The official DEUS EX thread

Deus Ex (2000)

I'm a Deus Ex megafan and I consider the original the best PC game ever, and probably the best game ever. Part of it is just transcendent game design, a perfect storm of same situation multiple approach gaming that hasn't been duplicated in the decade since its release, and part of it is that it just pushes all the right buttons for me. There probably isn't a single aspect of the game that I don't unreservedly love.

Here's some essential reading, the Deus Ex post mortem written by Warren Spector in December of 2000:

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3114/postmortem_ion_storms_deus_ex.php?print=1

And here's a post mortem in the form of Spector interviewing lead designer Harvey Smith:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTWvsGA77T4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2o31W_E73_U

It gives you a little bit of the impression that a lot of the success of DX1 was accidental in a way, where design decisions that would seem to be slam dunks to us today were second guessed and cobbled together. It really seemed like they didn't know what they had on their hands until the gaming public started playing and loving it, which makes it easier to understand how the sequel turned out to be such a disaster.

Deus Ex: Invisble War (2003)

Here's a really good effortpost from NeoGAF explaining how Deus Ex: Invisible War turned out so poorly from a design perspective. I finally played IW myself earlier this year and it was even worse than I expected, but this guy perfectly crystallizes all the little things I couldn't put my finger on while simultaneously shining a light on everything that made DX1 so special:

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=406143

And here's Harvey Smith's post mortem on Invisible War, which I consider sort of crucial to understanding the game:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGIdYl2oN74

This video helped me to formulate my pet theory that Gaben ruined Deus Ex 2. Spector and Smith talk about listening to their jerkoff designer friends about how many 'problems' the first game had and then sought to fix them with the sequel, and ended up creating this horrible sterile nightmare of a console game.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution (2011)

I don't have much to say about this, since it's not out yet. Presentation-wise it reminds me more of IW than DX, but that doesn't mean it can't be good. To be continued, I guess.

I remember first installing this back in the day, and yeh, it sucked me straight in. I started playing at around 4ish in the afternoon. Half an hour later I looked at the clock and it was 12:30 - I'd played that game for 8 1/2 hours, I don't think I blinked once. Amazing game.

i used to get up at four in the morning, play two hours of deus ex, go to high school, then come home and play several more hours of deus ex. with this schedule the game somehow nevertheless lasted me almost an entire week. really good example of a rare thing: it's a hugely flawed game but every flaw is almost as fun as every non-flaw. like sometimes deus ex would freak out and malfunction and make absurd unintentional things happen, and you laughed with it, not at it.

i had an amazing experience my first time playing this. i was in highschool at the time and away at a boarding school that didn't allow students to have computers or play games. so the once a month or once every two months that i'd visit my parents at home, i'd get to play a few hours of this over the weekend before going back to school. and it must've taken me a few months, but every time i came home i was still so excited about the game + the storyline that i was back into it immediately. some games if i stop playing for a week i might as well never think about it again because i'm probably never going back. but deus ex compelled me through a full playthrough over a couple months and then multiple more over the next few years (my most recent playthrough was about five years ago).

Oh yes, Deus Ex is my favourite game of all time. I have played it through so many times. And every time I STILL agonise over my aug/skill choices. So, so great. The locations! The character development! The story! The EVERYTHING.

yeah i do a playthrough every few years. also every time i do it i keep really meticulously labeled save files from the beginning of every level and before every major decision juncture (as well as three separate save files right before each one of the Flip This Switch To Win The Game decisions) and think "now i can play whatever part of deus ex i want later!" but i always end up just ignoring the saves and playing from the beginning.

Yeah I was the same with saves.

My favourite ending was 'blow up the whole fuckin' internet'.

the AI's my favorite example of that phenomenon. it's pretty bad, but in a way that just makes the game better as you learn how to toy with it.

i really stretched the game out on my first playthrough - i found myself constantly replaying certain sections just so i could try out all the different ways to solve a given problem. i think the reason the game's so great isn't just because it gives you options, but because all the options are pretty much equally fun to explore. that's why i've been able to replay it multiple times since then.

i also have to say, i think JC Denton's the best FPS protagonist ever. fuck Gordon Freeman. playing Invisible War made this really clear, because the protag you're cursed with is just like, monstrously dull. i feel like the fact that JC's such an undeveloped 'character' yet you grow so attached to him is a product of the devs recognizing how to optimize the gamer's desire to not just do badass things, but inhabit a world where they're recognized for it. call it the duke nukem effect. idk i just made that up rn but it sounds good.

http://i53.tinypic.com/339he05.jpg

all his dickhead one-liners + the deadpan v/o still make me laugh

Oh yes, Deus Ex is my favourite game of all time. I have played it through so many times. And every time I STILL agonise over my aug/skill choices. So, so great. The locations! The character development! The story! The EVERYTHING.

― oppet, Sunday, January 23, 2011 3:12 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark

otm

i love that this game allows its characters to make big, inelegant speeches about the perils of one-world government - theres just nothing else like it

walton simons also just expertly done bad guy. AM I BEHIND A DESK RIGHT NOW? NO, I'M NOT.

compare this game to more recent games with "complex morality systems" (read: track your Morality Score until at the end you are either satan or jesus). the only person in this entire game that you have to kill is anna navarre. (and that happens in one of three totally different places, hugely spaced out.) there's no prize or alternate ending for not killing anyone (or for behaving in any of the other 8293572952 different ways the game allows you to behave), but you don't need one; you meet the game halfway.

ohhh man i love walt simons.

i love that this game allows its characters to make big, inelegant speeches about the perils of one-world government - theres just nothing else like it

oh my god the way everybody talks about this. like, drifters on the street rave at you about g.k. chesterton. in voice acting so bad it's demented. absolutely great.

i think the recognition of actions done is otm. games where the gameworld reflects the decisions you've made (fallout, deus ex, even gta/rdr to some extent) are the best kinds of gameworlds.

my favorite example of the acting is when the inexplicably australian bartender in hong kong is going on and on and on to you about the military-industrial complex and says that governments are all run by wealthy technocrats in think tanks and then says "what is that, a think tank?", and the line clearly means "what even is a think tank anyway" but he says it as if he's just seen something in the corner of the bar and thinks it might be a think tank.

compare this game to more recent games with "complex morality systems" (read: track your Morality Score until at the end you are either satan or jesus).

haha i was ranting about this trend in i think one of the mass effect threads - i like bioware well enough but i feel like this is their fault, and it's terrible.

otm about meeting the game halfway. i tried a no-kill playthrough just because i could and because it was fun, not because i needed to be incentivized to do so (or worse, browbeaten into doing it like in MGS)

which reminds me, I can't believe I didn't mention the Shifter Mod. It's worth giving a shot on your next playthrough:

http://www.moddb.com/mods/shifter1

I don't like all of the changes, but it does some interesting things with game balancing that changes how you play.

lest i sound like i am Above the weedy theorizing in deus ex, i unreservedly love and am legit moved by the (totally optional and easy to miss) part where you find, basically in a closet, an abandoned prototype for the AI that runs the world government's surveillance system, and the AI is isolated and cut off from the network and bored and sad, and entertains itself by guessing things about people who find their way into the closet, and in this mild garbled little voice it tells you that in constructing an omniscient and intelligent surveillance system mankind has finally succeeded in birthing god. that was really good.

my favorite example of the acting is when the inexplicably australian bartender in hong kong is going on and on and on to you about the military-industrial complex and says that governments are all run by wealthy technocrats in think tanks and then says "what is that, a think tank?", and the line clearly means "what even is a think tank anyway" but he says it as if he's just seen something in the corner of the bar and thinks it might be a think tank.

― difficult listening hour, Sunday, January 23, 2011 3:23 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark

haha YES. "RHETORIC! (pronounced ritterick) AND YOU BELIEVE IT?"

Argh yes the voice acting...the girls who get you to pay them into the bar..."Thanks for getting me in!" See also: all the French people in this game.

I used to spend ages playing basketball and pool, even though it achieved absolutely nothing.

xxp - that mod looks great. I'm totally losing another few hours to this game in February.

i tried a no-kill playthrough just because i could and because it was fun, not because i needed to be incentivized to do so (or worse, browbeaten into doing it like in MGS)

i think morality systems make "moral" decisions in games feel less like moral decisions: i like bioshock, but when you're choosing whether to kill or save the little girls, it's clear that you're entering a number in a chart, and it's also clear that if you want the full game experience, to See All The Endings, you're gonna have to go back and enter the other number. i'm often really squeamish, but the "quandary" in bioshock is so clearly constructed and limited and just there so they can list a feature on the back of the box that i massacre little girls without a thought.

deus ex makes me wanna play it nonviolently because there are no consequences to shooting everyone -- because being a pacifist actually makes the game harder, and affects everything you have to do and the way you're going to have to do it, and it feels like a living moral decision (i mean, as much as it can considering it's still just a video game) and not like a path you choose so you can see what's at the end of it.

that mod looks really cool.

oh man sorry just remembered, re moral incentives, deus ex does do this one really subtle thing: after that huge shootout in hell's kitchen, if any UNATCO soldiers died, the receptionist at UNATCO will later say to you "i had a buddy who went down in the park in hell's kitchen. sorry, i know there wasn't anything you could do" and this one throwaway line used to make me try SO HARD to keep all the soldiers alive in that scene.

otm re moral choices in the game. My natural tendency is always to play a sneaky, low kill-count game, so in my last playthrough I went for a plasma rifle & rocket launcher destructofest. Felt like a different game, but still a complete blast. It was nice not to get called out as a complete pussy by Agent Navarre.

"we WILL be called upon to do more than FRIGHTEN the nsf with our BAGGY COATS that make us look BIGGER THAN WE REALLY ARE."

Is there an easy way for a Mac user to play this?

my Favorite Path, like the one i'd script if this were a movie, was:

1) leave paul's apartment through the window
2) kill anna navarre in the 747 cabin before she kills lebedev
3) tell jaime to remain at UNATCO
4) kill maggie chow w/ the laser sword and throw her body into the collapsing universal constructor
5) kill gunther in the paris cathedral w/ the killswitch
6) kill walton simons in the ocean lab by luring him onto the train tracks and turning on the current
7) merge w/ helios

while killing as few grunts as possible on either side, preferably none.

Is there an easy way for a Mac user to play this?

there is a mac version, but i don't know if it works on OSX -- google search suggests it doesn't, but that there are ways around that.

is it possible to kill anna navarre in the 747 cabin? i think i always ended up either killing her in the subway or killing her remotely back in the UNATCO base

yeah I should make it clear that I'm not laughing at the game's ambitions - i think it actually has some pretty smart things to say politically! I just love how it deluges you with the conspiracy stuff, which some people dislike but I think is actually pretty canny from a storytelling perspective. I don't think you can go halfway with your paranoid cyberpunk conspiracy thriller.

i think morality systems make "moral" decisions in games feel less like moral decisions: i like bioshock, but when you're choosing whether to kill or save the little girls, it's clear that you're entering a number in a chart, and it's also clear that if you want the full game experience, to See All The Endings, you're gonna have to go back and enter the other number. i'm often really squeamish, but the "quandary" in bioshock is so clearly constructed and limited and just there so they can list a feature on the back of the box that i massacre little girls without a thought.

i think maybe this is the end result of tunnel vision gaming, where you just progress from cramped corridor to cramped corridor. immersion comes from super detailed art and sound direction, not from encouraging the player to test the game world and look for interesting feedback. it's a facile experience, and so are the 'moral events' - there's nothing organic about it. deus ex rewards practically every decision you make, 'good' or 'bad', by letting NPCs in the game acknowledge it, which imo is one of the most important things an RPG can do. one of the funnest things about the replays is how many tiny things you didnt notice before that have tiny rippling effects in the gameworld.

the other thing i noticed in my last playthrough, where I was an Evil Dickhead, is that the game does make you feel like shit for being a badguy, because there's so many opportunities to do bad things to good people, and often for no gain besides the sport of it. i will say that on my first time through I was very disappointed that the game never gave you an option to side with UNATCO and the New world order - i understand how hard that would've been to implement, but it could've been a really rich and awesome experience.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4wH-bU-YVY

i've killed anna in the cabin in almost every playthrough. there's a lot of fun metagaming opportunities with that encounter.

one of the funnest things about the replays is how many tiny things you didnt notice before that have tiny rippling effects in the gameworld.

i love the setup involving the hotelier, his estranged daughter, and his estranged daughter's thuggish pimp, which there are about four ways to handle (including "ignore") and which has no effect on the game at all except to change the situation in the hotel when you go back there later.

iirc, the easiest way to kill Anna in the 747 is to rig it to blow before she even gets into the cabin.

I get pretty obsessed with saving Paul in NYC. I can't remember it bringing much benefit, except a couple of extra meetings with him later on.

yes! that's the kind of thing that's kinda missing from the later sections of the game, unforch. xp

i didnt even KNOW you could save paul the first time i played the game - that really blew my mind when i found out about it later

haha and yeah, on my second playthrough i remember being disappointed by how disproportionately pointless saving paul seemed to be

i've saved paul a couple times but usually i let him die just because it doesn't make any dramatic sense for my character at the beginning of the game to be able to overpower a whole platoon of nanoaugmented MiBs (honestly when i first tried it, and succeeded, i thought it was a bug), and it undercuts the whole THEY KILLED MY BROTHER motivation. don't get me wrong it is rad that the game allows you to save him, but the story feels lamer if you do.

xp -- yeah, maybe if it made something happen besides him showing up in hologram form to say "good luck" like ten gameplay hours later.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kihGm4KfY7k

THE BLACK MARKET PRICES IN CLUBS LIKE THIS... LET PEOPLE HAVE A GOOD TIHUHUHUHIIIIME.

mistah jc denton, in da fresh

le sigh

http://www.computerandvideogames.com/313559/deus-ex-human-revolution-pc-gamer-review-awards-94/

it's not quite as good as the original because thanks to a "slight shift away from improvisation and wide open spaces", which stops it "just short."

Regardless, Human Revolution is described as "the Deus Ex of our age, a genuinely worthy prequel, and a game that puts almost everything else in the genre to shame."

i hope the gameplay in this is great, because i don't like what they've done with the setting at all

i really want this to be great bc deus ex is one of my fave games of all time. also, princess tam tam, your namesake was on TMC last night.

The Movie Channel?

fred durst was on TMC?

http://images.moviepostershop.com/princesse-tam-tam-movie-poster-1935-1020670418.jpg

oh don't get all old timey pc gamer on me

the guy who voices sarif is one of the best things about dxhr btw! he sounds like will arnett

oh don't get all old timey pc gamer on me

― goole, Tuesday, July 23, 2013 4:51 PM (35 seconds ago) Bookmark

it was just confusing, mate. i dont know why you'd make no attempt to identify what you were playing

the whole last year of the thread is talking about HR! sorry m8

anyway, cool game. weirdly, it's got some big problems, sort of one-trick in its gameplay, and isn't exactly 'exciting', but still engrosses. i think cos the quests take some time to finish, maybe? somewhat mysterious

i think i just enjoy progessing through office buildings stealthily

my second playthrough of dxhr was a lot less rewarding than the first. but the first time was pretty good. not something i'll revisit again (unlike og DX) but i respect the job they did

the guy who voices sarif is one of the best things about dxhr btw! he sounds like will arnett

― i wanna be a gabbneb baby (Hungry4Ass), Tuesday, July 23, 2013 3:51 PM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i think he sounds like fred armisen in the californians

lol

plus your main guy always reminds me of tina fey doing 'talking like this contest'

i think i just enjoy progessing through office buildings stealthily

me too, i would be fine if there weren't any soldiers or guards, just people working at their computers and having meetings.

and you were just trying to go to lunch without being seen.

GANKED JENNY'S CHOBANI (200XP)

lollllll

i still haven't finished HR because i got to the final or near-final boss fight and VAGUE SPOILERS i have to fight it without using augs, because i Made A Mistake several hours back that it only occurred to me was probably a mistake after i'd overwritten my most recent save and i didn't want the hassle of going all the way back to a previous one, and now this boss fight is even less fun than the other ones. i actually feel really stupid about this mistake. i wouldn't have made it in real life but i was in that video game mode (well-exploited by bioshock 1) where you just do whatever anybody tells you no matter who they are. be careful goole.

what was your mistake? i can't remember what it could have been.

you're told to go to a clinic to have your chips refitted along w everyone else suffering from strange shutdowns. but obv it's a Plot.

lol i did that, figured it would be ~plotty~ but didn't get to the twist i guess

the momentary unexplained glitches in your hud leading up that point were pretty cool tho

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2014-11-16-ion-storms-lost-deus-ex-sequels

rich people don't get grey death. like that billionaire bob page-- he don't have it. the president don't have it. i ain't never seen a movie star who got it. YOU DON'T HAVE IT!

i must greet each visitor with a complete summary of his file. i am a prototype for a much larger system.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=He09JaBVZdE

never forget

I'm a primitive feces-slinging rube 2

i'm a primitive feces-slinging rube 2: invisible war

from jacob's shadow, the invitation to love-esque pulp novel you find lying around all over the world in deus ex (2000)--specifically, chapter 20, the first section you read after going rogue from the united nations and losing your brother, paul, who'd urged you at every encounter through the first half of the game, including in transmissions via the "microreceiver exostructure" embedded in your brain, to avoid killing enemies ("remember that we're police"), probably leading you-the-gamer to believe there would be some sort of mechanical punishment from the game for killing people, which there isn't:

"You ever wonder about morals?" he said. Jacob shook his head. "I do, all the damn time... I wonder what it means to be good -- if there's some tally that says 'you only hurt ten people, so come on up, but eleven and you're going straight to hell.' Then I think maybe it's a little voice that tells you, way back in your head. And then I wonder what happens when that voice goes away."

suck it bioshock (2007)

no 'ronald reagan wrote about america as a city on a hill' introduction tho right

― thomp, Tuesday, August 30, 2011 5:47 AM (4 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this post and the one where abanana thought you had to kill the guy at the beginning have been making me ia for years. the guy who quotes reagan (they puckishly credit it to thomas aquinas, instead of to reagan or winthrop or yknow that other guy) literally just got done saying "let the bodies pile up in the streets."

i'm sorry to have caused you so much difficulty ):

--the poll options in this thread have made me laugh p much every time it's been revived. classic tamtam

--i played the one i was agonizing about whether to buy upthread and hate hate hated it, and that experience has made me look back on the first game way more positively, so, er, yeah.

--the joke in my post is that they got the credit wrong, not that invoking that line is in and of itself bad. i'm not convinced that it's meant to be the character's error and not just a boner on the part of one of the writers--idk, i am totally uncertain about what aspects of this game's narrative are deliberately off and screwy

--one weird thing about deus ex (o.g.) is that when i visited the statue of liberty i was like 'okay, so the fallen head's gonna be here ...' : i mean, it totally succeeded, and succeeds in memory, whenever i see a picture of that island, of infringing upon my idea of the real world space. all the spaces in it feel both convincingly 'real' and successfully 'designed', as far as i can remember, and the number of games that do that is yeah, pretty fn small

i meant the i part of the ia!

i'm not convinced that it's meant to be the character's error and not just a boner on the part of one of the writers--idk, i am totally uncertain about what aspects of this game's narrative are deliberately off and screwy

yeah this is true of much of the game, e.g. the voice acting, which in places is just alien--even certain optional plot points or abilities feel uncannily like bugs/exploits, but cannot be

had same experience at irl statue of liberty (and battery park). playing it even now is incredibly immersive; they feel like totally real places even when you are kind of layering a real-looking place in your mind atop the unreal engine 1 images you are actually seeing. i like moving around at walking speed. also i like taking showers at certain points where i think jc might take a shower. when paul's in his living room crippled by nanovirus i click on him so that he starts a long monologue about how consortiums of bankers have always sought world government and then i walk into the bathroom and get into the shower so i can't hear him.

haha i am kinda tempted to play this. does steam have a workable modern version? does gog?

which is the better game, this or ultima vii

I got the game from Steam a couple of years ago and it worked fine on my Win7 PC. Deus Ex is definitely the better game unless maybe you're a huge Ultima series fan.

both gog and steam do yeah; i recommend gog cuz no drm and you don't have to run steam in the background. also install this to make the environment textures look better. (probably the only mod you need; there's one that adds a handful of hi-res character models but the resulting inconsistency between new and old models is hideous; there's one called "shifter" that changes all kinds of little things that ultimately i didn't like because it tended to deluge you with xp and i am attached to the original game's stinginess.)

this is better than ultima vii i think? the scope of actions is much narrower (no baking bread etc) but can feel wider because actions tend to have effects, prevent other actions, etc. i also think it is a better game than metal gear solid, but maybe you were taking that as given by asking about ultima vii.

i guess you don't have to run steam in the background with the steam version either, actually; you can prob just run the executable. steam is weird and inconsistent with this stuff tho. anyway i own both versions for some fucking reason and they both run fine.

Started playing on Steam, seems fine.

But can't get past the stealth part in the training session!

not sure i've played the training session since i was 13 (even tho it has plotty stuff! i think bob page shows up in a secret room) but my main sneaking advice is to not forget the Q and E "lean" buttons, for poking your head out from behind cover a moment. weirdly i find the unadorned 90s-fps-style cover controls of this game (find an object and hold down crouch, use lean to glance around the object) more engaging+mimetic than modern "cover systems", where entire sequences of actions (exit cover, move right, roll, enter cover) are mapped to a single push of a button that normally does any number of totally unrelated things but is contextually responding to your status as In Cover. this usually gets called "elegant" and of course it is, from the perspective of someone playing a video game. dx is clunky and uncomfortable in comparison but it puts me consistently in the perspective of someone operating a body.

(my experience operating a body has been clunky and uncomfortable.)

I really prefer the old way of doing stealth, because it feels awkward like it would IRL. In more recent games like DX:HR it's way too slick, especially when it switches to a third person view when you're in cover, enabling you to see stuff that in first person you wouldn't. Also the whole context sensitive button 'press X to move from one area of cover to another area of cover in one smooth movement'. It takes all the tension away from the stealth experience.

Like in recent games I never get the feeling that I don't know where the enemies are. Although OTOH older games were pretty unforgiving where getting spotted by an enemy meant immediate game over.

especially when it switches to a third person view when you're in cover, enabling you to see stuff that in first person you wouldn't.

otm. headslapping.

a thing i enjoy is that despite his superhuman abilities and badass affect (and his employers' idea of him as something less than human--as a product, or a tech demo) jc is a freshly graduated trainee for whom a controlled, low-risk field test (recapturing the statue) distends into an endless terrifying night. (days pass, but for jc it is always night. at one point, as you fly west out of hong kong, you can see the sun rising behind you.) when i fumble with the controls, i decide that this is why.

(also at the beginning of the night, his superhuman abilities consist of a flashlight.)

when paul's in his living room crippled by nanovirus i click on him so that he starts a long monologue about how consortiums of bankers have always sought world government and then i walk into the bathroom and get into the shower so i can't hear him.

along similar lines, it's fun to save all the bottles of wine the triad leaders competitively gift you if you (totally unnecessarily and for no reward but this) go to the hong kong nightclub for drinks as they offer, then later get absolutely trashed with nicolette duclare in her teenage bedroom at her mother's illuminati estate. more fun to imagine jc's feelings if you do this before you wander into the drawing room and the voice of an evil artificial intelligence bursts into your ear growling WHAT ARE YOU LOOKING FOR.

15 years and billions of dollars later show me an adolescent fantasy like that.

dlh i bought deus ex in the steam stealth sale and now it harassing me to install 'deus ex: revision'. what is this and is it any good

the screenshots/trailer are pretty--the new textures aren't much better than the much older "new vision" mod i linked above but the new lighting looks great and i bet they changed some models. not sure what else it changes. it touts "expanded environments", which, idk, hands off, honestly. it also seems to optionally integrate Shifter which i would not use on my first playthrough (or my first adult playthrough), even though it fixes some genuine bugs; it makes some changes to the augmentation system and the effect by the halfway mark is to make you ten times the superman you become in the vanilla game. still tho, it is optional. in the end my only wholehearted objection is that they have for some reason changed the music. fuck that.

potential discussion here re: the merits of these sorts of overhauls, comparison of their usually ecstatic reception to the poor reputations of similar technical adjustments in other media (e.g. colorization), the casual assumption one sometimes sees in unexpected places that video games follow some sort of moore's law of asymptotic aesthetic refinement and that all games even good games would only have been better had their tech been more advanced. but i recommended new vision and my morrowind and fallout:nv are near-unrecognizably encrusted with mods, and in both cases i feel like the mods have liberated the platonic game from a cramped box. deus ex has never felt that cramped to me tho--it's never felt like its potential is being frustrated or squandered.

i'll install it on my next playthrough. these come slightly less often than viewings of the third man.

i guess my advice would be, play the game, and if you stop playing the game for the specific reason that it looks like shit, mod it.

btw interested in hearing about your hatred for dx3. i more or less enjoyed most of it but as i have mentioned in this thread before i am the only human being alive to have reached the end of the genuinely dire dx2.

idk, it just hit my i-don't-give-a-shit threshold by the end of the tutorialish level, and it felt horribly anonymous--i feel like the first one's primitivism adds character, sorta (quake and quake iii also look 'better' in some sense now than they did at the time). i didn't even get to the proper start of the game

well strangely despite its primitivism the first one is more ambitious: an opening level where you're offered the opportunity to sneak down hallways and fire from cover vs an opening level where you freeroam across a virtual recreation of liberty island

idk if quake looks better now--some of the newer engines for it, "darkplaces" etc, look pretty great, and its incoherent goth-metal-aliens aesthetic is all-time classic, but it is unmistakably the game that invented Shooter Brown--but doom looks totally, totally beautiful.

Reviews coming out for Mankind Divided, sounds solid. Interest piqued by the VR Missions-type mode.

i more or less enjoyed most of it but as i have mentioned in this thread before i am the only human being alive to have reached the end of the genuinely dire dx2.

https://kotaku.com/the-internet-agrees-that-elon-musk-is-deus-exs-trillion-1843185039