Well I can definitely tell you it ain't coming from Warren Spector that's for damn sure. His latest game looks fucking atrocious. We're talking Redfall levels atrocious.
Deus Ex was written by two Harvard grads (and the lead pulled double duty at MIT) and a compsci major. Most other games are going to come up short. Ivy Leaguers interested in working in the game industry don't grow on trees and the Ivies also suck now.
On the surface it defies all reason. Deus Ex didn't exist when they made the original. It should get easier to make games like this once you already have an existing title to use as a blueprint, but nobody has matched it in 25 years.
Canucks were just code and asset monkeys, the art direction, design and concept were all tightly controlled by Japs. NuDXes have more in common with MGS than the original
It was precisely the challenge and the thrill of creating something new that once drove the artists of old. Retracing someone's steps whilst still imbuing the work with a spark of brilliance is a tenuous proposition for the best of them.
I thought James Swallow was the writer, since he wrote both the books accompanying the games.
It's hilarious how much more sense the game makes, if you read the book first. Major mistake leaving so much of the plot to some random book that maybe 5% of the playerbase read. (Liked it btw, but yeah
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While it's true Square Enix was the publisher, they gave Eidos full creative control. It's just that Eidos was staffed by console peasants and weebs who were contemptuous of the original Deus Ex. It's the same story with their Thief game.
wasn't as good as the original but Mankind Divided had a bunch of loose story threads that I would have liked to see resolved in the sequel, especially the body swap/Jensen corpse in the Versalife vault.
People should be careful with what they wish for. Early Access title Fortune's Run that is aping Deus Ex has an even more involved command line, not just picking between options but typing out all the commands properly. It's neat but it breaks the flow of the game. Slowly typing things out doesn't fit the fast-paced stealth-action around it and turns the game very stop-and-go. I'd argue that the budget and time restraints imposed on Deus Ex forced it to conform to a focused ethos which made the game all the more coherent, both in terms of gameplay and narrative. It's as good as it is because of those restraints, doesn't make it unfinished at all. In fact, replaying it just recently the lack of awful mini-games that were introduced to the series after Ion Storm shut their doors was a breath of fresh air.
Mankind Divided has the best gameplay of the series, it only comes up short in the writing, which would be near-impossible for anyone to match. A Criminal Past had great character writing though.
Well. minus the crashes, frame drops, lack of weapon variety, length, and maybe even voice acting in comparison to HR.
Old SNL, The Simpsons, National Lampoon, Harvard grads made for some of the best humorists, expertly blending the high- and low-brow in a way that could be enjoyed by nearly everyone.
I mean yes you're right. Without the constraints Harvey redesigns the skill system and ruins the game. This was about to happen when Eidos put their foot down.
Of course. Its one of those things where we're lucky we even got the game in the state it shipped in. I just wish that instead of developing Invisible War they just went back to Deus Ex 1, same engine and tried to work out those issues they had during development rather than introducing a bunch of new ones in the terrible sequel. You can make the argument that this was "Good" for Ion Storm, but I think just barely getting the game out forced them to rein in their ambitions and it was at that point they stopped being the studio we all respected. It came at a price - one that whilst I think was worth it (cause we got Deus Ex), robbed us of what could've been a lot of really wonderful experiences, I wanted Ion Storm to thrive and that just didn't happen.
I can understand that, but even the wait to win system in Deus Ex still breaks it up. I think System Shock 1 handled it better where hacking would become an extension of the FPS gameplay (so like its own dungeon) - SS2 not so much the match 3/pipedream system is a bit lame. There is a better way to do it but no one's tried it yet. Deus Ex of course was never going to have such systems. But nearly everyone would say the ideal would have been Deus Ex with an Uplink style hacking system because Uplink is very very quick.
