Deus Ex: Human Revolution Diary and Impressions

The press hasn’t quite finished to write about the latest preview build for Eidos Montreal’s prequel to Ion Storm’s masterpiece.

PC Gamer publishes the last of its diaries, titled “the Thinker”, focused on a sneaking, thoughtful approach.

No matter how saintly you play, it’s tough to ignore a dialogue option labelled ‘˜CRUSH.’ Rarely a lunchtime goes past that I don’t ache to CRUSH the self-service checkout machines in Boots. Selecting it here made Adam launch into a systematic takedown of all anti-augmentation terrorist Zeke held dear. He didn’t react well to me calling his eyepatch stupid, waving his weapon around and hugging his hostage harder. I backed off from that avenue of verbal attack, and chose instead to ‘˜reason’ with him. Look, I said, spreading my terrifying robo-arms to look less threatening. I knew he was a noble man, caught up and betrayed by forces bigger than he. A few back and forths, and I’d convinced him of his folly. But still, Zeke was certain he needed to keep his hostage to avoid the firing squad waiting outside. I had one chance to dissuade him of this, and gambled it on another ‘˜reason’ dialogue tree.

It worked. Zeke saw sense, and jabbed the hostage forward. I let him disappear off into the night, and gained the jeers of the SWAT team who had been forced to wait for my arrival. In their eyes, I’d turned up late, huffing and puffing, before letting the orchestrator of a terrible massacre go. When they put it like that, I sound fucking useless. But I’ve got giant robo-arms and sunglasses that flip onto my eyes when I think about sunglasses. What have they got? Big stupid faces, all of them. Let them jeer. Sure, eight people are dead, but I finished the mission without firing a bullet, and I used my words to defuse an execution. Who needs guns when I’ve got a silver tongue?

As soon as I could, I upgraded that tongue. There’s only one dedicated social augmentation in the game, and I’d managed to earn the Praxis to activate it after completing a few sidequests. I’d been pottering around the streets of Detroit since installing it, chatting to prostitutes with the enthusiasm of a schoolchild who doesn’t understand why the nice ladies are standing on a street corner. They professed their cheap rates, but none of them offered any extra dialogue options. In my haste to experience all of the game, I’d already mined out a chunk of the city’s meatier conversations before awakening my new ability, and the aug only comes into play during important chats.

And Plughead.net publishes some first impressions of the game in bullet-point form.

• The conversation system is better than all of Bioware’s efforts, and possibly better than even The Witcher 2‘˜s. It’s far less ambiguous, you always say exactly what you want to say the way you want Jensen to say it.
• Keycodes are input manually. The first one? 0451. Of course. I haven’t hacked any computers yet, but I’ll let you know. They’re supposed to be manual too.
• There’s plenty of reading to do, but it’s disappointing how many magazines and books are just for show. I’d rather they only have a few that we can read instead of loads we can’t.
• Takedowns are cool, both silent knockouts and permanent kills, but they require energy. So you can’t do loads at a time.
• Health and energy regeneration are only worthwhile out of combat. Excellent.