Deus Ex

 Deus Ex is, in my eyes, one of the most overrated games of all time.

The melding of RPG and FPS action elements didn't work, the plot was incomprehensible, and I couldn't hit the side of a barn using the weapons. You tend to get discouraged when the reticle takes 10 seconds to zero in on someone. At that point, I'd never played an RPG in my life. It was disorienting, to say the least.

Now, I had played quite a bit of Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six. R6 used this unique reticle system at the time where it gets larger if you run or make really fast turns. The bullets spray in a random pattern in the reticle. So if you have a smaller reticle, there's a smaller area for the shots to end up. If you're really dodging and moving about, it'll get so big that you'll have difficulty hitting somebody 2 feet away.

Deus Ex had a similar reticle system, except that it only changed when you had it locked on a target. That was what annoyed me the most about Deus Ex. A lot of people evidently didn't find it bothersome. *shrug*

I think the reason I don't like Deus Ex is that it's trying to be both an RPG and an FPS. When you take away the RPG elements, it's not a good FPS. I talked to a friend of mine about it a while ago and she hated the aiming at first, but wanted to play through the game, so she found ways around it. See, a good game... shouldn't have to force a player to do that. You shouldn't be forced to endure terrible shooting in order to get through and experience a decent story. Have I mentioned that it takes about 10 seconds to close the reticle enough to actually shoot someone 10 feet away?

The whole inventory system seemed quite bothersome. From what I remember, the inventory was basically like Tetris, you were constantly forced to try and arrange weapons and items in a grid.

The training mode is pretty nice. Up until the very end. I got stuck there. Security bot started shooting me for no reason. Well, he took out my legs and arms yet couldn't quite kill me, so I was stuck. That kinda sucked.

Deus Ex had the worst shooting mechanic of any game I've ever played. Like, the very first level of Deus Ex was unplayable for me until I decided to go with the fucking stun baton. You don't ever think to pick a stun baton when given the option of pistols or sniper rifles, but there it was. The gunplay was just dreadful. No game, RPG or otherwise, should be borrowing that aspect of Deus Ex's design. It was terrible then, and it's terrible now.
 
But wait, you say... you should've put your skill points into the gun skills to increase your gun accuracy. Well... I did put skill points into the gun. As many points as they gave you for the first level, on Liberty Island. The problem was, it wasn't enough. The aiming was just not good. And of course, if you took the reticle off the target just for a moment, the entire aiming just disappeared. Poof, just vanished. Gone bye bye. It was unbelievable. Why would anyone think that was a good idea?

So basically, what happened to me on Liberty Island was, I'd have to deal with this terrible aiming, and either I ended up missing at everything and getting shot and killed by all the terrorists who were upset that I was firing rounds in their general direction, or I'd somehow manage to hit em enough to kill them. Except now I'm out of ammo for the gun, cause they only give you a small amount, and most of it was wasted because of the terribly inaccurate aiming mechanic. So now I'm out of ammo, and the enemies, from what I recall, didn't drop any ammo. They dropped stuff like... cigarettes. I... it was an awful experience.

Anyways, I did eventually play through the game. Finished the long, long campaign. So the game's not unplayable. But the shooting never felt good. And it should've at least been up to the standards of an FPS. They should've known what to expect. They presented it as an FPS. You look at screenshots for Deus Ex, it's in the first person perspective, you've got a gun onscreen... it's all there. It was an FPS/RPG hybrid. Those developers had the ambitious balls to try and make something like that, they better deliver on their promise. They better actually stay true to what they're claiming, which was an FPS/RPG. And while the RPG elements, the dialogue system, the inventory and loot, the moral choices, the NPCs, those were all fine... they did not deliver on the FPS part. They fell far short of what was expected.

Deus Ex came out in the year 2000. Just think about that. Half-Life came out in 1998. And no, I'm not saying that the shooting had to be as good as Half-Life. Half-Life was an amazing game, the gold standard for FPSs in those days. So no, it would be unfair to expect the shooting in Deus Ex to be better than shooting in Half-Life. But they were coming out 2 years later, it's not unreasonable for us to expect something competent. Something that was at least within the ballpark. They had to at least try and get within the ballpark of good FPS shooting. And that was not what we got. If the only way to get past the first level is to choose the stupid stun baton because actually using guns is retardedly difficult and frustrating, something has gone terribly terribly wrong. That is a trainwreck of a game.

And I carry that bitterness with me to this day.
 
Accuracy getting better with levels isn't even that problematic. It just has to make sense. You can't have a gulf in your leveling scheme where it goes from "I'm fucking incompetent and can't hit the side of a gigantic barn" to "I can hit the wings off a fly." Just look at Mass Effect 1. That system worked well when it came out. Your aim went from "I can aim fairly accurately at medium to long range" to "I can place amazingly tight groupings at long range." I was fine with ME1's shooter mechanics that involved leveling skills. Can we agree that ME1 did have shooter mechanics that involved leveling? Compared to ME2's, it obviously feels a bit clunky and lacking, but when I first played through ME1, I thought the shooting was absolutely fine. Even a delight. Did not have a problem with it at all. I was peachy keen.

So... I don't think shooter mechanics that involve leveling skills are bad. I think Deus Ex was just in a league of its own in terms of awfulness.
 
The big problem is that most regular RPG systems have leveling up making a huge difference. When you're level 1, you're a weak as hell rat killer and when you're level 60, you're like a tiny god. But this sorta dynamic just doesn't make any sense in a game where you start out as a highly skilled operative and by the end of the game, you end up as... an exceptionally highly skilled operative. There's gonna be improvements, but they can't be that drastic, it just wouldn't make any sense. If they are, we end up starting out as an incompetent terribad, a la JC Denton.

Really, they should've just had Deus Ex start with Denton as a three year old. Then we could start the game without any real capabilities and level up from there.