The headshot collision code in DX is broken as well. This is from memory from looking at the DX SDK years ago (+15 at least), but...
The collision shape used for a character in DX is a single cylinder. The game looks at where on the cylinder the collision point of the shot is, and tries to figure out if it's a head, body, or leg shot. It does this by checking how high the collision point is, with the lower X% being legs, top Y% being the head, and the middle being the body.
If a shot hits the head section, it runs some additional checks, and can sometimes still count as a body hit. There was some weird code that, after you stared at it long enough, looks like it ended up splitting the head area into compass aligned 1/8ths (so north, north-east, east, etc) and hits to the N-E-S-W octants would count as a head shot, and a hit to the NE-NW-SE-SW octants would count as body shots. (I couldn't tell if the angles rotate with the character, or are absolute relative to the world.) I think there was also a check for hits on the top cap of the cylinder, so that the hit would have to be close to the center of the cylinder to count as head hit, and near the outer rim would count as a body hit.
I guess what they were trying to do was make the actual head hitbox a smaller section of the head level, so that a shot that should go over the shoulder and miss would just count as a body shot and not a true headshot. And if you made a test map, with the player and a static test enemy placed in a line, this could work reliably from a fixed position. But when you actually play DX, and approach enemies from various angles, headshots inexplicably fail.
Weird coincidence, but I had to look through some old files backed up from the computer I was using 15+ years ago, and noticed it had C:\DeusEx sitting right there, with the SDK files in it. I found the function that handles damage in it.
It looks like I misremembered/misinterpreted some stuff. It looks like the top of the head behaves like the sides of the head, extending upward, forming a + shape.
Judging by how the arm/leg damage works, it the collision hit zones rotate with the enemy. Offset appears to be were the collision point is releative to the character's rotation, since it's also used to determine front/back and left/right collision. So for a hit to count as a headshot, it has to hit a cardinal octant of the collision cylinder.
I could be wrong, I didn’t work on it, but I believe these jankyness you describe was because DX was originally going to be like a Fallout style game but pivoted to an FPS. Old code left over from Troubleshooter and flawed game design choices that didn’t translate to a full 3D world.
But I could just be remembering it wrong.
Are you sure that the jankiness you describe is not related to you not being close enough to the enemy for it to count as a point blank hit? The engine does a simple distance check which is rather unforgiving, and if you utilize the range your melee weapon affords you, you will fail this point black attack check. This is just a guess on my part, but it's the #1 reason I've seen people be perplexed at seemingly inconsistent melee stealth takedown behavior.
If you first push yourself as close as you can get to the enemy model and attack the general area of their torso, it works every single time. But again, this is just me taking a guess as to what the problem you're referring to is!
Well that's the problem. In the first mission you have to figure out to stun the enemies in the center of their back rather than directly in their head. Its super counterintuitive and probably leads to many players not getting past the first mission.
The minicrossbow is even harder than the prod, especially at lower skill levels and with no weapon mods. The prod at least stuns enemies momentarily. With the darts they still stand around shooting at you and set off alarms, and that's if you manage to hit them at all. You can run up to a guy and get a guaranteed stun in the time it takes him to spin around like a dumbass to look at the source of the footsteps.
My first playthrough, when I was 12, I opted for the GEP gun, but had to go to the minicrossbow after running out of ammo, thereby leaving me with no pistol skill. The worst of both worlds on the very first mission. Ended up climing up the back of the statue of liberty and throwing gas grenades. Good times.
The GEP gun is ironically the pro choice to make if you know what you’re doing. All of the other weapons on offer can be found in the first level, and the GEP works as a fantastic “lockpick” even if you never fire it in anger.
This is true, but the upside of the crossbow is that for most soldiers it only takes a single shot to take them out, even if it takes a while, and you can do it from a safe spot, this can be beneficial if your JC sucks at combat or is low on ammo.
Also if you have to stun them in a pinch, they just stand there being spastic, you can knock them out by prodding a second time, but if you do it right away the hit won't register, you have to wait half a second and move around a bit or something. This is very annoying since it wastes precious prod charges.
This may be because the 'headshot' multiplier is lower than the regular multiplier (1x vs 2x) for the prod and baton. For most weapons the headshot multiplier is 8x (or something).
The game also features bullet drop, but this is completely broken. Iirc it does a hitscan against the cylinder and then depending on the length of the ray the hit point is moved further down the length of the cylinder, but this means you cannot for instance aim above the character to compensate for bullet drop.
Modders have put a ton of effort into fixing and restoring this game. The developers originally wanted to let players choose the protagonists gender, but they didn't have the resources to make it happen, so of course the community ended up redubbing JCs entire script and editing the rest to bring it back almost seamlessly.
This is what Warren Spector made while Romero was busy pissing money away and constantly rewriting Daikatana.
The one worthwhile thing to come out of Ion Storm.
Lots of emergent gameplay. Almost always more than one way to solve each puzzle. Stealth, brute strength melee, long range combat, explosives, computer hacking ...
Having played a good portion of Daikatana with a big fix-up mod, I'd say it's one of those games where there's a good game trying to get out and would have been a great if it released in a better state - but it didn't. However it's really hard to see how any commercial project could do an overhaul/remake to try and explore that potential and not deal with that baggage. Probably similar for Duke Nukem Forever, if that had been a well run project instead of a 14 year saga, it seems like the poison is being a bit drunk on earlier success and having too much money available without accountability for it.
I think people will hate it somewhat because the older style and assets mixed with more modern lighting and textures (moreso, often AI upscaled ones), will look... kinda shiny and overall a bit off, same as happened with the GTA remaster, other launch issues aside.
That said, I am still in the minority that enjoys such attempts, if nothing else, then because at least these modern versions often run a bit better, with proper high resolutions and widescreen support, as well as sometimes receive some quality of life fixes to bring the game up to speed and make it play like something a bit more modern - the jank of early 2000s games is something I don't enjoy.
At the same time, there's no reason why a mod made by passionate members of the community couldn't do more or less the same, except often times a bit better, which is jarring - how some companies seem to do the equivalent of outsourcing it and try to produce something quickly and on a budget.
The sales numbers show that you're not in minority for enjoying remasters.
There's a very loud cacophony from a minority of fans that get really really angry because someone touched their favorite thing and moved some rivets around. Similar to the effect where people were VERY VERY angry about the changes and omissions LotR movies did to LotR books.
"Moving rivets around" is how I might describe the recent SS2 remaster from nightdive, it was pretty good. This DX remaster is more like "let's have the cheapest contractors we can find run this venerated classic through an AI upscaler and charge 30 bucks for it". Notice the sign on the wall in the unatco break room that says "Stratigies" in the remaster trailer. DX deserves far better than that
On the bright side, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, while largely a different dev team was a fantastic game and scratched the itch for me when it came out. One of the few games in the last 15 years I’ve actually played to completion.
Eh. It didn't really feel like Deus Ex to me, spiritually. I think Prey (2017) hits way closer. I haven't played the System Shocks, so I don't know if they were aiming for that or for Deus Ex. I've heard some people from Looking Glass went to Arkane. It seems like there's only 5-10 people in the world who know how to make immersive sims and keep making action RPGs where you can upgrade your body and have quests with multiple viable approaches.
It had some cool mechanics but was pretty meh on the storyline. I didn't really feel a connection to the characters like I felt with the original Deus Ex. Except maybe copter pilot girl
If everyone who liked the original goes out and buys a remaster, then hates it, aren't they still counted as a sale? It's like a movie ticket, you don't know if the movie will be any good when you pay for it. I don't see sales numbers as being linked to quality or enjoyment.
Why would anyone do that? I would assume people can just read a review first before buying. Especially since they already played the original, so it isn’t like they would need to worry about spoiling the story for themselves.
Also, easy Steam refunds if the game was played for under 2 hours is a thing.
I felt like outside of bug fixes and QoL improvements, Revision's maps and soundtrack were a downgrade compared to the original. I feel quite strongly about this, but I recognize it's also largely up to taste and it's valid to like those changes.
But for me, they made the experience worse and they were enabled by default. As a result, I gave it a thumbs down on Steam and did my best to explain my thoughts in detail. I received a couple dozen negative comments over the years on that review, largely in the vein of how dare I give negative feedback to a labor of love provided for free. That kind of argument did make me feel guilty, like I was being unfair to the developers. I eventually changed it to a positive review, and now I regret doing that. I allowed my genuine opinion to be clouded.
This was an extremely tame internet conflict overall, I'd feel ashamed to frame myself as a victim over so little. What I'm trying to say is that both sides are capable of failing to genuinely engage with the other.
It's definitely true that Revision has been to some degree unfairly attacked. There are purists who do not give it a fair shake and make ludicrously confident statements, peddling opinion as fact. But there's also legitimate reasons to dislike it. Not knowing you, I am not at all accusing you that you'd be lacking nuance on this topic. I'd just like to say as a general statement that discourse ends up healthier when people care about distinguishing between people who disagree with you versus people who disagree with you _and_ that are acting in bad faith.
Remasters generally are worse than originals. There are rare exceptions, but usually you get either mixed bag, or outright worse experience than original. Ditto for remakes.
The System Shock 1 remaster in particular is excellent. It's not just a graphical improvement, they improved the controls and inventory interface and a host of other legacies from from DOS-era gaming that did not age well.
It's well received after launch, yes. There's been plenty of screeching about "not being true to original" and "this looks ugly" and "this looks wrong" on the way there though. Just like for this.
Especially for the first remake.
This is why I say the screeching right now based on a trailer means nothing. "Fans" always get mightily offended if someone touches their childhood favorites.
You don't have to be a fan of the game to see the trailer and think it looks bad. I'm certainly not a Deus Ex fan. I played it just once, years and years ago. Yet when they showed the trailer during State of Play I was shocked at how bad it was. It's clearly just some texture upscaling and an update to the lighting. The original looks ugly and this remaster manages to look uglier.
An example of a remaster done right was Halo 1 (which is actually quite an old remaster at this point). They threw a new graphics engine on top but also remodeled and retextured everything. That's what I expect out of a proper remaster.
While I enjoyed CE:A, it had issues. The big one was the loss of bump-mapped textures making everything look flat. They only show up when you use a flashlight.
Games people love usually have a large portion of spontaneity behind their success. This is hard to faithfully capture even if that's your intention, and remasters are usually done on a tiny budget for profit by people who often aren't even familiar with the OG game, which doesn't really help.
There are exceptions though, and also there are some remasters that are not faithful but are good on their own.
I don't care for Deus Ex, but looking at the screenshots I struggle to tell which one is the remaster. It's very clear that they messed up the lighting and the overall mood though. I'd be offended as a fan.
As a GMDX user your comment and the Remaster are both irrelevant. The mentioned mod makes the 1st Deus Ex perfect. It enhances places, items, location, graphics... without breaking the original gameplay and mood to please Gen-Zers.
Might be the greatest game ever made. I was raving like a lunatic about it to a friend in public once and a guy next to us turned around and interrupted me to say it’s the only game he’s ever played because he felt no other games could top it.
I was 14 and impressionable, but when I played, the "twist" of the game coincided exactly with the moment I decided to switch to the "terrorists" and tried to kill Anna Navarre. Then the rest of the game went exactly as I hoped it would. It completely blew my mind.
I'm not ashamed to say that Deus Ex was extremely formative and the reason why now, almost in my 40s, I still read about political philosophy, anarchism, and cultivate a healthy distrust of the government and mass media. Which in turn also gave me a direct pipeline towards crypto-anarchism and Internet privacy rights.
When I first played this game, I couldn’t speak english and just thought it was cool.
I still remember the exact moment I learned the word “surrender” from the terrorist leader at the statue, because I’ve replayed the first level hundreds of times, since my pirated version of the game would crash around one of the first levels.
When I was a late teenager I learned english and my mind was blown that the game actually had deep meaning behind it.
It's the game that made me stop using cheats. I was young and discovered cheat codes and used them in every game that made them available.
I remember completing Deus Ex and finding it "just ok", but then I read how people talked about it, and realized that taking away the challenge from games was making them worse!
Never used one again, aside from when I discovered Cheat Engine, which was amazing for somebody who was starting to get interested in programming.
I opened the level file I was currently in and filled a room with every weapon upgrade and skill booster. Then put bosses outside the door, saved, loaded the game. If I could get in, I could have the stuff.
Kids these days don’t have access to edit their games like we did. It’s why crafting games are popular, the only “level editors” that remain once companies realized they could monetize extra content.
IMO - There's a few games that match it, but nothing "in the same category". Braid, Portal, Stanley Parable come to mind. (Also what I hear about Baldur's Gate 3, but I haven't played.)
But the depth of character, discussions on morality - I still reference the MJ12/Illuminati portrayal from Deus Ex as a discussion on leadership and morality - the depth of gameplay, the way it created a feel of a much bigger, open world.
>Also what I hear about Baldur's Gate 3, but I haven't played.
They're very different, so they're difficult to compare. BG3 is very much a tabletop RPG in electronic form, with a focus on tactics and positioning. I guess you could call it fantasy XCOM. In terms of player choices, BG3 is more open, though I'd say it's almost to its detriment, because it's jankier than DX. You'll probably get at least one bugged out quest during a playthrough. Nothing game-breaking, but still. It kind of kills the immersion.
Yeah. I was just a teenager when I first played, but the prison escape and the associated revelations were breathtaking to me and once of my first "holy shit" moments in playing a PC game. And not the only such moment just from that game! The Agent Navarre airplane scene was incredible. And I loved that you had conversations, like with the Australian expat at the Hong Kong bar or the AI, or the terrorist at the statue of Liberty, that were good conversations where the payoff was just intellectual curiosity and the content itself. Hong Kong was amazing to just explore too.
I still haven't played anything like it some 25 years later unless The Nameless Mod counts.
While still not treating its audience like idiots. A modern game with political undertones would be much more in your face in a us vs them kinda way and unable to deal with any sort of nuance, just like our political discourse.
Several years ago Elon Musk did an interview with Marques Lee Brown praising the original Deus Ex and stating his disappointment with the sequel.
In the intervening years he's invested tons of money into neuroaugmentation, capturing global telecommunications in a massive satellite array, buying out the US president, and poured money into a compute cluster for a superintelligent AI finetuned to be obedient to his will (although it deviates from time to time)
Basically Elon has turned into the supervillain Bob Page from Deus Ex sans the "globalist agenda" and with a dash of stormfront white nationalism to boot.
The original game takes place in 2052, and we are headed straight towards that dystopia.
One thing I found especially disgraceful was Elon pointing to the games narrative as a reason to be skeptical of measures to limit the spread of covid, noting that in the game the a plague intended for social control.
But... in the game the good guys were the ones trying to make sure everyone had the vaccine, which Elon conveniently omitted when tweeting about it. What makes his invokation of the game more hilarious is exactly what you noted: the parallels between Elon and Bob Page, a billionaire tech mogul and one of the main villains, are impossible to ignore.
Technically in the game both the disease and the control of the supply of vaccine are used for social control and political leverage. It was a plotline ripped directly from popular media at the time, mainly the X-files Movie which had a very similar if not identical plot of shadowy government conspirators named the "illuminati" spreading an virus but secretly manufacturing a vaccine for themselves, their families, and certain government officials.
The game, both in the 2000s when it came out, and today has bits of both left wing and right wing elements. The NSF faction read as libertarian right wing terrorists, and UNATCO is literally an arm of the "globalist" UN which would probably appeal to the right-wing qAnon types today. But the actual villain is basically a dude who is exactly like Elon.
>and the control of the supply of vaccine are used for social control and political leverage.
The bad guys were trying to manipulate supply of it. The good guys were trying to make sure it was available to everyone. Interestingly, even the bad guys understood the necessity of vaccines, and their ability to leverage them for power hinged on a shared global understanding of their importance.
What it meant to be curious about conspiracy theories in the late '90s is fundamentally different than what it is in the present day, in a way that I think unfortunately distorts the experience of the game for people who don't know what it was like before. Hence Elon's bizarre attempt at retrofitting it to anti-covid narratives.
In 2 years it matches the date of the prequel Human Revolution. On the technology side there's still a lot that remains sci-fi, but the themes are at least on the horizon.
I recall watching a review in 2020/2021 where the reviewer stated how awkward he felt about the way it just took every conspiracy theory and just asked “what if it were true?”
Bear in mind that, at this time, people genuinely believed there was some nutjob conspiracies being revealed by QAnon. Ironically, half of them seemed to come directly from Deus Ex…
Deus Ex was drawing from a palpably '90s flavor of fascination with aliens, conspiracies, and alternative history. In the present day that same subject matter is unfortunately associated with things like vaccine denial and anti-democratic nationalistic movements. It's the difference between the X-Files and Alex Jones, essentially.
damn, for real? I still haven't played it -- I didn't have a Windows machine when it came out, and by the time I did have one, it slipped through the cracks.. it's really that good? That reminds me I do have one friend who says it's his top favorite game, actually, heh. It's especially strange I haven't played it since I generally love cyberpunk/dystopian stuff like that!
Agreed: didn't listen to the doubters, I think it's still the best PC game ever, even now. The level design still rocks, the dialog is great, the items, skills, inventory management, richness of environments, and breadth of locations, it set a standard I don't think has been eclipsed (for better or worse). I think Dishonored has a liiitle bit of the same vibe but not really, as it has no prescient future oriented politics. But yeah, ignore the haters, it's the best ever.
While I don’t agree with the best ever chorus, I’d say it holds up decently well with mods. The HD mod makes the graphics acceptable, and I replayed it in 2023 or something and it was still great.
A better rendering-engine is a no-brainer—the original shadows tend to become olive-banded messes—but my experience with texture-pack mods isn't as good.
IIRC they tended to make the overall experience worse, with jarring inconsistencies of high-poly/high-res objects versus unmodified portions of the environment.
Plus nowadays "low res" is sometimes it's own art-style. :p
I disagree. The political undertones in the setting of a global pandemic hit even harder today than when the game released in 2000.
I especially loved the "conspiracy" talk about corporations consolidating their powers thanks to government-sponsored wage slavery and higher taxes to the individual vs companies. It's something that's even more relevant today, especially in this space of entrepreneurship.
For sure! I just meant that when it came out it was revolutionary and cutting edge, if you play it for the first time now you have to get past the outdated graphics and clunky gameplay to really appreciate it.
I think things are a product of their time, and you had to be there for the vast majority of it. The Matrix was a revolution when it came out, but now it just kind of looks the same as everything else (even dated), but that's because everything else copied it.
I understand your point, but for some reason there's some corner of my brain that's interested in litigating this if you'll bear with me. I definitely think the color of nostalgia is a real thing, and for me that imprinting shows up the most in still having an inexplicable affinity for '90s nu metal that I can't really reconcile with any notion of sophisticated taste.
But I think sometimes you see the opposite thing too, where a rewatch or re-listen is very disappointing, and undermines your impression that something is great. So it's clear that at least some of the time the nostalgia effect falls away. And I like to think staying power after repeated watchings can testify to "classic" status. But I think the reason I'm interested in drawing distinctions here is because I don't like the idea that Deus Ex, the greatest game of all time imo, can be pointed to to vindicate modern day conspiracy theorists, like they are the same thing.
In fact, the next time Warren Spector is interviewed I hope someone asks how he feels about his game being invoked in that way.
I think I made the wrong point when I wrote about nostalgia. I don't mean so much "you're remembering the work as better than it was", but more "you remember the zeitgeist that made the work great".
I watched Macgyuver (my favourite childhood show) recently, and it was terrible, twenty minutes of filler for one cool engineering scene, way worse than I remembered it. However, it's not the show that's changed, it's that I forgot what the 90s were like and how cool Macgyuver was in that zeitgeist.
Similarly, it's not that the Matrix isn't great, it's that, if you watched it in its era, you may remember how unlike anything else it was. You can't know how groundbreaking it was unless you remember that era, otherwise it's just one movie of many.
I can't speak to your later points as I don't know what Deus Ex is about or how it's used to vindicate conspiracy theorists, unfortunately.
The dialogue options and scenario possibility outcomes were very impressive for its time. Still kinda is today. It's more in depth than you'd think. The levels are pretty sandboxy with how they allow you to approach missions and it still holds up today. Deus Ex came out in that period of time where stealth games were popular, so there's a lot of emphasis on subterfuge mechanics.
Gotta be honest, I don't like people trying to go about their day being disrupted for the sake of a silly video. Even if I thought the jokes were funny, that would have ruined it for me. And they left in the part where they were asked to leave! They're proud of it!
When I originally played it back in the day, there was one scene, combined with some "gameplay decisions" which had me completely lose it.
On the mission where you have to assasinate Lebedev in the airport, when you finally get to him on the airplane you start a conversation, but are interrupted midway by your fellow agent Anna something, who proceeds to kill Lebedev. Well since this wasn't my first playthrough, I knew where the whole thing was headed so I decided to plant some LAMS on the approach to see what would happen.
And what did happen was one of the funniest scenes in a video game. You hear Anna's footsteps, the camera angle change from the dialogue-style camera to a zoom out, and JC turns to the hallway she is coming from. LAMs go off, Anna lets out a scream, JC turns right back to Lebedev and just continues chatting as if it was some type of minor disturbance
Imo its crazy that there basically hasn't been a game made since, in it's genre, with the same level of ambition.
Prey 2017 was fantastic.. but in terms of ambition it was a step back, it's basically an improvement on system shock 2.
I do think there is an ultimate game out there that has not been made yet.. We could do it now though, combine a totally open simulation like minecraft with on-the-fly story / dialogue / characters by an LLM.
> Imo its crazy that there basically hasn't been a game made since, in it's genre, with the same level of ambition.
I'm not sure what you mean by ambition. Deus Ex was pretty heavily criticized for having "last-gen" graphics
What made Deus Ex stand out was the writing and atmosphere, and maybe some gameplay mechanics which hadn't become quite so popular. As you mentioned System Shock had already pioneered them, although that game didn't reach the level of popularity of Deus Ex which won game of the year in 2000
I'd also add in the music, to this day I still remember the main theme. Alot of games these days, don't even bother.
Well, yeah. Who has ever said the best thing about Deus Ex is the visuals? The levels are boxy, the characters look and move like dolls, and the textures are blurry. Deus Ex is great in spite of this, not because of it.
I think the closest we've had is Cyberpunk 2077, although it's still a very different game. I can appreciate why they're hard to do, when you start piling on variations in how the player can approach situations plus short and long term story/character choices it quickly starts multiplying the complexity and quantity of work involved to make something satisfying for dozens of hours
> Imo its crazy that there basically hasn't been a game made since, in it's genre, with the same level of ambition.
I would argue that games like Cyberpunk 2077 or KCD2 are a logical step-up for the genre offering open world, next gen graphics, many more weapons, NPCs, interactions, etc. and quite ambitious.
Warren's 6+2+1 questions before starting a game project; Team 1 & Team A (no one wanted to be Team B or Team 2); the day we hit pre alpha and realised the game was not fun; LAM wall climbing & problem solving with explosive barrels; origin of the name JC Denton
It was truly amazing at the time. Currently, I think the OD trailers are showcasing the SOTA when it comes to facial animations (guessing they're on Unreal Engine): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yi-5xTlWiiM
Wonder if we'll see similar differences in the future between the OD trailer and whatever is SOTA in ~10 years.
My favorite recent Deus Ex discovery is that you can skip the entire Paris sewer section of the game by grenade jumping off the Paris rooftops and then grenade climbing into the area containing the entrance to the Catacombs. Nothing breaks!
Surprised to see Deus Ex mentioned; I played the game first in the early 2000s and was entranced by the storyline, coming from shoot-em ups like Doom and Quake. I've played this game several times over the course of the last two decades, and while it hasn't aged very well, it remains one of my favorites. I can't recall any other game making me pause towards the end and considering the consequences of my actions.
I think it's in people's minds because A) "Deus Ex: Remastered" was announced this week [1] and B) many have remarked that the remaster low effort, and at least from its trailer, does not compare favorably to the many high quality community mods such as this one.
Thanks for the heads up, I was wondering which version to play as I never played it the first time around.
The GOTY was £0.83 on Steam and I've installed the revision Mod which the comments say is the one you _should_ play as it's better than the "remaster".
Revision deviates too much from the original, often not in a good way. I would suggest you to start with GMDX as a mode that strives to very carefully fix and improve the game without introducing random changes for no good reason.
Thanks for the tip. I'll look into it. Revision was a one click install on my handheld from the Steam store, but it looks like I'll have to figure out how to install GMDX by hand into the Proton directory for the game.
Worth it though I think, I prefer to play as true to original as possible with only QoL changes.
I have lutris, but i just installed GMDX by downloading the binary and running it from CLI with WINE and pointing it at the Steam game directory, it was actually really straight forward.
My past experience with trying to get mods on Proton games was much more complicated, but this seems to work fine; a little buggy, but once in gameplay it plays nicely, tested a few minutes of the tutorial on my lunch break and no issues.
As someone who played vanilla Deus Ex several times, I disagree. GMDX introduces a _lot_ of changes, and will not give you the same experience on a first playthrough. It's pretty good, though.
For a first run-through, I'd recommend the "Zero Rando" edition of the [Deus Ex Randomizer](https://github.com/Die4Ever/deus-ex-randomizer/) mod, since that's strictly limited to quality-of-life and bug fixes. If you're playing on a Steam Deck or with a controller, it integrates a radial menu for augmentations, which will help a ton when mapping the mouse-and-keyboard controls onto a gamepad.
The headshot collision code in DX is broken as well. This is from memory from looking at the DX SDK years ago (+15 at least), but...
The collision shape used for a character in DX is a single cylinder. The game looks at where on the cylinder the collision point of the shot is, and tries to figure out if it's a head, body, or leg shot. It does this by checking how high the collision point is, with the lower X% being legs, top Y% being the head, and the middle being the body.
If a shot hits the head section, it runs some additional checks, and can sometimes still count as a body hit. There was some weird code that, after you stared at it long enough, looks like it ended up splitting the head area into compass aligned 1/8ths (so north, north-east, east, etc) and hits to the N-E-S-W octants would count as a head shot, and a hit to the NE-NW-SE-SW octants would count as body shots. (I couldn't tell if the angles rotate with the character, or are absolute relative to the world.) I think there was also a check for hits on the top cap of the cylinder, so that the hit would have to be close to the center of the cylinder to count as head hit, and near the outer rim would count as a body hit.
Hm, I should just make a diagram. Here: https://imgur.com/a/KG6MF1k
I guess what they were trying to do was make the actual head hitbox a smaller section of the head level, so that a shot that should go over the shoulder and miss would just count as a body shot and not a true headshot. And if you made a test map, with the player and a static test enemy placed in a line, this could work reliably from a fixed position. But when you actually play DX, and approach enemies from various angles, headshots inexplicably fail.
Weird coincidence, but I had to look through some old files backed up from the computer I was using 15+ years ago, and noticed it had C:\DeusEx sitting right there, with the SDK files in it. I found the function that handles damage in it.
https://pastebin.com/bwjaiDj7
It looks like I misremembered/misinterpreted some stuff. It looks like the top of the head behaves like the sides of the head, extending upward, forming a + shape.
Judging by how the arm/leg damage works, it the collision hit zones rotate with the enemy. Offset appears to be were the collision point is releative to the character's rotation, since it's also used to determine front/back and left/right collision. So for a hit to count as a headshot, it has to hit a cardinal octant of the collision cylinder.
Edit:
Updated diagram: https://imgur.com/a/Mec7HGm
I could be wrong, I didn’t work on it, but I believe these jankyness you describe was because DX was originally going to be like a Fallout style game but pivoted to an FPS. Old code left over from Troubleshooter and flawed game design choices that didn’t translate to a full 3D world. But I could just be remembering it wrong.
The good comes with the bad. Deus Ex's roots as an RPG are what made it so fun back when it was released.
I still remember how happy I was when I finally had gotten rid of any sort of sway on my reticle. Yeah, I can play this game like Half-Life now!.
This explains the totally janky behavior of the stun prod and baton in the 5 playthroughs of this game I've done over the past 25 years
You need to crawl up right next to their ass and zap their lower back
Just like in real life.
Are you sure that the jankiness you describe is not related to you not being close enough to the enemy for it to count as a point blank hit? The engine does a simple distance check which is rather unforgiving, and if you utilize the range your melee weapon affords you, you will fail this point black attack check. This is just a guess on my part, but it's the #1 reason I've seen people be perplexed at seemingly inconsistent melee stealth takedown behavior.
If you first push yourself as close as you can get to the enemy model and attack the general area of their torso, it works every single time. But again, this is just me taking a guess as to what the problem you're referring to is!
Well that's the problem. In the first mission you have to figure out to stun the enemies in the center of their back rather than directly in their head. Its super counterintuitive and probably leads to many players not getting past the first mission.
It makes the difficulty curve super inverted
Only if you want to do totally non-lethal and "ghost" playthrough. Even then you have the dart gun
The minicrossbow is even harder than the prod, especially at lower skill levels and with no weapon mods. The prod at least stuns enemies momentarily. With the darts they still stand around shooting at you and set off alarms, and that's if you manage to hit them at all. You can run up to a guy and get a guaranteed stun in the time it takes him to spin around like a dumbass to look at the source of the footsteps.
My first playthrough, when I was 12, I opted for the GEP gun, but had to go to the minicrossbow after running out of ammo, thereby leaving me with no pistol skill. The worst of both worlds on the very first mission. Ended up climing up the back of the statue of liberty and throwing gas grenades. Good times.
The GEP gun is ironically the pro choice to make if you know what you’re doing. All of the other weapons on offer can be found in the first level, and the GEP works as a fantastic “lockpick” even if you never fire it in anger.
It's so bulky, though. I'd rather carry an auto shotgun and four other situational items. As for lockpicks:
* Lockpicks: single inventory slot, stacking; plentiful; silent
* LAMs: single inventory slot, stacking; loud
* Dragon Tooth: infinite uses; can't break down every door; silent?
* Sniper rifle: optionally silent; semi-common ammo; can't break down every door
* GEP gun: loud; bulky; semi-common ammo
It is also the pro choice for taking out your former boss.
This is true, but the upside of the crossbow is that for most soldiers it only takes a single shot to take them out, even if it takes a while, and you can do it from a safe spot, this can be beneficial if your JC sucks at combat or is low on ammo.
Also if you have to stun them in a pinch, they just stand there being spastic, you can knock them out by prodding a second time, but if you do it right away the hit won't register, you have to wait half a second and move around a bit or something. This is very annoying since it wastes precious prod charges.
This may be because the 'headshot' multiplier is lower than the regular multiplier (1x vs 2x) for the prod and baton. For most weapons the headshot multiplier is 8x (or something).
So torso hits from behind are the way to go.
The game also features bullet drop, but this is completely broken. Iirc it does a hitscan against the cylinder and then depending on the length of the ray the hit point is moved further down the length of the cylinder, but this means you cannot for instance aim above the character to compensate for bullet drop.
I'm surprised they did not use a bunch of cheap sphere-ray intersection tests. It would be more accurate.
GMDX should had that fixed that since long ago.
[dead]
Modders have put a ton of effort into fixing and restoring this game. The developers originally wanted to let players choose the protagonists gender, but they didn't have the resources to make it happen, so of course the community ended up redubbing JCs entire script and editing the rest to bring it back almost seamlessly.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=naDOv1W6-Cc
That voice actress totally nails JC's monotone delivery!
dont forget the deus ex coop mod https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=19486...
they did a really good job with this
wow crazy stuff!
One of the best games of all time.
This is what Warren Spector made while Romero was busy pissing money away and constantly rewriting Daikatana.
The one worthwhile thing to come out of Ion Storm.
Lots of emergent gameplay. Almost always more than one way to solve each puzzle. Stealth, brute strength melee, long range combat, explosives, computer hacking ...
Branching story with multiple endings.
A must play.
Having played a good portion of Daikatana with a big fix-up mod, I'd say it's one of those games where there's a good game trying to get out and would have been a great if it released in a better state - but it didn't. However it's really hard to see how any commercial project could do an overhaul/remake to try and explore that potential and not deal with that baggage. Probably similar for Duke Nukem Forever, if that had been a well run project instead of a 14 year saga, it seems like the poison is being a bit drunk on earlier success and having too much money available without accountability for it.
maybe if they released Daikatana today it would be hailed as GOTY and get all the prizes. but those days, people expected a game to actually work.
> The one worthwhile thing to come out of Ion Storm.
Anachronix too. Not a 10/10 game but an absolutely solid entry for the period.
Oh my god!
For 15 years I have been trying to recall the name ofthis game my mom got me randomly for for PC as a kid!!!!!!!!!
I have googled EVERYTHING possible related to "late 90s to early 2000s PC game starting with A".
THANK YOU SO MUCH!
ChatGPT is great for these tip of the tongue/joystick type things.
For sure. I haven't thought of this particular TOMT for a few years now, IE; last time I dug was before LLM/Chatbot popularity.
So it's kind of like a.....double whammy for me. Can't wait to play later.
I might have to try it. Currently playing Beyond Zork.
ChatGPT is great for {inser anything} things.
*Anachronox
and not to forget the soundtrack masterpiece, which until today gives me goosebumps.
For fans of the game, Aspyr just announced Deus Ex: Remastered https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1RdKezTYNk
However, fans of the game are calling it "Demastered".
I think people will hate it somewhat because the older style and assets mixed with more modern lighting and textures (moreso, often AI upscaled ones), will look... kinda shiny and overall a bit off, same as happened with the GTA remaster, other launch issues aside.
That said, I am still in the minority that enjoys such attempts, if nothing else, then because at least these modern versions often run a bit better, with proper high resolutions and widescreen support, as well as sometimes receive some quality of life fixes to bring the game up to speed and make it play like something a bit more modern - the jank of early 2000s games is something I don't enjoy.
At the same time, there's no reason why a mod made by passionate members of the community couldn't do more or less the same, except often times a bit better, which is jarring - how some companies seem to do the equivalent of outsourcing it and try to produce something quickly and on a budget.
I think the best attempts at giving us a fresh look at old games that I've seen were the Mafia Definitive Edition https://store.steampowered.com/app/1030840/Mafia_Definitive_... and System Shock https://store.steampowered.com/app/482400/System_Shock/ although those are basically remakes, that just happen to stay true to the original.
The sales numbers show that you're not in minority for enjoying remasters.
There's a very loud cacophony from a minority of fans that get really really angry because someone touched their favorite thing and moved some rivets around. Similar to the effect where people were VERY VERY angry about the changes and omissions LotR movies did to LotR books.
"Moving rivets around" is how I might describe the recent SS2 remaster from nightdive, it was pretty good. This DX remaster is more like "let's have the cheapest contractors we can find run this venerated classic through an AI upscaler and charge 30 bucks for it". Notice the sign on the wall in the unatco break room that says "Stratigies" in the remaster trailer. DX deserves far better than that
On the bright side, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, while largely a different dev team was a fantastic game and scratched the itch for me when it came out. One of the few games in the last 15 years I’ve actually played to completion.
Same, I had zero expectations for HR and was very pleasantly surprised. Realistically it's probably the best follow-up to the OG that we'll ever get
Eh. It didn't really feel like Deus Ex to me, spiritually. I think Prey (2017) hits way closer. I haven't played the System Shocks, so I don't know if they were aiming for that or for Deus Ex. I've heard some people from Looking Glass went to Arkane. It seems like there's only 5-10 people in the world who know how to make immersive sims and keep making action RPGs where you can upgrade your body and have quests with multiple viable approaches.
Prey was excellent. I agree it was more like DX1 than DXHR but the latter is still excellent too.
Human Revolution and Mankind Divided have been fantastic, I agree. Unfortunate we're never getting a third.
Square seemed mad they couldn’t micro transaction it.
It had some cool mechanics but was pretty meh on the storyline. I didn't really feel a connection to the characters like I felt with the original Deus Ex. Except maybe copter pilot girl
It does, but right now there's one trailer out and it's already a cacophony of complaining. You haven't even seen the product.
If everyone who liked the original goes out and buys a remaster, then hates it, aren't they still counted as a sale? It's like a movie ticket, you don't know if the movie will be any good when you pay for it. I don't see sales numbers as being linked to quality or enjoyment.
Why would anyone do that? I would assume people can just read a review first before buying. Especially since they already played the original, so it isn’t like they would need to worry about spoiling the story for themselves.
Also, easy Steam refunds if the game was played for under 2 hours is a thing.
Steam offers refunds, but even still, why would someone buy a remaster without looking at any comparisons from the older versus newer versions?
I think the most apt comment I saw on the announcement was "Looks like they brought it from 2000 all the way to 2003".
And I think that’s enough.
Revision is much better than this and it was made by fans: https://store.steampowered.com/app/397550/Deus_Ex_Revision/
Given this "remaster" by Aspyr, I'm glad Nightdive exists.
Ironically, Revision is massively attacked, derided and review bombed by a subset of DX fans.
See e.g. GoG comments and comments down this thread.
I felt like outside of bug fixes and QoL improvements, Revision's maps and soundtrack were a downgrade compared to the original. I feel quite strongly about this, but I recognize it's also largely up to taste and it's valid to like those changes.
But for me, they made the experience worse and they were enabled by default. As a result, I gave it a thumbs down on Steam and did my best to explain my thoughts in detail. I received a couple dozen negative comments over the years on that review, largely in the vein of how dare I give negative feedback to a labor of love provided for free. That kind of argument did make me feel guilty, like I was being unfair to the developers. I eventually changed it to a positive review, and now I regret doing that. I allowed my genuine opinion to be clouded.
This was an extremely tame internet conflict overall, I'd feel ashamed to frame myself as a victim over so little. What I'm trying to say is that both sides are capable of failing to genuinely engage with the other.
It's definitely true that Revision has been to some degree unfairly attacked. There are purists who do not give it a fair shake and make ludicrously confident statements, peddling opinion as fact. But there's also legitimate reasons to dislike it. Not knowing you, I am not at all accusing you that you'd be lacking nuance on this topic. I'd just like to say as a general statement that discourse ends up healthier when people care about distinguishing between people who disagree with you versus people who disagree with you _and_ that are acting in bad faith.
How does it look worse than Deus Ex: The Recut Remastered, which came out six years ago?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmOCsiZgAbg
Remasters generally are worse than originals. There are rare exceptions, but usually you get either mixed bag, or outright worse experience than original. Ditto for remakes.
yes, looks ugly. Why can't people make games where every surface is flat, my brain loves the unrealistic perfection of it
I'm just pumped its coming to the Switch.
Meh; GMDX it's far better.
Fans of a game always crap on remasters so that means nothing really.
In a similar space, I'm pretty sure the recent remake & remaster of the two System Shock games were really well received, so that's hardly a given.
The System Shock 1 remaster in particular is excellent. It's not just a graphical improvement, they improved the controls and inventory interface and a host of other legacies from from DOS-era gaming that did not age well.
It's well received after launch, yes. There's been plenty of screeching about "not being true to original" and "this looks ugly" and "this looks wrong" on the way there though. Just like for this.
Especially for the first remake.
This is why I say the screeching right now based on a trailer means nothing. "Fans" always get mightily offended if someone touches their childhood favorites.
You don't have to be a fan of the game to see the trailer and think it looks bad. I'm certainly not a Deus Ex fan. I played it just once, years and years ago. Yet when they showed the trailer during State of Play I was shocked at how bad it was. It's clearly just some texture upscaling and an update to the lighting. The original looks ugly and this remaster manages to look uglier.
An example of a remaster done right was Halo 1 (which is actually quite an old remaster at this point). They threw a new graphics engine on top but also remodeled and retextured everything. That's what I expect out of a proper remaster.
While I enjoyed CE:A, it had issues. The big one was the loss of bump-mapped textures making everything look flat. They only show up when you use a flashlight.
Games people love usually have a large portion of spontaneity behind their success. This is hard to faithfully capture even if that's your intention, and remasters are usually done on a tiny budget for profit by people who often aren't even familiar with the OG game, which doesn't really help.
There are exceptions though, and also there are some remasters that are not faithful but are good on their own.
This one is a particular kind of bad.
As a fan of C&C, the C&C remake was _awesome_.
D2R was also very good.
I don't care for Deus Ex, but looking at the screenshots I struggle to tell which one is the remaster. It's very clear that they messed up the lighting and the overall mood though. I'd be offended as a fan.
HN posters usually present wrong statements as facts so yours mean nothing really.
See d2r, oblivion, etc.
As a GMDX user your comment and the Remaster are both irrelevant. The mentioned mod makes the 1st Deus Ex perfect. It enhances places, items, location, graphics... without breaking the original gameplay and mood to please Gen-Zers.
Yeah, d2r and oblivion are both great. Thanks for confirming my point :P
Might be the greatest game ever made. I was raving like a lunatic about it to a friend in public once and a guy next to us turned around and interrupted me to say it’s the only game he’s ever played because he felt no other games could top it.
I was 14 and impressionable, but when I played, the "twist" of the game coincided exactly with the moment I decided to switch to the "terrorists" and tried to kill Anna Navarre. Then the rest of the game went exactly as I hoped it would. It completely blew my mind.
I'm not ashamed to say that Deus Ex was extremely formative and the reason why now, almost in my 40s, I still read about political philosophy, anarchism, and cultivate a healthy distrust of the government and mass media. Which in turn also gave me a direct pipeline towards crypto-anarchism and Internet privacy rights.
Just don’t move to Idaho and form a militia. If you do, get better helmets.
When I first played this game, I couldn’t speak english and just thought it was cool.
I still remember the exact moment I learned the word “surrender” from the terrorist leader at the statue, because I’ve replayed the first level hundreds of times, since my pirated version of the game would crash around one of the first levels.
When I was a late teenager I learned english and my mind was blown that the game actually had deep meaning behind it.
It's the game that made me stop using cheats. I was young and discovered cheat codes and used them in every game that made them available. I remember completing Deus Ex and finding it "just ok", but then I read how people talked about it, and realized that taking away the challenge from games was making them worse! Never used one again, aside from when I discovered Cheat Engine, which was amazing for somebody who was starting to get interested in programming.
I opened the level file I was currently in and filled a room with every weapon upgrade and skill booster. Then put bosses outside the door, saved, loaded the game. If I could get in, I could have the stuff.
Kids these days don’t have access to edit their games like we did. It’s why crafting games are popular, the only “level editors” that remain once companies realized they could monetize extra content.
It's true, Warren Spector won PC gaming and it's just been downhill with snazzier graphics since.
I was really excited when he was announced to be working on System Shock 3 which unfortunately ended up getting shelved.
IMO - There's a few games that match it, but nothing "in the same category". Braid, Portal, Stanley Parable come to mind. (Also what I hear about Baldur's Gate 3, but I haven't played.)
But the depth of character, discussions on morality - I still reference the MJ12/Illuminati portrayal from Deus Ex as a discussion on leadership and morality - the depth of gameplay, the way it created a feel of a much bigger, open world.
>Also what I hear about Baldur's Gate 3, but I haven't played.
They're very different, so they're difficult to compare. BG3 is very much a tabletop RPG in electronic form, with a focus on tactics and positioning. I guess you could call it fantasy XCOM. In terms of player choices, BG3 is more open, though I'd say it's almost to its detriment, because it's jankier than DX. You'll probably get at least one bugged out quest during a playthrough. Nothing game-breaking, but still. It kind of kills the immersion.
But the spirit of the post is correct, both are games that you the player mold around you as you play. They aren’t just hallways of content.
Im playing BG3 right now and im very impressed. Also feel this way about New Vegas is a league beyond the Bethesda Fallout games.
Disco Elysium
Came here just to see comments like this. Still my favorite game by far and I wish I could forget about it so I could replay it without remembering :)
Yeah. I was just a teenager when I first played, but the prison escape and the associated revelations were breathtaking to me and once of my first "holy shit" moments in playing a PC game. And not the only such moment just from that game! The Agent Navarre airplane scene was incredible. And I loved that you had conversations, like with the Australian expat at the Hong Kong bar or the AI, or the terrorist at the statue of Liberty, that were good conversations where the payoff was just intellectual curiosity and the content itself. Hong Kong was amazing to just explore too.
I still haven't played anything like it some 25 years later unless The Nameless Mod counts.
it is the most based game i've ever played
Good thing it's just fiction https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46oDDnE1Z6o
based?
He’s saying it kicks ass because it doesn’t pull punches on politics and conspiracy theory discussion and analysis.
While still not treating its audience like idiots. A modern game with political undertones would be much more in your face in a us vs them kinda way and unable to deal with any sort of nuance, just like our political discourse.
I played it last time in 2007 or so.
I wonder how the themes of the original game hit today, in 2025, the world being what it is now.
Several years ago Elon Musk did an interview with Marques Lee Brown praising the original Deus Ex and stating his disappointment with the sequel.
In the intervening years he's invested tons of money into neuroaugmentation, capturing global telecommunications in a massive satellite array, buying out the US president, and poured money into a compute cluster for a superintelligent AI finetuned to be obedient to his will (although it deviates from time to time)
Basically Elon has turned into the supervillain Bob Page from Deus Ex sans the "globalist agenda" and with a dash of stormfront white nationalism to boot.
The original game takes place in 2052, and we are headed straight towards that dystopia.
One thing I found especially disgraceful was Elon pointing to the games narrative as a reason to be skeptical of measures to limit the spread of covid, noting that in the game the a plague intended for social control.
But... in the game the good guys were the ones trying to make sure everyone had the vaccine, which Elon conveniently omitted when tweeting about it. What makes his invokation of the game more hilarious is exactly what you noted: the parallels between Elon and Bob Page, a billionaire tech mogul and one of the main villains, are impossible to ignore.
Technically in the game both the disease and the control of the supply of vaccine are used for social control and political leverage. It was a plotline ripped directly from popular media at the time, mainly the X-files Movie which had a very similar if not identical plot of shadowy government conspirators named the "illuminati" spreading an virus but secretly manufacturing a vaccine for themselves, their families, and certain government officials.
The game, both in the 2000s when it came out, and today has bits of both left wing and right wing elements. The NSF faction read as libertarian right wing terrorists, and UNATCO is literally an arm of the "globalist" UN which would probably appeal to the right-wing qAnon types today. But the actual villain is basically a dude who is exactly like Elon.
>and the control of the supply of vaccine are used for social control and political leverage.
The bad guys were trying to manipulate supply of it. The good guys were trying to make sure it was available to everyone. Interestingly, even the bad guys understood the necessity of vaccines, and their ability to leverage them for power hinged on a shared global understanding of their importance.
What it meant to be curious about conspiracy theories in the late '90s is fundamentally different than what it is in the present day, in a way that I think unfortunately distorts the experience of the game for people who don't know what it was like before. Hence Elon's bizarre attempt at retrofitting it to anti-covid narratives.
"At last, we at Unicorn Startup, Inc have built the Torment Nexus from the famous sci-fi story Don't Build The Torment Nexus"
The HK Universal Constructor, with its chunky Unreal 1 polygons, pretty much matches what I imagine for the Torment Nexus.
In 2 years it matches the date of the prequel Human Revolution. On the technology side there's still a lot that remains sci-fi, but the themes are at least on the horizon.
I recall watching a review in 2020/2021 where the reviewer stated how awkward he felt about the way it just took every conspiracy theory and just asked “what if it were true?”
Bear in mind that, at this time, people genuinely believed there was some nutjob conspiracies being revealed by QAnon. Ironically, half of them seemed to come directly from Deus Ex…
Deus Ex was drawing from a palpably '90s flavor of fascination with aliens, conspiracies, and alternative history. In the present day that same subject matter is unfortunately associated with things like vaccine denial and anti-democratic nationalistic movements. It's the difference between the X-Files and Alex Jones, essentially.
damn, for real? I still haven't played it -- I didn't have a Windows machine when it came out, and by the time I did have one, it slipped through the cracks.. it's really that good? That reminds me I do have one friend who says it's his top favorite game, actually, heh. It's especially strange I haven't played it since I generally love cyberpunk/dystopian stuff like that!
It is the best PC game ever made, but I don't think it hits the same in 2025... one of those things where you had to be there.
Agreed: didn't listen to the doubters, I think it's still the best PC game ever, even now. The level design still rocks, the dialog is great, the items, skills, inventory management, richness of environments, and breadth of locations, it set a standard I don't think has been eclipsed (for better or worse). I think Dishonored has a liiitle bit of the same vibe but not really, as it has no prescient future oriented politics. But yeah, ignore the haters, it's the best ever.
100%
While I don’t agree with the best ever chorus, I’d say it holds up decently well with mods. The HD mod makes the graphics acceptable, and I replayed it in 2023 or something and it was still great.
A better rendering-engine is a no-brainer—the original shadows tend to become olive-banded messes—but my experience with texture-pack mods isn't as good.
IIRC they tended to make the overall experience worse, with jarring inconsistencies of high-poly/high-res objects versus unmodified portions of the environment.
Plus nowadays "low res" is sometimes it's own art-style. :p
Personally anything since Quake II / UT / HL era impresses me.
I disagree. The political undertones in the setting of a global pandemic hit even harder today than when the game released in 2000.
I especially loved the "conspiracy" talk about corporations consolidating their powers thanks to government-sponsored wage slavery and higher taxes to the individual vs companies. It's something that's even more relevant today, especially in this space of entrepreneurship.
For sure! I just meant that when it came out it was revolutionary and cutting edge, if you play it for the first time now you have to get past the outdated graphics and clunky gameplay to really appreciate it.
Story, dialogue, theme-wise hasn't aged a bit.
I think things are a product of their time, and you had to be there for the vast majority of it. The Matrix was a revolution when it came out, but now it just kind of looks the same as everything else (even dated), but that's because everything else copied it.
as someone who went to watch The Matrix in IMAX a couple of days ago I gotta disagree! :)
Did you just watch it for the first time?!
If so, they're a great test of the theory that it was only good in its time and wouldn't hold up to a modern viewer.
Yep, that's why I'm asking.
not the first time i've seen it, no. but the first time i've seen it was as a teen in the 2010s, once more since then and now at the cinema.
Yeah but that's different from seeing it for the first time now. You still have the nostalgia.
I understand your point, but for some reason there's some corner of my brain that's interested in litigating this if you'll bear with me. I definitely think the color of nostalgia is a real thing, and for me that imprinting shows up the most in still having an inexplicable affinity for '90s nu metal that I can't really reconcile with any notion of sophisticated taste.
But I think sometimes you see the opposite thing too, where a rewatch or re-listen is very disappointing, and undermines your impression that something is great. So it's clear that at least some of the time the nostalgia effect falls away. And I like to think staying power after repeated watchings can testify to "classic" status. But I think the reason I'm interested in drawing distinctions here is because I don't like the idea that Deus Ex, the greatest game of all time imo, can be pointed to to vindicate modern day conspiracy theorists, like they are the same thing.
In fact, the next time Warren Spector is interviewed I hope someone asks how he feels about his game being invoked in that way.
I think I made the wrong point when I wrote about nostalgia. I don't mean so much "you're remembering the work as better than it was", but more "you remember the zeitgeist that made the work great".
I watched Macgyuver (my favourite childhood show) recently, and it was terrible, twenty minutes of filler for one cool engineering scene, way worse than I remembered it. However, it's not the show that's changed, it's that I forgot what the 90s were like and how cool Macgyuver was in that zeitgeist.
Similarly, it's not that the Matrix isn't great, it's that, if you watched it in its era, you may remember how unlike anything else it was. You can't know how groundbreaking it was unless you remember that era, otherwise it's just one movie of many.
I can't speak to your later points as I don't know what Deus Ex is about or how it's used to vindicate conspiracy theorists, unfortunately.
am i not a modern viewer if the first time i've seen it is 15 years after it released? liked it "back then" and now :)
in fact liked it even more, as the "humanity lost a war against AI in the early 21th century" felt very current.
The dialogue options and scenario possibility outcomes were very impressive for its time. Still kinda is today. It's more in depth than you'd think. The levels are pretty sandboxy with how they allow you to approach missions and it still holds up today. Deus Ex came out in that period of time where stealth games were popular, so there's a lot of emphasis on subterfuge mechanics.
Take a look into Prey (2017) too.
Fantastic, and actually underrated, immersive sim.
It works on Linux in Wine.
One of the best games of all time.
Play it.
As a side note one of the composers of Deus Ex's OST, Alexander Brandon, has a YouTube channel where he regularly answers questions from viewers:
https://www.youtube.com/@AlexCBrandon
One of my favorite pieces of game music ever, perhaps only rivaled by Morrowind's.
Thanks to your link I also learned that Alex has done some voice acting work, including the voice of Ancano in Skyrim! Thanks for posting :)
The janky lip sync gave us one of the funniest videos of all time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Js02m-7qHyE
Gotta be honest, I don't like people trying to go about their day being disrupted for the sake of a silly video. Even if I thought the jokes were funny, that would have ruined it for me. And they left in the part where they were asked to leave! They're proud of it!
Deus Ex doesn't need parody videos to achieve one of the funniest videos of all time:
https://youtu.be/ekVI_UoEYRc?si=f-txpkn32J3S8YQj
When I originally played it back in the day, there was one scene, combined with some "gameplay decisions" which had me completely lose it.
On the mission where you have to assasinate Lebedev in the airport, when you finally get to him on the airplane you start a conversation, but are interrupted midway by your fellow agent Anna something, who proceeds to kill Lebedev. Well since this wasn't my first playthrough, I knew where the whole thing was headed so I decided to plant some LAMS on the approach to see what would happen.
And what did happen was one of the funniest scenes in a video game. You hear Anna's footsteps, the camera angle change from the dialogue-style camera to a zoom out, and JC turns to the hallway she is coming from. LAMs go off, Anna lets out a scream, JC turns right back to Lebedev and just continues chatting as if it was some type of minor disturbance
I must have laughed for a good 10 minutes or so
This is crazy because I did the exact same thing. You recalled a 15 year old memory perfectly with this post.
Games since then basically don't let you kill kids anymore.
And the voice acting one of the second of third funniest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHX5-SvRXTs
YES, oh my god, I remember this. The funniest part for me was definitely the way they imitated the jank lipsync from the game.
“I am a prototype for a much larger system” presaged the catchphrase of our LLM era.
“You will soon have your God, and you will make it with your own hands.”
Imo its crazy that there basically hasn't been a game made since, in it's genre, with the same level of ambition.
Prey 2017 was fantastic.. but in terms of ambition it was a step back, it's basically an improvement on system shock 2.
I do think there is an ultimate game out there that has not been made yet.. We could do it now though, combine a totally open simulation like minecraft with on-the-fly story / dialogue / characters by an LLM.
> Imo its crazy that there basically hasn't been a game made since, in it's genre, with the same level of ambition.
I'm not sure what you mean by ambition. Deus Ex was pretty heavily criticized for having "last-gen" graphics
What made Deus Ex stand out was the writing and atmosphere, and maybe some gameplay mechanics which hadn't become quite so popular. As you mentioned System Shock had already pioneered them, although that game didn't reach the level of popularity of Deus Ex which won game of the year in 2000
I'd also add in the music, to this day I still remember the main theme. Alot of games these days, don't even bother.
Well, yeah. Who has ever said the best thing about Deus Ex is the visuals? The levels are boxy, the characters look and move like dolls, and the textures are blurry. Deus Ex is great in spite of this, not because of it.
I think the closest we've had is Cyberpunk 2077, although it's still a very different game. I can appreciate why they're hard to do, when you start piling on variations in how the player can approach situations plus short and long term story/character choices it quickly starts multiplying the complexity and quantity of work involved to make something satisfying for dozens of hours
> Imo its crazy that there basically hasn't been a game made since, in it's genre, with the same level of ambition.
I would argue that games like Cyberpunk 2077 or KCD2 are a logical step-up for the genre offering open world, next gen graphics, many more weapons, NPCs, interactions, etc. and quite ambitious.
Same could be same of Skyrim 10 years ago.
lots of good stuff in Warren Spector's 2017 GDC Deus Ex postmortem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tffX3VljTtI
Warren's 6+2+1 questions before starting a game project; Team 1 & Team A (no one wanted to be Team B or Team 2); the day we hit pre alpha and realised the game was not fun; LAM wall climbing & problem solving with explosive barrels; origin of the name JC Denton
Interesting mod and writeup. But for me the jankiness is part of what makes Deus Ex so good. Together with the special voice acting and what not.
They actually hired professional actors for some roles but NPCs are pretty bad...
NOT ADVISABLE TO GO IN TO THE CANAL AT NIGHT
I SPILL MY DRINK!
Love the HL2 mention, I remember being very impressed by the lip sync/facial expression demo: https://youtu.be/Bdbhr2pZUgg
Said demo has actually aged very well imo.
It was truly amazing at the time. Currently, I think the OD trailers are showcasing the SOTA when it comes to facial animations (guessing they're on Unreal Engine): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yi-5xTlWiiM
Wonder if we'll see similar differences in the future between the OD trailer and whatever is SOTA in ~10 years.
My favorite recent Deus Ex discovery is that you can skip the entire Paris sewer section of the game by grenade jumping off the Paris rooftops and then grenade climbing into the area containing the entrance to the Catacombs. Nothing breaks!
(The real pros can do it all in a single jump.)
Surprised to see Deus Ex mentioned; I played the game first in the early 2000s and was entranced by the storyline, coming from shoot-em ups like Doom and Quake. I've played this game several times over the course of the last two decades, and while it hasn't aged very well, it remains one of my favorites. I can't recall any other game making me pause towards the end and considering the consequences of my actions.
> Surprised to see Deus Ex mentioned
I think it's in people's minds because A) "Deus Ex: Remastered" was announced this week [1] and B) many have remarked that the remaster low effort, and at least from its trailer, does not compare favorably to the many high quality community mods such as this one.
[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/3131640/Deus_Ex_Remastere...
Just tested Deus Ex - Revision mod. It's pretty good so far.
Thanks for the heads up, I was wondering which version to play as I never played it the first time around.
The GOTY was £0.83 on Steam and I've installed the revision Mod which the comments say is the one you _should_ play as it's better than the "remaster".
Revision deviates too much from the original, often not in a good way. I would suggest you to start with GMDX as a mode that strives to very carefully fix and improve the game without introducing random changes for no good reason.
Thanks for the tip. I'll look into it. Revision was a one click install on my handheld from the Steam store, but it looks like I'll have to figure out how to install GMDX by hand into the Proton directory for the game.
Worth it though I think, I prefer to play as true to original as possible with only QoL changes.
Get Lutris, it supports the GMDX mod.
I have lutris, but i just installed GMDX by downloading the binary and running it from CLI with WINE and pointing it at the Steam game directory, it was actually really straight forward.
My past experience with trying to get mods on Proton games was much more complicated, but this seems to work fine; a little buggy, but once in gameplay it plays nicely, tested a few minutes of the tutorial on my lunch break and no issues.
If you have the game on GOG, you can get GMDX as a separate free download:
* https://www.gog.com/en/game/gmdx
* https://www.gogdb.org/product/1553376539#builds
As someone who played vanilla Deus Ex several times, I disagree. GMDX introduces a _lot_ of changes, and will not give you the same experience on a first playthrough. It's pretty good, though.
For a first run-through, I'd recommend the "Zero Rando" edition of the [Deus Ex Randomizer](https://github.com/Die4Ever/deus-ex-randomizer/) mod, since that's strictly limited to quality-of-life and bug fixes. If you're playing on a Steam Deck or with a controller, it integrates a radial menu for augmentations, which will help a ton when mapping the mouse-and-keyboard controls onto a gamepad.
It also has an option to enable Autofill Passwords, which also helps a lot for controller players
If you don't like Github, the main website is simpler to navigate https://mods4ever.com/project/DXRZeroRando
Big bonus of the Revision - it is available directly on Steam - just install original & Revision, play. Everything else needs manual intervention
GOG has GMDX as a standalone install I think.
Impressive augmentation.
LMAO, this goes to show that people can be funny with a few words. Why lot word, when few word do trick?
What a shame ;-)
Deus Ex OST remasters and remixes are one of my most frequent choices of music still.
And the DuClare Chateau level remains one of my favorite plot beats in gaming.
I miss games using tracked music, its a really unique sound.
Wonder if this works with Malkavian Mod?
I spill my drink!
This is giving me another reason to play DX again.
Very nice. I believe this is the 1st time in history that lips have been augmented.
"I didn't ask for this!"
You wanted orange, but it gave you lemon lime?
[dead]
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