Talking about it is a bit different to supplying it. Wikipedia has articles on cocaine but it’s not about to point out your local crack den.

Yeah I forgot that you still got XP when you did non-lethal takedowns.

Agreed, the level designs in Dishonored were much better and the stealth felt a lot more organic instead of “oh hey, here’s another vent to crawl through, because, STEALTH!”
I would be fine with Eidos looking to Arkane’s level designs for some influence.
Everything also is very... confusing, it wasn’t just me getting…

The “weakness for stealth” is true for pretty much every type of “choose-your-style” game. Simply put, once a game is designed around the option of stealth, stealth quickly becomes the option that’s most fun. There are a million action games where you can go in guns/biotics blazing. Only in MGS, Deus Ex, and a handful…

Pretty much, and level design is why I like Dishonored more, because it makes less of those mistakes. Paths were more varied and organic to the world you were in, along with mechanics that opened up paths you might not even notice on the first playthrough.

The issue with the lack of fun non-stealth gameplay also applies to the original DX. You felt in control as a stealthy operative from mission one, while all the other approaches (sniper or Rambo) suffered under the terrible accuracy that you had before massive upgrades.

Smart AI is hard, but it has been done before. It’s not your adversaries being the smartest most efficient people in the room, but providing a sense of challenge without being cheaply exploited.

I think that clunky on purpose excuse is lame. Being an RPG doesn’t necessitate you forget about fluidity of movement and control.

I don’t particularly find it elegant. You’re taking the extreme of first-person where it lacks peripheral vision, and replacing it with third-person where you have a grossly exaggerated field of view, enabling you to see enemies above or around cover without your character physically need to look out. Oh, and your…

I’ve tried to play this game a few times and I always end up quitting out of frustration pretty early on.

You gained more experience for taking the stealthy approach. Essentially, killing someone gets you a cookie. Getting through the level without killing anyone gets you the entire jar. Not being seen will get you frosting.

Yeah, but it still runs into the issue of Deus Ex being a game about playstyle you pick, and inherently you hope they’re given equal attention and reinforcement.

I actually just finished HR for the first time last week and have started playing through it again on NG+. I’d probably started it half a dozen times in the past couple of years but just couldn’t get past the first few hours. The biggest problem, and what kept me from getting any further all this time, is that…

Yeah, the shooting had aim-down-sights as if it were a Call of Duty game, but A) your health regenerated incredibly slowly and you take HUGE damage so realistically you could almost never just stand there aiming down your sights with an assault rifle because you’d get lit up in like 3 seconds, and B) if you get into…

I’d kind of agree with most of this, though making each playstyle valid and balanced with good AI is something the original game struggled with.

DE:HR is actually the game that got me back into single player games. As a kid who owned a NES on up through the PS1 I was obviously into single player games. Then I got a computer and the world of online game opened up to me (mostly Quake 3 though) and I never really touched anything that wasn’t multiplayer for a…

I’m in two minds about the third person elements.

Eh, I’m kind of glad he didn’t bring up the boss fights. They’ve been discussed to death at this point - everyone knows they’re terrible and ill-fitting, there’s not really a whole lot more to say about it.

I thought the 3rd person switches were weird too. Like cover mechanics work in Killzone and stuff, and first person sneaking worked out fine in Dishonored (maybe Thief? didn’t play it), so the first I played Deus Ex : HR, and the game just suddenly switched to 3rd person when i went into cover, I was like :/.

Here's the problem and it's something that Ubisoft has inexplicably been doing for a while now. Parts of the plot in terms of missions that would develop characters are put into side missions while things that actually progress the narrative, no matter how dull, are made the main missions.