There's a lot to cover with the game, so I'm not surprised he doesn't cover the music. But the soundtrack is great! I still listen to it regularly. I like the UNATCO music best. Each track has a regular theme, and switches to variations on the theme for combat and other situations. Pretty unusual in 2000 and even today.
Like many games, I think people's ratings of importance and quality are highly colored by their own experiences. For example, Goldeneye is beloved, but I've always found it weird, and I think anyone who played multiplayer Quake, Descent, Doom, etc., before it came out will just never see it as the revelation that console gamers do. Similarly, if you played Marathon games, Halo never seems nearly as special as many gamers find it.
With Deus Ex, I think one factor that really boosts it is that very few games previous to it focused nearly as much on experiencing a story while giving a first person player agency of any degree, and this is probably doubly true for the kind of audience that would find a first person real-time experience appealing, or at least I imagine the audiences for Fallout and Planescape: Torment and such, while overlapping some, weren't really quite the same audience as for Deus Ex, and stuff like Lucas Film's Maniac Mansion style games (puzzle narrative games?) are even further removed. While other games that are obviously similar in some ways, like Half Life, are much much more on rails in terms of both player experience and narrative compared to Deus Ex.
I think it's a great game, just like the X-Files was a great show, but also just like X-Files was not a perfect show. (Though I'm not sure there's a strict analog to the degree of unnecessary continuation X-Files has had.) By the standard of its time, just being first person and having varied endings, varied routes, and a lot of narrative support are all big winners for its time.
I have the logo tattooed on myself (along with Babylon 5). First played it around 16 pre-spoiler-filled internet and was blown away by my friend and I having completely different outcomes to pivotal moments of the game related to Paul Denton (no spoilers: if you know, you know).
Never worked in games (bar a bit of voice acting in The Nameless Mod for Deus Ex) but I think were it not for that era of gaming I’d never have ended up working on Homebrew or at GitHub.
Sadly the graphics have not aged well but if you can handle them: the writing and non-linear/branching plot and dialogue is still probably second to none.
One thing that bugs me is the article explains the twin towers missing from the skyline as "rendering engine couldn’t handle any more polygons", but it turns out... it's way more complicated than that https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wpi5xUXPqok .
If I am remembering correctly, I felt terrible after completing the first mission but that may have been the point - make you think about what you are doing. It was presented to the player as authentic threat, then when you get to end you are told it was a test but in my playthrough I killed all the “bad guys” on the way, and could have spared their virtual lives by sneaking around and knocking them out.
For those who have never played Deus Ex, I'm actually going to do the heretical thing and propose that you start with Deus Ex: Human Revolution (Director's Cut).
It's an amazing game in its own right and holds up really well today. The problem with hopping directly into Deus Ex is that it's really showing its age these days, even with mods.
DX:HR is a prequel, so from a timeline perspective it makes sense to play it first :)
> The most infamous and chilling “proof” of Deus Ex’s alleged facility for predicting the future is a view of the New York City skyline that you can see in the very first mission. This game that was released fifteen months before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, nonetheless shows only empty sky where the twin towers of the World Trade Center ought to be. As the people who made the game have always been quick to explain, this was not intended as a conscious statement of any sort, much less a prophecy. The towers were left out simply because the rendering engine couldn’t handle any more polygons. But still… what a coincidence! It’s almost enough to make you believe that the ghost of the Oracle of Delphi really does haunt Deus Ex.
I always wondered how this was supposed to make any sense at all given that the skyline (a screenshot of which is shown right there in the article!!) is clearly a 2D image rather than being polygonal…?
Deus Ex: Human Revolution is one of my favorite games of all time (and the game that got me into games). I enjoyed mankind divided a lot as well, though it felt different. I've started the original Deus Ex a few times but never really got into it; maybe I need to give it another shot.
I remember playing it again and again as a teenager, each time finding something new, some shaft I hadn't explored or a character in some side street I hadn't talked to. I must have played through 15+ times.
I really really really really missed seeing blogs like this! These blogs always felt like home, like a traveler's notebook, like a cozy warm personal place. And all we are left with is these boring corporate flat garbage.
Finally sat down and played this a few years ago. I didn’t think I’d be able to get into such an old game but it was one of the best gaming experiences I’ve ever had.
loved this game so much back in the day despite its ckunkyness at times. 2 felt cool still and later the whole atmosphere for me was lost. Still recognise and recall fondly a lot of the game many years later. ion storm, the intro music, dialogues.
great example in my mind of that games dont need to be perfect to be released or very memorable.
good writing is essential in my mind, dialogues and music / atmosphere. maybe its personal taste.
thanks for the lovely blog and memories :) totally makes me wanna go and replay them!
> Still, I do understand why it was done this way, and don’t really blame anyone for it: because truly interactive storytelling, especially on a scale like this one, is hard, as decades of experience have taught us all too well.
The Stanley Parable is an exploration of the fact that this sort of "interactive storytelling" is largely impossible. It's not a coincidence that it was made as a mod for Half-Life 2 (and then as a Source game). The different paths represent different attempts by the game designer or the player to either fix or cope with the failure of the game as the Narrator originally envisioned it.
If I am not mistaken Deus Ex was one of the first game with non-linear gameplay having different story entries and exits. That feature itself was very interesting and unique. Apart from that cyberpunk rpg design was attractive. All in all it was an epic game and It is a game which is memorable for lifetime. Thanks to Ion Storm one more time.
I had a subscription to PC Gamer and saw it was named Game of the Year. I got it from Wal Mart, a beautiful shiny box, and inside was a fake newsletter about events in the game world, I think the paper that Joe Greene, an in-game character, wrote for.
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.
Such a great game. Afterwards I needed more and ended up finding this other game called Neocron which kinda ran the same vein but was no where near as good.
Deus Ex was an amazing game. My only regret is that the more we see the real world impacts of late stage capitalism and technology enthusiasm, I've spent more time wondering if the Tracer Tong ending was the better choice for the world
I always wondered why the game was called "Deus Ex". "Deus ex machina" is the "God from the machine", in a play someone who is magically lowered down from the sky via a theater contraption to save the day. "Deus ex" alone just means "God from". What does that mean? I guess I have to play the game to find out...
True story: two college friends of mine having a conversation on Friday evening, Friend A (single) asked Friend B (in a relationship) what he was doing on Saturday. B's excited reply was "Deus Ex!"
Still my favorite game of all time. The difficulty scaling was absolutely ridiculous though. In the first level, you're supposed to be a cyber augmented super soldier, but in the first level, they give you like 2 magazines for your pistol, and if you don't max our your small weapon skill, you have worse aim than a toddler with a nerf gun.
The gameplay and graphics don't hold up but the story was absolutely prescient around AI, billionaire oligarchs, and mass surveillance.
Remains one of my favorite games ever, even as current events make it difficult to return to at present (it used to be a yearly replay over my winter holidays).
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.
Deus Ex
(filfre.net)283 points by cybersoyuz 5 hours ago | 148 comments
Comments
"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.
New renderers, new engines, The Purist Mod, GMDX, The Nameless Mod...
With Deus Ex, I think one factor that really boosts it is that very few games previous to it focused nearly as much on experiencing a story while giving a first person player agency of any degree, and this is probably doubly true for the kind of audience that would find a first person real-time experience appealing, or at least I imagine the audiences for Fallout and Planescape: Torment and such, while overlapping some, weren't really quite the same audience as for Deus Ex, and stuff like Lucas Film's Maniac Mansion style games (puzzle narrative games?) are even further removed. While other games that are obviously similar in some ways, like Half Life, are much much more on rails in terms of both player experience and narrative compared to Deus Ex.
I think it's a great game, just like the X-Files was a great show, but also just like X-Files was not a perfect show. (Though I'm not sure there's a strict analog to the degree of unnecessary continuation X-Files has had.) By the standard of its time, just being first person and having varied endings, varied routes, and a lot of narrative support are all big winners for its time.
I have the logo tattooed on myself (along with Babylon 5). First played it around 16 pre-spoiler-filled internet and was blown away by my friend and I having completely different outcomes to pivotal moments of the game related to Paul Denton (no spoilers: if you know, you know).
Never worked in games (bar a bit of voice acting in The Nameless Mod for Deus Ex) but I think were it not for that era of gaming I’d never have ended up working on Homebrew or at GitHub.
Sadly the graphics have not aged well but if you can handle them: the writing and non-linear/branching plot and dialogue is still probably second to none.
It's an amazing game in its own right and holds up really well today. The problem with hopping directly into Deus Ex is that it's really showing its age these days, even with mods.
DX:HR is a prequel, so from a timeline perspective it makes sense to play it first :)
I always wondered how this was supposed to make any sense at all given that the skyline (a screenshot of which is shown right there in the article!!) is clearly a 2D image rather than being polygonal…?
I remember playing it again and again as a teenager, each time finding something new, some shaft I hadn't explored or a character in some side street I hadn't talked to. I must have played through 15+ times.
My favorite quote: "A bomb!" -Joch
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxOKEsBx4NU
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
great example in my mind of that games dont need to be perfect to be released or very memorable.
good writing is essential in my mind, dialogues and music / atmosphere. maybe its personal taste.
thanks for the lovely blog and memories :) totally makes me wanna go and replay them!
[https://www.moddb.com/mods/terminus-machina/images/the-human...]
The Stanley Parable is an exploration of the fact that this sort of "interactive storytelling" is largely impossible. It's not a coincidence that it was made as a mod for Half-Life 2 (and then as a Source game). The different paths represent different attempts by the game designer or the player to either fix or cope with the failure of the game as the Narrator originally envisioned it.
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.
Some years later I learned some english and found out the game is deep with layers, and the more I play the more I learn something new.
> https://jarmitage99.itch.io/opende
I can’t recommend highly enough the remasters and remixes by Mothership Loudspeakerz.
https://www.it-he.org/deus.php
Something has gone very wrong if you're taking a silly story about the illuminati so seriously.
I found this author's take barely more coherent than the YouTube commentators he laments.
"Oh fuck off" said A.
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.
The gameplay and graphics don't hold up but the story was absolutely prescient around AI, billionaire oligarchs, and mass surveillance.
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.