E.Y.E.: Divine Cybermancy

[t̷s͢uk̕a͡t͜ư]

Christ almighty, this game is ass.

Anyone else tried it out at all? I do not recommend you buy it if you haven't, but if you have made the horrible mistake of buying it, I'd like to hear what others think.

[Universezero]

Instead of simply posting 'You're doing it wrong,' and leaving it there, I am simply going to say that most people create topics about games that they think that others -should- play. For instance, I'm hardly going to start a topic about terrible PS3 game Rouge Warrior, simply because it got so many bad reviews that no one has even bothered to go near it.

On the other hand, I actually did play about five minutes of this at a friend's house and found it have quite a good premise. In which case, just stop being so damn negative all the time. Makes the admin team look like a bunch of depressive psychotics.

[SlappyMcGee]

Makes the admin team look like a bunch of depressive psychotics.

USER HAS BEEN BANNED FOR THIS POST

[Tanner]

In which case, just stop being so damn negative all the time. Makes the admin team look like a bunch of depressive psychotics.

Makes the admin team look like a bunch of depressive psychotics.

depressive psychotics.

I can sometimes get explosively angry; often whilst gaming. I used to just punch things until my rage simmered down, but I have found a new method which seems to work for me. Recently, I created a Rorschach mask (as can be seen in New Picture Project Thread) for general costumed-events use, and have found that if I put it on when angry it can help me become calm. It feels like I'm a different person; someone without rage. I can't explain the feeling that comes over me; it's quite odd.

[Slayr]

Makes the admin team look like a bunch of depressive psychotics.

USER HAS BEEN BANNED FOR THIS POST

WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

[t̷s͢uk̕a͡t͜ư]

In which case, just stop being so damn negative all the time. Makes the admin team look like a bunch of depressive psychotics.

Makes the admin team look like a bunch of depressive psychotics.

depressive psychotics.

I can sometimes get explosively angry; often whilst gaming. I used to just punch things until my rage simmered down, but I have found a new method which seems to work for me. Recently, I created a Rorschach mask (as can be seen in New Picture Project Thread) for general costumed-events use, and have found that if I put it on when angry it can help me become calm. It feels like I'm a different person; someone without rage. I can't explain the feeling that comes over me; it's quite odd.

POST OF THE YEAR

[t̷s͢uk̕a͡t͜ư]

In any case, I can't imagine how anyone could possibly have a pleasant first playing experience.
I'll describe mine:

Straight from the start, all the text is painful to read. The font is fucking tiny and doesn't scale with video resolution. Though it arguably doesn't matter because 95% of what you read is incoherent anyway (and the fact that the English audio setting keeps everything in French with subtitles doesn't help). I really made an effort to try to understand the history of the setting, to build an accurate worldview which took into account each faction's motivation and capability, but that's difficult when all the dialogue and reference material (e.g. in the library at the HQ archives) was written by a 12-year old. Every sentence introduces five or six new proper nouns or concepts, most of which you realize is totally irrelevant to anything you end up doing in the game, while those that are important go largely unexplained. (Zero information about the faction you're a part of, the Jien, the technology either side or the Federation has, any side's values, any side's history, their culture, their religion, any mention whatsoever of what any kind of territory, relative size, power, etc.) Every bit of learning material only answers questions with stupid buzzwords.

The dialogue is dreadful. It reminds me of the few times I've voluntarily associated with Renn-faire goers whose mode of method acting is stuck on "pretend everything everyone says is stupid". Damned near every line of dialogue you can choose from leads to the NPC you're talking to calling you an idiot in some way, and that trend is especially common when you ask questions about the setting. Like, way to go, dev team, for punishing the player for giving a shit about more than the numbers on their character sheet. And to top it all off, the training room consists of one instructor whose idea of training is aborting the conversation and directing you to the game's reference material.
Furthermore, every interaction is extremely straight-forward and simple, and in many cases simply childish. Your mentor, commander, and other high-ranking military officers speak impulsively and manically, all with very transparent and strongly assertive (and usually negative) dispositions toward you and every NPC in the area. There is no subtlety or subversiveness, or even neutrality; every judgmental NPC asshole is happy to gush about whatever's on his mind like a hyperactive 8-year old talking about his day. You will regret every single conversation you start.

Let's talk about inventory and items next. There are fully-equipped armories approximately every thirty feet, but none of them ever repair you. All of them have lots of weapons, but you can only take a small subset of them because you haven't encountered the others yet. And when you do encounter the others, e.g. when you loot it from an enemy's body, the armory still pretends it doesn't exist and will always refuse to tell you any details about it. Hilariously, the descriptive text for most items is "you do not have this item", even when you plainly do have it and put it to regular use (I apparently "don't have" items I've used to kill dozens of opponents). And what about armor? What is the difference between armor types besides slower movement? Despite the egregious amounts of information about cyber implants you're nowhere close to having and the tiny subset of weapons the armory insists you've only ever heard of, there is zero information anywhere about the effects of armor. There is no way to tell whether changing armor types is worthwhile for any kind of character.

Skills are bullshit. After seven min-maxing levels, I was barely noticing any difference in my abilities, and when I turned to the internet for details, it turned out that this was a common frustration -- skills mean approximately dick, even when their effects are clearly quantified. For example, blasting your Hacking skill along with your mental skills does not make you meaningfully better at hacking, as all the numbers pertaining to that ability tell you whenever you use it. The only skill that seems worthwhile in the slightest is Mental Stability (or what the fuck ever it's called; there's no online manual, and I've uninstalled the game), but only because it stops you from going randomly "paranoid" every ten minutes, which involves you dumping your psi energy into worthless powers and wasting your ammo until you MAINTENANCE WITH GIANT LOADING BAR yourself.
Research is similarly silly. Most of the time, you don't get to know the effects of what you're researching until you've finished it, but that's actually okay by me because I'm used to that flavor of bullshit from games that end up being very much worth it, like Deus Ex. But there's a handy little bug where your "Start Research" button becomes inert after one click, meaning you have to restart the entire game every time you want to start a new project (all of which finish rather quickly with 0 scientists working on them, so there's never really a point in wasting any more money than the bare minimum). And that would only be a minor inconvenience if the game had a proper game-saving mechanism, but alas, you can only save your game after you've finished entire missions.

Combat makes it all seem worthwhile... at first. Well, with the exception of the very first fight, anyway, which is just you emptying two mags into a four-armed cave monster that ignores you and runs in circles until it dies. You can even be all Action Hero about it and have firefights that resemble the ones the developers put up on YouTube. But after a short time, the horror of constantly-respawning enemies is inflicted upon you. Every thirty seconds, the same motherfuckers you've killed a hundred times appear directly behind you. There are complaints about this on damned near every forum thread I've found about this game. Then you run into feds, who are omniscient and shoot you from across the map with infuriating laser things (you have no way of knowing details about them, because you "don't have this item" when you pick them up) that fuck up your vision, the stability of your crosshairs, and your Mental Health, the last of which makes you go Paranoid fucking constantly. And if you choose to stay behind in New Eden (or whatever) beyond the first mission, constant waves of invincible Jien assholes ruin your shit every time you respawn (each time increasingly crippled).


So yeah, I can't imagine anyone's first time playing this game being the least bit enjoyable. I think this game was released well ahead of schedule, which is advertised constantly by major bugs, imbalanced mechanics, poorly thought-out game elements (like constant enemy respawning), and all NPC's having Asperger's. I cannot in good conscience bring myself to believe that this game was ever playtested. You would enjoy the $20 you'd spend on this game better by flushing it down the toilet.

[Kablizzy]

In which case, just stop being so damn negative all the time. Makes the admin team look like a bunch of depressive psychotics.

You must be new here.

[Rose]

In which case, just stop being so damn negative all the time. Makes the admin team look like a bunch of depressive psychotics.

You must be new here.

This is infinitely funnier with that huge picture of Papa John staring at me with that half-smile as I read it.

[Universezero]

This is why I've campaigned a few times for an admin spot. I'd fit in perfectly. :D
But seriously, I think that most of your comments are fair enough. I do have to say that the text was fine for me, but maybe that's just because my font for the IRC is quite small and I'm just used to it.