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What's so special about Deus Ex?

  • Thread starter Duralux for Durabux
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Lonely Vazdru

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On a completely opposite note, I tried it and finished it for the first time a couple of weeks ago, falling for the constant praise it gets on the Codex. Do I regret it ? Hell no ! Thanks Codex for finally managing to have me play this gem in spite of my initial reluctance. I'm not into FPS and I (usually) don't really like Sci-Fi settings in games. Still, I went in and played it blind. And had a blast !

I spent a couple of weeks shooting, exploring, hacking, crouching, observing, sneaking, lockpicking, swinmming, overhearing conversations, customizing weapons, managing ammo and supplies, choosing which skill to improve, reading e-mails, bypassing security systems, planting explosives, sworfighting, regenerating, gun blazing and finally winning !

Best game I played in years, so once again : Thank you Codex ! :salute:

And fuck the haters !
humanoid-robot-isolated-white-giving-finger-clipping-path-d-illustration-73282762.jpg
 

barghwata

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Too much low effort shitposting on the codex lately, it's getting boring....
 

Jaedar

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What is special about deus ex?
The levels: Most/all of them are made to be 'realish' places. That means decent architecture, room layouts, toilets, etc. They're also very interconnected. It is common these days to say "supports multiple routes" when what you really mean is that the map is a linear sequence of rooms where you can choose entry/exit points in between. Deus ex lets you make your own route (when applicable. Don't expect 3 different ways to go through someone's apartment, or a top secret military base with different clearance zones).
Gameplay: Stealth, running and gunning, sniping, trapping, cyberkatanaing... do what you wish or mix and match. Be a police and stick to the prod, or gun everyone down like the terrerists they are. Lots of games have tried to copy this, but I feel like none of them really get it.
Setting and writing: as someone pointed out above, deus ex predicted WTC being destroyed. It manages to make sense, despite being a combination of a dozen different conspiracy theories. Lots of nice socratic-ish dialogue about various social issues like democracy, surveillance etc.
Dynamic CnC: Lots of games give you MORAL CHOICE!!!!!: 1) Shoot bad guy, 2) spare bad guy. Deus ex almost always just lets you play the game without making any specific mention of THIS IS A MULTIPLE CHOICE!!! and then it just reacts anyway (even if it's in minor ways). The common example of this is the ladies bathroom, which is good because the better uses of this should not be spoiled.
Soundtrack: It is great.

It's really not a perfect game. One need only look at all the improvements made in the GMDX mod to see that. But it is incredibly good, and while I think it has been surpassed in most individual aspect the whole has not been.

I really don't know why I put any effort into responding to such low quality bait though.
 
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Thac0

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Oh hey, another quality George Duroy post! Managed to trigger as many people as the Daggerfall post, but I am disagreeing with this one.
Nice lore and story about transhumanism before transhumanism became mainstream and kinda a meme.
Good level design where it is very clear that the devs made an attempt to programm in multiple ways to solve each level, while actually giving a fuck that every way is also challenging and satisfying.
Rock solid rpg systems coupled with a good amount of secrets sprinkled into the levels that reward you for your skillchoices and paying awareness.
And the actual baseline gameplay didnt age awfully, sneaking is still kinda neat.
I think it's a tiny bit overrated, it should maybe not show up in single best rpg of all time lists, but it is absolutely in the top 50.

 

Serious_Business

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DX was the creation of a certain number of first person design choices that were very rare in the history of gaming - all originating in the so-called "immersive sim" genre, which started with UO and SS, and pretty much ended horribly with the Underworld game. The idea at the time was to take the first person shooter and make it more interactive and complex. It's an idea that still exists to this day, but it has it a good couple of walls, namely in the early 2000 (after the release of DX, with Invisible War), where level design regressed to adapt to 3d graphical "progress". The genre never really managed to realize its promises, in fact in never got beyond the original DX - the promises being a more and more interactive narrative and world, including open exploration and player decision making, all of it using first person action type of gameplay (thus creating a "deeper atmosphere"). You have things like Prey and such which do try, but never push the limits like DX did. Indeed one has to be sensible to how the game pushed limits at the time to grasp its quality, but it's not only a historical taste ; the game itself is fun, provided you do enjoy FPS gameplay. But if you don't, you'll have to work around it to enjoy the experience. It also has a pretty unique setting and story, which of course you can, to show your elite literary tastes, denounce as teenaged and predictable ; but it was and it still is something very unique in video game narrative. By itself, without mods, it is indeed clunky in many ways - and it was criticized as such at release ; but it still does something unique, which is why it's so widely recognized.

"Tldr", as they say : fuck off faggot
 

Ol' Willy

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Lots of nice socratic-ish dialogue about various social issues like democracy, surveillance etc.
When you meet Stanton Dowd for the fist time, dialogue starts: he gives you details of the mission, and you are ready to go. But you can keep clicking on Dowd and he will tell you some history of Illuminati. He has like 6 or 8 unique replies, and they are so easy to miss if you depart at once. Such attention to small details! I bet 90% of people just walked away and didn't click more on the guy.
 

Duralux for Durabux

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Elaborate then, without loud generalizations. What exactly you didn't like? What disappointed you?
1rst -> Gameplay and gameplay dissapointed me the most.
2nd-> Running
3rd -> The world which seems to be empty (at least to me)
4th->Terrible voice acting
5th -> uninteresting story
6th-> Boring world design
Btw: I broke the legendary rule " don't bash any old RPG " but after being dissapointed for the 10th time that was pretty much how I felt about this game.
 
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Nano

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Grab the Codex by the pussy Strap Yourselves In
I could waste my energy on explaining to the OP why he's retarded, but I think I'm just gonna relax listening to the Deus Ex soundtrack instead.

 

Ol' Willy

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1rst -> Gameplay and gameplay dissapointed me the most.
2nd-> Running
3rd -> The world which seems to be empty (at least to me)
4th->Terrible voice acting
5th -> uninteresting story
6th-> Boring world design
1 - use various ways to deal with the problems, game provides a lot of alternatives. Level up needed skills and use augs. Gunplay becomes better as you progress.
2 - "legs" augmentation - mandatory shit.
3 - bullshit. World in Deus Ex suffers from a deadly pandemic, so there is a lockdown. Remember last spring? Remember streets looking "empty"?
4 - bullshit. For example, JC has the deadpan delivery, and it's perfectly logical - he's a clone, and had little contact with the outside world. Or, Walton Simons - do you say that Tom Hall is not good enough for you? Not to mention the amount of one-liners that Deus Ex gifted to us.
5 - bullshit. Story in Deus Ex can look batshit insane from the first glance, but it has a lot of depth, sharp commentary and has immaculate internal logic. It's not the authors' fault if you fail to grasp it.
6 - seriously? What else do you need? Deus Ex level design is on par with good Hitman games, and Hitman is in completely different ballpark genre-wise.
 

JDR13

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Make sure to tune in for next week's episode of The Duroy Tard Show when he asks "Why is UnderRail considered incline?"
 

Tacgnol

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reacts anyway (even if it's in minor ways).

I wish more games would throw in more minor reactivity. It's really cool when an NPC offhand comments on your playstyle or the way you completed a certain mission.

It felt like a nice little reward for being extra careful in the first few missions and having Carter and Paul compliment you for your care, or alternatively make you feel bad for being a complete psycho.
 

Piotrovitz

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As much as I loved DX back when it came out, looking back it's hard not to admit that it has many flaws - mostly due to being too ambitious for that era.

It's kinda like Arcanum - buggy, unbalanced mess, that you still love anyway.
 
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I don't remember a single redeeming factor about this game and that's surprising because I really wanted to appreciate it, I really did. As for now, it's among other games in my trash tier list of games of the early 2000s.
Am I missing something about Deus Ex ? Or is Deus Ex that bad? Or is it another game overrated by the codex ?

It's a game you have to sit down and let yourself play in order to discover the game loops that make it fun, like most immersive sims.

It's arguably bad game design, in the same sense Bollywood movies are arguably bad films, Michael Jordan was arguably an overrated basketball player, and Butthole Surfers are arguably a shitty band. It's really a matter of opinion and your ability to enjoy it depends largely on your internal sense of what games / movies / basketball / music should be like.

It's good for people who enjoy discovering / testing the systems of a game as well as the intricacies of level design; a game for game designers or game aficionados, as it were, inasmuch as you have "writer's writer," "director's director", etc.
 
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Saduj

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It came out back when I used to really enjoy FPSs and I remember having a good time playing it. Only years later when I registered here did I find out that some people consider it, along with some other FPSs, to be an RPG. To each their own. Genre policing is boring.

Fun game regardless.
 

AW8

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I wish more games would throw in more minor reactivity. It's really cool when an NPC offhand comments on your playstyle or the way you completed a certain mission.
Manderley's comment after you started a shootout in the NYC bar cracked me up: "I don't even want to know what happened in the bar."

Likewise in Mankind Divided, if you retrieve the police scan of the metro terrorist attack stealthily, the newspaper headline reads "POLICE MISPLACES EVIDENCE". If you engage the police in combat however, the headline becomes "METRO HIT BY SECOND AUG TERRORIST ATTACK" and Miller calls you to ask what the fuck happened.
 

Bloodeyes

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Style, solid mechanics, excellent writing and setting. It's a pretty old game though. I can see someone who played it recently not being able to get past that. It blew my fucking mind when I played it in the early 2000s but I haven't booted it up in a long time. Still, I'll always love the OG Deus Ex. Fuck the new ones and their rude douchebag protagonist though.
 

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