Short 'update':

I bought Deus Ex and played it a few hours. It is an interesting aproach, but not that sort of freedom of gameplay that I thought of.

In HL when looking at a close person you can push the use button, and the npc will follow you, when pushing it again, the npc will stay where it is.
That interaction is simple and fast. I'd like to expand this sort of interaction to get more freedom within the 'social' communikation.

New approach:

What if the npc reacts like a Tamagotchi, and the player can offer him food and goods, not only for health, but for mental strength too? Non-material offers like information, like affirmation, like recognition, comparable to stroking(or playing with) a Tamagotchi.

What if the player's character is a Tamagotchi too, which has to get its supply of mental food from the npcs (instead from the player)? Then the player's character can ask for food, for things, for information and for mental support.

This way the player can do both with his character: offer and ask for, with maybe only two different buttons. Deciding wether he gives material support from an inventar or mental support, while he does not choose within a dialoglist, but pushs the 'offer'-button, and hears what the author thought what the character should say in such case!

You cannot see the freedom of DeusEx in a few hours. And wow, you have written so much why or why it is not the kind of freedom you want.

I dont know how far you have gone, but later in the game, approximateley when you get to Hong-Kong, you will notice the freedoms that are offered to you. You will begin to choose a side and it also depends on how you played til that point: The Rambo bang bang death guy? The sneaky assasin noone has ever seen? The I do not kill anybody because its against my principles guy? Whatever your playstyle was till that point will influence the story.

The beginning part however is just like in real life, your infancy, your a young child and have to choose how you get through live, bad or good?

But yes, in the end, there are oly 3 endings, but the whole thing between is just totally different each time you play it in different ways

Yeah i discovered Deus Ex, lot of years after it existed ,
but it remains one of the greatest games.
and with it's spoken dialogs, conspiracy, music, RPG elements and use of
augmentations ... lot of ways to reach the end of a level
a great moment.

Well, yes, i did not reall ytry the whole game without shooting, but i tried all of the levels then and now.

And i really mean without shooting, you are fully allowed to use the baton and the stun-stick, so with your sneak augs you can sneak up, beat them KO and go to the next one. The routes of all NPCs are made the way, that there is always a moment when noone sees him, you have to watch and learn, and the act.

Its the slowest method of all, but yes. It is possible

A wait, for a second I thought you meant 'no shooting' as in using no weapons at all , that was what I meant. Yup, solely using melee weapons is perfectly possible.

Cheers

But not any melee weapons, no swords and stuff. Only KO-Weapons, so no killing and stuff.

Okey, so basically what the developer meant was you can play the game without killing anyone, yeah that's possible indeed. Still that would be very hard at four specific places though, but not impossible,

Cheers

It would be interesting if you got rewarded for finishing the game without a single kill (maybe you do, I'm too trigger happy to find out ).

one of the best freeplay story development i have experienced so far was in epic2.
a simple spaceshoter game but with one remarkable option: the mission tree.

whenever you fail a mission (escorting some cargo ships aso) it didnt lead to a replay of the mission but the story simply continued. If you where not able to stop a weapon transport of the enemy, you still could continue but had to face another level.

after you have failed about 3-4 missions in a row (depending) you where game overed by "imprisoning".

this game had the hell of a motivation factor. first of all it played like battle star galactica and you where allowed to fail missions and the whole story and further mission desing reacted to it.

i have seen aspects of this in other games as well but never in such a great layout ever again.


deusx was not really that unlinear, but it offered you to solve missions in a few different ways. other games do this as well (thief for example).

deusx though had one big problem: you could get lost during the game. Not knowing what to do is very bad ingame.

But all of those games have a big replay motivation factor. somthing i am missing in games today.

cheers