Monday, September 19, 2011

Weird. My first time playing through DEUS EX: HUMAN REVOLUTION, it felt too hard, especially the bosses. It took me five hours (!) to beat the first boss on easy, and I didn't even try on the second. I turned her over to Hunter. I kept getting into shooting matches with squads of guards, and I'm a terrible shot.

Now on my second playthrough, on hard, it's almost too easy. I've learned how the guards' AI's work. They never look around corners. My character has 7 seconds of invisibility, which is enough to go almost anywhere safely, and with a few candy bars he can stretch that to 21 seconds. So now I never get into shooting matches. My character has learned the Importance of Not Being Seen. And that means the nasty shooty robots never even come out of their closets. Playing as a stealthy pacifist is so easy, I'm almost considering stopping playing.

(If I were designing a Give Me Deus Ex hardness setting, I'd just have the guards walk around a little more randomly. Or walk past the corner instead of just short of the corner. As is, the setting only makes guards harder to kill. Which, if you're never killing them, is irrelevant.)

Now here's the weird thing. Even though the game isn't, strictly, a challenge, I still have the urge to keep playing. It feels mildly rewarding to keep beating the guards, even though it's not hard. I like winning the little hacking minigame. Partly it's that I'm enjoying the world more -- actually reading all the e-books scattered everywhere, and paying attention to all the corporate politics. But most of it is, I think, just my lizard brain enjoying all the random rewards.

So I'm torn between quitting the game, and playing right now, in the middle of the day.

I recognize that as addictive behavior, so instead of procrastinating by playing a video game, I am procrastinating in a slightly more productive (and much less time-consuming) way by blogging. The thing about addictions is that the feel more like need than fun. Am I really enjoying DE3 right now, or do I just hunger to play it? I can't actually tell how much I'm looking forward to it, versus how much easier it would be to fall into the game than try to get my 5-10 pages today.

At least I'm not this guy...

Labels: games

11:30 AM

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