New renderers, new engines, The Purist Mod, GMDX, The Nameless Mod...
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3131640/Deus_Ex_Remastere...
What has been shown so far looks worse than many of the free modded versions out there, and with AI lowering the bar for modifying games every week… As an experiment I asked Claude to take the source code from the browser port of the game that appeared on GitHub recently, add coop multiplayer, 32:9 ultra wide support and as much of the graphical enhancements from the remaster video.
It took about 4 prompts, and I have builds playable on Linux, MacOS and Windows, with coop. Gets well over 300fps on my Mac Mini as uses metal on an a Mac.
It really makes you think how long the business models of companies like Nightdive Studios (specialists in remastering old games for modern systems) can last, when you can “remaster” entire games in very few prompts.
But probably the worst trend with modern remakes is taking the original games off of online stores or "upgrading" them to the remake thus making the original unavailable. Combined with the "demakes" trend above and it seems like we're actively destroying many historical games with these "remakes".
[1] https://www.digitalfoundry.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2021-...
Unfortunately I have the impression that the final part was rushed, as the story feels incomplete at best. I wish Arkane could dedicate 6 more months to this game.
I actually got chills during the surprise post-credits scene in Deus Ex: Human Revolution when the og Deus Ex theme started playing.
I loved the theme changes on them -- I remember HK Streets had explore, combat and death scene; transitions felt seamless in the game.
And the discoverability of all kinds of stuff in the canals. The cityscape building hopping and secret back entrances to the duplicitous Maggie Chow's apartment. It just had everything. You truly felt like you were discovering every inch of it and like it wasn't just on rails or procedurally generated.
It wasn't just misanthropy on our part.
Zooming out, macrohistorically[1], the amount of destruction that can be controlled by the individual soldier has increased, steadily at first, then exponentially in the modern era. Obviously the extreme example would be something like SADM[2], but this increase also includes the multiplying complex systems of the modern world - bulk ammunition, heavy vehicles, commercial aircraft. As the numbers needed for X level of destruction decreases, the span of viable ideologies increases; it's easier to convince 12 guys of nutty ideas than it is to convince 12,000. So, in the big view, the idea of big cultural icons getting flattened, this is something scifi has been kicking around for a while now. One could argue it's a significant pillar of "cyberpunk" worldbuilding: the persistent presence of the "crazies" wielding the modern tools of fuel, bullets, and nuclear bombs.
[1] Which is definitely the perspective of the Deus Ex creative team.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Atomic_Demolition_Muni...
Haven't been able to repeat that in Deus Ex, you can't play through the campaign as a total pacifist, and Carter explains as much right at the beginning.
Wann to try it again since i played it back then to its release, and back then i liked it but was too young to really get what it wants from me.
Revision is popular and cute, but changes too much. Level design on some levels is so different that you can't recognize them, I still get lost despite playing though it at least ten times, as original levels are burned in my memory.
Although this can be changed in settings, I'd still avoid Revision unless you want to have another go at it after finishing the original.
I can’t recommend highly enough the remasters and remixes by Mothership Loudspeakerz.
Paul Denton: Don't be so quick to trust the UN.
JC: Are you kidding?
JC: The UN's about the only chance we've got these days. If the U.S. spirals into another Civil War...
Paul Denton: A pretext, nothing more.
Paul Denton: The whole project of world government going back to the League of Nations has been funded and manipulated mainly by wealthy bankers.
JC (Jesus Christ): Is that so?
Paul Denton: Remember that the UN itself was built on land donated by John D. Rockefeller
Paul Denton: The wealthy have always been the ones to profit from one-world government
Paul Denton: The United Nations' secret goal... well, this is David Rockefeller's description, from half a century ago:
Paul Denton: "the supernational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers."
Paul Denton: The UN was founded not to end war but to gradually dissolve national governments and replace them with a Globalist meritocracy.
Paul Denton: Average people never benefit from government and business on a scale they can't even understand
I had no idea what I was in for, and as a 15 year old, I felt twists and surprises, and organic game reactions to things I did that blow my mind even today, and imo still haven't been matched. And leveling and skills truly mattered and were tied into the game. Inventory management and ammo was interesting, the interface was perfect. It also had a kind of intellectual curiosity (characters talking competently about surveillance state and capitalism!) in the dialog that I only ever felt in, say, Alpha Centauri and later, Disco Elysium. It's still the best PC game ever imo.
Edit: I think the most important thing about its legacy now, is that it engaged with conspiracies in a fundamentally different way, more like 90s X-Files style fascination and curiosity than anti-intellectualism of Alex Jones-style rabid misinformation. A critical nuance that gets lost when conspiracy cranks try to claim Deus Ex as theirs.
Edit 2: Respectfully, contra the article, if anything I think there's not enough hagiography surrounding Deus Ex. It's either beloved or not known, and the latter is the crime that needs rebalancing as it represents an example of what's possible in passion project game design that I think is just as important as it ever was. That matters infinitely more to me than sidecar questions of how more or less "living" it's game world was relative to its predecessor System Shock. I also think the analysis is a little bit off to criticize DX's three-choice ending as being too on-rails relative to System Shock, which is a one-stop boss battle that lasts like 15 seconds.
Now if only someone could make a game aping 'The Difference Engine' in the style of Dishonoured... the time is right for a steampunk equivalent!
Now with GMDX it's a must play.
When the game came out though the politics around conspiracy theories was very different. Deus Ex tried to cram in every conspiracy theory circulating at the time. MJ-12, the trilateral commission, Roswell...
The good guys were trying to coordinate and make sure vaccine was widely distributed, and IIRC the original friends of the main character continue to believe in the value of UNATCO (the agency you work for in the game) and treat it like a good cause that was poisoned rather than a philosophical error.
I can see the libertarian bent, but with the very heavy qualifier that it's like Noam Chomsky 90s anarcho libertarianism than the joke that is today's fascist-friendly memeified online libertarianism. I doubt Tracer Tong and Alex Jones would have much in common if they tried to have a conversation. And it does give you three choices at the end of the day, and seems to mean it, though if you squint I suspect it's most sympathetic to Tracer Tong's preferred outcome.
"Oh fuck off" said A.
Reference: Deus Ex [Windows video game]. (2000). Austin, Texas: Ion Storm.
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"As long as technology has a global reach, someone will have the world in the palm of his hand. If not Bob Page, then Everett, Dowd..." - Tracer Tong (Ion Storm, 2000)
Reference: Deus Ex [Windows video game]. (2000). Austin, Texas: Ion Storm.
The gameplay and graphics don't hold up but the story was absolutely prescient around AI, billionaire oligarchs, and mass surveillance.
There's a portion in the game when your brother Paul is sick and he tells you to leave him to fight off enemy goons alone. Apparently you can fight your way through the hotel and he survives all the way to the end of the game!
When the sequel came out, I was like "why the fuck is Paul still alive"
I tried playing Alice a couple times when I got Steam in 2023, and I couldn't get into it. Tried another game from that era: Made it about halfway through Half Life 1 on a long flight and couldn't get into it either, even after I'd played Alyx.
It's wild how games that were considered state-of-the-art when we were kids can feel unplayably unpolished today.
IIRC Quake used “a” and “d” to… turn, instead of strafe, by default. Absolute madness. Can be played without a mouse I think(?).
On the other hand, it is still very cool that you can get the bad guys to fight each other sometimes. That should be a feature in every game really.
One thing strikes me however, as perhaps revealing my own naïveté:
> Lurking in the accusations against “wealthy bankers” is the oldest, ugliest conspiratorial trope of all, the idea — stemming from the 1903 forgery “The Protocol of the Elders of Zion” — that a cabal of Jews secretly run the world.
I never made that connection until literally reading this piece. Bankers weren’t all Jews, and not all Jews were Bankers. I had heard the stereotype, sure, but I never read said stereotype into such conspiracies or narratives. It just made logical sense that a newly-emerged global society formed around currency and trade would be manipulated by those people who specialize in said sectors, i.e. bankers and financiers. The fact said individuals continue having outsized import on daily news and current events almost cements the plot point as real prophecy instead of antisemitic nonsense, but I can also see how bad actors would tie hate speech to current events to boost their own platforms.
Just an odd bit of reflecting, is all.
Compared to those, all bankers of the world even combined are still a minor insignificant player. I wonder if we will ever see 'occupy sillicon valley' movement?
Second, there's Open Deus EX (I think not GMDX compatible yet) and DX-Rust, which it is.
I still play to that game, and it's my favourite among Slashem and some few interactive fiction ones.
OpenDE: Fast, vanilla https://github.com/jarmitage99/OpenDE
DX-Rust: Slow, AI slop, but it can be improved. It supports GMDX https://github.com/Grissyelda/dx-rust
If you use Recomp Launcher you can install these with ease, even on Steam Decks.
"There's a tendency among the press to attribute the creation of a game to a single person," says Warren Spector, creator of Thief and Deus Ex.
"The individual desires judgment. Without that desire, the cohesion of groups is impossible, and so is civilization. The human being created civilization not because of a willingness but because of a need to be assimilated into higher orders of structure and meaning. God was a dream of good government. You will soon have your God, and you will make it with your own hands."
I've seen a lot of discussions among fans about why one specific publicly visible person made this or that decision when he was never part of any discussion related to it.
The myth of the solo creator who heroically makes something amazing has a romantic appeal to a lot of people, especially those who dream of doing such a thing themselves someday. In truth, all great things in history have many collaborators and what we think of as the “creator” is often just a person who played the role of bringing together the collaborators, with perhaps a few other direct contributions.
But in the AI era, this solo-creator myth can now become reality, or if you are more cynical, just an even deeper delusion that exploits the non-consensual labor of millions for one’s personal benefit.