Fuck you, I liked it. A great pity they never released the SDK, though...

>>horribly small levels
It's not that the levels were small, per se. It was that they had to be chopped up into tiny pieces due to terrible tech issues with their franken-Unreal 2. The Thief 3 fan patch gets rid of all the load zones to great benefit. But the same wasn't possible with Invisible War.
>>horrid story
Nah, the calibre of writing in Invisible War is pretty fucking good, especially compared to the newer Deus Ex games. And most AAA games in general.

>Would be a lot better if there were less load screens though, or if the loading was just faster.
Unfortunately, both Invisible War and Thief 3 essentially shut down the entire game and reinitialize it every time you load or move between areas. This can't be fixed, although Thief 3 solved the chopped up levels problem later. Apparently both games suffered from memory leaks, and the crash-and-restart trick was the only way to stop the game eventually overflowing the Xbox's 64MB of RAM.

The problems with Invisible War, with the exception of level size issues, were by and large the result of executive meddling. It's very enlightening to contrast Deus Ex PS2 against Invisible War. The PS2 team fought against the publisher's mandate that the game be made into a more conventional console FPS. Think something like Project Snowblind if you want to imagine the direction Eidos management wanted. The Xbox was a very powerful console by 2003 standards. It was a bit RAM limited, but it was leagues beyond any of the other consoles, and this is evidenced by the scope and complexity of stuff like Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, running on Unreal 2, or Far Cry: Instincts, running on CryEngine. A lot of the problems with Invisible War stem from executive meddling, creative indecision and a desire to experiment but not having enough time to fine-tune, and also their version of Unreal 2 turned into a fucking nightmare. I've heard that their main engine programmer quit and Invisible War struggled to recover from that.

Ultimately, though, Invisible War is a good fucking game. Time has only made it look better. I wish Deus Ex fans would spend less time fucking around with Deus Ex 1's SDK and more time remaking Invisible War in Unreal 4 or something. Square Enix would be open to that. They've handed off stuff like Fear Effect to third party developers to do remakes and shit. So if someone approached them with a decent offer, they'd let them remake Invisible War.

>it could have been good if it was completely different
The only real changes Invisible War needed were to have its levels stitched together and to have the ammo system rejigged. Anything else would be gravy. Maybe improve the UI so you can actually drag and drop things, too.

The worst part of this game is that my volume resets to default(too loud) every screen transition, so the game has been unplayable for me since windows 7 came out and volume mixer stopped being good.

I have fond memories of it, going through the game with 3 or 4 modded pistols all for different scenarios.

People actually like universal ammo what the fuck

Are you adjusting global volume or game volume? Because adjusting game volume won't work. Invisible War shuts down and opens a new instance every time you transition because muh memory leaks, muh insane deadlines.

Agreed. There was something about it that made me play through it several times throughout the years, but I can't exactly say what. I wonder if there are any mods for it.

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>It was that they had to be chopped up into tiny pieces due to terrible tech issues with their franken-Unreal 2
it had to be chopped into pieces because it was a console game and consoles had garbage amounts of memory

The Xbox had 64MB of RAM. Which wasn't super great but also wasn't super terrible considering that RAM cartels had hobbled the amount of RAM the average consumer PC had. Poor engine choices can often result in level size issues. Just look at Half-Life 2. The Xbox's RAM were a contributing factor, but Ion Storm's Unreal 2 branch was a leaky shitshow that had to be regularly rebooted to stop it dying.

Global I guess. In windows I have my master volume set high and my individual applications set to like 1%. So every transition for IW it sets my game volume to my master volume of 100%.

Back in the day you could have your master volume at 10% and an individual game could exceed that and not affect the master volume; now if anything goes higher than the master then it sets the master to that level.

So the game is unplayable for me unless I script a windows event to set my game volume to 1% every time the process ID is created or something. It's a shame because I'm staring at the cd case on my shelf right now and I own it on Steam.

deus ex didnt exist and invisible war was a standalone game it would be hailed as a hidden game masterpiece and people would be lenient to its many shortcomings.

Alright, maybe a dumb question, but why not just use the master volume while playing the game?

I tried playing again recently after giving up like 1/4 of the way through when I was maybe 10 years old. Couldn't remember why I stopped.

I remember now. It's because it was a fucking terrible game.

I always hated how petty and childish the hardcore PC fanbase of Deus Ex was about Invisible War. The game had a troubled and rushed development cycle. It did some stuff well, it did some stuff badly. The same can be said of Half-Life 2, the game with sections that are literally whitebox level design blockouts painted with brick textures. Yet HL2 avoided a lot of criticism because it was a PC exclusive for a year. At that time, the PC gaming community seemed extremely angry about the market shifts around PC and console gaming.

The reduction isn't enough, I could set my master volume on windows to like 70% instead and then reduce the master volume in game but I have certain other programs that need to be higher so I'd be constantly going back and forth with my volume slider. The issue really is with the audio mixer in Windows 7+. As I said the best fix would be to create a script or windows event to alter my volume for me, the game just isn't good enough to warrant me doing that, either that or if I could magically get the old winxp style audio mixer.

>I tried playing again recently after giving up like 1/4 of the way through when I was maybe 10 years old. Couldn't remember why I stopped.
One of the secrets of the first two Deus Ex games is that most people don't finish them. People tend to get bored of Deus Ex somewhere around Hong Kong, and with Invisible War, the game starts to drag around the second trip to Cairo.

>universal ammo
>not the future

Reminder that NG Resonance has the same voice actress as Shodan.

youtube.com/watch?v=F2Fwb8OrvSw

>People tend to get bored of Deus Ex somewhere around Hong Kong

how the fuck do they get bored of the best part of the game?

Terrible game. I remember how everyone was so obsessed with it because of physics implemented; in spite of not having any real impact on the game other than to look current alongside games like Half Life 2. The tiny levels was because of consolefaggotry not being able to handle larger sections; so the PC suffered with a watered down game for Consoles. The Universal ammo system was actually kind of cool, but the UI and minimalism of the game was complete shit. The plot was really a slap in the face to Deus Ex because it tried to be a sequel to a game with multiple endings, and decided that all endings were relevant. Really gay.

>universal ammo system was kind of cool
wow hopefully you die real soon.

>The plot was really a slap in the face to Deus Ex because it tried to be a sequel to a game with multiple endings, and decided that all endings were relevant.
Didn't Mankind Divided do basically the same thing?

>I remember how everyone was so obsessed with it because of physics implemented; in spite of not having any real impact on the game other than to look current alongside games like Half Life 2.
The game did release 2 years before Half-Life 2, but sure.

If sequel is worse by a mile than it's predecessor you KNOW someone fucked up. Too many restrictions that xbox "provided" caused many of forementioned issues.

Actually less than a year apart, and around that time the Source engine was already known for implementing physics into it.

>Too many restrictions that xbox "provided" caused many of forementioned issues.
Such as?

Ah, right. Forgot HL2 was 2004 not 2005. Still, Invisible War had physics because Deus Ex 1 had physics. Heck, Thief 3 had an identical physics system, and it was an iteration on the physics system in Thief 2, but with Havok middleware.

Deus Ex Invisible War put ragdolls and dynamic clutter into the game that responds to force. Deus Ex 1 only had very basic physics. All it did was give the game some realism, but it didn't actually become a useful part of the game, like in Half Life 2 where you could use the gravity gun, or use buoyant objects to lift a ramp up to allow your airboat to jump to a elevated part of the canal. Expensive technology and for consoles, probably helped contribute to the very closed, miniature levels.

I have a ton of nostalgia for this game. It was my first Deus Ex and the massive conspiracy plotline blew me away as a kid. It was good as an Xbox game for sure.
Haven't been able to complete a playthrough on pc though, crashing every loading screen is ass. I wish some brave soul would reverse engineer the game and develop mods for it
Or whoever owns the source code would leak or whatever, that would be cool too

64MB of shared VRAM and RAM
Shit CPU at the time
Using controller instead of mouse and keyboard
Different target audience of PC and consoles

Even thief 3 wasn't such a masive fuckup it still was a fuck up it shows Ion Storm's problems with development.

>Haven't been able to complete a playthrough on pc though, crashing every loading screen is ass. I wish some brave soul would reverse engineer the game and develop mods for it
Have you tried the unofficial patch? pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Deus_Ex:_Invisible_War#Visible_Upgrade:_Unofficial_patch_for_Deus_Ex_2
>Expensive technology and for consoles, probably helped contribute to the very closed, miniature levels.
The game's engine was a mess. It had a 256MB minimum RAM requirement on PC, which was pretty steep considering stuff like Call of Duty only needed 128MB.

It is good if you stop comparing it to something else.

>64MB of shared VRAM and RAM
A bit tight, but this didn't pose a problem for most games at the time.
>Shit CPU at the time
Eh, it was a bit dated, but let's not forget that the average PC didn't have a super great CPU either.
>Using controller instead of mouse and keyboard
And? The original Deus Ex plays better on PS2 than on PC. There's no reason Invisible War couldn't have followed in its footsteps.

Deus Ex wasn't port to PC, DX:IW was a port to PC. PS2 version of the game came almost 2 years later.
If you can't spot a difference then i'm sorry. Not really.

>Deus Ex wasn't port to PC, DX:IW was a port to PC.
Invisible War was not a "port to PC". It was a multiplatform game. There's a difference. One PC gamers have a weirdly difficult time grasping, historically.

>PS2 version of the game came almost 2 years later.
Annoyingly, Ion Storm weren't allowed to port the PS2 version's improvements such as an animation system that wasn't complete shit back to the PC version.

>radial menu
>press/hold one key for different actions
yeah totally not a shoddy port.

>sequel to GAME OF THE YEAR winner DEUS EX.
kek

>>radial menu
So Crysis is a "shoddy port" because it uses radial menus? Invisible War's menu design problems boil down to a lack of being able to drag and drop stuff. The radial design itself is fine.
>>press/hold one key for different actions
Not a bad idea when used correctly. For example, why would you have a button for holstering your weapon when you could simply make "reload" the button to holster? Press to reload. Hold to holster. I look down on PC games that don't cleverly merge functionality where appropriate.

Deus Ex won many GOTY awards and is still considered one of the greatest games ever made.

It's an exercise in "when should the devs have locked content behind the decisions you make?"