You missed mentioning the part where the game literally crashes and then restarts in order to load the next area. It was the most efficient way to dump its memory and create space for the next level. It's a marvel of technology.
I didn't know that, that definitely sounds accurate though as it would always throw me to the desktop in between levels. I'll mention that in the followup.
"Even in this game JC is still beyond all of this." Exactly how I felt when I finally got that point in the game. It's like that was the one portion of the game that wasn't compromised and actually felt like I was playing a Deus Ex sequel.
if no dumpster find a tub. if no tub find a janitors closet if no closet find a hole if no hole find a small room if none exists pile them in the middle of the place you are at
Fun for me, too. I'd get the strength aug, then see how far back I could stand and fling bodies into dumpsters. Should be an event in the 2076 Olympics.
8 GB is all nice and good, but Deus Ex would still be limited on consoles due to sacrificing the multitude of hotkeys for tree-structured inputs and digital mouse aiming for the poor analog thumbstick variation to accommodate the controller. Not to mention the fact that console hardware is weaker still, and Microsoft is discouraging utilizing the Xbone to its fullest potential via the Azure layer they're implementing for cross-platform play; some games just aren't meant for consoles, simple as that.
@@Emmanu013 it worked in that the entire game took place at night and outside the street lamps would likely be more of an amber color, but inside it should've had differences, bluer florescent looking lightings reds and strobey bits in clubs, neutral lights in offices, but not all of it is stylized ambient yellow/dark. I think Mankind Divided had a better lighting arrangement for the setting.
Regarding saving Paul in Deus Ex, instead of fighting your way out through the front of the 'Ton (24:30), you can just hide in the secret bookshelf-bunker until Paul cleans up the goons, just wait till the shooting stops. Saves you a bit of ammo, damage and brother.
All those complaints about this game make me wonder why hasn't Ross done a video about the STALKER franchise yet. Cool inventory system? Yes. Interesting, open world? Yes. Ammo management? Yes. Difficulty? Yes. Sountrack? Glorious. Immersion? Absolutely. Interesting story and a big backstory behind it? Yes. Ragdoll and dumping bodies into nuclear waste? HELL YEAH. And tons of hilarious, non-gamebreaking bugs to talk about. He mentioned those games once in a video so I assume he has played at least one of them, so I wonder what are his thoughts about it.
***** There's the thing with his channel where he either covers games that almost no one heard about or are very old classics. Now we get the Deus Ex mini-series as the new game is coming and apparently Ross has a soft spot for them. STALKER doesn't really fit anywhere, as it definitely isn't a widely known game, but isn't that obscure either. It's also not that old. So I'm just throwing it out there, hoping that one day I'll see a hilarious rant about the shortcomings of one of my favourite series. Ross also has a very good taste in both games and music, so I just wonder how the STALKER resonates with him.
+Templar Knight I heard first about The Secret World from Ross. None of my friends have heard about it either. Granted, none of us are much of an MMO people, but still. The Wolfenstein was a flop and I feel like it was covered because of the recent reboot-mania. Basically, for a game to be covered it has to be obscure but interesting in some ways (most of the content), a classic that he likes (Strife, Tyrian), some sort of enjoyable 'discovery' he didn't expect from a game (Still Life, Secret World) or a game that he can link to some of the recent events (Wolfenstein, Deus Ex, all the seasonal specials). So unless Ross 'celebrates' the 26th of April by squatting by a campfire in his gas mask and pouring vodka through the filters, then it might take some time for it to be covered.
the problem with STALKER games (that I absolutely love) is that the location grows "seen" fast... it's better than Fallout 3, but it's a similar problem...
I liked how New Vegas did it's ammo. If you wanted to play the survival mode it would have weight, but you could still carry thousands of rounds with even the weaker characters. There were also tonnes of different ammo types. FMJ, HP, AP. Also guns that could use .357 magnum could also shoot 38. special, and guns that shoot 5.56 could also shoot .233 just like real life.
The _only_ thing that affects whether Paul lives or dies is whether JC leaves the hotel via the front door or the side window. None of the dialogue or anything else makes a difference.
SHUSH! DX1 WAS PERFECTION AND DX2 RUINED IT ALL! Nah, srsly. Wooden dialog? Expressionless character animations? Plot holes in the vast, overlapping conspiracy narratives? Protip: they didn't invent that for DX2... doesn't mean either game was trash just because of it, either.
@@jasoncarswell7458 Wooden dialog? Maybe... Expressionless character animations? It was 2000! More like 1999 though. Plot holes? No... Don't knee jerk anti-like something just because it is popular. >__>
I PLAYED HALF-LIFE, I CAN HANDLE YOUR LADDERS Also, I assume the weaponized nanites were programmed with a limited number of replications, since the ones who used them didn't want the world destroyed. Either that or they were contained with counter-nanites or the liberal application of nukes.
@@davemilner5504 nah waste heat is unbeatable. It'd take a very long time to replicate the whole world. If the nanites have no replication speed limit they would melt themselves. Waste heat is always a side effect of energy expenditure and can be very slow to radiate away
Hey, Joannes from Playthroughline here. Thanks so much for linking to my parody script in the description! It's an honour to see it right next to your good work.
A "grey goo" event can be easily contained if certain protocols are put into place. They are nanites, small machines. What would a large mass of small machines be vulnerable to? EMP. What can generate a city-sized EMP? A nuclear detonation. Sure you lose the city, or at least a sizeable part of it, and have to deal with the fallout but at least the remainders and planet in general are safe.
Fun fact: All the damage of an EMP comes from how it affects extremely long wires, making them basically act as wireless energy receivers getting overloaded with dozens of kilovolts. Smaller wires act as smaller receivers, and get less damage. Even a modern car with all its electronics wouldn't be affected by an EMP because of how small it is. Sorry to burst your bubble, but a Nuclear EMP would do nothing against nanites.
Anna Harren no. The smaller the wires, the easier they burn. There are tutorials for EMP destroying RFID chips in your clothes for example that won't affect larger circuits much.
I was just playing Invisible War and realized there is actually an in-game book where they detail that the universal weapon clip actually takes ambient material and uses nanites to convert it into projectile or energy ammunition, which is what Ross mentioned in the video before saying that would be absurd... But yeah, that's actually the explanation. Wow.
Never forget Watch_Dogs which showed off great screenshots at E3 and then literally turned off the good shaders for the final release because they would have highlighted how much better it looks on PC.
I just want to point out that Alex Denton is not killed in the Templar ending. The whole point of the templar ending was to completely destroy all augmentations. So by completing the templar ending, Alex becomes an unaugmented human. The person they hanged in their ending is probably Tracer Tong.
I bought this when it came out on a whim - I was 13 and the metallic/iridescent cover looked cool. I ended up LOVING it, thoroughly enjoying my multiple play-throughs and was blown away by playing a game that was so different from the norm I was used to. That being said, playing the original Deus Ex later on I could see the threads of its DNA that remained in IW and of course those were the aspects that hooked me. Invisible War falls far short when compared to its predecessor - widely considered one of the greatest games of all times, as Ross stated - but I’d still take it any day over the next CoD and its ilk.
This video actually kind of makes me want to try it for myself, I kept ignoring it cause everybody said how bad it was, but there seems to be some genuinely interesting things in it.
The progressing war between Pete's & Starbucks in every city you visit is hilarious and criminally underrated in DE canon. By far the best part of the game.
I actually found myself intrigued by the coffee shop guy just openly offering to pay a stranger to commit arson against a competitor - it gave me the impression that shit like that was just a normal, accepted part of that society, and that it's _exactly_ what the Tarsus program trains people to do. Tarsus grads are mercenaries that _anyone_ can hire for _anything._ Then it turned out the rest of game didn't do much with that idea, so it's probably not the case, but for a while I thought it was really interesting.
in a way, thats brilliant cyberpunk, for small businesses to stay afloat, they have to both be hostile and physically takeover new locations or take out competition, AND defend themselves from others doing the same, its gang violence but with a twist. if only someone actually runs with the idea. tbf, CP77 invokes the concept a little.
Actually, if in Trier you do the side quest for barista guy, it turns out both "companies" are actually owned by the same entity. It's a commentary on how "rival" brands are not exactly opposed to each other.
In response to the music, even Alexander Brandon didn't like DX: Invisible War's soundtrack. he was told by his higher ups that he needed to make the music, "As close to theif as possibly while still being Deus Ex" which severely limited his creativity he felt.
I JUST FIGURED SOMETHING OUT. ALEX DENTON DOESN'T WEAR SUNGLASSES. THATS WHY THE MALE AND FEMALE MODELS ARE SO FUNNY LOOKIN'! THERES NOTHING ON THEM TO COVER UP THE BAD MODELING!
Regarding the gray goo scenario: this specific nanite detonator probably has some kind of a built-in limit on the number of nanobot replications. Like the Hayflick limit in living cells. Its creators might be mad, but not suicidal.
Still that is taking a HUGE risk. All it would take is one nanite with a failed replication which doesn't properly carry the limitation and suddenly you have the nanite version of metastasizing cancer. And with the 10^100 of replications that is almost guaranteed to happen.
@@GeorgeMonet not really nanites cannot convert on a 1 to 1 ratio they break down and most importantly heat and power too much heat and how are they making power they would break down by the simple fact of what are they generating granted a city is easily killable with this heavy tech power everywhere to daisy chain it yeah dangerous
"I know I'm in the minority here, but I'd rather have Deus Ex 1 graphics if it means I can have more fleshed-out worlds." You are NOT in the minority here; I've been wishing for this kind of paradigm shift for YEARS.
Thief 3 ( came out a year after invisible war ) suffered the same treatment. Great graphics, but severely restricted compared to its predecessors. It seemed like 2003-2005 had quite a few series aiming for great graphics over good world building
@@GreedAndSelfishness They don't hate it, but it did not live up to the predecessor for several reasons: i) Levels were very small compared to Thief 1-2, and they felt like game 'levels' rather than real locations. They were also broken up with loading screens. ii) Controls were very poor compared to Thief 2. Thief 3 implemented first person AND third person views, so all of the character movements had fancy animations. This sounds great, but it leads to poor camera control. When you jump/run/lean in Thief 2 and Thief 3, you notice a huge difference in how the camera handles itself. iii) No swimming, no rope arrows (climbing gloves were good, but not as fun as rope arrows in 1-2).
Just to play devil's advocate here, keep in mind that graphics vs. detail tends to be a zero-sum equation. There's plenty of people who are totally satisfied with the monochrome ASCII graphics of Dwarf Fortress, because that world is so detailed (i.e - fleshed out) that it nearly crashes their PC with all the calculations. My point? Don't chase the "details > graphics" rabbit too far down the hole, because it's already been done and the results were extremely niche.
I've always seen the light on the box art as hope, or truth. Deus Ex means "God from". Deus Ex Machina is "God from the Machine" "God from the Invisible War", "God from the Human Revolution", "God from the Fall"?? Either way, it's something I can't shake from my head whenever I read the titles.
Man, I feel your point about graphics. For all their shininess, I think the only instance in which games can really benefit from bleeding edge graphics IS when they're being watched by others, and in that situation it's no longer a game. Plus, pushing graphics toward realism without developing a robust engine and believable world just tends to make those moments of invisible walls and physics glitches even more jarring. It saddens me that it's such a minority opinion at times, but I do have this to say: To those who've played Deus Ex or VtMB, ask yourselves, "Did the graphics take you out of the world, or did the developer use them to create an even better world?" DX's oppressive angles only benefited the feel of the world, and it had an atmosphere so thick you could practically swim in it, all through the simple INTELLIGENT USE of what resources they had.
There's so many FAR more immersive games from old blocky graphics days for me, than most modern ones. Horizon Zero Dawn did an incredible job with the characters and story and world and sound and everything, but Battlefield V was FULL of bugs and terrible graphical issues and textures not loading or looking fucking atrocious when looking through even a medium range scope, or just a total blur with enemy NPC blobs walking on them through the zoomed in binoculars. Even sometimes the textures you were standing on, or heck, even your FUCKING GUN textures would be all blocky and fucked up in that game. I got BFV free and i STILL felt like i'd been ripped off lol. Whereas older games like STALKER or Deus Ex or Neverwinter Nights or KOTOR or Freelancer... all these old "blocky" graphics games that may not look fancy, but their atmosphere and immersion is INFINITELY better than 90% of the modern "triple A" games being shat out by EA or Activision or Ubisoft etc.
Thats how they explain the ammo:"Mako Ballistics created Universal ammo in which a nano-mass is dynamically configured by the weapon itself into ammunition of the appropriate type (anything from a pistol shot to a guided rocket, or even incendiary fuel for the flamethrower), allowing all Mako Ballistic weapons to use the same ammunition".
On a point of order, that can't be the greatest of all time, because the greatest of all time is that Russian sailor from the first game. "I SPEEL MY DREENK!"
Best thing about Invisible War is that they allow you to choose a side right from the beginning. You get the false choice (WTO or Order) then the real one (JC Denton, Illuminati, or Templars) halfway through. With DE and Human Revolution, you can't choose until the end. With The Fall and Mankind Divided, you have no choice at all. IW is also they only game where you can join the antagonists. Invisible War is the best game to start the series with. It's cool to hear JC talked about as as this mythical and mystical figure, then go the original game and play as him.
+Rashaed Hey, I was watching some of your videos the other day to see some things I missed in my playthrough (such as when Dumier and DuClare talk to you after you rescue her. Because I shot her soon as I was able to, lying bitch). Nice to see that almost a decade later, you're still loving the game. As for it being the game to start the series off with for newcomers... I'm not sure. It talks so much about the plot of the first game, and just kind of assumes you know what they're talking about when they refer to Helios or Aquinas, and they expect you to know the role MJ12 had in the original. Hell, pretty much the only mention Bob Page gets (you know, the one responsible for pretty much every plot point in the first game, resulting in JC having to make a choice for humanity itself) is in a loading screen, where the game just goes, "20 years ago, JC Denton killed Bob Page and merged with the Helios AI." Newcomers, I imagine, would find it very confusing. Rather, this is what I did: Invisible War is, in my mind, a console-focused spin-off that takes place in an alternate history where all three endings of the first game are combined into one, resulting in this even more grand scenario that the player has to deal with. It's not an *actual* sequel to me (just as Human Revolution and Mankind Divided aren't proper prequels, just two games that softly rebooted the series and pay lip service to the original game), just a fascinating alternate story that you can play or ignore (though I recommend people play it). This way, expectations for the game are lowered, and the way they handled the first game's endings can be handwaved away. This is the mindset I played and beat the game with over the last several days, and I think it's a pretty good one. So, to me, Deus Ex never got a proper sequel, not any proper prequels. And it's easy to get into this mindset because the original game is such an utterly standalone experience. Anyway, there's my suggestion.
YES! One thing I didn't like, though, (and this is really really minor) is that the Templars in the recruiting booth say something about how you could go to clinic to get "purified." That makes it feel like you have some choice in allegiance that the game makes for you, if you know what I mean, and chips at the sense of absolute freedom the game otherwise gives. I think 'you can't join the Templars because they want to kill you' would be a genius way to force the player to be enemy with a certain group without feeling like the game was making any decisions for you. Really really minor detail, but still.
That's kind of like saying "I'll bet you don't like getting hit in the head with a baseball bat." Of course he doesn't like The Division. Even people who usually love boring MMO grind don't like The Division. I'd be more surprised if you found someone for me who DID like The Division.
+OckhamAsylum I like The Division. The main problem it had was going into RPG territory to the point that by the time you reach higher levels and get cooler toys, clothes and accessories for your fashionable urban operator, you've seen most of what there is to offer and the enemies go from non-tactical shooter levels of health to the textbook example of a bullet sponge. It's a shame too, I like a lot about the game, but making it an RPG was a mistake. I hope that if Ubi makes a sequel they strip most of the RPG elements, but leaving the abilities and customization.
TJbrena Honestly I just found everything about it to be too dull. The environment, the story, the gameplay that becomes quickly repetitive five minutes in, nothing about it stood out to me. I've seen games with better shooting mechanics, I've seen games with better rpg mechanics, and I've see games with more interesting worlds. I don't believe the game is bad (other than the bullet sponges) on a technical level, but it's just so generic in everything it does. Nothing about it stands out, not even in the so bad it's good way like Ride to Hell or something. I'm of the mindset that the worst sin a piece of entertainment can make is being boring. At least with something that is a true piece of shit, you have something to laugh at. Everyone has stopped talking about The Division because there's nothing left to talk about. Everyone tried it, everyone shot some spongy guys, and then everyone forgot they ever played it.
I was reasonably 'lucky' when I played Invisible War, this was the only Deus Ex game I knew about since I was too broke to afford a PC growing up, and you're right. In a bubble, this game blew my mind as a kid, but compared to the original it's not even close to the same type of Sci-fi tone. Still loved it though
oh man, this game.... I just couldn't bring myself to play it, not after the first game. DX is one of my favourite games of all time, and the sequel that this was.... What a shame.
MasterOfMelons Yeah I played HR. It was pretty good, was let down on the story side a bit, but still, it was a great return to form gameplay wise. Although issues with the way the handled XP balance and energy kinda irked me, like how it is completely pointless to use your blade takedowns since knocking them out gives you more XP and such. And MD seems to be more of the same as HR which is good, although I hear that the story isn't that great which is a shame.
The 'universal ammo' was also used in Mass Effect 2 and 3, and actually had an in-universe explanation. Thermal clips were essentially blocks of metal that all weapons would break up and shape in specific ways depending on how they were designed. This is what resulted in their damage output, effective ranges, magazine sizes, even their spread
"That would change the face of the entire world, not just make our guns easier to load." Unfortunately, knowing us humans, we'd probably pick the gun option anyway.
After rewatching it, I realised, why Grey Goo event in the beginning didn't kill everyone. If it's a controlled event, like a case in such attack, you can make them stop replicating after several iterations - much like our own cells stop, when we get old, and you can more or less control the area with that. Wanna only goo your enemies? Set a small number of replications. Wanna goo the entire city? Set a bigger number. So in my opinion, that kind of might make sense.
I don't know if others mentioned it already or how accurate this is, but it appears in Mankind Divided, your idea for the black market augs was actually implemented. I think it comes down to balancing how much processing power they need to avoid Adam overheating and burning out bits of his body. I didn't get that far in Mankind Divided to know for certain.
As much as I have conflicting thoughts about this sequel, I absolutely loved the idea of all Deus Ex 1 endings happening at the same time from the start. Human world is a complex thing - they certainly portray it that way in the first game. So it actually stands to reason there're no simple one-way answers to all of the questions from the first game. And Deux Ex endings aren't about a single guy winning something, it's about the fate of mankind basically. So instead of a single ending, each faction kinda got something of what it wanted, lost some territory and all in all continued doing its own thing on a new social landscape. Pretty smart idea for a sequel. The quality of a said sequel is whole other question.
Yeah, I liked GTA 3 and Vice City but I don't buy that they are better games the GTA4 onwards like some people state. Pushing people down stairs, watching them tumble, leaping from a bike to bowl your ass into a crowd.... these things are missing from the old games and make it impossible to go back and play vice city for anything other than nostalgia. Tried playing San Andreas for the first time after GTA4 came out. Nope. To stiff and lifeless.
ragdoll physics =/= good game. while it is a really fun thing to play around with for an hour or two, realistically a game should just have good gameplay and/or story. that being said, the best ragdoll physics are the occasional glitched one like the swingset in gta iv
If you wanted a grey goo event that "stopped" after a certain perimeter, there's a few ways. You could have the assimilation phase take a peak amount of energy (hence, the spreading nanites would stop and have to crawl slowly to new energy sources). Have assimilation take time, so the heroes have a chance to stop it. Or, maybe have the nanites require a specific material/element to create themselves that they must hunt down (hence they slow and must crawl to new resources). That's just a few ideas...
Or create the nanites which have a predefined self destruction timer based on time, reproduction, or some such. Human cells have that, after a certain number of divisions human cells will not divide any further. Another option is to make the nanites run on external beamed energy and when they no longer receive enough energy to reproduce they would consume themselves. So the size could be controlled by simply cutting off the power.
I'm mostly a console gamer, but even I get upset when developers dumb things down because consoles are either too underpowered, or they think console gamers are too dumb to understand certain concepts. I remember it recently happening with BioShock Infinite. Older gameplay trailers made everything look so cool and combat much more complex. Then the game hit shelves and whoopsie, lots of cut content and the combat was dumbed down and simplified to the point where it's basically just another CoD/Halo clone.
I play MMO's with a controller. Its fun but really really hard. I'm pretty good at it thou after the hundreds of hours I put in. Very enjoyable way to play because I can constantly improve, the skill ceiling is basically not there at all. They they say they would need to change the game and simplify it if the game comes out on consoles... I'm like "WHY?!, its great being complicated and hard, people are as good as the effort they put in, Why dumb it down when you don't need to"
Not sure if this is applicable, but I recently finished replaying Hλlf-Life 2 on my Xbox 360. I'm making the transfer too PC soon, and decided to get Black Mesa for my first game. I wanted to get back into (lots of 2's "too'"s in this) the half life feel, so I set the difficulty on hard and played through it. The controller I was playing on was faulty (I've played HL2 with this controller before), so I felt like I was wearing roller blades and shooting BB's. I beat the game with relative ease, which is why Dumbing down drives me insane. People have told me they couldn't beat HL2 on PC because it was too hard, when I tell them what I did, they look at me like some kind of superhuman. Dumbing down games is just a way to trick the player into thinking that this is as good as it gets, so companies have to put less effort in. I would rather have a game that makes me feel stupid for screwing up and dying (HL2 with the failure screens) than a game that is easy enough that I can play it with one hand tied behind my back (Bioshock Infinite).
Infinite being a shooter wasn't due to dumbing down. The game got scrapped multiple times, and the footage shown was from an earlier build. In the end it seemed they ran out of time and money, so they made something very simplistic. It's why, despite being a selling well, the studio closed. Such a waste of a good concept.
remember when black ops 3 cut down its original plot that was very intricately written because they thought the general public was too dumb to understand it because its a cod game for dumb babies
Ross, when you mentioned The Journeyman Project I got chills. That franchise was a huge part of my childhood but all of my discs are scratched and none of my computers know how to emulate it. I don't want to be that guy who requests you do a video, but if you did a Game Dungeon on the Journeyman Project trilogy at the very least I would be eternally grateful.
I know this is seven years later but his video on that game was as good as usual. I hope you get to play The Journeyman Project again someday if you haven't already :)
its not about pixel density or amount of polygons. its what you use out of those things to make a player feel like they are in another world doing stuff to objects they recognize. you have to have a balance between clarity and action or else you just have a bunch of random shit on the screen that you cant discern or you have too little on the screen to discern and it feels empty and hollow.
This game is a prime example of consoles constricting game design by their technical limitations. Granted this isn't as big of a problem today due to Moore's law slowing down, but we still see it pop up from time to time especially when it comes to games with more open ended systems like Deus Ex.
Funny you mention the Kidney Thieves, I have both those songs on my Spotify playlist to this day. I'm pretty nostalgic for this game, DX1 is amazing but I had lots of young fun screwing around in Invisible War too.
Ross, you've been introduced to "KidneyThieves" through this game, and you've introduced me to them through your review of this game. What an awesome band, thank you for that. And for a great review, naturally
Actually, a second game with ragdolls came pretty quickly. Hitman 1 had ragdolls in 1999. Though ragdolls didn't become industry standard until around 2004/2005. I think that early ragdolls were hilarious. Especially the ones in Battlefield 2. They were so bad, lol. Also JC Denton's model in this game always bugged me for some reason. His head looks like a potato.
Both Warren Spector and Harvey Smith admitted that they did a lot of things wrong making this game. "It was a good game, just not a very good Deus Ex game" to paraphrase them.
I agree with "guns shouldn't respect how levelled up your character is". A bullet is a bullet, it doesn't matter how skilled the person firing the gun is. I've never fired a gun in my life but if i shoot someone in the head, they're gonna die.
I know the video is old but there's a fix to the grey goo bomb that more or less goes in line with current research >bomb carries some synthetic element that won't be present in the exploded area and has a long half life (let's say, technetium) >bomb is a cell with a large organelle containing technetium >every time it duplicates, the technetium organelle divides >once it can't divide anymore, cell duplication stops this way, you can give the bomb whichever yield you want by manipulating initial organelle size.
A minor issue to point out to Ross: Nanites can't replicate so fast that the heat produced damages them. Nanomachines are enormously resistant to blunt trauma, but in reality, a grey goo event could feasibly be fought with flamethrowers. They are very, very bad at dealing with severe temperature changes. Their internal structure is too fragile. And since they can't duplicate too fast, while the initial wave of replication might be relatively fast, at a certain point it would collapse under its own weight because of the heat generated.
you could use a time-to-live counter, like network packets. basically, the act of reproducing decrements the counter, and once the counter reaches zero, halt reproduction.
Man back when I was a kid and had little grasp on rpgs I loved playing this with my sister running around darting people and just genuinely being a goblin
I strongly approve of them giving you access to your augs right away. Nano-augmentation was way under emphasized in the original. You come to Liberty Island with nothing but a flash light aug and they already treat you like you're something special.
@@Dennis-nc3vw It is a test of test of his training as I said before, they want to see if he is as reliable as his brother before they pump him full of billion dollar nano augmentations. If they could observe his performance in a high intensity scenario then they could make a choice on whether to invest in him. They had two agents on stand-by just in case he failed. That's how I rationalize it at least.
@@brandonmorel2658 I still feels like it downplays the importance of nano-augmentation in the story, something that should have felt like it had a deeper part.
An interesting way they could have combined the endings from DX1 would have been JC merging with Helios, then the Illuminati got so scared of him that that they release a massive EMP that blacks out the world. Having the Illuminati trying to worm their way back into power post-collapse and playing the long game like that would have made sense, but I don't think the writers were really giving it that much thought.
I didn't see the point of combining endings. I don't get why anyone would be attached to the decisions of a character they are no longer playing. If anything its more immersive when the character you are no longer playing no longer feels like you. I felt the same way about Far Cry: New Dawn going so far to hide Rook's identity, even though you are now playing as a completely different character.
The simplyfing for consoles reminded me of Thief: Deadly Shadows, which suffered also frommuch smaller areas, that dont compare do the Thief 1 and 2 vast levels. Like how brought up the gang situation in seatle, there is also two rivaling factions in Thief right next to each other.
Yep. The two games use the same engine pretty much (a heavily modified unreal engine 2) that was butchered to run on the original xbox. That 64 MB of unified memory was def the biggest limiting factor and why Thief Deadly Shadows has so many damn loading spots (those blue portal looking things) multiple of them in just one level. Thank god for the mod community on PC. There is a fan made patch for deadly shadows if I remember correctly called "Sneaky upgrade". It fixes and improves SO many things including removing almost all of the loading walls other than the ones in the hub city. Also fixes any problems with modern systems, offers tons of gameplay tweaks you can turn on or off to make it somewhat more like T1 and T2 etc. It's a must have, same as TafferPatcher for T2.
Only one of the original writers from Deus Ex were involved with the project from what I can tell. Warren Spector wasn't involved with any of the future games as far as I can tell. This is is why development TEAMS are important to keep together if you can when making sequels.
Just noticed how much the graphics of Deus Ex Invisible War reminds me of Thief DS, another compromise of level size for graphics. Guess that's what Ion Storm liked at the time
Well, this Deus Ex happens in 2072, wich is 20 years after the original Deus Ex events, so by then they must have developed the universal ammo stuff. To me it sounded ok. But then again, Mass Effect did basicly the same thing with its termal clips, wich isnt exactly ammo, its coolers, because the guns have "infinite" ammo to beguin with thanks to melting and manipulation of steel within the chamber before shooting them in a gauss style way...
yeah but mass effect is science fantasy. Thats ok to be honest, nothing wrong with science fantasy. deus ex however tries to sell itself as near future
There is virtually no reason to make "universal ammo for everything". Even if techonological advancement would make "nanobot solution" possible, you still need different materials prepared for assembly when speaking about, say, rocket launcher or pistol. There is also a clear problem of gun control - no way in hell you want to provide the general public with universal solution that can be utilized to produce bombs with a few tweaks in the programming. There is a certain degree of uniform ammunition, but only as far as it doesn't affect the performance of the gun. It is unlikely that "universal" solution would exist that wouldn't do so at the expense of the particular gun's performance. All of this is, of course, debatable, since Deus Ex is still science fiction. But I do agree with Ross that it pushes the suspension of disbelief too far. It wasn't made so because it made sense. It was made to simplify the gameplay and inventory management for the consoles, which were the prime focus of the game. Similarly, Mass Effect used the same solution not because it made sense in the world. It was to simplify the gameplay. It doesn't make any more sense there, even if it was pitched to a wider audience.
If Conrad is still alive in ME3, he actually comments on how stupid thermal clips are. I remain irritated at a concession to make gameplay more generic - presumably to broaden appeal to CoDtards that might be put off by something slightly different. Sigh.
16:14 "The order?! NOOOOO! The One God virus didn't die after all and is plotting to destroy its mechanical competition in nanites!" Maybe the Omar are similar to either SHODAN's cyborgs or the Geth's heretic faction from Mass Effect.
You could write/create a "nanobomb" that has a limitation to shut down after a certain initial range/mass converted/whatever. A big part of nanotechnology is having the individual bots be able to communicate and orchestrate between each other.
So 50% of the video was basically to illustrate why consoles ruin everything, 40% on things the game itself could have done better, and 10% of an extra helping of dead bodies. Yep, it's Ross's Game Dungeon alright, and I wouldn't have it any other way.
"It's called console-idation. Strengthen graphics, weaken gameplay. With new console generations this can be done imperceptibly over time".
No Hair is telling the truth, I've seen the graphs.
Consoles weaken graphics too. That's why Crysis took so many years to hit consoles.
"for a hundred years, there's been a conspiracy of console owners against ordinary PC gamers"
@@naashchaa oh, owners know nothing, its those who sell these damned things
Holy based comment.
"Circles lost the HUD wars of 2003. Actually there was no war. Just this game." So would you say that it was... an Invisible War?
no just a war that went in circles
Haha
What about Mass Effect? Dragon Age? Both of those game wheels for a lot of commands
@@kalligthegrey7010 yeah, just for commands, not the entire hud
Invisible HUD war
You missed mentioning the part where the game literally crashes and then restarts in order to load the next area. It was the most efficient way to dump its memory and create space for the next level. It's a marvel of technology.
I didn't know that, that definitely sounds accurate though as it would always throw me to the desktop in between levels. I'll mention that in the followup.
can we expect the follow up this year?
I don't recall that ever happening to me...
consoles...
Forgot about that. Must've been erased from my mind.
"I have no enemies, merely topographies of ignorance"
"I feel like he should cock a shotgun after saying that"
*cocks a shotgun*
Cocking a shotgun sounds like it would be either just painful or in general bad your your health. Like... don't.
Thunder Soul the proper term for putting a round in the breach of a firearm is “charging the weapon”
[shotgun sound effect]
"Even in this game JC is still beyond all of this." Exactly how I felt when I finally got that point in the game. It's like that was the one portion of the game that wasn't compromised and actually felt like I was playing a Deus Ex sequel.
_"I can't even explain why, but I became obsessed with stuffing bodies in the dumpsters."_
- Ross Scott, 2016
still funny in 2019
if no dumpster find a tub. if no tub find a janitors closet if no closet find a hole if no hole find a small room if none exists pile them in the middle of the place you are at
A bathroom stall works too.
next thing you know there will be bodies in HIS dumpster
Fun for me, too. I'd get the strength aug, then see how far back I could stand and fling bodies into dumpsters. Should be an event in the 2076 Olympics.
Chunky text was so Xbox players could read the text from their TV across the other side of the living room.
OMG, harry is here too.. What is going on that my favorite youtubers just happen to be everywhere
Harry101UK I play on the Xbox 360 and I can never play on the couch. I have to be in front of the TV.
So in other words, consoles are confirmed, yet again, for ruining this game.
8 GB is all nice and good, but Deus Ex would still be limited on consoles due to sacrificing the multitude of hotkeys for tree-structured inputs and digital mouse aiming for the poor analog thumbstick variation to accommodate the controller. Not to mention the fact that console hardware is weaker still, and Microsoft is discouraging utilizing the Xbone to its fullest potential via the Azure layer they're implementing for cross-platform play; some games just aren't meant for consoles, simple as that.
Harry101UK haha awww 40 hertz too bad.
"My character has no skill, literally. He spent all of his skill points on his hair."
Deus ex: hey invisible war, thats a lot of teal tinting, are you alright?
Deus ex human revolution: hold my beer *oranges all over the room*
Calebfraser02 orange is better than lemon-lime though
Invisble War: *is teal*
Human Revolution: *I W A N T E D O R A N G E*
Golden tint was pleasant though, and it actually made sense storywise. Was disappointed when they removed it from Mankind Divided.
@@Emmanu013 it worked in that the entire game took place at night and outside the street lamps would likely be more of an amber color, but inside it should've had differences, bluer florescent looking lightings reds and strobey bits in clubs, neutral lights in offices, but not all of it is stylized ambient yellow/dark. I think Mankind Divided had a better lighting arrangement for the setting.
@@sorrenblitz805 Mankind Divided sucked so bad
Regarding saving Paul in Deus Ex, instead of fighting your way out through the front of the 'Ton (24:30), you can just hide in the secret bookshelf-bunker until Paul cleans up the goons, just wait till the shooting stops. Saves you a bit of ammo, damage and brother.
Pretty sure he dies if you let him go it alone.
@@INFILTR8US nope, paul is invincible here.
Paul is indeed immortal
Wtf everytime I play Paul literally dies if you don’t help him, is it because of GMDX?
@@halolime117 yes, it's because of GMDX.
All those complaints about this game make me wonder why hasn't Ross done a video about the STALKER franchise yet.
Cool inventory system? Yes. Interesting, open world? Yes. Ammo management? Yes. Difficulty? Yes. Sountrack? Glorious. Immersion? Absolutely. Interesting story and a big backstory behind it? Yes. Ragdoll and dumping bodies into nuclear waste? HELL YEAH.
And tons of hilarious, non-gamebreaking bugs to talk about.
He mentioned those games once in a video so I assume he has played at least one of them, so I wonder what are his thoughts about it.
Get out of here, Stalker.
*****
There's the thing with his channel where he either covers games that almost no one heard about or are very old classics. Now we get the Deus Ex mini-series as the new game is coming and apparently Ross has a soft spot for them.
STALKER doesn't really fit anywhere, as it definitely isn't a widely known game, but isn't that obscure either. It's also not that old. So I'm just throwing it out there, hoping that one day I'll see a hilarious rant about the shortcomings of one of my favourite series. Ross also has a very good taste in both games and music, so I just wonder how the STALKER resonates with him.
CHEEKI BREEKI:Yes.
+Templar Knight
I heard first about The Secret World from Ross. None of my friends have heard about it either. Granted, none of us are much of an MMO people, but still.
The Wolfenstein was a flop and I feel like it was covered because of the recent reboot-mania.
Basically, for a game to be covered it has to be obscure but interesting in some ways (most of the content), a classic that he likes (Strife, Tyrian), some sort of enjoyable 'discovery' he didn't expect from a game (Still Life, Secret World) or a game that he can link to some of the recent events (Wolfenstein, Deus Ex, all the seasonal specials).
So unless Ross 'celebrates' the 26th of April by squatting by a campfire in his gas mask and pouring vodka through the filters, then it might take some time for it to be covered.
the problem with STALKER games (that I absolutely love) is that the location grows "seen" fast... it's better than Fallout 3, but it's a similar problem...
I liked how New Vegas did it's ammo. If you wanted to play the survival mode it would have weight, but you could still carry thousands of rounds with even the weaker characters. There were also tonnes of different ammo types. FMJ, HP, AP. Also guns that could use .357 magnum could also shoot 38. special, and guns that shoot 5.56 could also shoot .233 just like real life.
Don't forget the low quality bullets.
they took the idea from original fallouts 1 and 2, and added some upgrades, which is cool.
I'll be honest, I never went into using different ammo types, new Vegas was pretty complex enough and damn was it immersive.
@@benjinatorkahki-1858 oh my gods it was. I feel like it was the better between it and 3, but I love the story of 3 more.
@@benjinatorkahki-1858 maybe, but it managed to make things like bullet sponges less annoying.
The _only_ thing that affects whether Paul lives or dies is whether JC leaves the hotel via the front door or the side window. None of the dialogue or anything else makes a difference.
SHUSH! DX1 WAS PERFECTION AND DX2 RUINED IT ALL!
Nah, srsly. Wooden dialog? Expressionless character animations? Plot holes in the vast, overlapping conspiracy narratives? Protip: they didn't invent that for DX2... doesn't mean either game was trash just because of it, either.
@@jasoncarswell7458 Wooden dialog? Maybe... Expressionless character animations? It was 2000! More like 1999 though. Plot holes? No...
Don't knee jerk anti-like something just because it is popular. >__>
He can't walk or climb a ladder but he can fend off an army.
I learned that the hard way when I cleared the hotel... and then took the window out.
@@jasoncarswell7458 Ok totally real person
I PLAYED HALF-LIFE, I CAN HANDLE YOUR LADDERS
Also, I assume the weaponized nanites were programmed with a limited number of replications, since the ones who used them didn't want the world destroyed. Either that or they were contained with counter-nanites or the liberal application of nukes.
or they just replicated inside human cells
@@terner1234 They ate the buildings, too
@@Ryu1ify I don't remember my original comment's intent but I think I was talking about the grey death
That's really the ONLY way the whole, 'nanite detinator' thing could work. Otherwise...Earth is TOAST in about 24 hours.
@@davemilner5504 nah waste heat is unbeatable. It'd take a very long time to replicate the whole world. If the nanites have no replication speed limit they would melt themselves. Waste heat is always a side effect of energy expenditure and can be very slow to radiate away
3:13 You say there was no war, Ross.
But what if it was just an _invisible_ war?
...Yeah I'll show myself out
shakes head*
I laughed
I cummed 2 times in 5 minutes
I came down here to make the same lame pun.
Uh, Flaming Bag of Crisps, Would you kindly leave those types of comments on your favorite porn videos? Thanks.
"Blowing up Area 51 isn't going to destroy Google." ~Ross Scott, 2016.
the madman did it
he qouted
Too bad.
Hey, Joannes from Playthroughline here. Thanks so much for linking to my parody script in the description! It's an honour to see it right next to your good work.
Just caught the shout-out at the end of the video too. You're the bestest.
A "grey goo" event can be easily contained if certain protocols are put into place. They are nanites, small machines. What would a large mass of small machines be vulnerable to? EMP. What can generate a city-sized EMP? A nuclear detonation. Sure you lose the city, or at least a sizeable part of it, and have to deal with the fallout but at least the remainders and planet in general are safe.
Fun fact: All the damage of an EMP comes from how it affects extremely long wires, making them basically act as wireless energy receivers getting overloaded with dozens of kilovolts. Smaller wires act as smaller receivers, and get less damage. Even a modern car with all its electronics wouldn't be affected by an EMP because of how small it is. Sorry to burst your bubble, but a Nuclear EMP would do nothing against nanites.
They had non emp methods mentioned in game, if I remember correctly.
Maybe, those nanites were programmed with some kind of self-termination protocol in mind?
What about a strong acid?
Anna Harren no. The smaller the wires, the easier they burn. There are tutorials for EMP destroying RFID chips in your clothes for example that won't affect larger circuits much.
I just realized that you are secretly teaching us random facts in the middle of your videos.
You can't fool me! You can't make me learn!
First video "I have a ship, that is a carrot
THE LEARNING, IT BURNS!
I was just playing Invisible War and realized there is actually an in-game book where they detail that the universal weapon clip actually takes ambient material and uses nanites to convert it into projectile or energy ammunition, which is what Ross mentioned in the video before saying that would be absurd... But yeah, that's actually the explanation. Wow.
Never forget Watch_Dogs which showed off great screenshots at E3 and then literally turned off the good shaders for the final release because they would have highlighted how much better it looks on PC.
I just want to point out that Alex Denton is not killed in the Templar ending. The whole point of the templar ending was to completely destroy all augmentations. So by completing the templar ending, Alex becomes an unaugmented human. The person they hanged in their ending is probably Tracer Tong.
I bought this when it came out on a whim - I was 13 and the metallic/iridescent cover looked cool. I ended up LOVING it, thoroughly enjoying my multiple play-throughs and was blown away by playing a game that was so different from the norm I was used to.
That being said, playing the original Deus Ex later on I could see the threads of its DNA that remained in IW and of course those were the aspects that hooked me.
Invisible War falls far short when compared to its predecessor - widely considered one of the greatest games of all times, as Ross stated - but I’d still take it any day over the next CoD and its ilk.
This video actually kind of makes me want to try it for myself, I kept ignoring it cause everybody said how bad it was, but there seems to be some genuinely interesting things in it.
The progressing war between Pete's & Starbucks in every city you visit is hilarious and criminally underrated in DE canon. By far the best part of the game.
I was genuinely not expecting to see you in the comments section of this video in particular lol.
You just want to yeet dead bodies into dumpsters, let's be honest.
@@junioraltamontent.7582 Yea but the whole "rivalry" turned out to be fake.
@@SheaM_DVE Do you not?
20:08 "The GEP gun is the most silent way to eliminate Manderley"
Unatco hurt my weewee
I actually found myself intrigued by the coffee shop guy just openly offering to pay a stranger to commit arson against a competitor - it gave me the impression that shit like that was just a normal, accepted part of that society, and that it's _exactly_ what the Tarsus program trains people to do. Tarsus grads are mercenaries that _anyone_ can hire for _anything._
Then it turned out the rest of game didn't do much with that idea, so it's probably not the case, but for a while I thought it was really interesting.
"What? It's just a little corporate espionage side job, teenagers pull those off all the time."
Deus Ancap
in a way, thats brilliant cyberpunk, for small businesses to stay afloat, they have to both be hostile and physically takeover new locations or take out competition, AND defend themselves from others doing the same, its gang violence but with a twist. if only someone actually runs with the idea. tbf, CP77 invokes the concept a little.
Actually, if in Trier you do the side quest for barista guy, it turns out both "companies" are actually owned by the same entity.
It's a commentary on how "rival" brands are not exactly opposed to each other.
@@quinnmarchese6313
'Street gangs are literally employed by local businesses' is such a genius way of looking at it.
"You can quote me on that"
-Ross Scott, 2016
In response to the music, even Alexander Brandon didn't like DX: Invisible War's soundtrack.
he was told by his higher ups that he needed to make the music, "As close to theif as possibly while still being Deus Ex" which severely limited his creativity he felt.
I loved the soundtrack, but it was extremely different from the original's.
I JUST FIGURED SOMETHING OUT.
ALEX DENTON DOESN'T WEAR SUNGLASSES.
THATS WHY THE MALE AND FEMALE MODELS ARE SO FUNNY LOOKIN'!
THERES NOTHING ON THEM TO COVER UP THE BAD MODELING!
Plus, the hair is bleh. Say what you want about Denton, but his haircut is timeless and slick.
i hope someone modded in sunglasses
Oh my god.....
You're right!!!
jc dentons sunglasses didnt bob in sync with his model and just floated in one spot
The fact Alex Denton doesn't wear sunglasses but Adam and JC do throws me off so hard. One of these things is not like the others. /o~
Regarding the gray goo scenario: this specific nanite detonator probably has some kind of a built-in limit on the number of nanobot replications. Like the Hayflick limit in living cells. Its creators might be mad, but not suicidal.
Still that is taking a HUGE risk.
All it would take is one nanite with a failed replication which doesn't properly carry the limitation and suddenly you have the nanite version of metastasizing cancer. And with the 10^100 of replications that is almost guaranteed to happen.
@@GeorgeMonet not really nanites cannot convert on a 1 to 1 ratio they break down and most importantly heat and power too much heat and how are they making power they would break down by the simple fact of what are they generating
granted a city is easily killable with this heavy tech power everywhere to daisy chain it yeah dangerous
You're assuming the nanites just have infinite energy to keep going. Maybe the capsule is the limit.
So basically the Minidisk DRM, right? xD
"I know I'm in the minority here, but I'd rather have Deus Ex 1 graphics if it means I can have more fleshed-out worlds."
You are NOT in the minority here; I've been wishing for this kind of paradigm shift for YEARS.
Thief 3 ( came out a year after invisible war ) suffered the same treatment. Great graphics, but severely restricted compared to its predecessors. It seemed like 2003-2005 had quite a few series aiming for great graphics over good world building
@@element1111 Sorry, I have only played beginning of Thief 1 but I started with Thief 3 and loved it. Why do people hate Thief 3?
@@GreedAndSelfishness
They don't hate it, but it did not live up to the predecessor for several reasons:
i) Levels were very small compared to Thief 1-2, and they felt like game 'levels' rather than real locations. They were also broken up with loading screens.
ii) Controls were very poor compared to Thief 2. Thief 3 implemented first person AND third person views, so all of the character movements had fancy animations. This sounds great, but it leads to poor camera control. When you jump/run/lean in Thief 2 and Thief 3, you notice a huge difference in how the camera handles itself.
iii) No swimming, no rope arrows (climbing gloves were good, but not as fun as rope arrows in 1-2).
Just to play devil's advocate here, keep in mind that graphics vs. detail tends to be a zero-sum equation. There's plenty of people who are totally satisfied with the monochrome ASCII graphics of Dwarf Fortress, because that world is so detailed (i.e - fleshed out) that it nearly crashes their PC with all the calculations. My point? Don't chase the "details > graphics" rabbit too far down the hole, because it's already been done and the results were extremely niche.
We're getting there, now that indie games are more popular and easily available
The flying surveillance bots don't seem all that unlikely anymore
I've always seen the light on the box art as hope, or truth. Deus Ex means "God from". Deus Ex Machina is "God from the Machine"
"God from the Invisible War", "God from the Human Revolution", "God from the Fall"?? Either way, it's something I can't shake from my head whenever I read the titles.
"God from the Human Revolution" kinds works.
Yeah, I actually kinda like that one the most when I read them. It sounds really cool, at the least
"God from Mankind Divided"?
That's the one that bugs me. I keep wanting to say "Deus Ex: Mankind's Divide" because it would be "God from Mankind's Divide"
... Nice link :)
I think it just needs to be "God From" since the original game is basically about creating a god...
How about, instead of "Consolified" we use "Console-idated?"
Puns are better.
How about given a "consolectomy"? Given how much is usually gutted or cut out.
How about "screwed?"
Booooooo.
That's terror.
Man, I feel your point about graphics. For all their shininess, I think the only instance in which games can really benefit from bleeding edge graphics IS when they're being watched by others, and in that situation it's no longer a game. Plus, pushing graphics toward realism without developing a robust engine and believable world just tends to make those moments of invisible walls and physics glitches even more jarring.
It saddens me that it's such a minority opinion at times, but I do have this to say:
To those who've played Deus Ex or VtMB, ask yourselves, "Did the graphics take you out of the world, or did the developer use them to create an even better world?"
DX's oppressive angles only benefited the feel of the world, and it had an atmosphere so thick you could practically swim in it, all through the simple INTELLIGENT USE of what resources they had.
There's so many FAR more immersive games from old blocky graphics days for me, than most modern ones. Horizon Zero Dawn did an incredible job with the characters and story and world and sound and everything, but Battlefield V was FULL of bugs and terrible graphical issues and textures not loading or looking fucking atrocious when looking through even a medium range scope, or just a total blur with enemy NPC blobs walking on them through the zoomed in binoculars. Even sometimes the textures you were standing on, or heck, even your FUCKING GUN textures would be all blocky and fucked up in that game. I got BFV free and i STILL felt like i'd been ripped off lol. Whereas older games like STALKER or Deus Ex or Neverwinter Nights or KOTOR or Freelancer... all these old "blocky" graphics games that may not look fancy, but their atmosphere and immersion is INFINITELY better than 90% of the modern "triple A" games being shat out by EA or Activision or Ubisoft etc.
Thats how they explain the ammo:"Mako Ballistics created Universal ammo in which a nano-mass is dynamically configured by the weapon itself into ammunition of the appropriate type (anything from a pistol shot to a guided rocket, or even incendiary fuel for the flamethrower), allowing all Mako Ballistic weapons to use the same ammunition".
Weaponized nanites would be designed with a hard lifetime. After a certain number of generations, they would "die"
You played through Invisible War multiple times and didn't include the greatest NPC line in gaming history:
"Got fired again! Time to start drinking."
"Like my brother Danny, he cleans the bots that clean the floors up there. How would he get to work without the Inclinator?"
On a point of order, that can't be the greatest of all time, because the greatest of all time is that Russian sailor from the first game. "I SPEEL MY DREENK!"
"I'd like to be you chamber-boy." ;)
@@ZGryphon tumor shmumor. S-s-s-s-sure i-i-i-i like needles
"Before I landed this job I was a real loser"
9:44 No, Ross, I live near Seattle and have visited many times. It's basically that small.
Best thing about Invisible War is that they allow you to choose a side right from the beginning. You get the false choice (WTO or Order) then the real one (JC Denton, Illuminati, or Templars) halfway through. With DE and Human Revolution, you can't choose until the end. With The Fall and Mankind Divided, you have no choice at all. IW is also they only game where you can join the antagonists.
Invisible War is the best game to start the series with. It's cool to hear JC talked about as as this mythical and mystical figure, then go the original game and play as him.
Rashaed Or better yet, play Invisible War, then Human Revolution and Mankind Divided, and then finally the original
+Rashaed
Hey, I was watching some of your videos the other day to see some things I missed in my playthrough (such as when Dumier and DuClare talk to you after you rescue her. Because I shot her soon as I was able to, lying bitch). Nice to see that almost a decade later, you're still loving the game. As for it being the game to start the series off with for newcomers... I'm not sure. It talks so much about the plot of the first game, and just kind of assumes you know what they're talking about when they refer to Helios or Aquinas, and they expect you to know the role MJ12 had in the original. Hell, pretty much the only mention Bob Page gets (you know, the one responsible for pretty much every plot point in the first game, resulting in JC having to make a choice for humanity itself) is in a loading screen, where the game just goes, "20 years ago, JC Denton killed Bob Page and merged with the Helios AI." Newcomers, I imagine, would find it very confusing.
Rather, this is what I did: Invisible War is, in my mind, a console-focused spin-off that takes place in an alternate history where all three endings of the first game are combined into one, resulting in this even more grand scenario that the player has to deal with. It's not an *actual* sequel to me (just as Human Revolution and Mankind Divided aren't proper prequels, just two games that softly rebooted the series and pay lip service to the original game), just a fascinating alternate story that you can play or ignore (though I recommend people play it). This way, expectations for the game are lowered, and the way they handled the first game's endings can be handwaved away. This is the mindset I played and beat the game with over the last several days, and I think it's a pretty good one. So, to me, Deus Ex never got a proper sequel, not any proper prequels. And it's easy to get into this mindset because the original game is such an utterly standalone experience. Anyway, there's my suggestion.
Rashaed -- Actually you can play all missions forall sides and they just whine at to a bit when you help the enema.
YES! One thing I didn't like, though, (and this is really really minor) is that the Templars in the recruiting booth say something about how you could go to clinic to get "purified." That makes it feel like you have some choice in allegiance that the game makes for you, if you know what I mean, and chips at the sense of absolute freedom the game otherwise gives. I think 'you can't join the Templars because they want to kill you' would be a genius way to force the player to be enemy with a certain group without feeling like the game was making any decisions for you. Really really minor detail, but still.
You hate bullet-sponges unless they're something like mechs? Oh man, I'll bet you don't like Tom Clancy's The Division.
Nobody likes The Division.
That's kind of like saying "I'll bet you don't like getting hit in the head with a baseball bat." Of course he doesn't like The Division. Even people who usually love boring MMO grind don't like The Division. I'd be more surprised if you found someone for me who DID like The Division.
Why does nobody like The Division? I was just thinking why is no one talking about it any more?
+OckhamAsylum I like The Division. The main problem it had was going into RPG territory to the point that by the time you reach higher levels and get cooler toys, clothes and accessories for your fashionable urban operator, you've seen most of what there is to offer and the enemies go from non-tactical shooter levels of health to the textbook example of a bullet sponge.
It's a shame too, I like a lot about the game, but making it an RPG was a mistake. I hope that if Ubi makes a sequel they strip most of the RPG elements, but leaving the abilities and customization.
TJbrena
Honestly I just found everything about it to be too dull. The environment, the story, the gameplay that becomes quickly repetitive five minutes in, nothing about it stood out to me. I've seen games with better shooting mechanics, I've seen games with better rpg mechanics, and I've see games with more interesting worlds.
I don't believe the game is bad (other than the bullet sponges) on a technical level, but it's just so generic in everything it does. Nothing about it stands out, not even in the so bad it's good way like Ride to Hell or something.
I'm of the mindset that the worst sin a piece of entertainment can make is being boring. At least with something that is a true piece of shit, you have something to laugh at.
Everyone has stopped talking about The Division because there's nothing left to talk about. Everyone tried it, everyone shot some spongy guys, and then everyone forgot they ever played it.
I was reasonably 'lucky' when I played Invisible War, this was the only Deus Ex game I knew about since I was too broke to afford a PC growing up, and you're right. In a bubble, this game blew my mind as a kid, but compared to the original it's not even close to the same type of Sci-fi tone. Still loved it though
oh man, this game.... I just couldn't bring myself to play it, not after the first game. DX is one of my favourite games of all time, and the sequel that this was.... What a shame.
Human Revolution brought back alot of things from the original.
It's OK. It has some good parts.
He was a good man, what a rotten way to die
Ikr... after the first one, i wanted orange... it gave me lemon-lime...
MasterOfMelons Yeah I played HR. It was pretty good, was let down on the story side a bit, but still, it was a great return to form gameplay wise. Although issues with the way the handled XP balance and energy kinda irked me, like how it is completely pointless to use your blade takedowns since knocking them out gives you more XP and such.
And MD seems to be more of the same as HR which is good, although I hear that the story isn't that great which is a shame.
The 'universal ammo' was also used in Mass Effect 2 and 3, and actually had an in-universe explanation. Thermal clips were essentially blocks of metal that all weapons would break up and shape in specific ways depending on how they were designed. This is what resulted in their damage output, effective ranges, magazine sizes, even their spread
We gonna see a episode of Game Dungeon featuring the POSTAL series? (except 3)
That would be amazing! I'm really curious about what Ross's opinions are about a lot of the stuff in those games, especially 2.
Not true, the underlying horror in it adds to it IMHO.
@Thomas Civvie 11 has done great videos on the Postal series.
'I love games that involve you hiding bodies from the authorities...'
Any chance for a Hitman (the old one) Game Dungeon?
Max William Lauf the cloth physics blew my mind back in the day too
"That would change the face of the entire world, not just make our guns easier to load."
Unfortunately, knowing us humans, we'd probably pick the gun option anyway.
After rewatching it, I realised, why Grey Goo event in the beginning didn't kill everyone. If it's a controlled event, like a case in such attack, you can make them stop replicating after several iterations - much like our own cells stop, when we get old, and you can more or less control the area with that. Wanna only goo your enemies? Set a small number of replications. Wanna goo the entire city? Set a bigger number. So in my opinion, that kind of might make sense.
plus they would need power which destorying a city would definatley ruin
I don't know if others mentioned it already or how accurate this is, but it appears in Mankind Divided, your idea for the black market augs was actually implemented. I think it comes down to balancing how much processing power they need to avoid Adam overheating and burning out bits of his body. I didn't get that far in Mankind Divided to know for certain.
If you reach 400% overcharge on augs in MD, you can actually cause Jensen to restart his systems. It's merely a short cutscene, but it's still fun.
*All of Chicago destroyed*
"This is an Invisible War."
...huh ?
Ross needs to check out the older Hitman and Thief games. especially if he likes hiding bodies!
As much as I have conflicting thoughts about this sequel, I absolutely loved the idea of all Deus Ex 1 endings happening at the same time from the start. Human world is a complex thing - they certainly portray it that way in the first game. So it actually stands to reason there're no simple one-way answers to all of the questions from the first game. And Deux Ex endings aren't about a single guy winning something, it's about the fate of mankind basically. So instead of a single ending, each faction kinda got something of what it wanted, lost some territory and all in all continued doing its own thing on a new social landscape. Pretty smart idea for a sequel. The quality of a said sequel is whole other question.
Just mentioning Quarantine, Invisible War, Tyrian, you've already moved to the top of my list of favorite youtubers.
"Blowing up Area 51 isn't going to destroy Google, you can quote me on that." - Ross Scott, AKA the only acceptable voice for Gordon Freeman, 2016
Would you rather have ragdoll physics or good level design?
Al3xh413 Why wouldn't you?
Depends on the title. I might pick ragdoll physics in sandbox game.
Yeah, I liked GTA 3 and Vice City but I don't buy that they are better games the GTA4 onwards like some people state. Pushing people down stairs, watching them tumble, leaping from a bike to bowl your ass into a crowd.... these things are missing from the old games and make it impossible to go back and play vice city for anything other than nostalgia.
Tried playing San Andreas for the first time after GTA4 came out. Nope. To stiff and lifeless.
ragdoll physics =/= good game.
while it is a really fun thing to play around with for an hour or two, realistically a game should just have good gameplay and/or story.
that being said, the best ragdoll physics are the occasional glitched one like the swingset in gta iv
Level design. It's the decision made by favoring the first game over the second.
"Level load, level load, alley. Level load, level load, coffee shop."
That's basically actual Seattle
If you wanted a grey goo event that "stopped" after a certain perimeter, there's a few ways. You could have the assimilation phase take a peak amount of energy (hence, the spreading nanites would stop and have to crawl slowly to new energy sources). Have assimilation take time, so the heroes have a chance to stop it. Or, maybe have the nanites require a specific material/element to create themselves that they must hunt down (hence they slow and must crawl to new resources).
That's just a few ideas...
Or create the nanites which have a predefined self destruction timer based on time, reproduction, or some such. Human cells have that, after a certain number of divisions human cells will not divide any further.
Another option is to make the nanites run on external beamed energy and when they no longer receive enough energy to reproduce they would consume themselves. So the size could be controlled by simply cutting off the power.
Brilliant as always! I'd love to see a game dungeon on Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay/Dark Athena
I'm mostly a console gamer, but even I get upset when developers dumb things down because consoles are either too underpowered, or they think console gamers are too dumb to understand certain concepts. I remember it recently happening with BioShock Infinite. Older gameplay trailers made everything look so cool and combat much more complex. Then the game hit shelves and whoopsie, lots of cut content and the combat was dumbed down and simplified to the point where it's basically just another CoD/Halo clone.
I play MMO's with a controller. Its fun but really really hard. I'm pretty good at it thou after the hundreds of hours I put in. Very enjoyable way to play because I can constantly improve, the skill ceiling is basically not there at all.
They they say they would need to change the game and simplify it if the game comes out on consoles... I'm like "WHY?!, its great being complicated and hard, people are as good as the effort they put in, Why dumb it down when you don't need to"
Not sure if this is applicable, but I recently finished replaying Hλlf-Life 2 on my Xbox 360. I'm making the transfer too PC soon, and decided to get Black Mesa for my first game. I wanted to get back into (lots of 2's "too'"s in this) the half life feel, so I set the difficulty on hard and played through it. The controller I was playing on was faulty (I've played HL2 with this controller before), so I felt like I was wearing roller blades and shooting BB's. I beat the game with relative ease, which is why Dumbing down drives me insane.
People have told me they couldn't beat HL2 on PC because it was too hard, when I tell them what I did, they look at me like some kind of superhuman. Dumbing down games is just a way to trick the player into thinking that this is as good as it gets, so companies have to put less effort in. I would rather have a game that makes me feel stupid for screwing up and dying (HL2 with the failure screens) than a game that is easy enough that I can play it with one hand tied behind my back (Bioshock Infinite).
Infinite being a shooter wasn't due to dumbing down. The game got scrapped multiple times, and the footage shown was from an earlier build. In the end it seemed they ran out of time and money, so they made something very simplistic. It's why, despite being a selling well, the studio closed. Such a waste of a good concept.
remember when black ops 3 cut down its original plot that was very intricately written because they thought the general public was too dumb to understand it because its a cod game for dumb babies
BioShock Infinite was bad because it didn't let you play as the good guys.
Ross, when you mentioned The Journeyman Project I got chills. That franchise was a huge part of my childhood but all of my discs are scratched and none of my computers know how to emulate it. I don't want to be that guy who requests you do a video, but if you did a Game Dungeon on the Journeyman Project trilogy at the very least I would be eternally grateful.
I know this is seven years later but his video on that game was as good as usual. I hope you get to play The Journeyman Project again someday if you haven't already :)
its not about pixel density or amount of polygons.
its what you use out of those things to make a player feel like they are in another world doing stuff to objects they recognize.
you have to have a balance between clarity and action or else you just have a bunch of random shit on the screen that you cant discern or you have too little on the screen to discern and it feels empty and hollow.
This game is a prime example of consoles constricting game design by their technical limitations. Granted this isn't as big of a problem today due to Moore's law slowing down, but we still see it pop up from time to time especially when it comes to games with more open ended systems like Deus Ex.
DISHONORED IS THE BEST BODY DUMPING SIMULATOR EVER
I'm glad Ross prefers gameplay over graphics. Makes me know I'm not the only one.
Funny you mention the Kidney Thieves, I have both those songs on my Spotify playlist to this day. I'm pretty nostalgic for this game, DX1 is amazing but I had lots of young fun screwing around in Invisible War too.
As a Washington native, I can honestly say that "alley of a city" pretty much sums up downtown Seattle.
Ross, you've been introduced to "KidneyThieves" through this game, and you've introduced me to them through your review of this game. What an awesome band, thank you for that. And for a great review, naturally
I had to scroll down way further than is acceptable to find a comment acknowledging how great a band Kidney Thieves are.
Actually, a second game with ragdolls came pretty quickly. Hitman 1 had ragdolls in 1999. Though ragdolls didn't become industry standard until around 2004/2005. I think that early ragdolls were hilarious. Especially the ones in Battlefield 2. They were so bad, lol. Also JC Denton's model in this game always bugged me for some reason. His head looks like a potato.
I think it's the haircut.
The ragdolls in Hitman 1 were fantastic!
Did you mention that you could see Alex Denton in Deus Ex 1?
And screwing up the ending seems to be a Deus Ex illness.
Spot on point about modern soundtracks
I love Ross' reviews. I can watch his Deus Ex ones multiple times and enjoy them.
I’ve listened to it easily a hundred times over the years.
Both Warren Spector and Harvey Smith admitted that they did a lot of things wrong making this game.
"It was a good game, just not a very good Deus Ex game" to paraphrase them.
I agree with "guns shouldn't respect how levelled up your character is". A bullet is a bullet, it doesn't matter how skilled the person firing the gun is.
I've never fired a gun in my life but if i shoot someone in the head, they're gonna die.
12:00 *Awwwwww yeah, in the future Imma bust a cap in yo ass, yo! Then Imma go jell my hair.*
It's just amazing how well are these videos made
"aaaaawwww yeeaaah in da future imma bust a cap in yo ass, yo, then imma go gel my hair" hahahahahahahaha good god that caught me off guard
I know the video is old but there's a fix to the grey goo bomb that more or less goes in line with current research
>bomb carries some synthetic element that won't be present in the exploded area and has a long half life (let's say, technetium)
>bomb is a cell with a large organelle containing technetium
>every time it duplicates, the technetium organelle divides
>once it can't divide anymore, cell duplication stops
this way, you can give the bomb whichever yield you want by manipulating initial organelle size.
The font reminds me of the one in Halo CE.
Graphics and HUD style also look similar.
Deus Ex 1 DID introduce a Universal Constructor. So technically, they SHOULD have a Replicator.
TIME TO RIP AND TEAR A GAME TO SHREDS!
IT'S A BIG GAME, SO THAT MEANS IT HAS BIG GUTS!!
THE BIGGER THEY ARE THE COOLER THEY ARE TO KILL
OOH. HERE IT COMES. HERE COMES THE NIGHT TRAIN. CHOO CHOO CHA! BOOGIE!
I DON'T KNOW WHAT WE'RE YELLING ABOUT!!
LOUD NOISES
A minor issue to point out to Ross: Nanites can't replicate so fast that the heat produced damages them. Nanomachines are enormously resistant to blunt trauma, but in reality, a grey goo event could feasibly be fought with flamethrowers. They are very, very bad at dealing with severe temperature changes. Their internal structure is too fragile. And since they can't duplicate too fast, while the initial wave of replication might be relatively fast, at a certain point it would collapse under its own weight because of the heat generated.
Oh dear: this game.
The game that really divided people's views.
Don't you mean that it left _Mankind Divided_?
AVAILABLE NOW!
noice
+Jemoni HOOOOOOOOOO!
Man Mankind Divided is being super fun right now, I played 7 hours and I'm still exploring Prague.
human revolution and mankind divided are much worse than this game...
Limited gray goo event is possible in the nanites have a built in limit to their spread or an offsite off switch
you could use a time-to-live counter, like network packets. basically, the act of reproducing decrements the counter, and once the counter reaches zero, halt reproduction.
"Blowing up Area 51 isn't going to destroy Google." - Ross Scott 2016
I'll be using this in my thesis.
Man back when I was a kid and had little grasp on rpgs I loved playing this with my sister running around darting people and just genuinely being a goblin
I strongly approve of them giving you access to your augs right away. Nano-augmentation was way under emphasized in the original. You come to Liberty Island with nothing but a flash light aug and they already treat you like you're something special.
I suppose they justify his deployment by saying it is a test of his extensive training or whatever.
@@brandonmorel2658 Who wants to test an augmented agent without his augmentations?
@@Dennis-nc3vw It is a test of test of his training as I said before, they want to see if he is as reliable as his brother before they pump him full of billion dollar nano augmentations. If they could observe his performance in a high intensity scenario then they could make a choice on whether to invest in him. They had two agents on stand-by just in case he failed. That's how I rationalize it at least.
@@brandonmorel2658 I still feels like it downplays the importance of nano-augmentation in the story, something that should have felt like it had a deeper part.
Hot damn, great work Ross, you've pumped these out fast!
An interesting way they could have combined the endings from DX1 would have been JC merging with Helios, then the Illuminati got so scared of him that that they release a massive EMP that blacks out the world.
Having the Illuminati trying to worm their way back into power post-collapse and playing the long game like that would have made sense, but I don't think the writers were really giving it that much thought.
I didn't see the point of combining endings. I don't get why anyone would be attached to the decisions of a character they are no longer playing. If anything its more immersive when the character you are no longer playing no longer feels like you. I felt the same way about Far Cry: New Dawn going so far to hide Rook's identity, even though you are now playing as a completely different character.
I like thinking that Gordon Freeman was put into a video-reviewing stasis by the G-Man.
The simplyfing for consoles reminded me of Thief: Deadly Shadows, which suffered also frommuch smaller areas, that dont compare do the Thief 1 and 2 vast levels. Like how brought up the gang situation in seatle, there is also two rivaling factions in Thief right next to each other.
Yep. The two games use the same engine pretty much (a heavily modified unreal engine 2) that was butchered to run on the original xbox. That 64 MB of unified memory was def the biggest limiting factor and why Thief Deadly Shadows has so many damn loading spots (those blue portal looking things) multiple of them in just one level. Thank god for the mod community on PC. There is a fan made patch for deadly shadows if I remember correctly called "Sneaky upgrade". It fixes and improves SO many things including removing almost all of the loading walls other than the ones in the hub city. Also fixes any problems with modern systems, offers tons of gameplay tweaks you can turn on or off to make it somewhat more like T1 and T2 etc. It's a must have, same as TafferPatcher for T2.
Only one of the original writers from Deus Ex were involved with the project from what I can tell. Warren Spector wasn't involved with any of the future games as far as I can tell. This is is why development TEAMS are important to keep together if you can when making sequels.
Just noticed how much the graphics of Deus Ex Invisible War reminds me of Thief DS, another compromise of level size for graphics.
Guess that's what Ion Storm liked at the time
"Lets make a great weapon". if only my employer at Heckler and Koch gave me that pep talk.
Well, this Deus Ex happens in 2072, wich is 20 years after the original Deus Ex events, so by then they must have developed the universal ammo stuff. To me it sounded ok. But then again, Mass Effect did basicly the same thing with its termal clips, wich isnt exactly ammo, its coolers, because the guns have "infinite" ammo to beguin with thanks to melting and manipulation of steel within the chamber before shooting them in a gauss style way...
yeah but mass effect is science fantasy.
Thats ok to be honest, nothing wrong with science fantasy.
deus ex however tries to sell itself as near future
+TheBritishGeek Well, not by Invisible War anyway. By then it's future future
There is virtually no reason to make "universal ammo for everything". Even if techonological advancement would make "nanobot solution" possible, you still need different materials prepared for assembly when speaking about, say, rocket launcher or pistol. There is also a clear problem of gun control - no way in hell you want to provide the general public with universal solution that can be utilized to produce bombs with a few tweaks in the programming.
There is a certain degree of uniform ammunition, but only as far as it doesn't affect the performance of the gun. It is unlikely that "universal" solution would exist that wouldn't do so at the expense of the particular gun's performance. All of this is, of course, debatable, since Deus Ex is still science fiction. But I do agree with Ross that it pushes the suspension of disbelief too far. It wasn't made so because it made sense. It was made to simplify the gameplay and inventory management for the consoles, which were the prime focus of the game.
Similarly, Mass Effect used the same solution not because it made sense in the world. It was to simplify the gameplay. It doesn't make any more sense there, even if it was pitched to a wider audience.
If Conrad is still alive in ME3, he actually comments on how stupid thermal clips are. I remain irritated at a concession to make gameplay more generic - presumably to broaden appeal to CoDtards that might be put off by something slightly different.
Sigh.
A decision that I rank up there with human reaper baby and star kid gotta kill organics to stop organics getting killed.
11:59 - hahaha, great description Ross. I always thought Invisible War's cover was horrible too.
"there was no war, just this game"
What if there was, but to you it was just... invisible?
I fucking hate universal ammo. But I love this game, the exchange between JC and Alex in Antarctica is reason enough to play through.
16:14 "The order?! NOOOOO! The One God virus didn't die after all and is plotting to destroy its mechanical competition in nanites!" Maybe the Omar are similar to either SHODAN's cyborgs or the Geth's heretic faction from Mass Effect.
You could write/create a "nanobomb" that has a limitation to shut down after a certain initial range/mass converted/whatever. A big part of nanotechnology is having the individual bots be able to communicate and orchestrate between each other.
So 50% of the video was basically to illustrate why consoles ruin everything, 40% on things the game itself could have done better, and 10% of an extra helping of dead bodies. Yep, it's Ross's Game Dungeon alright, and I wouldn't have it any other way.