although when I first got to Hengsha and picked up the Mei's sidequest, I was under the impression that there are 3 districts. the fact that that is not so was a bit dissapointing.

can't seem to find much use for the wallpunch aug, though. only saw it being usable once, in Detroit, when

Spoiler

I tried to sneak into Derelict Row from the roof.

but since it inevitably involved snapping some baller's neck, I decided to find another way in.

also, once you get to Hengsha, Praxis points cease to be a problem. I have about 6 to spare right now, with hacking maxed out. I have the basics for all the exploration augs (except for X-ray vision. Is that any good?) and I think I may just max out dermal plating, for when I inevitably face another boss. Barrett was a pain.

This post has been edited by Mentalist: 10 September 2011 - 06:58 AM

[Gothos]

Allright folks, this post won't be really touching gameplay. However, some mild spoilers for this game may be in it, and some major ones for the original Deus Ex will certainly be.

I've been running my second playthrough today, and a rather minor detail made me think.

Today, I'd like to tell you something about Adam Jensen.



Now, I know he's got his reputation for being emo, and memetic about how he never asked for this and all that. He's got his hate thing for the merc leader, and I have - as possibly you all did - just rolled with it and didn't pay much attention. But, visiting his apartament now, something minor made me pause.
Consider, please, Adam Jensen's broken mirror.
It's pretty obvious how it got broken, what with the impact point - he probably smashed it with his augmented arm. However, think on that. There's that loading screen where he just sits there with a glass of something alcoholic, the glass showing signs of fracture. The smashed mirror, the glass, the cigarettes all around, the pictures of Megan on his desk - with the slight gloom of his apartament, it really started to sink in - this man is shattered. The broken mirror - I see it now, he was standing there for a long time, staring into his reflection, thoughts of Megan, of that fateful day, all the more reminded of by the mechanical body parts he sees in it - it's a lot to live with. He can't take the sight, he literally hates himself and takes a furious swing at his reflection's face. He is not okay, he's not dealt with anything, each day he relives that day when his life was shattered into little pieces. He was powerless to stop what was happening, and it haunts him. The empty apartament seems like a hollow shell, it's not a home. What's a man to do after everything important in his life is taken away from him?
I don't know, perhaps it's just me, but that one broken mirror made me see the man in Adam. The human being of flesh and blood, to the point where it felt like I'm intrudin in another person's life, thoughts, head. Like I'm violating his most sacred privacy - much like that hacker was using an auged guy as a remote proxy, here I am, doing the same. For perhaps the first time in my gaming history, I feel that I'd rather all this never happened to the guy. For the first time I stopped seeing a traumatizing entry sequence as just a nice excuse for having a game and shoot things, and instead I saw the tragedy behind it.
This makes Adam completely different from JC Denton from Deus Ex 1. JC Denton wasn't ever a real human being - he's just an artifical model with implanted memories. Jensen was a human being before all this was forced upon him. If there is one aspect where I think Human Revolutions is better than the original, it's this link, this humanity of the main character, who's really something more than an excuse for the player to enter the fictional world.

There, I said it. This is how I now see this.
And please, the next time you get annoyed at Jensen "whining", consider the broken mirror, and all that is behind it.

[Gothos]

Mentalist, on 10 September 2011 - 06:55 AM, said:

also, once you get to Hengsha, Praxis points cease to be a problem. I have about 6 to spare right now, with hacking maxed out. I have the basics for all the exploration augs (except for X-ray vision. Is that any good?) and I think I may just max out dermal plating, for when I inevitably face another boss. Barrett was a pain.

I'd reccomend 1 level of breathing, full cloaking, Icarus and the reflex package.
As for x-ray vision, yes, it's very good.

[Illuyankas]

My favourite thing about the mirror is that Adam's apartment PC has an email from the receptionist snidely telling him the replacement mirror isn't available yet and she's basically being a bitch about it, then when you read her computer you find out the mirror's been in the warehouse and available for weeks and she's just been blowing you off the whole time. So next playthrough I blew her off. Wait, I mean up.

Also EMP shielding is a good aug to get.

[POOPOO MCBUMFACE]

I don't see the point in the cloak/radar/stealth augs. The stealth is stupidly easy in the first place. Fucking minimap telling you which way your enemies are facing, goddamn, Garret wouldn't ask for this.

Currently sneaking into the medical center in Heng Sha. Game has a lot of good points and a lot of bad points. Overall, 3-4/5. Will reserve judgement for completing it and being sober.

[Mentalist]

I concur. after playing Alpha protocol for a solid month, cover-less stealth (ie, crouch and hide, FPS-style) is ridiculously easy with the starter radar.

[Illuyankas]

Getting the upgraded radar actually makes it harder to make out the direction the enemy arrows are facing, also it turns into a clusterfuck if you have too many on there at once. I have no idea if the x-ray eye aug adds them to the starter radar or not, I'll have to check it when I eventually do my no kills no alarms run.

[POOPOO MCBUMFACE]

Finished the game in a marathon yesterday. Left me feeling kind of... unaffected. It was good overall, but there were major problems with it, not least the shitty ending area. Managed to max out every augmentation apart from the popamole ones (making the radar even more omniscient, smart vision, social enhancer), which is ridiculously dumb. Has enough replay value that I might run through it again sometime, but once at most. 6/10, which probably translates to about 85 under modern score bloat.