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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   2814 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for December 1, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I recently finished Deus Ex: Human Revolution as...a stealthy hacker.

Isn't that the one where the boss fights can be quite difficult for certain (non-combat) role choices?

Maybe?

I recall playing the original Deus Ex with a stealth assassin. The game took care to provide killphrases for two of the minibosses. And then—whoops!—I had a devil of a time trying to deal with Walton Simons(?) at Area 51 armed just with a sniper rifle. Apparently if I had just spent a moment to knock him unconscious in the previous mission he never would have appeared...

I think the key frustrations for DE:HR boss fights boil down to a couple of things.

  1. You have to carry along weaponry on mission after mission so it'll be available during the four boss fights. For most of the game, that meant a fully tricked-out revolver, based on wiki advice. Then I added a grenade launcher. They take up room, especially when added to a tranq rifle and a stun gun.
  2. You'll find the usual game designer trope where your weapons don't really do much until you've dealt with some precondition.
  3. Pretty much every time I save spammed and retried and then looked on the wiki for hints and then won, I explored the area after the fight. Lots of weapon/ammo caches, and other rooms and corridors besides the main "arena". So maybe they did design them to support hiding and sniping. (Your non-lethals won't work.) But when the cut scene ends and the mini-boss is in front of you, there's a very strong tendency to just start unloading.

There's a DLC The Missing Link where the final boss is just a guy, and sneaking over and doing a takedown works just fine. That was nice.

There are still (at least?) two ways to get past Simons in Area 51 without killing him. That game did not want want to be accused of railroading you.

Apparently they patched the boss fights so they're beatable even when you didn't spec into "apply gun to enemy in open combat".

Here we are. Director's Cut only.

Reworked Bosses

Now remember that the reworked bosses is incredibly important for this DLC and the main selling point for many fans. The reason the Deus Ex Human Revolution bosses were unfaithful to the original source was that the game itself was outsourced to another company to create the boss battles so it didn't really follow as close to the other work done on the game as it should have. Leading to the bosses being more like a generic FPS instead of having multiple viable options based on how you developed your character.

They did not add ways to avoid bosses completely however they have given you various options on how to deal with them depending on how you progressed with your character.

Hacking is now a viable way to deal with bosses

Boss 1 Example: [...]

Boss 2 Example: [...]

https://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/137386/whats-different-in-deus-ex-human-revolution-directors-cut

I elided the spoilery bits.

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