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PaperclipPerfector  19hr ago (text post)   731 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for July 31, 2026

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Something that's always pissed me off to no end in the Deus Ex games is the energy management running on consumable power cells. I suffer from a bad case of videogame hoarding disorder, and I've beaten most of them without ever using any of the damn things, at significant cost to my sanity.

Its 20XX, just stick your dick in a convenient power socket, you're a fucking cyborg Denton/Adam.

The newer games do, from memory, let you automatically recharge a few pips with time, but that's lame. I'd rather not play a game set in a parallel timeline where the Note 7 debacle put an end to the development of battery technology.

Wha? Did you miss all those orange repair-bots that recharge your energy?

I think time based auto-regen of hp or any other resource is pretty silly. I think the console-gamers-first cover-shooters were what started the trend.

It's been somewhere in the ballpark of 15 years since I played the OG Deus Ex. Even then, the recharge bots were rare. Power outlets are... not rare.

Battery packs or capacitors are not like HP, and it does not break immersion to allow them to be recharged at a reasonable pace in-game.

at a reasonable pace

I feel like this is the only catch ... but how much of a catch?

Wiki says your 100 units of bioelectric energy will power Speed Enhancement for 150 seconds, which increases your running speed by a max of 80%. 80% of athletic-human running power is going to be something like 250 watts, and 150 seconds of that is about 10 Wh, which means your recharge time at a decent 1kW power outlet is only going to take you under 40 seconds.

Yeah, other assumptions might bump me up by a factor of 2 here, but that still seems fine. Even if we assume that standard electrical power can only be converted into "bioelectric energy" slowly, 10 Wh is small for a phone battery; just keep a supercapacitor or something in your pocket, charge that quickly, and use that to recharge your bioelectric energy slowly.

I think the only thing that makes the mechanic work is if we assume that making "bioelectric energy" is less like recharging a battery and more like synthesizing a fuel, something that requires slow and/or bulky equipment.

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