Monday Gaming Diary: Deus Ex HUD Issues

I’m not going to lie; Deus Ex: Human Revolution really does push the boundaries of my comfort zone, and it doesn’t do so where I thought it would. I thought I would have the most problems with the first-person perspective, but that’s honestly the least of my problems. The stealth elements really put me on edge, and some of the “thinking-outside-the-box” really pushes me. I like that the game forces me to be creative on occasion, but at the same time, it reminds me how uncreative I am with this kind of problem solving. Once in awhile, I’ll get a revolutionary idea, but it doesn’t strike me as often as a game like DXHR requires. Couple that with my extreme lack of patience, and you get why I’m using the strategy guide.

However, none of these aforementioned reasons made me want to rage quit the game over the weekend.

In the middle of the Cloak and Daggers side missions, at the part when I need to take down a gangbanger, I kept running out of ammunition and I had no idea why. Shouldn’t I get a notification about such things? Shouldn’t I know how much ammo I have? And hey, where is my cross-hair? I kind of need that for aiming. Now that you mention it, where’s my health bar? Aren’t I supposed to have a mini-map in one corner that shows where NPCs are?

In a nutshell, my HUD had disappeared. I swore it was something I did in the settings or with a button press, so I spent a good 10-15 minutes going over and over my options in an attempt to see what I switched off. Nothing I did worked, and I was livid. I’m not good enough of a gamer to survive a FPS without a HUD, especially in those stealth zones. Not to mention, I like knowing my ammo levels at all times and I need the cross-hairs for aiming assistance. Just because I’m from Texas doesn’t mean I automatically know how to aim a gun with expert precision and direction.

I started to wonder when this happened, so I reloaded my last checkpoint. And then past saves. I finally pulled out the iPad and did a Google search, and I found nothing but bad news. It’s a glitch in the game, something that doesn’t happen often, but it requires reloading of past saves to fix. In other words, there is no fix. Oh and it occasionally corrupts past saves, forcing you to go back even further. Guess who had to do that? The one save that didn’t have the glitch was the save I used TO START MY GAME SESSION. I lost 2 hours of gameplay, and I was FURIOUS.

I quit playing that night, and when I played the next night, I swore that if it happened again to that extent, I would be done with the game. No, I don’t want to trade it in for a PS3 version. I want Square Enix and Eidos to acknowledge this problem and release a patch. I’ve seen complaints in their forums as well as the Xbox forums. This is ridiculous, and you must fix!

So far, saving after every little checkpoint with my five save files has prevented it from happening again. I will be so sad if it kills my game. So far, I’m really digging the story and the gameplay, and I really want to get this game done before November, when I will lose my soul to so much greatness.