I had mixed feelings about HR too, and not just because of the shitty, shoe-horned boss battles. I kinda hope this one is more open ended and sandbox-ish.

I liked it despite the flaws, which seemed to mosty be caused by console considerations.

I played Human Revolution a second time last year after I got an upgrade to the Directors Cut and listen to all the commentaries. It was actually amazing how frank and forthright they were in the game itself about the games shortcomings, not just for the boss fights but also things like the level design, voice acting, graphics and lack of real variety. In short, the only two parts they seemed mostly happy with themselves were the opening mission (hostages at the factory) and The Missing Link DLC. Everything else was pointing out the small good things and then sort of Mea Culpa about the rest. It was fascinating to hear so many designers in contrition that I ended up playing the whole game again just to hear all the commentary.

That said, while the story itself turned into The Watchmen by the end (it REALLY did) I really liked the setting they made and the ideas they touched on, even if the game itself didn't' execute on that more philosophical element. I really hope the next one has more of the actual conspiracy stuff too, because I want some hollow earth and lizard men and proper, purple robed Illuminati in my Deus Ex.

I got the impression that DE:HR had two separate writing teams.

The A team was Eidos' in house team. They were responsible for the world, the emails, and brilliant little side conversations peppered throughout the game. There would be stuff like a side conversation between two characters on the street about whether or not augs are really a choice when all the jobs go to augmented workers. Also you were basically working at Apple, there were hordes of idiot early adopter suckers, and your boss was Steve Jobs.

The B team was Square Enix's usual band of idiots who insisted on writing the main plot, cobbled together from various Final Fantasy movie ideas. They wrote all the terrible cutscenes where Jensen gets sucker punched by every boss in the game (the Chinese CEO lady being the absolute worst), the awful A.I. news reporter, the "push one of three buttons for the same ending" finale, and the intro which is pretty much just Double Dragon (bad guys toss your girlfriend over the shoulder to kidnap her, big bad guy punches through wall).

I'm not even joking that much. I refuse to believe that the people who wrote the brilliant emails and side stuff were responsible for the main plot and cutscenes.

That's odd that they were proud of The Missing Link. I found it to be the weakest (link) part of the game. It didn't make any sense story wise and was totally redundant.

I just started replaying DXHR for the first time since the first time a couple of years ago, in the last week. Without even knowing this was in the works at all.

I think you're probably not far off, FABIO.

The game's setting, the NPC side conversations, the emails, the little details that bring the world to life in almost every stage of the game, they're all brilliant, truly wonderful fun. The characters are great, too, even fuckin' Zhao and what's his name, the bio-conservative dick whose name I can't remember just now. And the gameplay is a lot of fun, tops amongst the third person/cover shooter genre, even hacking is pretty un-bad.

The main story ranges from adequate to terrible to I FUCKING CHOSE THE KILL EVERYONE ENDING BECAUSE YOUR FUCKING HAMHANDS PISSED ME OFF SO MUCH THANKS GUYZ.

What a shame.

From what I gather, the boss battles WERE done by an outside studio, and they were among the worst parts of the game.

As far as the story goes, they crippled themselves by making this game a prequel to Deus Ex instead of just rebooting the damn thing. They wanted an "ending" that you could kinda-sorta think leads to the beginning of Deus Ex, which... Eh, it's open to debate. That said, I wish they'd just said "fuck it" and done a more satisfying ending or had one of the three choices be interesting.

This is in opposition to Mass Effect 3 whose ending made no sense in the context of the previous games and had choices that also made little to no sense in the slightest.

BUT anyway, the level designs being cramped was weird, and I'm guessing that's so the game could be played on consoles (which have more severe memory limits than PCs). It was also strange that everyone had a hard limit of, what, five e-mails? There were also several places where its as if the internet didn't exist (like someone storing a file on their local drive at a company they were mad at, rather than putting it on some kind of DropBox-style setup), but that's a problem with future-tech not meshing with knowledge about the current day.

I also hope they ditch the candy bars. I mean, really. I get they want to limit your available powers, but that's just dumb. It's also strange that if this is what you need for augs that hardly anyone has them for sale. You'd think there'd be effing vending machines everywhere if they're so essential...

Here's hoping they come up with a better system for energy than "sneak up behind bad guy, munch 2 candy bars, punch them".

I think it's more Icarus symbolism as opposed to heavenly angel, right? You think they're going to ultimately make Jensen's consciousness into the Icarus AI, or something? The slogan will change from "I never asked for this..." to "I've found you. Run while you can."