Hey, I'm back with more innane suggestions!

[Hogeyhead]

Okay, my suggestions aren't really innane, but they are when taken in context that this will never be patched or modified again, (maybe one day but officially no).

One thing I thought of is if you allowed for the played to be able to remove mods from weapons at the gun store, it would make it much easier to mod weapons, then if you found a better one (a unique maybe) you could just switch. This would be a bad idea if it were done wrong, but what I would propose is that first it should cost 500-1000 credits. The kid (I can't remember the name) would destroy your weapon, and you would get all your mods back. (They would probably spawn on the desk as you probably don't have 20 inventory spaces available).

Also I feel that this game was slightly lacking in fighting zones. It would be kind of cool of for instance the section where you are jumping around lava had enemies that spawned flied around and were generally annoying. (it might be too much, but I like the idea)

Also I think it would be cool if on day 2 there was an opportunity to crawl through a purely optional dungeon, that was like strait out of a text based adventure, and like the only loot in the whole game is right at the end, and there are zombies or something. I think it would be cool, because normally the game is strategic, but this would not be, it would be like quake or something, funny, and hard. Maybe some weird old guy would challenge you to to enter, and slay the dragon (a clone of the dragon you made), then you can either give him the dragon heart or it's treasure or whatever, or you could fight him, or something. Maybe if you eat the dragon heart your torso gains a permanent +20 hp. I think it would be surprisingly appropriate, as I find there are too few bosses.

I would also like to see a brief boxing match, that could really show off the fist system. (just cause)

I've said this before, and I'll say this again, there are too many Aug upgrade canisters, and too few weapon mods, replace some canisters with mods, it'll make the game more balanced. The reason you really need to do this is because you can end the game with like 10 extra upgrade canisters, this makes the game a lot less fun. It's more fun if you have to be selective with your upgrades as you know you will not be able to max them all, rather than you know you will be maxed by aunt Betty's.

Also I feel that you might want to consider nerfing Regen. You didn't change it or anything in this game, but I've always felt it was overpowered, making energy shield and med packs useless. if it went 5/10/15/20/(25 with heart mod) and drained twice as fast it wouldn't make you god when you used it, and it would become more of a tactical power, and a non-com power.

Also with the katana(s) I feel that it would be really cool if when you upgrades melee skill the katana was upgraded more than other weapons, showing that it requires real skill to use properly, and if you have at least advanced in melee, you should be able to turn the blade around for non lethal kills (an alt firing mode like for dual pistols).

I've said this before too, but I do feel that you should be able to buy more weapon mods at the store, just at very high prices (and maybe limited stock) to give the player more choice with his limited money. Also you should be able to buy red bio calls from a seedy character, maybe only on day two in some dark corner.

I know Jonas doesn't like the idea of a player being able to buy everything, but they still can't, as there are very finite financial resources throughout the game.

One thing that always bugged me about the PHAT rifle, is that on higher difficulty levels the rice bags do nothing at all to most enemies even if you hit them 40 times in a row directly to the head (normal non boss enemies) This makes the PHAT rifle on high HP difficulties useless for less lethal playthroughs.

Love the game, I'm actually downloading it again on a different computer to play again. Ah the joys of TNM

I always feel guilty playing as WC ah well.

Oh I can't remember but as WC can you get a reward for killing the sewer scientist? you should if you can't.

[Jonas]

In advance: sorry if this seems harsh.

One thing I thought of is if you allowed for the played to be able to remove mods from weapons at the gun store, it would make it much easier to mod weapons, then if you found a better one (a unique maybe) you could just switch. This would be a bad idea if it were done wrong, but what I would propose is that first it should cost 500-1000 credits. The kid (I can't remember the name) would destroy your weapon, and you would get all your mods back. (They would probably spawn on the desk as you probably don't have 20 inventory spaces available).

I see where you're going, but it wouldn't fit with the design philosophy of TNM - like Deus Ex, we're all about forcing the player to make permanent choices. You can't get your skillpoints back, you can't get your augmentations or aug upgrades back, and you can't get your weapon mods back. You make a decision and you live with it, it means the learning curve is a bit steeper than you may be used to from other games, but it makes for a more engaging game.

Hell there's even psychological research to back it up as a better play experience: decisions that you can't undo tend to make you happier than decisions you can undo - if you have an option to backtrack, there's a good chance you think so much about it you get unhappy with the decision you made and you go back and forth all the time. If you're stuck with what you've got, your brain kind of keeps reassuring itself that you've made the right choice - turns out learning to live with choices you can't change is human nature.

Also I feel that this game was slightly lacking in fighting zones. It would be kind of cool of for instance the section where you are jumping around lava had enemies that spawned flied around and were generally annoying. (it might be too much, but I like the idea)

Yeah that would be too much. I'm pretty happy with the amount of action in TNM.

Also I think it would be cool if on day 2 there was an opportunity to crawl through a purely optional dungeon, that was like strait out of a text based adventure, and like the only loot in the whole game is right at the end, and there are zombies or something. I think it would be cool, because normally the game is strategic, but this would not be, it would be like quake or something, funny, and hard. Maybe some weird old guy would challenge you to to enter, and slay the dragon (a clone of the dragon you made), then you can either give him the dragon heart or it's treasure or whatever, or you could fight him, or something. Maybe if you eat the dragon heart your torso gains a permanent +20 hp. I think it would be surprisingly appropriate, as I find there are too few bosses.

I'm... not a fan of that idea. TNM exists because we're all in love with Deus Ex's gameplay and we want more of it, not because we want to take Deus Ex and turn it into Quake or Diablo. Also, I hate traditional bosses. I really hate them.

I would also like to see a brief boxing match, that could really show off the fist system. (just cause)

Yeah I'd like to see that too. In fact we were planning to have a whole Fight Club style boxing ring minigame, but the NPCs have no appropriate animations for it, and adding animations to any Deus Ex model requires recreating every single animation, which is a completely impossible amount of work for the human characters.

I've said this before, and I'll say this again, there are too many Aug upgrade canisters, and too few weapon mods, replace some canisters with mods, it'll make the game more balanced. The reason you really need to do this is because you can end the game with like 10 extra upgrade canisters, this makes the game a lot less fun. It's more fun if you have to be selective with your upgrades as you know you will not be able to max them all, rather than you know you will be maxed by aunt Betty's.

Let's see... by Aunt Betty's, unless you've been cheating to get into places where you're not supposed to be able to get, you'll have a maximum of 22 upgrades. Account for the fact that you can upgrade augs with canisters that contain identical augmentations and yeah, you're probably right that you can be maxed out by ABI if you find everything. But most people won't find everything. Anyway, normally I'd be on your side - choosing what to max out is more fun than choosing what order to max everything out in. However, the aug system already has permanent long-term choice built into it in that you can only ever install half of the game's available augs. For the same reason, I'm pretty happy with the amount of weapon mods in the game - choosing which weapons to mod how is the only permanent choice concerning the weapons, if you don't count the weapon skills (which are so broad as to not really matter in this regard).

I don't feel particularly strongly about it either way, I could probably fairly easily be convinced to reduce the number of aug upgrades and increase the number of weapon mods, but your arguments don't cut it and either way we're done tweaking the game

Also I feel that you might want to consider nerfing Regen. You didn't change it or anything in this game, but I've always felt it was overpowered, making energy shield and med packs useless. if it went 5/10/15/20/(25 with heart mod) and drained twice as fast it wouldn't make you god when you used it, and it would become more of a tactical power, and a non-com power.

I agree with this one. But regen is kind of a weird aug anyway. Might just cut it completely and replace it with something else. If only that bot domination aug had worked out...

Also with the katana(s) I feel that it would be really cool if when you upgrades melee skill the katana was upgraded more than other weapons, showing that it requires real skill to use properly, and if you have at least advanced in melee, you should be able to turn the blade around for non lethal kills (an alt firing mode like for dual pistols).

Meh. I can see how this would be cool, especially as the versatility would make the katanas useful despite being less powerful than the fireblade and the dragon tooth sword, but it's just not worth it.

I've said this before too, but I do feel that you should be able to buy more weapon mods at the store, just at very high prices (and maybe limited stock) to give the player more choice with his limited money. Also you should be able to buy red bio calls from a seedy character, maybe only on day two in some dark corner.

You really like weapon mods don't you? No, there has to be some things you can only get by exploring, and that goes for the red biocells too. If you can just buy everything, nothing feels special to discover.

I know Jonas doesn't like the idea of a player being able to buy everything, but they still can't, as there are very finite financial resources throughout the game.

It's not about how much of it you can buy, it's about how rare an item appears. If you can buy it in a store, even if you don't really have the money to buy more than a couple, it doesn't feel as rare as if you have to go looking for it. That's why you can't just buy the napalm launcher or Trestkon's pistol silencers through the normal shopping system - those items have to feel special.

One thing that always bugged me about the PHAT rifle, is that on higher difficulty levels the rice bags do nothing at all to most enemies even if you hit them 40 times in a row directly to the head (normal non boss enemies) This makes the PHAT rifle on high HP difficulties useless for less lethal playthroughs.

Huhwhuh? If that's true, it's a bug. Rice bags to the face should always be a one-hit take-down.

I always feel guilty playing as WC ah well.

Embrace the Dark Side!

Oh I can't remember but as WC can you get a reward for killing the sewer scientist? you should if you can't.

Nope. But yeah you probably should.

[Hassat Hunter]

Heh, mention DDL too.

Also how aug's should probably be affected by the "item difficulty", but you weren't a fan of that back then .

[Jonas]

No that is the worst idea.

[Hogeyhead]

You know a lot of your points regarding what you can and cannot buy are very good. While I feel that your point about augs is good, it is also irrelevant, as the solution would not affect the choice between augs (I mean between mutually exclusive augs), just what and when you upgrade.

You don't like traditional bosses? That's too bad. I'm sorry to hear that. I'd like to clarify that the suggestion about the 'traditional dungeon' was meant to be sort of a total shift that would be temporary, you know like a change in pace, though playing again things move quickly and smoothly, and there is no lack of action as I suggested. I played it originally at levels that might have been a little too easy for me the first few times. Now I feel I am probably playing at a difficulty that is too high (3/3/3/3) I never have enough ammo! I think I'll have to start again at a lower difficulty.

About the fists: originally you unlocked the gloves in the order stun emp kill (I believe) judging the stun ability too good for trained you moved it to master, I feel it would have been more appropriate at advanced, as to spend all those points to get a free stun prod is appropriate at advanced, but a bit much at master, and only a master boxer will try to take on a robot with his fists anyways. Though to be fair, I've never gotten my fists to that level, so I really can't speak to the effectiveness of the various gloves

On high resolutions as you know the HUD and text become small, what you may not know is so does the visible area on the gas mask. About 5-10% of the screen is visible at the resolution I play at, I don't know if this is a glitch you were aware of, but there you go (not really a glitch I guess).

The sewers were one of my favorite areas simply because of how totally optional they were, kudos. It would have been cool though if you had the option of flooding the sewers with poison to kill some of the damn greasels in exchange for areas being toxic.

I like that the only way to get the romantic plot line is to go the evil route. Very unconventional decision I whole heatedly approve.

It is a shame you couldn't keep the cats with Jonas, but what you could have done was have one or two the first time you go to his office, and then add one or two every mission, and just never explain it. This would be ridiculous, and it would not have the same frame rate kill effects as having 100cats in a small room.

It's a shame about fight club, that would have been funny, when, and where would it have occurred if it had made it?

The PHAT rifle issue has always been true as far as I know, have you tried the rice bag out on the highest enemy health difficulty? I suppose it could have been my install...

How was robot domination supposed to work? I assume it replaced the useless spy drone?

One suggestion I have is a little unconventional, and I know that even if you were still tweaking the game you wouldn't even consider implementing it, because it would be a bitch to even attempt. A trait system like from fallout. like maybe your head and torso get an extra 20 hp each, but your limbs get 20 hp less. Or you start with 2000 extra skill points but the master level of any skill costs more than it used to. Maybe you get extra carrying capacity, but your movement speed takes a hit. You can chose one, or maybe two or none, since they all would have down sides.

You buy stuff in this game but you never sell anything. I think it would be cool if you could sell augs. That way the excess of Aug upgrades could be useful, and maybe you don't sell Aug for cash, but maybe you get a weapon early, or a very small amount of cash (like 100 creds) or a digital construct that follows you and attacks your enemies till it dies (like Miguel). Maybe you trade three on to get one that you want and wouldn't get till much later otherwise. You could screw yourself over, but that's what would make it cool.

You know I really appreciate that you still respond to these crazy posts your fans make even after all this time.

[Hassat Hunter]

No that is the worst idea.

I meant Aug Upgrades anyways. Darn words falling away (Like "I mentioned DDL too"). Although you probably gathered that in which case;

It is a shame you couldn't keep the cats with Jonas, but what you could have done was have one or two the first time you go to his office, and then add one or two every mission, and just never explain it. This would be ridiculous, and it would not have the same frame rate kill effects as having 100cats in a small room.

Hehe, that's just me slipping a humorous screenshot inside the walkthrough. It's not really the original design .
Though I wouldn't object to mysteriously appearing cats in Jonas office.

[Jonas]

You know a lot of your points regarding what you can and cannot buy are very good. While I feel that your point about augs is good, it is also irrelevant, as the solution would not affect the choice between augs (I mean between mutually exclusive augs), just what and when you upgrade.

Uh no, your argument was that being able to upgrade everything removes an element of long-term choice from the game. My argument is basically: you're correct, but this particular aspect of the game (the augmentation system) already has a strong element of long-term choice, so I can live with that.

I will say this though: I looked up how many augmentation upgrades Deus Ex gives you compared to how many TNM gives you. There are apparently 20 upgrades in all of Deus Ex, whereas TNM has 33 I think. It takes 27 to upgrade every augmentation. You're probably right that's too many. Like in Deus Ex, TNM's augs are largely given out in the last half of the game, but since TNM is a lot more open than Deus Ex, if you know where to find the upgrades or you're just a particularly thorough explorer, you can get all the pre-ABI augs pretty quickly, which is a problem.

About the fists: originally you unlocked the gloves in the order stun emp kill (I believe) judging the stun ability too good for trained you moved it to master, I feel it would have been more appropriate at advanced, as to spend all those points to get a free stun prod is appropriate at advanced, but a bit much at master, and only a master boxer will try to take on a robot with his fists anyways. Though to be fair, I've never gotten my fists to that level, so I really can't speak to the effectiveness of the various gloves

That change was made in response to wide-spread player feedback, so I'm pretty confident it was the right way to do it.

On high resolutions as you know the HUD and text become small, what you may not know is so does the visible area on the gas mask. About 5-10% of the screen is visible at the resolution I play at, I don't know if this is a glitch you were aware of, but there you go (not really a glitch I guess).

It's not a glitch it's just Deus Ex's window system sucking. There's no way to scale a graphic like that, play Deus Ex and you'll notice the binoculars and the scope work exactly the same way.

The sewers were one of my favorite areas simply because of how totally optional they were, kudos. It would have been cool though if you had the option of flooding the sewers with poison to kill some of the damn greasels in exchange for areas being toxic.

Yes that would've been cool.

I like that the only way to get the romantic plot line is to go the evil route. Very unconventional decision I whole heatedly approve.

Thanks, it's something I'm oddly happy with myself. Though it does strike me that the morale could be understood as "nice guys finish last", which I always thought was bullshit

It's a shame about fight club, that would have been funny, when, and where would it have occurred if it had made it?

I don't remember exactly where it was supposed to be, but I know it was in a bar. Could be we thought about putting it in Sol's, but we used to have a plan to have O'Malley's as an enterable bar in the game as well, potentially with some sort of rivalry subplot between O'Malley and Alpha. We may have talked about putting the boxing ring in O'Malley's instead, I'm unsure.

On a sidenote, I seem to recall that O'Malley's was scrapped after we decided to put the Partyzone in the game and we realised there was no point to having two bars in addition to a night club. The decision-making process surrounding that was long and complicated and largely based on what sort of level design resources we had at the time. Partyzone won partly because it was different than Sol's (being a night club rather than a bar), partly because it was based on something that existed in the Deus Ex community (the DX Partyzone mod, whereas I think O'Malley's was just something Phasmatis came up with to fill out the Residence district he was working on, before that was merged with Downtown), and finally partly because ZeroPresence had already mapped a night club that we could use.

How was robot domination supposed to work? I assume it replaced the useless spy drone?

Actually it was meant to replace Aqualung because we had no water areas in the game (same reason we replaced Swimming with Fists). Later on, we did end up adding water to some of our levels, so since we'd already removed Swimming, the Aqualung aug became almost useful. Bot Domination would've been pretty great though, it was supposed to work exactly like Bot Domination in Invisible War, and there's several augs in Deus Ex I wouldn't mind replacing with something more useful. By the way, like many seemingly useless things in Deus Ex, spy drone can be supremely useful if you use it right.

One suggestion I have is a little unconventional, and I know that even if you were still tweaking the game you wouldn't even consider implementing it, because it would be a bitch to even attempt. A trait system like from fallout. like maybe your head and torso get an extra 20 hp each, but your limbs get 20 hp less. Or you start with 2000 extra skill points but the master level of any skill costs more than it used to. Maybe you get extra carrying capacity, but your movement speed takes a hit. You can chose one, or maybe two or none, since they all would have down sides.

Yeah clearly that's not gonna happen in any way, shape, or form, but if we were to design a new Deus Ex mod today, I might well consider replacing the skill system with a trait or perk system. More likely I would make it work like Dark Messiah's brilliant skill system, which I always felt is really perfect for FPS RPG's.

You buy stuff in this game but you never sell anything. I think it would be cool if you could sell augs. That way the excess of Aug upgrades could be useful, and maybe you don't sell Aug for cash, but maybe you get a weapon early, or a very small amount of cash (like 100 creds) or a digital construct that follows you and attacks your enemies till it dies (like Miguel). Maybe you trade three on to get one that you want and wouldn't get till much later otherwise. You could screw yourself over, but that's what would make it cool.

Do you realise how boring selling stuff is though? I mean you play RPGs and you have fun, and lugging junk back to vendors seems satisfying, but if you take a step back and look at it, doesn't it actually turn out to be really tedious and boring? I don't think a proper trading system has a place in a game like Deus Ex, it's a game about being a nano-technologically enhanced superspy, not a one-man salvage operation. TNM has a slightly different aesthetic of course, but I just don't think the game would benefit from letting you sell unwanted items.

You know I really appreciate that you still respond to these crazy posts your fans make even after all this time.

No worries, I like talking about TNM