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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 names 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.
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…
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!
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
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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
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
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.
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...
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!
*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.
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 think the most apt comment I saw on the announcement was "Looks like they brought it from 2000 all the way to 2003".
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
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.
HN posters usually present wrong statements as facts so yours mean nothing really.
See d2r, oblivion, etc.
Yeah, d2r and oblivion are both great. Thanks for confirming my point :P
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.
This one is a particular kind of bad.
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 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
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
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.”
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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 names 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"
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…
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.
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.
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.
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?!
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.
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.
One of the best games of all time.
Play it.
Take a look into Prey (2017) too.
It works on Linux in Wine.
What a shame ;-)
Impressive augmentation.
LMAO, this goes to show that people can be funny with a few words. Why lot word, when few word do trick?
Wonder if this works with Malkavian Mod?
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.
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.
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
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.
I spill my drink!
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.)
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.
"I didn't ask for this!"
You wanted orange, but it gave you lemon lime?
This is giving me another reason to play DX again.