Hello Sup Forums, I am about to play this game for the first time. Any advice before I get started?

Hello Sup Forums, I am about to play this game for the first time. Any advice before I get started?

Take the gep gun, it's the best lock pick in the whole game.

Prod with the prod

Prod with the prod.

put half of your points into swimming. You'll need it for most of the game

Upgrade the shit out of your pistol, it's the best gun in the game.

The assault rifle is the best gun in the game

Just fucking play it. You can basically do things however you want so it's hard to fuck things up completely.

The hitboxes for stealthy melee KOs are fucked. Aim kinda between the shoulder blades.

STICK WITH THE PROD, JC.

Put most of your points in swimming

Swimming is a meme. It's useful to have one level in it early game, though.

Don't open it

...

Get the hacking skill.

People say swimming is a bad skill but it's actually fairly useful. You pretty much can't explore everything without it. The rest of the skills don't completely lock anything off from you.

Don't get silent running, it's useless.

Flatlander woman

It's also the only one you can't find otherwise on Liberty Island map.

Take the Gep Gun at the beginning.
Remove the starting rank in pistols, don't worry you get it back and with more starting points.
Max out computers early, you can hack ATMs for money and never have to worry about remembering logins/passwords.
Take either rifles or heavy weapons, you do not need both.
Explosives only help with LAMs, don't waste your points with it.
Lockpicking and Electronics can be bypassed by pausing the game and waiting for how long it would take to use the item. You never need more than one tool per lock. You may want to put a rank into each just to speed them up.

don't put any points in pistol skills during character creation. game will give the first skill upgrade to you for free.

You can. Augs make up for swimming, at least in vanilla. It's a truly useless skill unless you're playing an aug-less game.

Aqualing obviously, but even without that, vanilla regen is so OP you can just turn that on while you're drowning and it's like it's not even happening.

your skills matter less than you think because it's not system shock 2 where you can absolutely fuck yourself over with an nonviable character. just, you know, don't be retarded and invest in something like swimming.

Thanks baby.

Shit, I'm confused. The other is saying swimming is helpful, the other is saying it's useless. What the fuck.

iirc there's an aug that can replace swimming tho

it's useless for some exploration bits, but it's otherwise a waste of skill points

Suggesting swimming is an old, old meme, because it's the most pointless skill, and therefore the funniest to recommend. There are only a handful of places in the whole game where it might be useful, and only one or two where swimming is the only option(and those aren't mandatory to progress.) Even in those cases, you have options available other than swimming skill.

>aqualung power for staying underwater longer
>rebreather items always available in the areas you might need to go for a long dunk
>medkits to heal light drowning damage
>regeneration power to heal ongoing damage, shitload of batteries by that point to keep regen going

thx :*

its not

its barely useful. Got through the whole game multiple playthroughs without a single point. Rebreathers, medkits, augs, regeneration. Thers ways to swim to places without the skill, and even the rewards for doing so arent significant

Best advice i can give you is let yourself play at least through Hong Kong. The game often gives a bad first impression because its a little archaic and you dont have the experience or knowledge to realize why the level design is awesome.

Going forward levels open up a lot, and once youre invested in your build and the world its undeniably a classic game.