Deus Ex 3: Some Highs, Mostly Lows

So I just beat Deus Ex 3 last night I guess.

I cared so little whether JC Denton (or Adam Sandler...whatever his name was) lived or died or saved the world that I just pressed one of the two buttons in the supraliminal "CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE!!!!" room that I had managed to unlock. I should mention that I only unlocked those two buttons by accident because I was following X marks on the map.

Where do I begin on this shoddy, clever game?

There were some real high points. I liked the ability to choose my augs and be a sneaky dude. I hated the fact that the boss battles were all about shooting dodging shooting running shooting regardless of whether I had chosen the shooty dodgy runny skills.

I loved being able to hack stuff, hated that hacking stuff was almost always just a way to get more ammo or read stupid messages on boring terminals.

I loved the idea of a quasi open world. I hated the fact that it was a shitty maze with boring quests and loading screens. It's like the ghost of Eidos past didn't remember to tell anybody that the worst part of Thief 3 was the quasi open world with crummy loading screens and the best part was sneaking around cool non-linear environments.

I didn't want to save Megan. I didn't want to work for Sarif. I didn't want to kill USA MARINE GO GO GO! or The Girl with the Dragon Augment or Boris Vladimir Ilyitch Plasmovsky.

I didn't want to listen to Tiny Tim's fucking speech about how he was going to godblessuseveryone.

What I really wanted was to do was just blow the whole damn place sky high like Eliza was recommending so we could give George Lucas his bottomless pit back but there didn't seem to be a button for that in the "CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE!!!!" room and I was really, really bored by that point and didn't want to go searching for the jeffries tube that had the explodium in it.

My rating: thumbs up your butt Eidos.

[EDIT]

OMG I can't believe I forgot the zombies. Oh how I loathed the zombies.

You missed a thing. Because you can do that. That might even be the canon ending for the game.

I've cleaned up my prose a bit...I did know about that option but I was so annoyed by that point that I didn't want to even bother with it. I skipped Adam's final monologue too.

I liked DX3. It had its faults, mostly the boss fights and I think that you got too many aug upgrades, but it gave me a solid DX experience.

DX > DX3 > DX2 > Tebow

I'm still playing DX3 and am having a hard time sitting through the conversations. The voice acting is so universally terrible (though I hope Bill Cosby Bukowski Cop shows up again later) and the character models so twitchy and gesticulatory (Ralph Bakashi would be proud) while speaking, it just makes for an uncomfortable watching experience.

Yeah the body motions are reminiscent of the strange jerking and twitching that Geralt did in the Witcher. Having people gesticulate in bizarre ways does not create any sense of immersion. They'd be better off just striking a pose...arms at sides, arms folded, arms straight up. Anything.

My interest in DX3 dropped precipitously when I discovered that you can do anything to anyone in the police station, and the game will never acknowledge your actions. That's a big, fat, immersion killing failure in a game that's premised on reacting to what you do. Say what you will about Alpha Protocol—you'll probably be right—but it smartly avoided letting you make choices that had no consequences.

That's a great write-up. I'm still only in Shanghai (because of the LOWS parts of your post) but I already suspect the rest of the game will be like that. It's why it's shelved right now, to be returned to at a later date. :/

So much right, but so much wrong at the same time. Quite an accomplishment when you think about it ... and yes, I'd still rate it above DX2. It's far more clever and the consolization isn't so utterly painful.

I liked the game, but I had no expectations going in. Not that many of the criticisms aren't valid, of course. There are places you can make meaningful choices, though they aren't always obvious. Like how you handle the first mission, for example, where in my playthrough all the hostages died because I went after the hacker first. As a return to the Deus Ex setting I was fine with what I got. But the boss fights and why they were bad has already been covered elsewhere. And I agree that the zombie stuff at the end was just stupid.

What you're saying is that you liked the ending, right?

I think the devs admitted that they intended there to be way more to Montreal but that it got cut due to time constraints. Kind of how they ended up farming out the boss fights.

That still doesn't excuse the ending area zombies, though. But I guess some people like a penis on their beautiful woman.

I restarted playing this from the beginning after stopping for a few months due to a nasty quest bug that I hope resolved itself (I doubt it, but it's worth a shot). I do like it but I haven't gotten to the date-with-a-penis part yet. Trying to knock every bad guy out is a fun enough challenge.

Am I right that whatever you stick in your hiding spot in your apartment won't vanish if you go to Shanghai or wherever?

You can stick anything anywhere and it won't vanish, you just might not be able to get back to it. In Detroit the safest storage is indeed your apartment.

That being said, the game is much more fun if you just cheat into existence the weapons you want to play with.

Is the Missing Link DLC worth picking up?

I definitely thought so. Mechanically, it covers the whole gamut of player actions that Deus Ex 3 provides in a pretty tight, focused fashion. Storywise, it fills in a huge hole.

I feel like I'm the only person that didn't mind the endings. Clarification on that... I didn't like the ending combat/arena sequence which I thought was silly and very underwhelming, but I liked the endings themselves and watched them all. I thought they did a good job of narrating the theme of the game and the musings about the human condition.

And anyone who hasn't yet seen it, watch this interview with Elias Toufexis, the voice actor for Adam Jensen, while playing the game:

If you like DX3 then definitely and as scharmers said it fills in a pretty big part of the story. I've played through it twice (2nd time was a no weapons, no augs run to get the Factory Zero achievement) on "Give Me Deus Ex" difficulty and it took about 6 hours each time. My only real problem with it is that there is too much backtracking in the 2nd half. It's not terrible, but it does get annoying because of the "security checkpoints" (cleverly disguised loading screens).

So in a vain attempt to try & clean out my back-log I started this. I've never played any other DX before. I think I picked this up at some recent steam sale.

I'm about 30-45 minutes in, after the almost death, getting my implants and on my first assignment to the factory. I chose the sneaky option, but I'm stupid at trying to sneak around. I watched this one room with 4 guys for 5 minutes and didn't discern any pattern where I could sneak around them, tried to take one guy out soft and they all notice me. Since I picked silent option, all my rifles are one-shot wonders and I promptly died.

I'm really just in the mood to say fuck it and kill everything and take the loud option for here on out. This entire watch a room and try to find a sneaky way around guards that are on stupid patterns is not very immersive nor fun for me. I'm guessing this is most of the game. If this is correct, can you take the loud option and just kill everything in all missions?

Yes, you can just go loud the entire game. I actually prefer playing the game as sneaky until it stops being fun and then just shooting everyone. Find a creative way into the area and then just go on a murder spree.

I went loud for the first half of the game, including murdering the entire police HQ.

Unfortunately you're rewarded heavily for stealth and hacking, so it's worth hacking everything you can.

Also, do yourself a favor and get the faster sprinting and prolonged sprinting modifications (I think it's the lung-related one for increased stamina). I also went with high jumping. The gameplay does reward you for being able to jump high and land from higher distances, and the sprinting stuff is just to make the game quicker as you run between areas or missions or whatever. The weapons sort of take care of themselves as you upgrade them more.

Best Easiest way to deal with guards in a crowded room quietly is to get to a point where only one of them can hear you, make some noise (such as by jumping), hide behind something, wait for him to come to you, then do a takedown. Rinse and repeat until everyone in the level is unconscious. Stealth in DX:HR is almost ludicrously easy once you have it figured out.

Anyway, what I didn't like about the game was that for most of it, it seemed to know that you wouldn't be able to make any difference in the long run. It gave you a story and objectives that were all on a very personal scale; sure you had that whole shadowy conspiracy going on in the background, but the parts that really stood out for me were Adam and his interactions with the people around him; Adam searching for Megan, Adam finding out who's fucking with his boss, Adam helping Malik with her problems (and ultimately saving or abandoning her), as well as the problems of a bunch of other people, and of course, Adam discovering the details of his past.

Then at the end it suddenly goes NO, WAIT! YOU REALLY CAN CHANGE STUFF! LOOK, YOU'RE KING-MAKER FOR ALL THESE DIFFERENT FACTIONS! PUSH THE BUTTONS! PUSH THEM! ...and then it turns out all the endings are completely wishy-washy with none of them having any clear impact or connection to the plot of the original Deus Ex, and the whole exercise just ends up feeling kind of pointless. It would have been much better if they'd either gone with a Fallout-syle slideshow showing what impacts your actions had on the people and factions in the game, or if they'd actually had the balls to have some (or all) of the endings be definitively non-canon.

For fuck's sake, you people and your stories.

The game lets you do a ton of badass shit in dozens of well-designed locations at whatever pace you want to do it and with multitudes of approach patterns and tactics.

Who gives a fuck about buttonSSSSSSSSSSSSS

I gotta go with Pogo on this one. I had a hell of a time with this game, played it through twice and recently went through the DLC. Being a super stealthy cyborg ninja is right up my alley and made for a really fun trifecta with Mark of the Ninja and Dishonored.

Ok, thanks for the replies, I'll try this one again

Yeah, I've got to go with Pogo: Some lows, mostly highs. Boss fights were terrible and the three-button ending sucked, but 90% of the game is cyborg stealth ninja action and is pretty awesome. Not Dishonored levels of awesome, but awesome all the same.

I do wish that more people making choice-and-consequence games would realize that the ending is where you put the consequences, not another choice. (HEY MASS EFFECT GUYS I'M TALKING TO YOU.)

It's another in a long distinguished line of absolutely amazing games with shitty endings. Most of my favorite games for some reason have a point near the end where you just pretend it never happened. With DX:HR, it's only the absolute last level (and every boss fight, which are thankfully rare)

ME3 did it. ME2 arguably did a pretty terrible ending. Bioshock 1 was kinda downhill after the mid game reveal. Etc, etc, etc. Still all awesome rides until then.

When it first came out, people complained that it didn't let you stealth, that it favored people who just wanted to go in guns blazing. Those people are full of shit and have obviously never tried to play it just going in guns blazing. Every single boss is the same difficulty whether you bought all the combat augments or none* and every other part of the game is easier to sneak (and assassinate, if necessary) your way through--plus, something like half of the potential XP in the game is for stealth and takedowns, so anyone playing straight combat will be much, much weaker than someone doing a stealth run.

*except typhoon, the I WIN button of DX3 combat.

I consider Typhoon to be less the "IWIN" button, and more the "these boss sequences are shitty, ISKIP"

Because the ending is where all your actions take you, so it will always have a disproportionate importance. A great ending can carry a below-average game and a bad-ending can ruin an above-average game. If the story matters at all then the ending matters a lot. If the story doesn't matter one bit then the ending is generally irrelevant.

I'll take the bitching about endings in games more seriously when I see clear support for interesting endings rather than goddamn ending montages.

Waawaahing about a prequels endings all being equally likely to lead to the plot of the original game certainly is a new level of something though.

That's an interesting point but one that I disagree with completely. I personally have never played a bad game that was salvaged by its ending, nor a good game that was ruined by its ending. Which probably explains why I always enjoyed ME3.

ME3 was far too good to be ruined by its ending, though it left a nasty after taste.

I think my expectations of endings is just so low that I don't really care when I find out that the last 5% of a game was phoned in.

Like many pseudo stealth games (Alpha Protocol comes to mind here), Deus Ex is a lot more fun if you play it as an angry violent guy. Sadly you can't give Adam Jansen a Grizzly Adams beard and ballcap. If you've got high combat skills and tons of guns, the boss fights (at least as I remember them) became ludicrously easy.

And you can cheese the boss fights without much difficulty too - throw explosive barrels at the first guy, taze the second one until she's dead, and there's a YouTube video of how to take out the last guy with one punch. Granted, not as awesome as the kill phrases from the first game, but doable.

Oh, what? Alpha Protocol was a rubbish shooter. The only fun to be had was with sneakily taking out everyone.

I just wish DX:HR didn't give you more XP for going stealth. It should be its own reward, not part of some min-max system.

ME3's ending was so bad that it not only ruined ME3, it went back in time to convince George Lucas to put Jar-Jar in Episode 1.

You're totally high. The stealth game was the usual "take advantage of limited AI and robotic patrol routes" that was made tolerable only by multi-shot with the pistol. Other than that the amount of player empowerment. On the other hand, playing the game as angry bearded guy with a shotgun and rifle is hilarious and surprisingly easy; I actually find it's a much easier way to do things than stealth.

Jeez, you guys make me want to replay Alpha Protocol.