Deus Ex – Human Revolution Hints, Tips and Tricks

When I began playing this game, I could hardly find any hints for playing this game. Therefore I want to put out some. I’ll present which augmentations really count and which are worthless (in my opinion) and give some general tips for the game – I try not to spoiler anything.

Tips and Hints

- Link: How does hacking work?

- Each clinic has two praxis kits for sale for 5000 credits each. When you know where a weapons dealer is, it’s not really hard to get the money by taking single guns from your opponents to the dealer. Always make sure you buy them.

- Overall you will get all useful augmentations in the game, if you explore a lot. Exploring a lot gives you not only what you find, but a lot of XP bonuses too.

- Not killing enemies gives you more XP and is more silent, so use an appropriate weapon and knock people out instead of killing them. Hide them, as when they get found they can wake up again.

- Have a rocket launcher with you and save rockets for situations you can’t solve otherwise. The rocket launcher can solve every hard situation.

Good Augmentations

- Hacking power, and the augmentation to lower the chance of getting found while hacking. Important to get a lot of XP early on and also later in the game. Later in the game, hacking turrets is nice. I also bought the hack robot thingy, but there was no chance to use it so far.

- Raise carrying strength (there’s always more stuff you want, and the place in your inventory is very small – helps getting stuff to weapon’s dealers and helps having the rocket launcher with you when you approach boss fights)

- Raise lifting strength (with crates you can often get to higher places, use big crates to block line of sight or push away big things that stand in front of passages needed for stealthy actions)

- Social Optimizer (you get more XP if you persuade people and at least one level can be done without fighting just because of the optimizer). When you have it, just look for the weakest area of the person can choose the appropriate way of persuasion.

- Break though walls (at least 2 praxis kits and a lot of stuff are hidden behind breakable walls and some stealthy approaches are benefitted highly by this).

- Augmented reflexes (in many places two guards talk to each other and can be knocked unconscious simultaneously)

- The skin armor is the only really good augmentation when it comes to fighting.

Mediocre augmentations

- The Taifun looks cool, but I only used it once in a boss fight. Maybe I should just play this in hard mode. Again multiple enemies it’s hard to use, as they will have you killed before you get in the middle of them. Maybe good with a lot of battery and the cloaking augmentation, but there are rarely so many enemies in one place, and for those you also have the rocket launcher or grenades.

- The cloaking augmentation. If you hide well you should need this very rarely, though there are some few scenes where I just couldn’t fulfill all side-quests silently (police station) and it might have helped.

- Therefore the battery stuff might be useful if you use the Taifun and the cloaking, but I don’t like that battery only reloads to one battery automatically and everything else needs recharging by power items.

- The shooting thing is maybe good for players using a mouse, I played this game on a playstation and didn’t use and aggressive play-through. I didn’t use it.

- The jumping augmentation is okay, but not really necessary when you have lifting power and crates. But later in the game you will want to buy it anyways.

Worthless augmentations

- All stealth augmentations. Crouching towards enemies and keeping out of line-of-sight is always enough.

- All vision enhancements, maybe besides the look through walls thingy, that’s just handy from time to time, but not really necessary as you can always look around corners and have your basic radar.

- I bought the augmentation to fall down slower, but it seldom actives in the game, and I so far didn’t find even one chance to use the aggressive mode of this thing. Looks cool though.

- Breathing gas. Bought this in a situation where I didn’t see the thing that could close the gas vent behind a breakable wall. Did need it once, when an enemy threw a gas grenade at me, and once where it was easier to save a worker who was about to die from gas, but I don’t think you really need this.

- The vision timer and flash immunity… flash immunity is rarely worth it and the vision timer doesn’t shorten the time needed till enemies will become less hostile.

- Running speed and duration. What for? To play the game in 5 minutes less overall?

Buy augmentations in this order

- Hacking 3

- Silent hacking 2

- Lifting strength

- Social optimizer

- Break though walls

- Silent Hacking 3

- Reflexes

- Carrying strength

- Hacking 5

- Skin armor 3

- The stuff you want but don’t really need.

Hope this helps you a bit with your decisions. Have fun playing the best game I’ve played in my whole life. If you disagree or have any more hints to share, post a comment.

4 comments so far, add yours

The “Move The Content” Paradigm, Criticism And The Future Of Mac OSX

Tiger

With Mac OSX Lion, the default setting for scrolling in Lion is that you don’t move the scrollbar, but instead you’re moving the content. This means the scrolling direction is inverted. Many people said they didn’t like this, but I guess they’re not using the touchpad – I grew completely accustomed to it within about three days, because it really feels more natural, especially when the scrollbars are hidden. Touching the webpage and moving it around feels more as if you’re in control.

Creative Commons License photo credit: Andrea Costa Photography

The Future

But Apple won’t stop here. If you’re looking at Safari’s new way of moving back in the history by moving the active page to the right (effectively scrolling to the left further than possible) so that the last page in the navigation history appears below the active page  shows where this could lead. If you try this left and right-scrolling in iCal and do it really slowly, you get an effect like in iBooks where a new calendar page slowly flips over. This kinda semantic way of moving things is also followed with mission control, where you push everything away from you (four-finger-swipe up) to get an overview of everything running and do the opposite to get back close to the windows. I believe this kind of semantic movement of windows and content will sooner or later work in a lot of menus, the finder, the AppStore and anywhere else where “back” usually would be a button.

Criticism

If this is the course of the OS, I wonder why Apple didn’t go further with this. In the new iCal, you can move forward and backwards with this new side-scrolling. So, if you move the content (for example the month August on a sheet of ‘paper’) to the left, on the right side ‘September’ slides in. In my opinion, this is exactly the natural way it should work. Why then, if you use three fingers and make the same gesture (three finger swipe to the left) it moves the other way round, back to July? Because three finger swipe left is defined as ‘back’. Putting the ‘back’-command on three-finger-swipe right sounds silly, but I think this is the way it should work as you’re always moving the content to the right when you’re going backwards, and vice versa. This would also give a sign to third party applications like Twitter, where in a conversation the same confusing three-finger-swipe to the left actually moves the content to the right side to return to the stream.

What I would like additionally is a three-finger-down gesture for minimizing or closing a window, or better some way to define gestures as triggers for actions in programs, as possible in BetterTouchTool (with that you can remap and define new gestures for touchpads and magic mouses).

Leave the first comment

Google+ needs more Plus

Google+ is a huge success. Even everyday people ask for it, use it and are interested to move on from Facebook. To me, it still feels like a beta as I believe Google didn’t expect it to catch on that fast. Therefore I will list, what I think Google+ definitely needs to do better.

Huddles for the Webapp

DSP 83: Thumbs Up! 2007-08-08
While the mobile apps support “huddles”, which are nothing else but group chats, these cannot be seen in the website. That this is not just a GTalk group chat makes only sense because people might not have used GTalk or the GMail webview before, so it could be made a single “chatting”-website, but ultimately it should be a usual GTalk group chat, so that other GTalk clients can benefit from that.

Additionally, Huddles for the mobile app are extremely handy for shorthand-group chats has you’ll get a push-notification for each message, but for each of such communications it should be possible to silence the push-notifications or just send one on the first new message instead of one for everytime someone writes a message.

Hangouts for the mobile apps

Hangouts are about the same as Huddles, you just can talk live and chat and watch Youtube while you’re in the room. Why shouldn’t you be able to talk with the other people while you’re using your mobile phone? Especially if you’re in a WiFi network? Or at least see the chat? If Google treats group-posts, messages, group-chats in GTalk, Hangouts, Huddles, mail and just everything differently, how should users know which one to use?

Fix the mobile app’s bugs

The Android and iOS apps are buggy. Sometimes they crash without any reason, and oftentimes the notification count is not what I should be. This needs to be fixed.

Improve Circle’s posting

Cicles are a huge win, and everyone knows it. What I miss from here is operations you can do with there circles.

For example, it would be nice to define that “Friends” and “Coworkers” are automatically in “Contacts”, so you have lesser clicking if you know the implications of adding a coworker for example. Inheritance would be a nice feature, although not everyone might use it.

Being able to do set operations would be another huge advantage. My use case is to have cicles of people understanding English, and people understanding German. If I do a german post, I would like to make sure only people of the targeted circle (for example “contacts”) that are also in the circle “german” can read it, the intersection of those circles. In theory, this is a very simple operation, and I would love this. If you think adhead, having other set operations could be nice too. If you for example make a joke about how stupid programmers are, you might want to post if to all your contacts minus those that you’ve also added to “programmers”.

Make Spaks useful

Spraks seem to be an aggregation of Google news. I would love to be able to set the “metatags” of a certain Google+ post. For example, if you find out a nice feature about the new Macbook Air that just came out, you should be able to tag it with the appropriate words, so it appears in everyone’s sparks for “Macbook Air” for example.

Open up the API

Facebook and Twitter weren’t extremely useful without clients, and Google+ isn’t too. There’re unofficial APIs out there (and Abelssoft has already released a Windows client for Google+ here), but these unofficial APIs rely on HTML parsing and therefore are not very convenient to use, are not too fast and also don’t open up all the functionality that Google+ offers.

That’s what I think. Am I missing something?

Creative Commons License photo credit: vernhart

Leave the first comment

The Next Bubble might be Apple’s

Bubbles

This WWDC gave us a lot of features. MacOSX gets better and better and iOS too. I believe that the next “bubble” that techpeople fear might be the near-perfection, that Apple aims for. In Windows, you always have a lot to make better via 3rd party software, but Apple just builds in everything that is making it’s OSses better. What happens to Software producers when there’s nothing that you can do better?

Creative Commons License photo credit: Jeff Kubina

Leave the first comment

Will Google+, Twitter or Facebook survive?

What defines social connections online? When you exchange details information not everyone else has access to and have the possibility to communicate, you have some form of connection with another person. But this is already the case with a lot of services, beginning with LinkedIn and XING and including address-books as found in most e-mail services. I would not define this a social connections, because I believe that social connections are defined mainly by the communication you do with other persons.

+1
In my definition, only a few services fit in. Those, that most fit in are obviously Facebook, Twitter and Google+, because you instantly communicate as you login, when you see the newest posts that others have written, and additionally usually always communicate when you do anything with the services.

Creative Commons License photo credit: premasagar

Who will survive?

All other services, be it the business contacts networks, specialized networks for other specialized groups as well as forums and the like of not-arrived-in-the-present-services, will over time perish, as the big three technically replaces them and it’s just a matter of time till people won’t pay for business networks and instead have their business connection in one of the other big three. The nature of those big three (although Google+ is not even a week old, I would call it one of the big three) is competitive, as they more or less all do the same thing.Beyond competitors, the metagame can be analysed. This is an old term from the time I played Magic – The Gathering, where always approximately three top strategies were around and you could outweigh their respective pros and cons, as well as which strategy won against which other strategy.

Facebook

Facebook does most, as it tries to be the one service to rule them all. Broadcasts, bookmarks, instant messaging, video, pictures, games, apps, interests, groups, and soon even videochatting? Check this for Facebook. Additionally, it has it’s own ad-system, product and company offers and even it’s own virtual currency. It is omnipresent and the strongest of the big three if you take into account that even your parents might be using this service. The usual homepage was replaced by a facebook-profile, and even usual websites begin just updating their facebook-page instead of their own HTML-website. Facebook as compelling support for 3rd party apps and native clients on all platforms – some smartphone even have a facebook-button built in their hardware.

Google+

Google+ tries to battle Facebook’s overwhelming power with a different approach. More configurability with circles gives you the power to share stuff only with that group of people you want to share it with and additionally, you can explicitly only read certain updates, for example those of the people you put in “Interesting People”. Additionally, it’s white and clean and not filled with ads and distractions like “have a look at the latest pictures of Adam!”. The other services like Google Talk, Youtube and Picasa are all well-included for good. “Sparks” is like a newsfeed for everything tagged with the tag you choose and the new hangout feature is a fantastic killer for IRC and Skype. As the service is really young, it’s missing all the native clients that could be used to get notifications and relies on it’s web interface and e-mail for notifications only, which is certainly going to change soon.

Twitter

Not getting Involved
Twitter is the most minimalistic of those services and only focuses on communication only without all the other crap attached. It’s communication is mainly broadcasting and limited to 160 characters, and it has a rudimentary direct messaging service and simple bookmarking (‘favourites’) included. It has clients on every platform and is deeply integrated into iOS. It’s the most used link-to service, if you look at the various news articles that show stuff like “tweeted by 300 persons, shared on FB by 53 persons and +1′ed by 30 persons”.

Creative Commons License photo credit: TarikB

Prediction

This is the point where I predict which of the services won’t survive: None of them. This was the point in the metagame of Magic back then, the big three are the ones that remain and kill off all the other small services that try to do something else differently. Even if one seems dominant and/or has the best technology, the best system or the best philosophy, there’re always enough people that want to differ and use the not-best-alternative. And as a Google-Plus-API will go public, there will be enough plugins and services to feed your info into the other services, so that you can use your favourite of the big three, while the next person will use his favourite. Only one thing is sure: there won’t be any more competitors than the big three, as those three services do enough for everyone.

2 comments so far, add yours