Deus Ex at 20: The oral history of a pivotal PC game
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> ‘Just run the studio, we’ll pay the bills and keep you isolated from anything that’s happening up here in Dallas’.
I don't think this can happen today and I also believe this is the reason we don't see anything close to the original Deus Ex.
The big blockbuster games cost so much money to make today that those who provide the money are extremely risk averse, so you get rehash after rehash after rehash of proven formulas with shinier graphics.
All the (gameplay and storytelling) innovation happens in smaller indie games. Some of them actually have incredible production value, but rarely the marketing power of AAA productions by the big publishers.
It's much like Hollywood in the 70's vs Hollywood today.
(some edits to make it clear that I'm talking about innovation outside the pure rendering technology, that's where AAA productions are leading, no doubt).
Today you can really only see innovation in indie games - which have limitations because of their resources. Deus Ex was a innovative triple A.
Above thoughts are ramblings, I know. Truth is I don't know what I would like to see in a modern equivalent. And that's how I want it too, I want to be surprised, overwhelmed, I want to see the best in the business come up with something I can't even imagine.
Instead I get remakes and ubisoft like formula "open world" full of busy work and chores.
I think the price of Daikatana is well worth the existence of Deus Ex.
Ofc no investor would ever take a risk like that these days. Sad reality for me as a consumer.
Note that the original Deus Ex led to the pretty poor Deus Ex 2: Invisible War, that nobody talks about today. Deus Ex was more of an exception that anything else.
I'd say it's a thoroughly mediocre game. Still, I've played through it at least two or three times, which is two or three more than the number of times I've played through DX:HR!
EDIT: Also I find it funny that they wanted to make it "family-friendly" and removed blood & gibs, but you can still massacre an academy full of kids. Happened on my previous playthrough..
- Tomb Raider with it's "even the scenery can be explored"
- Shenmue with it's 3D open world and concept of fully immersing the player in the role
- Half-Life, System Shock and others with their emphasis on story and setting
But these ideas have been well explored and so games like Alien Isolation, which is a great game, aren't held in such high esteem.
The solution to that is to look outside of the traditional gaming paradigm. Look at indie games and see what they're creating -- there's some really great indie titles out there. Look at games that utilise new technology like VR (ok, technically VR has been around since the 90s but it's only really becoming mainstream now) and you'll see some stand out titles there too.
If you're only looking at games like Deus Ex then it could be easy to miss all the other stuff going on.
> The solution to that is to look outside of the traditional gaming paradigm.
I don't think indie & VR gimmicks are the solution to lack of games that are close to the original Deus Ex. It's not revered for original superb mechanics; most of everything it does was done before. It's that it put them all together and did so many things right to create a polished, immersive experience with a compelling story (rather footed in reality as opposed to all out scifi/fantasy), strong plot focus (as opposed to disconnected mass-produced side quests), rich level design, lots of choice and player freedom, great music, replay value..
Hardly anyone is doing that. But, evidently, a lot of gamers want that.
> If you're only looking at games like Deus Ex then it could be easy to miss all the other stuff going on.
I just don't see anything that really compels me. Stuff is going on, and it's mostly not worth my time (or does a terrible job marketing itself).
I don't think flatly calling all indie and VR games as "gimmicks" does justice to some of the more innovative creators out there.
> * It's not revered for original superb mechanics; most of everything it does was done before. It's that it put them all together and did so many things right to create a polished, immersive experience with a compelling story (rather footed in reality as opposed to all out scifi/fantasy), strong plot focus (as opposed to disconnected mass-produced side quests), rich level design, lots of choice and player freedom, great music, replay value..*
I was gaming back then as well. It was mostly the mechanics people seemed to talk about at the time (and the graphics too).
In any case, story driven games have existed long before Deus Ex and still exist now.
> I just don't see anything that really compels me. Stuff is going on, and it's mostly not worth my time (or does a terrible job marketing itself).
I see these kinds of comments all the time and frankly a lot of it is rose tinted glasses. You will naturally favour the games you grew up with. As it was, I grew up with text adventure games and crappy 8-bit conversions of arcade games so as much as I enjoy modern games I'm often still going back to Pac-Man and it's ilk because 3D is too "modern" for me. Like with how people harp on about how cartoons aren't as good as when they were kids, people make the same arguments for computer games too.... but that doesn't mean it is true.
Huh. Nobody praised the graphics back then. They were dated on the day Deus Ex came out; it uses the original Unreal engine (with some tweaks) and looks just as dated. Rendering technology moved fast back then and a game as large as Deus Ex had no hope of staying ahead of the curve. Plus they had to make some compromises to fit such a large scale game on disk & in RAM (there were other UE1 games that looked arguably better). I recall reviews considering Deus Ex's graphics "boxy" (literally!) and it has plenty of super small textures..
The thing that most people praised was the freedom. That's part mechanics, but what I was trying to say is that very few of the mechanics in Deus Ex were innovative; mostly they just did a great job incorporating mechanics that already existed in prior games. That's the ticket. You don't need to innovate and make some superb new mechanics to make a new Deus Ex quality game.
> In any case, story driven games have existed long before Deus Ex and still exist now.
Yes, but few games pull all the elements I mentioned above together. Deus Ex has "all the parts", and for most part it's done well, therefore it's more than the sum of its parts. Yes, story driven games exist, but few of them incorporate all the other elements that made Deus Ex what it is.
> I see these kinds of comments all the time and frankly a lot of it is rose tinted glasses.
I see people always dismiss this as nostalgia. I call bullshit, if only because I played very few games "back in the day" (and I don't like most of the games I had back then; I played them only because I really didn't have anything else to play).
Most of the old games I discuss today are games I've only played sometime during the last decade for the first time. And I keep finding old games that I really like, and then I don't like their sequels, and I have a hard time finding new games that I like as much.
I'm pretty sure they did. Unfortunately I don't still have any magazines of that era
> They were dated on the day Deus Ex came out; it uses the original Unreal engine (with some tweaks) and looks just as dated.
Back then "with some tweaks" and high resolution textures did make a significant differences
> I recall reviews considering Deus Ex's graphics "boxy" (literally!) and it has plenty of super small textures..
I guess our recollections differ then. I do remember the game ran slooooow compared to other games out there that used the Unreal Engine. Perhaps you had to run the game at a lower texture quality or resolution than other games?
> Yes, but few games pull all the elements I mentioned above together. Deus Ex has "all the parts", and for most part it's done well, therefore it's more than the sum of its parts. Yes, story driven games exist, but few of them incorporate all the other elements that made Deus Ex what it is.
Basically your criticism here is few other games are Deus Ex since if everything you loved about Deus Ex was copied you'd just end up with the same game. And if that happened you'd probably also criticise it for not being original.
> I see people always dismiss this as nostalgia. I call bullshit, if only because I played very few games "back in the day"
That's exactly it though. You don't have to love every game you grew up with but you did have to spend time playing Deus Ex because you had fewer options verses now where you are able to skip game the moment your attention wavers.
> I guess our recollections differ then.
IGN: As good as the gameplay is, visuals aren't one of Deus Ex's stronger points. Since it's built on the Unreal engine, Deus Ex isn't as pretty as other first-person games like Quake III or Soldier of Fortune. The graphics are blocky, the animation is stiff, and the dithering is just plain awful in some spots [...] (between presentation, graphics, sound, gameplay, and lasting appeal, graphics got the lowest score)
Gamespot: Deus Ex's graphics aren't very good, either. Though the game uses Epic Games' Unreal engine, which was once lauded for its exceptional visual quality, Deus Ex is actually a fairly bland-looking game because of its incessantly dark industrial environments.
(I could've sworn PC gamer also considered the graphics blocky, but I can't find that right now)
HDTP: The original in-game textures were of a very low resolution, some textures even being as low as 32x32.
For comparison, Doom (1993) had 128 px tall wall textures. Quake 3 (1999) shipped 256x256 textures and generally much better looking (and more dynamic) visuals thanks to its shaders and gamma hack. Unreal shipped hi-res s3tc textures (sorry, can't figure out what the resolution is right now).
Also I think Deus Ex used indexed (256 color) textures, while Quake 3 engine based games used truecolor. At least I remember having to dither & convert textures to 256 color gifs back when I did some Deus Ex modding..
> Basically your criticism here is few other games are Deus Ex since if everything you loved about Deus Ex was copied you'd just end up with the same game. And if that happened you'd probably also criticise it for not being original.
Absolutely not. My criticism is that very few other games try and let alone manage to put all the elements together as competently as Deus Ex did. You absolutely can deliver an original story & setting with all the elements that made Deus Ex good without making the same game. Virtually nobody today is trying.
> That's exactly it though. You don't have to love every game you grew up with but you did have to spend time playing Deus Ex because you had fewer options verses now where you are able to skip game the moment your attention wavers.
No, that's not it. You missed the part where I mention old games in plural. Yes, old games other than Deus Ex, that I played sometime post 2010 and liked a lot (more than most recent games I try to play). Deus Ex is rather the exception, in that I both played it back in the day and enjoy it a lot (even today). Most of the games that I like from that era are not games I played in that era. And most of the games I played back then are not games I would enjoy today. So the vast majority of my opinion about old games does not come from nostalgia or rose tinted glasses, but from discovering them on GOG and playing them post 2014 (which is when I created my account on GOG and started trying out these old games I never had a chance to play back in the day).
I have zero reason to believe in nostalgia making much difference in how I feel about games I play today. I can pick up a game I loved 25 years ago, and get bored in 30 minutes because it's actually not that good. I can pick up a game I never played 25 years ago and love it because it's actually good. I can pick up a game I heard about 25 years ago and wanted to play, and find out it's actually not good. I can pick up a game I hated 25 years ago and like it, because it's actually better than I thought back then.
Actually playing these games today is the best way to dispel nostalgia, and usually 15 to 120 minutes is more than enough time for that.
Not enough really, we've had the Deus Ex reboot (Human revolution), Dishonored, Prey and their respective sequels, they're all great games but they didn't do amazingly, they mostly did "ok", they're all now on hiatus with their studios working on other franchises.
I think these games (immersive sims) are actually pretty difficult to make and the reward just isn't there vs other genres out there right now.
To be clear, I don't think they even tried, as far as DX:HR is concerned. Instead, it looks like they tried hard to borrow ideas from these mainstream console games and made an anti-immersive "sim" that constantly takes you into third person, floods the screen with XP & loot popups and other UI noise, replaces melee weapons with "tap E to watch a mini-cutscene where MC beats up a guy", features busywork-filler-padding sidequests for the instant gratification RPG addicts, etcetra.
I think, if someone actually tried, this is a proven niche where one could definitely find some success.
As far as the FPS genre is concerned: boy do people nitpick them. You can point at a handful of super popular titles, and for each, there's a mountain of forgotten and thoroughly mediocre (or worse) first person shooters.
There's no single genre where success is for granted. In general, there's a long tail of games that get little attention and a small bunch of "rockstars" that everyone plays.
As for genres, your point about only x number of games becoming a success is taken, but I guess my counter to that is, if you become a success in the shooter genre the upside is 10x or 100x what it would be for an immersive sim because the market for fps is much much bigger than those for immersive sims.
I might be a fan, but I rarely buy new games myself, so extrapolating anything at all from my gaming habits probably tells nothing about the market at large. I generally don't buy any new game unless it's DRM-free, has native Linux support OOTB, and doesn't come with crazy overpriced moneygrab editions or a shitload of DLC.
I think your criticisms of the RPG element, which is what the xp pop ups and stuff were, are overly harsh. I would have been happy without timit actions but they were all the rage when HR came out, so I can forgive Eidos for also doing them.
No. Mizzurna Falls was first.
Shenmue also has a much higher polygon count, all the NPCs had voice actors, it had action sequences, mini-games, etc. It was a hell of a lot more immersive than Mizzurna Falls in every imaginable way.
But the concept of "open world" could date back to Ultima RPG. You could set Ultima VII under an "open world" genre.
But the real reason we don't have games that run as long as Deus Ex is that the cost of reworking what was already there have exploded since those days. If you are predicting a 3 year release cycle(not unheard of to this day at large publishers), and you are delayed by 2 extra years, the hardware you are targeting is different, and the amount of art you have to upgrade or completely remake is crazy compared to Deus Ex. With teams being far larger than they were to meet a 3 year plan, marshaling a modern AAA game team to rework large parts of a game has little to do with managing to do the same with a team from the late 20th century. A linear increase in team size gets you a geometric increase in coordination costs.
That said, we still have small teams that might work on a game for a very long time, but they have to aim far lower technically, or in scope. You can make a beautiful, shorter game with a small team, like Outer Wilds. You can also make a 2d game, and tweak your game to perfection, like Stardew Valley. At those sizes, saying "when it's done", and letting yourself change direction and scope is fine. But try that with the Red Dead Redemption 2 team, trying to be at the forefront of everything. Without a far more rigid plan, you can go into a Duke Nukem Forever spiral (and DNF was a far smaller team!)
I don't think that approach would work well with story-driven games, but for e.g. Stardew Valley and a lot of the infinite gameplay indie games being made nowadays it's ideal. Also, they will add features all the time, so people will come back to them on a regular basis (e.g. Factorio, KSP).
- Half Life -> https://www.mobygames.com/game/windows/half-life/credits
- Horizon Zero Dawn -> https://www.mobygames.com/game/playstation-4/horizon-zero-da...
Things got more difficult when everything became legitimate 3D because of unreal and quake. It still happened but IMO was a much steeper curve.
You mean quadratic, no?
I say this as a fan of the game but even I can concede that he wants to make the ultimate space simulation game which just isn't feasible with how long it would take in reality.
I'm saying it's not making me want to play Star Citizen at all (unless if I backed the game, that would be a different story).
I don't work in gaming, and I haven't been an avid gamer in nearly 15 years. From my cursory viewpoint, it feels like every 5-10 years a story-driven game comes along, but mostly it feels like the industry is focused on either massive open world games, or Fortnite-esque quick-hit experiences.
I'd love to hear from people in the industry on how games like Deux Ex that live and die on story are thought of in the industry.
A short list of ones to look into, just to name a few:
Disco Elysium - 2019 - A _very_ weird RPG where you play an alchoholic amnesiac detective and where your skills are more aspects of your personality than abilities. The writing is so incredibly strange and wonderful that I'm not sure quite how to describe it. Your own personality traits sometimes talk and may try to convince you to be a socialist.
Outer Wilds - 2018 - A game about exploring a small simulated solar system for the purpose of simply learning more about it. There's a lot to this game, but because the entire purpose of the game is exploration and learning about the world _everything_ is a spoiler so I won't say any more.
A Plague Tale: Innocence - 2019 - Stealth-focused fantasy/adventure game set in the 1300s in France.
Undertale - 2015 - Another game that's hard to describe, don't be put off by its look but it absolutely lives and dies by its story. Especially since there are some very important gameplay elements that blend into the story.
Mass Effect 1-3 - 2007-2012 - Even if ME3's ending is widely panned, the rest of the series is absolutely story-focused and I figure I should mention some true AAAs that are known for story.
NieR: Automata - 2017 - philosophical weirdness about androids and machines wrapped up in a pretty good action game.
Bioshock 1-2/Infinite - 2007-2013 - Hard not to mention these in a thread about writing and Deus Ex, seeing as this series also has roots going back to Looking Glass, Thief, and System Shock.
"I came for a game review and left with a better understanding of the economy and politics. Ross you blow my mind"
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxOKEsBx4NU
The table of contents is impressive, the writing is wonderful, and you can download a series of ebook collections containing the individual blog posts.
(Jimmy Maher also is pretty good about citing sources and the book Masters of DOOM is cited several times as a primary source, which is also why it is recommended several times in sibling comments.)
There are some great reads out there about gamedev and gaming history, though:
- Blood, Sweat and Pixels by Jason Schreier
- Masters of Doom by David Kushner
- The Ultimate History of Video Games by Steven L. Kent was required reading for me in college
- Game Over by David Sheff
- Dungeon Hacks by David Craddock
Deus Ex made me read "The Man Who Was Thursday". I was slightly disappointed that the other book "Jacob's Shadow" was made-up for the game.
At least you aren't alone[1]
Despite being an inferior product, Special Limited Edition was sold by major retailers for as much or more than the full game, sometimes on the same shelf. This version was very negatively received, as the similar price and misleading name lead many to unwittingly purchase what turned out to be an "extended demo" or "trialware".
The rest of the game is an absolute marvel of design. Even for a modern game the level design and depth of the story is remarkable. The game doesn't even look half bad if you install modern texture packs. It's a shame that the themes of the original were dumbed down significantly in the sequel.
I started another play through recently exactly for this reason:
> Smith: Deus Ex and Dishonored both involve a plague, and they both involve powerful, corrupt elites turning the disenfranchised against each other. When some states discouraged the wearing of masks or sheltering in place, somebody inevitably linked me the opening cinematic. ‘Why contain it? Let the bodies pile up in the streets’.
Is it finicky? The stealth system is very basic and based on line-of-sight and sound (for human enemies). As long as you aren't running, it's actually incredibly trivial to stealth through levels without being seen. Even the bots aren't really a problem, since they have static patrol paths and limited line of sight.
Also in Hong Kong (and a spoiler) was this way of completing an objective that I didn't realize was possible until I saw it on YouTube [1].
Fun fact about stealth mechanic rewards in the original: they don't vanish if you did the offensive approach! You could get the most xp by first killing everyone and then run around through tunnels and obstacles to get the other half of the xp
I remember the escape from his brothers apartment in hells kitchen especially fondly because of that. First you slaughter everyone so your bro is safe for offensive reward, then you run through the level for the discovery rewards such as enabling the turret which shots the now non-existing enemies (the brother dies if you don't block him by standing in the way so risky to do earlier) and finally escape through the window. 3 routes and you get all the xp :)
Whaat. I must've played DX at least a couple dozen times and I never found a turret in the hotel?
I might misremember though... It's been almost 20 years after all ;)
When bro, the great pacifist, has killed absolutely everything in the hotel, walk out together with him through the front door, where he spontaneously drops dead for no reason at all because the script says he should.
I did love that game
You meet him again later iirc, though only very briefly.
States as such here (Spoilers, of course): [0]
I actually still play Thief 2, and am about to play Deus Ex again
>Smith: Every time the US shifts a little towards fascism or centralised control, somebody will send me a link to something from Deus Ex. It’s not that we were prescient – the sad part is that it’s on repeat through history.
That said, it's more that they're both drawing on similar cyberpunk traditions. There's a clear line between the aesthetic of Neuromancer and Deus Ex / The Matrix both.
The original DX, on the other hand - it took me years to get past the first level, but once I did it was really engaging.
Penny Arcade captured the sentiment at the time pretty well:
https://arewenewatthis.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/deus-ex1....
(Sorry this is not officially from their site--their archive search system is terrible)
The unavoidable boss-fights were certainly something of a shock at the time.
There are overhaul mods like GMDX, New Vision and Deus Ex: Revision (which I'd rank from best to worst in that order) that are meant to make it a bit nicer too.
I just played the first Mass Effect for the first time, and was really impressed by how well it had aged for a game from 2007.
I replayed the first Bioshock (also from 2007) not long ago, too, and it, too, holds up IMO.
Could we get further back than 2007?
- Half Life 2. I recently started playing it again (for catharsis, when DC was under military occupation a few weeks ago—drones, helicopters, gas-masked cops and all), and woo boy is that game still jaw-dropping to me. Plus, games built on its engine, like TF2 and L4D2, are still popular.
- World of Warcraft. I never got into this game at the time (was still a recovering EverQuest addict), but sometimes I pop on the free edition and level a character to 20. It’s still the largest MMO by player base.
- Also: Knights of the Old Republic II, The Sims 2 (best Sims imo), Metal Gear Solid 3, Halo 2, Metroid Prime 2
I think some of the original frantic shooters hold up alright, for what they are. Quake, stuff like that. They're kinda niche genre now, though. Not sure about the early Dooms, hard to judge those as easily. I like them, still, but...
The Half Life remake in the HL2 engine (Black Mesa) is very true to the spirit of the original and smoothes its rough edges off very elegantly, but the original's probably still fairly playable, too.
First mass effect, oof. It suffers from a lot of "which of the three buildings they made will this quest take place in?". Also having enemies walk right past your AI teammates, who are busy doing nothing, to shoot you in the back over. And over. And over. Gets really frustrating after a while. Two is so much better. You're in for a treat.
[EDIT] on reflection the one mechanic that probably feels off to a modern player in Perfect Dark, and indeed in many older shooters, is having thrown weapons treated like ordinary weapons, rather than a secondary attack with a separate set of items to cycle through. That is, you have to switch away from your gun to arm a thrown weapon, then throw it, then switch back. That's a little clunky. IIRC throwing-is-separate model wasn't popularized until the first Modern Warfare (I've played the first Call of Duty recently and I don't think it was in that, yet—man, talk about one that doesn't seem nearly as good on re-visiting)
Perfect Dark on the Xbox One is a lovely bit of emulator stacking: it's running in the Xbox 360 VM on the Xbox One, and the 360 game is itself running a custom Microsoft N64 emulator. It works much better than you think it should given the layers upon layers of indirection; many kudos to Microsoft's game VM and emulator teams for some of the hoops they've gone through over the years.
A good way to pick up Perfect Dark for the Xbox One is the Rare Replay pack. Sometimes you can find it for surprisingly cheap given the wealth that exists inside it. In addition to Perfect Dark and its 360 launch title prequel Perfect Dark Zero, it's about as complete a set of Rare's extensive back catalog as Microsoft's lawyers could muster the licenses for (so none of the games with Nintendo owned characters, though it sounds like they almost succeeded in convincing Nintendo, and also not Goldeneye which was bogged down with licensing issues between both Nintendo and EON Productions, the Bond license owners, and apparently truly scuttled at the very last minute based on intended behind the scenes features that wound up on YouTube anyway), plus some fun Behind-the-Scenes featurettes.
And if you're willing to go with simpler games Pac-man (1980) and tetris (1984) both still hold up, as does Arkanoid (1986).
I did replay Tron 2.0[2] (2003) a few years ago and it was passable, though I think the art direction helped a lot. But I've also tried to play some games I really enjoyed back around y2k and yeah... mostly had to give up even though I got them to run fine.
If you expand the remit to 2D games since they depend much less on tech, the retrogaming community has lots to offer.
Nothing about it is epic - it feels like a cramped dungeon crawl. The gameplay and puzzles are extremely simplistic (lots of slow moving enemies crawling down a hallway). The story is a bad B-movie compared to some of the compelling modern games that are raising world-building to new levels. When you compare it to modern games, I don't see how anyone could justify spending more than an hour or two on nostalgia playing.
It's Windows only, but I managed to get it running inside Wineskin on my Mac :)
Personally I got a lot more enjoyment from those games than I did Deus Ex. Particularly SS2 which still remains one of the most atmospheric games I've ever played and one of the few ones to make be jump and literally scared at times too.
Not taking anything away from Deus Ex, but at the time it didn't feel as genre defining as the others that inspired it.
The gameplay is clunky now in comparison to modern gaming, but the story is still one of the most compelling in the field.
Agree with the above -- would love to see it remade using modern engine.
Large empty levels like liberty island.
Brilliant puzzles like picking the lock on an office (destroying the lock pick) so you can steal a lock pick from the office.
My favourite was the well-timed cache misses that would immediately freeze the game, e.g. the first time you fire a shot in combat, then restore interactivity after you die in fast-forward.
But it's all worth it because you're a badass cyborg with a flashlight, i mean, "augmented vision".