Deus Ex: Human Revolution - Director's Cut is a mess and you can't buy the original on Steam anymore

[Dr. Caroll]

When Human Revolution DC was released in 2013, it displaced the original version. People who own the original version can still play it. People with physical copies or grey market keys can still buy it. But it has been effectively removed from Steam.

Square Enix aren't the only publisher to do this. Deep Silver displaced the original Metro releases with the Redux versions. Which is annoying for people who want to play the original and don't own it, but it's not as bad as when they displaced the Dead Island titles with the deeply broken Definitive Editions.

You might ask, "What's the big deal? Isn't the Director's Cut just a polished version of Human Revolution with less crappy boss fights and the story DLC integrated into the main game?"

The big deal is the ridiculous list of bugs -- quite a few game breaking -- that crept into the game as a result of it being based on outdated source. (Something similar happened with Deus Ex: GOTY Edition/Patch 1.112fm, which used outdated map files. But the bugs there weren't as serious.)

The list of issues in HR:DC is ridiculous. It just goes on and on and on. Few of these issues were present in the fully patched original version of Human Revolution. Heck, they generally weren't even present in the launch version.

http://steamcommunity.com/app/238010/discussions/0/810939350891608249/

Gems include:

Broken multi-monitor support.
NPCs T-posing.
Bullet decals flicker.
Broken textures. Like, everywhere.
Save/Load bugs.
Music looping issues. Which causes cutscene fast forwarding issues.
A weird radio sound that keeps appearing and disappearing that seems linked to the commentary system.
Talking to NPCs with your gun drawn muffles their audio.
Police often hostile to Jensen for no reason.
Misaligned weapon sights.
Eliza Cassan TV broadcasts are broken.
Multiple broken and/or bugged quests. Often caused by key NPCs vanishing.
Post-processing issues including degraded SSAO quality.
Oh, and of course multiple localized languages are missing and if you choose to play in a language other than English you get visual artifacts on character faces.

In short, it's a mess. We've traded fundamental polish for better boss fights and less yellow filtering.

 

[Cybersai]

I really want a remaster of this on current consoles. Definitely need to fix the glitches and give us a definite version.

 

[super-famicom]

I never asked for this.

 

[Cess007]

There's something about how NPCs does the T-pose in-game that always makes me smile :')

 

[Smash-It Stan]

Is the DC on consoles the same?

 

[PensivePen]

I was just thinking about this recently and it's something that very much annoys me too. When these enhanced versions make significant changes they really should always come with a playable version of the original included so players can decide for themselves which one they would rather play. Darksiders 2 is another example in which not every change in the new version was for the better, and now you can't get it anymore on Steam.

 

[Dr. Caroll]

I was just thinking about this recently and it's something that very much annoys me too. When these enhanced versions make significant changes they really should always come with a playable version of the original included so players can decide for themselves which one they would rather play. Darksiders 2 is another example in which not every change in the new version was for the better, and now you can't get it anymore on Steam.

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Examples of games that do this are Resident Evil 5, which allows you to roll back to the GFWL version which is less buggy, and also, the Crystal Dynamics Tomb Raider/Rise of the Tomb Raider games let you roll back to previous updates, IIRC.

 

[Gamer @ Heart]

This brings me back.

I called all 8 GameStops in my city trying to find the DC on wiiu. 4 stores got one copy which they of course gutted for display.

 

[Mozendo]

Yup it's a huge mess, whenever I warned people on the SteamGAF I was told it was my PC because the game got patched

 

[LossAversion]

Yeah, I got the director's cut on the PS3 and while I didn't run across any game breaking bugs, there was a really annoying glitch not present in the base game. They added a commentary mode to the game but even if you don't enable the commentary track, a radio SFX will still play whenever the commentary would begin if it were enabled. It happens constantly throughout the game and I can't believe something so blatant was never fixed. Poor form on Square Enix's part.

 

[1-D_FE]

Didn't it used to be a cheap upgrade for owner's of the original? Guess I'm glad I never did it. Although I think I may have had a reason at the time. Part of me thinks the director's cut screwed up 3D Vision and that's why I didn't bite at the time. It was something for me.

 

[Mivey]

Man, I'm glad I could somehow avoid most issues when I played the DC two years ago. There were some glitches, and I think one or two T poses, but nothing severe.
It sucks though that Nixxes couldn't give the Director's Cut more polish. They are a great PC porting studio, in general. Must have been a time and money issue, so blame Square?

 

[HeeHo]

What a coincidence that this got posted, I was thinking there was something off. I was just playing it last night for the first time and I thought maybe my settings were off. The game looks really grainy in weird places like cutscenes and I even experienced the fast forwarding too. I chalked up the ugliness of the game to it being older and I thought the bugs were maybe just rare occurrences

 

[Blackage]

Surprised there's no fan patch to fix these issues.

 

[Khanimus]

WiiU version was solid. Sad that the word about the DC got sullied by these last minute additional ports that were trash in comparison.

 

[Baleoce]

Weeeelll Shiiiiiieeet

 

[Blabadon]

Didn't they reduce the piss filter? It added a lot to the game.

 

[TyGuy]

Yeah, isn't the directors cut based on like a wii-u build and that's the crux of the problem? I beat this game long ago, but I remember they had bug fixes in the original version that were annoying and came back to the directors cut version.

I was wondering if they ever re-fixed those bugs.

 

[manchego obfuscator]

I didn't encounter any bugs that particularly stood out to me when I played through DC on PC in 2016 (keeping in mind that I never played the original version), but man, The Missing Link really shouldn't have been integrated into the main story, at least not without significantly reworking it. It's incredibly obvious that it was designed as a separate mini-campaign, and including it as a mandatory part of the story progression completely breaks the pacing.

 

[Poimandres]

WiiU version was solid. Sad that the word about the DC got sullied by these last minute additional ports that were trash in comparison.

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Solid compared to what? The 360/PS3 versions sure. Less bugs then the PC DC? Almost certainly. But it looks and runs far worse than a very modest PC and has long load times. OG PC is still the way to go all things considered, in my opinion.

 

[vypek]

I think I was lucky enough that I didn't run into problems but I wish I could get the original because I absolutely hated the DLC mission and I couldn't find a way to stop it from being integrated. It stopped me from doing a second playthrough of the game where I I would go lethal.

 

[Aangster]

The Director's Cut is based on an older (and of course, unpatched) build of Human Revolution. In addition to re-introducing bugs, it also has worse fps stuttering for certain GFX cards that may be fixed by:

1. Going to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Eidos\Deus Ex: HRDC via regedit.exe
2. Opening dword AllowJobStealing and setting it to 0 from 1 value
3. For Nvidia users: going to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Eidos\Deus Ex: HRDC\Graphics and changing AtiForceFetch4 to 0 from 1 value

For its improvements, I do appreciate the rebalancing of the DLC weapon drops and added bar of battery for Normal/Standard difficulty and below. But, it was incredibly disappointing to see Square Enix drop support soon after launch.

 

[Dr. Caroll]

The Director's Cut is based on an older (and of course, unpatched) build of Human Revolution. In addition to re-introducing bugs, it also has worse fps stuttering for certain GFX cards that may be fixed by:

1. Going to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Eidos\Deus Ex: HRDC via regedit.exe
2. Opening dword AllowJobStealing and setting it to 0 from 1 value
3. For Nvidia users: going to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Eidos\Deus Ex: HRDC\Graphics and changing AtiForceFetch4 to 0 from 1 value

For its improvements, I do appreciate the rebalancing of the DLC weapon drops and added bar of battery for Normal/Standard difficulty and below. But, it was incredibly disappointing to see Square Enix drop support soon after launch.

Click to shrink...

Also, in some cases, renaming the game's exe file to something else can solve the game running <30fps at all times on Nvidia hardware. (A similar trick is needed for Skylake CPU+AMD RX480 setups playing Wolfenstein: The New Order/Old Blood.)

 

[raketenrolf]

Controls on Wii U are bad imo. While hacking and such was fun with the Gamepad (Gamepad use in general), aiming with those stick with a huge deadzone was certainly not. Framerate wasn't great either from what I remember.

 

[Dictator]

I ended up grabbing this drom CD-Keys because they had the non-DC version of the game.

 

[Tizoc]

The Director's Cut is based on an older (and of course, unpatched) build of Human Revolution. In addition to re-introducing bugs, it also has worse fps stuttering for certain GFX cards that may be fixed by:

1. Going to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Eidos\Deus Ex: HRDC via regedit.exe
2. Opening dword AllowJobStealing and setting it to 0 from 1 value
3. For Nvidia users: going to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Eidos\Deus Ex: HRDC\Graphics and changing AtiForceFetch4 to 0 from 1 value

For its improvements, I do appreciate the rebalancing of the DLC weapon drops and added bar of battery for Normal/Standard difficulty and below. But, it was incredibly disappointing to see Square Enix drop support soon after launch.

Click to shrink...

The 2 battery on normal or lower is my fav change, wonder if it can be applied to the og game...