Exploring Stuff That Makes Life Great
Regardless of whether you listen to fools or not, it’s now officially official that Electronic Arts will be publishing Brütal Legend, Tim Schafer’s next title. This comes as a wave of relief for Schafer fans, since the title was floating in limbo since Activision Blizzard dropped it.
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Aye, it’s Garbled Zombie, your local Deus Ex fanboy and chief editor of all things Deus Ex 3 on StuffWeLike. What arouses me from my slumber? It seems that Gamereactor got some brand new concept art for Deus Ex, and by it looks friggin’ sweet to my eyes.
There’s also a crumb of extra info, i.e. we learn that the protagonist of Deus Ex 3, Adam Jensen is a security chief for a biotech company called Sarif. The company is raided by men in black, and everybody without the name Adam Jensen are killed. And of course, it’s upto Adam to find out who did this, and why. One important piece of news we learn is that the game will come sometime in 2010. That’s 10 years after Deus Ex. Hot dayum.
And now, I analyse the concept art.
This one seems to be set in Paris, with the bridge up there labelled “Passerelle 01”. What I believe to be some sort of a cafe to the left uses a neon sign saying “Le Canne”, so I think that kind of confirms it. The “Connaught” sign down their highlights “aug”, signifying Augmentation. Possibly an augmentation-related advertisement? Then we see a postmodern building to the right, with the name “DWM”, which must be some sort of a corporation’s headquarters.
With Paris around, I’m guessing we may see the origins of the Silhouette. Maybe even explore Everett’s Illuminati and even see Beth DuClare alive! This sounds like fun.
This one is a little blurry, but it shows the Renaissance influence on the game. Nothing particularly remarkable here, but to the left there’s an information terminal (or maybe a security terminal) that’s reminiscent of the news terminals in Deus Ex. This one looks bulkier and integrated into the wall, so I guess it’s a natural progression. To the right, there’s a computer with a holographic display. Again, reminiscent of Deus Ex. This one appears to be a Star Wars-ish hologram, since it’s blue-tinted and kinda faded, whereas the ones in Deus Ex were exact and colourful. So at least that’s one step in the right direction.
This here is Shanghai, according to the PC Zone scans we found. It’s also pretty clear since there’s a dragon illustration to the bottom-left. On closer inspection, I think there’s supposed to be some sort of a transparent display there. Screenshot is mostly a standard cityscape, a little futuristic. The cool looking guy to the right may or may not be Adam Jensen. I kind of hope he is, but what the hell.
I can’t believe I missed this! While I did get you the deal on what little info was found about Deus Ex 3, it looks like somebody got their hands on the actual magazine scans, which have been put up here. Okay, they’re not scans, they’re outright photos and pretty bad ones at that: most of the text seems to have been clipped out.
So we’ll have to do with the concept art/screenshots, and they are definitely some tasty eye candy. The Cyberpunk/Renaissance art design becomes visible here, though I think making NPCs wear 16-century-ish clothes is a little overkill. I love the environments, though.
Augmentations are a lot more “in your face” says the caption, and that they are. With what looks like direct prosthetics for your arms, you won’t find the subtlety of JC’s nanotechnology-enhanced augmentations. This goes with the story, since JC and Paul were the first test subjects in augmented agents.
The protagonist of Deus Ex 3, Adam Jensen appears to be an agent with mechanical mods, like Gunther Hermann or Anna Navarre from the original game. In any case, he looks pretty cyborg.As for the Biomods themselves, here’s what I found from the pages:
Another bit of info that can be found is about Stealth and Hacking, both of which disappoint me greatly.
Okay, I’m totally not sure about this. An RTS-style mini game for hacking? You’ve got to be kidding me. I’m also not comfortable with replacing the shadow-based stealth mechanic from the previous two games. Deus Ex had handled stealth without making it too technical, I’m not sure if Deus Ex 3 will be able to do it.
All in all, I’m both impressed and disappointed. Still, since its Deus Ex, I won’t be missing it. 😉
id’s long tradition of keeping games mod-friendly and mod-supportive appears to have broken with their revolutionary new game: Rage. Tim Willits from id says that it is impossible to mod Rage even on the PC, but the matter is still under consideration.
While id is as always, supportive of mods, Rage is simply too complex a product to mess around with. The biggest hindrance will be the much-talked-about MegaTexture system. For those not in the know, id’s new idea is to create something of a “super-texture” that the game streams seamlessly, rather than rendering hundreds of different textures on different objects.
The system itself is said to consume heaploads of processing power at id. A large number of computers are working hard to process them in a similar not unlike a CG render farm. And if id is taking that long, it will probably take years on an average computer, I imagine. I don’t even want to know the size of that thing.
Still, Willits doesn’t rule out modding entirely. He does say that it may just be possible for users to create mini-mods that will add to the gameplay, in small chunks of stuff. So full mods and conversions may be out of the question, but we’ll still be able to make smaller mods. Sounds fine by me, I guess. Then again, I’m not a modder.
Ask me my favourite video game genre and I’ll tell you it’s the FPS/RPG hybrid. Deus Ex, is of course, my favourite game of all-time, but other notable games in the rare genre are the System Shock games, or Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines. But these games, like my second-favourite genre, Adventure games faded into an abyss.
But let’s hope this is set to change. With a Deus Ex 3 already in the works, we have some more optimistic news. Harvey Smith, who partnered Warren Spector to design Deus Ex now has his own studio: Arkane, which he is going to use to create “immersive” FPS titles, in the same vein as Deus Ex. Talking to Gamasutra, he says that Arkane’s focus will be on these immersive titles.
He didn’t release any specifics just yet, but that is as good an announcement as any. Oh, and they’re working on a strategy game for the iPhone, if you are interested in that, for any arcane reason.
Is this finally it? Are FPS/RPG games making a comeback?
Holy shit, did anything even remotely think of this? The Inquirer reports a breaking that Google may be buying Valve any second. And why this seemingly random move? Google most probably wants to acquire Steam, Valve’s trusty and super-successful content distribution service. So is Google taking it’s first step in the video game industry by bridging the Internet and video games?
There is no doubt that Steam is the greatest, most effective and most awesome content distribution ever. It looks like Google is interested in distributing content around. Owning Steam would definitely be profitable for Google, but it would only enforce peoples’ opinions that Google is turning into a Microsoft-ish monopoly with their webby hands over everything related to the Internet.
I personally think that the acquisition will still give Valve some space, a bit like the Activision-Blizzard merger, I’m thinking. But Google will definitely want Steam for itself. I just hope they don’t change the default theme to their boring white-blue nonsense, that just sucks.