Preface: Another two parter revolving around videogames, the only other topic I tend to get word-ish about outside of animation.
Original Post: April '12
So yeah, I’m a gamer.
I look more like this guy than I'm willing to admit.
Not a hefty gamer mind you. Certainly nothing like I was back in the ‘ol days of sprites (SNES repreSENT!) Course that was when I was a kid, before I had to pay for games myself along with bills, rent, sustenance, hookers, medical utensils, turpentine, police bribes…look, the point I’m making is I don’t game as much now, but I never let the habit drop and am still neck deep in the culture and exploration of it as a medium.
So let’s talk about Deus Ex.
Shortly after Human Revolution was announced, I found the original was on sale for less than a couple bucks on Steam. It was certainly a well regarded game and being a FPS enthusiast, I was eager to find games that did more with the first person perspective than just ‘SHOOT ALL THE THINGS!’ After playing it though…well let’s just say time hasn’t been kind.
I’m not just talking looks here. DE was never that pretty even back in its heyday, but a lot of the real-time mechanics, such as stealth and melee, were clunky or flat out broken. It was easy to tell that by cramming so many different mechanics into the game, the actual polishing of those mechanics sort of fell by the way side. In the end, I just couldn’t bring myself to beat the game. Which was a real shame, because I found the actual design of the game to be phenomenal to say nothing of ahead of its time.
First person games have always revolved around a control scheme wherein certain buttons each controlled a section of the characters body: the mouse controlling the head, the WASD keys the legs and the mouse buttons the arms, however since up to that point all first person games were first person shooters, the arms were always carrying a gun, limiting any other action to an ‘e’ or ‘f’ key typically.
The revelation Deus Ex came to was a simple one: why not have the arms(i.e. the mouse buttons) hold something other than…well, arms? It really is kind of amazing how simple yet effective this change made. Suddenly the left mouse button wasn’t about firing your weapon, but using the item you had placed in your hand. Yeah, you could be pulling the trigger on your pistol, but you could also just as easily be downing a drink, using a lock pick…using items. Items you had picked up with your other hand: the right mouse button.
It was a seemingly small thing, but in conjunction with the ‘grid’ inventory system (which should be a game design standard at this point, why do game’s deviate from it…WHYYYY) and the over level designs, it lead to an amazing amount of freedom and an exponential increase in interactivity for the first person genre. It turned a Deus Ex from a game with levels, to a world you lived in.
It was also the core reason I was prepping to absolutely despise Human Revolution…
I look more like this guy than I'm willing to admit.
Not a hefty gamer mind you. Certainly nothing like I was back in the ‘ol days of sprites (SNES repreSENT!) Course that was when I was a kid, before I had to pay for games myself along with bills, rent, sustenance, hookers, medical utensils, turpentine, police bribes…look, the point I’m making is I don’t game as much now, but I never let the habit drop and am still neck deep in the culture and exploration of it as a medium.
So let’s talk about Deus Ex.
Shortly after Human Revolution was announced, I found the original was on sale for less than a couple bucks on Steam. It was certainly a well regarded game and being a FPS enthusiast, I was eager to find games that did more with the first person perspective than just ‘SHOOT ALL THE THINGS!’ After playing it though…well let’s just say time hasn’t been kind.
I’m not just talking looks here. DE was never that pretty even back in its heyday, but a lot of the real-time mechanics, such as stealth and melee, were clunky or flat out broken. It was easy to tell that by cramming so many different mechanics into the game, the actual polishing of those mechanics sort of fell by the way side. In the end, I just couldn’t bring myself to beat the game. Which was a real shame, because I found the actual design of the game to be phenomenal to say nothing of ahead of its time.
First person games have always revolved around a control scheme wherein certain buttons each controlled a section of the characters body: the mouse controlling the head, the WASD keys the legs and the mouse buttons the arms, however since up to that point all first person games were first person shooters, the arms were always carrying a gun, limiting any other action to an ‘e’ or ‘f’ key typically.
The revelation Deus Ex came to was a simple one: why not have the arms(i.e. the mouse buttons) hold something other than…well, arms? It really is kind of amazing how simple yet effective this change made. Suddenly the left mouse button wasn’t about firing your weapon, but using the item you had placed in your hand. Yeah, you could be pulling the trigger on your pistol, but you could also just as easily be downing a drink, using a lock pick…using items. Items you had picked up with your other hand: the right mouse button.
It was a seemingly small thing, but in conjunction with the ‘grid’ inventory system (which should be a game design standard at this point, why do game’s deviate from it…WHYYYY) and the over level designs, it lead to an amazing amount of freedom and an exponential increase in interactivity for the first person genre. It turned a Deus Ex from a game with levels, to a world you lived in.
It was also the core reason I was prepping to absolutely despise Human Revolution…
2nd post
This is a gif I actually drew, because the internet didn't provide.
First a bit of a confession to make. That last time, when I was talking about the original Deus Ex? I hadn’t actually played the game in a while. I decided to start ‘er up again since I was literally in the middle of both DE:HR and the DLC, so I figure I could just start switching happily between all three whenever the fancy hit me. Playing it again I realize now that…I was pretty much on the money about it (though I’ll admit there was a bit more finagling with the default keyboard setup than I remember…). Impeccable design marred by…well I said it was ‘clunky’ last time, but really I should have said ‘unpolished’.
Which is exactly what Human Revolution was: the same concept of the original buffed and polished to a mirror shine. I’m not talking the graphics neither (which by all accounts wasn’t all that impressive compared to its contemporaries), but the mechanics, interface, etc…everything was streamlined and simplified.
A good example was how in the original, if you augmented yourself with a strength enhancer to lift heavier objects, you had to manually activate it in order to lift said objects. In HR, all augmented actions have been automated save four special abilities or context sensitive actions.
Now a lot of…*ahem*…’people’ have dismissed this style of alteration as ‘dumbing down’ or the even more inane ‘consolization’ of the game. They are wrong. There’s a difference between altering fundamental gameplay concepts and smoothing out the rough edges of an idea in order to keep the player from needlessly taking actions that waste time. Not to say that Human Revolution did none of the former…because it did.
My big beef before the game came out was that interacting with the world had been relegated to a keyboard button rather than the originals’ right mouse configuration, which now handled the cover mechanics. It turned out not to be that big of a deal as the cover mechanics are some of the best I’ve seen in the industry so far, but it did end up exposing a larger overall problem of how un-interactive the game world had become. You could no longer hold anything in your hands except guns, the only things that could be picked up that didn’t instantly get shoved into your inventory or get put back right where it was found were basically crates of various sizes and weights and all the rest was all just set dressing. A fire fight in the middle of an office - with grenades being tossed and rockets being launched - would not push one piece of paper out of place or break one coffee cup. I fired a magnum with explosive rounds at some cleaning supplies that didn’t even show a bullet mark. That plastic is hardcore.
Point being that while HR can and has gone too far in simplifying some areas and even taken a step backwards in others (inventory management is a needless hassle), it still offers a better play experience overall due to that simplification. It wasn’t a bad idea…it just kinda got out of hand.
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