What's worse is, Adam's coat is double-breasted, but that's the skinniest ulster collar I've ever seen in my life!

So what happened is, after the Derelict Row Mission, I went back to the arms dealer to sell my excess loot. When I came back, the VTOL was stuck mid-landing animation, blocked off my invisible walls, and I can't get into it.

The Steam version of the Director's Cut doesn't have a cheat console either (that was present in earlier versions), so the game is just bricked. Several hours of save game wasted.

I slept through the next three-or-so hours of the dev commentary video, but they just keep talking about stuff they had to cut that sounds way cooler than the actual game.

Apparently, Detroit II was supposed to be a a rehab clinic in Utah where people get their augs removed and the anti-aug terrorists were supposed to use it as cover for their base.

Hengsha II was supposed to be Bangalore, and Hengsha I was supposed to have more Upper Hengsha to explore, including Belltower HQ.

I wanna play the game these people wanted to make!

Don't let my never-ending complaints deter you, btw. DXHR is a very fun game.

Its just unfortunately a very linear game with a story that doesn't allow for more than two or three branching paths (which immediately lead back to the main path). It's a poor Deus Ex game. By average gaming standards, it's perfectly good.

tbh it would be amazing to try to re-implement DXHR in the Source Engine (extensive modifications to the Source source code required) and add in all the stuff they hoped to make.

Or at least re-implement the Detroit hub, ditch a bunch of the RPG elements that don't translate to Source, and just make a faithful (to the geography and the spirit of the original plan) open world level with all the life and random encounters they hoped to make.

A few minutes later, one of the designers talked about how they had to scrap half the Detroit map on grounds of "we don't have the capacity to make this" and that's why Adam's posh apartment building is on the "drugs and prostitution" street and that that's "part of the concessions we have to make sometimes".

So far, about 50% of the last two hours of dev commentary has been about those concessions. About all the things they planned and then couldn't implement.

I want to play the game they were hoping to make :c

It's ironic that Francois Lapikas, one of the devs, gave a GDC talk where he went on about how they planned the entire game on paper from scratch and barely deviated from that plan, by way of explaining why some things weren't improved, but when you listen to the dev commentary, it's all about how they had initially planned a much better game and were forced to cut it down.

So apparently, the only way they deviated from that detailed plan was by cutting things that would have made the game better. Never by changing features for the better.

If I may make a recommendation:

Deus Ex (GOTY Edition) for pennies,
Deus Ex: Human Revolution for 3 bucks (good game, but the price is only fair given 10 years and all of that wasted potential),
Deux Ex: Mankind Divided (7€, improves a lot on Human Revolution and is a truer immersive sim, though you can tell the next planned instalment was never made).

For a little over 10€, that's 50–200 hours (depending on if you only do main objectives or go for a reasonable ~90% playthrough) of fun. Can only recommend it.

(bla bla am not getting paid this is no sponsorship yadda yadda)

From: Why Care About Player Agency? by RoSoDude Modding

Speaking for myself, I strongly value the sense that I am carving out my own experience in a game. If I am fundamentally performing the same sequence of actions as any another player with negligible differentiation, I’m not likely to be very interested in a game, regardless of its other experiential qualities.

That really sums it up.

In F:NV, other players are going to make different choices. The answer to the moral questions the game poses differ depending on how much emphasis the player places on truthfulness vs. greater good, community vs. individual, flawed organised government vs. the fight for a better form of governance at risk of getting neither.

Even in trivial quests, like "My Kind of Town", who different players prefer as Sherrif will vary. Should it be the robot, who has no sense of nuance, but is incorruptible? The very gung-ho former sherrif turned felon, who took frontier justice a little too far, but who's got a good grasp of right and wrong (mostly)? Or should it be the army, who will incorporate the town into an expanding nation, with all the benefits, but all the downsides as well, trading independence for safety?

If you take four quests – "The White Wash", "Hard Luck Blues", "Come Fly With Me", and "My Kind of Town", you end up with over a hundred permutations if you consider all the relevant choices in those quests. You can throw a stone at a group of players and no two of them will have made exactly the same choices.

In Deus Ex: Human Revolution, there are probably fewer important choices in the entire game than in New Vegas in a handful of quests. Every DXHR player has played the game the exact same way. The ways the story can branch are limited to "did you kill that guy and he can't give you info later", "did you save that hostage", and "did you get that upgrade".

You can't compare side quests with your fellow players, because at no point do you have to decide between doing side quest A or side quest B, and all the ones you do are identical between players, save for how their sneaking-to-shooting ratio was.

It feels like being walked on a leash, and not in a good way.

Compare that to a game like Fallout: New Vegas. Side quests – quests that are not directly related to the main storyline – in that game are often absurdly detailed and involve making actual decisions and finding stuff yourself.

"The White Wash" can turn out any of a handful of ways, all of them validly complete the quest, and you get to make moral choices in the process that affect your standing with multiple factions.

"Hard Luck Blues" requires you to findyour way (because the in-game maps are useless) in an underground facility and make a decision between the wellbeing of the many or the lives of the few.

"Come Fly With Me" has several approaches, from just wantonly killing a bunch of people and being done with it, to trying to find a peaceful solution for two groups group by killing another, to trying to find a peaceful solution for all three. You can be too hasty and commit multiple small genocides, or you can put in way more effort than the quest giver demands and save several dozen lives, and perhaps make a few individual lives better. You need to think and decide on your approach. And here, the choice between sneaking, killing, and talking is not about how you approach one and the same objective – it's about which objective you want in the first place. Because the task is not "get this item", the task is "resolve a volatile situation between three hostile factions", and you get to decide if that means mass murder or negotiations.

DXHR doesn't even come close to that kind of complexity. It doesn't have any complexity. It just has "go here and do the thing", and it's up to you how much you kill on the way there. And when you do, it's completely inconsequential if you left a trail of bodies in your wake, because aside from a few comments from NPCs, it has zero effect on the story.

I could get into all sorts of problems DXHR has, but I would only repeat Hbomberguy's video, where he puts all that more elegantly than I possibly could (and he's actually played the first Deus Ex all the way to the end, unlike me).

Deus Ex: Human Revolution is FINE, and here's why