Deus Ex: Human Revolution Message Board older than one year ago

#deusex Earlier this week, code-crackers broke the secrets of a teaser site Eidos has put up for Deus Ex: Human Revolution, finding what appeared to be clues for the game's first DLC extension (above). Eidos now has officially confirmed it will arrive in October. More »

New Deus Ex: Human Revolution DLC is scheduled for October, according to the official website. The content, called The Missing Link, explores what happened to Adam during the time period where he disappears for three days in the campaign...

Welcome to Extended Play, a new feature series where we (and you) get to engage in real, substantive discussion about the biggest games for a whole month after release. Our first subject is Deus Ex: Human Revolution: is it as clever as it thinks it is? Does it live up to its promises of choice, and ...

Those among you with your ears to the internet will have noticed that a mystery has been unfolding around Deus Ex: Human Revolution. Some people are referring to it as an “ARG”. That’s a pretty serious term and shouldn’t be bandied about lightly, but this does have all the hallmarks of one. It all started with a code, or “some gibberish” as I call it, and eventually led to the image you see above. Quite how people worked it out is a mystery to my little meat-brain, which is to say I’m convinced they had some form of calculating device embedded in their skulls. Rather amusingly, even that wasn’t enough though because Eidos Montreal had to release extra clues. To be fair, I didn’t even understand those though. The story so far is here. What does it all mean? Were any of you involved in figuring out what’s happened so far? And am I actually quite stupid for not understanding how any of this worked? Arg(h)!

Every editor at IGN wishes he or she had the time to personally respond to every comment from the message boards, but we don't. However, we've decided to pick out some of the most interesting comments on Arthur Gies' recent Deus Ex: Human Revolution review and respond to them. The reviewer did not p...

Every editor at IGN wishes he or she had the time to personally respond to every comment from the message boards, but we don't. However, we've decided to pick out some of the most interesting comments on Arthur Gies' recent Deus Ex: Human Revolution review and respond to them. The reviewer did not p...

#speakuponkotaku In today's digital-only edition of Speak Up on Kotaku, commenter TaylorEatWorld tries to find a physical copy of a hit PC game, not knowing what a monumental challenge that is these days. More »

#techspot For those unfamiliar with the Deus Ex franchise, it goes back to the year 2000 when highly hyped developer Ion Storm went on to develop a System Shock-inspired action game that combined gameplay elements of first-person shooters and role-playing games. More »

Come on now, you must have had some time to play DXHR by now? If so, head below and tell us what you thought of it. Let’s assume SPOILERS for this comment thread, shall we?

If you want to know our thoughts, check out The RPS Verdict, John’s thoughts on the game, my own story of lethality versus non-lethality, and Alec’s explanation of why he is not Adam Jensen.

Anyway, how are you getting on with it?

Eidos Montreal commissioned a cyborg to document real-world advancements in biotechnology that could serve as precursors to the gadgets used in Deus Ex: Human Revolution, titled The Eyeborg Documentary. Why "Eyeborg," you ask? Filmmaker Rob Spence has a prosthetic eye -- but this isn't your grandma's prosthesis. Spence's is a wireless camera that transmits footage to a receiver, with no connection to his optic nerve, not to mention it looks pretty cool when he reveals it from under his eye patch.

Spence documents the height of artificial-limb and augmented-reality advancement, following a man with a computer chip behind his retina, a health-bar-encoded firefighting helmet, two men's bionic arms and three bionic legs, all in a very viewable 12-minute timeframe. We may not have machines guns in our forearms yet, but this stuff is still spectacular.

#deusex Ordinarily I scoff at the age-gate trailer, but here, I think it supplies a useful warning and a chance to say THERE IS VIDEO OF AN EYEBALL BEING CUT OPEN at the beginning. So look away for the first 16 seconds if you don't want to see that. More »

GameStop has not had a particularly brilliant week. Immediately following its forcible removal of OnLive bonus codes in copies of Deus Ex: Human Revolution for the PC, the company suddenly found itself inundated with enraged (and rightful) hurlings of vitriol in the direction of the retailer's management and its policies regarding selling opened games as new--not to mention physically removing content, even if it is for a competing brand, from copies of games. After Square Enix, Deus Ex's publisher, inexplicably apologized for a problem that was only tangentially its fault, GameStop has finally come out and said something beyond a simple reaffirmation that it wasn't cool with a competitor's promotion being sold at its stores.

Sent in an email to GameStop customers today, CEO Paul Raines sent out the following half-apology and goodwill offering:

Dear GameStop customer,
Earlier this week, GameStop removed a competitor's coupon from standard edition PC versions of Deus Ex: Human Revolution, a recent release by Square Enix. We were not aware that the product box would contain this competitor's offer. We regret the events surrounding this title release and that our customers were put in the middle of this issue between GameStop and Square Enix, the publisher of this game. And for this, we are truly sorry.

For your inconvenience, we would like to offer you a free $50 GameStop gift card and a Buy 2 Get 1 Free pre-owned purchase. We want to earn back your trust and confidence in the GameStop experience. Please bring in this email and your store receipt or order confirmation from GameStop.com and present it to a Game Advisor.

Sincerely,
Paul Raines
CEO, GameStop

While it's unarguably great news that anyone who purchased a copy of Deus Ex: Human Revolution for the PC (and still has their receipt) will apparently get these free offers, Raines and GameStop PR's unwillingness to straight-up say "We should not have removed these coupons from the product in question" effectively implies that GameStop isn't really sorry that they did it in the first place. Some might chalk it up to legal language wrangling, in an effort to avoid admitting a more specific "our bad!" that could potentially turn into some kind of lawsuit down the road. Still, all Raines really admits to is that it was pretty jacked up that customers were brought into this mess between a retailer and a publisher, which is but a fraction of the issue at hand.

If you're one of the customers who picked up your PC copy of Human Revolution at GameStop, go forth informed, and get your free games on. Then I suggest doing as I will do, and never, ever purchase anything from this company again.

Gamestop has pulled a few things over the past few days, including the coupons from PC boxes of Deus Ex: Human Revolution and eventually the entire game itself, but now we hope it's not pulling our leg, too.

Gamestop CEO Paul Raines is emailing customers with an apology, and offers of a $50 gift card and a "buy two, get one free" deal on pre-owned purchases. Anyone who ordered Human Revolution through Gamestop simply needs to bring in the email and their store receipt or order confirmation for their consolation prizes.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution is out in the UK today! Jim, Kieron, Alec, and John have assembled to pass judgement on it. They like it. They like it a lot. But not without reservation. Read on to hear about why a wall is a man’s best augment, and why Kieron is feeling all dirty after kissing Geralt.

SPOILER WARNING: There are minor plot spoilers within. Endings and plot twists are not discussed, but there are a number of narrative elements mentioned as well as a few mechanical spoilers. Just beware. You know. As usual.

(more…)

This latest patch addresses:

• A frequent issue for AMD/ATI hardware users that can cause the game to crash on startup.
  
• Improvements to loading speed. The speed increase depends on machine spec and settings, but loading time improvements of over 50% have been measured on some machines.
  
• Some control fixes:
  
  • Diagonal movement is no longer faster as intended.
    
  • Adjustments have been made to mouse sensitivity in response to user feedback.
    
    • Mouse sensitivity for X and Y axis can still be configured separately, but is now consistent when set to default settings.
      
    • The range of settings for mouse sensitivity has been adjusted to provide for more accurate adjusting.
      
    • The default mouse sensitivity has been altered to be somewhat less sensitive.
      

The first line of discussion I seem to have had with anyone who has played DXHR (which is a considerable fraction of the people I know) concerns how we played it. And to talk about how is to say whether you approached it violently, or non-violently. Whether you relied on knockout punches, tranquiliser darts and stunguns, or whether you stabbed people in the dick. Most people I know felt that to be true to the game, and to themselves, they had to defer to a non-violent route. I… did not feel that way. At least not by the end of the game.

This is my story. (Mild mechanical spoilers.)

(more…)

GameStop has pulled its PC copies of Deus Ex: Human Revolution from store shelves after the company discovered a redeemable voucher for competing service Onlive was included, allowing players to access an additional copy of the game, according to an internal letter...

Hey, remember the free Deus Ex: Human Revolution OnLive code that comes with the retail PC version? If you bought your copy at GameStop, chances are you didn't get the code. It turns out that the retailer decided not to participate in the promotion ... by force.

GameSpy is reporting that GameStop employees received notice yesterday that they were to open new PC copies of Deus Ex and remove the free OnLive token. To repeat: GameStop employees were told to open new copies and remove contents intended to be sold with the game.

A GameStop representative confirmed to GameSpy that the company is removing the tokens, saying, "Square Enix packed the competitor's coupon with our DXHR product without our prior knowledge and we did pull and discard these coupons." Indeed, some of our own commenters claiming to be GameStop employees said the same thing in our post revealing the OnLive promotion yesterday.

Joystiq is currently investigating the issue, including the possible legal implications of tampering with a product and selling it as new.

[Image: GameSpy]

An internal GameStop email with corporate instructions forwarded by an employee this afternoon.

GameStop dominated the conversation today, based on reports the retailer was opening copies of Deus Ex: Human Revolution on PC, removing the coupon for a copy of the game through OnLive, sealing the games back up and selling them as "new."

Perhaps for a variety of reasons, possibly ranging from conversations between GameStop and Square Enix to backlash from basically the entire Internet, the company is now pulling all copies off store shelves.

A GameStop employee forwarded me an email (as seen above) sent to every store, announcing the move.

"At this time please pull all Regular PC editions of Deus Ex: Human Revolution and place them in your backroom. These will be recalled at a later date.
As GameStop is developing a streaming service in our Spawn Labs Cloud Computing Division, the coupon that was included is for a competing service. We are returning all copies of the PC regular edition to the vendor in agreement with Square Enix.
Any unfulfilled reserves of the Regular PC Edition should be taken care of with the inventory set aside in your backroom.
Please honor any returns with a receipt."

GameStop issued a similar public comment about its original reasoning for opening the games.

"We pulled the coupons because, like all retailers, we prefer not to promote our competitors and their competing offerings and services in our stores," said a company spokesperson. "Unfortunately, the coupon was packed without our prior knowledge."

Both Square Enix and OnLive declined to comment on the matter.

Hey, remember the free Deus Ex: Human Revolution OnLive code that comes with the retail PC version? If you bought your copy at GameStop, chances are you didn't get the code. It turns out that the retailer decided not to participate in the promotion ... by force.

GameSpy is reporting that GameStop employees received notice yesterday that they were to open new PC copies of Deus Ex and remove the free OnLive token. To repeat: GameStop employees were told to open new copies and remove contents intended to be sold with the game.

A GameStop representative confirmed to GameSpy that the company is removing the tokens, saying, "Square Enix packed the competitor's coupon with our DXHR product without our prior knowledge and we did pull and discard these coupons." Indeed, some of our own commenters claiming to be GameStop employees said the same thing in our post revealing the OnLive promotion yesterday.

Joystiq is currently investigating the issue, including the possible legal implications of tampering with a product and selling it as new.

Update: GameStop has issued an official statement on its Facebook page. We've also turned to our go-to legal guru, Mark Methenitis for his comments. Find both after the break.

[Image: GameSpy]

#deusex GameStop tells Gamespy.com that they have been removing the codes for free copies of the OnLive PC version of Deus Ex: Human Revolution from the new PC copies of the game they sell at their stores and selling the game, without the free bonus, as new. More »

In case you hadn't had a recent reminder that the brains behind video game retailer GameStop and its policies are like the villains in a bad '80s comedy, let today's news be the refresher you need to reassert your desire to never, ever go to that place to buy games.

GameStop management (pictured) were unavailable for comment.

According to a picture obtained by GameSpy from a GameStop employee, those working at GameStop retail locations have been instructed by corporate management to open any and all copies of Deus Ex: Human Revolution, and remove the OnLive coupons included with the disc for a free digital copy. Yes, GameStop is actually opening new copies of games, removing content provided to you by the publisher as a bonus for your purchase, and then selling that copy as new. New. As in fresh, or unopened, or unused. NEW.

The OnLive promotion was just announced yesterday, and apparently GameStop didn't take too kindly to the idea of coupons for a copy of the game being included from a competing service. OnLive, which deals in streaming-on-demand versions of games, is in direct competition with GameStop's Impulse service, which currently sells digital copies of PC titles and is in beta testing for on-demand streaming as well.

Ars Technica separately confirmed from a GameStop spokesperson that this policy is 100% accurate.

How do you do this and not expect people to be pissed?

Understandably, customers who purchased Human Revolution from GameStop are irate, both at having content they were provided by the publisher forcibly removed, and by GameStop selling a game that has been opened and tampered with as "new." While GameStop's corporate management likely won't care too terribly much about this outrage, being the soulless caricatures of humanity's horrendous insatiability and inhumanity toward their fellow man that they are, they might actually start caring if these sorts of abysmal practices actually begin to affect their bottom line.

As such, I'd just like to include a reminder that there are roughly a gajilliondy other retail outlets that sell video games. Some of which even aren't run by the industry's equivalent of greedy, thieving goblins.

Jonathan Jacques-Belletete, art director of Deus Ex: Human Revolution has been talking about the four-year journey he and his team took to create one of the most visually impressive games ever created...

Apparently people still sometimes buy games in shops! Imagine that. And if you do that with the US retail version of Deus Ex: Human Revolution, according to VG247 you’ll get a code to play the game via OnLive. That’s the service that lets you stream the game via your internets, so it’ll play on any machine with a decent connection. It’s an interesting inclusion. And makes me wonder – have you tried OnLive, or any similar service yet? What have your experiences been?

Please note: this includes some minor spoilers, but none of them relate to the game’s core plot.

I am not Adam Jensen, and Adam Jensen is not me. Our goals are not aligned.

This is not a complaint. This is exactly why Deus Ex: Human Revolution has been the mainstream game I’ve been most obsessed with this year. Jensen’s goals are these: to avenge his girlfriend and to serve his employer. These goals change over time, and most importantly become far bigger than such comparatively petty interests. They also don’t get in the way of my goals.

My goals are these: find everything, upgrade everything, read everything, buy everything, hack everything, don’t kill anyone. At the same time, I’m not terribly invested in why I’m doing these things, from the game narrative’s point of my view. I want to know how it all plays out, but being a dutiful employee and a dutiful boyfriend – those are Adam Jensen’s goals, not mine.(more…)

4 out of 5

Deus Ex: Human Revolution feels like the sort of cyberpunk story that no one writes anymore. Why? Probably because this game is set up as a prequel to the original Deus Ex, which was released back in 2000. That's means the game is set in a world that was conceived before the Internet became quite as crazy it is today, before our society's conspiracy theories got a lot deeper than basic boogeymen like "the Illuminati" and "Majestic-12." It's a world where a Chinese biotech firm still makes sense as an evil organization. And Human Revolution is set at an extremely interesting time in this world's development, as augmented humans and "normal" people start to clash along lines both class-based and philosophical. It's an exciting world with a tale that's worth hearing, even if some parts of the performance and gameplay don't hit the same high bar as the others.

In Human Revolution, you play as Adam Jensen, an ex-SWAT cop who now works in corporate security for a biotech company called Sarif Industries. Sarif is one of the companies leading the charge into human augmentations--implants that can grant their hosts all sorts of superhuman abilities--and it's preparing to send a team of its best scientists to Washington to reveal some game-changing technology when the company is attacked by a crew of augmented soldiers that wants to eradicate all traces of the team and their research before it can be revealed. Jensen barely survives the attack and is reconstructed using a ton of augmented parts, turning him into precisely the type of RoboCop that Sarif needs to track down the entities responsible for blowing up all that research. It doesn't take long to realize that the conspiracy behind the attack goes deep and requires a bit of globetrotting, taking you from your starting point in Detroit to Shanghai, Montreal, and other points of interest.

The way the world is set up and how the story unfolds is the best part about Human Revolution. Positioning itself around the rise of widespread human augmentation gives the story some moral and ethical weight on the subject of transhumanism, which makes for a fantastic backdrop for the rest of the game. That said, you don't necessarily have a ton of moral sway over the proceedings. You can shake people down for rewards on your side missions and take on some missions that aren't quite as noble as your main goal, but it's not really a "good ending" or "evil ending" sort of game. The choices you make do have some impact, though, most notably on how much information you'll know about what's really going on around you. Between dialogue trees that let you grill various people in different ways and a ton of email to read on pocket secrataries, hacked computers, and so on, there are plenty of things to read and hear about this world of the future. If you're the sort of person that loves to dig into a game's fiction and read every little thing you can, you'll really enjoy this aspect of the game. All told, these things paint a reasonably clear picture about both the important events that are depicted in the game as well as flavor text about the world at large.

Your access to information is limited by how you choose to spend upgrade points as you earn them. For example, you can't even attempt to hack higher-level terminals unless you spend a handful of points in hacking. You can't get any assistance in your conversations unless you spend a couple of points to activate a personality meter that lets you figure out what sort of person you're talking to and emit pheromones that help you influence the conversation. This type of conversation doesn't happen all that often, though, and most of your discussions will be fairly straightforward. Unless you're mindlessly rushing through everything and skipping side missions, you'll earn enough points over the course of the game to invest in just about any upgrade you find remotely interesting, from recoil reduction to super lungs that let you breathe normally in rooms filled with toxic gas. Some of these abilities allow you to take alternate paths to your objectives. For example, being able to lift heavy vending machines will often let you get to the ventilation ducts hidden behind them. Being able to fall any distance without taking damage lets you drop down deep shafts instead of taking the long way around. And turning invisible with your cloaking system, though limited by your energy reserves, lets you waltz right past security cameras, turrets, and hapless guards. There are also plenty of upgrades that are less essential, but still useful, like aiming upgrades that reduce reticle growth, inventory upgrades, and skin upgrades that make you more resilient. In short, the upgrade system gives you plenty of choices, but there are some crucial ones that you'll probably want to enable earlier rather than later.

Some of those upgrades mitigate the handful of issues that get in Deus Ex's way. The shooting and enemy AI makes a lot of the action flat, with plenty of largely unsatisfying weapons that require you to pump most enemies full of lead. Speaking of lead, it's surprisingly limited, inviting you to spend too much time fiddling with your inventory and filling up your limited inventory space with too many bulky guns, just in case you find more ammo for that particular weapon. The enemies are pretty boneheaded by cover-based shooter standards, and their main tactic when not hiding behind cover themselves is to slowly step back and forth while constantly shooting at where they think you're currently hiding. They also, inexplicably, refuse to shoot through breakable glass in some cases, resulting in situations where you're staring at a room for of enemies who activate and step back and forth like they're intending to gun you down, but never open fire. And as soon as you take the initiative and send a bullet of your own through that window, breaking it completely, they all open fire. That's just stupid.

A stealthy approach ends up being a bit more satisfying, if only because not alerting the enemies and activating them prevents you from seeing their "tactics." You can execute non-lethal takedowns to subdue enemies, and then drag the bodies away before any patrolling guards find the bodies. I found a mix of quiet and loud tactics to be the best fit, which felt a little cheap as it exploited that AI a bit, but you can essentially shoot a guy in the head from cover in such a way that no other enemies see or hear where the shot comes from, but they see the body go down. This causes the dopes to march right over to the body and stand over it in disbelief, giving you plenty of time to shoot the second guard in the head, and so on down the line. Piling up nine bodies in a stack like that is pretty funny, though it makes looting their bodies for the four or five bullets they all seem to carry around kind of laborious. If I was more patient, I would have just stocked up on energy replenishing items and used the cloaking device to simply walk past as many of the enemy encounters as possible. That would still leave you with the game's boss fights, however, which aren't especially engaging. The bosses, though usually fairly chatty, don't give you great feedback about if your chosen method of attack is actually doing any real damage.

The presentation end of Deus Ex: Human Revolution has some high-minded ideas that, depending on your platform of choice, might not hold up as well as you'd hope. Artistically, the game looks wonderful. You really get a sense of the state of the world, from run-down slums to shining future towers that rise high above the waste and poverty found below. Augmented humans, with their crazy robot arms and retractable sunglasses that don't connect in the middle look super cool. And on the PC, the technical end of the bargain holds up just as well, provided you've got a machine that can handle it at a good, high resolution. On consoles, the frame rate bogs down pretty frequently. It's not a deal breaker, and it typically happens when you're just running around the city areas, so it doesn't impact the gameplay that much, but it's very noticeable. The voice acting is pretty scattershot, as well. The gruff-voiced Jensen just sounds ridiculous, and plenty of the other main characters also turn in performances that, at best, are poorly accented. But some of the line delivery, especially with minor characters and unnamed city dwellers, gets so stilted in spots that you wonder if anyone bothered to attempt a second take when recording it.

It has its issues, but its the world, the setting, and the story that make Human Revolution great. These aspects of the game are so solid that I happily waded through the game's low points in search of the next hackable terminal or other flavor-filled bit of dialogue or text. That stuff is so strong that, unless you're an extreme stickler for the above-mentioned problems, you'll more than likely be able to look past the game's weak points as well.

An issue was found that caused some users to be unable to start the game on specific machines. Specifically, the presence of older ATI/AMD drivers, also on machines with NVidia hardware, would cause the game to crash on startup. This patch is a hot-fix for that particular issue. On top of this, it also increases the number of save-slots from 20, like on the PS3 and Xbox 360 versions, to 99.

Square-Enix, Eidos Montreal and Nixxes are committed to supporting this title and will continue to monitor for any further issues and provide additional patches in the future if required.

We hope this will help you enjoy Deus Ex: Human Revolution!

PALO ALTO, Calif. - OnLive, Inc., the pioneer of on-demand, instant-play video games announced that PC discs of Square Enix's critically acclaimed Deus Ex: Human Revolution will include a code for a free copy of the game on the OnLive Game Service, giving gamers access to the game not only on a home...

LOS ANGELES - Square Enix, Inc., the publisher of SQUARE ENIX interactive entertainment products in the Americas, today announces DEUS EX: HUMAN REVOLUTION is now available at retailers...

Deus Ex: Human Revolution is now available on Steam in North America and South America! Other regions will release soon, please check the game page for more details.

You play Adam Jensen, a security specialist, handpicked to oversee the defense of one of Americas most experimental biotechnology firms. But when a black ops team uses a plan you designed to break in and kill the scientists you were hired to protect, everything you thought you knew about your job changes.