Deus Ex: Nihilum

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Deus Ex: Nihilum

Postby James » Fri May 31, 13 1:02 pm

http://www.moddb.com/mods/nihilum

FastGamerr wrote:Deus Ex: Nihilum (DXN, DEN or Nihilum for short) is a First Person Shooter mod taking place in an alternate Deus Ex continuity. It features new made-from-scratch original content, while also extensively featuring material from the UNATCO Born mod (used with permission from fender2k1, UB's project leader) and Deus Ex: Revision (used in accordance with the mod's license).


Initial Story wrote:In 2049, unsavory conditions are rampant throughout the world. As soon as it becomes clear that a terrorist attack in Shenzhen, China, was carried out by perpetrators with ties to international groups and that Hong Kong may be their next target - the United Nations Anti-Terrorist Coalition (UNATCO) dispatches their first nano-augmented agent, Mad Ingram, into the city to prevent the situation from escalating any further.
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Postby James » Fri May 31, 13 1:18 pm

streaming this DX mod
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Postby synthetic » Fri May 31, 13 3:54 pm

Waiting for some positive feedback from DX fans, then might give it a go. TNM made me loose faith in user made mods, but hope is there.
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Postby James » Fri May 31, 13 6:15 pm

ssss
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Postby Psychotic » Sat Jun 01, 13 2:57 am

Waited so long. Waited so long!
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Postby James » Sat Jun 01, 13 10:25 am

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Postby SimonDenton » Mon Jun 03, 13 3:39 am

I did beta testing of this mod and still can't get enough of it! Really great stuff from FastGamerr, someone should congratulate the man :D
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Postby Aidan » Mon Jun 03, 13 4:04 am

Looks like fun. I'll probably play some tomorrow.
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Postby James » Tue Jun 04, 13 10:15 am

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Postby ynnaD » Tue Jun 04, 13 12:31 pm

Gave this a quick go on Sunday for a few hours, very enjoyable
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Postby synthetic » Thu Jun 06, 13 1:48 pm

On average 448 downloads per day, not bad at all.. 4026 downloads in 9 days. Going to give it a go tonight and see how I can beef up the graphics on this junk. Since I can run UE3 based games fairly nice on my pent4 I'd imagine I can push dx graphics some as well, but have to check whats compatible with Nihilum.


Edit:

Ok, gave it a little go, enough to explore the first mission area in town. It certainly tries to stay true to the original, but the map design annoys the heck out of me. Unrealistic and bulky is best way to describe it imo. I think the receptionist had the best voice acting, rest are various degrees of bad. Still better voice acting than Freelancer, lol.

Going to try and complete it coming days, if the maps dont piss me off too much. Kind of irritating to explore claustrophobic spaces that don't really say what they're supposed to be. I understand that chinese are stereotypically slender, but come on. Some misaligned textures, but with high graphics its pretty decent looking aside the geometry.
Last edited by synthetic on Thu Jun 06, 13 9:55 pm, edited 3 times in total.
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Postby Mr357 » Mon Sep 30, 13 12:13 am

Nihilum is a great mod, but a big problem it has is the lighting on most of the maps. Some parts like doors will be completely black, even if there's a light source against it. Besides that the gameplay and level design were excellent. I enjoyed it.
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Postby Machina » Tue Oct 01, 13 12:16 am

synthetic wrote:Ok, gave it a little go, enough to explore the first mission area in town. It certainly tries to stay true to the original, but the map design annoys the heck out of me. Unrealistic and bulky is best way to describe it imo. I think the receptionist had the best voice acting, rest are various degrees of bad. Still better voice acting than Freelancer, lol.

Going to try and complete it coming days, if the maps dont piss me off too much. Kind of irritating to explore claustrophobic spaces that don't really say what they're supposed to be. I understand that chinese are stereotypically slender, but come on. Some misaligned textures, but with high graphics its pretty decent looking aside the geometry.


WARNING, THIS POST CONTAINS SPONTANEOUS OUTBURSTS OF THE F-WORD.

Here was my first game experience:
Start on a helicopter platform, take the stairs down, fall off the stairs because shitty design.
Hey wait, did that really happen? Let's try it again!
Go up, take stairs down, fall again. Yep those stairs are shit. They look nice though. Ok, one more time.
Go up, take stairs down, fall again. Ok it's definitely the stairs, the steps are too short. How lazy he didn't fix that.

Let's keep walking. Hmmm, these textures look kinda crappy. Is that what he meant with "this mod has been optimized for New Vision" because it looks like shit without it. God I hate New Vision because everybody expects you to use that shit and I prefer vanilla DX. Oh well, as long as gameplay in Nihilum is good I can live with all these little flaws. Now where's my first mission?

Ah, I've found an office, let's see what's in...
*SOUNDS OF NAILS GOING OVER A BLACKBOARD*
*throws off headphones*
Holy shit what was that? That hurt my ears! What the fuck, that's in the sound track? Holy shit that sound fucking sucked! Fuck this mod and its maker!! FUCK, FUCK, FUCK!!!

I tried the mod again later with the music off but seriously: what an overrated piece of crap. Maybe I still "haven't gotten to the good parts yet" but so far I've only been disappointed. I still have it installed and I might try it again later but the city map was plain stupid. I got bored very quickly so I went on a killing spree and I found out that HKMilitary wasn't even carrying weapons. How lame is that?

On the bright side I liked it more than Terminus Machina which was a complete waste of good coding since everything else about that mod sucked.

What's with the crappy mods lately anyway? I've been trying to stay quiet about it because I know how much work can be put into a mod. But I can't stand this anymore, particularly the "yeah let's use NV because then I don't have to go through the trouble of making this texture 256x256, too bad for the people who don't use NV!" That's not good modding in my book.

So there's my honest opinion. I hope nobody is overly offended by it but I'm kinda tired of holding back my opinion on mods just because I'm working on a mod myself. If someone would have complained about the stairs and the soundtrack and the unarmed HKmilitary when this was still in testing mode they could have fixed that.
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Postby WCCC » Tue Oct 01, 13 3:17 am

Pretext: May contain profanity... you know, for big kids... Talking about big kid games.

Still logged in after all these months? Nice job alpha. Pretty sure I've cleared my cookies pretty broad-spectrum once or twice too, so that's crazy. While I'd prefer machina had chosen maybe a more articulate way of describing the mod's experience, I have to agree the mod has questionable points for design, often seeming off balance. To someone in a modder's position I could see some of the aspects infuriating, so I had to take off my oddly shit-colored coder's glasses to assess this myself. I tend to carry large amounts of initial biase that may later clear up to reveal reason (like with that TNM kid, or 2027.)

Emphasis: The mod is not without value, it simply needs more polish (and a voice acting overhaul for 95% or so of the lines.)

Pros:
-Maps are sizable and detailed in complexity, new textures appear to be present and diverse, and there is a lot of little things in the mod earlier game that makes it feel fairly open world.
-The environment is thorough and consistent, in fact I got lost in several maps through the combined size/complexity and the total lack of english labeling in hong kong(?).
-The mod has a fairly sizable campaign and there are no totally game breaking bugs present.
-It has some nice humor and the script isn't super childish/the plot is more than acceptable.
-A few new interesting enemies, models, locations, etc.

Cons:
-Voice acting. I know voice actors, especially on a large scale, are VERY hard to procure, especially with quality. I do think however even given their current voice actors they could have attempted to provide feedback and do some revision so important bits of conversations such as tone, emphasis, and speed could have been recentered, even if the actual voice doesn't seem like "pro quality", though a few select voice actors were done very well.
-Clarity. Lots of times through these large maps and complex corridors, areas, and the occasional running in circles clarity was close to zero. I know I'd played TNM at some point and got lost to high hell, but eventually you can learn the method to the madness, this was very untrue about nihilum, it pains me to say. The lack of english signs in some locations and very few/poorly orchestrated datavault images combined to a lethal degree of confusion at some points.
-Balancing. Even on lower end difficulties the game seemed to be quite questionable in balancing for the new weapons. The secondary 10mm pistol is the exception; although not very creative it has a clear stance vs standard 10mm and does that well... but the same can't be said across the board. There's a super puny smg that does like 3 damage or something, but can handle with 100% accuracy at higher levels... the model is cool I guess but its so horribly skewed, much like the later m249 (or maybe a m60) like LMG, had outrageous accuracy and damage in addition to the whole LMG deal. Had a gauss gun that was cool, but pretty basic... kinda a disappointment relative to how secretive it was to get.
-NPC side balancing. Many maps proved to have situations where stealth was somewhat less of an option and enemies were much more plentiful and in some cases outrageously questionable in balance... like carrying those roid rage LMG's and having health high enough to present a very considerable challenge even when you have the drop on them. Think I tested some weapons from a WIP of mine and had a situation where this Arnold Schwartz kinda aug'd super soldier guy proved to be insane... like let's take a upscaled power shotgun, load it with expanded pellet spread, exploding effect ammunition and shoot him in the back of the head. Totaled up to like 18*2*8 + 18*1*8, or somewhere around that range for a couple hundred damage total in his head, guy turned around and glock'd me good... but I can't guarantee all of that was perfect aim, or even say the head area was perfectly defined relative to mesh... but the concept is the same: lots of firepower, sneak attack at full throttle, guy is still standing with enough punch to take you out in one or two shots to the face (Which he has very little issue hitting, even at medium-long ranges)

*I do not personally guarantee these claims of difficulty as non-biased, but I remember consistently being met with an ass-whooping unlike anything I'd seen for a long time, and in a way that seemed pretty skewed at that, not just one or two key points but almost all aspects (to my perspective).

-Script could have used some cleaning up. Most of the universe's information and plot bits were there so it more than functions as an acceptable work... but it proved random at some points (especially coupled with second-grade voice acting) with talk about ham sandwiches and the like in the middle of mission briefings. I remember bits like this slipping in relatively frequently, which was a decent laugh, but more-so in the shameful sense.

Nihilum is not without value, I re-iterate. But to me, nihilum seems to lack a very large quantity of polish or revision, most of which could probably be patched because it is, for the most part, an incredibly stable, playable product. I have played worse, I have played better, and I have had bigger letdowns relative to my expectations from its ModDB page.

Overall: 6.5/10. Probably worth DL'ing and playing at least once if you're a hoarder with nearly 14GB of DX (and yes, I do clean out save files quite often AND save conservatively) much like myself... but if you want an experience that is memorable for the right reasons and you'll want to come back to once or twice, it may not be the one for you. ~WCCC
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Postby clyzm » Wed Oct 02, 13 6:55 pm

Topic cleaned of sidetracking arguments. Keep discussion on topic please
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