So far we've learned to open unlocked doors, unlock doors with keys, break crates, unlock doors with lockpicks, use keypads, and bypass keypads. We just had all of our equipment confiscated so I wonder what could be next. The sign on the wall says medical, we open the door and … oh my God! Someone's unconcious on the floor, what horrible
thing happened here?
Lying in front of you is a brave
cadet who volunteered to be rendered unconscious for this next
training exercise. Highlight and search him to find the key to the
medical room. Afterward, pick up his body and place it on the
medical table so that one of my aides can revive him once the
exercise is over.
Oh. Right. You knocked someone out
for a training exercise. It makes perfect sense.
The point is to teach you that you can
search bodies to get stuff, and to teach you that you can move
bodies, which will be useful if you don't want guards to go into
panic mode when they come across a comrade of theirs that you've
knocked out or killed. Things will generally go better if they're
not aware they should be in panic mode than if they're actively
trying to find and kill you.
I think that a major missed opportunity
in Deus Ex is that apart from right now, the game never considers the
possibility that you might want to move a body for altruistic means.
It is totally unprepared to deal with the fact that you might, for
example, knock out someone who you were ordered to kill (which
onlookers will mistake for you actually killing the person) and then
take his body to safety so that when he wakes up he'll be free instead
of dead (which the game totally ignores.)
For that matter, if you thought
someone was worthy of interrogation you might consider capturing them and bringing them back to base. Again, you can do that but the game won't pay attention.
It ignores the fact that you might want
to move someone for any reason other than stopping people from
noticing that there's a body there.
The biggest problem for me is that it
really seems like this mechanic would be well suited for a resuce
mission. When you're moving a body you can't do much of anything
else and you cant move all that fast, so the temptation would always
be there to ditch the person and fight/run/whatever, but if you did
that you'd be ditching the person, and potentially leaving them in
danger.
I like that one of the first things TNM
did was to give you the option of accepting a mission to rescue and
unconscious person. It seemed like a logical use for this game
mechanic.
Looking in while you ponder all this is
a male scientist, possibly the one who was with the female scientist,
possibly a different one. It's impossible to tell because background
characters are forced to share appearances. There is more than one
male scientist appearance, we've seen two already, but I'm not sure
how many there are and it is definitely true that when dealing with
background characters just because they look the same doesn't mean
they are the same.
Anyway, let's put the volunteer on the
table.
Good work. I'll get someone down
there immediately to revive Private Winslow. Move on to the next
area.
While you're at it, perhaps you could
explain why he needed to be knocked out in the first place instead of
using a dummy or something.
The next room is dark, but fortunately
you have a light augmentation. Light shines right out of your retina
through the lens of your eye onto the stuff in front of you creating flashlight. The plan was for
enemies to be able to react to this (because shining a flashlight
around is a good way to get noticed and a bad way to remain
unnoitced) but that was never implemented.
The room also introduces you to the
concept of a light switch. Amazing, I know. Once you're out of
there you meet your first repair bot:
You're not a mech, but you're
enough of a machine to need repair bots now and then. If you used up
some bioelectric energy getting through the dark area, for example,
this contraption can charge you back up.
Repair bots are like little power
sources. If you actually were a mech perhaps they could repair a
broken augmentation, like say if your arm had been damaged, but for
the purposes of Deus Ex they can give you a charge, after which they
shut down to recharge themselves, and after that they can give you
another charge.
This one is sitting in place, but they
can actually move around. Unless I'm forgetting something you will
never see one repairing anything.
After that you've completed phase one
of training, you're introduced to cameras and warned that terrorists
use security cameras too so watch out, hidden in the room with the
first camera is some ammunition which appears to serve no purpose
because there isn't a gun in this entire level. (At least I don't think there is.) You get to do some
jumping and crouching then come into a room where... well let's let Jamie explain:
You need to go through the door
up ahead, but it's blocked. Those wooden crates are too big to jump
and too heavy to lift, so use the metal crates near the wall to build
steps. [snip game mechanics]
Uh, Jamie, those aren't wooden.
They're metal. All of the crates in the room are metal. Some of
them are actual metal crate objects and other are crate shaped game
geometry with metal crate textures slapped on the outside, but
they're all metal. You know what's not metal? Wood. Wooden crates
are not metal. Metal crates are not wooden. Moving on.
Next we meet a ladder, also there's a
candy bar hidden in a pipe.
CHOC-O-LENT DREAM. IT'S
CHOCOLATE! IT'S PEOPLE! IT'S BOTH!(tm) 85% Recycled Material.
An obvious reference to Soylent Green if ever there was one. Soylent Green is loosely based on the
1966 novel Make Room! Make Room! If you want to know how loosely, the whole “It's people,” thing
from Soylent Green referenced in Deus Ex does not appear in
the novel. Both are about a world struggling under the weight of
overpopulation, though, and are thus wholly unlike the depopulated world of
Deus Ex. As I said before, just because something is a reference
doesn't mean that we should assume things are the same.
Then we come to the thing I was talking
about when I said training is here so you don't forget to left click:
We get some complaints about this
swimming obstacle because the water's contaminated. Recruits forget
to grab the HazMat suit and end up in my office. Not pretty. Or
they forget that they have to put the suit on by selecting it and
pressing the left mouse button. Remember that the HazMat is
disposable; you can wear it only once, and it operates only for a
fixed duration. Use the ramp on the other side of the pool to climb
out.
No. You get complaints about the
swimming obstacle because even with the hazmat suit you get injured
and what the fucking fuck? What possible purpose does this serve, Jamie? You're a doctor you bastard. Do No Harm. Why do you need to
see if I can swim in a straight line in a hazmat suit anyway? And
even if that is vitally important the water doesn't actually need to
be contaminated. You could just say, “Pretend the water is
contaminated," and I'd play along. Seriously, what's next? Having me
defuse real bombs and get real bullets fired at me?
Wait! Forget I said that. Never mind.
Do not take notes. Please, just pretend I never said anything.
Anyway, what is the real purpose of
this? Is it just so you can watch me get hurt? It is, isn't it? That's why there are two windows in this room. The head of UNATCO,
Joseph Manderley, is watching me through one of them while his
secretary Janice Reed paces, you watch me through another window, and
a female scientist looks at a monitor. You probably all have
popcorn.
In fact, the the reason for it is
probably to force the player to use the medical bot at the far end of the
obstacle. These can do for health what the repair bots do for energy.
They can also install nano augmentations.
Before I used the medical bot I ate the
candy bar. I healed two points of health. Does that make any sense?
Does it matter?
It might be worth pointing out that
Deus Ex has location specific damage, the locations are your right
leg, your left leg, your right arm, your torso, your left arm, and
your head. Each location has 100 points of health when healthy. If
the torso or the head reach zero then you die. If your arms and legs are damaged it's much harder to do things with them. You can reach the point where you are no longer able to stand, for example. (You will never lose the ability to crawl, otherwise there wouldn't be much point in the game going on.)
Moving on we meet another trooper, but
I already told you everything he could possibly say. Past him we move
into the next map. So I'll stop there for now.
-
Putting my thoughts on all four parts together here.
ReplyDeleteObservation rooms were of course used very well in Portal, though there the designers were careful to give them exits.
Data + Interpretation = Information!
I don't think there's an easy solution to the problem of training. An in-universe voice makes it sound as though the protagonist is an idiot who doesn't know how to use doors. An out-of-universe voice breaks immersion.
As a roleplayer I don't have the option of a diverse design team, but when I'm running a game and working up an NPC I'll quite often roll randomly for sex if I don't already have a strong impression of the person.
I'm glad you feel this way about treating bugs as bugs. I regard television in the same light: you can go to great lengths explaining why Doctor Who has a tattoo in one episode, or you can say "Jon Pertwee got it one night during WWII, and they didn't have the ability to cover it up in post-production".
I'm told that Soylent Green was sold to the studio as a cannibalism movie. Well, sort of...