Deus Ex is a fun game and Cyberpunk is an ubisoftcore borefest.
If you think Deus Ex is fun then you hate video games, because that game has seriously bad gameplay.
I don't know whether you're trolling or not, but I do actually partly agree. It all seems rosy in hindsight, but at the time, having lived through System Shock and System Shock 2, Deus Ex seemed rather contrived by comparison, with respect to the fact that the different paths were much more rigidly and obviously laid out, so the virtual world had a contrived, plasticky feeling to it that SS and SS2 never had, even though their worlds
were pretty contrived too - just somehow they'd managed to disguise it better, whereas Deus Ex put its gamey-game side on its sleeve ("here's the stealth path, here's the straight assault path, here's the techie path" - I cant even remember now what the options were, but you know what I mean). IOW, it was less a question of
discovering your path than
choosing from a selection. And that felt like decline tbh. To be charitable, it was probably a function of the fact that they were trying to depict a much bigger world, so to avoid the player getting hopelessly lost, they had to flag everything with honking great pointers.
In fact, relatively speaking System Shock remains unmatched, both in terms of advanced graphics for its time and in terms of its immersive, real-seeming virtual world at the time. SS2, though graphically snazzier, was a slight decline, and Deux Ex, graphically the dog's bollocks at the time, felt like a
further slight decline and streamlining, although of course at the same time one recognized it as an amazing achievement (and no need to even speak of Invisible War, that and Thief Deadly Shadows - brrrr, those dire days that brought the first trickle of what eventually became the rivers of console slurry we have in our PC games now).
However, to balance that, one has to recognize that some of the multitude of toys in SS were levers that didn't do anything. But that's the same with all the old classics (e.g. the first Fallouts). The point is that the intention was there to simulate a world.
To me, all games are simulations that fail to be full simulations at various levels, as a result of technological limitations, but because we grew up with some particular contrived "gameplay" and loved it at the time, we tend to think of that "gameplay" as the right and proper form of "gameplay". But if games were proper simulations,
there would be no need for gameplay, the adventure, the choices and consequences, would be totally transparent, and would follow the rules of real life (plus magic or s-f or whatever).
This is the perennial complaint of normies when they encounter games for the first time, they're misled by the graphics into thinking the game is a simulation, then they're annoyed when they find out that really it's a Potemkin simulation with something called "gameplay" that they have to get used to, that's only a vague abstraction of the rules of normal life. It's just that nerds got used to the contrivance when they were young, learned to "speak the lingo," so they love it and have a sentimental attachment to various older stages of this thing called "gameplay."