Intro

Its been 20 years (much less in real life) since the original Deus Ex. For Deus Ex: Invisible War you step into the shoes of Alex Denton who must confront some enormous consipracy involving terrorists, aliens, and a big 'ol can of whoopass.

That's when I realized that my life wasn't controlled by the goverment, religion, or my mom. It was controlled by a gamepad!

 

Getting Started (Compiled from various fourms)

Assuming you've downloaded and installed the demo, you're first thought is probably "What the hell is wrong with this game?" There are several answers to this question:

  • Deus Ex: Invisible War is not a clone of the original. CHANGES HAVE BEEN MADE. The core aspects of the game: multiple solutions to problems, firepower or stealth, exploration, mods, etc. are all intact. Peripheral stuff like typing in passcodes, inventory management, different ammo for each weapon, and even reloading have been simplified or removed. I'm generally pleased with all of this though I admit I do miss the loss of experience points. (Well, finding them anyway. Documenting every bleeding one of them for my walkthrough I DO NOT miss. :-)

  • When the installer sets up DX:IW it sets the User.ini file to read-only. This will prevent you the game from saving your custom key configurations. On 2000/XP boxes you can find this file in My Documents\Deus Ex - Invisible War Demo. Right-click on the file and select properties. Click the Read-Only box to uncheck it. Click Ok.

  • The demo is flawed. The INI files it comes with seem to be set for some other gaming platform. This can be fixed by running this config utility and selecting optimal for both tabs and then click "Speichern" which means Save. On the default.ini tab beware that optimal sets your monitor refresh rate to 85hz. If you are uncertain what your monitor can handle do this:

  1. Right-click on your desktop and select properties.
  2. Click the settings tab.
  3. Click the Advanced button.
  4. Click the Monitor tab.
  5. Note the Screen Refresh rate and use that in the ManualRefreshRateHz field on the default.ini tab. While you have the Display properties open you can also experiment with different monitor refresh rates. If your computer can't handle them wait and Windows will automatically reset you back to your previous seting (On 2000/XP it does, 95/98 may not do this.)

  • If you get a COMDLG32.OCX missing (or similar) error while running the config tool follow the tip found on this thread. A tip to all you Visual Basic developers: Take a few minutes to create a proper install package. To date, only WindowsXP or later have all the VB components. Windows2000, 95, 98, and possibly ME don't have 'em unless someone installed Microsoft Office 2000 or better.

 

More Tweaks

Next, are some personal tweaks that I have adopted which you might find useful (all can be found under options)

  • Game: Set interface opacity to 0. This will keep it off the screen until you select something (inventory, biomod, etc.)

  • Control: Set mouse sensitivty to 10 (the default was WAY to fast for my taste)

  • Video: Not sure about nVidia but on ATI cards do NOT enable bloom AND set Multisampling to a number higher than 1. You take a performance hit and you get strange dot affects. I run my 9700 pro with no bloom, multismaple set at 1 and NO forced FSAA or Ansitropic Filtering.

If you have any other problems or questions, please follow the link to the forums at the end of this walkthrough.

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